As I have observed before, bondage games take on a certain rough piquancy when the man dishing out the “fun” is wearing an ominous hood to obscure his features. The hood has interestingly ambiguous connotations.
In our historical imagination, such hoods were worn by the king’s executioner, who may have doubled as the king’s torturer. People in the king’s dungeon were not, typically, peasants; they were upstart nobles and other powerful people, experiencing a very bad day in the realm’s political struggles. The king’s “Minister Of Cruelty” might well have reason to fear reprisals from anybody whose visit to the dungeon was not fatal. So the hood was for his protection.
More modernly, we see similar hoods in what, for want of a better phrase, might be called “kidnap porn.” When a luscious victim finds herself in the bondage play-dungeon of some sinister anonymous abductor, she may experience deeply mixed emotions upon apprehending that her captor is wearing a hood. Obviously it’s intimidating, and it means he’s going to do rude stuff to her for which he never wishes to be held for account. But on the other end of the chain, it means he expects her to survive his idea of a good time. It’s the kidnapper who shows his face who’s the most dangerous!
Heavy-duty menacing hoods are not all that common in photographic bondage porn. I’m uncertain whether that’s because the porn industry in general has little time or money to expend on sets and costumes, or whether it’s because the hood demarks a set of extreme, horror-like scenarios that aren’t really all that popular. Where you see more hoods, honestly, is in BDSM comic books, graphic novels, fumetti, and the kinkier of the adult games that are available through portals like Best Sex Games and Best Porn Games. My theory is that animation and cartoonery take some of the edge off the roughest BDSM porn. Porn/horror hybrids, are I think, a tiny bit more commercial when done this way, which is why we see more of them. (There may also be a hard-to-calculate trade off between the cost of paying models to play rough bondage games versus the cost of paying artists and programmers to draw or animate these scenarios.)
That said, the Bondage Blog motto is “taking pleasure in the beauty of restrained women” and it’s deliberately ambiguous. I’ve always tried to find and share bondage content that ranges the whole gamut between “fluffy-bunny love bondage” and “dark erotic horror with implied screaming.” Which means that this last image, where our restrained heroine is menaced at the neck with a museum-piece stabbing tool, runs right up to the line at which I usually stop. You wouldn’t see it here, probably, if it wasn’t part of the set:
I don’t have a good source ID on any of the images in this post, although the metadata associated with them suggests they are from somewhere in Scandinavia.
