Bondage Beginnings
Coming out of a woman's closet
Many of you know that I had lots of say on my pages at the
Close-Up Concepts and Harmony Concepts websites, but I was always
given those spaces with the understanding that it’s a business relationship, and even
though I put personal material there, I had a continual responsibility to provide content
that will draw customers-with-a-capital-$.
This is entirely different to me, to sit down and speak about ANYthing -- so let’s toss that old bottom line and see what I really want to talk about!
When I started editing Harmony's Bondage Life magazine years ago, I was getting a lot of letters from male readers who complained that there were "no real women" who wanted to be tied up. This frustrated me tremendously because I know personally how hard it is for a bondage-woman to "come out." We all hide in the woodwork for years, or our whole lives, and there are good reasons.
In my teens I knew there was something odd about me. At night I was rolling up in tight blankets in my bed, letting my fantasies run wild, but during the day all those thoughts were completely repressed. I couldn’t let my conscious mind even realize what excited me. I had a vague fear there was something deeply wrong with me, and I had an irrational anxiety that some boyfriend was going to sense that about me. Whenever I became too close to someone I worried he might eventually "discover" my disgusting, unlovable inner self.
In college I did gradually realize on a conscious level what my fantasies were. It worried me. Our culture automatically equates bondage with rape, so I feared that if I asked a guy to tie me up, he would misunderstand me. So I didn’t ask anybody to tie me up. I figured I’d have to keep that desire to myself my whole life.
When I was 20 or so my boyfriend of the time commented, "gee, you never seem to get REALLY turned on -- what is it that you would like me to do for YOUR enjoyment?"
I was too scared to acknowledge anything and I just said "um, I don’t know."
It wasn’t like I was a conservative woman. I was a free wheeler in a free wheelin’ crowd. In fact, my best friend Jace and I decided one time to go to an adult bookstore, to see what they were like. I knew I liked looking at Playboy and Penthouse so I figured this would be exciting. I had no idea that I would see anything there besides pictures of naked people having sex.
Jace and I were wandering around in the store when I saw the fetish rack. I stopped and stood in front of it in complete amazement. I saw dominatrixes in leather . . . and wide-eyed women cowering in ropes. I stood there in total shock as I realized the truth.
This meant I was not the only person thinking about bondage. There were men thinking about it who were buying magazines.
My next thought was that all the men who bought these magazines must be rapists. It still hadn’t dawned on me that my desire to be tied up consensually would be matched by a man’s desire for the same consensual act.
Jace noticed me staring at the fetish section and I got embarrassed so I moved away from the rack and looked at the rest of the racks in the store.
Soon I wandered right back again and stood in front of the rack, gaping.
Jace came over and reassured me with a few words. Once I believed that he wasn’t going to laugh at me, I gave in to my urge and picked out a few of the magazines for purchase.
Before long, we were going regularly to the bookstore so that I could buy the sale mags. I began collecting titles by HOM, Lyndon and Harmony. But I still didn’t mention this to my boyfriend.
With Jace I didn’t feel worried about rejection. He looked at my magazines without saying anything judgmental. One day when I was looking at a Harmony magazine I wondered aloud whether I could tie better than what I saw in an amateur photo. Jace said I could try on him. With that we were off like a shot, spending entire days tying him up and getting photographs. We put together a photo album which Jace proudly showed to ladies at parties. He was sexy and good-looking and non-threatening, and women simply ate it up. Seeing him tied up countered their fears and misperceptions about bondage. Many of these ladies asked me to tie them up and take pictures for their boyfriends.
Around that time, my boyfriend discovered my magazine collection and made a scene. He called me names and scrawled obscenities on my "disgusting" magazines. He told me that I should try to develop "normal" fantasies and he promised that he would help to fix my twisted mind. Thankfully this situation didn’t last long and the relationship ended.
Getting positive responses from people who wanted me to tie them up, along with reading Harmony magazines, changed my ambivalent feelings about myself and bondage. I "came out" to my next boyfriend and asked him to start tying me. I learned that it was safe and fun to act things out.
My journey out of the closet occurred in the mid-’80s, and it wasn’t always easy. After Jace moved away, one time I went to the adult bookstore alone. A man saw me looking at the bondage magazines and he followed me out of the store. When he tried to talk to me I got quite a start. It was scary. The store clerk came and told the guy to leave me alone. If I hadn’t had someone like Jace to begin with, I doubt I would ever have gone into an adult bookstore... in which case I would never have seen an adult magazine. And there are a lot of women who have fantasies like mine, but they’ve never spoken them aloud, or admitted them to a partner, or seen a bondage magazine. They’re completely shut off and they have no idea there are others like themselves. And I don’t blame them for being scared to come out.
The Internet has changed everything because it has leveled the field. Now women can wander the Internet anonymously, exploring their fetishes and fantasies without risking being followed out of a store, or risking alienating their partner before they’ve really pinned down what they want. I think it’s great, it’s wonderful. To all those men who used to write to me saying, "there are no female fetishists," I can now say, "look on the Internet." The chat rooms, the websites owned by gals, the fetish companies owned or run by women (such as Shadow Lane or Redboard) -- it’s part of the new subculture where women can safely explore their own minds and bodies, and then share their discoveries with their partners.
Well, I’ve been talking a mile a minute here, so it’s time to apply the duct tape. Thanks for letting me get this off my chest.
~~Lorelei