Val's Kinky Column: Bondage in Media: When is it Kink and When Isn't it?

Hey Patrons,

Another month has come and gone. I hope the first month of 2021 went well for everyone. One thing I'm going to be trying here is to keep up with a monthly newsletter of some sort to keep everyone posted on my doings. I'm gonna try and make things a little different and a little fun with these posts though. Instead of just an "here's what I've been doing" kind of thing, I'm gonna give everyone a brief update on what I've been working on and what's coming, and then the rest of this space will be for musings. Basically think of this as "Val's Monthly Kinky Column" (hey, that's a good title!) 

First off, what I've been working on. Progress on Mystica has slowed a bit this month because I'm back to work after a brief lockdown and I have a few other writing projects going on. I think that I should be finished with Mystica within the month though, seeing how right now I'm "in the third act of the story" to use a screenwriting term. After that I'm going to take on a few commissions because, to be frank, your girl could use the money. Once I'm done with the commissions I'm not sure what story I'm going to get to. Right now I think it might be the Misadventures of Mrs. Americana but honestly it all depends on what I'm feeling when I get to that point. My mood changes all the time so when the time comes to work on a personal project I may decide to write the next Mystica story, or another Damsels Anonymous. We'll see, either way, that's a few months away anyway. 

Another thing is that I've started experimenting with 3D modeling! After picking my good friend Destro's brain about how he does his awesome 3D art, I started playing around with a program last night. As of now, I have a rough character model of Mystica in progress. Once I get it finished, you guys, dear Patrons, will be the first to see Mystica in all of her sexy glory! Right now my plan is to just use the 3D art for my book covers because I don't think using stock photos is cutting it anymore. Since my Mystica story won't be out in a few months, that gives me some time to work on the covers and make some other fun and sexy art that will be posted exclusively here, so stay tuned!

As for this month, you'll get another new story too! This story is my first attempt at a guy in distress/couple in distress story. It's a fantasy story featuring a male barbarian character and a sexy sorceress. Then after that you'll get my writer's commentary on my Red Sonja fan-fic, another Damsels Anonymous story, and maybe Mystica, if she's done, but we'll see. 

So, now that we've discussed what I've been up to, let's get to what I really wanted to talk about: depictions of bondage in media and whether it's there to appeal to the kink crowd, or something else. One prevalent attitude that I see, especially among the Twitter Damsel in Distress community is this belief that anytime a woman is bound and gagged in movies, comics, or TV, it's done in order to appeal to those of us with this specific fetish. Not to get all woke on everyone, but it seems to be a belief held specifically by white males, who are conditioned to think that everything is for them. Last May when Batwoman found herself bound and gagged on an episode of her live action show, I saw more than one person boastfully stating that this was only done in an effort to boost ratings for the show. 

This got me thinking about whether or not there is a sexual component to the images of women in bondage that we see in media, or are these just innocent games of capture and escape? If you go back to the beginnings of cinema, many of the old silent films featured sequences of women in peril and distress (I'll never get over the irony of a woman bound and gagged in a silent film) and then onto the Saturday morning serials, which heavily involved the female characters getting captured and in peril. Then of course there's old comic books and pulp magazines which were rife with images of women in bondage.

The covers of pulp magazines in general may be partially responsible for sexualizing the image of women in bondage, often depicting them scantily clad or in torn clothing while being menaced by a villain or facing a dire peril. Of course, I'm not saying that these magazines created kink or BDSM, but they were definitely using the imagery to sell stories. More famously, William Moulton Martson, creator of Wonder Woman and the namesake of the fictional town of Marston's Pointe from my Damsels Anonymous books, frequently used images of women in bondage to draw adult readers to his stories. The Wonder Woman comic books came under fire for the heavy bondage imagery and BDSM undertones that were in the old comics. 

So we have here two examples of kink and fetish being used to sell comic books, but is that always the case? If you look through classic comics from about the 30s to the 60s, they're filled with images of bondage, and not just damsels in distress. Batman and Robin frequently found themselves getting captured by the bad guys and often bound and gagged to the point where it was a source of parody in the 66 Batman series, and Billy Batson from the Shazam comics got gagged every time he was captured so that he wouldn't speak his magic word and escape, and even many of the pulp covers depicted muscle bound men in bondage as much as women. One of the most iconic covers to the classic Tarzan stories features the Ape-Man tied hand and foot as a knife wielding native looms over him. 

Once again though, frequent bondage depictions weren't exclusive to just comics. In the classic Sherlock Holmes movies staring Basil Rathbone, the titular sleuth gets bound and gagged at least five times out of the fourteen films in the series, and his stalwart sidekick Watson got bound and gagged at least once. Dick Tracy got bound and gagged twice over the course of one of his classic serials, and at least one more time after that, and poor Billy Batson got bound and gagged three times in the Captain Marvel serial. So what's with all of these guys getting tied up?

Sometimes, it's just as simple as putting the hero in peril. I'll be using the term "hero" as a blanket for both male and female in this case. In the old days, strict censorship made it difficult to portray violence in media, so I imagine that instead of scenes showing the villains capturing and torturing the hero, we instead got death traps with violence as the implied outcome. Not only that, but when it comes to telling a story, you have to make things difficult for your hero, and to do so, the antagonist must appear to have the upper hand for most of the story. The moments where the hero finds themselves caught and tied up by the bad guys often are the low point where it seems that the villain will finally win, before the hero makes a daring escape. 

Scenes with the hero as a prisoner of the villain often serve as a way to finally give the audience insight into the villain's plan and motivations, the infamous "villainous monologue" that we all know and love. With the hero, who is often the audience surrogate as well, bound and at the villain's mercy, we finally get insight into who this bad guy is and what they want. Plus, if you add in a gag, then it means that the villain gets to monologue uninterrupted, as the hero can only listen in silence.

There is an element of BDSM to the power dynamic here between the hero and villain too, as the villain is the one with all the control in the situation. Not only does tying the hero render them helpless, but it adds a level of humiliation too. If the hero is gagged, then the humiliation is amplified because they now have their ability to speak or reason taken away, they are literally helpless at the mercy at the villain. In many case, once the villain is done talking they remove the hero's gag, reinforcing the power dynamic by telling the hero that they can only talk when the villain wants them to talk. One of my old readers would always tell me how he didn't like scenes with men in bondage because it made them look weak, as opposed to scenes of women in distress, which he found hot. Sexism of that aside, the intention is very much for the villain to make the hero seem weak, for the audience to doubt if they can stop the bad guy, though they ultimately often do.

Sometimes there's also a story purpose for gagging the hero. Having your hero be bound and gagged, especially if they're in an area around people, means that they can't call for help or warn of a looming trap. Not to bring back Billy Batson, but since his powers are vocal based, his kidnappers always have to gag him, same with characters like Black Canary and Zatanna. 

But also, capturing a hero, and gagging them, is also a good way of building suspense. We've all seen the classic death trap where the hero is bound and gagged behind a target at a shooting range while someone (usually an ally of theirs) takes aim with a gun, or the hero is bound and gagged in a large house with a ticking bomb while help desperately searches but their gag prevents them from revealing their location, or another classic scene is when the hero is calling for help on their phone but unable to communicate because of a gag. It all goes back to what I brought up in my Black Scorpion commentary about dramatic irony and letting the audience know something that the characters do not. If the audience knows that the hero is in mortal danger but unable to summon help, it adds to the intensity of the scene an ups the stakes.

Even with all of these story reasons, you'll still find women being depicted in bondage way more than men, and I think the answer for that is good old fashioned sexism. For generations, women in media were generally depicted as just damsels in need of rescue. Lots of pulp stories, and superhero stories, are classic male power fantasies, and defeating the bad guy and saving the girl is the ultimate male fantasy. One thing I also hear often is that damsels in distress and images of women in bondage are "things of the past", and while I don't know if I agree with that, I do think we see less of damsels in distress these days because women in media are portrayed differently. Nowadays, women in movies and comics are fully fledged characters with agency of their own, not just props in need of rescue. 

So when it comes to bondage in media, I think it depends on the source. While there are plenty of things that sexualize the image of a woman in distress, more often than not I think that there's a more "innocent' reason for it. There is a sort of "chicken and egg" scenario though that happens with this, where people develop a bondage fetish after exposure to images of people in bondage at a young age. I can't tell you how many people I know that told me that their fetish was born out of watching images of characters like April O'Neil, Penny Gadget, or Daphne Blake tied up every Saturday morning, or likewise, people who enjoy men in bondage often cite the scene in Aladdin where the titular hero gets bound and gagged by Jafar's men. So the intention to sexualize is not always there, but many times something is born out of it that leads to a sexual fetish, and well, here we all now, kinky and proud.