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SM Play

January 1972

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Cover of SM Play, January 1972

Issue Details

PDF pages
145

Summary

SM Play Photo Special is a large visual anthology devoted to bondage, sadomasochistic imagery, punishment, fetishism, and erotic illustration. The cover describes the volume as containing approximately 250 SM photographs and pictures across roughly 150 pages and emphasizes visual material rather than conventional magazine departments. The issue accordingly moves through numerous photographic and illustrated sequences with relatively little connective editorial apparatus, producing the character of an omnibus or picture archive rather than a normal monthly issue.

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The opening section is dominated by black-and-white bondage photography. Women are shown restrained indoors and outdoors, with wrists or ankles attached to architectural points, trees, furniture, or overhead ropes. The photographs explore standing, kneeling, bent, spread, and floor-bound positions and repeatedly emphasize posture and the physical geometry of restraint. Beginning around PDF page 13, the publication turns toward elaborate punishment illustrations with titles such as Tears of Submission, A Woman at the End of Her Strength, Horse Stable, and Sadistic Hell. Historical material follows, including reproduced Meiji-era punishment imagery and commentary on older Japanese prints depicting torture, restraint, and violent spectacle.

The central third expands dramatically beyond rope bondage. Illustrated portfolios depict sacrifice, captivity, forced positions, accidents, wartime brutality, imprisonment, whipping, execution, burning, strangulation, and other forms of punishment. A substantial sequence on the tragedy of military defeat uses documentary photographs and illustrations of war, refugees, imprisonment, narcotics, and violence, while another group returns to more overtly fantastic erotic scenarios. Western-style bondage and fetish imagery appears alongside Japanese historical and contemporary settings, creating a deliberately eclectic comparison of punishment traditions and visual conventions.

From approximately PDF page 63, the volume becomes more explicitly concerned with bondage practice and presentation. Beautiful Bondage combines short commentary with photographic demonstrations of rope placement, body positioning, suspension, outdoor tying, chest restraint, and improvised anchor points. Subsequent pages mix photographic bondage with illustrated discussions of rope, furniture restraint, punishment poses, spanking, execution fantasies, and historical or foreign examples. Later prose-heavy sections include illustrated fiction and sensational narratives, among them Betrayer and Ranch Secret Story, while photographic portfolios continue to punctuate the text.

The closing portion returns decisively to bondage imagery, including rear-wrist ties, kneeling restraint, gagging, floor bondage, kimono and Western clothing, pillar and chair ties, and elaborate illustrated positions. There is no conventional editorial conclusion or reader-correspondence section. Instead, the anthology ends with further erotic bondage illustrations. Across the volume, photography, historical reproductions, modern illustration, sensational reportage, and fiction are assembled around a common fascination with restraint, punishment, bodily vulnerability, domination, and the visual aesthetics of SM.

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Highlights

  • The opening photographic portfolio presents a wide range of rope restraint, including overhead wrist and ankle ties, outdoor tree bondage, standing restraint, compact kneeling positions, and improvised use of furniture and architectural anchor points. (PDF pp. 3–12).
  • A sequence of dramatic punishment illustrations beginning with Tears of Submission shifts the anthology from photographic documentation toward highly theatrical images of captivity, bodily torment, and restraint. (PDF pp. 13–17).
  • Reproduced historical Japanese prints and commentary examine punishment imagery associated with the Meiji period and earlier popular visual culture, placing contemporary SM interests beside older representations of violence and restraint. (PDF pp. 18–19).
  • The illustrated section that follows ranges across sacrifice, bondage, female captivity, bicycle and railway accidents, medical or execution fantasies, and other forms of bodily danger, revealing the anthology's broad conception of eroticized suffering. (PDF pp. 20–32).
  • A substantial sequence on war and defeat combines historical photographs, reportage-style commentary, prison imagery, narcotics, refugees, and illustrations of captured or assaulted women, markedly shifting the tone from fetish fantasy toward sensational historical violence. (PDF pp. 33–45).
  • The New Wife in Early Autumn sequence uses a nylon raincoat and rainy garden setting to transform everyday clothing and seasonal atmosphere into a bondage scenario, illustrating the publication's interest in fetishizing ordinary garments and environments. (PDF pp. 46–47).
  • Images of White Toys introduces Western-styled female bondage imagery, followed by a large assortment of illustrated restraint, gagging, prison, snake, basket, electric-apparatus, and punishment scenes. (PDF pp. 48–62).
  • Beautiful Bondage combines commentary with photographs of floor restraint, rear-arm ties, suspension, outdoor bondage, chest ropes, and improvised anchor points, making this section one of the volume's clearest attempts to treat bondage as a visual technique rather than merely narrative fantasy. (PDF pp. 63–76).
  • The later illustrated section broadens the repertoire to spanking, chairs and furniture, beheading, firing squads, burning, strangulation, and other punishment scenarios, often presented with explanatory text alongside the drawings. (PDF pp. 77–105).
  • The final third interweaves illustrated fiction with bondage photography, including Betrayer, scenes of humiliation and restraint, outdoor bondage records, Ranch Secret Story, rear-wrist tying studies, kneeling bondage, gagging, and elaborate closing illustrations. (PDF pp. 106–145).
Kinbaku Today is an independent online journal dedicated to the study, practice, and cultural history of Japanese rope bondage. Blending essays, translations, interviews, and archival research, it explores kinbaku not simply as technique, but as a living dialogue between history, performance, and human connection.
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