The Lure of Bondage

by guardian46w, 2019-08-10 05:00:58

Originally published in Hogtie, vol. 2, no. 2, ca 1974

Scanned by EKrayon and transcribed by guardian46w

Story Codes: M/f, bondage, fantasies, consentual, ropes, chains, whips, spanking,

A CENTURY AGO THE WORD "BONDAGE" COMMONLY APPLIED TO FORCED ABDUCTION, KIDNAPPING, UNDER RESTRAINT, OR SLAVERY. WE READ IN THE BIBLE THAT THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL WERE SOLD INTO BONDAGE, WHICH MEANT IN THOSE DAYS SLAVERY TO THE PHAROAH, UNDER THE LASH. TODAY, HOWEVER, THE WORD "BONDAGE" HAS MANY COMPLEX CONNOTATIONS, PARTICULARLY THOSE IN THE FETISHISTIC AREA OF BEHAVIOR. FOR THERE IS NOW A FETISHISTIC QUALITY TO BONDAGE WHICH RELATES DIRECTLY TO SADOMASOCHISM, SINCE ITS RAMIFICATIONS USUALLY INVOLVE EMOTIONAL PENCHANTS WHICH DIRECT EITHER TOWARDS THE INFLICTION OF SUBJUGATION AND ITS CONSEQUENT PAIN AND HUMILIATION, OR THE REVERSE ATTITUDE, NAMELY, EAGERNESS TO ENDURE PRECISELY THOSE TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS.

To the bondage fetishist, since very often the ritualistic features of sexual emprise or conquest serve to bring about sexual gratification, bondage is worthy of individualized treatment, as well as discussion and study. There are many psychic overtones, we know, surrounding the utilization of bondage as a sexual device or, as is evident to the psychiatrist, the end in itself in the achievement of sexual fulfillment.

When man first emerged from survival against the elements and the hideous beasts and birds which threatened his very existence, he found himself at war with neighboring tribes, sometimes over a piece of land, a lake that provided good drinking water, a hunting site, and the like. His ego prompted him to take possession, and that was how bondage began.

SHACKLED THRONGS

In war, man took captives; to symbolize his conquest of them, he had them bound hand and foot or shackled in chains. Those of us who have read "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" can picture the processionals of the Roman legions with the centurions marching in advance, and behind the legions, throngs of conquered captives, vassals from Britannica or the German forests or the dark-skinned Nubians from Egypt. All such captives were presented before the Imperial Caesar; then they were taken to the gladiatorial prisons or to the slave markets. Once enslaved, before them always loomed the whip, the torture rack, and the gyves which punished rebellion.

In that same epoch, jaded Roman matrons dallied with the exquisite little games of humiliation and torture. It was commonplace for a wealthy matron to sip Thracian wine while she watched her steward take some sixteen-year-old girl slave, perhaps a fair Circassian, or an olive-skinned, sloe-eyed Persian maiden purchased on the auction block. The girl would be stripped naked and bound with cords, twisted by the steward to cause the victim pain and leave red marks on the satiny bare skin, so the mistress might be gratified.

Through the centuries until our own sophisticated era, the ritual of bondage became imposed as much psychically as physically. But history inevitably shows that the powerful rules of aggressive nations conquered the weaker countries and brought slaves to their shores, there to serve in bondage.

BOUND - BODY AND SOUL

In the eighteenth century, the British empire reached its peak in colonization, and established the system of indenture. Petty criminals, and often those convicted of more serious crimes which made the gallows obligatory, were commuted to the indenture. It was stipulated that their services would be granted to a recognized master or mistress who would own them body and soul for a stipulated length of time.

Many women led their entire lives as slaves, in the Carolinas, Georgia, the Bahamas, the Caribbean, and New England, where there were British holdings. We recall the two famous novels by Neil Swanson, "The Judas Tree" and "Unconquered." (This latter was made into a movie with Paulette Goddard and Gary Cooper.) These detailed the method of indenture very vividly. In the English courts of that time, attractive female criminals were put under indenture for seven to fourteen years or even longer, sent to the colonies, where landlords or innkeepers would buy these indentures from the captain of the vessels in which these unfortunate women were conveyed. Once that was done, the indentured female was no better than a real slave, since she might be flogged at will by her master or mistress, branded and even mutilated for attempts at escape, and her term extended if in the opinion of the owner of her indenture, she had not kept her bond.

Early in the nineteenth century when our own pioneers founded towns by the method of families traveling in wagon trains, many families had their own indentured bond servants, who were often manumitted so they might marry the sons of the migrant families and establish a new community.

PSYCHICAL STIMULANT

With the Civil War, the indenture was abolished, just as was slavery. It took the beginning of the Mid-Victorian era to categorize bondage as both sexual and psychical stimulant. The wealthy Englishman patronized houses of ill fame where he might purchase the services of an attractive young girl to whip, rape and sodomize, or to fetter as he chose. Much of the sadistic expression of his lust was evolved from rendering the girl absolutely vulnerable to his possession of her; this he did by imposing such fetters as cords or ropes, or at other times such special fettering and restraint garments as hampered her movements and made her unable to escape either the lash or his erotic attentions.

The English mania for flagellation is already too well known to need inclusion in this article, but what is not so well known is that there were bondage devotees who visited these London brothels and paid a substantial fee for voyeuristic pleasure which consisted solely of watching an attractive girl stripped by a man or another woman, bound and gagged and left helpless upon the bed or floor. Here the erotic stimulant was that of comprehending her sense of despair in conjecturing what would next befall her. Thus, the psychic element of bondage began to emerge as a potent aphrodisiac, which could whet the lustful potential of an elderly rake and lead him towards that virility which he envied in the young.

SECRET CULTS

From these brothels, as from the "houses of specialty" in Amsterdam, Hamburg, Paris and Berlin, we have come full circle to the modern bondage society and "velvet underground" club extant in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco. The devotee of bondage and subsequent sadistic amusements can find his or her release and outlet by acceptance in these secret cults.

For example, there are certain nightclubs and bars in New York, not too far from 42nd and Broadway, where the customer can express his or her own personal desire to bind or to be bound, and ultimately find admission into these esoteric societies. He or she may wear a symbol, like a pin or a figurine of leather, indicating passive or active interest (masochist or sadist), which communicates at once to the "charter members" of these underground societies. There are scores of publications, from illustrated magazines, to pamphlets, to full-length novels, with bondage as the principal theme; and here again we find a demarcation as to method and application. In bondage, the two prime motivations are the domination of the female by the male and, conversely, that of the male by the female.

Sadomasochism is always prevalent in the lure of bondage, though in varying phases. So too is fetishism, and it is often said that bondage is in itself a complex fetish. Thus, the bondage devotee may be no more than a ritualistic fetishist who finds complete sexual fulfillments in the preparation, accoutrements and the act of bondage itself without once indulging in coitus or flagellation or frottage, or any other of the sexual practices which find their ultimate end in copulation.

EROTIC FANTASY

The power of the fetish is incalculable, so much so that merely thinking of it or conjuring it up by fancy suffices to excite and gratify the bondage devotee who finds his or her erotic "kick" in leather and kid, animal substances like hides or hair, inanimate objects such as cords, whips, ropes, handcuffs, gags, chains and the like. Indeed, so suggestively powerful are such objects that the bondage devotee may not even touch them and yet derive sexual pleasure therefrom.

Psychiatry in the days of Krafft-Ebing held these to be aberrations, resulting from "sickness of the mind." Today we are not quite so sure. There is probably no one living who is not affected in one way or another by some fetish. In the natural selection of woman by men, this man may find his sexual admiration most incited by the female's long, shimmering hair, or the curve of a calf, or the jut of a buttock or breast; or again, by the vibrancy of the voice and what it implies and connotates. It is when sexual fulfillment can be achieved only by the presence or the imagined presence of the bondage fetish or object (about which is drawn a world of imagery and stimuli) that the individual may be said to be afflicted pathologically. In such instances, he or she does not even require the presence of a victim for the imposition of bondage. Sublimation, one of the most powerful of all emotional "self-starters," as very often enchants and gratifies the devotee of bondage. Perhaps by reading a single paragraph in which perhaps the heroine of a wagon train is seized by marauding Indians, bound and dragged off through the wilderness by them, will arouse all the imaginative lust of the bondage addict.

RAPE SYNDROME

But going farther into the physical realm, we define our terms by sadism and masochism. The first being the urge to force submission; the latter being the urge to submit to that coercion. Undoubtedly the female who enjoys bondage by her husband or lover or even casual boyfriend, subconsciously is linked with the female who, in the classical rape syndrome, rationalizes that once she is overpowered by someone of superior strength, she cannot therefore be responsible for "moral sin." So too with masochistic female who allows the dominant male to bind her in constricting poses, which render her body suggestively vulnerable to the whip or rape. The exquisite suspense and psychical anguish which she undergoes after being so fettered is often to her even more sexually gratifying than coitus or orgasm themselves. Similarly, for the male dominant who subdues the female, his is the atavistic impulse coming down from the dark ages, celebrating man's domination over the weaker vessel, by which he proclaims his carnal will to enslave and demean, to defile and to conquer. For many a sadist, therefore, just as with the masochist "victim," the mere act of imposing fetters will be enough to bring about complete climax and gratification.

In this article, we shall not dwell upon the pathological individual who is compelled to inflict bondage before he or she can achieve carnal satisfaction. But in view of the enormous literature available on this complex subject, we suggest that husband and wife, or lovers, may often utilize the imaginative aspects of bondage by way of a variation of a theme of lovemaking to fulfillment.

FOREIGN EROTICA

A single example suffices to illustrate my point. From my own acquaintance I cite the union between an extremely attractive brunette of thirty-two, married for seven years to a distinguished corporation lawyer. Both were Phi Beta Kappa’s, and both had an unusually Continental attitude toward sex, most likely because both were brought up in private schools through the twelfth grade and learned at an early age to read in foreign language and be familiar with the widespread erotica, which in foreign countries is often written with more wit and probing knowledge of human foibles than our somewhat cruder counterparts.

We shall call this woman Betty J— (which of course is not her real name). Some few months ago, learning that I was writing a study of fetishism, she told me that there were times when she loved to feel herself playact the role of slave girl to her husband; by varying her approach to him on each different occasion, she provided him with the illusion of having a harem of different girls "yet always being sure he'd be faithful to me alone. Sometimes I'd let him lock me in the closet, blindfolded. Then when he took me out, he'd tie my wrists behind my back, roll up my clothes and pull my panties down, then tie me over a chair or a bench, and leave me again. "He wouldn't tell me how long I'd have to wait nor when he'd be back. Sometimes he wouldn't even spank me. Sometimes he'd just turn me over and make love to me right then and there. But the anguish and suspense which I endured while waiting for what eventually happened made our sexual relationship deliciously exciting every time.

ORIENTAL QUEEN

"Sometimes I very much wanted to be spanked, and very hard, too. And then of course I'd have the guilt feeling which I could rationalize by telling myself that since he'd punished me, I was free to surrender to him. Or again, sometimes I'd tie him up and pretend to be an Oriental queen who'd taken him captive in a battle against a foe, and then I'd sentence him to be punished. Then he'd have the same anticipation and anguish I'd had, and I'd steal from him the male dominance.

"But what I want to make clear is that never did either of us go beyond playacting, and we knew what it was all the time. Yet we got into the spirit of it. It was a 'kind of emotional setting, if you want to call it that, which added to our enjoyment of each other.

"The way I see bondage, it's a deliciously exciting, naughty little game we often play when we're bored. We haven't cheated on each other, nor have we deceived each other, and we're better lovers today than when we first married. That's the way I want it," Betty J— concluded.

There indeed speaks an intelligent woman who has learned that everything in moderation and yet in variation is the ideal course in sexual behavior. From her we may learn also that the lure of bondage has indeed strong fascination, yet indeed a darker side which we would do well to skirt, lest we warp our lives and diminish our pleasures.

The beauty of sexual imagery and imagination is a major part of our contemporary advance in the science and cultures, granted. Yet the dark demons of sadism and masochism lurk in wait for the unwary. If we were candid enough to open up the hiding places of our minds and expose them for what they are, then we may surely enjoy bondage as experimentation and variation, but never as the complete substitute for unselfish, passionately fulfilling lovemaking.