Bondage Blog

2018 update: Some (most?) of the photos from old shoots are once again available for member download. Hurrah! However I am keeping this post as written, for historical context.

Over the last year, venerable BDSM porn producer Kink.com has quietly removed its huge archive and library of more than 2,000,000 fetish porn photographs from the market. The photos are no longer available to the public as part of any of Kink.com’s pay-per-view or subscription offerings. With the exception of 15-20 free-to-the-public promotional photos per shoot (which represents less than 10% of the total archive) Kink.com is no longer in the dirty pictures business. Given that some of the shoots used to have 300-400 photos available for paid members, the news represents an enormous shrinkage in the Kink.com offering, which is now presented as a pure video product:

This development has been slowly building for almost two years, and the company has offered conflicting responses to questions about the change. The current word is that the images will someday return as zip file downloads available to subscribers, but an affiliate manager emailed me on September 6 that “the issues that forced us to remove them … are complicated” and they “don’t currently have a specific time that we will be returning those images to the site.” In a followup email on September 27, the affiliate manager confirmed “there remains to be no timeline for photo resolution.” Viewed together with the removal (between September 21 and September 22) of the front-page banner offering access to “Over 2 Million Photos!”, I think it’s fair to predict that the still photos are probably gone for good.

Background and history: the kinky porn sites for which Kink.com is so famous used to be individual porn sites at URLs like Hogtied.com (since 1998!), SexAndSubmission.com, and DeviceBondage.com. These URLs no longer exist as independent websites or porn products; they are now “channels” at Kink.com.

Kink.com has been “migrating” its sites from their original URLs to its new channels since December of 2014. The project began with all the company’s moribund “legacy” sites that haven’t been updated in years, such as Water Bondage, Wired Pussy, Men In Pain. In May of 2015 I noticed that the new “channel” architecture for the legacy sites at the Kink.com URL didn’t seem to offer access to any photos, so I reached out to inquire about the change. On May 14 of 2015 my contact at Kink.com told me:

We are working to create the best possible user experience for our members on kink.com, which is why you may notice a lot of onsite changes lately.

One of the sacrifices that was made to our sites was the images that we previously shared with our members. To be frank, the design and functionality on the new platform just didn’t allow for it.

In a follow up email that same day, my contact confirmed that “photos did not make the cut” for the Kink.com redesign, but “photos is something that we have spoken about internally, and we are trying to make the vintage photos make sense in an updated format.”

Four months later I tried to follow up, with a series of emails that at first went unanswered. Finally, on November 5, 2015, I got more bad news about the legacy archive of still photos:

I don’t see this changing any time soon. We have only been able to isolate a small portion of our members who use or appreciate them…

I left it alone after that, until June of this year when Kink.com began to advertise its Kink Unlimited product, which is the new consolidated buffet offering of all the Kink sites under one subscription. (It’s a great deal, too.) I noticed the “Over 2 Million Photos!” banner (the one at the top of this post) was still flying on the Kink.com front page, but I could not find the photos anywhere in the Kink Unlimited offering or in any of the legacy “channels” that replaced the individual sites. So I reached out to affiliate support and inquired about the current status of the 2,000,000 photos. On June 30, 2016, Kinkydollars Support told me:

Unfortunately, we had a technical issue with our zip files that we are trying to resolve so we can offer images as zipped files to paid members again. But it’s on the roadmap!!

That sounded promising. But, sadly, it seems not to have been real. I immediately asked about a timeline, which was not forthcoming. Then in August when the Kink.com marketing director began advertising on adult webmaster boards that “as of August 1, we are 100% migrated” I started making inquiries again. But it was not until September that that I got the word (quoted above) that there is no timeline. Put that together with the fact that access to the photos is no longer being advertised as of September 22, and I think it’s safe to predict that still photos are permanently gone from the Kink.com product offering.

What does this tell us about the state of the porn industry in 2016? I have two theories, neither of them good:

1) It’s possible that there’s no longer any market demand for still porn photos. An economist would assume that Kink.com is a rational actor in an efficient market and must have run the numbers, concluding that the photos don’t matter to enough customers to justify the cost of serving them up. If true, this would be dismaying to me; I like a dirty video as well as the next fellow but porn photographs have a charm of their own. If they are on their way out — if “internet porn” as a commercial product is not going to include still photos in future — that’s a loss that makes us all a little bit poorer. But I don’t really believe this theory, because:

2) It’s also possible that Kink.com is not a rational market actor making a cool green-eyeshades economic decision. Instead, it may be an over-extended producer in a shrinking market (nobody much pays for porn any more and the problem gets worse every year) and the loss of the photo archive could be a “flailure” — an unintended consequence of the technical chaos of their consolidation from dozens of porn sites to one porn site. If we speculate that they are a company under intense financial pressure, it could be that they consolidated the sites on a too-small budget using limited technical resources. It could just be that the code to deliver the promised zip files just didn’t work or never made it out of the programming queue. It’s not hard to imagine some overworked manager under deadline pressure (or even Peter Acworth himself) just saying “fuck it, we don’t have time or budget to worry about that.”

Either way, it’s sad that such a beloved archive of kinky porn is no longer available for any price. I, for one, will miss it!

Elsewhere on Bondage Blog:

• Coming Down From The Upper Floor
• More Vintage Hogtied.com
• Vintage Hogtied.com
• Sex And Submission
• Contortionist In Bondage
• Jungle Bondage

Cages are handy for keeping girls in:

But if you keep ’em in there for too long, you have to sluice ’em off before you can play with ’em:

Images from Sex And Submission.

Elsewhere on Bondage Blog:

• Yup, They Are Hosed
• Slave Hygiene: He Fixed It For You
• Nika Noire Caged
• Clean Your Toys
• Caged Girl

Indulge me please with one last dive into the Bondage Blog archives before we call my anniversary week over. There’s so much bondage in popular culture that keys into the tropes of fascism, militarism, and dictatorship. Nazis, prison camps, military prisoners, prisons in general — it’s a rich trove for fantasy despite (or possibly because of) being edgy as hell, the edge of course coming from the ineradicable truth that in reality, all of these tropes are associated in our history with a an enormous volume of suffering and blood and bones and bodies. But sexual fantasy, like humor, is one of the ways humans process painful things, and I’d no more ignore that (or apologize for it) than I’d deny the necessity of breathing.

• “Strip the Prisoner!” — A prison yard scene from the movie The Bamboo House of Dolls.
• Doorway Bondage, Brutal Whipping — At first glance, this is just a brutal bondage whipping scene; a woman is suspended in a doorway, having her pussy whipped. But at second glance, she’s in a prison camp and it’s the doorway to a slat-sided cattle car. {shiver}.
• Nazi Bondage — I’d call this gratuitous use of a swastika. There’s a girl tied to a chair with a bucket over her head; there’s arms with sticks threatening to hit her. And on one of those arms there’s a Nazi armband. Otherwise, the scene could be set in the basement of the Cleveland public library.
• Nazi Apes, Girls In Panties — This is more specific, and too foolish to be anything but fun. Cartoon Nazis using slavering chained apes to menace helpless maidens in panties.
• Parade Ground Bondage Whipping — This is a bit more serious: a parade ground whipping for an American girl press-ganged into the Hitler Youth, from a 1943 propaganda film.
• Whip Ready — An illustration of a menacing Nazi with a whip, facing his helpless bondage victim.
• Pretty Military Prisoners — American girls in the clutches of the Chinese communists, bamboo bondage and all.
• Bondage On Devil’s Island — More movie poster women in prison fun, this time for a movie called Devils Island Lovers.
• Pretty Prisoner In Chains — Vintage art postcard featuring a woman chained in a dungeon-like prison cell.
• Prison Sex For Mika Tan — The Sex and Submission take on what happens when brutal prison guards get their hands on a woman in a prison cell.
• Cavity Searched Female Prisoner — Pornified reimagining of a woman in jail getting a very thorough cavity search.
• Tila’s Interrogation — Very rough series of photos of a girl kept in a dark basement until two uniformed secret police come for her. After which, her day goes down hill.
• Buttfucked Blonde Military Prisoners — Supposedly these girls suffering the typical “fate worse than death” are prisoners of an Arab warlord. A rifle is in evidence.
• The Way Of A Woman In Jail — A porny Caged Tushy exploration of a woman in jail using her female wiles to make her stay a little less unpleasant.
• Bondage Prisoner Feeding — Messy force-feeding in a Japanese women-in-prison movie.
• In The Hogtied.com Military Prison — Porn company military prison sex. Foolish but fun.
• Bondage Interrogation — Cartoonish “stress position” interrogation bondage by a Nazi officer.
• Fascist Whipping — This is another “suspended for a whipping in a prison camp” movie poster illustration.
• Hair Bondage For Female Prisoner — Several stills from the prison camp movie The Big Bird Cage in which a female prisoner is suspended by her hair as a punishment.

Elsewhere on Bondage Blog:

• Seven Years Of Bondage Sex Art
• Seven Years of Bondage Miscellany
• Seven Years Of Bondage Blowjobs
• Seven Years Of Bondage (Blogging)

The Sex and Submission people got their hands on the prettiest little spy you ever did see the other day. Of course, they had to interrogate her. Rigorously and without mercy:

A good time was had by all.

Elsewhere on Bondage Blog:

• Time For Tila's Interrogation
• Stress Positions
• Cavity Searched Female Prisoner
• Wrapped In Steel
• Dungeon Interrogation

The riding crop is just to make a point: she’s well tied up and she’s not going anywhere. This is a great bondage position for rear entry sex if you don’t mind a little rope burn on her wrists and legs. Or come at her from the front, until she’s gasping with pleasure:

From this shoot at Sex And Submission.