Mistress Hu's Ultimate Guide to Tape Gags

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In Praise of Gagged Tops

I never ordered a copy of Harmony Concepts' first-ever bondage video, but I got one anyway. After I bought my first bondage magazines in the mid-nineties, I ordered some Close-Up Concepts videos through the mail after seeing an ad for them. The magazine was several years old, though, and Close-Up Concepts didn't offer some of the videos that I'd ordered any longer, so they sent me a couple of videos I hadn't asked for instead, including the first Hamony Concepts bondage video, starring Harmony Concepts' original "bondagette," Jennifer West.

The video (which Close-Up Concepts no longer offers, sad to say) is interesting just as a cultural artifact of what kink videos used to look like in the seventies, and to see how the pioneering work of kink producers like Irving Klaw and John Willie and Eric Stanton carried over into this new age of video work. A lot of the scenarios depicted in the video, like Jennifer West cleaning a living room while lightly bound and gagged, would have fit right in with those early pictures and drawings from the early icons of fetish erotica.

One of the final scene from that video shows a number of other bondagettes, all wearing swim caps and tape gags, "overpowering" and binding West, using hand signals and gag-music to communicate with each other. This was the first time I ever saw a gagged person tying and gagging another person, and that scene still sticks with me to this day. At the time I was just intrigued by seeing someone acting dominant but still in some kind of bondage, but as I got more immersed in kink I began to understand that wearing a gag, or a collar, or anything else (bondage-related or otherwise), is only an act of bottoming if the person wants it to be that way. If a top wants to wear a gag then that is their prerogative, and if anyone has a problem with how that looks then that's their problem.

Some studios occasionally feature gagged tops in their work, including Elizabeth Andrews' Office Perils, Bound Beauties Photo Salon and Bondish. It's something that I wish more producers would experiment with, though. Maybe the dynamics of a gagged top are too confusing for the average watcher of kink videos, but when it's done right (like the studios mentioned above), gagged tops can create some wonderfully playful and bizarre scenes that harken back to the fetish artists of decades past. Oh, and it's really hot, too.

Identifying Real Amateurs

When I first got Internet access in the early nineties, if you wanted bondage pictures then your best bet was to go to USENET groups like alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.bondage and see what people had posted on there. Back then, with relatively few exceptions, most of the pictures you'd find were scans from kink magazines, and the scans were usually low-quality because most of the people who did the scanning didn't bother to color-correct their scans (and may not have even known what color-correcting was). Websites with bondage photos on them were few and far between, although as the decade went on, and digital photography became more affordable, more and more paysites sprung up as amateur producers and models tried their hand at selling their work online. (The initial wave of "alternative" bondage sites inspired by Suicide Girls, especially The Underground, were particularly wonderful.)

However, as file-sharing services took off to the point where Napster soon became a household word, erotica producers of all stripes soon found their hard work being passed around for free online, just like the photos from kink magazines that were so popular on USENET a decade earlier. Lots of people who wanted to get off to quality erotica, but didn't want to pay for it, could just jump on their sharing client of choice and download hundreds of dollars' worth of paysite content in a matter of minutes. This problem has never gone away, and if anything it's gotten worse with major streaming video sites for erotica making it easy for people to post pay videos for everyone to see. (This phenomenon is not unique to photos and videos; I find someone trying to pirate California Bondage Sorority Book One online at least once every week.)

The problem is that even with all this piracy going on, there are still amateurs who put their work out for free. Maybe they just don't want to go through the rigmarole of trying to set a paysite up, or maybe they just like the idea of lots of people seeing their photos and videos, but they do exist. Honestly, I often find myself preferring that kind of work because there's a rawness to it that reminds me of those old sites like The Underground. The problem is that these amateurs tend to use the same websites that are responsible for so much of the piracy of erotica that's going on right now, and since even these amateurs have high-quality video cameras on their cell phones, and can get professional-quality lighting for a good price at Amazon, it can be hard to tell at first glance whether a video on one of these sites is a genuine amateur production or a stolen paysite video.

I understand why a lot of my producer friends have taken to boycotting these sites, but it feels like there must be a better way to go about this. Back when there weren't so many bondage websites out there, sites like Red's Realm and Talon's Eyrie served as an excellent guide to both the free and the paid content out there. Maybe someone needs to make a website, or some other service, for those of us who enjoy true amateur erotica, so we can find the photos and videos that are being put out there by their producers for free without accidentally running into pirated content. That doesn't seem like it would be too difficult, and it would enable everyone to find and enjoy truly free content without accidentally watching stuff that they should have paid for first.

Pedantic and Proud?

Recently Wellcome Collection, a museum in London, posted a YouTube video showcasing a scold's bridle that they have in their collection, and discussing how scold's bridles were used over the years. This video caught my attention for a few reasons, the first being that material about scold's bridles (one of my fetishes) is kind of rare just by itself. Secondly, the video contained the first photograph I've ever seen of a scold's bridle being used for non-kinky disciplinary purposes. (Like a lot of bygone punishments that were outlawed before the camera was invented, the scold's bridle was still used "in the shadows" in places like prisons and POW camps.)

What still bothers me about the video, though, is that the device shown in the museum's collection looks much more like a German schandmaske than a scold's bridle. Although derived from the scold's bridle, the schandmaske was a substantially different punishment. Not only did most schandmasken not have a gag, but they covered much more of the face to superimpose another image over the wearer's head (usually something animal-like or devil-like), which also served to make it harder to identify the criminal later, whereas most punishments of that era (like the pillory and stocks) were meant to expose the criminal to the public so citizens would know which persons to avoid and distrust.

Since I'm an enthusiast about gags, as well as medieval-era punishments, it's natural that I have a lot of knowledge about these topics, but it brings to mind how pedantic I can be about these things. Especially when it comes to the difference between a stocks and a pillory, this cartoon kind of drives the point home perfectly. I can't count the number of times when I've been at a play party and bristled when another kinkster referred to a pillory as a stocks (or, worse yet, a stockade), and as much as I know that it's not polite to "correct" someone about that (unless they're one of my subs, of course), part of me always wants to go into Teacher Mode and explain the difference.

Looking back at California Bondage Sorority Book One, I can see how I used dialogue to kind of take a jab at people who use the word "stocks" to refer to a pillory. (To be fair, Cece and the other sisters of Epsilon Pi Sigma would be expected to know this difference because of their comprehensive BDSM classes.) I also took a similar swipe at non-kinky people who call ball gags "gag balls," although I've seen other kinksters rankle when someone says that term aloud, so I feel a lot less self-conscious about that. Being seen as a pedant doesn't exactly help you make friends, but maybe I shouldn't fight that label when it comes to knowing the proper terminology for punishment devices. After all, I'm kind of supposed to be an expert on those.

Getting Off On Your Handiwork

A little over a week ago, Alice of aliceinbondageland.com fame tweeted that she was getting turned on by editing fetish videos that she'd just played a part in. That kind of threw me for a loop, because I've always had a hard time getting aroused by erotica that I've produced (whether stories or scene logs or pictures), and I'd figured that was the norm. Inspired by that tweet, I posted a poll on Twitter to see how erotica producers felt about their own work. To my surprise, not only did most producers say that they found it easier to get aroused by their own productions, but no one else reported having a more difficult time.

On the one hand, it's easy to see why people would be more aroused by erotic media that they played a part in, because many producers create work that targets their own fetishes and other interests. Especially for producers who specialize in relatively niche fetishes and other markets, their work might literally be the only work out there that caters to what it is that gets them off. Even with as much erotica as you can find on the Internet these days, there are still lots of fetishes out there that don't get much, if any, attention.

For me, though, I think the problem is that because I created my work, I know exactly what's going to happen, and part of what arouses me is the surprise of going through a story or video or photoset, that "what's gonna happen next" anticipation. Even going back to stories I wrote over a decade ago and completely forgot about, I just can't get that aroused when I read them. It's almost like I need that outside perspective, someone else tackling that thing I like, for me to get aroused. (Intelligence is definitely a turn-on for me, so experiencing someone else's brilliance may also be what gets me going.)

Part of the reason I wrote California Bondage Sorority Book One (and why I'm working on the sequel right now) is because I want my work to inspire others to create their own takes on the fetishes and predicaments and such that I put into my books. A good deal of that is just selfishly hoping that I wind up with more material to get off to. I have a hard time believing that I'm the only erotica producer who has a hard time getting aroused by their own work, though, and it makes me wonder if there's a market for some kind of exchange system, where producers of erotica can cater to another producer's fetishes and then get catered to in kind. I don't have the slightest clue about how and where to start something like that, so I'll just throw that idea out there for some of you to run with.

In Defense of Fuzzy Handcuffs

What's wrong with fuzzy handcuffs? From a physical standpoint, there are two common problems. First, the actual handcuffs that get sold with the fuzzy sleeves on them tend to be very low-quality, and can get jammed or otherwise break more easily than a pair of good quality, police-issue handcuffs. Secondly, if the fuzz wears off and gets into the handcuff mechanisms then it can cause jamming issues as well. Handcuffs are always a higher-risk bondage toy than your typical set of leather cuffs, but putting fuzzy sleeves on the ratchet mechanisms can significantly increase the risk involved when playing with them.

When kinksters speak with disdain of "fuzzy handcuffs," though, they're usually not talking about handcuffs. Rather, they're talking about the kind of people they see as the target market for those kinds of toys: Light players who call themselves kinky because they occasionally use blindfolds during foreplay, or engage in a little light spanking during intercourse. In a lot of kinksters' eyes, these people insult the whole concept of kink, as well as those of us who play heavier, by "daring" to appropriate the name of kink for their lighter play.

I wouldn't experience blindfold play or light spanking as much different from "normal" vanilla sexual activity, but I don't think that makes me "more" of a kinkster. I've always disliked the idea of being exclusionary when it comes to labels and identities, but I really blanch when it happens with kink because of how dangerous it is. When kinksters rail against lighter players who start experimenting with kink using fuzzy handcuffs and the kinds of toys you find in "upscale sex boutiques," they run the risk of putting those people off of kink events where they could be educated, where people like us can say, "Hey, those fuzzy handcuffs can be risky to play with because of these reasons, so here's why you might want to try using these buckling leather cuffs first." Those people could then get seriously hurt if they try riskier kink on their own, not coming to the rest of us for help because we've treated them so poorly before.

It's understandable that some heavier players may want to associate with other heavier players, but all of us who identify as kinky -- no matter how light or heavy we play -- face the same problems from the rest of society when it comes to stereotypes and legal problems and potential employment issues. You can avoid playing with lighter players and still support their rights to express their kink, just like those lighter players want you to be safe as a kinkster as well. We're all in the same boat, battling the same rough waters, so it really bothers me when some kinksters want to throw people overboard for not being "kinky enough" for them. We have a lot to gain by tolerating our differences, and a lot to lose by continuing all this petty bickering.

California Bondage Sorority Book One now in paperback

California Bondage Sorority Book One is now available in paperback through CreateSpace, the self-publishing arm of Amazon.com. I apologize for the high price, but CreateSpace isn't well-suited for long books (about 390,000 words, nearly four times the length of the average novel) like this one, and I wasn't allowed to sell it for less than $25.21.

Remember that the ebook is still just $9.99 at Amazon.com, and Kindle Unlimited subscribers can read it for free. (I actually make more money from ebook sales than I will from the paperback.) Thank you to everyone who has bought the book and enjoyed it so far, and I hope that more of you give it a read soon.

John Willie and Creating Fetish Cultures

I've never had as many orgasms in a day as I did the day that I received my copy of Taschen's reprint of every issue of John Willie's landmark fetish magazine, Bizarre. I'd seen some of Willie's artwork on USENET on bondage photo groups (yes, it was that long ago), so I knew that he'd done a lot of work that touched on my primary fetishes, bondage and gags. Although much of Bizarre (especially the later volumes) focused more on other fetishes, the combination of Willie's artwork, photography and writing about bondage and gags turned me on much more strongly than I could have expected, and I spent most of a day pleasuring myself as I kept reading and reading.

Willie worked at a time when he had to couch the fetishes he was displaying in Bizarre so they didn't appear, at least on their surface, as sexual; this is why he famously paired most of his photographs of bound and gagged women with a printed exhortation to women that went, "Don't let this happen to you! Learn jiu-jitsu, the art of self-defense." More subtle was how he often couched bondage in the concept of fashion, inventing things such as a dress that could be lifted over a woman's head and tied off at the top to immobilize the woman's arms. His essay (and accompanying photo and watercolors) about how gags will inevitably become a fashion staple is easily my favorite moment in Bizarre's history, and it still excites me every time I read it.

As I think back about what made Willie's work so powerful and unique, apart from the time frame in which he worked, I've come to realize that more than just portraying various fetishes, Willie was able to create entire mini-cultures through his writing and other art. Nearly anyone can depict a fetish with just a few models and the right tools, or the requisite skills to paint a painting or write a story. Maybe it was due to the constraints he worked under in the fifties and early sixties, but Willie had a real talent for making you believe that people really would wear his upside-down dresses, or gag themselves to be fashionable. He made it all seem not just realistic and possible, but sometimes even inevitable.

Those of us who work in kink often have to put a lot of effort into making sure that our clients feel okay in expressing their sexuality and their kinks; no matter how many kink-themed music videos get made, or how many stores stock fuzzy handcuffs because of the latest trends, there are still a lot of negative messages about kink in the broader culture, to say nothing about sexuality at large. Many of us have to work (sometimes very hard) just to make various kinks seem acceptable, but Willie was one of those rare artists who could make kink seem normal. When I look at the other kink artists whose work has really moved me -- especially the team behind Harmony Concepts, and then later the wave of amateur sites inspired by Suicide Girls that came out once digital photography became affordable, like The Underground -- they all had that ability to create their own culture, a world where bondage and whatever other kinks they portrayed seemed like a daily fact of life. I hope that I can achieve that kind of brilliance in my own writing one of these days.

Degrading Sex Work Enables Piracy

If I make a short, non-erotic film for about $10,000, and distribute it through pay channels like YouTube Red or Netflix (or even get a major distribution deal like the Blair Witch Project filmmakers), then it's obvious to most people why I would have a serious problem with other people uploading the film and making it available for streaming or download in a way that I don't get any money from. This isn't a hard concept to grasp: I spent my own money and put a lot of effort into something, and so I deserve financial compensation from people who want to enjoy the fruits of my labor. Yes, perhaps the world would be a better place if we abolished money and everyone was able to get whatever they wanted whenever they wanted it, but we're pretty far from that kind of world right now and we're not going to get there any time soon.

The same understanding doesn't hold true for erotic media, though. Judging by the popularity of some free streaming video sites for adult videos, and all the videos up for sale there that are clearly taken from paysites, piracy seems to be the norm for videos that are meant to sexually titillate their viewers. Although this problem is most prevalent with erotic videos and photos, it happens with other kinds of erotica as well; I find pirated ebooks of California Bondage Sorority Book One online every week, even though it's really not all that popular (yet). This isn't a matter of just robbing creators of pocket change, either; last month Dave Simpson, longtime producer of bondage photos and videos, committed suicide because piracy virtually destroyed his business. (Contrary to the widely-held perception of many consumers of erotica, for many creators it is their primary form of income. Piracy destroys lives.)

When erotica producers find their work posted online without their permission, though, they don't always have the same mechanisms in place to get their work taken down. Part of this is because a lot of sharing sites just don't have the same standards as sites like YouTube when it comes to taking down stolen material promptly (and some of those sites operate out of countries with lax enforcement of copyright laws). A lot of it has to do with the fact that sex work is degraded in our culture, though, because people who make erotic photos or videos or books are seen by many people as somehow less deserving of help (or even basic respect) than others. Just like women who dress sexily are told "what did you expect" after they go out to a club and get raped or sexually assaulted, erotic photographers and videographers and models and writers are blamed for the piracy of their work because "they knew they were in a seedy business." It's not right to blame women for getting raped, and it's not right to blame adult producers and models and writers for their work being pirated.

A lot needs to be done when it comes to getting pirated videos off of adult streaming video sites and file-sharing services, but in addition to the technical work of reporting videos and making it easier for these sites to detect when paid content is being uploaded to their servers, we also need to keep working to change mainstream culture when it comes to its perception of sex work and sex workers. If erotic video and photo producers had the same piracy-reporting tools at their disposal that others producers had then it would be much easier for everyone involved in erotic media to make a living doing what they love, and hopefully there won't be so many suicides in the future.

Fantasy vs. Reality in Erotic Literature

As long as erotic literature is still broadly classified under the heading of romance, one of the things that this may result in is that readers will expect erotica to hew to the same aspects of fantasy seen in most romance novels. Although there are certainly exceptions out there in the market, romance novels tend to take place in ideal environments, with any dangers or difficulties that pop up being quickly resolved, and nearly always to the protagonist's benefit. One of the reasons that romance novels have been so popular decade after decade is that they provide the same kind of escapism for readers that "popcorn movies" provide for filmgoers, albeit with fewer explosions and more purple prose.

From the very start of conceptualizing it, though, I didn't want California Bondage Sorority Book One to depict an idyll. The fantasy of.a sorority where the sisters practice all kinds of kink on each other is compelling to a lot of readers, and it's my hope that the book can be read in that way if that's how readers want to experience it, but Epsilon Pi Sigma is far from perfect. I very deliberately raise issues of consent and safety in the novel to reflect problems that I saw back when I was a part of BDSM groups and went to play parties. (Those problems are the main reason why I don't participate in those things any longer, and keep my kink to my inner circle.)

Some of the people who've read the novel have had issues with those aspects of the sorority, though. On the one hand, I can't blame them for having those problems because I wanted them to be problematic, to raise questions and concerns about how the sorority (and even kink in general) operates. At the same time, though, if readers don't want to engage in those issues then it feels like there's no possibility for erotic texts to deal with larger issues that many may (rightly) find non-erotic.

I want the California Bondage Sorority books to be capable of being read in a variety of ways, from erotic romance all the way to literary fiction. Historically, though, erotic literature has always been pigeonholed into the category of romance, and all the stereotypes that come with that categorization. If it's just not possible for my books to break out of that mold, regardless of what I do or say as the author, then I'm probably going to have a very hard time creating dialogues about the issues I'd like to discuss, let alone an audience for my novels.

Classifying Erotica as Romance

The first "BDSM stories" I read were in kink magazines that I found in my house. I was old enough to know what "bondage" was at that point, and I knew that I loved it from the "tie-up games" I liked to play, but the stories didn't really do much for me because they were heavy on S&M (which I hadn't tried and wasn't into at the time) and they had a lot of non-consensual sex. When I got online, though, I found stories more to my liking on USENET at alt.sex.bondage, as well as erotic forums on places like America Online and CompuServe. (Wow, typing that makes me feel old.) I've kept reading kinky stories over the years, but there was something about those first stories I found online that stuck with me through the years, more than any others I've read since then.

As I was getting ready to write California Bondage Sorority Book One, I revisited those old stories -- saved first to 3.5" floppy, then Zip Disk, then CD-ROM, and now my iCloud -- and tried to figure out just what it was about those stories that I liked so much. Part of it was definitely nostalgia -- even if I'd read those stories from BDSM magazines, the ones I found online were the first ones that I actually liked -- but a lot of what I liked had to do with the level of detail that the writers put into describing the feeling of being bound and gagged and played with. That created a kind of verisimilitude that let me enjoy the stories more than other kinds of kink erotica that I've read, especially since the writers came up with some very creative situations that I enjoyed for their sheer brilliance. I definitely tried to emulate those stories in my own writing, both the emphasis on the actual kink going on and the creativity of all the different situations that the characters got into.

In these first couple of months of having California Bondage Sorority Book One up for sale, though, I've run into a problem of reader expectation. For better or worse, the category of erotica, at least as far as literature goes, is almost always lumped under the category of romance. Although California Bondage Sorority Book One has some elements of romance, they're definitely not as present as they are in other "kinky novels" I've read; I'll definitely be incorporating more romance in later books, but I've always wanted the California Bondage Sorority books to be not just erotic texts, but also novels that can be appreciated as literary fiction, suspense, and much more. I'm not comfortable classifying California Bondage Sorority Book One under a genre other than erotica, though, since bondage and other forms of kink play such a huge part in the story.

If erotica continues to fall under the broader category of romance, then it's only natural that readers are going to expect not just romance in erotic novels, but many of the other conventions of romance novels as well. Maybe California Bondage Sorority Book One, and those stories I first read online over twenty years ago, belong to a different classification of story, one that borrows heavily from kink-themed erotica but should be considered its own genre. I don't know what that genre would be called, or how to set it up so readers have appropriate expectations coming into a story, but part of the reason I'm writing the California Bondage Sorority books is to encourage more writers to write stories and books like what I've written, so maybe I should work on defining and promoting that new classification.

March Mmmmmph-ness Sale

For those of you who can think of kinkier uses of brackets and balls, California Bondage Sorority Book One is on sale for $4.99 (that's more than 50% off the normal price) from now until March 27th. While everyone else is watching sports on television, why not curl up with a nice, long tale of bondage and ball gags? Take advantage of this special offer while you can.

Pricing.a Long eBook

Recently I was talking with one of the early readers of California Bondage Sorority Book One about how I priced my novel. The issue of how to sell the novel is kind of a tricky one for me not only because I've never directly published an ebook before, but because I can't find a real precedent for my first novel.

Most erotic/romance novels by published authors (those who have traditional publishing contracts) sell at around $7.99 in Kindle form on Amazon, while those by self-published and non-traditional authors are priced at around $2.99. There's a good deal of variance, of course, but those seem to be pretty standard. However, most mass-market paperback romance novels are about 50,000 words long, and the average length of a free-standing "full" novel is about 100,000 words. At approximately 390,000 words, California Bondage Sorority Book One is several times as long as the typical novels in this field.

Maybe I haven't been looking in the right spots, but I haven't been able to find any novels of that length published as erotica or even romance. It's hard to make comparisons to "vanilla" novels of that length because so many of them are in the public domain, so publishers only need to recoup the costs involved with things like translations and glosses. Contemporary, non-public domain novels of "epic" length, such as A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, tend to have higher ebook prices than shorter novels, and that seems fair, but again, prices there vary a lot.

I am a published writer in my "vanilla" life, so I feel like I should have a better idea of how to price California Bondage Sorority Book One. Since I can't find any other erotic novels to compare it to, though, I kind of feel clueless.

Fun and Kink

Watching the evolution of kink groups over the past couple of decades has been interesting. Twenty years ago, the process of finding and joining kink groups was a tedious rigmarole that involved looking up ads in the backs of newsletters sold at adult bookstores, exchanging letters, meeting for appointments, going to munches, paying yearly fees and then, quite often, finally getting to go to a play party only to find that no one there shared your fetishes. These days, all an adult has to do is get a membership on a social networking site for kinky people, look up where the nearest event is (and there are a whole lot more of them now than there were before), pay the event fee and go do whatever it is you want to do.

One of the things that I enjoyed about the evolution of kink groups in those twenty years was the creation of TNG (The Next Generation) groups, or TNG subgroups within existing groups, for younger kinksters, usually defined as those 35 years of age and under. Not only did I have an easier time talking with people in TNG groups, but the parties were just a lot more fun. My style of kink has always tended to be on the silly and playful side, and you just don't find that many older kinksters into that sort of play. On the whole, I'd say that those who get into kink for fun and joyful purposes are a very small percentage, and given the solemn tone that tends to dominate at all-ages play parties, it's easy to see why so many of us who like that kind of play never really feel at home in that kind of an environment.

As I've been writing the California Bondage Sorority books, it's been difficult to figure out the tone to take. I've always wanted to address serious issues like abuse and consent in the books, and so I try to keep a fairly serious tone in most of the novel. There are less serious moments, though, including the kind of "tie-up games" I love so much. Stylistically, I think they work to help the books from becoming too dark, but I worry about readers not identifying with the events like they do with the more serious scenes that they're more likely to have seen in kink clubs (and online videos and the like as well).

The California Bondage Sorority books have never been intended to present what I think of as an idealized world of kink (far from it), but there's always a danger when you're a writer that people will assume you write about how you'd like things to be. I fear that this may cut both ways with me, because the funnier scenes may turn off old-time kinksters who want their kink more serious, and the darker scenes will turn off people who don't want to consider the serious issues of abuse and consent in their erotica. Feedback on California Bondage Sorority Book One has been positive so far, but time will tell whether or not that continues to be the case as I work to find the right tone for the novels.

Fashion and "BDSM"

The intersection of fashion and what people perceive as "bondage" or "BDSM" has long intrigued me. Even back when I was in high school, I can remember some of my teachers showing us picture spreads and advertisements in fashion magazines, and pointing to anything that looked vaguely rope-like coming off of a woman's clothes and claiming that it "represented" a leash, and therefore the subjugation of all women. I had enough reasons not to like those teachers, but the way they went on about that stuff really ticked me off.

Kink, like other practices considered outside of "mainstream" society, has a real problem with people misusing its terminology. Too often I hear someone talk about a "bondage dress," and then I see that it just has a couple of horizontal straps on it that only have a decorative function. I was reminded of that earlier this week when I saw a news article talk about fashion models in "BDSM-style denim masks" that just looked like dreadie wigs put on backwards. If those can be called "BDSM-style" then I don't know what isn't "BDSM-style."

There are, of course, those fashion designers who use elements of actual bondage in their designs, such as this Samuel Cimansck show that showcased some very interesting -- and more importantly, effective -- gags. I got one of the first copies of the complete reprint of John Willie's Bizarre magazine when it came out from Taschen about twenty years ago, and one of the ways Willie liked to talk about bondage in the couched terms he had to use back then was to wrap it up in the auspices of fashion. I can still remember a wonderful article he wrote in his tenth issue -- gorgeously illustrated with his watercolors and line drawings, and even one photo of a tape gagged damsel -- about how gags would eventually become a fashion necessity for all women.

I've always believed in the value of aesthetics in kink -- such as matching a duct tape gag to the wearer's clothes -- but it's hard to see true bondage in fashion becoming much of a reality simply because of the worries about the wrong people seeing it. There's.a part of me that still wishes that John Willie's dreams about gags becoming fashionable would come true, though, and not just because I can think of a lot of people who need to be gagged all the time. Those old high school teachers of mine certainly spring to mind.

Erotic Novels and Politics

As I wrote California Bondage Sorority Book One, I struggled with whether or not to include discussion about political issues in the novel. On one hand, university campuses are often full of political discussions and arguments, so there was a lot to be said for adding political discussions to make the novel more realistic. On the other hand, though, politics is a huge turn-off for a lot of people, so including politics in the novel would come with the risk of alienating readers. That's probably even more true for an erotica novel, where many readers don't want anything getting between them and the titilation that they want to feel.

I don't care to discuss my own political beliefs too much (at least on this blog), but I'd like to think that I'm one of those people who can recognize idiocy on all sides of an issue. College and university students tend to go to extremes in their politics because it's a time when many young people try out different beliefs and philosophies to see what works for them. Focusing on those extremes felt like a good way to go about exploring politics in my novel, with characters like Belle and Dean Ranklin, while still having more reasonable characters like Victoria and Chloe.

For now I'm trying to keep Cece as apolitical as possible, just so she can watch the extremes and keep reporting on how they play out. As the protagonist, she's going to be the character that most readers identify with, especially since the novel is written in first-person perspective, and I hope that keeping Cece out of the political fights will help readers stomach the politics of the other characters, whether readers agree or disagree with them.

It feels like there's still a lot to be said for not distracting readers from the fun of reading the novel with political stuff, but I'm hoping that the California Bondage Sorority novels can transcend the traditional boundaries of erotic novels and be appreciated through the lenses of other genres. Maybe that's too ambitious of a goal, but I'm still shooting for that as I begin work here on the second novel. I hope I can get it into your hands soon.

Can Erotica Be Cross-Genre?

I read a lot of fiction, and although there are certain genres of fiction that I don't care so much for, I like to read from a variety of different perspectives. I always try to keep my mind open to all kinds of books, and if a book holds my interest then I don't particularly care what genre it's classified as. Most of my friends who are avid readers seem to have the same attitude towards the books they choose to read.

Erotica seems to be a sticking point for a lot of readers, though. Part of that may be due to the weird puritanical influences that still pervade a broad cross-section of American society, but it also seems like there's a widespread attitude that any written work that can be construed as "erotica" must only be intended for masturbatory aid and can't have any other value. It all goes back to the definition of the dreaded p-word: "Something with no artistic value." Since we still haven't moved past Justice Potter Stevens' nebulous "I know it when I see it" classification of the p-word, all it takes is one unfriendly reader to get a work classified as "without artistic value."

Obviously kink, and bondage in particular, play a huge part in California Bondage Sorority Book One, but I didn't write it as just a work that some people will (hopefully) find erotic value in. I spent a lot of time working on other themes that I feel should interest a wider variety of readers, such as woman-on-woman bullying, university politics, shifting attitudes towards what are considered "acceptable" punishments (outside of kink) and the voyeuristic tendencies of modern American culture. I wanted to write a book that could be enjoyed in a variety of ways, in large part because that's the kind of writing that I enjoy reading the most.

There are lots of readers who are just inherently squeamish towards kink and/or sexuality, just like there are readers who can't handle horror novels (as just one example). I'd like to think that there's a way to open erotica up to a broader base of readers by emphasizing the fact that lots of novels classified as erotica can be read in a variety of ways. I just wish that I knew how to go about doing that, except through my own writing.

Whither Harmony Concepts?

Like a lot of kinksters my age, one of the first "gateways" I had to the world of "bondage and discipline" was the work of Harmony Concepts. Even if my tastes in kink didn't run to the more subdued to start with, I probably would have latched onto Harmony's work simply because of its high artistry -- both from their professional producers and the amateurs whose work they distributed -- and how it so closely mimicked the kind of "tie-up games" I loved to play when I was younger.

Other studios did more explicit work, which was good in its own right, but even in an age before fucking machines and horror movie-like backdrops and all that stuff, Harmony's work tended to be much less "hardcore" than their contemporaries. Apart from special video lines, which were often advertised separately from their monthly mailers, their work contained no S&M (except for the kind of "spanking" that was so light that it'd be generous to call it "love taps"), hardly any explicit sexuality (save a few videos near the end that had magic wands) and usually only allowed nudity above the waist. Their "Harmony Philosophy" pervaded everything that they did, and for those of us who were (and still are) fans of love bondage, their work remains a kind of holy grail of the pre-digital age of kink erotica.

As more producers and models started setting up their own websites in the 1990s and 2000s, though, and as digital photography enabled amateurs to set up their own websites and make money that way, Harmony stopped being the kind of destination studio that it used to be. Especially as grittier, more sexually-explicit work became the norm in kink erotica, Harmony began to be seen as almost an anachronism, a quaint relic of the old days of fetish photography and videography along the lines of Irving Klaw's work. It didn't help that love bondage began to be seen as "not real" kink by many people who claimed that you weren't "really" kinky unless you engaged in X, Y and Z forms of "extreme" kink. (I abhor that kind of thinking.)

Although Harmony's old work is still available through their website, and other studios like FM Concepts produce stuff that's closer to Harmony's work than most of the other major studios these days, there really isn't the kind of one-stop-shop for a wide variety of current love bondage erotica that Harmony Concepts used to provide. Pretty much every major studio does a fair deal of explicit sexuality and hardcore S&M, probably because that's what sells the best these days. I'd like to think that there's still enough demand for love bondage that another studio can pick up where Harmony Concepts left off, but maybe the best we can hope for is the scattering of amateur love bondage producers that are still out there, but aren't as easy to find as the major studios.

Standard Guidelines for Fetish Shoots

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Book One of the California Bondage Sorority series is now available on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited.

On the coast of California lies a private liberal-arts university with a sorority whose sisters learn a whole lot more than the three R's ...

Fresno-born brat Cece Sorensen arrives at Pearl Springs University on a bright August day, eager to escape her parents and live a wild college life. Little does she know how wild that college life will be ...

Lured into the secretive Epsilon Pi Sigma sorority by her scheming mother, Cece is soon inducted into a world of near-constant bondage, harsh punishments and more gags than she ever thought possible. Her "big sister" in the sorority, Chloe Demers, gives Cece the discipline she's been needing her whole life, from sleeping in chains to waiting on the other big sisters as a French maid.

Before her first semester as a college student is over, Cece will experience public humiliation, fetish video stardom and a trip home that will push her to her very limits. But along the way she'll make wonderful new friends, learn a lot about the world of BDSM and discover that some of that stuff can be pleasurable.Very pleasurable.

The first book of the California Bondage Sorority series will take readers on a roller-coaster ride through the worlds of kink and college alike, and sets the stage for even crazier adventures to come as Cece Sorensen begins her journey as a sister of Epsilon Pi Sigma.

BDSM and Kink Educational Resources

Here is a (very partial) list of resources for those wanting to learn more about how to practice BDSM and kink. Nothing beats hands-on experience, so also look for local BDSM/kink groups and see if they offer any educational events.

Books:
SM 101: A Realistic Introduction and Jay Wiseman's Erotic Bondage Handbook by Jay Wiseman
Shibari You Can Use and More Shibari You Can Use by Lee Harrington
Screw the Roses, Send Me the Thorns: The Romance and Sexual Sorcery of Sadomasochism by Philip Miller and Molly Devon
Different Loving: The World of Sexual Dominance and Submission by Gloria G. Brame and William D. Brame
The New Topping Book and The New Bottoming Book by Donnie Easton

Websites:
keepingitkinky.net

Consent Resources

Here is a (very partial) list of resources for help understanding consent, particularly when it comes to BDSM and kink;

BDSM Wikia category entry on consent
Understanding Consent from BDSMWorkbook.com
Consent and BDSM: The State of the Law from the National Coaltion for Sexual Freedom
Understanding Sexual Violence and Sexual Assault from UCLA