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.
