Assylum.com's New Features Help Humanize BDSM

NEW YORK CITY—Anal-centric BDSM website Assylum.com has announced the launch of two "industry-first" features aimed at helping humanize the people who enjoy sexual power exchange and to further build out the educational component of the company’s productions. First, a new intra-site linking feature directly connects selected scenes to contextual discussions with the performers. These discussions, which are minimally edited and often extensive, assist members in learning more about how sex, BDSM, and sex-work integrate into the performers’ lives. Many of these discussions tackle contemporary political and cultural challenges as well, critically examining issues faced by people with sexual kinks in the current environment. According to Dr. Mercies, Assylum’s director, the intra-site linking feature was custom-coded into the site’s content management system by Ross at MAS CMS. “It’s a very powerful and flexible new feature that will allow us to shepherd viewers from any of our BDSM sex scenes to any additional contextualizing content on the site. We’ve wanted to have this for a long time, especially for our more severe scenes and deeper discussions, and now this capability is part of our DNA.” Second, a new People page features non-sexual content that captures the performers participating in activities outside their roles as submissives. For example, members can now watch young, hardcore anal performer Charlotte Sartre doing cross-stitch (pictured above), something she regularly enjoys along with countless middle-American grandmothers in her spare time. The People page exists in parallel with a traditional Model page, reinforcing the differentiation between performers within their submissive roles and outside their submissive roles. In the view of Dr. Mercies, “Both those who view BDSM performers as agents or victims of female oppression and those who view them as disposable objects tend to share the same enormous blind spot: that we are complete, multifaceted people with lives that go far beyond the sex we enjoy. Assylum does not euphemize what we do. These things can, on one level, be objectifying or degrading. But people who enjoy consensual objectification or degradation also enjoy many other things and are just as likely as anyone else to contribute goodness to the world. We aim to better remind everyone of the full humanity, dignity, and worth possessed by people who do BDSM with the new features on our site.” The new features are currently live on Assylum and will be rolled out in greater volume on the site over the coming months. The features will be also be included on Slavemouth, the oral BDSM sister site to Assylum. Prospective affiliates can apply to promote Assylum or Slavemouth at DerangedDollars.com. Ross at MAS CMS can be contacted here.