Bondage pornography

Bondage pornography is a fetishism that involves photographs, stories, movies, or drawings that contains depictions of sexual bondage or other BDSM activities.

Detective magazines, comic books and early fetish magazines

Bettie Page is tied and spanked for Bizarre

In the early 20th century, bondage imagery was available through "detective magazines", and comic books often featured characters being tied up or tying others up, particularly in "damsel in distress" plots.

There were also a number of dedicated fetish magazines which featured images of fetishism and bondage. The first of such magazines in the United States was Bizarre, first published in 1946 by fetish photographer John Willie (the phallic pseudonym of John Coutts), who developed the concept in the 1920s. Willie was able to avoid controversy in censorship through careful attention to guidelines and the use of humor. Publication of Bizarre was suspended completely from 1947 to 1951 because of post-War paper shortages. By 1956 Willie was ready to give up the magazine, and in that year he sold it to someone described only as R.E.B., who published six more issues before Bizarre finally folded in 1959.

Willie is better remembered for his Sweet Gwendoline comic strips, in which Gwendoline is drawn as a rather naïve blonde damsel in distress, with ample curves, who is unfortunate enough to find herself tied up in scene after scene by the raven-haired dominatrix and the moustachioed villain "Sir Dystic D'Arcy". She is rescued and also repeatedly tied up (though for benevolent reasons) by secret agent U-69 (censored to U89 in some editions). The comic strips were published largely in the 1950s and 60s. The story was published as a piecemeal serial, appearing usually two pages at a time in several different magazines over the years.[1]

Illustration by Gene Bilbrew for Exotique. "Women of History Dominating Males" series.

Though Bizarre was a small format magazine, it had a huge impact on later kink publications, such as ENEG's fetish magazine, Exotique, published 1956-1959. Exotique was entirely devoted to fetish fashions and female-dominant bondage fantasies. The 36 issues featured photos and illustrations of dominatrix-inspired vamps (including Burtman's wife Tana Louise and iconic model Bettie Page) wearing exotic leather and rubber ensembles, corsets, stockings/garters, boots, and high heels. Gene Bilbrew contributed illustrations to the magazine. The articles, many written by Leonard Burtman, using an alias, covered various aspects of sadomasochism and transvestism, with men depicted as slaves to imperious, all-powerful women. Exotique had no nudity, pornographic content, or even sexually suggestive situations. Nevertheless, much like fellow publisher Irving Klaw, in 1957, Burtman would be targeted as a pornographer. He was relentlessly pursued by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (acting as a censorship agency under the Comstock laws) and local law enforcement (who functioned in coordination with Postal Inspectors and the Catholic Church). Eventually, he was arrested, his magazines and materials confiscated, and brought to trial. This led to the demise of the magazine in 1959. However, starting in 1960, Burtman (under a different imprint) would go on to publish many more fetish magazines that were nearly identical to Exotique such as New Exotique, Masque, Connoisseur, Bizarre Life, High Heels, Unique World, Corporal (a pioneering spanking-fetish magazine) and others well into the 1970s.

New York photographer Irving Klaw also published illustrated adventure/bondage serials by fetish artists Eric Stanton, Gene Bilbrew, Adolfo Ruiz and others. Klaw is best known for operating an international mail-order business selling photographs and film of attractive women (sometimes in bondage) from the 1940s to the 1960s. His most famous bondage model was Bettie Page, who became the first celebrity of bondage film and photography.

These publications disappeared for a time with a crackdown on pornography in the late 1950s.

Bondage magazines return

Dedicated bondage magazines again became popular in America in the 1970s. Publishers of bondage magazines included Harmony Concepts, the House of Milan and Lyndon Distributors. House of Milan have since been purchased by Lyndon Distributors.

These magazines were not generally available through mainstream distributors, and were sold either in sex shops or by mail order. They contained little advertising content, and were entirely dependent on sales.

Typically, each magazine consisted of several multi-page pictorials of tied-up women, often with a fictional narrative attached, and one fictional story of three or four pages in length. Sometimes pictorials were replaced by artwork by a fetish artist and/or included an interview with one of the performers in the industry. In the case of House of Milan and Lyndon Distributors, the magazines were simply illustrated text versions of videos published by the same title. Such practice cut costs and allowed a streamlined output of material.

Another type of magazine was the "compendium magazine", usually consisting of a large number of individual photographs drawn from previous magazines, without any linking story.

Because of their relatively small circulation, compared with mainstream pornography, most bondage magazines were printed in black and white, except for the cover and centerfold. In the 1980s and 1990s, experiments were made with adding more color content, but most magazine content remained black and white.

The attitude of some the early magazines could be regarded as misogynistic, in spite of editorial disclaimers that the magazines represented only fantasies, as the storylines deviated from the old-fashioned "damsel in distress" motif towards more restrictive and explicit BDSM practices. However, in reality the opposite effect often happened: as a bondage performer was cast in more material and engaged in more acts, she would often develop a stronger fan base and became a recognized star in her own right. Nikki Dial and Ashley Renee are two examples of performers who won awards for their work as subs in bondage videos, and typically endured the most punishment.

In the 1990s, as homosexuality and bi-sexuality began to be more socially acceptable, magazine publishers started to produce femdom material depicting men in bondage, as well as portraying female models as participants in mutually satisfying bondage games, usually with at least one actress performing as a dom and at least one as a sub. Sometimes, the roles of dom and sub would be reversed. Be Be LeBadd and Alexis Payne are two professional dominatrices who also found themselves on the receiving end of a whip from time to time.

Bondage websites and bondage imagery in mainstream pornography

As the Internet becomes more widely available to deliver pornographic material, the bondage magazine market began to decrease. As of 2003, specialist bondage magazines were mostly displaced by bondage material on the Internet, and the presence of bondage imagery in mainstream pornographic magazines such as Nugget and Hustler's Taboo magazine.

However, the tradition of bondage magazines continues in the form of "art books" of bondage photographs, published by mainstream publishers such as Taschen.

Certain websites have begun providing bondage videos and photographs featuring the kidnapping roleplay, which has been largely the hallmark of 'detective' style bondage magazines. These styles are much closer to the style of bondage scenes in mainstream television.

Possible risks of widespread viewing

With the increase of free pornography available on the internet, concerns of microagression towards women have been discussed.[2] The concern is that since the bondage violence is mostly directed towards women (women are portrayed mostly as submissive), it furthers a positive attitude towards violence against women.[2] The book series and movie "50 Shades of Gray", in fact, perpetuate this misogyny thus portraying the BDSM/bondage subcultures in a patriarchal and misogynistic light.[3] When properly reflecting the BDSM/bondage subculture, pornography will "focus on mutual consent, mutual power, and communication," much like the movie "50 Shades of Dylan Ryan".[3] It would be important to note that bondage is a category that relates to the BDSM subculture. BDSM is an acronym for "bondage and dicipline, sadomasochism, and D/S dominant/submission."[4] Since consent, communication, and equal power exchange are fundamental in the BDSM subculture, pornography that is made can ultimately be used as educational for the inquiring practitioner.

See also

References

  1. ↑ The Adventures of Sweet Gwendoline, 2nd Edition, by John Willie. ISBN 978-0-914646-48-8
  2. 1 2 "X Views and Counting: Interest in Rape-Oriented Pornography as Gendered Microaggression". Journal of Interpersonal Violence. 31.
  3. 1 2 Stevens, Sarah. "Rope Sluts, and Bottoms, and Subs, Oh My: 50 Shades of Grey and the Shifting Discourse on Female Submission in Feminist Kink Porn". The Communications Review. 17.
  4. ↑ Gavin, Brown; Lim, Jason; Browne, Kath (2012). Geographies of Sexualities: Theory, Practices, and Politics. Ashgate. pp. 89–99. ISBN 9780754684787.
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