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Sun & Moon · March 1977

Summary

The inaugural March 1977 issue of Sun &amp; Moon introduces itself as a magazine “seeking love,” but its real editorial center is the lived practice of SM. Unlike the historical, literary, and pseudo-sexological mixture of 1950s magazines, this issue is built heavily around contemporary participants, domestic photography, first-person reports, instructional discussion, and accounts of couples trying to incorporate SM into their relationships. It preserves elements of the older “abnormal sexuality” tradition, yet its tone is more practical, confessional, and participatory.
The opening editorial, “Like the Sun and Moon,” explains the publication’s purpose through complementary opposites. Sadist and masochist, husband and wife, domination and submission are imagined as paired forces that acquire meaning in relation to one another. This relational framing is important. The magazine is less interested in diagnosing isolated perversion than in showing how compatible inclinations might be brought together.
The issue’s first major feature is a roundtable presented as a record of “practical” sexual exchange. Participants discuss spanking, restraint, implements, pain, pleasure, and the negotiation of SM within relationships. Photographs accompany the conversation, including demonstrations of impact and bodily positioning. Although the language is informal and sometimes sensational, the article treats experience as something that can be discussed collectively rather than hidden behind fictional villains.
A long first-person confession titled approximately “My Wife’s Breeding Diary” or “A Husband’s Record of Raising His Wife” examines the transformation of a marriage through SM. The narrative describes discovery, experimentation, bodily discipline, and the gradual formation of complementary roles. It is framed as testimony, but it also carries the structure of erotic fiction, leaving the boundary between documentary account and constructed fantasy uncertain.
The issue repeatedly returns to spanking. One article presents a woman’s confession concerning buttocks striking, while photographs isolate marks, implements, and bodily response. The focus on impact expands the magazine beyond rope and situates SM within a broader field of sensation, discipline, and ritualized punishment.
Another major feature, “Two Years of SM with My Teacher,” recounts a relationship organized around training, authority, and repeated practice. The word “teacher” gives the relationship a developmental structure: one person possesses knowledge, while the other learns how to inhabit a submissive role. This is characteristic of Sun &amp; Moon, which often presents SM not as an innate tableau but as something cultivated through experience.
The serialized photographic report “A Red Persimmon Left on a Branch” follows a couple or small group through a staged rope encounter in a Japanese room. The images show kneeling restraint, floor bondage, chair bondage, and the gradual adjustment of rope. The accompanying commentary presents the scene as an event with conversation, hesitation, correction, and changing positions rather than as a single frozen photograph.
The issue also includes an article on the film The Barbarian Girls, using stills from an imported exploitation movie to examine foreign representations of restraint, violence, and female suffering. The film feature demonstrates how specialist readers were learning to compare domestic SM imagery with international cinema.
A rope-instruction column explains a behind-the-back upper-body tie, using photographs and commentary to discuss placement, visual effect, and control. The article is not a modern safety manual, but its technical focus shows rope becoming teachable craft rather than merely a symbol of capture.
Several confession pieces foreground wives’ perspectives. “My Wife’s Past,” “A Married Couple’s SM Play,” and related accounts explore jealousy, shame, arousal, and the uncertain relationship between marriage and role play. They repeatedly ask whether SM strengthens intimacy, reveals hidden desires, or simply provides theatrical form for tensions already present within a relationship.
The later photographic portfolios display a wide variety of amateur models and restraint styles. Pregnant women, middle-aged women, fuller-bodied models, wives photographed in domestic rooms, and reader-submitted models all appear. This differs markedly from a polished commercial glamour aesthetic. The magazine makes ordinary rooms and ordinary bodies central to its visual identity.
The first issue also includes foreign SM photographs, reports on overseas publications, bondage drawings, and discussions of the historical development of SM magazines. One essay, “The Collector of Humiliation,” surveys older publications and photographic albums, explicitly placing Sun &amp; Moon within a lineage running through Kitan Club and later specialist magazines.
For readers of Kinbaku Today, the inaugural issue is valuable because it captures the movement from print fantasy toward amateur practice. The magazine still inherits the coercive scenarios and gender assumptions of earlier SM culture, but it increasingly asks how rope, spanking, role play, and submission function inside actual relationships. Its pages are part instruction manual, part confession booth, part amateur photo album, and part social laboratory.

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