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Top reasons why the internet is a dangerous place for Adults. You won’t believe number three.

6 Replies

Hi All

The internet is no longer a safe place to be an adult. Puritans and authoritarians are closing in from all directions: state censorship, financial censorship and corporate censorship. This sounds like paranoia, but it isn’t. Here’s why. (Oh, and sorry for the ghastly Upworthy headline, I couldn’t resist).

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1) State Censorship

The UK has censored depictions of acts which are legal to perform- like BDSM, spanking, face-sitting. See blog posts passim.

Australia has even more draconian restrictions.

The USA has protected speech, so did it by the back door: 18 USC 2257 imposed very onerous record keeping requirements on producers. For example if a model you shot in 2001 pops up again in 2014 with a different stage name, in theory you could go to prison if you don’t update your records on her accordingly. Even if you don’t work with her and don’t know she’s resumed her career. And the feds can come knocking any time they want, and you have to have you record keeping address on the site.

I remember a lot of single-model sites closing down because they didn’t want to publish their real names and addresses, naturally enough. These days it has settled down, with lawyers acting as keepers of records, but mainly because the current democrat government has had other priorities than closing down porn. Just wait until a censorious person gets in as attorney general again.

Other governments world wide have woken up to the potential of the internet. The potential for people to bypass old (state-censored) media. And they don’t like it- witness the use of, and censorship of, the Internet and Twitter during the “Arab Spring”.

Now that so many of us are online, they have also woken up to the fact that they can keep tabs on people by spying on the internet en masse.

Clearly there is a balance to be struck between using the internet to catch people committing serious crime and allowing the rest of us privacy and freedom of expression online. Personally I think the presumption should be innocent until proven guilty, and that enforcement agencies should be made to justify each case with judicial oversight. I think we need a public debate over where these boundaries should be set, and that’s something we’ve not had to date.

What actually happens is that the decisions are made out of public gaze by bureaucrats with a job to do. That job may be intelligence gathering, law enforcement, or classification and censorship of films. The problem is that the parameters for how they are allowed to operate have not been set following mass public consultations and long debates in Parliament. They have been set by the people at the coalface, doing the job. Is it any wonder that they are erring on the side of making their jobs easier, and grabbing everything they think might be useful to them? That they have the technical capability to do something doesn’t mean it is healthy for our society to allow them everything they’d like.

I’d ask even the most determined “won’t someone think of the children?” brigade to step back a moment and consider the chilling effects. Their children will grow up soon enough- don’t you owe it to them to ensure that when they are adults, they enjoy freedom of speech, freedom from unwarranted intrusions into their privacy, and the right to be themselves online?

Because make no mistake, being yourself online is exactly what is at stake here.

2) Financial Censorship

Paypal

I’ve been in the website business for nearly 14 years. I remember the feeling of freedom, the Wild West spirit of 2001. Back then, you could use Paypal to join erotic websites. They had a service specifically for that. Many webmasters used it, many more customers did too.

Then the axe fell. One day, Paypal changed their minds. All the professional accounts of webmasters- who had been making a neat amount of money for themselves and for Paypal- got blocked. Not only that, but in many cases Paypal kept hold of the balances in the accounts, too. Pretty shitty if you happened to have the money to keep your business running in there. Most people eventually got the money out of Paypal- but by then the damage was done. This was the first wave of website closures I can remember.

My business Paypal account remains blocked to this day.

Ariel opened a business one too a while ago. We accepted a few payments that way for custom videos, because we thought that was OK by their terms and conditions and people like paying that way. Guess what? Account got frozen, lots of intrusive questions from Paypal, eventually the money was released but still- lesson learned. Don’t use Paypal for business, especially not if you want to be an adult online.

Google

Google makes its money through advertising, and the primary form of advertising it uses is Adwords, those “sponsored links” that pop up when you Google something. Advertisers pay Google when you click on of those links. Advertisers like it because it lets you target people who might be interested in your specific project.

Google was entirely happy for erotic websites to use adwords and pay them money. I did so for many years. Just a hundred pounds a month or so- but enough to get the Restrained Elegance brand name in front of the eyes of people searching for “bondage porn”. I reached hundreds of thousands of people that way. Sure, not all that many of them signed up. But some did, and it was a good way of attracting new people who’d not heard of us before.

Then the axe fell. One day I got an email from Google telling me they were no longer happy to accept my advertising money. At a stroke, the primary online form of advertising was denied to adult producers.

Oh, and Google refuses to push pirate sites down their search rankings, even back when we were all paying them to advertise with them. Google bondage porn now and you find tube sites with stolen content. The first actual producer is Hogtied from Kink.com down at the bottom of page three.

They claim they remove search results if they’ve had enough DCMA copyright notices about a page. But this is disingenuous. Google is in the business of building search algorithms. That allows them to deliver good search results on page one, and encourages advertisers to pay because customers stick with Google. If Google wanted to push pirate tube sites down the search rankings, they’ve got hundreds of very smart people who could work that into the algorithms. They haven’t.

That puts a lot of financial pressure on producers, who are now competing with their own stolen material and denied even the chance to pay to show their own sites above the pirates.

Credit Card Companies

Credit card companies levy hefty penalties against the erotica industry. Not without reason, they say the transactions are high risk. They are probably right. Because of the hysterical reaction some people have to the entirely normal situation of a grown adult person looking at porn, one can imagine the conversations when an unexpected charge is detected on a partner’s credit card.

“Oh! My card details must have been stolen online! I’ll call the bank!”

The merchant has essentially no say in this process (not the credit card companies’ fault- it’s the law). We just have to accept that sometimes someone charges back a dozen monthly payments worth of website memberships because “my card was stolen and I didn’t notice for a year”. Yeh, right.

What we’d do if we were a mature society is accept that people like porn, and if you have a problem with your partner doing so you’d talk about it to each other, and come up with a mature and considered solution. But that’s not how it is, and with the way things are going, that’s now how it is going to be in the future either.

So we’d love to accept payment methods other than credit cards. But credit cards are only available to people over 18, so the use of one is often used as a de facto age verification process. So one of the things the UK censor of video on demand is requiring is that only credit card payment be accepted.

Oh, and you used to be able to get a merchant account for adult processing fairly easily in the old days. These days it is prohibitive for any small company to do. So a little restaurant or pub or craft shop can get a merchant account and start processing right away. In my observation these businesses have a pretty high risk of failure, although admittedly they probably don’t suffer the chargeback crisis. So adult companies are forced into the hands of payment processing companies who levy eye-watering charges. a) Because they can and b) to give themselves some insulation against the chargebacks by aggregating payments for many producers.

iBill, CCBill, Clips4Sale, Epoch and the rest

iBill was the first big name processor. They imploded, taking a bunch of websites with them. The second mass die-off I can remember.

Their successors are CCBill, Clips4Sale, Epoch and the rest.

On the one hand, it is great that they exist. They enable cottage industry adult production, without them there would be NO small websites producing niche fetish material. On the other hand, they have often arbitrary compliance codes. Many sites have had to gut their descriptive text to avoid whatever CCBill think is bad this month.

Furthermore, if CCBill think you’ve been naughty, they can keep your money for six months to a year. It is right there in their terms and conditions.

This is an example of the creeping censorship by the back door imposed by corporations on erotica and adult freedom of expression. You can still say it, but you can’t say it and make a business out of it. And you can’t challenge it- there’s no court of appeal for CCBill deciding your content is not the sort of thing they want to handle any more.

Clips4Sale pre-emptively blocked UK debit cards earlier this month. I believe it is back now, but it hardly makes one feel safe hosting material on their service.

If your favourite site bills with one of these companies, the text on the site has already been censored. The producers and performers can’t say what they really want to say. (For example, you can’t post an essay on why BDSM isn’t rape, because it contains the word “rape”. See what I mean about the chilling effect of censorship?)

Censors pressuring the banks

The UK video on demand censor has been trying to make bank block payments to websites outside the UK which don’t conform to their regulations. That’s not just putting financial pressure on the producers, it is using financial pressures to make sure you can’t buy what you want to buy. Thus far the banks have declined to go along with it. But Home Office minister Damian Green has said “the government supports their work on whether banks can decline to process payments to websites operating outside the EU”.

So if we tolerate this, your freedom to buy what you want will be next.

This is not paranoia, this is stated policy from the censor. And like the R18 regulations it will disproportionately hit small producers making cool, kinky, queer, feminist or minority interest erotica, because these are the small businesses. And small businesses are always more vulnerable- we just don’t have the resources to fight hostile regulations or take legal action or do anything much other than shut up shop and do something else for a living.

Blogger

Out of the blue one day, Blogger ordered all money-related links on adult blogs removed. I’ve yet to hear an even faintly sensible explanation.

We copied Ariel’s blog posts across to here in case. What it means is that she’s still allowed to talk about the lovely fetish shoots she does, but she’s not allowed to link to them or let you know who they are so they can share some love.

3) Corporate Censorship

In many ways this is most insidious and most worrying aspect of censorship in the 21st Century.

Many of us use large corporations on the Internet as utility companies. We use their services as infrastructure to reach other people and to do business. Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, YouTube, Vimeo, Google, Microsoft, Wikipedia, Paypal. Smaller utilities serving niches like PurplePort, Purestorm, Model Mayhem.

But these are not utility companies. The utility companies are the internet service providers, mobile phone networks and web hosting companies. They get paid like utility companies too: according the amount of service you use. A fat pipe to the internet costs more than a piddly slow connection.

Governments are regulating them: the UK has forced ISPs to implement “won’t someone think of the children” filters (which 90% of people have sensibly turned off, despite the pernicious requirement by the government that they be switched on by default). They are requiring ISPs to keep and give up traffic details which can reveal almost as much about you as the content you are looking at. Knowing who you talk to, where and when and how often and for how long, is almost as revealing as knowing what you are talking about. It’s called traffic analysis. They’d certainly be able to figure out if someone is having an affair, or regularly attends alcoholics anonymous meetings.

But these things are brazen, and easy to find out about. Worrying, but open.

The worst thing of all is the creeping censorship amongst the utilities which aren’t utilities.

Apple

Apple won’t let you sell an app of nudie pictures. Because nipples. It’s great that Tim Cook has come out as gay, but sad that his company is so offended by the naked human form as to ban it in all their works. You can buy Fifty Shades of Grey from Apple, but not something like Screw The Roses or Chanta’s book which will actually tell you how to do BDSM safely in a loving and consensual environment. How fucked up is that?

Amazon

Amazon started hiding erotica. And then decided to ban a lot of BDSM just for being BDSM. Overnight, a small but vibrant community of eBook erotic and romantic authors had their business model whipped out from under them.

Vimeo

I’ve had an account on Vimeo for a couple of years. Their guidelines said nudity was OK but porn wasn’t. I posted some of our most romantic videos, including “Bondage can be Beautiful” (our trailer- which incidentally RED digital cinema said they were happy for us to use the RED logo on. Thanks, RED. You don’t know how welcome that was!) and “Ballerina loves Beethoven”, which is a beautiful film of Ariel as a ballet dancer. These videos had hundreds of thousands of views, and hundreds of positive comments.

This week the axe fell. My account was deleted from Vimeo. No “this video is OK, that isn’t”. Just – chop. Gone.

Vine – and soon Twitter?

Vine, which is owned by Twitter, is blocking adult content.

Puritans

Facebook is puritan central and always has been. Instagram likewise.

Social Media Future

Personally the only social media service I’ve ever liked is Twitter. I’ll bet you a tenner the @RElegance account will be axed inside 12 months, and all the other adult ones along with it.

No matter that thousands of people follow it, and presumably enjoy seeing bondage photos on their timeline (or they would unfollow again). No, all it will take is a few outraged “won’t someone think of the children” complaints, and it’ll all be gone.

The Shame Game

They’re playing the same shame game that the gay and lesbian community have had to endure for years. Ignoring that adult humans are sexual beings. Pretending that “all those perverts who look at this stuff” are not also the people who buy cars and kid’s toys (because they’ve had sex to have the kids, but mustn’t admit to it).

It is trying to say that people with sexual identities aren’t also functioning members of society. We’ve finally… finally! got gay marriage accepted in the Western world, and gay sex made legal. It is now OK to be gay and be the head of a large corporate, and thank goodness. But it is time we insisted on the same for other sexual identities too. Being into BDSM is one single aspect of your personality. It doesn’t make you of another species, some strange alien who doesn’t buy fruit or watch the news.

There are so many problems here. The first is that we are not willing to pay for services online. When you post a letter, you pay for the envelope and stamp. But no-one is willing to pay to tweet or follow on Facebook. Me included. This leaves the online service utilities like Facebook and Twitter to try to make money in other ways, and it means that we have no say whatsoever in their terms and conditions. We aren’t Facebook or Twitter’s customers. The advertisers and people they sell our details to are.

The only say we have in how the service treats us is to stop using the service if we don’t like it. When a mass migration happens (remember MySpace?) that can kill off the business, but if we withdraw in ones and twos, it makes no difference.

The adult content on these sites is irrelevant to Facebook and Twitter’s customers, the advertisers. Despite what the porn panic people would have you believe, porn is not big business. The revenue we make from it is small beans compared with what a car manufacturer might make by persuading thousands more people to buy their hatchback. The majority of us watch porn, but only a small minority are willing to pay for it. So there’s just not enough money around for us to be big players in advertising.

While people are too afraid of the shame game to admit to liking porn, so they won’t complain on our behalf when it the axe falls on Tumblr and Twitter. They’ll just quietly watch us go, and wonder where else they’ll find their porn fix now.

We’ve almost lost the ability to be an adult online

In the rush to think of the children, we’ve nearly run out of places to be adults. We’ve certainly lost a lot of places to be sexual, even though a huge fraction of human communication is sexual in one way or another (just look at a typical perfume advert to see what I mean). We just can’t admit to liking it. We have to keep up the “us and them” shame game pretence.

You are running out of places to post those sexy selfies.

You are running out of ways to reach an audience with your erotic fiction.

You are running out of places to find out about sites that might interest you.

It’s not OK to be an adult on the internet. We’re an endangered species. The freedom of the current generation to find out about their fetishes and sexual identities online may not be available to the next generation. Do we really want to go back to the dark ages of worrying that being sexually dominant and into BDSM makes you a potential serial killer? Shouldn’t we be celebrating sexual diversity, the freedom of sexual information? After all, 99.99% of the people on this planet are the result of sex between two adults. What on earth is so wrong with seeing it and discussing it and enjoying it?

What can we do?

For the UK producers, the R18 regulations applying to online video on demand is kind of the last straw. We fight this or BDSM disappears from the UK. It’s the latest wave of site die-offs. I personally know of many which have closed, several which have moved abroad in the last three weeks, and the rest of us feel under threat like never before. Because we ARE under threat.

It is naive to think that the censors will stop at this, as they are proudly announcing their intention, with the support of government, to prevent us all accessing censored material from outside the UK.

So obviously, help fight the regulations. Tweet about it, sign petitions, organise protest, all the things I’ve spoken about in previous blogs.

But is there anything else we can do to prevent the large-scale creeping censorship?

First, don’t rely on any service where you are not the direct customer. Don’t blog on blogger, get a little bit of web space (ideally hosted in country with protected speech), install WordPress and do it yourself.

There are free and open source social media projects, like SocialNet Federated services such as quitter and even more distributed intiatives like diaspora*. These are a long, long way from having critical mass but at least they are somewhat decentralised and are operated by people who want to facilitate communication rather than make money. We need to consider using those, and notifying our communities before we all get the axe from the existing social media companies.

I’m considering setting up a kink-friendly server for Twitter-equivalent social media – no idea how, or how much it would cost to run, but worth a go.

Then there’s Fetlife, which is an advertising supported not-a-real-utility but one whose entire selling point is the presence of fellow kinksters. I must admit I’ve always found it impenetrable, but I’ll give it more of a go. At least they make some of their money from paid subscribers, so they have some customers who use their service rather than advertise via it.

But if you upload video to Fetlife, you’d better believe the UK censor will come gunning for you once they killed off the cottage industry websites. Because they have a classic perverse incentive (they are funded by the people they decide are eligible to be regulated by them) they have defined TV like video on demand to encompass everyone putting video online, more or less. They WILL come for Fetlife sooner or late, if not stopped.

I didn’t get much joy advertising on Fetlife- I think it is largely preaching to the choir, because most of the people on there are already doing BDSM. So I’m not sure its a good way to reach newbies. And I’d be much happier if they implemented a Twitter-like section.

But it behooves us to support what facilities do exist, and to be pro-active in looking around for ways to protect our freedom of expression. You may not need the Tor browser to access your favourite sites today, but you’d do well to have it ready for the day the axe falls.

If anyone has any knowledge or experience of running microblogging services, especially via diaspora*, please get in touch as I am interested in setting up a pod for kink-friendly posting.

If anyone knows about payment via Bitcoin, or if there are better alternatives, I’d also love to hear from you.

I’ll see if I can get https: implemented for our sites.

What else should we be doing?

Save BDSM in the UK

9 Replies

Hi Everyone

SIGN PETITION: SAVE BDSM IN THE UK

As you may have heard, most forms of BDSM have just been banned from UK websites, despite the fact that it is legal to peform, legal to film, legal to own and legal to buy from a website outside the UK. It’s just not legal for a UK-based producer to put on their website.

The regulations are ignorant of BDSM safe practice, ignore the consent of the performers, and also prohibit many other forms of sexual expression and enjoyment, especially those involving women actually taking pleasure in the activities. For more details, see these posts by lawyer Myles Jackman and feminist film maker and Restrained Elegance and Silk Soles model Pandora Blake.

Please help us repeal this ridiculous censorship. Sign the official UK government petition here: http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/72693 and share with everyone you know. Enough signatures and the government is legally obliged to respond. (For UK residents only- sorry, only just found that out).

You can also complain about the new regulations to the censor directly (more details on that from Pandora Blake).

If we cannot get these regulations revised or revoked, fetish production in the UK will cease and your favourite UK models will no longer appear in bondage and spanking films for your pleasure. RE model Nikki has already had to close several of her websites. Virtually all of Pandora’s scenes have suddenly and unjustifiably become illegal. Northern Spanking, AAA Spanking, Spanking Sarah and others have been forced to leave the country – and that is just in the last four days.

The cold, dead hand of the censor

4 Replies

New regulations have just come in which may kill fetish production in the UK. Excuse me while I have a bit of a rant. Please forgive me if this is less carefully considered than my usual posts.

http://obscenitylawyer.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/the-following-content-is-not-acceptable.html

The new regulations pertain to “TV-like” video on demand services where editorial control rests in the UK. The UK has chosen to define that much more broadly than other EU countries, and have now decided to censor much more heavily than other countries as well.

It has just become illegal to provide material which does not fall within the “R18” guidelines- a patchwork of outdated, arbitrary, misogynistic and paternalistic crap whose attitudes are held over from the Victorian era.

Let’s just be clear about how ludicrous the very concept is before we get on to the grossly offensive nature of the restrictions they impose. We’re talking about acts which are entirely legal to do – like doing a BDSM scene with someone where someone is bound and gagged. Or spanking. Or female ejaculation. Or face-sitting. So it’s legal to do it. It’s legal to own pictures and video of it. It’s legal to make pictures and video of it. It’s legal to download it from a site outside the UK, even if the customer is in the UK.

But as of 1st December, it is no longer legal for a UK production team to show it to you.

If you downloaded exactly the same material from a non-UK based site it would be legal for them to sell it to you and legal for you to buy it, watch it and keep it.

What the actual fuck?

 

Nice Girls Don’t

Apparently, the censor father figure has decided that women don’t ejaculate, so you’re not allowed to show that in case it is urine. Because of reasons. And that you can’t eat it, because presumably the male censors are a bit threatened by that. But swallowing semen is just fine (presumably because that’s the right way around- women should be taking it?) You can’t show a woman sitting on a man’s face because you poor innocents might not realise that he could suffocate, try it at home, and die. But of course it is OK to show a girl having her air cut off during a blowjob, because of … well… ummm… reasons.

The absurdities go on and on.

Apparently, bondage is OK and gags are OK but bondage plus gags are not because it might not be clear to the viewer that the person tied up can still withdraw their consent. So how did this scene get passed as 18 (not even R18):

pulp-fiction-1994-ving-rhames-bruce-willis-sex-prisoners

I can’t see any way for Bruce Willis or Ving Rhames to withdraw their consent, do you? But the censor didn’t worry about that scene because of… well… reasons.

They didn’t worry about it because Pulp Fiction was shot on a film set, with professional actors, presumably. Just like all our films are shot professionally, on a film set, with professional actors. So why are we presumed to all be dangerous maniacs?

By any rational measure, if you are concerned about the safety of people in bondage and gags, you would come to the BDSM community and ASK THE EXPERTS what a good system of work is to ensure it.

We’ve shot over 2500 photosets and videos with gags and bondage over the last 14 years with exactly zero trips to the hospital. That’s a pretty good safety record. We have evolved a professional way of working to ensure that tied up people are not only still consenting, they are still comfortable, and they are still OK for the scene to continue.

So I’d actually be more concerned about the health and safety of mainstream actors like Bruce and Ving in this sort of scene. I really hope they had some BDSM players advising them on health and safety on set.

frame-000030-2

Ariel, by contrast, has been gagged and bound in a professional work setting literally thousands of times. But of course, she’s only a girl so she can’t be any sort of judge of what’s safe or not. The big brother censor knows better than her.

Here is our video explaining how we do it:


http://www.restrainedelegance.com/preview/video/videoarielsafety1_720p.mp4

 

Spanking

Spanking is out unless it is temporary and trifling- an arbitrary distinction which the father figure censor knows (but won’t define clearly for you, natch). Of course, the performers themselves- professionals who have FAR more experience of spanking than anyone else- cannot be trusted to set the levels or decide for themselves what constitutes acceptably temporary marks from a spanking. Some of them are only women, you know, and a lot of the rest might be homosexual. Of course those people don’t know their own bodies or their own minds. The paternal censor knows best.

I hereby propose we ban all sports where anyone has ever received a serious injury from video on demand services. Because someone might decide to play rugby and hurt themselves. So that’s bye-bye cricket, soccer, formula one…. Why can these professionals be allowed to decide acceptable risks for themselves when professional spankees cannot?

Denying Agency

This is the thread running through every line and fibre of the regulations and the organisations which enforce them. The idea that the people who do this for pleasure, or for a living, cannot possibly know better than the father figure censor what is acceptable, what is safe practice, what they want to do and what they want to have done to them.

This is called denying their agency- telling them that they cannot possibly know their own mind or make their own minds up. Because father figure censor knows best.

What the actual fucking fuck?

Won’t someone think of the children?

This will do exactly nothing to stop under-age people seeing this material because they will seek it out on free pirate sites anyway. I guarantee you they are NOT joining websites with a debit card!

How does this affect Restrained Elegance?

As with everything else to do with the censor, we don’t know. Restrained Elegance is operated under licence by a company registered in and based in the USA, as it always has been.

But a lot of our production is done in the UK.

Expect to see a lot of smaller hobby-level sites based in the UK close down.

We will not be pre-emptively stopping production.

When this first came up a year or so ago, we said we might move out of the country rather than stop running the site. But we’ve just moved house to a place we love, and DAMNED if we’re going to be forced out of the land of our birth by some pre-historic idiocy from the censor!

We believe we make lovely, intelligent, articulate, artistic, interesting, educational films and photographs in a safe, sane, consensual and professional environment. Our safety record and work practices are demonstrably effective in preventing injury and mishap. We have done our best to share this experience over the years precisely so people can enjoy BDSM for themselves safely.

We vehemently object to the suggestion that the censor has the first damn idea about how to signal consent in BDSM scenes, and believe that they should seek the advice of those in the BDSM community instead of presuming that we know nothing. They should be ASKING, not telling, what is good practice and how to ensure consent and safe working practice.

We are determined to continue doing what we do.

We’re delighted to say that we just won “Best Website” award at the 2014 Kiel Fetish Film Festival. It is a damn shame that the UK’s barbaric anti-porn laws have overshadowed what should have been a very proud day for us.

UPDATE:

This is the important petition- enough signatures and the government is required to respond. Please help us repeal these Medieval regulations.
Sign UK government petition.

Not for the likes of me

3 Replies

Hi All,

This is a reply in the on-going conversation with @bandreesub that started on Twitter. See earlier posts here and here.

The first bondage shoot I did was with a lifestyle BDSM couple who ran one of the very earliest British bondage sites. I remember the male/top/photographer explaining that what he found sexy was the SITUATION. The way in which she was tied, the loss of her freedom, the pain she was experiencing. That the identity of the submissive was at best secondary to the situation in which she found herself.

This was very useful for me because it triggered the realisation that what I wanted to do was the absolute opposite. For me, the identity of the submissive was the critical thing. I didn’t want to make photos of any old person tied up- I wanted it to be the duchess, the princess, the movie star, Ashley Renee or Andrea Neal.

I know of course that those people are fictional- even Ashley Renee or Andrea Neal is only the stage name or scene persona of the real person. But that’s fine. I’m a romantic at heart. My work is romantic fiction.

So I care more about the story and the identity and personality of the submissive in the romantic fantasy world that I do about realism. I care more about making sure the model looks at her best in bondage than portraying her ordeal.

My approach opens my work up to the charge of being “Bondage Lite”. It’s true that we avoid completely immobilising the model, because then she can’t pose or find different poses, and can’t generate the 40+ photos customers demand of a website update. (Unlike buying a single dramatic photo for your wall, for example).

We also use masks and blindfolds sparingly because the eyes are the windows of the soul and eyes are powerful tools in an actress’ storytelling arsenal.

Other sites clearly emphasise the situation over the person. A lot of stuff produced by Kink.com, for example, or House of Gord. Not that they aren’t crediting the models – just that the most important thing is what’s happening to her, not who she is.

That’s great, if that’s your preference. It doesn’t happen to be mine – I don’t want to feel that the girl is in any way interchangeable. Because in my head she’s the Princess or the Pirate Queen or the Winter Witch or the vicious CEO getting her comeuppance. Identity trumps situation, for me.

What sometimes does annoy me is to take it a step further and say that because we’ve done everything in our power to romanticise the photos, choosing bondage positions that flatter the model’s figure and work with how she poses best, lit as beautifully as we can, in a romantic setting… that the bondage is somehow fake. Not real. Maybe lacks conviction, as @bandreesub says. That, I must take issue with.

It’s a real girl, and she’s really tied up, and she’ll really have rope marks to show for it, and that’s a real ball-gag, and it’s just as hard for her to cope with as it would be for anyone else. They might make it look easy, but it isn’t. It’s as real as any other bondage photo that was created for art… and anything more real was probably a criminal act, not something we should consider.

We won’t tie a reverse prayer or an elbows-together tie on someone who finds it borderline impossible to hold. So you will see those ties done repeatedly with models with narrower shoulders and longer arms, where girls with broader shoulders will get tied in box much more often. It looks better on them and it is safer to tie. Even in the relatively narrow range of body shapes we shoot, there are massive variations.

There is a reverse prejudice that one also hears fairly commonly in the media and online as a reaction to the ridiculous over-representation of particular body types in fashion, porn or commercial modelling… that something is for “REAL women”.

I get where this is coming from, I really do. The fashion industry in particular is grotesque in its narrow-minded pursuit of a single, extreme body type.

But saying that the women in the shots aren’t REAL is not fair either. They are real people, they get real back ache and real knee problems and get every bit as upset when people say horrible things to them as anyone else does.

My wife is a professional model and she’s every bit as real as any other person. Her physical type is closer to some of the ones commonly used for commercial work- although actually she’s too tall for fashion and nothing from the high street fits her. Waists are always under her bust and there’s no such thing as an ankle-length skirt, jeans that come down to her shoes or full-length sleeves.

My previous partner is very outdoorsy and slim, but quite short with a long back and short legs and nothing ever fits her either.

So one might imagine looking at them that fashions would be exactly for the likes of them- but it turns out, not so much. What I think we really need here is not just a broadening of the range of body shapes fashion companies use in their advertising, but also a broadening of the range of body shapes they actually make clothes for.

Here I would say the bondage world is actually in a better state than the fashion industry. If what you want to buy is bondage gear, you can get it in a wide variety of styles and sizes. Actually the main issue we have is getting bondage gear small enough to fit- we invariably have to punch extra holes in straps. But even so, custom-made equipment is readily available, and much closer in cost to the off-the-peg versions than is the case with mainstream fashion.

To return to @bandreesub’s point, I would say that the bondage equipment manufacturers do a good job of catering to all shapes and sizes. I think that’s because all shapes and sizes actually buy bondage gear to use, so they have to.

What is demonstrably not so well covered is portraying that wide variety of body shapes in bondage photography. Clearly, for female submissive imagery, the overwhelming majority of images one encounters browsing random bondage photos for free feature models who are dress size 8-14 women under the age of 40.

It’s better than fashion photography. There are sites out there featuring a wider range of shapes and sizes, and amateurs of Fetlife feature a wider variety too. But yes, if you google Bondage Photography what comes up is a bunch of dress size 8-14 girls under the age of 40. My strong suspicion remains that this is just what the people who are willing to actually PAY for bondage photos will pay to see.

It’s not meant to be exclusionary. It’s unfortunate that people feel excluded by it. But it is a by-product of who is willing to pay to make the art- it’s the market at work. Long ago people discovered that to sell magazines to men, put a pretty young woman on the cover. To sell to women… put a pretty young woman on the cover. It is possible, certainly, to buck the trend. Magazines with steam trains on the cover do sell. (But allegedly not as well as they used to sell when they had pretty girls and steam trains on the cover).

So it comes back to the point about paying for art. Breaking it down, @badreesub wants something pretty but not too pretty, realistic but not amateurish, well-lit but not so well lit as to become too perfect, not too graphic, and featuring a model who will make her feel like the bondage is for the likes of her. Evocative of the intensity of the moment but not overproduced (to her tastes).

I think one will agree that’s quite a specific set of requirements. So I’d again encourage anyone who finds their artistic needs not currently being served to reach out and commission someone to bring your vision to life with you, or take up the camera and make some yourself. I think it could be absolutely splendid, and might broaden consumer’s horizons and mean there will be more of it around. Someone has to be the pioneer.

I’d still be happy to give it a go, but suspect that the critical difference between the focus on the girl, or the focus on her situation, makes my work the antithesis of what @bandreesub is looking for.

Parenthetically not all of my ideas are terribly commercial either- Georgian ladies always bombs horribly (apparently Jane Austen fans are not bondage buyers, who knew?), historical stuff in general doesn’t go down so well, and where I have ideas I have to moderate it to the commercial realities and shoot with models who will sell rather than the actress I’d ideally cast for each role, given that we have to produce 5-8 sets every day we shoot. So I do them, but compromise on them.

Cheers, Hywel

Restrained too elegantly (Guest post by Bandreesub)

1 Reply

Hmmm, where to start?

By saying that I don’t find very glamorous bondage photographs very convincing, I didn’t mean that they don’t serve their market well.

Indeed, they are gorgeous and I have no problem believing that mainstream kinky males just love them and would pay for them.

I think it is precisely because they are so gorgeous that they ring a little hollow to me, a far-from-glamorous female bottom

In rather the same way that fashion photography does not make me spend money!

If they show me a frock (which might be a nice frock) on a dazzling thin-as-a-slat young tall model, I doubt the dress: sure, it looks great on her – because, let’s face it, a paper bag would look great on her – but how would it look on ME? And if they refuse to show me, my considerable spending power stays firmly in my purse. The dress is probably unsuccessful on any normal person. Advertising fail.

There again, I’m probably not the target market in that field either LOL

I call this the Pirelli Effect

If a good recipe for Simpson’s Spicy Sausages is published with an illustration of a naked girl limply holding a frying pan and a spoon, I immediately “know” that it’s not a real recipe: it’s only a pretext for the naked-girl pic and a way of parting men from their money.

Well, with bondage, the things that make bondage inviting to me are NOT the naked-girl pictures, (pretty though they are, and appealing to a mass market, as mentioned above).

No, it is the internal qualities of bondage that appeal: things that would be present even if the model were plain, chubby, mature etc:

Her loss of control: her subjugation to the will of the rigger: her immobility, which she can either melt into or struggle against: her endurance of the discomfort, great or small, as an expression of obedience or submission – or alternatively, her struggle to escape, a little metaphor of human life in the middle of challenge and restriction –

If she is naked, it is her exposure – either willing or unwilling – a revelation of private, vulnerable places – which takes courage, or loss of power – or both together –

If she is suspended, I see a loss of simple freedoms, the choice to move about or gaze at will. Instead she responds only to the hands of the rigger, being pushed, pulled, or ignored – while remaining safe – even though uncomfortably! And her patience, too: or his deliberate tempting OF her patience…

All these things make bondage photography riveting and edgy for me: I like looking at those photos on fetlife and so on. Except the fetlife ones that satisfy my criteria for “real-ness” are often amateurish and poorly lit, or too graphic in a pornographic sense, or have other defects.

While the professional ones – once they go past a certain Plimsoll Line of prettiness and perfection – begin to lack conviction, to my cynical and demanding old eyes. See Sausage allusion, Pirelli effect, etc.

So thank you, deliciously elegant restrainers, for noticing my comment and hearing me out.
Your point is well made and well taken, too: it’s far more constructive to go and get, or make, what you like rather than whine that it’s not available. And I love it when I find a picture that pushes my buttons and make me catch my breath at the beauty and intensity of the moment.
And find so often that the ropers, models, designers, photographers and publishers have tried so hard that…suddenly I am again looking at a dress that isn’t for the likes of me.