Bondage pornography
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Bondage pornography is the depiction of
Historically, most subjects of bondage imagery have been women, and the genre has been criticized for promoting misogynistic attitudes and violence against women.
Magazines and comics
Variety
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
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 mustachioed 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]
Though Bizarre was a small format magazine, it had a huge impact on later
New York photographer Irving Klaw also published illustrated adventure/bondage serials by fetish artists
These publications disappeared for a time with a crackdown on pornography in the late 1950s.
Resurgence of bondage magazines
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
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 of the early magazines could be regarded as
In the 1990s, as homosexuality and bi-sexuality began to be more socially accepted, magazine publishers started to produce
Websites and imagery in mainstream pornography
From the late 1990s onwards, specialist BDSM pornographic websites such as Insex and the various websites of Kink.com appeared. As Internet pornography became more widely available, the bondage magazine market began to decrease. As of 2003, specialist bondage magazines were mostly displaced by bondage material on the Internet, and bondage imagery is to be found 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.
Criticism
As the availability of free pornography on the Internet has increased, its possible effects on microaggression towards women have been discussed.[2] The concern has been raised that since bondage pornography mostly depicts women (who are portrayed primarily in situations of female submission), such pornography may promote an attitude legitimising violence against women.[2]
The book series and film
See also
- Fetish model
- Irving Klaw
- Japanese bondage
- Kink.com
- List of fetish artists
- Sadism and masochism in fiction
- Splatter film
- Sexual fetishism
References
- ISBN 978-0-914646-48-8
- ^ S2CID 206564636.
- ^ S2CID 145210538.
External links
- "Between the Rubber Sheets: A Look at Modern Fetish Magazines", essay by D.K. Holm