BDSM: Bondage, Discipline, Domination/Submission, Sadism & Masochism. When a couple decides to “get kinky” for the first time, more often than not, someone is going to be bound or cuffed. Why is bondage so central to kink? Thinking about the history of bondage erotica, a very specific image probably comes to mind. Those who know the brand "Salty Vixen", well, I love writing BDSM stories, the fantasy that many have, that is why there are so many erotica books out there, including 50 Shades of Grey
That picture in your head, likely stars that “proper” submissive, bound and perhaps gagged, her innocent blue eyes glancing around half-heartedly for her knight in shining armor, that all-too-telling smirk on her face that not even a gag can hide. With that silky black hair and those fringe bangs, Bettie Page is the face of BDSM. We all know and love her, but how did she find her way into so many voyeurs’ fantasies? I would argue that if her bondage pin-up hadn’t become so popular in the early 1950’s, bondage may not have become the “de facto” fetish we all try in our bedrooms.
In the late 1940’s, Bettie Mae Page was highly popular with the “camera club” photographers, due to her lack of inhibitions, or “hard-limits” when it came to posing. She was very open-minded and loved taking requests that would push her limits. These “camera clubs” were underground circles formed to circumvent the strict laws of the time that banned producing and distributing pornography. While nude photography existed, most erotica was considered porn in those days. Despite her popularity in those clubs, the nature of such underground networks meant that the general public never saw her work. Had she never met Irving Klaw, many of us kinksters today may not have been able to so freely express our sexuality and our lifestyle.
Irving Klaw was born November 9, 1910 to a Jewish Family in Brooklyn. The family owned and operated a small, struggling business selling used books on 14th Street in Manhattan. While Irving worked in the store in the early 40’s, he began to notice photos of famous stars, mostly the glamorous women, were being torn out and stolen from the movie magazines on sale. To him, this indicated a demand for photos of these beautiful stars and he began selling them, along with lobby photo cards in his family store. The demand for these pin-up photos became so high, Irving stopped selling books, moved the storefront from the basement to street level, and re-branded the shop “Irving Klaw Pin-Ups”.
This new direction for the store proved so profitable, Klaw expanded his business, moved to a larger storefront and opened a mail-order business selling photos of the stars throughout the 1940’s. This new business, “Movie Star News” made pin-up photos highly accessible to anyone with a mailbox. It wasn’t long before customers started making special requests for more still shots of their favorite scenes. An overwhelming favorite was the “damsel in distress”. Movies often depicted beautiful women in dangerous situations, at times bound and gagged, awaiting rescue. Stills of those scenes were common promotional tools to draw interest in the films, but they weren’t created with BDSM in mind.
Irving, seeing this overwhelming demand for photos of pin-ups in bondage, began selling as many stills depicting bondage as Hollywood could produce. Still, the demand was greater than the supply, so he and his sister, Paula, began taking these photos themselves. In many ways, his bondage and fetish photography resembled the illegal content produced by the “camera clubs”, but Klaw was a respected pin-up distributor and his photos contained no nudity or sexual material. He and his sister hired famous burlesque dancers like Tempest Storm and Blaze Starr to pose bound, gagged, flogged and spanked. Tempest, of course, was more likely to be the one doing the spanking! Eventually, fetish artists and writers took note of Irving’s business, and began to illustrate some of Klaw’s photos and produce bondage serials for the company to distribute.
In 1953, Irving saw a new way to expand his business after the burlesque revue film “Strip-O-Rama” became a surprise hit. He wouldn't just sell sexy photographs of the stars made famous by movies, he would make films of these stars performing burlesque! One particular star of “Strip-O-Rama” caught his eye, young Bettie Page. Bettie joined the line-up of Klaw’s sexy models in his first film, “Varietease” in 1953 and played Tempest Storm’s maid in his most famous film, Teaserama in 1954. Still, these films proved too vanilla for the kinky folks who were accustomed to the still shots they ordered through the mail. Bettie, always happy to take requests, posed in Klaw’s more extreme fetishistic fantasy movies filmed on silent home-video cameras. During those sessions, many of the famous Bettie Page stills were taken, and those photos were sold at the New York store and distributed through the mail-order catalogue.
This fetish photography swept the nation and much of the world, exposing the masses to erotic bondage and spanking. Irving’s work became so popular, that by 1957, it had caught the attention of the religious conservatives, who launched a campaign not only labeling his work as pornography, but linking pornography to juvenile delinquency. These censors hoped to put a stop to the spread of such “devious” sexual imagery, but lucky for us, they were too late.
The pressure on Irving, though, was too much. He closed his business and unfortunately, burned most of his negatives. Paula, his sister, secretly hid away what she considered to be his best work and preserved them. Those images are the ones we have all seen, they are the ones that are so ingrained in our culture that when we think of the history of BDSM, we think of Bettie Page in bondage. Without a brother and sister, a girl named Bettie, and a dance called Burlesque, there may have never been a “B” in BDSM.
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