Kinky Friends With Polaroid Cameras
Some of you may be too young to have ever seen a Polaroid instant 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. “Back in the day” 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 with kinky friends and play partners.
Should I be talking about Polaroids in the past tense? In theory, not. The Polaroid company went bankrupt years ago, but Polaroid film is still somewhat available, and other brands of instant camera do exist. But it’s a bit of a hipster/artist thing these days, like listening to vacuum-tube radios because you like the sonic profile better.
Nope, these days an “instant” (they were actually 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 best friend’s wife’s ankles chained behind her head. This is the era of digital cameras right in in your phones, endless online porn, and dating apps for making the kind of special friends with benefits who will let you tie them up and snap dirty pictures. It’s still fun to take 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 and enjoy, as a Polaroid easily might have been in my youthful years.
Reminiscing now about the technologies of being kinky in a pre-digital age is easy, but the social context is hard to describe to people who weren’t there and don’t remember. Every kind of sexual expression was stigmatized or outright forbidden/illegal/dangerous. That goes double and triple for anything gay or kinky. Porn was super 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 — they had to be! — a lot more private about their kinks. They damn sure weren’t any less kinky, though. We’ve got ample evidence of that:
But they did have to be more careful. Even a friendly 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, played with lovers and trusted friends, and kept their kinky business very close.
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