Good question! The best speculation I can offer is that in that era, BDSM in general was very poorly understood in vanilla culture, and an awful lot of pop culture imagery that invoked BDSM got stuff laughably wrong. In particular slapping bondage gear onto photographic subjects (or in this case, illustrative ones) without understanding it. Treating bondage gear as a fetish signifier without considering who should wear which pieces, who or what body parts should be restrained, what the gear was for — all of this was so common as to be unremarkable. One of my favorite examples is this domme on the cover of a 20th-century vampire magazine who is also wearing a really crappy leather collar and using a whip to… make her submissive sneeze? I dunno.
Twenty plus years later, though, I have to wonder: Why is HE the one wearing the collar?
Good question! The best speculation I can offer is that in that era, BDSM in general was very poorly understood in vanilla culture, and an awful lot of pop culture imagery that invoked BDSM got stuff laughably wrong. In particular slapping bondage gear onto photographic subjects (or in this case, illustrative ones) without understanding it. Treating bondage gear as a fetish signifier without considering who should wear which pieces, who or what body parts should be restrained, what the gear was for — all of this was so common as to be unremarkable. One of my favorite examples is this domme on the cover of a 20th-century vampire magazine who is also wearing a really crappy leather collar and using a whip to… make her submissive sneeze? I dunno.
Thank you for the insight, and thank you for the link! That’s a very funny pic.