It’s been a lot of years since the lights first came up here on Bondage Blog, and a lot of things have changed in the world, especially in the realm of gender self-determination. I’m not saying trans people didn’t exist, but I certainly didn’t know any; and their cultural visibility (before the invention of social media) was much lower than it is today.
That’s the context in which I could start a blog subtitled “taking pleasure in the beauty of restrained women” without having to think very hard about what I meant by “women”. People didn’t put their pronouns in their social media bios; hell, social media had barely been invented. It doesn’t help that I’m straight, male, middle-aged, and as boringly-traditional in my BDSM tastes as they come. At the origins of this enterprise, bondage was (to me) a man and a woman and some restraints and a playful sensibility, leavened with sufficient quantities of sadism and masochism.
To the extent that I’d seen transsexual people in porn at all, their transness was strictly fetishized. The TS porn that I’d seen in 2004 was all male-gaze porn, marketed to straight men, usually sold with titles, keywords, and descriptions that relied heavily on slurs and stereotypes. It was “trans sexuality as fetish object for straight man” and nothing else. I never imagined (if I bothered to think about it at all) that I’d one day start encountering TS porn made for the internet, as a mostly-noncommercial venture, created for the amusement of… well, on the internet, you never know, do you?
Hailing as I do from the era when photos of well-endowed transwomen would fill a magazine called “Chicks With Dicks” that got sold to truckers in a windowless plywood store out by the Interstate, it’s tough to know how to parse some of this modern trans porn. Who makes it, who views it, and what (if anything?) can we deduce about the gender preferences of the audience for it?
Somebody presumably knows all these things, but that person is not me. You can get buy a TS cam show at sites like TSYum.com, you can find every kind of porn you care to look for on the chans and boorus, but visibility into the sexual motives of the creators and consumers is not easy to get.
Still, over time I’ve come around to the point of view that a good bondage image is a good bondage image, whatever the arrangement of primary and secondary sexual characteristics the artist chooses to include. I don’t usually stray very far from my original (boring, traditional, lazy) notions of man and woman as reflected in the site subtitle, but that’s mostly because of inertia.
Sorting through the infinite sea of internet erotic art is a thing I spend more time doing than (probably) most fully grown men. It should surprise no one that I end up finding lots of good smutty art that doesn’t fit the original “man, woman, handcuffs” Bondage Blog editorial template. You’re seeing some of it today.
