Welcome to a very special BDSM history project here at BED. Today, we are launching The Mistress Michelle Peters Collection and kicking it off with the first installation, Professional Dominatrices ca. 1970s-1980s (44 images).
BED is grateful to the anonymous donor who recently gifted us with a treasure-trove of magazines and images from the BDSM/Fetish/Leather worlds of the 1960s – 1990s. The staggeringly abundant collection is the legacy of Mistress Michelle, a famous professional dominatrix of the era and epic collector of SM erotica. Her collection is now digitized for the Internet age.
The full collection documents thousands of known figures who shaped the perception of who we are and how we love. Given its size, this will be a long-term project for us. Suffice to say, we anticipate adding hundreds of obscure photos and BDSM/Fetish/Leather ephemera to the Library to delight and surprise you. We don’t expect to finish curating the entire collection until 2019.
Educators, scholars, students, and general viewers are welcome to use any of these images for teaching, sharing, or illustrations for publications. Enjoy these 44 images of infamous femme fatales, their toys, and their slaves, from the 1970s-1980s.
Side Note:
It’s poignant to remember that all the people who shot and posed for these photos, along with the publishers and editors and creatives who produced them, placed their own well-being at risk to disseminate BDSM erotica. Every one of them was a rebel, an iconoclast, a person who believed that their sexual desires were valid and valuable — and each of them risked arrest, jail time, bankruptcy, and worse to express their passions. Just as today, behind the Scenes, these people were mothers and fathers, business people and teachers and truck-drivers with lives and reputations that could be destroyed by a BDSM bust. We owe them a debt of gratitude for taking those risks because, without them, BDSM would have been silenced by the fat grubby fists of censorship.
It also struck me how many period magazine covers and photos I had to reject because they showed mild nudity (nipples, pubes). Although the subject matter is adult, the photos selected are PG-rated to accommodate any range of adult purposes, including your blogs, merchandise ads or classes. For all the social progress we’ve made with acceptance, sex itself is more censored on the Internet today than since I first got online in the early 1980s. It hurt to limit our selections to comply with current laws, and we sincerely hope that consensual adult nudity will be acceptable on the Internet again. When that happens, we can revisit our policy and put pubes and nipples where they rightfully belong. In the BED Libraries!
