Payback (IMDB) is a 1999 neo-noir crime thriller, starring Mel Gibson.

In The Celluloid Closet, Vito Russo talked about the phase of American movies in which queer film characters existed mainly as dramatic or comedic foils to the straight characters. Whether they were swishy nellies or twisted sadists, they were a simple object lesson in proper and improper gender roles. That extends to the present day, though perhaps a little less overt: heroes are associated with heterosexuality, monogamy, vanilla sex, and other normative sexualities, while villains tend towards bisexuality, non-monogamy, and fetishes and kinks.

Mel Gibson’s filmography is full of scenes of his characters being physically tortured, and films he has directed also include scenes of torture, such as The Passion of the Christ (2004) and Apocalypto (2006). Payback, no exception, opens with Gibson barely alive on a backroom operating table. Porter, a professional thief, was involved in a robbery, then betrayed and left for dead by his wife and his criminal associate, Val Resnick. Val used the stolen money to buy his way back into the criminal syndicate known as “the Outfit”. Porter comes back to town, determined to get what he believes is his share of the money, $70,000. Some of this is done through trickery, but most of the time Porter navigates the criminal underworld through straightforward violence or the threat of it. Porter threatens or beats up nearly every man he encounters. (I wish I could say he’s never violent with women, but that would be a lie.)

In another generation of Hollywood film, Porter would have been played by Humphery Bogart as an icon of proper masculinity, and Val would be played by Peter Lorre or another character actor, representing improper masculinity, implicitly queer.

Val is twice described as a “sadist”, and he does go out of his way to physically hurt people. His superior in the Outfit says “That comes in handy.” This is only a relative contrast with Porter, who is also sadistic but with a kind of detached efficiency. Porter is definitely a heel, but the audience is supposed to enjoy his mastery of his environment vicariously, and his sadism is part of that. That he doesn’t take pleasure in it is supposed to redeem him, and assert his normative masculinity.

However, in the scene that introduces Chinese dominatrix Pearl (Lucy Liu), Val is just as much a masochist, as he and Pearl punch and kick each other.

When Porter invades Val’s hotel suite (where Pearl is also sleeping) and threatens him for the money, Pearl intercedes and beats up Val on Porter’s behalf.

This is a peculiar scene, as if Pearl is there as a beard to keep the violent encounter between Porter and Val from being too homoerotic. Porter just watches, occasionally wincing, as Pearl punches, kicks and stomps on Val. The movie doesn’t seem to understand that there’s a difference between the presumably negotiated beatings Pearl inflicts on Val as his domme and the violence she inflicts on him on Porter’s behalf. The implication seems to be that even though Pearl sleeps in the same bed as Val, she doesn’t care about him in the slightest. Even after Pearl beats up Val under Porter’s authority, he doesn’t throw her out.

Pearl has a few more scenes, being part of the team of Chinese gangsters sent to kill Porter. While she survives Porter’s retaliation, she and Porter have a moment when they fail to shoot each other. This emphasizes Porter’s masculinity again, with Pearl preferring him over Val.

It wouldn’t be a Mel Gibson film without his character being tortured, and this is no exception. After various incidental beatings, Porter finally gets the attention of the leadership of the Outfit and they come to watch him being tortured, with his toes being smashed flat by a sledgehammer one by one.

There’s actually no need for this scene, as Porter’s goal is to get the remaining leaders of the Outfit present so he can manipulate them into going to the building that previously had a bomb planted.

Many of the characters comment on the relatively trivial amount of money Porter demands. It does raise the question: is the amount of violence Porter inflicts and suffers justified by such a sum? Porter claims he just wants what he is owed, his only statement of principle, as he is pretty amoral in every other respect.

Once he had healed, Porter could have just considered the $70,000 a loss and started over. Instead, he undertakes a perverse quest in which the money he claims justifies his sadism and his masochism, a post hoc rationalization.

As Fairfax, one of the Outfit’s leaders, says of Porter: “He doesn’t want to say anything. He just wants to get beat up, that’s all.”

Richard Pérez Seves has written a thorough and visually engrossing study of fetish artist Eric Stanton and the world he lived in. Stanton was one of the major artists to define the post-WWII American style of fetish and BDSM art, when this genre was very much underground. Seves managed to get access to impressive quantities of ephemera of the artist’s life and interviews with his friends and families.

Born “Ernest Stanzoni Jr.” in Brooklyn, 1926, Stanton’s youth coincided with the nascent medium of American comic books. Quarantined at home because of his sister’s illnesses, young Stanton began learning to draw from tracing comics, especially to draw aggressive, leggy women. He was a fan of comics like Wonder Woman and films the Republic’s The Perils of Nyoka, both full of bondage and powerful women. Drafted into the US Navy but too late to see action in WWII, Stanton did pinups on scraps of paper and handkerchiefs for his fellow sailors.

After discharge, Stanton did a knife throwing act in nightclubs. He got into the comics business through a friend’s uncle, named Boody Rogers, who had invented a hillbilly girl character with superhuman strength named Babe. As an assistant, Stanton learned the business and did some of the original pencil and ink work. After this, he spotted an ad in a girlie magazine for a comic about wrestling women, but was so disappointed with what he purchased that he wrote in and said he could do better. This led to a meeting with Irving Klaw and the beginning of his lifelong career of fetish art.

Robert Bienvenu talked about the dynamic of the early fetish media community, a dialectic between profiteers (like Irving Klaw, Leonard Burtman and Eddie Mishkin) and producer-practitioners (like John “Willie” Coutts). Stanton definitely fell on the producer-practitioner side, as most of his artistic work was fetish fantasies, and he had a tense relationship with publishers like Klaw and Mishkin. Stanton deeply regretted putting a bra and panties on a nude woman in one of Coutts’ illustrations, on Klaw’s orders. He often struggled with payment issues and lost control of his original artwork.

However, Stanton apparently didn’t do any kink in his personal life. Some of this may be due to circumstances, such as being married to Grace, his first wife, who regarded his work as “filth”, or suffering from a debilitating back injury for much of his adulthood. Maybe reality could never live up to his imagination.

Stanton also went to art school with fellow fetish artist Gene Bilbrew (aka “Eneg”, “Bondi”, etc) and future Marvel Comics artist Steve Ditko. Stanton and Ditko were an odd-couple partnership, who shared office space and often collaborated. Ditko partnered with Stanton on fetish art under the alias “Jon Bee”, while Stanton helped out with the pencils on some of Ditko’s early work on Dr. Strange comics. Stanton, ultimately, had little interest in the narrative possibilities of sequential art, and arguably was more of a pinup artist.

While the artistic partnership between Ditko and Stanton is well established, Seves claims that Stanton was a major contributor to the creation of Spider-Man, helping Ditko develop a germ of an idea from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. The author cites the character’s full-body, form-fitting suit and full-face mask, common in Stanton’s fetish art but rarely seen on superheroes; the webbing texture on the costume, resembling fishnet stockings; and the way his webbing wraps around targets like bondage. There are also some spider-motifs in Stanton-Ditko fetish art of this period. Even Peter Parker’s Aunt Mae is supposedly based on Stanton’s Aunt May, who looked after him when he was a sick child.

Personally, I’m not entirely convinced Stanton was a major influence, but I am tickled at the thought that another major superhero (besides Wonder Woman) has roots in the worlds of fetish and bondage art. Stanton himself, in his rare interviews, downplayed any involvement in the creation of Spider-Man, whether out of shyness or to help his friend’s career.

The classic American fetish era came to an end in the late 1960s. The publishers, like Mishkin and Burtman, went down under police investigations, court trials, and prison terms. Once-underground fetishes like bondage and wrestling were absorbed into porn publishers. Loosened government censorship allowed more hardcore material.

Stanton emerged from end of this era in much better shape. As the 70s progressed, Stanton learned to manage his back injury with yoga instead of painkillers. He married a woman who was far more understanding about his work than his first wife, and they had a family that helped him put to rest his guilt over giving up access to the children from his first marriage. Finally, he remade himself into an independent creator of fetish art. Publisher Stanley Malkin bequeathed to Stanton a mailing list of about 20,000 names, which, combined with Stanton’s talent and reputation, was the foundation of the Stanton Archives.

The most frustrating thing about this book is that Stanton himself is a bit of a cipher. He was an unusual case in that he was first and foremost a fetish artist, and any other work he did was incidental. (Compare this to Touko Laaksonen, aka “Tom of Finland”, who worked as a commercial artist while secretly making gay erotica.) While Stanton did some female submissive and queer art, mostly he liked big aggressive women and that’s what he made. If Stanton had any particular artistic statement or philosophy, it’s a mystery. “Who really knows,” he said in a 1978 interview (pg.23) He just kept working in the same field until his death in 1999.

It’s a shame that we’ll probably never get biographies this detailed for other artists and publishers and writers of this era, like John “Willie” Coutts or Gene “Eneg” Bilbrew. This book gives us a window into the roots of the modern fetish and BDSM culture.

High Anxiety (1977) (IMDB) is a comedy film, directed by Mel Brooks, written and directed by Mel Brooks and Ron Clark.

High Anxiety is Mel Brooks’ parody of Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers, which often had some psychosexual weirdness driving their plots. E.g. voyeurism in Rear Window, gender confusion in Psycho, fetishism in Vertigo. In this case, it’s female sadism and male masochism.

Some of the movies and TV episodes discussed in this project include BDSM as a major element, while others feature it in only a single scene or even a single moment.

I operate on the theory that, first, nothing in a film is an accident, no matter how small the detail. If there’s even a hint of BDSM, it’s there for a reason. Second, these scenes and moments may be a person’s first exposure to the concept of sadomasochism, and may inform their later development as sadomasochists.

Queer people of earlier generations became adept at reading against the text, finding queer relationships and dynamics within seemingly heteronormative works. I believe that kinky people do the same, privately cataloging those scenes and moments that resonate.

Brooks plays Dr. Thorndyke, a psychiatrist with acrophobia who takes over a mental institute. The plot, such as it is, is that Dr. Montague (Harvey Korman) and Head Nurse Diesel (Cloris Leachman) are keeping their patients in highly expensive care instead of treating them. While Montague was the head of the Institute until Thorndyke arrives, Diesel is really in charge, as made clear in the dinner scene, when she punishes him for being a few seconds late.

Right off the bat, this character is ill-conceived. She’s named “Nurse Charlotte Diesel.” (No doubt a reference to “Nurse Ratched” of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.) The “Diesel” is presumably a reference to “diesel dyke”, i.e. a butch lesbian. She also has a bit of facial hair, and enjoys cognac and a cigar after dinner. However, she doesn’t show any interest in other women (not that there are any apart from Thorndyke’s love interest, played by Madeline Kahn).

Late at night, Thorndyke hears someone crying out and investigates Nurse Diesel’s room. She says it was just the TV, looking extraordinarily suspicious. When Thorndyke leaves, Diesel takes off her bathrobe, revealing a stylized prison guard uniform, complete with cap and high-heeled boots. She has Montague literally chained up in her closet, in his pyjamas.

Montague: “I can’t help it. You’re hurting me. You’re going too hard tonight.”

Diesel: “Oh, get off it. I know you better than you know yourself. You live for bondage and discipline.” [tightens bonds]

Montague: (moans) “Too much bondage, too much bondage. Not enough discipline.”

Diesel: “You want discipline?” [spanks him]

[…]

Montague: “Mommy!”

This is the familiar pairing of sexual deviance with moral deviance. Of course people this deviant would be capable of anything, such as gaslighting their patients and plotting to have Thorndyke killed. As a submissive man paired with a dominant woman, Montague and Diesel are held up as obviously funny. I wouldn’t take this personally, as the whole movie is a parody. Of course the characters are cardboard.

Following other standard tropes, the deviant couple of Montague and Diesel are contrasted with Thorndyke and his love interest, Victoria. At the climax, Thorndyke must overcome his acrophobia (via a flashback to his infancy) to rescue Victoria’s father. Diesel plummets to her death (with a black cape and a broomstick, no less) and Montague immediately surrenders.

Montague: “I like you. I’ll be on your side. I’ll do anything you say. I’m good at that. And if I don’t behave, you can beat the living crap out of me. I wouldn’t mind.”

Even in the realm of comedy, the domineering woman and the masochistic man must be punished, and normative heterosexuality is valorized.

I’m not saying that Mel Brooks is kinkphobic or set out to make an anti-BDSM piece of propaganda. He just followed the paradigmatic tropes laid down by other films: “Deviant sex is funny” and “Sexual deviance corresponds to moral deviance.” It wasn’t his job to question those.

In my research, I’ve observed patterns in the past that we still see today.

For instance, in the 1830s, a woman named Maria Monk turned up in New York City. She claimed that she had been held prisoner as a sex slave in a convent in Montreal, where she had been subjected to bizarre tortures and told to sexually serve the priests who entered the convent via an underground tunnel. Any offspring of these unions would be baptized, strangled and disposed of in lime pits.

In a nation full of anti-Catholic and nativist ideologies, Monk’s (probably ghost-written) book, Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, became a bestseller. Problem was, when people investigated the convent in Montreal, they could find no evidence Monk had ever been there, no tunnels, no lime pits, and none of the bizarre torture devices she described.

Awful Disclosures remained a staple of anti-Catholic propaganda, even during the presidential campaign of John F Kennedy. Anti-Catholicism frequently traded in sexual imagery, linking religious deviance (from sober Protestantism) with sexual deviance. This contributed to the rise of “sexy nun” erotica.

This eroticization wasn’t unique to anti-Catholicism.

In the decades leading up to the US Civil War, northerners and abolitionists painted the slaveholding South as a hotbed of sexual impropriety. This slid into eroticization, both before and after the war, leading to books like Memoirs of Dolly Morton, which purported to be a white woman’s story of being held effectively as a slave.

In antebellum New Orleans, the house of socialite Delphine Lalaurie was destroyed in a fire, which revealed the bodies of tortured slaves. Over time, this incident has grown into legend, depicting Lalaurie as a witch with insatiable and perverse sexual appetites. In the exploitation film, Goodbye Uncle Tom, Lalaurie was played by a beautiful woman slinking around her manor in a see-through nightie, standing over a pile of naked slaves drugged with opium.

In an era that professed the idealization of women as pure and chaste and maternal, there was nothing more terrifying than a sexually aggressive woman. The existence of a woman like the mythologized Lalaurie was the symptom of the deviance and depravity of the South. It was also, for certain people, sexually arousing.

Even in the 19th century, militarism and authoritarian regimes were linked with sexual deviance. Starting in the 1930s, fascism was strongly associated with homosexuality, fetishism, sadism and masochism.

After WWII, American men’s adventure magazines created an iconography of male and female sadists wearing swastikas, titillating with the promise of sadism and aggressive women.

Starting with Love Camp 7 in 1969, we had the beginnings of the Nazisploitation subgenre of film. This included highbrow dramas like Cabaret and The Night Porter, and grindhouse classics like Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS in 1975. Dyanne Thorne played Ilsa (very loosely based on real world wife of a camp commandant, Ilse Koch), the icy blonde mistress of bizarre medical experiments, who takes male prisoners to her bed for one night, then has them castrated.

Despite dying at the end of the film, Ilsa returned in Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks, now working for petro-states and not having aged a day. Thorne also played a similar character in two more unofficial sequels, Ilsa, the Tigress of Siberia and Ilsa, the Wicked Warden.

Even if she dies at the end of the film, Ilsa always comes back, off to serve some other regime: Stalinst gulag, North American mafia, or Latin American dictatorship. The “Nazi dominatrix” archetype, both terrifying and titillating, can be attached to any politically deviant regime. Only a truly corrupt society could produce such an unwomanly woman.

And this is still happening.

The “Satanic panic” of the 1980s, alleging ritualized sexualized abuse of children, deployed the same tropes of strange abuse, hidden realms of tunnels and secret rooms, etc.

During the 2016 US Presidential election, there was the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, alleging the Democratic Party leadership ran a secret child prostitution/pornography ring out of a hidden secret room underneath a pizza parlor in Washington DC. This would be ridiculous if not for the fact that at least one person believed it enough to enter the restaurant and fire off a gun.

Even more recently, there’s the “Frazzledrip” theory. This claims that there’s a snuff video circulating in the dark web which shows Hillary Clinton and her right hand woman, Huma Abedin, mutilating and killing children in a Satanic ritual. The alt-right types who have spread this story have picked up on the idea of portraying Clinton as the “evil woman” archetype, just like Ilsa, Delphine Laulaurie, and the other monster women. It never gets old.

Personal Services (1987) is a comedy-drama directed by Terry Jones.

The DVD I had begins with text that says “This film is a fiction. The author’s inspiration was a book about Cynthia Payne. However the events recorded in the film and the characters who appear in it are wholly fictitious. This is not the life story of Cynthia Payne.” This is a bit disingenuous, as Payne, a notorious UK madam, is listed in the credits as “Consultant.”

Cynthia Payne, excuse me, “Christine Painter” is introduced as a struggling single mother, working as a cafe waitress while subletting flats to sex workers. After giving a handjob to her landlord in lieu of rent, she quits her waitress job and moves into managing sex workers full time. Christine and her comrades decide to specialize in kink. “The future lies in kinky people,” says Morton, a client who becomes an assistant of sorts to Christine.

At first, Christine is not particularly good at her job. She doesn’t know the jargon, she can’t keep a straight face during fantasy scenes, and she dozes off while a client is in heavy bondage. Shirl, one of her workers, has the best grasp of playing female authority figures to submissive/masochistic men. Christine’s approach to kink is basically capitalist: she doesn’t have to understand it to make money from it. It’s a market niche.

What gets lost in this story is women as desiring subjects. “What’s sex ever done for me? Up the duff at sixteen,” says Christine. We get a few of Christine’s fantasies, which always feature signifiers of upper-class identity: luxurious rooms in penthouse suites, elegant suits and gowns. While she does date a man she finds attractive, she stands him up because she’s busy looking after her clients, including doing a counseling session for her landlord who has been breaking in and wearing her lingerie.

In one scene, over coffee, Shirl pigeonholes men by their kinks to Christine, just by looking at them.

Shirl: “Most men don’t like sex that much. Can’t wait to get it over.”

Christine: “They’re only after one thing. If they didn’t want it, we’d be out of a job.”

Shirl: “I didn’t say ‘want’, Christine, I said ‘like’. I said they didn’t like it.”

Sex, at least for hetero men, is a need that requires women to manage.

After one of her parties, Christine serves tea, poached eggs and toast to the men seated around her kitchen table. Is she doing the same job she did as a waitress, just charging a lot more?

This woman-as-caretaker gets into an uncomfortable, bordering on incestuous situation when Christine’s teenage son David has his birthday and her “present” for him is a woman in lingerie named Carol. (In the 1980s, the age of consent in the UK was 16, which makes it slightly better.) Moments later in the same scene, Christine’s father drops by and reluctantly admits that “Your father needs a woman.” Her solution is to send him to Carol too, only moments after seeing David. It’s as if being a good madam also makes her a good daughter and mother.

The climax of the film is a Christmas house party for her clients, with the house packed with sex workers. Christine has created a community space for pleasure and expression of divergent gender identities. The convivial atmosphere ends when the police (whom Christine resisted when they pressured her) raid the establishment.

In the police station, Christine monologs about her philosophy:

“If the wives were willing, I’d be out of a job, wouldn’t I? They go off sex. Rather sell Tupperware.”

[…]

“Sex soon goes out of a marriage. I’m a bit old fashioned, really. I believe in marriage. Men are animals, sexually. They don’t talk a bit of sense until you’ve got them despunked. Women are more affectionate. They like a bit of affection. Though I’ve met a few horny buggers in my time. The wife wants a three-piece suite. If she gave the man sex, he might be more inclined to come across with the three-piece suite. It may not be a fashionable thing to say, but once you’ve got him despunked, and he’s sitting there thinking he’s all wonderful, done you a good turn, given you a pair of soggy knickers, in the afterglow of his glory, he’s more likely to come across with a Dralon three-piece, don’t you think?”

[…]

“I’m responsible, not the men. You can’t expect the men to be responsible. When the balls are full, the brain is empty.”

Called before the court, Christine sees that the head judge is one of her clients. From her point of view, she sees him in his wig and robes, then in his schoolboy uniform and cap. This representative of the state is just another overgrown boy in need of nurturing, whom she can control.

In other words: maternity = sexual/emotional labor = material goods = social status and security. Women as desiring sexual subjects aren’t a part of that equation. No mention of what women are supposed to do for their sexual or emotional satisfaction.

Danielle J Lindemann’s book Dominatrix discusses the problems of the “healing” narrative of explaining and justifying pro dommes. Not only does this pathologize kinky people as in need of healing, it also puts a lot of pressure on dominatrixes to be caretakers instead of service workers trying to survive economically. Personal Services allays Christine’s mercenary, blunt and domineering qualities by presenting her core as maternal, a proper woman. I.e. an asexual caretaker of men.
One of the themes of Personal Services is the difficulty of putting a dominant woman in a romance plotline, and we will return to this point in other films.

Not every film I study in this project has a lot to say about sadomasochism. In some cases, these may be single scenes or even brief moments.

Dancing at the Blue Iguana (2000) is a semi-improvised drama about the exotic dancers at a club and their various struggles in life.

Jo (played by Jennifer Tilly) is immediately set up as the “crazy” one. She wears black leather or rubber in most scenes, is almost always shown drinking, smoking, or popping pills, and has the most belligerent personality. Her main plotline involves her pregnancy and whether she will abort it. Her dancing costume is black leather with lots of buckles and fishnets, in other words, the signifiers of BDSM.

The scene in question comes when Jo, at her apartment, is in the middle of a pro domination session with a client. (I assume this is business, not pleasure.) Jessie, one of the other dancers (who is probably underage), interrupts after being beaten and kicked out by her boyfriend, in need of a place to crash. Jo alternates between continuing her scene with her client and looking after Jessie, while Jessie alternates between insinuating herself into the scene (in either position) and explaining what happened.

There’s no particular resolution to this scene, much like the movie as a whole. We don’t even find out if Jo has an abortion.

Perhaps it just bothers me that Jo, the dancer who is most obviously self-destructive and out of control, is the one linked with sadomasochism. Then again, this is also the scene in which Jo shows concern for Jessie, and the interaction with her client is treated as comedy, not anything dark. Jo is judged no more harshly than any of the other women in this film, each of whom have their own problems.

Venus in Furs (1967) IMDB

As far as I know, this is the first feature film adaptation of Venus in Furs, or more accurately the first to bear that name. (According to IMDB, there was a short film released in 1965 titled Venus in Furs, though the description sounds nothing like the book.) It was also released the same year that the Velvet Underground released their debut album (having been formed in 1964), which featured the song “Venus in Furs.” I don’t know if there was any direct connection between the two. 

The opening scene is a fairly direct adaptation of the book’s opening scene, in which the unnamed narrator has a conversation with the goddess Venus. This is revealed to be a dream of the protagonist, David, who fell asleep reading the book. 

After that, the film bears little or no resemblance to the book, narratively or thematically. The opening credits say as much, claiming to be “Suggested by a novel by Leopold Sacher Masoch (sic).” 

David, the protagonist, keeps having dreams/fantasies of women dominating him as he travels by subway to his job at a women’s shoe store. While serving a female customer (and ogling her stocking tops), two other men working there ask him why he lets women customers push him around. The film keeps shifting to fantasy and back, with him crawling before the legs of the female customers. There are a lot of scenes of women in fur, but there’s an equal or greater emphasis on women’s feet, legs, shoes, stockings and boots. This suggests that this film was made for the fetishist market. 

David then runs into a woman in furs at the New York Public Library. He and the woman, Marina, drive out to a party house in the country. There’s little in the way of a plot, after this point. Instead, it’s a series of scenes, mostly female dominant, with a framing device of David as a participant or a voyeur. While he’s drawn to Marina, she keeps pushing him away. In some cases, David is partially naked and shown off lifting weights. The scenes stop short of full female frontal nudity. 

One of the bigger scenes looks like they just kept the cameras rolling while the house guests had a party. Some couples make out, a crossdressed man dances, one woman plays solitaire on another woman lying on the ground, a guy fondles a woman’s leg in fishnet while also fondling a creepy clown doll.

Marina sits in David’s lap, who tells her that he’s not happy with the way things are, such as having to share her with other people. She gives him a sugar cube (containing LSD?) in a glass of wine and tells him to enjoy the show. 

After a lot of this, David pushes Marina to the floor and starts pulling her clothes off. She resists at first, then commands, “Kiss my toes.” David starts worshipping Marina’s feet and legs, but gets upset when she, at the same time, makes out with a blonde woman, Lorelai. He stalks off.

Outside, David is leaving with his suitcase. Marina stops him. 

Marina: “I keep thinking of last night. All the things you did to me. The way you began to take me so forcefully like a real man.” Embraces him. “Oh David, please help. I’m so unhappy.” Cries on his shoulder. 

David: “That’s no news. I’ve always been. Always.”

Marina: “Oh my poor darling. I guess I haven’t been much help. Sometimes I long to be something better but I just can’t help myself. There’s something perverse in both you and Lorelei. Some weakness that makes me want to punish you both. Subdue you. Dominate you.”

David: “Let’s forget about all of that now.”

He picks up up and carries her off.

Cut to: David and Marina riding horses in the country. It’s idyllic, until David finds Marina making out with Lorelai. 

“You rotten liar!” David yells. He starts trying to kill and/or rape Marina while Lorelai bites his ankle (his Achilles’ heel?).

The scene cuts to David, nude but for a leopard-print posing pouch, tied to a tree with stockings. Marina and Lorelai lie at his feet, while people stand around staring at the tableau. 

… and it was all a dream. David gets up for the steps at the New York Public Library and walks into the Manhattan streets. He sees a woman in furs in a car who smiles at him.

There is a loose thematic connection between the book and this film, the tension between a man’s masochistic and fetishistic desires and his ideal of how a man should be. The climactic tableau suggests that David is paralyzed by his self-imposed paradox: his muscular body makes him a spectacle to be observed and controlled, and his desire to submit to Marina makes him fear rejection. Though I’m not sure there was any particular thought put into this film, other than stringing together some soft-core fetish scenes. Even with all the padding, the film is only slightly longer than an hour.

Marina was played by Barbara Ellen who was also the co-screenwriter. She acted in a handful of other films and TV shows in the 50s and 60s. Shep Wild (David) appeared in a few other minor films in the 60s. Joseph Marzano, the director and co-screenwriter, had a long career as a filmmaker from the 1940s to 2000, mostly shorts. I don’t know of any other connections to the kink/fetish culture, though he did write and direct Fur (1979), about a haunted or possessed fur coat that kills people.

GENE BILBREW REVEALED: The Unsung Legacy of a Fetish Art Pioneer (African American Artists Series) is the latest in Richard Pérez Seves’ series of biographies of fetish artists and publishers.

Pérez Seves’ previous work on Eric Stanton gave an interesting picture of a man, his work and his time. However, the author has less to work with when it comes to Gene Bilbrew.

Arguably, Bilbrew and Stanton defined the American fetish style in the 1950s and 1960s, drawing and painting numerous comic strips, digest magazines and pulp covers for semi-underground publishers. They both went to Cartoonists & Illustrators School in NYC (along with Steve Ditko). They maintained a rivalry that was not always friendly, competing for work from a limited number of publishers.

While Stanton left behind a legacy of creator-owned work, family members, friends and interviews, Bilbrew was a cipher, an African-American in a business and a subculture dominated by whites and Jews.

Even why Bilbrew started doing fetish art is a mystery. Stanton was interested in bondage, fighting women and the like from adolescence, a fan who turned pro, but there’s no evidence Bilbrew had any interest in kink or graphic arts. As a young man, Bilbrew enjoyed some success as a singer in several vocal groups under the name “Gene Price”, and married another singer known as Rosita Davis. His career and marriage came to an end in the early 1950s. There’s no hard evidence on how or why Bilbrew went into art at this point, even working for comics great Wil Eisner. As Stanton recalled, he spotted Bilbrew working on a bondage scene illustration on his desk, and that led to Stanton introducing him to the Klaws and the bizarre underground.

Bilbrew didn’t stay within the Klaws’ strict rules about nudity and explicit sexuality in the work they published. The Klaws ordered Stanton to censor Bilbrew’s work, starting a rift in their relationship. Bilbrew moved into the orbit of other underground publishers such as Edward Mishkin, working under aliases like “Eneg”, “Van Rod” or “Bondy”.

One of the few direct quotes from Bilbrew about his work came from when he was called as a witness in one of Mishkin’s trials for obscenity.

Bilbrew: … I, more or less, learn the psychology of the type of work, what’s appealing–

Justice Gassman: But you didn’t read the book. How did you know that the cover was going to fit the book?

Bilbrew: Actually speaking, I didn’t.

Justice Gassman: You just made a cover without knowing whether it fitted the book or it didn’t fit the book?

Bilbrew: That’s the way I have been working.

Pg.100

In the 1970s, changes in the industry combined with Bilbrew’s alcohol and drug use left him in a sorry state, with declining work and living in a small room in the back of one of Mishkin’s businesses. The exact cause and location of his death in 1974 is not clear, and he left behind no obituary or grave marker. Stanton’s widow, Britt, says Eric wept when he learned of Gene’s death.

Was Bilbrew like Stanton, whose kinks drove his art? Or did Bilbrew just happen to find a field of art that would offer him better work than he, a black man, would get in other businesses? These questions will probably remained unanswered.

Written, produced and directed by Victor Nieuwenhuijs. Starring Anne van de Ven as Wanda, and André Arend van de Noord as Severin. IMDB

(Unless otherwise stated, all quotes are from English dub, not the English subtitles.)

Unlike the 1967 Venus in Furs or the 1969 Jesus Franco Venus in Furs, this is pretty close to the original story, though set in the present day. Severin, a young man, falls for a young woman named Wanda. They sign a contract to formalize their dominant-submissive relationship.

There are several scenes extracted from the novel, though modified as this is a low budget film. (It often feels like a filmed stage play.) They travel by train, where Severin plays “Gregor” her servant, who watches from outside the compartment as Wanda flirts with another man. In another scene, three black women chase him down and tie him to a cart to pull, while Wanda stands on a distant hill, nude. 

In voice-over, Severin talks about how he read a book about Christian martyrs at age 10, “I read it with a revulsion bordering on voracious ecstasy. They languished in dungeons, were roasted above a small fire, pierced with arrows, had pitched poured over them, were nailed to a cross. All of this they underwent in a state of intoxication.” This is consistent with the original novel and Sacher-Masoch’s other writings, which often had elements of religious rituals. 

Since almost the entire film is in Severin’s POV (there are some frontally nude shots of the male lead), it’s often unclear if any particular scene is something that is actually happening or is something Severin is fantasizing or dreaming. This matches Severin’s constant insecurity about Wanda: Is she doing this to please him, or because she enjoys herself in this role? Will she leave him because she has tired of this role, or because she has discovered her own submission to another man, or because she has realized that the cruelest thing she could do to him is abandon him? Or is she trying to be as cruel as possible to exceed his desire and “cure” him of this? Or has he awakened some latent, uncontrollable sadism in her? There’s a lot of push-pull between the two leads. 

Old joke: “The masochist says, ‘Hurt me.’ The sadist says, ‘No.’” That’s the unsolvable paradox that drives the book and this movie. Both Severin and Wanda struggle with the idea that cruelest and most powerful thing Wanda could do is leave Severin. In other words, the way to “win” the game is to end it. Severin has to keep cajoling Wanda into playing the game. 

In the climactic scene, the camera takes Severin’s POV as Wanda hands over the black fur coat and riding whip to a man (analogous to “the Greek” in the original) who proceeds to beat and brand him, while in the background, Wanda, nude, kneels at the feet of another, fur-clad woman. Not only is Severin “forced” to submit to a man wearing the fetishized symbols, he “has to” watch Wanda submit to someone else, abdicating the role he has assigned her. 

The idea that female dominance/male submission is a relationship that cannot be resolved romantically has turned up in other films (e.g. Something Wild (1986), Preaching to the Perverted (1997)) (unlike the romantically successful male dominant/female submissive relationships, e.g. Secretary (2002), the Fifty Shades trilogy (2015-18)) . The more I think about this, the more I am unconvinced that a femdom-malesub romance is impossible. There must be some way to do it, even if it goes against the “rules” of heterosexual romance. 

Venus in Furs is a thematically faithful adaptation of the original novel. 
In researching this film, I also found references to another adaptation of Venus in Furs, directed by Aryan Kaganof (co-writer of the 1995 film) and released in 2001. There’s no mention of it in IMDB, however. There was also a Korean film adaptation in 2015.

The Duke of Burgundy (IMDB) is a 2014 drama film written and directed by Peter Strickland, and starring Chiara D’Anna as Evelyn and Sidse Babett Knudsen as Cynthia. Shot in the UK and Hungary.

One of the oldest cliches in BDSM is “the submissive has all the power”. This is not always true, nor is it necessarily a good thing, as the life of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch demonstrated. Submissives and masochists can be abusive, as shown by The Duke of Burgundy.

Somewhere in Europe, sometime in the mid-20th century, two women play out elaborate sadomasochistic scenarios. Evelyn, playing the meek maid, comes to the house of Cynthia, playing the haughty mistress. Evelyn’s duties of cleaning and laundry are, inevitably, unsatisfactory, which results in punishment. Cynthia drags Evelyn to the bathroom, closes the door on the camera, and urinates on her. 

Obviously, the MPAA would not give a film could give a film with an explicit golden showers scene an R-rating or even an NC-17 rating. (IMDB says it doesn’t have a rating in the USA.) 

A few days later, they do it all over again. It’s a bit reminiscent of Secretary or the Munby-Cullwick relationship, a private world between two people in which mundane activities are elevated to erotic rituals. 

Evelyn loves their scenes, but Cynthia is slowly stockpiling resentment. She follows Evelyn’s minutely detailed scripts, wears the uncomfortable lingerie and clothes Evelyn purchased, drinks the pitchers of water so she can urinate on Evelyn on cue, stands on the tape marks on her bedroom carpet so Evelyn can spy on her through the keyhole. “Topping from the bottom” is an expression that is not always properly applied, but this is definitely a case. 

Even when they’re cuddling face to face in bed, Evelyn insists on the same fantasy script, and Cynthia reluctantly obliges her.

Evelyn: Gasps. “Keep talking. Say something else.”

Cynthia: Thinks a moment. “You haven’t washed my panties recently. Nor have you polished my boots. If you want to be a good maid you have to do these things a lot more. Otherwise you’ll be punished.”

Evelyn: “Keep talking.”

Cynthia: Running out of material. “Um, I don’t know what to say.”

Evelyn: “Just go back to the beginning then.”

Cynthia: “I’m not happy. I’m not happy with you at all.”

Evelyn: getting close. “Improvise!”

Cynthia: “When you work for me it’s for life. You have to do whatever I want, whenever I want. Because if you don’t, I just might tie you up and use you as my chair for the afternoon. I can read about cave crickets whilst you are helpless underneath me and I put my weight upon your face. And you just have to lie there and wait until I’m finished reading my book and–”

Evelyn orgasms. She relaxes, blissed out. Cynthia kisses her forehead. 

Evelyn smiles and touches her face. Then says, “Try to have more conviction in your voice next time.” 

Cynthia: “More conviction. Okay.” 

Even though they’re in bed together and touching, it’s more like a phone sex session. 

Doms and tops, professional and otherwise, don’t like being treated as wind-up toys. Evelyn both micro-manages Cynthia’s dominance, and leaves her without guidelines. Worse, she’s giving nothing back. When Cynthia throws her back out, or otherwise wants a little TLC, Evelyn is reluctant and bitchy, criticizing Cynthia for wearing comfy pyjamas instead of vintage lingerie. 

At the low point of the relationship, they just throw passive-aggressive barbs at each other. Jealousy about other women rears its ugly head

This separation reaches an extreme when Evelyn sets her heart on being locked up for the night. She drags a heavy black trunk into their bedroom and has Cynthia tie her up and put her in it. Instead of sleeping with her lover, Cynthia has a black box in her bedroom. 

Perhaps the worst moment is when Cynthia blatantly ignores Evelyn’s safeword. 

Cynthia: “Pinastri. Pinastre, pinastri. Oh, if we could all just say ‘pinastri’ to end our torments.”

This does not, however, end the relationship. 

Eventually, they’re both just going through the motions. Cynthia breaks down. 

Cynthia: “Sorry. Please don’t be mad at me.” 

Evelyn: Hugs her. “If this is what it does to you, I can change. All this is just a luxury. The important thing is you.”

Cynthia: “No, but maybe you’ll end up resenting me. We can’t win.”

Evelyn: “How can I resent you? I love you. I have a different way of showing it, but I love you. You do believe me, don’t you? What do you want me to do, to prove it? Just tell me. Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it. Please believe that I love you.”

They take the trunk out of the bedroom, and burn Evelyn’s instructions. However, the ending is ambiguous, suggesting that Evelyn and Cynthia have returned to their old patterns. 

The Duke of Burgundy is a psychologically realistic portrayal of a dom-sub relationship. However, the mise-en-scène is deliberately unrealistic, with no clear indicator of time or place, in a world solely inhabited by women. The film shifts into dreams and fantasies, and even the normal scenes have elements of unreality. For instance, when Evelyn and Cynthia attend lectures on entomology, some of the people in the audience are actually mannequins. I kept expecting the camera to pan over and reveal a smartphone or some other modern artifact. 

Coming at this from a kinky person’s perspective, this seems unnecessary. It’s not like Angels and Insects (1995), in which the insects serve as metaphors for the sociological observations. Why not give this subject matter a more naturalist treatment?

Despite the ending, and the air of unreality that permeates the film, The Duke of Burgundy takes the relationship between these two women seriously and doesn’t want it to fail. The problems develop not because Evelyn and Cynthia are kinksters but because they are human and flawed.

The Image (1975), also known as The Punishment of Anne, is an erotic drama directed by Radley Metzger, which he adapted from the novel L’Image (1956) by “Jean de Berg”, a pseudonym of Catherine Robbe-Grillet. 

The Image is on the threshold between porn and “real” movies, characteristic of the mid-1970s; it got an X rating in the USA.. It makes good use of Paris locations and professional directing, but the plot and characterization are a bit lacking. It. Also unlike a lot of the movies discussed in this project, this has frontal male and female nudity and even shots of fellatio and Anne urinating. There are, however, no shots of genital penetration.

The film takes place in the rarefied, aspirational movie world in which writers can afford gigantic luxurious apartments in major cities. Jean, a writer, goes to a black tie literary cocktail party and meets a former acquaintance, Claire, another writer, and a younger woman, Anne. Claire describes her as “Just a young model…. She belongs to me.” They go to a restaurant for an afterparty, where Claire fondles Anne under the table. Later, the trio go for a walk in the Paris rose gardens, where Claire makes Anne urinate before them. 

The film presents the classic hetero male fantasy of being invited into a threesome with a female-female couple. Jean doesn’t have to engineer this scenario; Claire just serves it up to him, and he walks into it, very entitled. A lot of this is Jean watching as the women interact, catering to the heterosexual voyeuristic male gaze. Even when Claire dominates Anne, she constantly looks to Jean the observer. Claire tells Anne, “Look at Jean! It’s at his request you’re being punished.” Claire’s attitude to Anne alternates between condescension and jealousy.

If the first act of The Image is about voyeurism, the second is about exhibitionism. Claire “loans” Anne to Jean. He’s into sex in public places with Anne, and we get vignettes of their trysts scattered around Paris. The trio’s dynamic shifts slightly, with Jean and Anne as the performers who report Claire as the observer. 

The third act is about sadomasochism, building up to the big scene in the “Gothic chamber” of Claire’s apartment. Jean is back to being primarily a voyeur as Claire puts Anne through her paces, including making her urinate (on camera) before Jean

When Anne is hanging nude from the Gothic chandelier, and Claire is applying heated metal spikes to her body, this is when the performance is the most intense. Anne howls like a wild animal. When Jean whips her, at Claire’s behest, she turns silent and focused. (The whip resembles a flogger or martinet, but the sound effects are like bullwhip cracks, and all the impacts are off camera.) 

When Jean finishes coitus with Anne, Claire suddenly goes berserk and attacks him, yelling “Damn you.” When Jean tries to push Claire away, Anne grabs a champagne bottle and smashes it over his head. Jean leaves. 

Suddenly more self-possessed, Anne gets up and says, “I’m leaving.” 

Claire asks, “What will I do?”

Anne glances at Jean’s abandoned jacket, then leaves. 

This is the only scene in the movie between the two women, with Jean. There are no scenes of just the two women together sexually, and only a few moments that aren’t in Jean’s point of view. The Image strongly differs from The Duke of Burgundy or The Piano Teacher in that we get no direct insight into the subjectivity of the women. 

We know nothing about Anne other than she’s a model. After their initial encounter, Jean meets Anne in public at a newsstand. She’s on a mission from Claire to get a rare book only sold under the counter, and she’s far more self-possessed and assertive with Jean than before. Her intense facial expression as she bottoms shows her willing participation. She paraphrases the Passion of the Christ by saying, “Forgive me for I know what I do.” After the scene in the Gothic Chamber, Anne just casually tosses the shackles away and walks off, without any attachment to Claire or Jean, despite the depths of her submission. For her, it really is just a game, and she can go play it with someone else. 

It’s Claire who is revealed as hung up, nursing an infatuation with Jean and her own submissive desires, but projecting them onto Anne. Before she “lends” Anne to Jean, Claire shows him a series of sadomasochistic photographs. Most are of Anne, but one shows what appears to be a different woman, though her face is obscured. Jean suspects this is actually Claire, though she is evasive. 

The most direct reading is that Claire is using Anne as a proxy for herself to seduce Jean, with resulting jealousy that he’s more drawn to the younger and submissive Anne than the older, remote Claire. Jean’s narration states he never saw Claire as a “potential conquest” because of her lack of vulnerability. The film ends with the solution to the problem: Claire goes to Jean’s home, dressed in a girlish outfit like Anne previously wore, and submits to him.

From an ideological perspective, this ending asserts the primacy of heterosexuality (Jean + Claire) over homosexuality (Anne + Claire), male dominance over female dominance, and vanilla coitus over kink. The last shot of this film is the Eiffel tower standing proud and erect, with Claire ecstatically moaning on the soundtrack. 

Radley Metzger had a history of making sexually provocative films, and was a major director during the “golden age of porn” in the 1970s. Anne was played by Mary Mendum, who appeared in a number of other pornographic features in the 1970s. Claire was played by Marilyn Roberts, who had only a handful of other acting credits, including a role on Mary Tyler Moore. Carl Parker (Jean) was primarily a model, and after this film went into real estate. Catherine Robbe-Grillet, a French actress and writer, wrote the original novel under a male pseudonym. She wrote other sadomasochistic fiction, and appeared in a 2014 documentary called The Ceremony, showing her as a dominatrix.

The Abnormal Female (IMDB) is a 1969 exploitation film, a collection of softcore sexual vignettes loosely tied together by the voiceover narration of a psychiatrist and his female patients talking about their sexual experiences and fantasies.

In BDSM terms, the only segment of note is the first, in which a brunette woman known as Vickie, said to be a sadist, describes dominating a man. The film shows her doing just that, wearing a black leather minidress and boots, and carrying a bullwhip. However, she doesn’t actually use it as a whip, and instead uses it to tie a man’s arms behind his back. She rips off his clothes, forces lemon juice into his mouth, rubs pieces of fruit on him and ends with implied 69. It’s not clear in the diegesis if this is actually happened or is something she’s imagined.

This is the only known film work of the director George Rodgers. None of the actors turn up anywhere else (likely pseudonyms). The Abnormal Female came at the end of the softcore sexploitation era, just before the hardcore era of the 1970s.

The Girls on F Street, also known as The Maidens of Fetish Street, is a 1966 exploitation film (IMDB), directed by Saul Resnick. A lot of the film is padded out with the voiceover sermonizing, and shots of 1960s downtown Los Angeles, including landmarks like the Flight of Angels inclined railway.

Girls has even less of a coherent narrative than The Abnormal Female. There are moments when it attempts to present itself as set in the 1920s, mainly through talk overheard on the radio, but all of the fashions and hairstyles are 1960s contemporary.

It’s best understood as the stream of consciousness of and/or about Nick, a lonely middle-aged guy who haunts Los Angeles’ burlesque theatres and porn shops (where you can see glimpses of Eric Stanton and Gene Bilbrew art in their natural habitat). The film shifts to vignettes that may be Nick’s fantasies or memories: a female sculptor and her female model, a Rubenesque burlesque dancer performing on stage, living as male companion of an elderly brothel madam. One scene, actually shot with sound and skilled lighting, is more of a two-hand one-act play between a sex worker and her client.

For kink, the main vignette involves Nick somehow becoming the gigolo of Hilda, an elderly woman who runs some kind of brothel. Hilda uses a flogger (possibly a martinet) to make a brunette woman dance to an antique gramophone, while Nick watches. When Hilda steps out for some reason, she forbids Nick to have any female company. Instead, a black woman named Toni arrives, and the film alternates between Toni fighting off Nick’s sexual advances, Nick washing Toni in a bubble bath, or Toni tying Nick up, pouring molasses all over him, and applying the contents of an ant farm. When Hilda and the brunette woman return, this sparks off a three-way cat fight between Hilda, Toni and the brunette woman. Nick watches for a while, then gets bored and goes elsewhere.

How much of this is “real” in the diegesis and how much is fantasy is not at all clear. In a scene near the end, Nick and a blond woman (presumably a sex worker) lie side by side in bed, not moving at all, just resting. As if he cannot imagine himself being content, Hilda suddenly appears with her whip and beats Nick and the woman (though the whip marks are obviously makedup).

Girls does reflect the contradictions and volatility of male sexual frustration. Nick is poised on the knife edge between masochistic worship of women and sadistic domination, and the seductive woman who says yes with a price and the punishing mother. The final image of the film is Nick locked into the porn shop by the security gate, yelling, “Let me out!”, then crying.

Director Saul Resnick was involved in a few other exploitation films in the 1950s and 1960s. Few of the cast appeared in anything else, with the exception of Kellie Everts, the model in the lesbian sculptor scene, who appeared in a few adult videos in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Addendum: Kellie Everts, also known as Rasa von Werder, had a remarkable life before and after this film. According to her personal web site, she was a dancer, a stripper, specifically a “stripper for god” who did sermons on stage, a photographer, and claims to be “the progenitor of female bodybuilding”. She had pictorials in Esquire in 1975 and Playboy in 1977 (one of nine total appearances). Her other main website, Woman Thou Art God, talks about her philosophy of spiritual matriarchy, her experiences as a pro domme, and how natural breastfeeding is lovemaking (“nutritive coitus”) between a mother and her baby. Her personal Youtube channel was active up until March 2019.

One Night at McCool’s (IMDB) is a 2001 sex comedy film. Three men become obsessed with one beautiful woman, resulting in a tangle of sex, greed, and murder. (Though it’s rated R, there’s no actual nudity.)

For our purposes, the only point of interest is one of the men: Carl, a yuppie lawyer who gets into a submissive relationship with the woman, Jewel. She includes the demand for legal advice as part of their scene, and Carl happily agrees. Though materially successful with a wife and child, Carl is unhappy, sexually unsatisfied, and immediately smitten with Jewel.

For Jewel, this is purely instrumental. She needs legal advice to get her dream house, and adopts the domme persona in the same way she plays the damsel in distress to manipulate other men. There’s only one scene of her in the dominatrix outfit.

Later, Carl tries to set up a date with Jewel in the house she has appropriated, and puts on leather assless pants and a bondage harness. This is interrupted by another of Jewel’s admirers in a full motorcycle cop uniform. Circumstances conspire to put Carl in situations that look like he is gay, as if no “real” man would ever wear such a thing. Many other characters immediately assume that he is. The gay-panic comedy even arranges to put the three male characters and a “cigar store Indian” in a lineup looking like the Village People, and then follows it up with a shootout set to “YMCA”.

The shootout that ends the movie spares the first man of the three to meet Jewel, and kills the cop character in a blaze of masculine glory. Carl flees the scene barefoot and in bondage gear, only to be crushed to death by a falling dumpster in the last scene. This feels weirdly punitive for a character who has transgressed the least compared to the others. Can’t he just go back to his wife?

One Night is meant as a comedy, and arguably has no obligation to educate on BDSM. Still, it is uncomfortable that many of the scenes with Carl are based on the assumption that a man willingly in a submissive position is, in and of itself, funny. It comes close to the rare appearances of a homosexual man or a lesbian woman in media of early generations, as an object of either ridicule or fear. Having apparently forsaken masculine dignity, Carl might as well be dead.

Secret Diary of a Call Girl (IMDB) is a British dramedy TV series focusing on Belle, also known as Hannah (played by Billie Piper), a young woman experiences in different kinds of sex work.

Episode 4 of series 1 (untitled, premiered 18 October 2007), directed by series creator Lucy Prebble, starts off with Belle having a session with her tax accountant, as he’s also a client. He says, “I don’t want you to be nice to me.” She doesn’t know anything about this, commenting later, “All that pain and paraphernalia, I don’t really get it.”

This request sends Belle to her manager.

Manager: “I was a domme for a while. I tell you, there’s no fucking money in it.”

Belle: “I’m not changing career. I just want to give it a go.”

Manager: “Good. I understand. You do this job long enough, you’ll want to kick the shit out of a man, eventually.”

The manager puts her in touch with “Mistress Sirona” (Sally Dexter).

While it is good that Belle seeks out advice from someone experienced in the field before her session with her accountant, this is where the episode goes over the top. First, “Mistress Sirona” drops by Belle’s flat in full dominatrix outfit. Second, she’s accompanied by her male slave, who strips naked as soon as he enters Belle’s place. Apparently, she’s combining her social call to Belle with a client session.

Sirona: “So why not send your client my way?

Belle: “I’m curious.

Sirona: “Curiosity is a first step to enlightenment.”

Belle: “I thought it killed the cat.”

Sirona: “Belle, I like you. I like anyone with an open mind and clean shoes. Just to be clear, though, I take this job seriously.

Belle: “Of course.

Sirona: “Some people meditate, some people pray.

Belle: “Sure.

Sirona: “And fetish is not something for working girls to retire to once their tits have started to sag.

Belle: “My tits are fine.” 

Sirona gives Belle her brief introduction to the practice and theory of kink, including impact play and bondage on her slave.

Belle: “What about the sex?”

Sarona: “There is no sex.”

Belle: “None at all? How do you know when you’re finished?”

Sarona: “My watch beeps. I’m a goddess to my slaves. That’s what they want. I wouldn’t stoop to sex with them. Plus I’m a married woman.”

Belle: “He knows?”

Sarona: “Of course. Our sitting room’s a dungeon.”

In her book Dominatrix, Danielle J Lindemann explores the particular role of professional dominatrixes and their relationships to other types of sex workers. She says that pro dommes, their clients, and the mainstream media have jointly cultivated a professional mystique around the female dominant sex worker. The idea is that they are an elite with specialized expertise, who are authentically interested in dominance; not that they’re women, performing a job with varying degrees of skill, dedication and enthusiasm, for clients with money.

Secret Diary buys into this mystique, and doesn’t critique any of it. It even copies the “healing” rationale of pro domme work, as Sirona tells Belle that what she provides is “a huge relief.”

In a montage in the middle of the episode, Belle shops for the clothing, the implements and the furnishings for this new role. She even redecorates her flat with a pair of giant Gothic candelabras. There are obligatory shots of the arrays of bondage and impact gear, and a full-body shot of Belle in her new latex dress, corset and heels. Presumably her accountant is paying for all of this, even though Belle might not keep any of it. This fits with the consumerist ethos of Secret Diary, which links upscale escort work with a luxurious lifestyle. As Barbara Ehrenreich et al. observed in Re-Making Love, sadomasochism is the perfect form of sexuality for a consumerist society.

One of the problems of this episode is that Belle treats the role of dominatrix as something she can acquire in a package, rather than something she has grown into. When she’s in the full outfit, she’s not completely comfortable, which is emphasized by the squeaking of the rubber dress as she moves and her awkwardness on the high heels. This fits one of the series’ themes: Belle trying on different identities at the behest of her clients.

When the accountant shows up, Belle says in an aside to the camera:

“Everything’s worked out in advance. The script, the scenario, even the insults I’m going to use have been agreed with over email.”

While it’s good that this is made clear, wouldn’t showing the negotiation between Belle and the accountant have been interesting? Perhaps, but it would have detracted from the glamorous fantasy.

As the scene progresses, Belle stumbles a few times. First, she doesn’t know how to read her sub’s responses. She has to ask for “Red, amber or green?” “Green,” he says.

Belle (to camera): “How do you know if you’re doing it right? In my job, if you make a man come, that’s success. With this I can’t even tell if he’s enjoying it.”

Her second problem is that she runs out of things to do to him. After a quick call to Sirona for advice, she puts him to work scrubbing her toilet. While this keeps him busy, she makes a few calls.

The B-plot is that Belle has just learned that Ben, the guy friend she has a crush on, is getting married. This puts a rift in their friendship, and Belle responds by pushing him away. Later, when she finally takes one of his calls during her session with the accountant, he points out that she’s always secretive and controlling, and she’s punishing him by avoiding her calls. In other words, sadomasochistic dynamics of control, punishment and suffering can occur in any relationship.

Belle gets angry and starts to take it out on her accountant, vigorously using all of the implements. He red-safewords but she keeps going for a few more strokes until he calls her “Belle.” “I don’t want scars.” (Note, however, that the accountant says he can’t have marks, not that Belle has gone over his physical limits.)

Belle is stunned, sits down, asks Accountant to help her undo her dress.
They apologize to each other. Belle recommends Sirona to him.

The episode ends with Belle telling her friend Ben about her sex work.

Belle (voice over): “Sirona was right. Hurting people is a very special talent. S&M has taught me one thing. Maybe absolute control isn’t always best. Maybe sometimes, you’ve got to give a bit away.”

While Secret Diary is fairly positive in its portrayal of BDSM, it’s also pretty shallow; there’s only so much one can cover in 22 minutes. Much like Personal Services, it’s focused on the emotional-commercial transaction between hetero male clients and female providers, and doesn’t explore adjacent areas like non-commercial BDSM or maledom/femsub interactions. Certainly no indication of why a woman would want to be a top/dominant for any reason other than money.

Belle/Hannah was played by Billie Piper, best known as companion Rose Tyler in the revival of Doctor Who. Mistress Sirona was played by Sally Dexter, who also played a dominatrix character in Adult Babies (2017).

IMDB First aired 18 November 1998

DaVinci’s Inquest was a Canadian crime drama that aired from 1998 to 2005. The lead character of coroner Dominic DaVinci is based on real-life Vancouver coroner and later mayor Larry Campbell. 

As is typical for this sub-genre, episode S01E07, “The Stranger Within”, begins with the discovery of a dead sex worker. In this case, she’s dumped in a parking lot. 

The medical examiner reveals, first, that the victim, Allison Cody, had signs of multiple beatings, which leads DaVinci to suspect sadomasochism. One of the major threads of this episode is the indeterminate cause of her death, which appears to be a pulmonary embolism that might be caused by the bruises from her beatings.

Second, the ME says, “This is one where all is not as it appears to be.” She pulls back the sheet with a flourish, like some 19th century showman with a cabinet of curiosities. She points out that the victim’s jaw is strong and squarish, she has breast implants, her hips are narrow and flat, and she has a “surgically constructed vagina.”

Older cop: “Get the hell out of here.”

DaVinci: “She was a he?”

Younger cop: “Pretty good looking man, hey, Leo?”

ME: “You’re going to have to change the gender on your paperwork.”

From a 2020 perspective, it’s startling just how crude this show is in its treatment of a transwoman (who is dead and can’t speak up for herself). Almost everyone persists in calling Allison “Alan” and uses male pronouns. Her body is treated as a puzzle, something inherently deceptive and even repulsive, with a feminine appearance but a male truth. Even though Allison was post-operative, had been living as a woman for years, and had ID in her post-transition name, it wasn’t enough for these people to respect her gender. The victim’s dead body determines their identity, not the life they lived or how they identified. 

We meet only two people who knew Allison when she was alive: her ex-wife, who still seems deeply resentful, and the pro domme she worked with, Mistress Harriet (played by Lisa Howard), who is almost the only person who uses “she” pronouns to talk about Allison.

DaVinci says, “I speak for the dead.” But in this case, he is woefully lacking in empathy for the deceased. And his drive to determine the cause of Allison’s death may only be endangering someone else. 

DaVinci tracks down Mistress Harriet and starts pressuring her to tell what happened. Harriet lawyers up and says she has to keep her clients confidential. Eventually he convinces her to meet with him one on one as a private conversation. 

Their meeting is set up like a date, in the middle of a busy restaurant. A lot of their conversation has more to do with DaVinci’s curiosity than the case. 

DaVinci: “In your opinion, what is it these people want?”

Domme: “Well, it’s not about sex, in most cases.”

DaVinci: “Really?”

Domme: “Yeah. I mean, sometimes it is, but in my experience those are the rare exceptions. If you’re submissive, we call them slaves–”

DaVinci: “Slaves?”

Domme: “Yeah. Then you’re seeking domination, or a release from something.”

DaVinci: “Something you can’t get in your straight life?”

Domme: “Basically, yeah. Sometimes it’s an extension, a very extreme extension, of their personality. They act it out in a safe environment where they’re not judged as freaks, outsiders.”

DaVinci: “So Alan [sic], he [sic] was a submissive.”

Domme: “To a degree. Have a little trouble with this concept?”

DaVinci: “Well, yeah. I don’t get the attraction in slavery.”

Domme: “You’ve never engaged in a submissive act?”

DaVinci: “Excuse me?”

Domme: “Never allowed your partner to dominate you?”

DaVinci: “This isn’t about me. This is about your clients.”

Domme: [gets flirty] “You certainly have something in common with my clients. You’re very secretive about your personal desires.”

The domme later explains on record that Allison had finished a session and was having a cigarette when she just slumped over. Harriet reveals the client who was present, and DaVinci interviews him in private. 

The client fits the stereotype of the high-status CEO who submits in the dungeon. 

DaVinci: “I’ve been having a lot of difficulty understanding what this activity satisfies. I mean, a man like you, with such a great life. You have people that you care for, you have a position in society that many people would envy.”

Client: “With all that, comes a lot of responsibility, and that comes with a lot of pressure. Some people might take a drink or jump out of an airplane. I don’t know how to explain it. I used to jump on people. I used to hurt them. I don’t do that anymore. I get a release from what I do.”

This leads to another twist: before Allison died, the client beat her, on Mistress Harriet’s orders. This further muddies the waters of the cause of Allison’s death. 

After two autopsies came back with “undetermined” cause of death, the case is dropped. 

Da Vinci: “That leaves us with a legal act between two consenting adults.

This episode also ends with a dead sex worker. Somebody threw Mistress Harriet out of a window to her death. 

This episode has a lot of kinkphobia as well as transphobia. Mistress Harriet is put in a very difficult position between the police and her elite clients. DaVinci in particular goes out of his way to pressure her for no reason other than his own curiosity about BDSM. (He could just get a book out of the library instead.) 

The death of Allison ultimately seems to be just an unpredictable accident, which is better than blaming BDSM, but it is entangled in a lot of shame and secrecy. Procedural TV series like Da Vinci’s Inquest are ultimately not a good way to explore minority subcultures, because the narratives revolve around the revelation of truth after the initial lies, and judgement from an outside authority. A police detective or doctor doesn’t interact with BDSM practitioners when things are going fine and everybody is having a good time. They only get involved when somebody is dead.

Castle S02E16, “The Mistress Always Spanks Twice”, March 8, 2010 IMDB

Sooner or later it seems every police or lawyer show does an episode about BDSM. Castle, about a bestselling mystery writer who uses his connections to ride along on police investigations, is no exception.

We open with the discovery of yet another dead sex worker, typical for this genre. She’s in lingerie, hanging from custom bondage cuffs, and slathered in caramel sauce. 

In the narrative logic of Castle, the murder of a person is less important than the series’ leads flirting. As the investigation proceeds, BDSM figures in two ways.

First, it’s a topic for the homosocial bonding between Castle and the other (all male) detectives. They research online and call what they find “nasty”, and Castle chimes in to say, “That’s illegal in twelve states.”

Secondly, it’s a topic for detective Kate Beckett and writer Richard Castle’s ongoing flirtation. Beckett proves to be knowledgeable about kink culture and equipment, and the costume design often puts her in a black leather jackets and gloves. She mentions that she knows about “clubs”, though she seems to confuse them with “houses of domination.” Castle quips at her: “You know, you should moonlight. Seriously. You would make a fortune.” This is another backhanded compliment at women in authority positions. 

The victim, Jessica, turns out to be a PhD student who is studying professional dominatrixes. Later we learn that she is also working as a pro domme, alias “Mistress Venom”, though this appears to be part of the study and not a matter of economic necessity. 

For unclear reasons, Beckett pretends to be submitting her boyfriend, Castle, for discipline. The house of domination is presented as a place of glamour, where Beckett is at ease but Castle is uncomfortable. 

Castle: “This place looks like a law firm.”

Beckett: “What did you think it was going to be, torture wheels and women in corsets?”

Castle: “Well, yeah.”

Beckett: “That’s in the back.”

[…]

Beckett: “Do you think we could gag him?”

Castle: “Remember my safeword is ‘apples’.”

Note that “safeword” is used without any explanation, as if assuming this concept would be familiar to the audience or understandable from context. 

The dungeon owner goes by Lady Irena, who fits the stereotype 

Irena: “Don’t let the leather fool you. I used to be a partner at a law firm.”

Castle: “Wow.”

Irena: “When you dominate and manipulate men in every boardroom and courtroom that you’re in, this just seemed like the natural progression.” 

Irena also flirts with Castle, putting him on the defensive. 

Irena is does reveal that “Mistress Venom” was Jessica, then refuses to divulge information about her clients. 

Later, Beckett comments, “She wants to protect her clients. What about her girls?”

They find out one of Venom’s clients was nicknamed “Sam I Am,” a Smart Assed Masochist who provokes people into punishing him. Beckett suggests that Castle is a SAM himself. 

When interrogating the SAM suspect, Beckett plays up her dominatrix image, zipping up her leather jacket and barking orders as soon as she enters the room. 

Suspect: “It’s fantasy.”

Beckett: “But the fantasies weren’t enough. And so you had to make your dreams come true.”

Suspect: “That’s not possible.”

Beckett: “The more she said no, the more you became obsessed. You didn’t want to be the submissive. You wanted to dominate her and the ultimate domination in murder.”

This is a stretch as a theory of the crime, as a SAM wants to push just to the point of being punished. However, the SAM turns out to be another red herring suspect. 

The suspicion turns back to the dungeon owner for seeing clients off hours, or threatening the dungeon’s reputation, but the killer ultimately turns out to be Jessica’s obsessed, codependent roommate. She was the origin for Jessica’s interest in sadomasochistic relationships to begin with. Instead of kink, Jessica’s murder turns out to be more about an obsessed lesbian, which is more misogynistic than kink-phobic.

There’s almost nothing in the way of actual BDSM play, which is to be expected in a network TV show. The sexuality is displaced onto ogling the outfits worn by the pro dommes. 

Dominatrixes are an easy sell. They are, according to the popular view, beautiful and glamorous women who make ridiculous amounts of money by exploiting weak men. Like the medieval story of “Phyllis and Aristotle” or “Mounted Aristotle”, the dominatrix simultaneously defies and upholds conservative gender roles. The dyad of dominant woman and submissive man is threatening, but can easily be managed with humor. This means power and violence of the pro domme isn’t “real”. The viewer can console themselves that, as provocative as this is, it’s ultimately all just a joke. The man can walk away at any time, and if he doesn’t, that’s his own weakness and foolishness; he deserves what he gets. A male dom and female sub dyad can’t be managed in the same way. It’s too real. 

The B plot of the episode concerns Castle’s discomfort with his studious teenage daughter flirting with being a cheerleader. Wearing a friend’s uniform, she says, “It’s totally not me, and I like it.” She concludes her arc by saying that cheerleading is too demanding a lifestyle, especially with all the other things she wants to do. It was a fun place to visit, but she wouldn’t want to live there.

Castle doesn’t have anything substantial to say about BDSM or sex work.

Law & Order: Special Victims Unit S11E12 “Shadow”. Aired Jan 13, 2010

At least there’s one police procedural show with BDSM that doesn’t begin with the discovery of a dead sex worker. 

The premise is axe-murder of a high-status couple. Most of this episode is about high-status people embezzling money from their families or from their employers. 

The detectives need to turn a witness, Nigel Prestwick, to get the killer. Detective Ramsey (a guest star) says he’s a “milquetoast”. “Typical fifth-generation WASP elite. Inbreeding’s melted their brains.” He also mentions Prestwick pays his dues to something called the Donatien Society. 

Detective Olivia Benson perks up. “Mister Milquetoast is not so vanilla.”

In Prestwick’s office, Benson is all in black and very forceful/seductive. “You see, Nigel, I know that men have needs. But when a wife can’t fill those needs, men have to look elsewhere. […] But sometimes those needs are misunderstood, judged, unfairly by society. On your knees, worm. Now.”

He complies. 

Benson puts up her black leather boot next to him. Prestwick immediately starts fondling and licking her boot. 

Ramsey runs into the room with a camera and snaps a picture. 

Benson: “Get up.” [To Ramsey] “You owe me a new pair of boots.” 

[…]

Benson: “Your wife is going to lose respect for you after she finds out about your dirty little fetish. You think you’re pretty clever there, naming your secret society after the Marquis de Sade? Donatien Alphonse Francois?”

[…]

Benson: “Because last year we arrested two sadists who were members of your little club. And I remember we seized a whole lot of videos. We should check the evidence locker to see if our friend Nigel here is on tape because I specifically remember there was one on Nazi role–”

Prestwick: “Enough!”

SVU has always been the black sheep of the Law & Order family, with stunt casting and bizarre plot twists. Sometimes it is understanding in its treatment of non-normative sexualities and sometimes it is deeply phobic. As we’ve seen in other texts, sadomasochism or fetishism is treated as a disease of the decadent elite. People who practice them are overprivileged weirdos, worthy of Ramsey’s contempt and Benson’s disgust. There’s no mention of Prestwick doing anything illegal. The detectives are straight-up entrapping and blackmailing him to get his testimony. 

As for the “Donatien Society”, this is a case of knowing just enough to get it wrong. The Marquis de Sade wasn’t into feet. 

Another episode bucks the cliche by not opening with the discovery of a dead sex worker. This time it’s a controversial artist named Victor Moore (loosely modeled on Robert Mapplethorpe, who died in 1989), found strangled to death with a noose around his neck, inside his workspace/dungeon. The investigation delves into the sexual fringe and its intersection with the city’s elite. 

Law & Order is usually more thoughtful and less sensational than other procedural shows, and this story does engage with the issues of sadomasochism. 

Greevey, one of the two detectives on the case, is the most prejudiced against Moore and his art. “Some work. If I did stuff like this, I wouldn’t advertise either.”

The detectives question a man who knew the victim casually, but wouldn’t date him. 

Logan: “Let me get this straight. You’re asked out on a date by a guy who published pictures of people hanging upside down in chains. And you’re tempted, but there’s something about him you don’t trust?”

While it’s entirely possible that Moore was coming on creepy to the guy, the Implication is that a person who makes sexually violent art must be dangerous. 

Greevey privately asks his superior to be taken off the case, as he’s Catholic. 

Greevey: “This thing disgusts me. This guy’s pictures: porn. If that’s art, Hugh Hefner’s Michaelangelo. […] Chances are, living that life, he’ll be dead in a couple of years anyway. As far as I’m concerned he’s going to the same place. […] I still believe in sin. […] These freaks aren’t going to the same place you and I are. […] Yesterday, we walk into this leather bar, high noon. The place still reeks of stale sex. We’re not talking about beautiful people here.”

The chief says it’s about the crime, not the people involved in the crime, and sends him back to work. 

Later on, Greevey reconsiders when he discovers that Moore was a Catholic who gave to charities and supported his parents in retirement. 

The episode sometimes takes a “hate the sin, love the sinner” view, in that Moore is worthy of justice in spite of his works and his lifestyle, which don’t have value on their own. There is a line drawn between “us regular people” and “them freaks.”

The investigation leads to Henry Rothman, the city’s commissioner of artistic affairs, and then to the wealthy and domineering Elizabeth Hendrick. Logan notices that Hendrick owns a leather glove identical to one custom-made by a leatherworker who knew the victim. 

The detectives arrest Rothman, but it becomes increasingly clear that Hendrick was involved at the least. 

Much of the middle of the episode focuses on the question of whether Moore died because of suicide, an accident, negligence or intent. 

ADA Stone: “Erica [Rothman’s attorney] will argue that Moore consented to being tortured. She can just about prove that he liked being beaten up, but I can work around that.”

DA Schiff: “You can consent to being tortured but you can’t consent to being murdered. You still have to prove intent. Do we know that Rothman wanted to hurt him?” […] “I don’t care what consenting adults do in their bedrooms or elsewhere. That’s their business. But Rothman’s a public figure. He’s a role model. He has an obligation not to behave like this.” 

Again, this is tolerance, not acceptance, of sadomasochism and bisexuality. It’s also debatable whether Rothman’s status as a public figure matters. Are they required to police their personal lives?

Rothman’s attorney says, “My client is not compelled to rescue someone who is risking his own life. […] No matter what you think my client was doing with Victor Moore, this was a guy who begged to be hurt as part of the game. He was a masochist.” I.e. framing Moore’s death as an accident and/or suicide. 

The last third of the episode revolves around the wealthy, domineering Elizabeth Hendrick and her role in the death of Moore. 

Schiff: “If she’s into this scene, if she is the dominant one, what was going on that night?”

Stone visits a psychiatrist to get insight into the real villain of the piece. 

Psychiatrist: “Every relationship, Mr. Stone, work, at home with your wife and kids, every relationship is about power.”

Stone: “But I don’t beat people up for kicks. A dominatrix, a woman who plays a dominant role in a sexual relationship, would she play the same role in another situation, not a sexual one, but one that was emotionally charged?”

Psychiatrist: “It’s learned behavior, operant conditioning. Press the right button, you get the right response. The question is finding the button.”

After a search of Hendrick’s home turns up black market drugs and bondage gear in her hope chest, the district attorneys discuss what to do. 

Stone: “You have three consenting adults, consenting to certain activities and games, and one of them dies. Who’s responsible?”

[…] 

Schiff: “No law against owning a leather jacket.” 

Stone: “There might be against what you do when you’re wearing it.”

The leather crafter admits she sold Hendrick the leather gloves. “I don’t get close to the customers. They’re all playing with fifty-one cards. […] There’s a couple of clubs. One where a lot of rich people go. It’s Club X.”

The brief scene at Club X, in mid play-party is the most sensational part of the episode. The venue is said to function like an actual club, with members playing dues. 

Club owner: “She liked to have slaves. […] She liked to watch things get a little out of control. […] Last month, she had this slave and it got crazy. Damn near killed a kid.”

Eventually, before a grand jury, Rothman testifies that he was present when Moore set up a noose for himself, but when Moore accidentally knocked over the chair he was standing on, Hendrick forbid him to help. “You have to understand. I had to do what she told me. […] It was part of our game.”

Hendrick tells a different story to the grand jury. 

Hendrick: “Mr. Moore invited me to join him in what he called a performance artwork. We were rehearsing it with Mr. Rothman. We’d done this before but the men were never very good at it. So I was doing my best to help them. I left the men alone for just a few minutes. When I returned, I found Mr. Moore dead and the chair several feet away. Mr. Rothman was sobbing on the floor, and he kept saying over and over again, ‘I let him die.’ It was a tragic mistake made by incompetent men. I know I should never have left them alone.”

Stone: “You knew you should never have left them alone? Does that mean you knew Mr. Moore would be hurt if you did?”

Hendrick: “I mean… I know now I shouldn’t have left them alone.”

In between court sessions, Stone sees Hendrick yelling at Rothman. 

Rothman returns to the grand jury and changes his testimony to say that he was solely responsible for Moore’s death, and Hendrick wasn’t in the room.

Rothman later hangs himself, leaving behind a Polaroid of Hendrick letting Moore die. The detectives arrest her. 

While “Prisoner of Love” post-humously humanizes the victim as a complex character, the perpetrator is not developed in the same way. She’s a one-dimensional sadist, fitting the stereotype of the masculinized decadent female aristocrat. 

The rest of the people involved in the kink world encountered in this story either squirm with shame or distance themselves from it. This was a glimpse into another time, just at the beginning of the 1990s before alternative sexualities were more visible.

Bound (2015) (not to be confused with Bound (1996), the lesbian-noir thriller directed by the Wachowskis) has an interesting pedigree. It was made by The Asylum, best known as the producers of numerous “mockbusters”, low budget, direct-to-video knock-offs of popular Hollywood films. Usually, these are science fiction, disaster and horror films (e.g. Transmorphers, based on Transformers), but a few belong to other genres. Bound is The Asylum’s take on Fifty Shades of Grey (which, in turn, is a take on the Twilight series of books and films). 

Let’s get one thing clear. Bound is not a great film. The production values are low, the acting isn’t great, entire scenes seem to be missing from the story, and there are more than a few plot holes.

And yet….

It is a better cinematic treatment of a woman’s introduction to BDSM than Fifty Shades of Grey. 

Whereas the protagonist of Fifty Shades is introduced as an asexual, virgin college student, Bound’s lead, Michelle Mulan (Charisma Carptenter) is a mature woman who has a career, a lavish house, an almost-adult daughter (and presumably an ex-husband somewhere), and a vibrator for when her lover leaves her unsatisfied. Michelle’s difficulty in juggling these facets of her life feels realistic.

(There are other details that are less realistic, such as Michelle’s boss also being her father, or the gigantic mansion she owns.)

Michelle’s frustrations are relieved by Ryan (Bryce Draper), a younger man. He’s cut from the same cloth as Christian Grey: handsome, mysterious, moody, associated with wealth and luxury. They even made his surname “Black.” He just inserts herself in her life, issuing commands to her. However, there’s a push-pull between Ryan and Michelle over her boundaries that makes things interesting. 

Bound borrows a technique from Zalman King’s Red Shoe Diaries to soften the already soft-core sex scenes by adding dissolves, montages, color filters, slow-motion, and voice-overs. This produces a dream-like effect that is at odds with the usual hyperrealism of hardcore sex, on the assumption that it is more palatable to the desired middle-class heterosexual female audience (and broadcast regulators). 

However, Ryan goes through rants and mood swings that would have most women reaching for the pepper spray. After they have a dom-sub moment in her father/boss’ office, Ryan goes full-on megalomaniac.

Ryan: “He’s not your daddy anymore. I’m your father. I’m your master, your husband and your god. I’m your daddy. Be afraid of me. Be afraid of what I’ll do if you don’t obey me.”

Michelle’s reaction is weird. She doesn’t flee in terror, but neither does she seem turned on by this. She looks like she’s trying to figure out if he’s for real, or if this is a game she wants to play along with. As she keeps seeing him after this, it must be the latter. 

Apparently on the same night, they go to a play party, though this wasn’t a big set piece. The budgetary limitation shows how few extras they could show. 

After this, they go to the alley outside and make out (copying the sex-in-the-alley scene from Nine and an Half Weeks.)

Ryan: “What turned you on in there?”

Michelle: “The girl with the whip. And the way she was treating… her sub?”

Ryan: “Her sub.”

Michelle: “It made my whole body clench.”

They continue making out, with a guy in a leather mask watching down the alley. 

Michelle: “He can see, he can see.”

Ryan: “Let him watch.”

Michelle: “Red, red!”

If there was a scene in which Michelle was introduced to safewords, it was cut or never shot. Ryan does respect her safeword, and her boundary not to go to her place because her daughter is there. 

This leads to another set piece in Ryan’s private dungeon, and more tension about Michelle’s other obligations and her interest in being a dominant.

We’re told that Ryan is a car thief and a drug dealer, though just as hearsay. He’s definitely a predatory dominant with no respect for Michelle’s boundaries. When invited to a charity benefit run by Michelle’s father, Ryan fucks her in the bathroom, insults the other guests, and uses a remote controlled vibrator on her when she’s trying to talk business. Her affair with him keeps interfering with her work, which leads to being called on the carpet before her dad/boss. But she goes back to Ryan for stress relief and pleasure. 

Michelle: “Have you ever been a submissive?”

Ryan: “Maybe.”

Michelle: “Can I spank you?”

Ryan: “No.” 

Michelle: “No, you don’t want to be spanked, or no, you don’t want to be spanked by me?”

Ryan doesn’t answer.

Michelle: “Is that what happened in the restaurant that day with Alana?”

Ryan: “She’s a psychopath. Whatever she told you is lies.”

Michelle: “Well, I’ve never met her. She didn’t tell me anything. I did see her in a video, though.”

Ryan: “You’ve been researching on your own. Is that where this is coming from?”

Michelle: “Mm-hmm.”

Ryan: “This is my world. You’re not ready for it. Far from it. You should say, ‘Thank you, Master’ and that’s all.”

Michelle: “Thank you, Master.” [bit of insolence there]

They kiss. She teases him a bit in the kiss. 

Michelle: “I still want to try it, though.”

Ryan: “Leave. Get out now. Get the fuck out now!”

After her introduction to kink by Ryan, Michelle takes initiative and investigates BDSM on her own, thinking about being a dominant. This is another major difference from FSOG, which views female dominance with a kind of horror.

She goes to an adult store and later the BDSM club, by herself. There she meets Alana, a dominant who warns her about Ryan. 

Alana: “Can I give you some advice, Michelle? Be careful of Ryan. He’s dangerous. He hurts people, not just their bodies, but their lives. He gets off on it.”

Michelle: “Why should I believe you?”

Alana: “Don’t. Just thought someone should warn you to watch out.”

Michelle: “Why do you care?”

Alana: “Because people like Ryan give people like us a bad name. These are loving, creative, smart people here, and Ryan is a predator.”

Michelle: “So what does that make me? The victim?”

Alana: “You’re feisty. Looks to me like you’ve been on the wrong side of the whip.” 

Bound may not pass the Bechdel test, but it does show women in solidarity against a predatory man. 

Later that night, Michelle returns home and finds her almost-adult daughter tied up (not nude) in bed with Ryan. Michelle tries to untie Dara, while Ryan rants “I am your master! Don’t fucking forget it.” and “You’re weak! Both of you! You’re always going to be weak!”

This is where the plot runs into problems, as Michelle threatens to call the police and Ryan says he’s untouchable because he didn’t technically have sex with her. (Let’s see that hold up in court.) Michelle throws him out and re-bonds with her crying daughter, but doesn’t call the police.

After more frustrations at work and harassing texts from Ryan, Michelle goes to his place and confronts him. Ryan calls her a “weak, pathetic divorcee” and “I turned you from a mousy little weakling into a sex goddess who worshiped the ground I walked on.” This leads to a fight in which Michelle knocks Ryan out.

She drags him to the dungeon, strips him naked, puts him in a bondage harness and pulls him up by his wrists. (No frontal male nudity.) Michelle says she can call the police on him (which she could have done already), and “What I want is to send a very clear message that I can and will kill you.”

This consists of her doing a fairly mild impact play on him, though probably the real impact is psychological, of forcing a control freak like Ryan into a situation he can’t control 

Michelle: “Ryan, what did you learn?”

Ryan: “To stay away from you and your daughter.”

Michelle: “Good boy! Good boy.”

She leaves him tied up, after telling him someone is coming and he will have to explain the harassing messages to her daughter on his hard drive. (Wouldn’t the text messages to her be enough?)

Michelle, newly confident, returns to her office and pulls off a deal that saves her dad/boss’ company, which makes her a partner in the company. 

Later, the guy with whom she made a deal invites her to dinner. 

She grabs him by his necktie like a leash. “Sure you don’t want something kinky?” 

Jesse: “Yes, mistress.”

Michelle smiles.

Bound has porn-video-like production values compared to a major studio film like Fifty Shades of Grey, but its sexual and gender politics are far more advanced. It ends with the aspirational fantasy that a woman’s sexual power and professional power are complementary. 
Charisma Carpenter (Michelle) is probably best known as Cordelia on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. She also played the dominatrix-like priestess Triana on the fantasy TV series Legend of the Seeker. Director and writer Jared Cohn has directed many other films for The Asylum. Co-writer Delondra Mesa is another Asylum inmate.