Extreme Soap Opera Bondage

Woman in straightjacket (thinking): "Boy, those judges sure hate to hear people talking about jury nullification!"

The thing about women's TV programming: soaps, the Lifetime Channel, Oxygen, chick flicks, what-have-you, is that they have no qualms about playing bondage scenes to the hilt, as this vidcap from the soap opera Sunset Beach demonstrates.

Considering all the sexploitation women in prison flicks designed for the delectation of evil, horny men (and the occasional politically incorrect lesbian) which are charter member of the no-bondage zone, this Sunset Beach scene is EXTREME women in prison imagery.

The story behind the image: Annie Douglas (as played by hottie Sarah Buxton) is a Very Bad Girl in the way that only soap opera hotties can be. She is being hustled into a jail cell because she got all disorderly in court and aroused the ire of a judge. He ordered some fashion changes for Sarah's jailhouse appearance.

Instead of the dull old usualness of handcuffs, he directed that Sarah be dressed in a stylish, fashion-forward straightjacket, complete with an enticing crotch strap to keep her naughty bits a-tingle. The crotch strap goes over Sarah's short dress, creating quite an interesting look. The entire ensemble is set off by a thick white cloth cleave gag to give her mouth that stuffed look.

This is fairly amazing, considering that gag scenes in women in prison stories are as rare as hen's teeth. But with the inexorable demand for stories, US soaps have done an awful lot of wild bondage scenes: double cheerleader bondage, bride in wedding dress bondage, thong panty bondage, and, in another Sunset Beach scene, Sarah Buxton's character was tied to a bed in an upper spreadeagle for five days (i.e., the scene was shown on five successive episodes of the soap opera -- in true soap opera tradition, it might only have lasted fifteen minutes in the storyline).

Soap operas, of course, have a relatively small male audience and tend to cater entirely to their female audience. Who clearly like bondage scenes. A lot.