Bondage Blog

Some of you may be too young to have ever seen a Polaroid camera. Many more of you probably never used one. It’s hard to explain, in this era of digital cameras, how magical it was to take a snapshot, peel the photo out of the camera, and wave it in the air to speed the automatic development process, watching the image slowly form and firm up over two or three minutes. It was your only and best choice for taking fetish pictures, unless you were willing to (a) have a darkroom in your basement or (b) risk the social and legal consequences of having strangers at some photo development bureau look at your kinky photos. Yes, Polaroids were magical for kinky people.

Should I be talking about Polaroids in the past tense? In theory, not. The Polaroid company went bankrupt years ago, but film is still somewhat available, and other brands of instant camera exist. But it’s a bit of a hipster/artist thing these days, like listening to tube radios because you like the sonic profile better.

Nope, these days an “instant” (they were so slow!) film camera is not even close to being your obvious go-to technology if you just want to snap a private pic of your wife’s ankles chained behind her head. This is the era of digital cameras, easy availability of an ocean of online bondage porn, wall-to-wall kinky camgirls, and unlimited bdsm cams on tap, just a few clicks away at any moment. It’s still fun to snap a digital photo of your handcuffed girlfriend, but the result is never likely to be the only bondage image available for you to look at, as a Polaroid easily might have been in my youthful years.

Talking about the technologies of being kinky in a pre-digital age is fairly easy, but the social context is harder to convey. Every kind of sexual expression was stigmatized or outright forbidden/illegal/dangerous. That goes double for anything gay or kinky. Porn was hard to find outside the big cities. There were entire categories of “deviant sexual behavior” that a young person might not know even existed until some overheated preacher or political opportunist made the mistake of ranting against it from the pulpit or on television.

In that world, people were perforce a lot more private about their kinks. They weren’t any less kinky, though. We’ve got ample evidence of that:

But they did have to be careful. Even a bit of harmless scarf bondage against the tightly-closed bedroom curtains would scandalize the neighbors if they knew.

Obviously things were a bit wilder in the cosmopolitan cities, but even there, lip service to the prevailing moralism had to be paid. So people snapped their Polaroids and kept their kinky business very close.

Elsewhere on Bondage Blog:

• She Never Saw Him Coming #3
• Vintage Bondage Polaroid
• Old-School Amateur Bondage
• Lotsa Duct Tape
• Bit Gagged Amateur Slave