Friday, November 29, 2019
Big News
Announced today: Mr Rubber Europe will be taking place in Manchester, England, during the Manchester Rubber Weekend in April 2020! Very exciting news, and another reason to head back to Manchester again next year!
The Mother of all Memes
If there's one that's appropriate for the rubbermen, it's #BLACKFRIDAY!
Black Friday is spreading, my friends LOL
Black Friday is spreading, my friends LOL
Tuesday, November 26, 2019
Connecting Loneliness and Community
I find the study of this fascinating in how our modern society (and particularly with the advent and global addiction to smartphones and instant 'virtual' communication) has promoted the power of the individual, while not particularly getting to the root of loneliness, and prescribing what perhaps is not the best solution to lessening the impacts of it.
Stop medicalizing loneliness — history tells us it's society that needs mending
Opinion: Attention needs to be paid to loneliness’s complex history. In the context of this history, knee-jerk claims of an 'epidemic' are unhelpful
THE CONVERSATION Updated: November 26, 2019
What does loneliness sound like? I asked this question on Twitter recently. You might expect that people would say “silence”, but they didn’t. Their answers included:
The wind whistling in my chimney, because I only ever hear it when I’m alone.
The hubbub of a pub heard when the door opens to the street.
The sound of a clicking radiator as it comes on or off.
The terrible din of early morning birds in suburban trees.
I suspect everyone has a sound associated with loneliness and personal alienation. Mine is the honk of Canadian geese, which takes me back to life as a 20-year-old student, living in halls after a break-up.
These sounds highlight that the experience of loneliness varies from person to person – something that is not often recognized in our modern panic. We are in an “epidemic”; a mental health “crisis”. In 2018 the British government was so concerned that it created a “Minister for Loneliness”. Countries like Germany and Switzerland may follow suit. This language imagines that loneliness is a single, universal state – it is not. Loneliness is an emotion cluster – it can be made up of a number of feelings, such as anger, shame, sadness, jealousy and grief.
The loneliness of a single mother on the breadline, for example, is very different to that of an elderly man whose peers have died or a teenager who is connected online but lacks offline friendships. And rural loneliness is different to urban loneliness.
By talking about loneliness as a virus or an epidemic, we medicalize it and seek simple, even pharmacological treatments. This year researchers announced that a “loneliness pill” is in the works. This move is part of a broader treatment of emotions as mental health problems, with interventions focusing on symptoms not causes.
But loneliness is physical as well as psychological. Its language and experience also changes over time.
Lonely as a cloud
Before 1800, the word loneliness was not particularly emotional: it simply connoted the state of being alone. The lexicographer Thomas Blount’s Glossographia (1656) defined loneliness as “one; an oneliness, or loneliness, a single or singleness”. Loneliness usually denoted places rather than people: a lonely castle, a lonely tree, or wandering “lonely as a cloud” in Wordsworth’s poem Daffodils of 1802.
In this period, “oneliness” was seldom negative. It allowed communion with God, as when Jesus “withdrew to lonely places and prayed” (Luke 5:16). For many of the Romantics, nature served the same, quasi-religious or deistic function. Even without the presence of God, nature provided inspiration and health, themes that continue in some 21st-century environmentalism.
Critically, this interconnectedness between self and world (or God-in-world) was also found in medicine. There was no division of the mind and body, as exists today. Between the 2nd and the 18th centuries, medicine defined health depending on four humours: blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. Emotions depended on the balance of those humours, which were influenced by age, gender and environment, including diet, exercise, sleep and the quality of the air. Too much solitude, like too much hare meat, could be damaging. But that was a physical as well as a mental problem.
This holism between mental and physical health – by which one could target the body to treat the mind – was lost with the rise of 19th-century scientific medicine. The body and mind were separated into different systems and specialisms: psychology and psychiatry for the mind, cardiology for the heart.
This is why we view our emotions as situated in the brain. But in doing so, we often ignore the physical and lived experiences of emotion. This includes not only sound, but also touch, smell and taste.
Warm hearts
Studies of care homes suggest that lonely people get attached to material objects, even when they live with dementia and can’t verbally express loneliness. Lonely people also benefit from physical interactions with pets. The heartbeats of dogs have even been found to synchronise with human owners; anxious hearts are calmed and “happy hormones” produced.
Providing spaces for people to eat socially has, as well as music, dance and massage therapies, been found to reduce loneliness, even among people with PTSD. Working through the senses gives physical connectedness and belonging to people starved of social contact and companionable touch.
Terms like “warm-hearted” describe these social interactions. They come from historic ideas that connected a person’s emotions and sociability to their physical organs. These heat-based metaphors are still used to describe emotions. And lonely people seem to crave hot baths and drinks, as though this physical warmth stands in for social warmth. Being conscious of language and material culture use, then, might help us assess if others – or we – are lonely.
Until we tend to the physical as well as the psychological causes and signs of loneliness, we are unlikely to find a “cure” for a modern epidemic. Because this separation between mind and body reflects a broader division that has emerged between the individual and society, self and world.
The limits of the individual
Many of the processes of modernity are predicated on individualism; on the conviction that we are distinct, entirely separate beings. At the same time as medical science parcelled up the body into different specialisms and divisions, the social and economic changes brought by modernity – industrialisation, urbanisation, individualism – transformed patterns of work, life and leisure, creating secular alternatives to the God-in-world idea.
These transformations were justified by secularism. Physical and earthly bodies were redefined as material rather than spiritual: as resources that could be consumed. Narratives of evolution were adapted by social Darwinists who claimed that competitive individualism was not only justifiable, but inevitable. Classifications and divisions were the order of the day: between mind and body, nature and culture, self and others. Gone was the 18th-century sense of sociability in which, as Alexander Pope put it, “self love and social be the same”.
Little wonder then, that the language of loneliness has increased in the 21st century. Privatisation, deregulation and austerity have continued the forces of liberalisation. And languages of loneliness thrive in the gaps created by the meaninglessness and powerlessness identified by Karl Marx and sociologist Emile Durkheim as synonymous with the post-industrial age.
Of course loneliness is not only about material want. Billionaires are lonely too. Poverty might increase loneliness linked to social isolation, but wealth is no buffer against the absence of meaning in the modern age. Nor is it useful in navigating the proliferation of 21st-century “communities” that exist (online and off) that lack the mutual obligation assured by earlier definitions of community as a source of “common good”.
I am not suggesting a return to the humours, or some fictitious, pre-industrial Arcadia. But I do think that more attention needs to be paid to loneliness’s complex history. In the context of this history, knee-jerk claims of an “epidemic” are revealed to be unhelpful. Instead, we must address what “community” means in the present, and acknowledge the myriad kinds of loneliness (positive and negative) that exist under modern individualism.
To do this we must tend to the body, for that is how we connect to the world, and each other, as sensory, physical beings.
By Fay Bound Alberti, Reader in History and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow, University of York
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
My main takeaway.....what does "community" actually mean in the modern age? I don't even think community means what it did when I was growing up. I lament the declining numbers of younger people that come to community events and the even less numbers that realize that "strength of community" is directly related to the amount of involvement they volunteer to its longevity and impact.
Stop medicalizing loneliness — history tells us it's society that needs mending
Opinion: Attention needs to be paid to loneliness’s complex history. In the context of this history, knee-jerk claims of an 'epidemic' are unhelpful
THE CONVERSATION Updated: November 26, 2019
What does loneliness sound like? I asked this question on Twitter recently. You might expect that people would say “silence”, but they didn’t. Their answers included:
The wind whistling in my chimney, because I only ever hear it when I’m alone.
The hubbub of a pub heard when the door opens to the street.
The sound of a clicking radiator as it comes on or off.
The terrible din of early morning birds in suburban trees.
I suspect everyone has a sound associated with loneliness and personal alienation. Mine is the honk of Canadian geese, which takes me back to life as a 20-year-old student, living in halls after a break-up.
These sounds highlight that the experience of loneliness varies from person to person – something that is not often recognized in our modern panic. We are in an “epidemic”; a mental health “crisis”. In 2018 the British government was so concerned that it created a “Minister for Loneliness”. Countries like Germany and Switzerland may follow suit. This language imagines that loneliness is a single, universal state – it is not. Loneliness is an emotion cluster – it can be made up of a number of feelings, such as anger, shame, sadness, jealousy and grief.
The loneliness of a single mother on the breadline, for example, is very different to that of an elderly man whose peers have died or a teenager who is connected online but lacks offline friendships. And rural loneliness is different to urban loneliness.
By talking about loneliness as a virus or an epidemic, we medicalize it and seek simple, even pharmacological treatments. This year researchers announced that a “loneliness pill” is in the works. This move is part of a broader treatment of emotions as mental health problems, with interventions focusing on symptoms not causes.
But loneliness is physical as well as psychological. Its language and experience also changes over time.
Lonely as a cloud
Before 1800, the word loneliness was not particularly emotional: it simply connoted the state of being alone. The lexicographer Thomas Blount’s Glossographia (1656) defined loneliness as “one; an oneliness, or loneliness, a single or singleness”. Loneliness usually denoted places rather than people: a lonely castle, a lonely tree, or wandering “lonely as a cloud” in Wordsworth’s poem Daffodils of 1802.
In this period, “oneliness” was seldom negative. It allowed communion with God, as when Jesus “withdrew to lonely places and prayed” (Luke 5:16). For many of the Romantics, nature served the same, quasi-religious or deistic function. Even without the presence of God, nature provided inspiration and health, themes that continue in some 21st-century environmentalism.
Critically, this interconnectedness between self and world (or God-in-world) was also found in medicine. There was no division of the mind and body, as exists today. Between the 2nd and the 18th centuries, medicine defined health depending on four humours: blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. Emotions depended on the balance of those humours, which were influenced by age, gender and environment, including diet, exercise, sleep and the quality of the air. Too much solitude, like too much hare meat, could be damaging. But that was a physical as well as a mental problem.
This holism between mental and physical health – by which one could target the body to treat the mind – was lost with the rise of 19th-century scientific medicine. The body and mind were separated into different systems and specialisms: psychology and psychiatry for the mind, cardiology for the heart.
This is why we view our emotions as situated in the brain. But in doing so, we often ignore the physical and lived experiences of emotion. This includes not only sound, but also touch, smell and taste.
Warm hearts
Studies of care homes suggest that lonely people get attached to material objects, even when they live with dementia and can’t verbally express loneliness. Lonely people also benefit from physical interactions with pets. The heartbeats of dogs have even been found to synchronise with human owners; anxious hearts are calmed and “happy hormones” produced.
Providing spaces for people to eat socially has, as well as music, dance and massage therapies, been found to reduce loneliness, even among people with PTSD. Working through the senses gives physical connectedness and belonging to people starved of social contact and companionable touch.
Terms like “warm-hearted” describe these social interactions. They come from historic ideas that connected a person’s emotions and sociability to their physical organs. These heat-based metaphors are still used to describe emotions. And lonely people seem to crave hot baths and drinks, as though this physical warmth stands in for social warmth. Being conscious of language and material culture use, then, might help us assess if others – or we – are lonely.
Until we tend to the physical as well as the psychological causes and signs of loneliness, we are unlikely to find a “cure” for a modern epidemic. Because this separation between mind and body reflects a broader division that has emerged between the individual and society, self and world.
The limits of the individual
Many of the processes of modernity are predicated on individualism; on the conviction that we are distinct, entirely separate beings. At the same time as medical science parcelled up the body into different specialisms and divisions, the social and economic changes brought by modernity – industrialisation, urbanisation, individualism – transformed patterns of work, life and leisure, creating secular alternatives to the God-in-world idea.
These transformations were justified by secularism. Physical and earthly bodies were redefined as material rather than spiritual: as resources that could be consumed. Narratives of evolution were adapted by social Darwinists who claimed that competitive individualism was not only justifiable, but inevitable. Classifications and divisions were the order of the day: between mind and body, nature and culture, self and others. Gone was the 18th-century sense of sociability in which, as Alexander Pope put it, “self love and social be the same”.
Little wonder then, that the language of loneliness has increased in the 21st century. Privatisation, deregulation and austerity have continued the forces of liberalisation. And languages of loneliness thrive in the gaps created by the meaninglessness and powerlessness identified by Karl Marx and sociologist Emile Durkheim as synonymous with the post-industrial age.
Of course loneliness is not only about material want. Billionaires are lonely too. Poverty might increase loneliness linked to social isolation, but wealth is no buffer against the absence of meaning in the modern age. Nor is it useful in navigating the proliferation of 21st-century “communities” that exist (online and off) that lack the mutual obligation assured by earlier definitions of community as a source of “common good”.
I am not suggesting a return to the humours, or some fictitious, pre-industrial Arcadia. But I do think that more attention needs to be paid to loneliness’s complex history. In the context of this history, knee-jerk claims of an “epidemic” are revealed to be unhelpful. Instead, we must address what “community” means in the present, and acknowledge the myriad kinds of loneliness (positive and negative) that exist under modern individualism.
To do this we must tend to the body, for that is how we connect to the world, and each other, as sensory, physical beings.
By Fay Bound Alberti, Reader in History and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow, University of York
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
My main takeaway.....what does "community" actually mean in the modern age? I don't even think community means what it did when I was growing up. I lament the declining numbers of younger people that come to community events and the even less numbers that realize that "strength of community" is directly related to the amount of involvement they volunteer to its longevity and impact.
Monday, November 25, 2019
D2D
I almost forgot just how hot and horny it is to fully gear up with another guy, both of us hard as rock, tapping rubbered dicks together and against each other...mmm
45cm Of Fun
Now, that's an intubation!!!! @thekinkster1996 is such a sweet guy! I hope to meet him someday so we can intubate together WOOF
TAKE IT OUT:
TAKE IT OUT:
PUT IT IN:well, those 45 centimeters / 17.75 inches of tubing went down my throat— thekinkster1996 🔜 Rubber PubCrawl - Cologne (@thekinkster1996) November 19, 2019
FUCK IT FEELS SO DAMN GOOD!
I love the custom mask from @studio_gum pic.twitter.com/jHmQuGxMPX
the last two days with my good friend @lycraking80 (go check him out as well as his Instagram @lycraking) were awesome!— thekinkster1996 🔜 Rubber PubCrawl - Cologne (@thekinkster1996) November 27, 2019
as promised, here's the video of me inserting those tubes
to be continued...
*mask from @studio_gum
*suit from @skintightrubber #rubber #mask #insane pic.twitter.com/bp22zkBGRp
Muscle Gimp Training
Good boy...
I now have a Muscle Gimp I’m training full time 🤭— Cassy @ home (@PupCassy) November 23, 2019
Stay tuned for more of this kinda stuff 😉💦
Snippet #1 pic.twitter.com/lHbTsAlWZV
Leather Daddies
I really enjoyed wearing leather this weekend! Thanks so much to BeefnfurTx for lending me his skins! #alternateskin #alternativeskin #leatherdaddies
Thursday, November 21, 2019
Leather Daddy
This may or may not be a one-time situation for your Rubber Daddy....becoming a Leather Daddy for the weekend! I am blessed to know so many wonderful leathermen, and over the past ten years in Vancouver, they have accepted and loved their Rubber Canuck as much as any other leather man in the tribe....despite attending all Vancouver Men in Leather events in rubber!
This weekend is the VML organization's 15th anniversary celebration. Mr. P and I are attending, and I'm excited now that I've borrowed this sexy ensemble from Daddy BeefnfurTx!
What do you think of me donning and trying out this alternative skin?
This weekend is the VML organization's 15th anniversary celebration. Mr. P and I are attending, and I'm excited now that I've borrowed this sexy ensemble from Daddy BeefnfurTx!
What do you think of me donning and trying out this alternative skin?
Thursday, November 7, 2019
Rubber Bondage Session
I love this man! I always enjoy any time I can get with Sem Folego....he is a very mature young man, who loves to dominate and control....he is a breath of fresh air to me, and I feel so grateful that he feels I'm worthy enough to dominate - because I will let him dominate me anywhere, anytime!
Last night he liked my suggestion of getting into full head-to-toe rubber, and once we discussed our upcoming session, he wanted my cock and ass exposed, so the gimp suit was the obvious choice of what to wear. I donned the suit, socks, he put the bondage gloves on me, then the hood and put the rubber muzzle on nice and tight. Next came on the ankle and wrist restraints. He had be comfortably place myself on the fuck bench, then proceeded to use chain to lash me to the frame of the bench. But that's not all -- he used the 25cm x 4m latex strips I had made a few years ago to fix my forearms, thighs and calves to the bench as well, and a final strip roll to fix my torso to the top pad of the bench. I was definitely fixed into place!!!
A few weeks ago was the first time that Sem Folego fisted me, and he really enjoyed it. I was the fortunate recipient of an ass annihilation last night from his beautiful cock and fists, and a few pre-selected toys. I was in this position for almost 2 hours (not bad for a week night!). I found out once he released me that he had cum 2-3 times during those 2 hours (he couldn't remember exactly how many times!?), and as I hadn't got off yet, he ploughed me with a dildo while I jerked myself off.
What a hot session! What a hot man! I'm so lucky!
Last night he liked my suggestion of getting into full head-to-toe rubber, and once we discussed our upcoming session, he wanted my cock and ass exposed, so the gimp suit was the obvious choice of what to wear. I donned the suit, socks, he put the bondage gloves on me, then the hood and put the rubber muzzle on nice and tight. Next came on the ankle and wrist restraints. He had be comfortably place myself on the fuck bench, then proceeded to use chain to lash me to the frame of the bench. But that's not all -- he used the 25cm x 4m latex strips I had made a few years ago to fix my forearms, thighs and calves to the bench as well, and a final strip roll to fix my torso to the top pad of the bench. I was definitely fixed into place!!!
A few weeks ago was the first time that Sem Folego fisted me, and he really enjoyed it. I was the fortunate recipient of an ass annihilation last night from his beautiful cock and fists, and a few pre-selected toys. I was in this position for almost 2 hours (not bad for a week night!). I found out once he released me that he had cum 2-3 times during those 2 hours (he couldn't remember exactly how many times!?), and as I hadn't got off yet, he ploughed me with a dildo while I jerked myself off.
What a hot session! What a hot man! I'm so lucky!
Friday, November 1, 2019
Shiny Perfection
I think I'm going to put this on my fridge.....this is a perfect visual....
...and here's the other side!
...and here's the other side!
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