Karen Elson | David Sims | French Vogue's Erotic Surrender | Jan 2007

Always on her game, French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld styled Karen Elson for this erotic David Sims editorial around surrender, in the Dec.-Jan. 2007 issue.

The photos resonate deeply with us around the topic of surrender and power-sharing. We believe that many more couples would explore erotic surrender, if it was separated from the BDSM community. This opinion won’t make us popular, but we prefer to move visualizations and behavior like this into what’s commonly called ‘vanilla sex’.

Monogamy and deep intimacy must be cultivated in relationships. Neither is a natural state between lovers and couples must work to keep romance and sexual passion flourishing.

Personally, we are very sensitive to abusive relationships, even games that are degrading. Note that Mad Men’s divorced Don Draper is now getting slapped during sex.

It’s our view that more couples would explored subtle games like blindfolds and tie-ups, if the games weren’t so associated with being stage one in amping up the volume of a BDSM relationship.

We’ve read a lot of the literature and understand absolutely that BDSM doesn’t imply degrading behavior. Technically, it encompasses these beautiful photos. Reality is that the kinky porn community and the main messaging from BDSM blogs and practitioners is that subtle power-sharing is milk toast.

For this reason, we want to work with readers to move intimate surrender into the realm of vanilla sex, where it will find a much larger audience of practitioners and respectability. These photos underscore another major difference between eroticism in Europe and the lack of it in America.

In America, any visualization of intimacy out of the missionary position becomes pornographic and a form of fetish. In Europe (not Japan where roping is misogynistic in our opinion) surrender is just an erotic game for a bit of pleasure. Anne

Photos via Fashion Gone Rogue