When I was growing up, a scene from the 1990 IT miniseries always intrigued me. It was when “The Loser’s Club” banded together to face their fears and confront Pennywise in the sewers, but Bowers and his greaser, bully friends follow them into the sewer to seek their revenge. Not to get too much into the plot, but in the previous act, Mike stumbled upon the club when Bowers and his crew were chasing him. Bowers offered to leave the rest of the club alone if they let him have Mike, but the club stones Bowers and his gang instead, making Bowers out to kill “The Loser’s Club.” Knowing that the club outnumbers him and his gang, Bowers decides to attack the “losers” one by one when they’re in the sewer. Since Stan straddles a few steps behind his group, Bowers and one of his guys grab him and drag him away while holding a hand over his mouth to keep him from alerting the others. When they reach a more private location, Bowers’ minion holds Stan back, covering his mouth, while Bowers taunts him with his butterfly knife. Then Bowers slowly unbuttons Stan’s shirt by cutting each thread that held his buttons on. Before Bowers could hurt Stan, however, Pennywise emerges, distracting the bullies, and Stan gets away.
As an adult, I feel kind of weird about being aroused by such an oddly rapey scene between kids, but I basically grew up with this movie and the scene wasn’t intended to be rapey. It’s clear that Stan was just being restrained and kept quiet so he wouldn’t be able to fight back or call out for help and Bowers seemed to cut the buttons off of his shirt to build suspense without realizing that he wasn’t the most threatening thing in the sewer. Regardless of that, it almost feels naive as a modern audience member to overlook rape as a subtext for this scene because after all, a character is being held against his will and terrorized, is being held accountable for a conflict Bowers started, and is probably being stripped to feel more vulnerable when he very easily could have been stabbed within seconds of being captured. The way that Stan was restrained is also justified by the fact that a band of hoodlums wouldn’t plan to waste the time or energy bringing supplies and tying up the “losers” they captured, but that would have made the scene less rapey, not to mention less suspenseful, because Stan wouldn’t have been held in such close quarters with his captors.
In the film world, tension is typically built up with close-ups and when characters are close to each other. And in order to effectively restrain and silence someone without restraints, the dom has to firmly hold the sub from behind and clamp a hand over his mouth to keep his jaw from moving and muffle any sound that leaves his lips, which involves holding the sub close to the dom’s body. Therefore, this scene serves as an example of how hand gags appear to hold a lot of symbolism in the male bondage world. Because of the tension these kinds of gags convey, they seem to put subs/captives in especially vulnerable positions compared to merely being tied up and gagged. The physical closeness between doms and subs in hand-gaggings indicates a subtextual intimacy. Thus, when people are made to be vulnerable and in close-contact with their assailant, these tense situations are usually related to rape, which makes hand gags allude to that kind of violation without being explicitly crude or sexual.
Hand Gags in the Male Bondage World
Male bondage as a whole has a lot of symbolism attached to it because the mere acceptance and embrace of it allows men, the masculine dominators of most cultures, to show vulnerability. Even though men who show vanity are, in a sense, punished for being less traditionally masculine in the male bondage world, they are also allowed to be the center of predatory desire the way that women usually are. As examined in the Pop Culture Detective video about the “abduction as romance” trope, when women are physically restrained and silenced in TV and film, it is usually because they are exhibiting too many masculine qualities and need to be brought back to domesticity by either depending on a man who captured her or the man who would rescue her. This trope symbolically contributes to how women are often culturally silenced when they are denied positions of power and authority, when they are prohibited from learning or gaining autonomy, and when their voices are ignored in political or intellectual discussions. Thus, the mere act of gagging someone is in and of itself feminizing because it is preventing someone from voicing their perspective, calling out for help, or even generally addressing whatever is happening. So, while gags essentially put women “in their place” of subordinance, it downgrades men to an even lower position. Like giving a baby candy and taking it away, men are given socially constructed masculine privilege, which can be easily compromised when their voices become undignified with a gag. By playing with a man’s symbolic power and fragile sense of dignity, male bondage appears to place men at the same symbolic level of subservience as women, which allows them to be sexually desired and objectified.
Gags are especially undignified to men not only because they place men in a beta/feminine role, but also because they imply that the sub will do something feminine like scream, call for help, complain, or talk too much. Even though these actions for male or female captives are understandable considering the potentially strenuous and dangerous circumstances, they are typically seen as the “girly” things to do. Furthermore, when a bondage/captivity session reaches the point that the submissive is being gagged, the dom is usually removing the sub’s last chance for autonomy or freedom because at that point, he is no longer able to call for help, talk his way out of his situation, verbally deny his helplessness, chew through his ropes, or even bite or spit at his captor. If the sub’s lips get covered, the gag should force them together to limit the amount of sound that comes out. If the sub’s mouth gets stuffed, it seems symbolic of sexual penetration since his mouth is being forcibly penetrated with a foreign object, he is rendered less capable of making audible screams or articulate speech, and his face is forced into making an uncomfortable expression as his jaw is pressed down, cheeks are strained and flexed, and lips are left to curl around the object that fills his mouth. When it comes to a sub being handgagged, other kinds of meanings tend to emerge.
Obviously, “hand gags” are when a dom silences his sub by clamping a hand over the sub’s protesting mouth. The maneuver is simple and always seems pretty effective as far as keeping the sub quiet as long as the sub doesn’t bite the dom’s bare hand. In fact, it appears to be the simplicity that makes this gag so appealing because physically overpowering someone with one’s own body hearkens back to a pre-technological primitivism. If you need to shut somebody up and don’t have anything to go in or over that person’s mouth, the grip of your human hand usually does the trick.
This method of silencing is so psychologically effective that just placing a hand near somebody’s mouth is enough to indicate that they should stop speaking. So, if you aren’t actively subduing someone, you could just place a finger over the other person’s lips to quiet them without having to actually gag them. Typically, people are fairly sensitive to nonverbal signals and even human contact. So when someone reaches for our mouths, it is natural to become slightly defensive by flinching away from their hand and finding their attempt to touch us in order to silence us offensive. It’s usually embarrassing to be told to shut up and that you’re talking too much because of the implication that what you’re saying isn’t important or that you talking is a nuisance, and being physically silenced makes the matter even worse because you’re not being given the option to be quiet on your own. Even though consensual bondage sessions are one of the few occasions that deems physically silencing another person acceptable, this part of the session is usually kind of awkward and both parties usually laugh it off to get past it.
The Higher Stakes and Increased Vulnerability of Being Handgagged
It is highly likely that part of what makes hand gags so appealing to bondage enthusiasts is the fact that there appears to be higher stakes when a hostage or captive is in the literal grips of a perpetrator. It might help to consider how dramatic everything is when a main character in an action movie is being held by the bad guy who usually has a gun to their head or a knife to their throat. When captives are literally in a bad guy’s grasp, their lives are symbolically in this crazy or bad person’s hands, which is what keeps everyone involved on their toes. Whether or not the captive’s mouth is being covered, the captive is still in an extremely sensitive and vulnerable position because nobody knows what the villain is going to do. Since using an innocent person to avoid getting shot and killing an innocent person with no regard for the next outcome are fairly villainous moves, the tension is fairly high. Even though stakes usually aren’t that high when it comes to male bondage porn because doms don’t threaten to kill subs and there are no story lines to establish legitimate connections with the characters, the mere handling of subs with hand gags conveys the right amount of tension that bondage enthusiasts need.
Although nobody who is watching bondage porn is afraid that someone will die, there is still an underlying tension when men are hand gagged. One of the most threatening things about men compared to women is the inherent physical strength and size of most men compared to women, making it especially possible for a man to overpower or even murder a woman with his bare hands. However, this is not to say that men can’t also overpower other men with his bare hands, which isn’t as mainstream of an idea outside of bondage porn, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t possible since men come in many different shapes, sizes, and levels of physical strength. In fact, I believe that part of this reality might contribute to why gay men seem more apprehensive about enduring bondage when they aren’t into it compared to straight men because, for sexist reasons, the level of threat seems higher when a man overpowers you compared to when a woman overpowers you. Beyond that, I think there’s also just heterosexual male expectations to be risky, adventurous, and sexually well-rounded, while a lot of gay men tend to try debunking stereotypes that they’re sexually deviant by appearing normal, but I digress. Like the vulnerability of a delicate bunny rabbit in virtually any human’s grip, being handled by a strong man puts the subject being held in a very vulnerable position because if his hand is big enough, it might be able to unintentionally cut off the sub’s air supply by covering his nose and mouth, and he might be able to twist the sub’s neck with little effort.
So, with this gendered understanding of physical strength, the perceived stakes of somebody being in the oppressive grips of a man are usually high. With traditional expectations of masculinity, it is obviously emasculating for a man to be physically restrained and muzzled by another person, which makes the stakes even higher when humiliation is added to the inherent danger of being physically handled. Something that adds to these high stakes and humiliation is the fact that aside from a sub not having any control over what happens to his body, he is also being supervised by the person who is restraining him. Thus, when a live human body is being used as a restraint, the sub is rendered more helpless than he would be if he were restrained with handcuffs or rope. Subs who are held down and hand-gagged are in a more helpless position than subs who are restrained by inanimate objects because the sub is under the supervision of the person holding him and the person with the upper hand can’t be cut like rope or unlocked like handcuffs. When subs get restrained by inanimate objects, they are usually left alone and have a window of opportunity to break free from their restraints; however, when a sub is being hand gagged, he obviously isn’t alone since his dom is actively holding him, and a person’s grip might be more unrelenting. Specifically, a person’s grip can be firmer than ropes and can tighten like a snake’s grip when it’s constricting its prey. This reference to predator and prey brings me to the things that tend to come with being hand gagged because a dom is “already in the neighborhood” of the sub’s nearby, helpless body.
If a model is tied down in male bondage porn, the person doing the hand-gagging is usually inclined to feel up and undress his sub while he’s already in close proximity to him. If the model is being restrained and gagged by a captor, it is usually the case that he’s being held so another man can have his way with him. In either case, the stakes are fairly high for the sub because he’s being touched and sexually pursued against his will. Beyond the allusion to rape, which I will get to in a later section, the objective behind the forced intimacy in these scenes seems to frame male vulnerability as desirable. The implicit high stakes that come with being manhandled and hand gagged adds to this sense of vulnerability on top of the sub being objectified. Since men aren’t expected to accept the submissive role, the sub’s struggling and muffled objections usually coincide with masculine expectations for the perilous circumstances, making his resistance appealing to bondage enthusiasts. Therefore, seeing the dom maintain a firm hold on a struggling and distressed man is extremely arousing with an underlying sense of sexual intimacy.
The Subtextual Intimacy of Physical Closeness and Human Contact
As people, we typically find being in a stranger’s personal space or having our personal space invaded by a stranger fairly uncomfortable and awkward. In fact, most people we know can be thought of as invaders of our personal space with the exception of some close friends, romantic or sexual partners, or family members. At times when intimacy between you and another person is unwarranted, it creates tension, yet most instances of close human contact are considered intimate. For example, consider how others automatically assume that there is a romantic connection between two friends who hold hands or even spend a lot of time together when some people just happen to form platonic bonds with other people that way. It isn’t always accurate to assume that there is a sexual or romantic closeness between people who share some kind of intimate bond with one another, but it appears to be a way for us to make sense of the closeness that people show. In instances where someone is being hand gagged, others might not attribute a romantic bond between the dom and sub, but the physical closeness and intense handling of each other’s bodies seems to allude to sexual tension.
Like how wrestling is often considered homoerotic because it involves two big, half-naked, sweaty men violently handling each other’s bodies in order to achieve physical dominance over the other, a man hand-gagging another man appears to be just as homoerotic. Since traditional customs of male masculinity involve intensely repressing emotions, it is normal for heterosexual men to interact with one another with an awful lot of sexually repressed energy. For example, men are only socially allowed to express aggression when they want to convey intense feelings about something. So, if they’re really happy about something, they might feel like screaming, jumping up and down, and embracing the person closest to them, but would either hide that emotion by only giving a slight smirk in approval or celebrate by playfully berating one of their friends. If a man is really sad about something, he might either cut himself off from everyone else to let himself be sad without letting anybody see him in this vulnerable state or distract himself from his feelings by abusing substances, doing things with friends, or even trying to make someone else feel miserable. Therefore, things like wrestling seem to be a way for straight men to release their sexually repressed energy and emotions that have been bottled up. Likewise, this also appears to be the case for hand-gagging other men because even if the dominant might not be into bondage or attracted to men, he’d likely have some pent up emotional and sexual energy that needs to come out, which is usually expressed through aggressive dominance. Because masculinity has such primitive, caveman-esc roots and not every man has an effective outlet for that repressed energy and urge to dominate, a way of releasing that could be through dominating another man. Since women aren’t always available to these men and it isn’t really acceptable for men to be as physically aggressive towards women, even though a lot still are, other men seem to be fair game for this kind of overpowering. As I’ve mentioned before, men are traditionally the most challenging people to dominate, so overpowering one is often an ultimate sign of power and strength. Not to mention, these standards of masculinity also sets the man being overpowered up for feelings of humiliation and emasculation as a result of being made helpless and vulnerable, which are things that men aren’t typically conditioned to deal with. Thus, this added ability to “break” other men could add to the dominant’s feeling of superiority, which could explain his affinity for tying up and intimidating other men without it being sexual. Therefore, when it comes to hand-gagging, the implicit intimacy can come from the joy a dom gets out of having a completely helpless man in his grip, as well as how he uses his own physical strength to reinforce his dominance.
Since hand gags involve using a hand to restrain somebody’s speech, as well as pressing up against the submissive’s body, they are a fairly intimate way of gagging someone. Because hands can’t be tied or secured to the face like more disembodied gags, submissives have to be kept from moving their heads away from the dominant’s grip. So, the dominant has to keep a firm hold over the sub’s face and use his other arm to hold the sub down, especially if the sub isn’t already tied up. This friction between two tensed bodies seems to allude to sex because the two bodies are intensely pressed against each other, especially when the dom’s crotch grazes against the sub’s rear. Even though preventing a sub from fighting back, running away, or calling for help with your own body is more feasible than tying up and gagging him, using that kind of energy to hold a man down and keep him quiet is fairly sexual. Enduring a man’s desperate struggle for physical freedom and feeling his protesting lips brush up against your palms is a sheer sign of physical domination, as well as intense feeling of closeness. The dom’s persistent hold over his sub could be a way of fulfilling his almost-sexual urge to exert power, while the sub’s resistance could be his way of releasing tensions from things that made him feel helpless outside from this situation. When the sub finally gets tuckered out from resisting, him and the dom would experience an almost euphoric feeling of relief because the dom would get to relax his grip and the sub would have to regain his strength before putting up another fight. Therefore, even if hand gags aren’t always intentionally sexual, they always appear somewhat sexual.
When you think about it, most words that convey sexual intercourse also mean to dominate. For example, to “fuck someone” can mean to have sex with them or “fuck them over” in some way, which gives you the upper hand. The same can be meant when you use words like “smash,” “penetrate,” “crush,” “hit or tap that,” etc. to express having sex with another person. I don’t know the exact reason why the English language creates these kinds of associations between sex and dominance, but it might have something to do with how we feel about close and intense interactions with other people. For example, when people merely dislike another person, they might just try to avoid seeing or interacting with that person, which doesn’t really involve any strong or intense feelings towards that person or actions to harm that person in any way. However, when people actively hate one another, they often make it their goal to inflict some kind of harm onto the people they despise, much like how people go out of their way to make people they love happy and safe. The things that love and hate have in common are the amounts of emotional energy they take to exist and the effort they take to be expressed, which is why sex between partners who are angry at each other is called “hate sex” and not “disappointed” or “indifferent sex.” Both of these feelings involve passion and effort, which are both required in sex and fighting. So, when somebody has the motivation and energy to hold a struggling man down, it is fair to assume that it takes an amount of passion and effort to hand gag him. Therefore, even people who aren’t necessarily into bondage might be turned on by hand gags during times of intimacy.
Something a lot of people misinterpret about being hand gagged during sex is that it means the submissive is being too loud. This might be true in some instances, but it primarily seems to be an expression of intimacy. Beyond just being another way of exerting dominance, it’s another way of touching your partner in yet another vulnerable part of their body, which could be another test of trust during intimate moments. On the one hand, you get to safely explore the amount of symbolic and physical power you hold in your own hands when you observe how your sexual partner allows you to cover their mouth and notice how much your grip muffles their moans of ecstasy. On the other hand, you get to feel intensely desired by your sexual partner and secure in the sense that they are in charge and know what they’re doing when they clamp a hand over your mouth, which allows you to sit back and enjoy what’s coming to you. Hand gags are yet another form of closeness and touch. So, when you and a partner are close enough to comfortably hand gag or be hand-gagged by each other, it is a sign of bonding and intimacy because the exchange of power and vulnerability aren’t much of a concern for either party. From the submissive side, it is also worth mentioning that there’s something liberating about not feeling self conscious about the dorky sound of your muffled speech and moaning when your partner covers your mouth. These instances are one of the few times in life where you can feel safe to be as dominant or dominated as you want. Likewise, at least in media where men are physically dominated by other men for platonic reasons, their physical contact seems to suggest this kind of intimacy even if it’s just exploring what you’re capable of doing to another man, whether it is physically overpowering him or fighting your way out of his grip. Even when hand-gagging a captive is just an act of duty that the captor has no strong feelings about, the mere use of his body as a restraint and muzzle can be recognized as subtextual intimacy because of close bodily contact, the use of dominant and submissive roles, and the added effort it takes to keep a man quiet and in place.
So, What’s Appealing About Handgags in Male Bondage?
If you can’t tell from my writing, I am big on analyzing most things. So, it shouldn’t be a surprise that I like looking up particular aspects of dreams I have to try interpreting what they mean. Once, I dreamt of a spider. It didn’t do anything to hurt me, but like most people, they don’t have to do much to creep me out. When I looked up the significance of spiders in dreams, the website I used suggested that they symbolize feminine power. At first, I couldn’t wrap my head around what these creatures have to do with femininity or power, but then it kind of sunk in for me.
In gender studies, femininity is described as being tightly bound with materials and artifice while masculinity is more related to nature and authenticity. For example, femininity is a lot easier to embody and replicate than masculinity because things like wigs, makeup, glitter, etc. can make somebody feminine; however, replicating masculinity is more challenging because masculine traits are usually natural like broadness, body hair, musculature, social status, etc. Also, consider how age on a man is typically more appealing and flattering compared to age on a woman because old age is considered rugged, experienced, and accomplished, yet artificial things like plastic surgery are more accepted on women than men since makeup and hair can cover it up and the vanity that leads to plastic surgery is typically attributed to women. Therefore, when feminine power is attributed to spiders, it has to do with the fact that spiders usually don’t have to rely on physical strength to overpower their prey because they rely on materials (webs and venom) to do it. When you think about it, spiders are kind of the rope bunnies of the animal kingdom.
In this sense, I would argue that bondage is primarily feminine because it is usually all about dominating people through the use of materials like rope, tape, leather, chains, etc. Furthermore, bondage in media often involves giving people with less power the upper hand. For example, bondage is how kids could dominate adults, women can dominate men, victims can dominate their bullies, and so on in media because people of any stature can overpower others with materials. Moreover, even though bondage could often lead to violence and danger, it can be used as a way of overpowering somebody without actually hurting them, which makes it kind of pacifist compared to annihilating or fighting. However, using brute strength and force to dominate someone could possibly add some masculinity to bondage’s femininity, which brings me back to the hand gag.
If bondage primarily showcases feminine power, demonstrations of physical dominance in bondage make bondage a bit more masculine. As I mentioned above, hand gags rhetorically create higher stakes because they seem to render the submissive even more vulnerable than if he were simply bound, gagged, and left in a room. This, along with the fact that it takes some physical effort and agility to effectively hand-gag a sub, makes hand gags masculine since they illustrate and emphasize physical dominance by using the body as a restraint. Similarly, since carrying a sub over the shoulder involves physical domination and strength, it too can be considered a masculine aspect of bondage.
Therefore, what seems to make hand gags so appealing is the fact that they remove the bondage fetishist’s reliance on materials to gag a sub and instead have doms use their bodies to show their subs who’s the boss. This assessment relates back to what I said about a hand-gag’s intimacy because instead of relying on disembodied materials to restrain a sub, so the dom can keep his distance, hand gags literally and symbolically bring doms closer to their subs. Ironically, this also brings more masculinity into bondage because it allows doms to show how physically capable they are since they can silence, restrain, and probably even carry their sub with their own hands. This is not to imply that bondage needs to be less feminine or material, because that might make it more violent and rapey, but this added masculinity appears to put subs in more helpless situations. When men are made submissive to this kind of primitive dominance, it is arousing to see that level of vulnerability that we rarely ever see men in. Since we aren’t exactly desensitized to seeing vulnerable and helpless men and men aren’t desensitized to experiencing vulnerability, it becomes tantalizing to see men trying to deal with helplessness when they’re hand-gagged or lifted over another man’s shoulder.
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