Boxing Day Etsy Orgy

I hadn’t even slept off my ham hangover this Christmas before the sales pitches started hitting my inbox. The very first came from Apple, telling me “Now it’s time to treat yourself.” I couldn’t agree more — in my book, it’s always time to treat myself. But is it just my imagination, or do more and more days of the year seem to be set aside for shopping-related holidays?

The day after Christmas has long been the time for many consumers to hit the after-Christmas sales, but now retailers are trying to make it a mini-Cyber Monday. In the UK and most Commonwealth nations, it’s Boxing Day, “a day following Christmas when wealthy people in the United Kingdom would give a box containing a gift to their servants,” but in the U.S. most shopping-orgy holidays are about indulging on your own behalf, not buying presents.

But at my place this year, it was all about cooking, crafts and obscure vintage items from the depths of fashion history. That’s why I’m choosing today to fall in love with a few pieces of erotic retail therapy on Etsy that get at the heart of why I love this big, crazy, sexy consumer world we live in.

First, I can’t get over the truly spankable derrière cufflinks at the top of this post. Even when dressing to the nines, I don’t generally wear French cuffs — but I may start. Can you imagine anything more appropriate to wear during the spirited administration of an over-the-knee spanking? (Or, better yet, a spanking performed over one of these.) The seller, woman-owned and Bristol-based Urban Eye, has a variety of other ultra-classy erotic cufflinks (I like to think of them as “flufflinks”). Here’s a pair with a female-female bondage theme:

Additional sexy scenes include Renoir’s nude bathers, Manet’s Olympia, Courbet’s nudes, Klimt’s “The Kiss” and a wide variety of vintage nudes (plus some Lego-themed cufflinks), while sister shop Pink Burlesque sells burlesque-inspired jewelry “for the girls” (i.e., anyone who looks good in jewelry). Pink Burlesque’s jewelry is unbelievably sexy, but not exactly “erotic” — unlike this pendant, which, if it errs, does so by being perhaps a bit obvious:

(Under Oak Studios‘ “Fuck” pendant via Alison Tyler.)

Next, I can’t get over these Seven Deadly Sins tights that Rachel Kramer Bussel pointed out to me after spotting them on a friend. I can spot about three items from the list that I’d like to perform on those legs. The best thing about tights like this is that you can grab a Sharpie and use them as a checklist–much harder to misplace in the heat of a triple-sin moment than a 3 x 5 card or a torn-out page from your Daily Missal. These are the kind of crib notes I can get behind!

And yes, those are available on Etsy, too. Since I’ve already covered Envy, I think I’d start with Lust, Gluttony and Greed, and not in a gross David Fincher-Kevin Spacey type way.

Last, but far from least, if you or your “servant” play chess, you just may squee over this erotic chess set, handmade by UK artist Nicola Ford from a “ground stone compound”. At 140 pounds Sterling, the price is a little steep, but it’s gorgeous. This photo shows only the white pieces, so you can see a few details: