Nurture/Nature 2

I was born in the fifties, about ten years after the end of WW 2, and housing was still a big problem. In those days, it was perfectly normal for more than one family to share the same house. In my case, when I was one year old, we lived in a not to big apartment, and a few attic rooms, with my grand parents, two aunts, one uncle, my parents and myself. And six cats, some of which were on bad terms with each other, and had to be kept separated as much as possible. Same thing for the adults, from time to time

Of course it was nice that with so many people in the house there was always someone to take care of me. It also meant however, that during my toddler years I was brought up by four very dominant women, a.k.a. my grand mother, two aunts and my mother. Now like I said: I am quite sure I was born with these feelings, but of course you are free to draw your own conclusions.

In any way: I have had them for as long as I can remember.And that brings me to my point: actually, bondage is just one of the most coherent forms in which these feelings take shape. But in fact, they spread out much wider than that. Like I mentioned before: I had these exiting emotions far before I had ever heard about bondage. And above that, the situations or images that spurred them didn't even always involve bondage at all.

In my very young years, I had no idea what kind of label I could put on these thrills, they just occurred. But I definitely recognized them as belonging to a specific field of experience, which in later years (again:before the discovery of bondage) in my mind I defined as: women in difficult or awkward situations. For lack of a better term.

One of the oldest examples I can remember was an fashion add I saw in the newspaper. It showed a group of young adults, fashionably attired, all in different active poses. Now in one of these poses, a man tripped one of the ladies, using an umbrella, hooking it around her ankle and lifting her leg, making her fall over. I can still recall the strange mixture of excitement and bewilderment it awoke in me, a little shame mixed in there, too. I must have been something like five. I took it out, and hid it, took it with me to bed to look at it in the evening, not knowing what to do with it or how to act upon it, of course.I would just be looking at it and savor those strange thrills it gave me.

Now a few years later, I saw another image, a cartoon this time. By this time, all our families had found their own places to live, but it was summer and I was staying with my aunt for a week. Going through her books, I found this pocket book with Dennis the Menace cartoons ( I've shown you this one before, I think, but it fits here perfectly). One showed Dennis startling his mother, Alice, who is taking a bath, barging in with a friend to make introductions. Again, this simple innocent drawing had an electrifying effect on me. And simple as it was: it was also highly effective. In a few lines, the artist (Hank Ketcham, red) had perfectly captured the embarrassment on the mothers face, her vulnerability as she was covering herself up with a hastily raised towel. I consider it a master piece, maybe due to the fact that the artist himself was not totally immune to the implications of the subject, as he returned to it at least once.

Again, this was still all before discovering the wonders of BDSM. Now, I know exactly how old I was when I came across the last two examples I want to show you. I was seven years old when my father brought with him a book with cartoons by Yrrah (a pen name for an artist called Harry Lammertink) There were two pages in that book I kept coming back to time and time again, as I came home from school and my parents were out to work. They absolutely fascinated me as they implied this whole world of implications behind them.

And even though I have made the art of bondage my profession, from time to time I like to hark back to those earlier feelings. I guess that that's resulted in me creating the series of The Embarrassment covers. I am sorry that this more diffuse field never has made it into its own. You do have of course these pin up drawings with skirts caught by the wind, or torn off bya dog and all of that, but I think more could be done with it. If only I had more time...:)

See you next time,