Swinging On A Bondage Trapeze
I am — this news will doubtless shock you all — the BDSM-and-bondage sort of pervert. Which has implications. One of them is that everything reminds me of BDSM. A girl has a tight lace necklace? “Symbolic collar, I’ll be she’s as kinky as a cheap garden hose.” The kitchen I’m in has a cutting board with a handle? “Nice wooden paddle, bend over.” The rack of actual cattle prods (for actual cattle) at the farm store instantly fills my head with power fantasies of pretty bound submissives promising anything that might save them from repeated zapping. You get the idea. I see BDSM implications in everything. It’s my default lens for viewing the world.
That is why it will come as no surprise to you that the very notion of sex swings always puts a smile on my face. I can’t see them discussed or advertised without thinking of all the wonderful old woman-in-peril bondage comics from that whole stable of 1950s fetish artists who drew stuff for Irving Klaw’s mail-order catalogs.
Yes, I’m talking about Gene Bilbrew aka “Eneg”, Eric Stanton, Adolpho Ruiz, “Mario”, “Jim” and all the rest you can still see if you dip into back issues of Bélier Press’s Bizarre Comix series. To a man viewing the world through my BDSM-colored glasses, sex swings are kinky; they put me in mind of the swinging trapezes and complicated suspension-contraptions of all the tied-up heroine-victims in those comics.
In truth, there are lots of vanilla reasons for sex swings. Probably “swinging from the chandeliers” always has just been a metaphor for wildly uninhibited sex, but swings enable some positions and athleticisms that are impractical or impossible on or in a bed. It’s perfectly possible to use one of the many swings you’ll find at a site like Doctor Climax without doing anything kinky. But like I mentioned, I’m a guy whose mental filters kink everything he sees. The correspondence is too good. Swings are all about straps and anchors and suspension. The overlap with BDSM is not just visible to a guy like me, it’s written in flashing neon letters.
I’d be a terrible guy to actually use a sex swing with; I’d forever be “improving” the experience by adding ropes and weights and duct tape and sudden stimuli that the manufacturers may not have designed for. You think that thing is bouncy now? Let’s see how bouncy it gets when somebody is caning your tits! Perhaps it’s more obvious, now, why I think of Bilbrew and Stanton every time the subject of sex swings comes up…
