Girls just wanna be gagged

Bondage is one of the best known practices from the spectrum of BDSM varieties and is often combined with other practices. The applied techniques range from playful use within non-BDSM related sexuality, the so-called vanilla sex, to professional application and demonstration by Japanese bondage artists. Bondage can be the prelude to an erotic role-play, can be used as the only practice within a session or can be used as an aesthetic element outside of a sexual act or session.

As with many studies on human sexual behavior and sexual fantasies, not all available research is reliably scientifically based, for example, it comes from newsgroups or is based on surveys in scene magazines, sometimes the research is outdated. Due to the proximity of sadomasochistic practices to bondage, a statistical separation in surveys and studies has rarely been made.

In 1995 an analysis by the psychologists Ernulf and Innala was published in Sweden, which depicted the behavior of the members of the bondage-related newsgroup alt.sex.bondage. The predominant number of postings (76 %) came from men, the active role in erotic bondage was preferred by 71 % of heterosexual men, 11 % of heterosexual women and 12 % of homosexual men. 29% of heterosexual men, 89% of heterosexual women, and 88% of homosexual men stated that they would be tied up. One third of the respondents practiced sadomasochistic practices in connection with bondage or understood these practices as belonging together.

In a 1996 survey of U.S. students by a magazine, 24% of respondents said they had sexual fantasies that involved bondage, led by gay and bisexual men at 40%, followed by lesbian and bisexual women at 32%, while the figure dropped to 24% for heterosexual women and 21% for heterosexual men. Practical experience with bondage was reported by 48% of lesbian and bisexual women, 34% of homo- and bisexual men and 25% of heterosexual men. As recently as 1985, studies in the USA concluded that about half of all men consider bondage games to be erotic, but only 11% of the average American male and female population had experience with bondage, according to the 1993 Janus Report on Sexual Behavior.

The reasons why people let themselves be tied up are manifold. In the extensive physical passivity some people feel free, can concentrate thereby on their inside and come to the peace, as a participant in a study for motivation describes: Some people have to be tied up to be free. Other people feel powerless, fight against the shackles and sometimes feel a masochistic pleasure in the limitations and pain (pain of lust) as well as the symbolic degradation or inevitable access for erotic stimulation by the partner.

The reasons for the active person to tie up his partner are mostly based on the pleasure of the erotic subordination of his partner and the subjectively felt power difference and its visualization. For the sadomasochist, bondage is often a means to an end, for example to make the bound person defenseless and fixated for subsequent sadomasochistic practices. Optics and haptics can also play a role, bondage out of aesthetic perception is frequent.