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MAGAZINE COVER
BONDAGE
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DETECTIVE
BONDAGE COVERS In 1986, the Meese Commission, an anti-pornography arm of the law, swept down on various published "evils" and either forced them out of business or forced them to change their ways. One of their targets was the detective magazine market that depicted covers of helpless bound and gagged women being menaced by thugs. It's been decades since bondage was a steady staple of detective magazines. There are probably a lot of people looking at this site's faux covers who have never seen the real covers. The thing that probably grabs people the most about the fake detective covers is that they evoke memories of a time gone by. There still appears to be a half dozen detective magazines that are published today, but the covers have gotten a lot tamer. There's an occasional shot of a woman in loose bondage on these covers. More often than not, the woman is depicted as the criminal on the covers rather than as the victim now. If she's in bondage, it's usually police handcuffs as she's taken away. In the late '60s and early '70s, it was a different story. There were a couple dozen detective magazines on the newsstand every month and I could always count on half of them displaying a helpless woman in bondage. Back then, those covers represented some of the few persistent images of bondage that were commonly available. It's hard to remember back then that there were no VCRs available, so it wasn't possible to tape TV programs with bondage images. The World-Wide Web wasn't even an idea back then, so there were no electronic images. The only bondage images available were photographic. Outside of the detective magazine covers, which were openly displayed on newsstands, there wasn't much else out there available to the public at large. For folks who haven't seen a detective magazine, they were basically sleazy affairs made out of the cheapest stock of paper available. By contrast, comic books of the time looked like they were produced on fine art magazine grade paper. The magazines were supposedly true life stories of homicidal crimes with a lurid attention to detail. The cover was usually the only thing of interest. A few magazines used posed photos occasionally on the inside, but overall any photos on the inside were grainy pictures from crime scenes and police mug shots. I remember reading an interview with a comic book writer who used to work at one of these companies and he basically described the working conditions as being every bit as grimy as the products they put out. The people working on these publications hated it so that they'd clip photos of wealthy matrons from newspapers and paste them into a story layout as the killer just hoping that the magazine would be sued. There were a couple of covers that contained nudity and I'm wondering if the same thing was happening there? In spite of the low class origins of these magazines, the covers were wonderful displays of terrified women in bondage. A number of the covers from the late '70s were simultaneously shot as adult magazine bondage pictorials with semi-clothed and nude models and used a clothed shot for the detective cover. The faux detective magazine covers on display here are a tribute to those times. I'm glad that people enjoy seeing them.
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IMAGINARY DETECTIVE MAGAZINE COVER BONDAGE The Blonde |
