Public Disgrace
Remember about two weeks ago, when I mentioned the new public bondage site, coming from our kinky friends at Kink.com?
Well, Public Disgrace is now live, and looks to be living up to (some of) its promises.
About half the pictures in the sample galleries are close-in shots of hardcore bondage sex in what look to be protected, semi-outdoor spaces. To be honest, those aren’t terribly interesting to me, because I have a harder time with suspension of disbelief, and so there isn’t a lot of newness there. To me it’s “just porn”, with (by 21st century standards) no particularly transgressive edge.
On the other hand, I find the soft-core “pure” public bondage shots to be more interesting, because they seem to occur in genuinely public settings, complete with interested onlookers:
I will confess I find the branding for this new site a little confusing. If the goal is, to use their words, “unique street scenes of erotic humiliation”, what’s disgraceful about that? If the fantasy of a woman in chains is that she has to do what you make her do, I get that she may be embarrassed or humiliated by the public exposure, but I don’t see any disgrace in it; to me, disgrace connotes an aspect of guilt or sin or wrongdoing or bad behavior, and one of the essential transactions at the core of BDSM is that the submissive is liberated of responsibility for the things he or she is “made” to do. Hence, no disgrace. Unless the disgrace is supposed to be in the eye of the beholder, the putative onlooker shouting “that’s disgraceful!” or getting violent, like this guy?
While I like the concept, I just can’t support it. I like my porn like I like my sex, safe, sane, and consensual. The onlookers give me a feeling that some of them didn’t consent to seeing something like this.
Kink.com did a great video awhile back where there was a public scene in a bar. This clearly went all the way into “public display” without making me wonder if some child walked around the corner while they were filming this. Having a party on one of their outdoor sets and doing this would be great. Filming it on the streets of a city just makes me not want to do business with them.
Ken, I think you may be being more credulous than is really appropriate here. There are lots of ways to create the illusion of public porn without much risk of the sort of worries you’re sharing; I wrote about some of them in the comments to the first post I made about this site.
Of course neither one of us can know for sure without being there when these shoots are being made. But I know Kink.com’s good reputation so I’m pretty comfortable giving them the benefit of the doubt until I hear different.
In clicking through the links, I noticed a shot of a girl fixed to a fence beside a railroad track. This could add a whole new exciting element to the annual Mooning Amtrak
(http://www.erosblog.com/2006/07/13/female-moon/) gathering…
Princess Donna has done similar shoots before, once with Wired Pussy in New York. They had a big behind the scenes about that shoot. It showed that they applied for and got a permit to film non-nude scenes in public. A couple of cameras running to capture the whole scene, not just what would be published. Donna was visibly worried at times because of children being in the area, forcing them to move or hold off on certain aspects. Keep in mind that during this, the model was fully clothed, and no one was touching her. Donna was still worried and concerned that the children would be exposed to something they shouldn’t. So for that, I respect them.
That being said, I still don’t like this. I enjoy public play when it’s done under someone’s nose without their knowledge. Blatantly showing everyone just screams attention whore to me, and I’m just not attracted to someone who needs that kind of attention.