Two young men are intricately bound together; the tips of their tongues are each pierced to one end of a short length of chain. One man is naked save for a posture collar and shackles around his ankles, the other dressed in a revealing leather outfit chained to the naked man’s collar.
This drawing immediately resonated with me in a way few others have because the particular bondage predicament these men are in made me stop to imagine what it might be like to experience it. Good erotica is by definition material that invokes one’s imagination, and imagination is the tool with which one fantasizes. It’s therefore unsurprising that when pornography gets me thinking it gets me turned on, and when pornography is trite or when it’s rote it feels like a waste of time at best, and sexist insults at worst.
Images similar to this one, commonly referred to as yaoi and typically thought to be catering to womens’ interests, were some of the very first erotic artwork I enjoyed as an adolescent boy. They gave me submissive sexual narratives I could identify with and desperately wanted to find in the sea of derogatory implications about masculinity I had been drowning in, but also provided a measure of legitimacy for my homosexual desires in a context where the (supposedly female) implicit viewer actually appreciated that facet of my sexuality. For a questioning bisexual teen like I was at the time, the importance of this appreciation from multiple genders can not be understated.
-maymay
(via orz.4chan.org.)