"Between the Rubber Sheets" by D.K. Holm

How times change. Ten years ago, finding magazines with such titles meant entering a tiny, decrepit yellow storefront that specialized in smut, where hunched, shifty-eyed men clustered before shrink-wrapped packets of overpriced magazines.
But now, in almost any magazine store in the city, you can find publications such as the British “fem-dom” magazine Goddess, billed on its cover as “Devoted to the Superior Female.”
The cavalcade of hot magazines is but one aspect of a burgeoning nationwide taste for S&M that renders its aficionados more than merely the subculture others might have thought them to be. They are now organized and demanding, a targetable marketing demographic.
Practitioners focus on magazines not just for masturbatory material, but as an affirmation of their interests. Fem dom mags are the international newsletters for current practitioners of the art of consensual torture.
Today’s budding fetishists have it easy. A young man with a hankering for domination, who likes his women encased in leather, won’t have any problem finding girls with similar inclinations at regular public parties held for people who share that taste, nor any difficulty finding magazines to give him ideas. Older men, however, forged on the crucible of more repressed times, probably remember when finding specialized porno was a problem.
Until the `20s, masochists made do with postcards featuring photographic images of women in dominant poses (the German-based publishing house Taschen has gathered and reprinted collections of these postcards in book form). In the `40s, however, Irving Klaw became a force in fetish images. His shop, Movie Star News, was (and still is) a movie still collector’s boutique with a sideline catering to special interests. Klaw (now deceased) and his sister Paula shot and printed bondage and fetish shots, often featuring the vivacious model Betty Page. Irving Klaw collected some of the photographs in digest-sized magazines with titles such as Dominant Damsels. Page was a regular in other magazines of this kind, especially Exotique.
Klaw, driven out of business by various anti-porn crusades, was succeeded by John Willie’s sporadic Bizarre. That magazine provided readers a forum for voicing their interests and an avenue for rebelling against an intolerant society. Isolated perverts in the midwest, if they were able to find a copy of Bizarre, must have felt ushered into a world that affirmed their interests rather then ridiculed them.
From the `50s to the `60s, female domination was still a rarity, even as more accessible adult magazines, such as Playboy, began to appear. Specialized “fem-dom” magazines began to emerge with the relaxation of pornography laws in late the `60s and early `70s. A company called Parliament Press put out Aggressive Women É Who Demand to Meet You! A contact magazine, it was the flagship publication of a group that included such fetish favorites as High Heels and Bitches in Boots. Parliament’s magazines had striking covers, but the internal material only intermittently showed the mark of professional interest.
Though Parliament seems still to exist, it was superseded in quality and popularity by House of Milan. HOM specializes primarily in women-in-bondage magazines and videos, but it had a phase in the middle `80s when it issued a line of high class female domination publications, such as Mistress Quarterly and Super Bitch (it also took over Aggressive Women). Though this publishing spurt lasted only a few years, the material betrayed the hand of people truly interested in the subject. Often the models were then-popular professional dominatrixes, such as the fabled Mistresses Kat and Lana, both of San Francisco.
Around this same time, David Jackson’s Strictly Speaking Publishing Company, out of Palm Springs, began to issue magazines. First up was Bootlove’s, a magazine dedicated to professional dominatrixes interviewed about their footwear. This was dropped after one issue for Fantasy Register and a few other titles. Now, the company has settled in with two publications. Domination Directory International is a survey of working professionals, with addresses and particulars, while Fantasy Fashion Digest concerns fetish fashions, with letters and photos from readers in the John Willie manner. Both Strictly Speaking and HOM thrived in a decade when such magazines were still sold mostly in yellow front shops, their readers the same kind of isolates who pawed Bizarre decades earlier.
The modern equivalent of John Willie’s pathbreaking work is much different. Take Cruella, a sister publication to the English Goddess. Its premise is that there is a parallel earth where women rule and men are chattel to be herded, used as steps to mount horses, hunted for sport, and occasionally and indifferently run down by serene Mistresses in speedy sports cars. Cruella is a large-sized 52 page mag that balances lengthy and detailed stories illustrated with copious photos, many in color. “A Slave’s Torment,” for example, is accompanied by massive photographs of the two exaggerated vixens, one with a full-lipped cupid’s face, cascading brunette “big” hair the size of a constellation, and vast thigh high leather boots which the photographer ensures appear in several close-up shots, the stiletto heels suitably caked with carefully applied dried mud. Poor Barry in Goddess’s “Caught in the Web” is tormented, in the accompanying large photos, by a blond Pamela Anderson clone and an underwear-liberated leathern brunette.
Cruella is at the explicit end of this new trend in “fem-dom” publishing. But many of today’s fem-dom mags can be found on the shelf next to Vogue and Depeche Mode. That’s because the titles that have leaped to fill the gap left by the cessation of HOM’s fem-dom mags now focus on fashion and the strain of exhibitionism that informs most fetish activity these days.
Perhaps the best example of the New Mainstream S&M is Skin Too, the premiere journal of leather fetishism. Like Cruella, it is an English magazine. Skin Too is published by Tim Woodward, who began the magazine as the 16 page club bulletin of a small group of leather-fancying fetishists. Today Skin Too has evolved into a gorgeous 132 page ad-rich glossy, a British Vogue for perverts. It’s filled with photo spreads, naughty images from mainstream ads, new fetish fashions and their designers, and news of various fetish balls around the globe.
What Skin Too doesn’t do is link the interest in leather with any specific activities or sexual urges. It assumes that all the world’s a pervert, and everyone knows what they do. Aside from a couple of intellectualized stories on spanking, one an excerpt from a book, the other a lesbian’s history of her spanking fantasies, a recent issue is so neutral you could almost leave it on your coffee table next to Architectural Digest when the in-laws come over (“Oh look, Norm, here’s something you’ll like”). This neutrality affords Skin Too entry into living rooms but rather thwarts masturbatory action, the presumed end of all such sexual material.
Skin Too’s closest competitors are O and Marquis, two magazines that seem to be patterned on the Skin Too model. Also following in Skin Too’s bootsteps are Secret, a glossy black and white German magazine, and Zeitgeist, from Britain. All these magazines come in the same large format and emphasize news along with the arty photos.
Then there’s a brand of magazine that can be called “Dominatrix Lifestyle” publications. These are often run by women, and feature interviews with Dominatrixes along with “how to” articles about getting into the business. Among them are Mistress Jacqueline’s Power X-Change Magazine, published by the famous Los Angeles based pro, Attitude, run by Diana Vestri, a pro out of Florida, and Bitches with Whips from Seattle, perhaps the most “advice” oriented of the magazines. The punk / youth movement is represented by the newsy Canadian magazine The Boudoir Noir, by the piercing oriented The Taste of Latex and by the gothic, vampire oriented Blue Blood.
Local boy Jake Modern knows the problems attendant on publishing fem-dom magazines.
Modern, a long time art director for publications such as Rolling Stone, Hustler, and New West, returned to Portland a couple of years ago, and among other projects, started up Modern Goddess. He used the magazine to express his personal interest in female domination, experimenting with arty graphics and honest accounts of his forays into self-disclosure to women he wanted to introduce into the scene.
Is it hard to imagine an S&M magazine coming out of Portland? The rest of the country found it so. Modern Goddess folded recently due to distribution problems, according to its founder. “Putting the magazine together was no problem, and there were plenty of girls willing to model for the magazine," Modern explained. "But getting distribution was the downfall of Modern Goddess.”
Does this explosion in general S&M and female domination publications indicate an increased pervert community? Several theories are proffered to explain the high profiling of S&M. One is the AIDS Theory. As enunciated by photographer and Fad editor Doris Kloster in her Dominatrix photo album (also published by Taschen), the most popular theory states that “SM is becoming more and more visible and prominent as the risk of AIDS limits people’s interest in conventional sexual contacts.” This seems unlikely. Sex, so to speak, is more popular than ever, despite the threat of AIDS.
The sexual urges represented by S&M tend not to be the sort of thing you simply adopt in adulthood under threat of death, though surely many of the kids, slaves of conformity that they are, who attend fetish nights are merely following the current fashion. People don’t confront the AIDS crisis and think, “Huh, well, I guess I can’t have sexual intercourse. Hmmm, what to do, what to do. Oh, I know, I’ll don leather and whip someone’s ass with a quirt.” More likely is that the AIDS crisis made alternative sexual practices by people who were going to do them anyway more acceptable to people suddenly made more aware of sexuality in general.
On the other hand, there are a lot more people in the world, and with that comes a higher percentage of the society that has an interest in S&M. And with more people knowing about it comes grudging tolerance, spearheaded in the case of S&M by the gay liberation movement and its leather contingent. Says DDI publisher, David Jackson, “The entire SM, fetish lifestyle is slowly becoming more and more accepted. Generation X is embracing kinky fashion and alternative sexuality. Simple as that.”
Also, more plausibly, Kloster writes in her intro that “People have become more imaginative in their sex play, experimenting with activities that focus on the power dynamics of sexual relationships. People are discovering that the brain is the body’s principal sex organ. SM play integrates the brain and the body in fantasy; to engage in it takes more extensive personal involvement than just the senses and glands.” No longer just a “perversion,” S&M now has multiple meanings. It is a fashion statement (that designers are listening to), a lifestyle statement, and even an aesthetic mission, with the counterculture cachet that gives it the importance of a movement designed to Žpater les bourgeois as our bloody siŹcle becomes more and more fin.

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