Zegna mac

Another December quickie, from the pages of some mens' style magazine or other. It's an advert for Italian fashion house Ermenegildo Zegna but the model could've stepped out of the pages of Alligator Raincoats.





While I seriously doubt it's any indication of a resurgence in popularity for the classic rubber mackintosh, it's always nice to see a bit of black an' shiny on the catwalks...

"Comfy?"

Still in one of those prolonged phases where actual bondage encounters are, for a number of reasons, thin on the ground. YouTube's pretty good for throwing up the occasional gem, though, as with this triple offering from greenbrownblue3:

Part 1



Part 2



Part 3



Being a Brit, I'm almost completely unacquainted with All My Children. I do like this plot strand, though, particularly the first part. The straitjacket itself looks less than secure - no front/side arm loops, or even crotch strap - and it's not entirely clear how one man's managed to strap it onto an apparently unwilling, resisting victim. What does it for me is the combination of defiant-but-fruitless struggling from the captor ("wrapped up like a dirty burrito") and taunting from the captor. Favourite line: "Let's see you David Copperfield your way out of this canvas dinner jacket!"

Looking forward to my own forthcoming SJ scene...

November rain

Oh dear, November's been quite the washout, on several fronts. Literally, weather-wise, although for me that's one of the few pluses: I've had opportunity to wear not only my heavier leather coats and jackets but the torrential rain has necessitated the wearing of my Ralph Lauren rubberised riding mac, my western-style raincoat and a rather nice shiny black PVC Comme des Garcons mac. Only fly in the ointment is that my partner has taken a shine (ho ho) to the latter, and grabs it first of a morning, so I now rarely get the chance to wear it. Ah well, the consolation is that he looks damn good in it.

Otherwise, events seem to be conspiring against me. A sudden busy spike at work has meant much of my energy has been diverted there rather than into my blog (don't you hate it when that happens?) and I missed the opening night of a friend's monthly bondage club Fetishbound, which looked really promising. And in the last week, the demise of not one but two laptop computers has seriously limited my opportunities to go online to update or catch up with email correspondence.

Pah.

Most of all, I think, I'm missing bondage downtime: time spent roped, gagged, strapped, straitjacketed in my gear. In my much neglected e-correspondence, I'd been talking with someone about the meditative, almost hypnotic mind state induced by good bondage. For me, it feels like deep relaxation interspersed with bouts of adrenaline-infused struggle which, over time, subside. Sometimes the remaining state is one of low-level erotic and sensory stimulation; sometimes, it's more akin to the pleasantly blank time-out-of-time I also feel when swimming length after length of a deep blue pool. The usual nagging worries and concerns drain away, leaving me in the moment. It's not surprising that, frequently, I feel like dozing off in my bondage, and sometimes do. After a really great bondage session, I feel tired, sometimes a bit achey here and there, but wonderfully rejuvenated - like a bout of meditation and a vigorous massage rolled into one.

My next play session with CJ won't be until the end of December, and I'm very much looking forward to that. Wearing gear day-to-day or to sit around the house feels good but never really pushes my buttons in the way being tied up in the same gear does.

Now, for no reason other than that it features attractive gear in November rain, is a clip from Johnguzzi:

Green Ocean suit - director's cut

Another director's cut for Hallowe'en: this is a sequence of captured stills from the Motion of the Ocean scene, when I was togged up in a dark green Ocean Rainwear suit, comprehensively roped to a chair and tightly gagged with mouth stuffer, tape and bandage.

GiveIn and I had been talking about an earlier scene involving a hooded coat, specifically how much I'd liked it when he'd gagged me then tightened and fastened the drawstrings of the hood, blindfolding me. This time, he went further, using tape to make a truly effective gag then adding more tape around the Ocean jacket's hood.

This is the point when, unable to seriously resist and already too well gagged to voice a complaint, I realised he was going to seal off my vision, too:





There's something very potent about that last strip of tape going over the eyes. Having recently been pointed in the direction of a forum of mummification stories, I can see that this is a common theme: the captive's head completely taped up, securely gagged but eyes left clear until the last possible moment - presumably so they can see the hopelessness of their bondage predicament.









And he continued wrapping tape around and round...











Generally speaking, I think I prefer it when there's loads of tape gagging under a hood as opposed to on top of it - so that, to a casual observer, I might simply be someone with his jacket hood fastened against the wind and rain. Jim Stewart described something along these lines in his wonderful Initiative Test:

I watched the stars and felt the rain on the part of my face that wasn’t covered with adhesive tape, while the ropes from my wrists were knotted in front of my waist and then systematically run through both elbows pulling them forward before the rope was knotted with emphatic finality below my rib cage.

‘Impossible to reach’ I decided calmly as my neck was released and I stared mutely across the fence into a pair of piercing steel blue eyes.

Suddenly I was looking at the floor again, collar gripped firmly from behind. The athletic figure ahead of me was stooping to produce something from a back-pack behind the fence. I anticipated a sack over my head as everything went dark - but my head emerged out of the other side and I was standing up wearing an army rain poncho-type ground sheet. For the record, it wasn’t the sort of lightweight kit they use now. Back then a groundsheet poncho was thick khaki rubberised canvas with a tall collar but no hood; at front and back it reached to below the knees, at the sides below the finger-ends and had metal eyelets all round the edge for when used as a ground sheet. It completely covered my roped arms I noted as the grim-faced Turk in front carefully adjusted the high collar so it easily hid my taped mouth.

In this story, I like the cunning roping of arms tight in to the torso and also the degree of thought that's gone into hiding both tied arms and taped mouth from onlookers. I love the idea that, at least theoretically, one might be taken outside for transportation elsewhere - even briefly in public, perhaps - with one's restraints not obviously visible, so passers-by would not come to one's rescue. A hot fantasy... maybe I ought to revisit the idea of bondage and capes...

Anyway, this was one of our early experiments in combining tape and rainsuit hoods, and it felt wonderfully confining.



I could mmmph and vigorously shake my head to my heart's content: the gag was in my mouth and the smooth PVC hood sealed around my face; neither was going to move.



It's not always easy to contrive a completely successful gag - just the right level of discomfort, challenging without choking, impossible to dislodge, adequately silencing without seriously blocking breathing - and this is probably one of GiveIn's most effective to date. The other that worked very well was the time he used an open-face drysuit hood over cross-taped mouth, then added further tape on top. Just imagine all of that then a rainsuit hood tightened and knotted over the top. Bliss!



And then, while I wrestled with my bonds and enjoyed the wonderfully frustrating cling of hood, tape and gag, a Black Diamond coat approached... but that's a whole other story.

Acceptable in the '80s

Rereading Frglee's July post on space suits started a bit of a free association meander through the old memory banks. Indulge me.

Animotion's Obsession, which I recalled as featuring a spaceman. It does but only briefly (a rather attractive centurion stars throughout) and I wonder whether I'm confusing it with something else:



Then there was Pete Wylie's The Mighty Wah! and their video for It's Sinful:



Dancing dominatrices, naughty nuns, a mad aviator (interesting that both this one and the Animotion video feature people in flying jackets and helmets) and, most fascinating to Teenage Me, someone completely bound up and struggling (in shocking pink, at around 1:10 minutes in).

I found myself on an '80s video YouTube binge. Duran Duran's Mad Max inspired Wild Boys video is a bit of a fetish classic. Here's the extended version:



Then there was the most (in)famous fetish video of all, Frankie Goes To Hollywood's Relax. Here's the original, banned version:



(They later tried to recreate that sense of being drawn into a seductive-but-perilous underworld in the video for Welcome to the Pleasure Dome - which is much more professionally shot but also consciously safer, less threatening for a heterosexual audience.)

Bound & gagged or gagged & bound?

A question for the philosophers out there: which comes first, the bondage or the gag?



(Tangent: was it just me, or was Planet of the Apes really quite fetishy? Many of the "damn dirty apes" seemed well into leather, and Charlton Heston had more than his fair share of bondage action. Hmmm.)

My online friend Penguin kindly acceded to my suggestion that he write about his love of gags and gagging:

Why did a piece of cloth tied tightly around someone’s mouth turn me on so much? Was I a freak for feeling like this? I started to analyse what it was about it that was envoking this reaction in me but I couldn’t find a real answer. I just knew I wanted to see more of the same. I guess you could say I knew I liked bondage before I realised I was gay. In fact as a child the gender of the captive didn’t matter at all as long as they were suitably restrained and gagged tightly with a nice handkerchief. A white handkerchief seemed to be the common type and soon I managed to steal one from my dad’s packet that he always used to have. I kept this as my ‘official gag‘, putting it on myself as well as my teddy bears. My philosophy became “you tie someone up so that they can’t remove their gag.” If I would see bondage scenes without a gag they were never as arousing as the ones with gags.

I realised that, although I generally consider a bondage scene incomplete without a good solid mouth stuffer, fastened securely in place, I've never thought of the bondage as being there to reinforce the gag. Penguin added that

When I was watching a captive struggle I'd think "hehe that gag is going nowhere" then look at their hands and kinda think "yep no getting that gag off" and it just kinda developed from there.

I'm planning on revisiting the subject over several blog entries and will doubtless quote him again...

A mac for all seasons

I mentioned Leatherbill in an earlier posting but, really, he deserves a blog entry of his own, not least for his sterling mac-wearing in all weathers.

Sun:



Rain:



Snow:



Then there's a recent addition, pleasantly autumnal, and reminiscent of my own brief outdoors fashion shoot around this time last year.



(I think Leatherbill looks great in that combo but wonder why he never does up the tie-strings of his souwester. Maybe that's just me: I like all hoods and headgear snugly and securely fastened in place.)

Checking out his YouTube profile, I see that most of Leatherbill's Favourite video clips feature women in SBR mackintoshes (and sometimes souwesters, usually outside). From my own experience of male mac fetishists, this isn't at all uncommon. I'm aware of some gay men into this look but the overwhelming majority of mackophiles do seem to be heterosexual or at least other-than-gay. I wonder also whether their attraction to a look which is unisex-but-more-commonly-feminine reflects a degree of low-level cross-dressing or, perhaps more likely, the lack of a specific aversion to clothing that might be perceived as tending slightly toward the feminine.

It's interesting to broadly compare the forums of Rubberzone, a gay male contact site, with Rubberpal, which is much more mixed in terms of straight/gay and male/female. On Rubberzone, a search for "macs" garners nine posts (and several of those are from me!) On Rubberpal, the same search throws up 65 results. Even discounting a third of those (relating to computers rather than rainwear), that's a fair difference. Hardly a cast-iron comparison, since I've no idea of the relative numbers of members of Rubberzone and Rubberpal but it seems, at least superficially, to back up my own impression of mackintosh fetishists as more likely to be heterosexual.

One way of looking at it might be to think about the preferred associations of different types of fetish clothing: specifically, the people we see (and are turned on by) wearing it. As well as the sensual appeal of the gear itself, gay men might admire or lust over the male body inside the rubber wetsuit, drysuit, oilskins, hazmat, hi-viz... and by wearing the same kit themselves, somehow harness or get closer to that erotically supercharged admiration/lust. Straight men turned on by women in raingear (and it seems there were plenty of rubber-mackintoshed women around in the early 20th Century) might well be doing exactly the same thing when they put on similar raingear.

Alternatively, one might argue that people like Leatherbill are stronger and/or purer in their fetish attraction because they're turned on by the outfit whether it's worn by men (themselves, at least) or women. As I was saying to an online contact just the other day (in a discussion of bisexuality), fetish not infrequently cuts across the more conventional homo/hetero distinctions.

Complicated stuff - and I'm not sure that it goes any distance in explaining my own relatively recent attraction to the mac/souwester/riding boots "uniform", as a thirtysomething gay man. Ah well, I'm due a window-shopping visit to Weather Vain in the very near future, which might throw some light on the matter. Watch this space...

Fetish classics: 'Little Shop of Horrors'

Frglee just posted a fascinating blog entry on medical fetishism, mentioning in passing one of my favourite musicals, Little Shop of Horrors. I don't think I've ever found Steve Martin as sexy as when playing Orin Scrivello, the sadistic, leather-clad dentist:



(Obvious echoes of both Presley and Brando. And a Schott Perfecto?)

Having seen both film and stage versions, I think I prefer the relative darkness of the latter; various elements (including the incredibly bleak ending) were cut or altered for celluloid. Perhaps surprisingly, they didn't cut the death of (a now rubber-aproned) Scrivello from what is essentially auto-erotic breath control:



Not your conventional musical fare...

QUESTION: Would you like to see "director's cuts"?

As well as being a skilled bondage top, CJ is a bit of a technical whiz - compared to me, anyway. He's recorded several of our sessions on video and, on a couple of occasions, sent me captured stills (of captured me). An example can be seen in one of our early scenes, in which I was comprehensively roped up in a Black Diamond coat.

I rather like the results of this technique: although grainier and generally poorer quality than photos taken on a digital camera, I think the stills capture a sense of the movement in an ongoing scene, the struggle. The pics showing captor as well as captive are particularly effective: with two people present, there's suddenly a dynamic, a momentum, a story.

Last time we met, CJ very kindly offered to grab some still pics from other scenes, including one of my personal favourites, when I was hogtied in my long green Ocean Rainwear coat. Incidentally, a couple of people have asked about buying Ocean gear in the UK. I've tended to get mine from this online rainwear shop. The coat in question is here...



... and here I am modelling it. I've edited some of the pics into the relevant blog entry but liked them so much I though I'd post all of them again here:









































Of course, having waxed lyrical about the movement within a session, very little movement was possible in this particular case - certainly once CJ had me good and hogtied. I was trussed up so efficiently that even rolling over became a feat of exertion (made trickier by the fact that I was lying on a spongy mattress rather than a firm surface) and pretty much all I could do was twist and wriggle. Eventually, even that was limited, because the hood pulled around my face restricted my rotatory neck movements.

A great scene, now available as a director's cut!

Do you want to see more of these? Where extra screen captures from a scene are available, should I add them as a new blog entry (as I've done here) or to the original write-up, or what?

Jamie All-leather

I'm really not a fan of Jamie Oliver, but you can't move on the Tube right now without seeing posters for the Christmas spin-off book from his American Road Trip series:



(Apologies for blurring. It's taken with a no-flash iPhone in the second or two before boarding a train.)

Hate to say it but I'm finding him quite sexy here. Curse this leather/uniform fetish!