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BDSM Dictionary : Bondage magazine: history
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This entry is part of the BDSM Dictionary hosted by Informed Consent.
A bondage magazine is a publication that specializes in the depiction of sexual bondage or BDSM activities, either as photographs or drawings.
Previously, "detective magazines" had covertly provided a way of publishing bondage imagery. There were also a very limited number of specialist fetish magazines which featured images of bondage, such as the famous "Bizarre" magazine published from 1946 to 1959 by the pioneering fetish photographer John Willie, and ENEG's "Exotique" magazine, published 1956 - 1959.
These disappeared with a crackdown on pornography in the late 1950s.
Dedicated bondage magazines again became popular in America in the 1970s. Publishers of bondage magazines included Harmony Concepts, Inc. and the House of Milan, and Lyndon Distributors Limited. House of Milan have since been purchased by Lyndon Distributors Limited.
These magazines were not generally available through mainstream distributors, and were sold either in sex shops or by mail order. They contained little advertising content, and were therefore entirely supported by the cover price.
Typically, each magazine consisted of several multi-page pictorials of tied-up women, often with a fictional narrative attached, and one fictional story of three or four pages in length. Sometimes pictorials were replaced by artwork by a fetish artist.
Another type of magazine was the "compendium magazine", usually consisting of a large number of individual photographs drawn from previous magazines, without any linking story.
Because of their relatively small circulation, compared with mainstream pornography, most bondage magazines were printed in black and white, except for the cover and centerfold. In the 1980s and 1990s, experiments were made with adding more color content, but most magazine content remained black and white.
The attitude of some the early magazines could be regarded as misogynistic, in spite of editorial disclaimers that the magazines represented only fantasies, but in the 1990s magazine publishers also started to produce femdom material depicting men in bondage.
As of 2003, specialist bondage magazines have been mostly displaced by the availability of bondage material on the World Wide Web, and the presence of bondage imagery in mainstream pornographic magazines such as Hustler's "Taboo" magazine.
However, the tradition of bondage magazines continues in the form of "art books" of bondage photographs.
Bondage magazine publishers:
The longest-running bondage magazine titles include:
Harmony Concepts, Inc:
House of Milan:
Lyndon Distributors Limited:
(This entry in the BDSM Dictionary incorporates text from the Bondage magazine article in Wipipedia.)
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