The day after Christmas I found myself at the local mall with some friends who were anxious to spend several gift cards they had received during the holidays. There are many things I expect from a visit to the mall; pushy vendors of hand cream products, annoying people, and a full-blown mc-junkie on mannequin duty at the newest trendy fashion outlet.
Okay, I lied about that last one but it was a welcome surprise nonetheless. While my friends pretended it was completely natural (and the shoppers around us made sure I knew it wasn’t), I snapped a few photos of this delightful, tranced plastic lady. If the designer of this window display wasn’t thinking about a pocket watch or crystal swinging in front of her face I’ll eat shoes…or something.
I’m repeating myself a bit here, but the part of me that wishes I’d studied anthropology in college, can’t help but look at perfume ads, fashion photography, and displays like this and wonder what it is about the mind control fetish that keeps it an unspoken yet consistent staple of media. Content that plays into fetishes concerning various parts of the female body are rampant. The last several years have seen latex-clad dommes and candid reference to D/s & BDSM used in television commercials to promote parental awareness and pistachio consumption. Yet, to me, it still feels as though people are quite reticent where the sexualization of hypnosis and mind control is concerned.
Maybe I’m projecting. Maybe I want it to feel more present in mainstream media to alleviate some latent embarrassment at being turned on by an ‘odd’ fetish. Maybe I’m just biased. But maybe the person who designed this mannequin did so just for us; so we could wink at each other as we pass by; so we could share the silent joke that this display is far more lurid than the Victoria’s Secret counterpart next door.
In any case, it made the trip to the mall quite worthwhile; we’ll see if next year’s visit lives up to the precedent.
1 Comment
aelfstone
You aren’t the only one projecting. While I don’t want our collection of fetishes to go so mainstream that their….uniqueness, for lack of a better word, is lost, I would at least like to see subspace become more recognized as a real state of mind that some of us enter when getting deeply involved into whatever it is that we like. The emphasis on sex is great and all, but I’d also like to see more emphasis on the sexual state of mind, which is what our fetishes seem to be more about. Or at least that’s what I’m getting from all of the spirals in your wonderful pictures!