Bondage Blog

Pretty much since the invention of the video camera, they’ve had a place in BDSM play. Not just to record any given bondage play session as personal porn for later watching, but as an actual component of the BDSM session. It depends on each submissive’s individual kinks of course, but knowing that a camera is rolling can add extra layers of helplessness, objectification, or humiliation to the power exchange dynamic.

One of the reasons I like to dip into the enormous internet reservoir of Japanese hentai artwork is that the sheer volume of the stuff makes it easier to document and enjoy niche interests, or what we might call micro-fetishes. There’s a danger in it, though, which is that kinks are sometimes cultural. Bondage sessions where cameras are prominently featured — such as the examples in this post — are easy to find in kinky Japanese erotic art collections. But does this establish the bondage-on-camera micro-kink as “a thing” wherever people come together to tie each other up? Or does the uniquely-Japanese obsession with shame and humiliation make this micro-fetish more prominent in Japanese-origin kinky erotic art? I suspect the latter, but I have no idea how to confirm my suspicion.

Sometimes I wish I had the academic credentials and funding to do some serious anthropology around questions of kink and fetish. For instance, it seems to me that cams performers might have some interesting insights into the way that the camera lens affects fetish practice and reinforces (or doesn’t) various fantasies. These women live their entire professional lives on camera. Perhaps it’s unlikely that the gaze of the camera is a specific fetish thing for many of them — it’s just a necessary precondition to doing business.

Like the phone sex operators who are their spiritual predecessors, successful cams performers must be incredibly attuned to the fantasy lives of their customers. It would be fascinating to interview a bunch of random cam girls with big tits on a site like this, for whom catering to the fantasies of their customers is a condition of professional success. I’ll bet you they know whether it matters to their customers that “the camera is running” as a psycho-sexual (and not just practical) component of any given cam show.

I’m also interested in how cameras interact with fantasies and practices of voyeurism. The impact of a Peeping Tom is concretized and made permanent when he has a camera in his hand. For exhibitionists and voyeurs alike, that can significantly enhance the sexual power of their fantasies. This wraps in nicely with the BDSM scenarios in this post, where it’s difficult to separate the “doing mean things to the tied up girl” fun from the “she knows he’s recording the mean things she’s enduring, so that other people get to watch” fun. There’s a lot to unpack here!