This is the website home of the former Yahoo Club/Group "Bondage in Everyday Life", which sought out and collected pictures of women in bondage. Not sexual or commercially produced bondage, but duct-taped to a tree as a college prank, tied up in a summer-camp initiation ceremony, handcuffed during police cadet training or bound and gagged in an amateur theater production.
In other words, Bondage in Everyday Life.
The spiritual father of the group was Origpooh, who for several years has run a website devoted to the portrayal of damsel-in-distress bondage in the mainstream media. One of my favorite features was his collection of links to pictures of laughing tied-up girls and women on personal, non-BDSM-scene web pages.
When he dropped that feature (apparently because of complaints about the traffic he was driving to those pages), I decided to start a Yahoo club and invite others to join me in searching for more of those great pictures. The difference was that we would post copies of the pictures in the club, rather than links to the original sites. In fact, the club's No. One rule was that we would NEVER post the original URLs, or any information that might identify the subjects.
It was a huge success. We found hundreds of pictures in both likely and unlikely places. In the Message Forum, we discussed topics related to our quest, like how to tell the difference between an "Everyday Bondage" picture and a well-made, commercially produced "Girl Next Door" picture from TwistedSmile or the old Underground.Net. When we ran out of room in the Photo Albums, Lance Tomas and the SweetTies family generously offered to house our overflow pictures in an "offsite archive". As of May 13, 2020, we'd grown to more than 4,500 members.
That day, "Bondage in Everyday Life" vanished from Yahoo. Poof. Not one word of warning beforehand from Yahoo, not one word of explanation afterwards despite my dozens of efforts to find out why they'd killed it.
Although the pictures we'd moved to the archive were still intact, we'd lost the hundred or so that were online only at Yahoo. The messages, of course, are gone. But the biggest casualty was the membership roll -- members got only a snotty "Oops ... there is no group called bondageineverydaylife" message at our old URL, and they may never have made note of the address of the surviving "offsite archive", where we've been regrouping ever since and continuing to add new pictures every month.
The group's original working definition of "Bondage in Everyday Life" was simple -- women bound in nonviolent, nonsexual circumstances other than the BDSM scene or commercial photography. Over time, these broad categories began to emerge:
-- Pranks, stunts and horseplay on college campuses, at summer camps and family reunions, in offices...
-- Theatrical productions, magic acts etc. in which the girl is restrained.
-- Renfaires and other public exhibitions of pillories, stocks and manacles.
-- Demonstrations and rallies at which women gag themselves as a political gesture.
-- Law-enforcement training and other situations in which handcuffing is taught, demonstrated or practiced. (In some circumstances, this can include being arrested.)
-- Off-the-wall, totally random occurances, like the girl whose hundreds of ordinary, nonprovocative webcam snaps of herself include one in which she's handcuffed and being gagged by her roommate.
-- Probably lots of others we just haven't found yet.
Pat Powers has an excellent article on his JollyRoper website about what he calls "Flying Under the Radar" -- people enjoying bondage activities without consciously being aware that that's what they're doing. His point is that sexual bondage feelings exist for most people without being recognized as such. (Which explains, in part, why depictions of damsels in distress are so common in mainstream productions: Most people appreciate the appeal of the situation because they enjoy it themselves, if not as avidly as those for whom it is a conscious sexual stimulant.)
We think that's why there are so many of these pictures, and that's why we find them fascinating. We hope you enjoy our collection, and perhaps you'll join us in the search.
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