#303302 - Males in Love Bondage 1

Males in Love Bondage, Number 1
Harmony Concepts
Van Nuys, California
1996

digital replica

With its prodigious history of publishing magazines showing women in bondage, Harmony steps into female-guided scenes with Males in Love Bondage. Editors experiment with this motif in pursuit of “even-handedness,” with continuing reliance on certain premises:

It has never been nor will it ever be our purpose to depict women as mere subordinates to men. These pictures and articles are not about that. The materials we produce are carefully and, we think, obviously designed for men and women to whom bondage is an important mutual diversion, a recreational and benevolent experience, a fantasy with a happy ending, a good-natured game in which everybody wins.

. . . . we characterize lovers who are mutually involved in a complex and bizarre, but highly stimulating personal activity. The taste we reflect is mutually exciting and pleasurable — the bondage can be for the sake of sexual teasing or foreplay or the acting out of a benign rescue fantasy with slightly juvenile undertones; or just the sweet and secret simple sharing of a very special physical intimacy between caring persons. Whichever of these it is, we have characterized it on our pages as "I/we Bondage."

Editors conceive bondage as bilateral, between “fortune-blessed soulmates,” and encourage their audience to understand the Harmony-styled relationship as “an essentially gentle act used by lovers to intensify their physical and spiritual closeness.” For some real couples, these characterizations apply.

In Males in Love Bondage, we have restraint scenes with reverse polarity: men are bound by women. But some pictorials add a bizarre note of dissonance with men dressed in lingerie, wigs, hosiery and heels. Cross-dressing doesn't appear in Harmony magazines featuring restrained women and no one suggests that it should. Here it adds an ingredient that tests the symmetry of Harmony-choreographed tableaux. And we can certainly imagine that the males involved enjoy female transformation as much as women in other Harmony publications derive pleasure from being tied.

In Holly, J. Jordan, Goldstripe and Parliament magazines showing complete female transformation sequences, the male model often seems to be a person who cross-dresses for fun. He has shaved most of his body hair and undergone a manicure to appear more feminine. In Males in Love Bondage, men in pictorials have all their hair and no nail polish.

Domestic Discipline
To get her sports-absorbed husband to pay attention to her, pretty Laurel strips down to black bra, panties, stockings and pumps, and wrestles him to the floor. He's chair tied with ropes and cloth gag. When he's in panties, he gets tied upside down and hogtied.

Double Indignity
When John misbehaves, he's stripped, tied and gagged with panties and stocking. Sharon and Raven apply blush, eyeliner and mascara. They draw lips on his gag to make him look feminine and add a wig. In the last pictures, he wears padded bra, panties, fishnets, heels and handcuffs.

My Turn
Brooke turns tables on her dominating husband, silencing him with a ball gag and immobilizing him with leather straps and handcuffs. With ankles buckled to thighs, he kneels at her feet.

The Womanizer
Ingrid strips Stephen and fastens a ball gag. When he's chair-tied, she applies cosmetics and combs out his hair. Finally, she dresses him a maid costume.

Men Who Like to be Tied
Home photos of men bound in women's undies.

To Have and To Hold
Laurel ties her grumpy spouse to a chair, sits on lap and force feeds him dinner. She gags him, ties him to a wood frame and teases him with her body.

Your Panties or Mine!
When Juliet returns home, she finds Steven sleeping in her panties. She blindfolds then gags him, ties him to the bed and falls asleep on top of him.

Man-Maid Bondage
While dressed in lacy lingerie Steven demands for her bondage, Nancy escapes and turns the tables on him. After he's tied with ropes, she gags him and adds a wig.

Dorothy's Lesson Learned
“I only touched the stockings for a second — but Kristine caught me! Before I knew it, Chelsea handcuffed me! They put make-up on my face, put on a wig, painted my nails and they even dressed me in panties, seamed stockings, five-inch high heels, a bra and satin robe. They decided to call me Dorothy.”

All photography was accomplished indoors, some in studio. Brightness and contrast were adjusted and shadows reduced.

The digital replica includes all the content of the 48-page magazine, including advertising, in the original sequence. A few page layout were revised slightly. Some empty margins, borders, floors and walls were cropped out.

All new scans.

As this 48-page magazine has 8 pictorials, most are three or four pages long. While they all show women in charge, protagonists seem occupied with mischief rather than punishment. And they are empowered by belief in household equality, not fetish regalia.

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