Hans van der Kamp

AmeaNet members never cease to amaze me. A few years ago a member – I forgot his name – posted a picture showing a picture of a submissive man enjoying punishment by his Mistress. Nobody responded to that post. A few weeks later another picture was posted. This time a woman was being tied up to be flogged by a man. One member complained and that kicked off a discussion about BDSM and Fetishism.

I was intrigued and did not know what to say at first, so I just aired some very abstract ideas about BDSM.

Many discussions followed. It was interesting, because there was a lot of confusion and it took me some time to figure out that definitions differ throughout the world. I will try to keep nationalities out of this – for a change – but to give you an example: the words Fetish and Fetishism. For the largest group of members these words covered any sexual practice from bestiality and pedophilia. A smaller group defined Fetishism as a form of sexuality focused on specific tactile needs like rubber, leather, latex, fur, etc.

Yet another group was convinced that it was just about blood, pain, needles, whippings and other forms of torture — making it impossible for them to read the posts without getting upset. Two or three members even thought it was illegal to download BDSM photographs to their hard drives.

It seemed strange to me that we should have a forum without BDSM, so to please those who got so upset about it, I started another site: bdsm.ameanet.com. I launched it a few months ago with a 2 month free membership to see if anybody was interested. A site with free memberships is always popular, but this particular site had 500 members after the first month, which is quite a lot for what I would call a “special interest” site, receiving traffic from AmeaNet only. At least 20 of these members were the same people who had displayed their disgust on the forum. They were just checking things out, I assumed, but they are still there as regular visitors.

After twelve years of experience with AMEA, I think I have a general idea what is driving people who are looking for erotic art and vintage pornography, but this time I have no clue whatsoever. [To be continued..]

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Once again I find myself confined to the apartment for orthopedic reasons, so I spent some time watching and photographing the rain coming down on the tin roofs across the street.

Being forced to use a low shutter speed, because the sky really darkened when the rain came down, the photographic reflection of what I saw gives a different view. I never saw the raindrops bouncing off the tin roof across the street in such detail. What I saw was a curtain of rain blurring the view on the houses of the opposite of the street. My brain has no shutter, so everything I see is in motion. The camera also detects the motion but freezes that same movement within a timeframe that lasts 1/15th of a second.

Most photographers like to be in full control of the images their cameras deliver but as I grow older I tend to give the camera a bit more freedom to show me a different reality, or to show me what I did not see while I was trying so hard to see it.

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A few days ago the Quartet of Middle East mediators from the EU, Russia, the UN and US discussed the appointment of Tony Blair as special envoy for the region. Today President Bush “commuted” the prison sentence of Scooter Libby.

Most journalists saw little irony in the fact that Blair, a man who misled his electorate to start an illegal war, may be sent on a peace mission in that same region. Criminals apparently do like to return to the scene of the crime. I have always disliked Blair a lot more than Bush. With Bush it is easy to see who you are dealing with. He looks like a crook and acts like a crook. When he is lying you can see that he is lying by the way his eyes start to focus on the tip of his nose, as though he is checking on the progress of the Pinocchio syndrome.

Blair however is a better actor. Gullible people adore Blair.

After Bush we will hopefully get an America that is sadder but wiser. I fear Gordon Brown and his successors however will have to keep following acting lessons to compete with the memory of Blair’s well-acted populism based on snobbery.

Now I am waiting for a news item informing us that Paris Hilton is nominated for the Nobel Prize of Physics because she knows how to mix three kinds of hair gel without causing her head to explode.

No – I have decided to kill my rss feeds and avoid news items for the coming weeks. Just a tiny bit more information about the state our world is in and I will be forced to increase my medication. Instead I will pretend to be on vacation in a country without internet or printed media.

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