I feel a series of old vintage femdom photographs coming on. We’ll start with a slightly unusual example. Normally it’s the fashion choices or badly performed kink activities that identify an image as vintage. In this case the fashion choice and the kink is fairly timeless. It’s the technology in the background that really gives it away.
For any of my readers under 30, that’s a TV with an aerial on top of it. You’d have to go and wiggle the aerial to get a decent signal on the channel you’d chosen. Fortunately, you’d have already walked across the room to change the channel anyway, so you were perfectly placed to mess with the aerial at the same time. That’s efficiency for you.
There are two things to catch my eye in this photograph.
On the one hand, the aerial above the TV. In my parents house, the TV signal would change in quality (sometimes even getting better) as you walked across the room to wiggle the aerial to try and do something about the signal. Ah, what days those were!
On the other hand, something which is still as issue in contemporary kink photographs, is the poor state of some subs. In this case, a terrible hair cut, scrappy body hair and no muscular definition. Those should all earn immediate banishment until the sub gets his act together.
I definitely remember the vagaries of aerials. I had an old B&W portable in my room as a kid in the 80’s, and body position made a difference to that. The most annoying bit was when it was a good picture when you touched it, but degenerated the moment you let go. Made tuning it extra fun.
I’d guess that on average, for professional shots, subs are better looking that they used to be in the 70’s. At least for some studio’s, like kink.com. When it comes to domme’s shooting their own clips with volunteers, then yes, I think the common assumption still is that nobody is looking at the guy.
-paltego
We used to call those “rabbit ears.” The aerial was the larger antenna up on the roof. In the 60s and 70s, some people had a motorized version that allowed you to change direction from a control box. We would have to point it one way for New Haven stations, another way for Hartford stations, and another way for New York stations.
Our house was on a hill, so we got six or eight stations, if you included the UHF ones.
I hadn’t realized until I just looked it up that aerial was more of a British thing. We use it for both the small inside type and kind on the roof.
Motorized versions sound very fancy. Although it didn’t matter how much pointing and turning you did when I was a kid in the UK in the 80’s. Four stations were all you were getting!
-paltego
America, as you’ve noticed, is pretty spread out. We have cities with a lot of nothing in between. In the pre-cable era, UHF stations were the alternative broadcasting media, often showing late night mystery and scifi, and odd shows during the day.
Weird Al did a great parody of this in the 1989 movie “UHF”.
All major cities had one or two network stations: CBS, NBC, ABC. Public Broadcasting stations (PBS) were generally relegated to the UHF channels (the ones from Channel 13 and up).
In the rural districts (where I grew up), you generally pointed your aerial (roof antenna) in the direction that got the best overall signal for everything. Zenith or Motorola came out with a motorized spinner that allowed you to control the direction from in the house. And everybody had little bits of tape to mark which direction corresponded to the various stations.
Here’s an Ebay link to some:
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