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NYB is no longer accepting new memberships.
Everything that requires me to post
the "2257 Compliance Statement" is in the process of being removed.
Thanks to everyone who supported and encouraged this work. And thanks especially
to all the lovely and talented models I had the privilege of working with.
It's been quite the experience.
If you have a recurring-billing subscription, I advise you to cancel it.
(Here for CCBill subscriptions, and here for Verotel.)
I'll eventually do it for you, but the key word there is "eventually." I currently
do not have access to my CCBill management account, so "eventually" could be a
very very long time.
As promised, though, here is the solution to the mystery that has tormented the world
for nearly a decade:
 
Brandi Hall and Julie Simone are the same person.
I've just been messin' with ya.
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So what was here, why was it here, and why isn't it here any more?
This was a collection of original photographs of women, from fully dressed to fully
nude, bound wih rope, chain, handcuffs, et cetera. The technical term within the
industry is "light" or "glamour bondage."
Before the beginning, my then-partner and I had an interest in the subject matter,
but were disappointed at the quality and tone of most of the depictions. They
tended to be violent depictions of terrorized women. Not something your girlfriend
might see and say, "hey, that looks like it could be fun." (Yes, I know there were some;
I knew about them then; they were in the minority; don't bother writing me.)
Yes, I said "fun." I don't want to turn this into a monograph on the psychology
of sexuality, but c'mon, a consensual exchange of power during sex is just plain hot.
Your lover gets that look in their eye (forgive the tortured asexual syntax) and
becomes an unstoppable force, throwing you down on the bed and tearing your clothes
off... hot. Bondage is the same thing, taken up a notch or two, and a little more
premeditated. The operative word is "consensual." The second it becomes unconsensual
it ceases to be sex and becomes just violence... any or all of quite a few indictable
offenses.
The first problem is obvious. It's a consensual act that simulates a non-consensual
one. In a photograph that subtle distinction is easily lost. And for some reason
I don't care to analyze, the general trend is to depict the extremes of the fantasy...
leading in my opinion to some very unpleasant material. Everybody's got a line.
Considering I ran this site, mine isn't very inclusive.
My partner and I attempted to address this imbalance by creating the images we
wanted to see. There were a few rules: no sex; no typical porn gynecological shots; no making
the models look less than as beautiful as they started; no violence or pain (with
the exception of the occasional pair of nipple clips and a few simulated spankings;
we did a real spanking once and it just ended up looking endearingly silly); and no
pretending it was "real." Yes, they were really tied up, but they were models, posing.
Once in a great while there was a little story to go along with a photoset, but
it was obviously fiction.
It started out as a hobby. An expensive hobby. At the time, quite a few other
photographers were starting paysites, and that seemed like a decent way to allay
some of the costs. It turned out that there were a lot of other people who felt
the same way about the majority of the material out there, and the site took off
and did extremely well for a couple of years.
Then a number of things happened. Our clientele one by one had their formerly
high-paying IT jobs outsourced. Other sites noticed our success and what had
been an underserved marketplace became saturated. Better-capitalized websites
got heavily into video, and into more varied subject matter. The reduction in
income led to my partner's departure. On my own, I found it difficult to maintain
a regular update schedule. This caused even more members to leave.
Then the government implicitly defined a woman wearing handcuffs for fun in a photo
as a depiction of an explicit sexual act, subject to extraordinary record-keeping
requirements and unannounced investigations by the FBI, with a mandatory five-year
sentence for typos and mistakes. Compliance with these regulations made it impossible
to keep to a regular update schedule, and turned the whole thing into just plain
drudge work.
There were a long series of poor business decisions, but I defend them now by
simply stating it was never supposed to be a business. I could easily have kept this
site humming along successfully, but it would have required doing all sorts of
things I have no interest in just to stay competitive. But, I'm not willing to do just
anything to make money. I am not a pornographer. This wasn't a business. It was
an art project.
And, in fact, it was over long before the site closed. There were quite a few diehard
fans who stayed on to the bitter end, and they could testify that I was taking and publishing
more and more cute glamour cheesecake-type shots before getting to the bondage.
A pretty girl is enough by herself. When the bondage started seeming like a chore,
something I was only doing for the site, I should have shut everything down then.
And now, once again, there is a grim sameness about most of the successful
bondage sites. It doesn't matter how much fun the model says she had afterward,
the actual action is often downright scary. Certainly not first-date material.
I am proud of the many emails I have received calling New York Bound the most
tasteful and classy site of its kind. And that none of the models I worked with
has a bad word to say about me (I don't think), except maybe that I'm a bit of
a prude. I believe I'll turn this site into a tribute to them; after all, they did
at least half the work. Nothing but US-government-approved "clean" pictures, though.
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"I will always deeply treasure what you've done here, both as Art and as a Cultural Statement.
Wish I could send you 100,000 new subscribers!
"As long as you're here, I'll be with you!
"All the Best, and Thank You, Thank You, Thank You!!!"
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