Kinky Delight just posted an utterly classic example of a phenomenon that used to drive me utterly bugfuck nutzo during my horny teenage and young adult years: the “fake porn” and especially “faux BDSM” magazine (or, sometimes, book) cover:

bogus BDSM on the cover of a vampire magazine

Study this Italian vampire magazine cover closely and it has all the elements you could want to suggest some rousing BDSM pornography: bare tits, racy black lingerie, leather lingerie, a leather collar, knotted ropes worn as a harness, ropes going over unseen rafters or perhaps a pulley, dangling chains, a whip, kneeling women, a dominatrix sneer…

But none of the elements are connected, literally or figuratively! The chains and ropes aren’t tied to anything, the collar isn’t hooked to anything, nobody is submitting to anyone that we can see, nobody is getting whipped, nobody is tied up or tied to anything or to each other or to themselves, there’s no actual bondage or BDSM in progress and even the assumption of kneeling women is an assumption based on relative head positioning, as we cannot see their lower bodies.

This is a whole lot of effort being put into staging a photograph to suggest BDSM in the context of a censorship regime where nobody wants to take the chance of being arrested or censored or even glowered-at-by-officialdom for actually showing anything scandalous. Everything is suggestion, everything is deniable, nothing is actually what the image seems to promise, and — what made my sixteen-year-old self so angry — you can be fucking-damned certain that nothing within the covers will be even half as a racy as the worthless weak sauce on the cover.

Still, I guess we need to admire the creative effort that went into assembling so many elements of a BDSM tableau without actually committing any BDSM to film.

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