Desperate Housewives was a mystery/dramedy TV series concerning a group of four housewives in a suburban neighborhood who attempt to solve the mystery of the death of one of their friends. They also deal with various other challenges to their families.

One of the four wives, Bree (played by Marcia Cross), learns that her husband Rex (played by Steven Culp) has been cheating on her with another married woman, Maisy Gibbons (played by Sharon Lawrence), who is a sex worker and dominatrix. Maisy took this up for money when her husband lost his job.

To understand Maisy Gibbons, you first need to know how she spent her afternoons. Her mornings were spent running errands for her husband. Her evenings were spent washing dishes and helping with homework. But her afternoons, well, they were spent in the company of men. Frustrated. Misunderstood. Lonely men. Willing to pay money to feel a little less lonely. And Maisy Gibbons was willing to help them.

Mary Alice Young, the deceased and omniscient narrator of the series

As we’ve seen before, Maisy’s sex work and dominance is normalized by being framed as a form of gender-appropriate nurturing and support of her family.

It’s Maisy who tells Bree that her husband has sexual desires he’s afraid to admit to her. Bree was raised with very traditional ideas of marriage and sexuality, so this revelation hits her hard.

Maisy: “Why don’t you just tell Bree what you need? Tell her what you want.”

Rex: “Because she’d say no.”

Maisy: “So? I’ve said no to some things you’ve asked me to do.”

Rex: “Nah, that’s different. I don’t care if you reject me.”

Maisy snaps her fingers and Rex lies face down on the floor.

Maisy: “Rex, trust me on this. Sometimes, when you love somebody, you’ve got to make sacrifices for them.”

Rex: “Love or passion? That’s an awful choice to make.”

Maisy: “Yes, it is.

As Maisy walks on Rex’s naked back in stilettos, the camera focuses on the portrait of Maisy’s seemingly perfect family. Sex work and sadomasochism are portrayed in opposition to the upper-middle-class nuclear family ideal.

In episode 14, when Bree has reunited with Rex, he admits to her that he goes to Maisy because he wants to be dominated.

Bree: “You had an affair. You went to another woman for sex to give you something I couldn’t. At least have the decency to tell me what that something is.”

Rex: “Bree. I can’t.”

Bree: “Why not? Rex, please tell me. Let me prove to you how much I love you.”

Rex: (deep breath) “I like to be dominated.”

Bree: “Huh?”

Rex: “Sexually?”

Bree: “Huh?”

Rex: “Never mind.”

Bree: “Rex, please, I want to understand.”

Rex’s method of teaching Bree is to show her a video. We see them sitting apart on the couch, while audio of a stereotypical femdom-malesub scene plays.

Bree: “What the hell did your mother do to you?”

Rex: “What?!”

Bree: “Come on. This just reeks of unresolved childhood trauma.”

Rex: “This has nothing to do with my mother, Bree. This is a preference.”

Bree: “It’s a perversion.”

Rex: “For god’s sake, you promised to be supportive.”

Bree: “What do you want me to say? ‘My husband likes to wear metal clamps around his nipples, hooray’?”

Rex: “I want you to say you’ll try it. Just once.”

Bree: “Try what? Hurting you? You actually want me to hurt you?”

Rex: “So I can feel pleasure, yes.”

Bree: “Fine.” She slaps his face. “So, was it good for you too?” She walks off. Rex has nothing to say.

Later that night, when they’re going to bed, Bree asks, “So how does this domination thing work?”

Rex digs a box out of the closet.

Rex: “So there’s nothing to be afraid of. Mostly we’ll be constructing simple scenarios and acting them out.”

Bree: “So, it’s like we’re in a little play.”

Rex: “Sort of. And if things do get too rough, we’ll have a control word. If one of us says it, the other backs off immediately.”

As far as it goes, this is an acceptable introduction to BDSM. It’s followed by some comic moments as they squabble over the choice of a safeword.

Rex lifts a pair of handcuffs out of the box.

Rex: “Handcuff me to the bed.” 

Bree hesitates.

Rex: “Bree, you are not going to regret taking this journey with me. This is going to infuse our marriage with more passion than you can imagine. You just have to trust me.”

Bree: “I do.” [Looks at the handcuffs.] “Would you mind if I ran these through the dishwasher once?”

Rex: “Sure.”

The last image of the episode is Bree looking at the handcuffs hanging in her dishwasher. In Bree’s ideal of domestic femininity, these items are contaminated– “dirty”– by their association with Maisy, the “bad” woman. Bree must ritually cleanse the cuffs before they can be recuperated into her ordered, clean, domestic space.

Later plotlines in the series include Maisy being arrested for prostitution and threatening to release the contents of her “little black book”, which would include Rex. As Bree’s family further disintegrates, she blurts out that Rex is into S&M to her pastor (S01E19). BDSM figures as another source of stress on Bree’s family and another secret to keep, rather than something that can strengthen her connection with her husband or give her pleasure. Rex was killed at the end of the first season anyway.

The killing-off of Rex suggests that, as we saw in One Night at McCool’s, a male who is submissive and/or masochistic cannot fit within normative views of gender. (Dominant and/or sadistic men can fit, as seen in the popularity of Secretary and Fifty Shades of Grey.)

Live Nude Girls is a 1995 comedy-drama film, about a group of women who gather for a bachelorette party and mostly talk about sex.

The film starts with women as tween girls having a slumber party in a tent with a poster of David Cassidy, the dawning of their sexuality. In the present, the women mostly talk about their early experiences in the 70s, like reading page 26 of The Godfather, or sneaking peeks at their fathers’ copies of Playboy. Some of these are acted out in fantasy sequences. These women have a complex tangle of desire, vanity, anxiety and shame in their past and present sexual lives. 

Some of the talk in the second act gets a little kinky. Dana Delaney (Jill) and Kim Cattrall’s (Jamie) characters (with Charlie’s Angels hair) prep for a threesome with a guy described as a “Jewish Jim Morrison”. Delaney’s character talks about being spanked. 

Jamie: “You know there are some hairy men I find attractive. How about Sonny in The Godfather?”

Jill: “Oh, yes! Up against the door, page 27!”

Jamie: “No, 26!”

The kinkiest scene is Jill’s fantasy of being brought before a mob godfather and bare-hand spanked, with a good look at her butt (or more likely her body double’s). This scene includes the common motif in spanking 

Jill: “There’s something about those gangsters that was such a turn-on. That was my biggest masturbation fantasy when I was in high school.”

Jamie: “Oof!”

Jill: “I pictured that den in The Godfather with all those men in it. I’ve cheated on the don’s son and the family finds out. So they bring me into the room and the don decides I must be punished. Sometimes he rubs an ice cube on my butt because it is so sore.”

Jill’s sister Rachel objects to telling everybody else. 

Jill: “That is why we are so messed up, because we are too ashamed to reveal ourselves. That’s why my fantasy is about being punished, because I’m ashamed. Don’t you get it? I mean, we’re women, so we’re supposed to be pure. We’re not supposed to have fantasies, because we’re supposed to be up on this pedestal.”

This is similar to the thesis of the book Female Perversions, in that female sexuality must engage in an elaborate game of misdirection to maintain female purity. “Rape” fantasies are just the most obvious form of this. 

Jill’s story makes Marcy flash back to her own childhood, when young Jill tried to get her to play a spanking game. Jill also finds her friend’s father’s hidden copy of Playboy which leads to a threatened spanking for Marcy from her father.

Later, Marcy talks about how her mother warned her as a child to stay away from ladies rooms at highway rest stops for fear of rapists. “Something about the idea of my very own rapist used to excite me.”

Her fantasy scene shows an adult Marcy, dressed like a Barbie doll, going to a highway rest stop and finding a handsome and studly biker. “I’ve been waiting for you, darling.”

Marcy: “I didn’t even know what a rapist was. He just kissed me and then asked if he could watch me pee.”

Not all of the fantasies are masochistic. Jill’s sister Rachel talks about her own fantasy.

Rachel: “I have a domination fantasy.”

Jamie: “Do tell.”

Rachel: “I make my cretin supervisor clean the bathroom.”

[Whiplash sound effect. Quick shot of man looking down toilet bowl with Rachel visible in the background]

Jill: “Rachel, that’s an intellectual fantasy, not a sexual one.”

Rachel: “Well…”

[Back in fantasy, man is cleaning the toilet. He wears a collar and a chain leash. Rachel, in a dominatrix outfit and cap, is holding the chain and a bullwhip.]

Rachel: “I guess.”

Interesting that this female dominant fantasy is not explored in the same way as the submissive fantasies.

For the most part, these women talk about their masochistic relationship to the institution of heterosexuality. For all the venting these women do about the men in their lives, they’re not really likely to change anything. The evening starts with Jamie deciding to call off her wedding, but then she talks to her fiance and changes her mind. Marcy flirts with lesbianism with the girlfriend of Georgina, who until recently identified as a lesbian but found herself having strong fantasies about a male co-worker. Jill, the most sexually adventurous, also seems to have the best long term relationship with her husband.

Dana Delaney (Jill) was in Exit to Eden (1994) the year previously, so this was not her first time with sex on screen or mild kink. Kim Cattrall (Jamie), best known as Samantha on Sex and the City, also has a history of sexy roles.

Tomcats is a 2001 sex comedy. 

Tomcats is a catalog of white heterosexual male anxieties at the turn of the millennium: castration, marriage, children, public humiliation, romantic and sexual rejection, unruly female bodies, being outperformed by women professionally, women turning into lesbians, and women who are too sexual. For the purposes of this project, the relevant scene has the same comedic premise as in Euro Trip: that even the horniest man can be overwhelmed by the most voracious woman.

The premise is that a group of male friends made a bet that whoever is the last unmarried gets all the money in a large mutual fund. Our protagonist, Michael (Jerry O’Connell), tries to impress a woman at a Vegas casino, ends up owing $50,000, and has to get his womanizing single friend, Kyle (Jake Busey) married by the end of the month so he gets the money. 

Michael finds Natalie (Shannon Elizabeth), the one who got away for Kyle, who turns out to be a police detective. They set about seducing Kyle, while our protagonist starts falling for the woman. Natalie tells Michael that she’s falling for Kyle, prompting Michael to seduce the first woman he sees, which goes spectacularly awry.

Michel’s target turns out to be Jill (Heather Stephens), a redheaded librarian, the most stereotypically repressed of female professions. Complete with horn-rimmed glasses, hair in bun, and meek body language. Jill sees that he is (unknowingly) carrying The Scarlet Letter. They talk and she invites him into his home. 

Inside her pastel den of traditional femininity, Michael meets Grammy (Marnie Crossen)h, who was also a librarian. They go into Jill’s bedroom, which starts with her on top, and rapidly progresses to unnegotiated bondage. Jill’s handcuffs are hidden inside the arms of her stuffed toys, so it looks like they are holding his wrists to the bed. 

“Trust me,” she says.

She bites his nipple, eliciting an “Ow!”

Jill: “You can take it.”

Michael: “I don’t know if I want to take it.”

She strips off her pink slip to reveal purple bra, panties and corset.  

Michael: “I gotta tell you, Jill, this is a little unexpected.” 

Jill: “Call me Mistress, you disgusting little worm.” [Gets off bed] “You said it. We’re on the same wavelength.” [opens trunk, pulls out matching thigh boots]

Michael: “All that wavelength stuff, frankly, I was just saying that to get you into bed.” 

Jill: “That is not very nice.” [zips up stiletto platform boots] “In fact, that is downright naughty.”

Jill’s bedroom rapidly transforms into a dungeon, complete with suspension bondage, mood lighting, and a rack of toys, neatly organized and each with their own Library of Congress-style code. (A much more literate visual gag than I expected in a movie like this.) One giant paddle has a large red A. 

She hits Michael with it, who screams through the gag, and sobs.

Jill: “I don’t know. I’m just not feeling it. Something’s missing.”

The bedroom door bursts open. Grammy comes out in black dominatrix outfit, including cap, with coach whip. “Here’s Grammy!”

Michael recoils in terror. 

Cut to: Michael fleeing the house, muttering, “No more redheads…” He hits himself in the butt on the way out with the gate, and screams. 

(In a later scene, we see the imprint of a large A on Michael’s nude buttock.)

Later on, Kyle also hooks up with Jill and ends up in the same situation, complete with a surprise appearance by Grammy. However, he seems to like it….

I won’t even bother pointing out this is a total violation of consent. 

The joke here is that the meekest mouseburger can be revealed as a voracious virago. While this can be seen as comedic justice, in that Michael got what he deserved for trying to seduce and abandon a woman, the reversal of power also justifies the film’s overall anxiety about women, as if the most terrifying thing imaginable is to be at the mercy of a post-menopausal woman. 

Like other appearances of BDSM in comedic contexts, sadomasochism in Tomcats gives the sexual content a place to go that’s too far but won’t push the film out of the R-rated category and into the dreaded, commercially non-viable X.

Love & Human Remains is a 1993 drama film. It tells several interwoven stories of people in the big city, while in the background a serial killer murders women. The main character is David (Thomas Gibson), a gay former actor who coasts through life as a waiter and nightclub regular.

Love definitely has some resemblance to Cruising: paranoid people in an urban environment, a serial killer who could be anybody, masculinity in crisis. We get glimpses of the killings on news shows, but the characters, too self-absorbed, skip past them. 

Benita (Mia Kirshner) seems to vibe on that urban paranoia. She’s primarily a dominatrix, often telling classic urban legends (e.g. “the guy with the hook” or “the baby sitter and the extension cord”) during her sessions with men in her apartment. 

She says she’s psychic, which her friend David believes. He brings an underage man named Kane to see her, and gets the three of them to snort heroin (which Kane thinks will be cocaine), so she can “read” him. Not exactly a model of consent. She says that Kane is in love with David, to which David says “No such thing.” Benita jacks off Kane, which still feels pretty rape-y.

Later, Kane doesn’t remember what happened that night. David initially tells him that he jacked off Kane, who is shocked, then says Benita did it. 

Later on, Benita is in a session with another man, dressed in a full-black cowboy outfit, complete with jangling spurs and spaghetti Western music. Benita, in pigtails and damsel-in-distress outfit, is tied to the bondage post in her apartment. 

Man in Black: “Okay, bitch. Now I’m going to show you how to act like a real woman.”

Benita: “Get real, asshole.”

The Man in Black backhands her. I assume that this is, in the diegesis of the film, faked, as Benita doesn’t have an eyelash out of place in later scenes. 

Man in Black : “Watch your fucking mouth.”

The closet door bursts open and David emerges in an all-white cowboy outfit, complete with sheriff’s badge. 

David: “Just what the hell’s going on here?”

Man in black: [terrified] “We were just having a little fun.”

David: “I’ll show you fun, boy.” 

David punches him in the face, apparently for real, and knocks him down. Man in Black gets off on it. Benita watches, still tied up. 

Man in Black: “Please. Please don’t hurt me.” [starts fondling, kisses, licks David’s white boot]

David gives Benita a “Can you believe this?” look. Benita grins back at him.

Cowboy moves on to fellating the pointy toe of David’s boot. 

David grimaces. 

In the next scene, Benita and David eat breakfast in a cafe. David complains about “watching Herb get off on the cowboy schtick.”

Benita: “At least he was paying for it, not forcing it on someone who wasn’t into it. You were very good. Very believable.”

David: “He could have been my father. Your father.”

Benita: “My father was never that gentle.”

This plays into the common trope of the sex worker who was abused as a child.

One of the plotlines is David’s relationship with his old friend Bernie (Cameron Bancroft), who seems increasingly unstable and deeply resentful of David leaving the city to be an actor. 

When David meets Bernie, he sees that Bernie’s glove compartment is full of women’s earrings, just like the ones taken by the killer. It isn’t clear if he makes the connection. He tells Bernie to take him to Benita, saying, “She’ll do us both.”

Apparently getting some kind of psychic alert, Benita dismisses her current client. 

At the apart, Bernie grabs Benita and throws her around, while remaining focused on David. 

David: “Relax, man!”

Bernie: “She’s no one.”

David: “She’s someone.”

Benita grabs Bernie’s head and makes him re-experience all the women he killed. 

Bernie goes completely deranged, and starts to strangle Benita. David does very little to stop this. 

Bernie stops and leaves the apartment. David wants to take Benita to a hospital, but she tells him to chase after Bernie. 

David eventually finds Bernie on the roof of his apartment building, talking about how, “They were hairdressers and secretaries, for Christ’s sake.” Bernie’s misogynistic murders are deeply tied to his repressed feelings for David. He jumps off the building, killing himself. 

Sometime later, we see Benita in a green bathrobe, the first time we have seen her in anything other than black. 

Three times in this film, we see David and a supposedly straight man work out their sexual issues, mediated or catalyzed by the presence of Benita. She plays the object of desire for the pretense of heterosexuality, even though the primary axis of desire is between the two men. Thus she doesn’t really have a character arc of her own. The BDSM scenes are reflections of the pathologies that are found in all characters, though not as catharsis.

Mia Kirshner played the manipulative Jenny in the original The L Word, which almost had a BDSM storyline. Director Denys Arcand frequently touched on the idea of urban decay. The film was adapted from a stage play by Brad Fraser, who later became a producer and writer on the US version of Queer as Folk.

Romance is a 1999 French drama film, written and directed by Catherine Breillat. 

[Unless noted otherwise, all quotations are from the subtitles.]

Breillat is notorious for explicitly showing sexual acts in her films, as well as her unsentimental view of heterosexual relations. Sex between men and women is always a conflict in Breillat’s films, though who is winning isn’t always clear. 

The protagonist is Marie (Caroline Ducey), a young woman who lives with her boyfriend Paul (Sagamore Stévenin), a model. In the first scene, Marie watches from a distance as Paul is posed as a matador in a photoshoot with another female model. The photographer instructs Paul and the model in performing proper masculinity and femininity.

They return to their apartment, where their clothes and the furnishings are all white and off-white. Instead of innocence, it suggests sterility and emptiness. Paul rejects Marie’s sexual advances again, in a reversal of the usual gender roles. 

Paul’s passive-aggressive head game is that if he completely eliminates sexual desire in himself, he gains the upper hand in his relationship with Marie. Having her dance on the end of his string is more interesting to him than actually fucking her. 

Marie decides that if Paul can separate sex and love, so can she, and goes out in search of men. Her first infidelity is a stud she picks up in a bar (porn star Rocco Siffredi).

In my opinion, fading to black when it comes to sex is cheating the audience. How a character performs sexual acts can develop plot and character just like any other physical act, and Breillat uses actions like performing fellatio or stripping off a used condom as part of the cinematic language.

After their sex scene, Marie’s voiceover narration talks about how she wants to be alienated from the men who fuck her. “I want to be a hole, a pit… The more gaping, the more obscene it is, the more it’s me, my intimacy. The more I surrender… It’s metaphysical. I disappear in proportion to the cock taking me. I hollow myself. That’s my purity.” It may be that Marie has realized that the getting-to-know-you chit-chat she exchanges with her stud is actually more alienating, bringing them further from the truth. 

Her second affair is with Robert (François Berléand), the principal of the school Marie works at. He’s an older and less-than-handsome man (by his own account) who identifies as a dominant and claims to have slept with over 10,000 women. In person, he seems more like a lonely eccentric, who is more interested in puttering around in his trunk full of bondage equipment. His apartment and clothes are all reds, browns and blacks; blood and earth tones. 

He’s also a talker, perhaps too much of one. 

Robert: “The only way to be loved by women is via rape. Women yield to a stranger, but play hard to get with a wretch who loves them, who’d die for them, and swears he respects them. So it goes…”

[…]

Robert: “But do they want to be respected?” [Marie doesn’t answer.] “In a sense, yes. But respect is in the nature of things: since they’re up for grabs, they want to be taken. I’ve had 10,000 women. I don’t remember them all, but I kept their names, their age and their circumstances. Their cunts…. No two are alike, they’re as memorable as faces. But take ten men, cut off their cocks, put them in a basket: no one can tell his own!”

Marie is disengaged in this scene, as if she is waiting for him to finish the perfunctory ritual of seduction and get to the physicality. She gives the minimum response possible to him, making him do all the work to elicit something from her. When he asks her if he can tie her up (sloppily) or gag her, she answers with faint “Mmm” sounds. 

Marie: [voiceover] “Why do men who disgust us understand us better than those who appeal to us?”

Bound and gagged, Marie freaks out. They didn’t establish a safeword or safe signal, but Robert ungags and partially unties her. 

Marie: “At first, you feel your hands going numb. You think you can stand it. Then suddenly it’s unbearable. A form of dying. A galloping death. You think your hands will fall off. You slowly turn into dead flesh. And then it has to stop at once, it can’t last a second more. I was afraid you couldn’t hear because of the gag. It’s really freaky.”

Principal: “But you liked the gag?”

Marie: “I don’t like having to say things.”

After this, Marie goes home and masturbates intensely. 

Marie: (voiceover) “What’s done is done. It’s behind me. My head is very clear. It’s all I can be in my head. I feel my body doesn’t belong to me. It’s an anonymous appendix. In my head, there’s Paul.”

[…]

Marie: (voiceover) “He could have reconciled me with my body. But he didn’t want to do that. Because I don’t like my body. I was easy prey. I mean, a victim. Anyway, women are the victims men need for atonement. I always masturbate with my legs closed. I rarely part them. I can offer myself to myself, rape myself. It’s mildly satisfying, a bit nauseating, but it’s proof I don’t need a man if I have to resort to this.”

She goes out to look for Paul, and observes him just having dinner by himself. 

A passing man offers to pay her to eat her out, and she takes him up on the offer in the stairway of her building. 

Marie: (voiceover) “To be taken by a guy, anyone, a nobody, a bum, with whom you wallow for the joy of wallowing. For the dishonor, the discredit, that’s pleasure to a girl.”

This suddenly turns into rape. When the guy finishes and leaves, Marie cries but yells after him, “I’m not ashamed, asshole!”

Marie: (voiceover) “Is nymphomania destroying yourself because you choose a man who doesn’t love you? I don’t want to sleep with men. I want to be opened up all the way: when you can see that the mystique is a load of innards, the woman is dead! Maybe I really want to meet ‘Jack the Ripper.’ He’d certainly dissect a woman like me!”

She deliberately hangs out in the stairwell so she comes home after Paul. “That’s proof that women are capable of more love than men.” 

Marie returns to Robert’s place for another scene, this time wearing her hair down and in a flirty red dress, instead of her usual prim white dresses and up-dos. She is still somewhat passive, making Robert work for it. 

Afterwards, they eat together at a restaurant. 

Marie: (voiceover) “I enjoyed it so much, I grew attached to Robert. Tying me up without tying me down was the secret of his ritual. After these sessions I wasn’t gloomy. We giggled. We partied and over-ate.”

Marie returns to Paul’s apartment, and entices him into very brief intercourse, though when she gets on top and says, “You be the woman”, he angrily throws her off him and onto the floor. In voiceover, Marie says that was enough to get her pregnant. 

While volunteering to be examined by multiple medical interns, Marie talks in voiceover about how Paul believes that “you can’t love a face if a cunt comes with it.”

Marie fantasizes about a circular room. Women lie down with their upper bodies inside the room, in a white, hospital-like space, each with a man standing nearby. Their lower bodies protrude through the wall into a dark space with rust-colored walls, full of men fucking the detached bodies. 

Marie: (voiceover) “I fantasize about a brothel where a head is separated from a body by a guillotine-like contraption before the blade comes down. Of course, there’s no blade. I wear a silky red skirt that billows up and rustles. And those silly trappings that give men a hard on.”

This is the classic virgin-whore complex, seen from the woman’s perspective, inside. This produces a doubling for the women, with two men, the sweet husband and the brute.

While pregnant, Paul and Marie fall back into their own patterns. When Marie’s labor begins, Paul is passed out drunk. She turns the gas stove on, and drags a befuddled Robert into the delivery room. At the moment she gives birth, the apartment explodes, killing Paul. We last see Marie in a black dress with white floral patterns, holding her baby, at Paul’s funeral. 

Romance feels a little like Belle De Jour, though in the former the woman is trying to separate love and sex via encounters with other men, while in the latter, the woman is trying to combine them. The other big difference is that while Severine’s love of her husband is mutual, Marie has to realize that Paul is emotionally abusive. 

It’s also like The Piano Teacher, as an exploration of heterosexual female masochism. 

Marie starts out in a standard heterosexual pairing, goes through Paolo (the stud), Robert (the sadist) and the guy on the stairs (the rapist), before she can finally separate herself from Paul and become an individual. Marie plays a passive, masochistic role as an escape from the standard female script of resistance to male advances, embedded in our ideology of heterosexual romance. 

House is an American TV medical procedural drama. “Love Hurts”, aired May 10, 2005, is the twentieth episode of the first season.

The episode begins with a man in the Emergency Room with what appears to be a stroke. The patient, Harvey (John Cho), also has nominal aphasia (difficulty naming things), as his friend Annette (Christina Cox) explains. 

As Harvey has a metal plate in his jaw from an earlier injury, the doctors can’t do an MRI scan, and have to diagnose with other methods. They also notice oddities like how Harvey enjoys having needles inserted, and how Annette hovers around the patient. Finally, they find Annette in Harvey’s hospital room, apparently strangling him. 

One of the doctors, Chase, explains that she is a dominatrix. 

Annette explains that Harvey is an asphyxiaphiliac. “He likes to be strangled or smothered.”

She also says she was careful, watching the monitors, making sure his O2 stats were over 90.

Annette: “I would never hurt him. […] Harvey was upset. He needed to calm down, to feel in control by being controlled.”

Hospital official: “He pays you for this?”

Annette: “In return, he does my taxes and cleans my house.”

Most appearances of dominant women in mainstream media are professional dominatrixes, commercial sex workers. Annette is a little unusual in that she does this as a quid-pro-quo with Harvey, and there is no mention of her working professionally. 

Dr. Chase later explains that he knows Annette through “parties” and says he was once involved with a woman who liked to be burned. 

House hypothesizes that Harvey was injured because of BDSM play. As is typical, he also makes derisive jokes, referring to Annette as “Mistress Ilsa” and saying that Chase won’t get a “leather stethoscope” because he withheld important information. (Whether Chase was trying to respect the privacy of Harvey and Annette is not clear.)

House: (to Chase) “I wouldn’t have tortured you if I knew you liked it.”

Much like the sadistic dentist in Little Shop of Horrors, House is a sadist who is disgusted by a masochist.

When Chase tells Harvey that his strokes were because of the strangulations, he becomes deeply depressed. Chase tries to get him to sign a consent form for surgery, even adopting a commanding tone to bring Harvey’s submissiveness into play, but he still refuses. 

The doctors search for a way to get him to consent.

House: “Where’s a good dominatrix when you need one?”

Chase: “Annette’s barred from the hospital.”

House: “If you get caught, [Dr.] Cuddy’s got a hairbrush, and believe me, she knows how to use it.”

They bring Annette back into the hospital and have him talk to Harvey.

Harvey: “They let you come back.” [blissed on antidepressants]

Annette: “Not because you deserve it. You’ve been bad. You will have the surgery. Do you understand?”

Harvey: “No.”

Annette: “Do not laugh at me. You will respect me.”

Harvey: “Where do you get off telling me what to do? Get out of my room, you bag-faced witch?”

Black doctor: “Is this a part of their deal?”

Annette: “This isn’t like him. Something’s wrong.”

Harvey: [yells] “Get out!” [goes into a coma]

The doctors search for a next of kin to sign the consent form. Harvey told Annette his parents were dead, but it turns out they are alive. 

The doctors employ some trickery to get them to the hospital. Harvey’s parents have disowned him. 

Harvey’s father: “He humiliated us. Everybody we know knows about his… perversion.”

House has to threaten them with public shaming to make them sign a medical consent form so the doctors can operate. (This scene gets into uncomfortable racial stereotyping, as Harvey and his parents are Asian.) 

The doctors also go through Harvey’s apartment. (They can do that?) They find bondage equipment literally in his closet.

The surgery proceeds but finds nothing. The doctors realize that Harvey has been covering his bad breath with mints, and deduce that his infected jaw injury is releasing debris into his bloodstream and causing the strokes. Another operation removes his entire jaw. 

Afterwards, House visits Harvey and also finds that Annette has acquired hospital scrubs and snuck in to be with Harvey

House: “Like I say to all my patients, you’ve simply got to say no to strangulation. Me, I’m a freak. I get off on not being in pain. That and chocolate covered marshmallow bunnies.”

Annette: “He’s not a freak.”

House: “Yeah, he is… a little. But it’s got to stop, or he’ll die.”

Annette: “It’s not about pain. It’s about being open. And completely vulnerable to another person. If you can learn to be that deeply trusting, it changes you.” 

This seems to affect House.

House: “Lock him in a cage. That should be fine medically.”

Harvey: “Dr. House. Were my parents here? Did they come to see me?” (Would he be able to speak after his jaw was removed?)

House leaves without answering.

Though Annette is presented as suspect, even exploitative, she proves to be genuinely concerned for Harvey, going out of her way to provide emotional support and help the doctors. Conversely, Harvey’s parents have disowned their son, and have to be blackmailed into merely signing a medical consent form. 

This ties into the episode’s B plot in which House and Dr. Cameron resume dating, even though everybody thinks this is a bad idea. House’s idea of date talk is to say that Cameron is only dating him because she wants somebody she can try to fix. As a pathologist, he reduces everything and everyone to pathologies. 

The relationship between Harvey and Annette includes the pathology of his masochism, and mutual care and trust too. The lesson is that love does matter, even if it takes unconventional forms. 

One of the interesting things about this episode, compared to other procedural dramas, is its visual restraint. Usually in these types of stories, investigators physically go into another world of exotic people and practices, with a mixture of repulsion and fascination. It’s also a premise for putting attractive women in sexy clothing. In this story, most of the action is in the hospital. Harvey and Annette are not seen in fetish attire. The closest to the usual scene of entering the underworld is when Dr. Chase looks at the toy collection in Harvey’s closet.

Episode S01E08, “Denna”, aired January 10, 2009

Legend of the Seeker (IMDB) is a 2008 fantasy television series based on the Sword of Truth novel series by Terry Goodkind. It’s pretty boilerplate, hero’s journey, high fantasy. 

Legend of the Seeker shares some production staff with the TV series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess, and the Spartacus TV series, which frequently hinted at or showed various forms of queer or kinky sexuality. In turn, those series are descendants of the sword-and-sorcery genre of fiction, which frequently referenced sadomasochistic sexuality. E.g. the covers of the 1930s pulp Weird Tales by Margaret Brundage. 

Unlike most of the media we’ve explored so far, Legend is set in a fantasy world of magic and strange creatures. Therefore, we should hold it to different standards of realism and consent. 

The cold open of this episode introduces Mistress Denna, lieutenant of the series’ main antagonist, via a sequence of close shots of her suiting up in her fetishistic, red leather, skin tight costume. This includes sound effects of leather creaking and chains clinking. The low-angle shots, looking up at her in her dimly-lit, brick walled space, emphasize her sexuality and her power. She is told that the series’ main antagonist wants her to capture the protagonist, Richard, and “train him.” 

She and her minions capture Richard, who spends most of the episode bound and shirtless as he is both physically tortured and emotionally seduced. Denna uses a mystical weapon called an “agiel”, a leather rod which induces intense pain at a touch, accompanied by sound effects of screams. (It also unfortunately looks like a dildo.) The visual emphasis in these scenes is as much on Richard’s vulnerable body as it is on Denna’s “hard” body. (This is known as “whump” in media fandom terms.) The torture scenes are shot very intimately, often in close two-shots as if Denna and Richard are about to kiss. 

Denna’s ultimate goal is to emotionally break Richard and make him fall in love with her. Richard initially protects himself by withdrawing into a fantasy of himself with Kahlan, his love interest. As Denna wears him down, Richard puts her into his dissociation fantasy, with her blonde hair loose instead of her usual tight braid; nurturing femininity instead of cruel femininity.

It’s disappointing when Denna is revealed to have the stereotypical female weakness of jealousy. Formerly cool and collected, she is enraged when Richard asks to be tortured by one of Denna’s lieutenants instead. He says this is because he doesn’t want her to use her agiel, which causes her pain too. We also learn that Mord-Sith like Denna are captured as young girls and tortured until they are willing to kill their mothers and fathers. 

The parallel plot concerns Kahlan, a series regular and Richard’s love interest. She is a “confessor”, one of a mystical order of women who can induce permanent total love with a touch. Like Denna, Kahlan’s power stems from emotional control of others, but she is very concerned with the ethical use of her power. In this episode, she separates from Richard because she fears that her growing intimacy with him will make her lose control of her power and emotionally enslave him. She is horrified when she finds that another confessor has emotionally enslaved an entire village of people, and refuses to use them to rescue Richard. 

Kahlan attempts to rescue Richard on her own, but Richard prevents her from killing Denna, and she is captured too. Richard says to Kahlan that he’s losing control, and begs for her to use her power to emotionally bind him to her. 

Richard: “I’d rather be your slave than hers.”

Kahlan refuses. 

The big climax comes when Denna attempts to finalize her control over Richard by getting him to kill Kahlan instead of Denna torturing her. She gives him a dagger, but he hesitates to use it. Denna uses her agiel on Kahlan to motivate Richard. 

Denna: “End her pain, Richard!”

This is where the story breaks down. For most of the episode, the conflict was between Richard’s love of Kahlan and Denna’s growing emotional control over him. Now, instead, Denna has arranged the dilemma of Richard not wanting Kahlan to suffer versus not wanting to kill her, and his emotions for Denna (real or artificial) don’t matter. 

Richard drops the dagger, which Kahlan picks up and uses. This is the big fight scene of Richard and Kahlan versus Denna and her guards. Richard stabs Denna with his recovered sword, despite her magic.

Denna: “How did you…?”

Richard: “You taught me how to withstand pain.” 

After escaping, Kahlan says that they must repress their mutual attraction for the sake of Richard’s mission. 

Richard: “Well, if there’s one thing I learned from Denna, it’s how to suffer in silence.” 

Back in torture chamber, another Mord-Sith uses magic on Denna and revives her. 

It’s pretty obvious that Denna visually references dominatrixes, and particularly the Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS archetype, the woman who is both monstrous and seductive, whose sexual deviance reflects her moral and political deviance. Denna also has the same weaknesses as Ilsa: jealousy and falling in love with the male hero. As we will see in other media, there’s a tension of the possible redemption of Denna from evil. 

Denna is contrasted with Kahlan, who is very concerned about the ethical use of her power, and avoids emotional intimacy for fear of abusing that power. This contrast extends to their costumes: Denna’s tight red leather and tightly braided hair, compared to Kahlan’s white flowing dress and loose hair. However, this avoids simplistic dualities of good and bad femininity, as Kahlan is also a capable fighter and a woman of religious and mystical authority. 

According to the Sword of Truth/Legend of the Seeker wiki, Mord-Sith have a casual brown skin-tight leather outfit for everyday, a red leather version for battle or torturing, and a white version once they have broken a new “pet”. Presumably for production reasons, this was simplified to a single uniform. 
Mord-Sith appear in other Legend of the Seeker episodes, and in season two, a reformed Mord-Sith, Cara, becomes a regular cast member. No doubt, a woman in a red-leather suit has strong visual appeal.

“Escape from the Dungeon!”, aired September 26, 2010

Bored to Death is an American comedy TV series (IMDB) about Jonathan Ames, a struggling writer who moonlights as an “unlicensed private detective”.

In “Escape from the Dungeon!” (S02E01), Jonathan meets Drake, a mounted NYPD officer, who needs his name removed from the hard drive of the BDSM dungeon he frequents before it is raided by the police. He says the dungeon is involved in money laundering, not that it will be raided for sex work charges.

Jonathan pries into what Drake does at the dungeon. 

Drake: “Well, you ever hear of forced feminization?”

Jonathan: “Yes.”

Drake: “Yeah, Well, that’s what I got. You know, when I was eight years old, my older sister and a couple of her friends, they dressed me up in a girl scout uniform. You know, the little skirt, panties, lipstick, the whole nine yards. They said that I was a pretty little girl, and, uh, it did something to me.”

Note that Drake says he has “got” forced feminization, like it’s a medical or psychiatric condition, not that he “does” forced feminization. Also, he attributes his desires to an outside, childhood influence. The story actually sound like a classic forced fem erotic story, which makes Drake unreliable as a source. 

Jonathan: “You know, I tried on my mother’s panties when I was 15, and I liked it, but it didn’t stick. I just did it the one time.”

Drake: “Well, you’re lucky because with me it stuck. I mean, I have to do it once a month or so. It’s like I’m ovulating. Hey, don’t get me wrong, I love it, but it also suffocates me. It presses down on me.”

Later, Drake talks about quitting his kink after this, like it is an addiction.

At the dungeon, Jonathan enters as a client and meets with Mistress Florence (Kristen Johnston). Just as with Drake, Jonathan regresses into a childish mode, babbling trivia.

Florence: “We can start with some basic, beginner play. Once the session starts, you are to call me Mistress Florence.”

Jonathan: “Really? Florence is my mother’s name.”

Florence: “Oh, you’re an infantilist. I’ll go get some diapers.”

Jonathan: “No no no, no diapers. I just thought I’d mention it. You know, it’s just a coincidence. There’s not that many Florences. There’s Florence Nightingale, Florence a city in Italy, which actually is Florenze–”

Florence: “Stop talking! I’m going to go get changed, and when I come back, I want you naked and lying face down with your ass in the air.”

While the Mistress is changing, Jonathan sneaks into her office and wipes her hard drive. Florence discovers him. 

Jonathan: “Just thought we could roleplay hide and seek. Like I did with my mom. You know, my first Mistress Florence.”

Florence: “I’m the one who dictates what goes on in our sessions, you little castrato piece of shit.”

Florence doesn’t notice what she’s done, and instead drags him back into her dungeon. 

She beats Jonathan, who wears a full body leather suit and hood, padlocked on, 

Jonathan: “Eunuch! Eunuch! Eunuch!”

Florence: [stops] “What? I couldn’t hear you.”

Jonathan: “I said ‘Eunuch’. You’re supposed to hear a person’s safety word.”

Florence: “I’m sorry. Let’s take a break anyway. My arm’s getting tired.”

They chat a bit. When Jonathan mentions he’s a writer and a teacher,  offers to do a barter of a free session in exchange for him reading her manuscript. 

Florence: [re her clients] “Everyone’s in so much pain.” 

This is when the police raid the dungeon. Florence gets up to see what’s happening, as does Jonathan, which reveals he’s wearing underwear beneath the open butt of the leather suit. There’s the usual scene of people in bizarre costumes and bondage contraptions as the police for their way in. 

Jonathan flees the dungeon, and has to run through Manhattan in a full leather suit and hood to get help. 

This resembles the ending of One Night at McCool’s, in which the submissive male is forced to appear in public while wearing fetish wear. At least in this case, the man isn’t killed. 

There’s no narrative resolution to any of these plotlines. This is a comedy, so it doesn’t matter if Mistress Florence is irresponsible as a dominant, or Officer Drake is not very enlightened about his kink. 

The whole point of this story is male insecurity. Jonathan is wracked by anxiety after the rejection of his second novel, and being in a position of responsibility towards his students. Before he goes to the dungeon, he reveals his emotional masochism when he shoots down his girlfriend’s attempts to build his self-esteem. At the end, she agrees she is the best thing in his life. When Mistress Florence wants Jonathan to review her manuscript, he is immediately uncomfortable with the reversal in power dynamics. To be a success at anything, to have responsibility, is frightening. 

In a parallel plot line, Jonathan’s friend Ray agrees to go to yoga with his girlfriend, but passive-aggressively complains about it. When she breaks up with him, he descends into a deep depression.

These two man-children sabotage themselves. Ironically, it’s Officer Drake who may have the healthiest attitude, indulging in his kinks for relief and then going back to his job and family.

“Loud and Proud”, aired 1 May 2005 IMDB

The L Word was a night-time soap about a group of lesbian and bisexual women in West Hollywood, with multiple continuing storylines. 

“Loud and Proud” is centered on Pride Weekend in LA. In the previous season, Jenny arrived in West Hollywood and began exploring her sexuality, which caused some complications with her boyfriend. Jenny broke up with him and joined the other characters.

The cold-open shows two women having a BDSM session, in the red-on-black color scheme we will see repeatedly in this episode. The bottom is cuffed to a St. Andrew’s cross. There’s no nudity, and only a couple of light impacts with a flogger. 

The top says, “I’m going to give you a minute to think about how badly you want me to fuck you.”

She then puts on her jacket and walks outside, past a poster saying this is “Pride 2005.” (I hope that there were other people watching her bottom while she left.)

Various plotlines progress through the episode. In particular, Jenny is struggling with the emergence of memories of her rape as a child.

Alice, a journalist, and Dana, a tennis pro, are having a dom/sub roleplay session, with Alice in a black and white maid’s uniform and Dana in butch mode. This is interrupted by the arrival of Dana’s younger teenage brother.

After the parade, the top woman from the opening gives flyers to Alice, Dana and Jenny. The flyer says “The Seven Stations of the Cross” and shows a woman in a leather thong and bra next to a wooden cross. 

The top directly asks Jenny, “Will I see you there?”

Jenny: “Maybe.”

Top: “Well, I love to punish a tease.” 

Meaningful looks.

Later, Alice and Dana are hesitant to go into the BDSM club. 

Dana: “I don’t think I can do this.”

Alice: “Oh, god, sure you can. Come on.” [stops outside the club] “Okay, maybe it’s not a great idea. Let’s just look at the pros and cons.”

They look at the flyer.

Alice: “Um, okay, okay. ‘Gentle with novices.’ This is good.”

Dana: “Okay, great. So we can just tell them this is our first time.”

Alice: “I think they might know that, Dana, but…” 

Insert shot of back of flyer. 

Alice: “There’s seven stations of the cross. Whipping, temporary piercing…”

Dana: “Public humiliation, anal penetration. Torching?”

Alice: “Torching? Eugh… Spanking and specialty acts. That’s nice.”

Dana: “Ooh, there’s a free buffet ‘til six. Chicken wings and tofu.”

Alice: “What do you think?”

Dana: “I don’t know. A sneak peek?”

Alice: “Yeah! Okay, let’s do it.”

Alice and Dana psych themselves up and go through a metal gate, then through a door and down the steps into the venue. 

The camera holds on the door for a beat.

Dana and Alice emerge from the venue and quickly walk away, nervously talking about going to their usual hangout.

Much later that night, Jenny enters the BDSM club, full of reds and blacks, with sombre string music. The atmosphere is tense and quiet, with the sound of leather smacking flesh. Jenny looks at her surroundings. 

Reverse shot, slightly blurry, of people on bondage equipment. More reds and blacks. People in the foreground as audience. 

The femme top from before cuffs Jenny to “The Thing” bondage platform, arms outstretched (not unlike a cross). 

Jenny has a flashback to being held down by men on straw. 

She somehow pulls loose and sits up. The femme top comes over to check on her. 

Jenny: “Don’t touch me!”

This leads to more flashbacks, with Jenny reciting something in what may be Hebrew.

In the BDSM club, Jenny breaks down crying, sitting on the bondage platform. Cut to the Image of her as a young girl, standing outside, with the same red/black color scheme. 

“Loud and Proud” maps Pride and BDSM onto a heaven/hell dialectic. The Pride celebration is bright and colorful, full of happy people and energetic music. Dana is able to say “I love you” to Alice for the first time, and Shane confesses secrets to her own lover. Community grows, people become intimate.

The BDSM club scenes are all red light in darkness, set with tense string music. The people are sombre and quiet, and there’s no effort to personalize them. 

Jenny’s revelation of her past rape, brought on by her very brief bondage scene, is a solitary experience. Even when the top tries to check on her, she snaps “Don’t touch me!” BDSM is a means to harsh truth about the self, but not to care or community. 

Working through trauma can be a part of BDSM, but leaves out so much intimacy, comradeship, pleasure, and fun. As the saying goes, “BDSM can be therapeutic, but it is not therapy.”

I struggle to refrain from rewriting the stories I review in this project. This episode could have been a classic “journey through the underworld”, with Jenny guided by the top woman she meets. This could have reflected the pride/shame dialectic of the episode, but there’s only the briefest exploration. 

I have a minor personal connection to this episode. The early seasons of The L Word were shot in Vancouver, BC, where I live. The producers put out a call to the greater Vancouver BDSM community to be actors and extras in an episode showing a play party. I already showed the scripts issued for the auditions. 

As I understand it, the scenes at the play party were shot, with furniture from the Rascals regular play party, but not used in the final episode, except for one establishing shot and the interaction between Jenny and the female top. Why is not clear. Maybe the scenes were cut to save time for other plotlines, or that higher-ups decided it was too sexual. At any rate, The L Word took one step towards looking at BDSM, then backed off, much like Dana and Alice. 

The L Word was ground-breaking not only for being a drama series focused almost entirely on women, but on queer women. That has to be considered when it is criticized for depicting a very middle-class, white and femme version of lesbian life. Even Shane is more androgynous than butch. Likewise, it can be excused for not going deeper into lesbian BDSM sexuality when the industry and the audience are skittish about any form of sexuality. 

Jenny Schecter was played by Mia Kirshner, who also played the psychic dominatrix Benita in Love & Human Remains (1993), previously discussed.

“Poison Pen”, aired October 17, 2013

Elementary is a detective TV series of a modern-day retelling of the classic Sherlock Holmes stories and novels by Arthur Conan Doyle. 

The case begins with a pro domme (“Mistress Felicity”, played by Keesha Sharp) on an outcall who came across a dead client already in a latex suit, and called Holmes before she called the police. 

Dominatrix: (in full outfit, toying with crop) “Call came in around 10:30. New client looking for a light CP and a little OTK.”

Detective: “Excuse me?”

Holmes: “CP. Corporal punishment. OTK. Over The Knee. Spanking.”

Holmes and Watson are looking around. 

Dominatrix: “He said the door would be unlocked. I walked in and there he was.” 

Detective: “He was like this when you got here?”

Dominatrix: “He had on the mask. I gave him a few commands. He didn’t respond. At first I thought he was stubborn. Some slaves are like that. Then I whacked him with this.” [hits chair with crop, making Watson turn around] “Still nothing. I took off the mask and saw that he was dead.”

Detective: “And that’s when you called Holmes?”

Watson: “And you two know each other how?”

Holmes: “Mistress Felicia and I got chatting over an exhibition of torture devices throughout history. We realized we had a few friends in common. We stayed in touch.”

Holmes works out that the victim was actually poisoned, and the absence of talcum powder inside the latex suit suggests someone else put it on him. 

Holmes: “Putting on a latex garment like this is a bit like putting on a swimsuit that is two sizes too small and already wet. Talcum powder is generally de rigeur. Well, a man of Mister Delancey’s girth would not have been able to put on this suit without an assist.”

This is enough to clear the pro domme of suspicion. [If only it were that easy.]

Holmes notes to Watson that there is no other BDSM paraphernalia in the victim’s home, and traces the XXL latex outfit to one fetishwear store in Manhattan. 

The store’s owner, an older man in a black t-shirt, refuses to hand over the requested records without a subpoena. 

Owner: “Your job is to solve crimes. Mine is to protect my customers’ privacy from a police force eager to demonize the sexually adventurous.”

Holmes, Watson and a detective pressure the owner to provide a lead to the ATM in the store.

The surveillance camera in the ATM links to one of the victim’s employees buying the latex suit. However, he says he only found the body, already dead, and put it in the suit and called the pro domme. 

The motivation behind this improbable scheme is money. DeLancey, the victim, has a morals clause in his employment contract. Breaking that would mean his employers wouldn’t have to pay him, or his family in this case, millions of dollars. In other words, the best way to assassinate his character is to frame him as a pervert. 

There’s also the implausibility of the guy formulating this plan, purchasing the XXL latex suit, undressing the corpse and putting it into the suit (difficult enough with a live, cooperating person) without talcum powder. Then he called the pro domme, assuming that she would discover the body and call the police, instead of avoiding any possible legal entanglements. Simpler just to wait for a housekeeper or some other person to discover it.

None of this ties into the actual murder, which involved the victim sexually abusing his own son and the nanny whom Holmes knew years ago. 

This is a case of throwing in kink as a way of adding sex appeal and transgression, without any further development. It hints that Holmes may have been involved in BDSM, but backs off from any clear statement. (Most depictions of Holmes characterize him as asexual.)

Body of Evidence (IMDB) is a 1992 erotic thriller/neo-noir film starring Madonna and Willem Dafoe. It was part of the genre epitomized by Fatal Attraction (1987) and Basic Instinct (1992), but didn’t inspire their level of critical attention.

To quote Sean McGovern at The Film Experience:

Body of Evidence arrived at a particular nexus of Madonna’s career. Riding on the wave of Like A Prayer, pushing boundaries with the Blonde Ambition Tour and the exuberant Truth or Dare, Madonna’s imperial phase began to dip with her boundary-pushing take on sex and erotica; namely, SEX and Erotica. While Madonna would remain unapologetic, Body of Evidence, and the accompanying explicit period in career concluded with one of the most consistent criticisms of Madonna: rigid-perfectionism and managed-spontaneity…

[…]

The most grating problem with Body of Evidence is how reductive derivative it is. Released a mere 8 months after Basic Instinct, it’s shocking to see how much of it feels directly lifted from it and other films of its genre.

A wealthy man turns up dead from an apparent heart attack, bound to his bed, with a will that leaves millions to his lover, Rebecca Carlson. The district attorney points the finger at Rebecca Carlson (Madonna), who hires lawyer Frank Dulaney (Willem Dafoe) to defend her. The film is structured around the trial of Rebecca, and her “body of evidence”, as she appears nude several times.

Sexuality is strongly linked to threat in this film, typical of its post-HIV era. Frank’s teenage son asks:

Teenage son: “Can you really screw someone to death?”

Frank: “No!”

One of the first things we see is a pair of chromed nipple clamps on the bedside of the dead man.

Detective 2:. “What the hell is this?” 

DA Garret: “That is a nipple clamp.”

Detective 2: “How do you know?”

Detective 1: “He’s from LA.”

DA Garret: “Hey, I just happen to be a well informed individual.”

Detective 2: “How does this thing work?” [holds it up to where his nipples would be.]

Detective 1: “Who cares? Bag it.”

Garret also identifies the marks on the victim’s bedframe as being from handcuffs. 

The dead man’s secretary, Joanne, discovered the body, and immediately accuses his lover, Rebecca. 

Rebecca is set up as single, economically independent (she owns an enormous houseboat and has the money to hire a high-priced lawyer like Frank) and sexually liberated. 

Frank: “People here [Portland, OR] have very conservative views about sex.”

Rebecca: “No they don’t. They just don’t talk about it. They’re such hypocrites.”

Frank: “Well, those hypocrites are going to be sitting in the jury box, listening to Garret say how you led Andrew into perversion.”

Rebecca: “I didn’t have to lead him anywhere. Andrew knew exactly what he wanted. All we did was make love.”

Frank: “In handcuffs.”

Rebecca: “It was different, but we were still making love. Have you ever seen animals make love, Frank? It’s intense. It’s violent! But they never really hurt each other.”

Frank: “We’re not animals.”

Rebecca: “Yes, we are.”

She says she loved the dead man and didn’t kill him, and says he lied to her about the severity of his heart condition.

Rebecca: “I never know why men lie. They just do. Men lie.”

Garret: “Would you describe yourself as a dominatrix?”

Frank: “Back off of this, Bob.”

Garret: “A sadomasochist?”

Rebecca does not answer.

Rebecca is linked to Orientalist exoticism when she brings Frank to a Chinese herbalist shop, where he spies on her receiving acupuncture in the nude.

Rebecca is contrasted with two other women: Frank’s loyal wife Sharon, a restaurateur, and Joanne, the victim’s secretary. We see Frank and Joanne have passionate but vanilla, missionary-position sex, and she immediately hops up to go shower. Joanne, Rebecca’s primary accuser, presents herself as the victim’s loyal secretary, but she’s revealed to be the one who got the victim drugs and appears nude in his home videos. 

Garret, the prosecutor, not only paints Rebecca as a killer but dehumanizes her, calling her “the murder weapon itself” in front of the jury. 

Garret: “If I hit you and you die, I am the cause of your death. But can I be called a weapon? The answer is yes. And what a deadly weapon Rebecca Carlson made of it. […] She is a beautiful woman. But when this trial is over you will see her no differently than a gun, a knife or any other instrument used as a weapon.”

Frank tells the jury: “Rebecca Carlson is not on trial for her sexual tastes.”

Noir stories are usually structured around a woman seducing a man from the lawful path, and in this case Frank does act on Rebecca’s provocations, having a sexual affair with her. She talks about her own sadistic and masochistic tastes, when she was stealing strawberries

Rebecca: “On the other side, they had these wild rose bushes. And the thorns would dig into my legs and cut my thighs when I slid down. But the strawberries always tasted so sweet.”

Rebecca sensually eats a strawberry.

Frank: “Because of how much it hurt to get them.”

Rebecca: “Yeah.”

Body doesn’t go too deeply into BDSM acts or aesthetics. Rebecca wears black in some outfits, but never leather or latex. (This was before Madonna went full dominatrix in the video for the “Human Nature” single in 1995.) We see bondage (a belt, and pairs of handcuffs), hot wax play, and that’s about it. The scenes follow the conventions of early 90s, Red Shoe Diaries-style softcore: upper-class decor, soft lighting, smooth jazz soundtrack. Only a moment of frontal female nudity and no frontal male nudity. Rebecca is as comfortable on top as on the bottom. Frank is often “marked” by his sexual encounters with Rebecca, including scald marks on his chest from hot wax play, and cuts on his back from broken glass. The latter is what gives this him away to his wife, which leads to him sleeping in his office. 

On the witness stand, Rebecca states that Andrew was a willing participant, and that he bought her the handcuffs as a gift.

Frank: “For you to use on him while you made love.”

Rebecca: “Yes. He liked that. He was always in charge in his life and his work, and in bed, he liked to have somebody else in charge. It was a game we played. […] I never hurt him. […] I never humiliated him either. He picked the games.”

This is a common trope in mainstream discussions of BDSM, the powerful man who submits to a woman as relief. This doesn’t parallel the dynamic between Rebecca and Frank, who alternate being the aggressor. 

Body doesn’t succeed as a thriller. The courtroom scenes are dull, mainly because there’s no tension between Frank’s infatuation with Rebecca and his job as a lawyer. Frank’s affair with Rebecca is a breach of both his marriage vows and his professional ethics, but he doesn’t cross any ethical lines in his defense of her. The story even acknowledges this, when Frank says he would have given the same defense of her, regardless. Rebecca justifies this by saying he wouldn’t have been as convincing. 

The film ends with Rebecca dead, shot by one of her accomplices, and with Frank reconciling with both his professional colleague and his wife. Normative homosocial and heterosexual bonds are restored, by the death of the disruptive woman. Sadomasochistic signifiers like the nipple clamps and the handcuffs serve to mark Rebecca’s deviance, and as she is revealed as a mercenary murderer at the end, any insights into sexuality or BDSM from her are invalidated.

The General’s Daughter (IMDB) is a 1999 mystery/thriller. 

US Army Captain Elizabeth Campbell, a psychological warfare expert and the daughter of a famous general, is found staked out nude and dead on a training ground. Two warrant officers from the Criminal Investigation Division investigate and discover a web of sexual abuse and coverups. 

The two investigators, Brenner and Sunhill, illegally enter Campbell’s off-base house, which is extremely neat and organized, presenting the image of a model soldier and officer. Then they discover that the house’s basement includes a secret room, hidden behind a “Home of the Brave” poster. This room is dark and disorderly, with a messy bed, and handcuffs, whips and vibrators scattered about. Further investigation reveals a hidden video camera and tapes of Campbell, in dominatrix-type outfits, have sex with and dominating various men, though their faces are hidden with black leather hoods. 

As Sunhill and Brenner dig deeper into Campbell’s past, they learn that the ultimate cause of all this is the brutal rape of Campbell in her senior year at West Point, by a group of unidentified cadets during a night exercise. Her father, a famous general, was convinced by a superior to cover it up, for the sake of West Point and the army, and implicitly his own career. The general told his own daughter to keep quiet about it. 

Over the next seven years, Campbell orchestrated an elaborate revenge plan against her father. On the brink of his transition into the political sphere, Campbell restaged her own rape scene to tell her father (in a needlessly elaborate way) that she wasn’t going to keep quiet about her experience. 

Analyzing what The General’s Daughter says about rape in the military is beyond the scope of this article. What it says about BDSM is confusing.

As part of her plan of revenge on her father, Campbell weaponized her own sexuality, seducing numerous officers into her basement dungeon and taping it, though apparently without capturing their faces or other identifying features. Under the Army’s Puritanical regulations, marital infidelity is enough for a court martial that can ruin careers, not to mention the impact on their families. 

If that was the plan, wouldn’t vanilla sex be enough? Apparently not. As we’ve seen in other mainstream films and television, BDSM sexuality stands in for excessive/deviant sexuality in general. 

Brenner himself is disgusted by the evidence of Campbell’s sexuality. He says “Oh my god…” as he holds up a strap-on dildo harness. He illegally has the contents of her house moved to the base and reconstructed, to keep it hidden. It’s not clear which he is more concerned with, her posthumous reputation or the reputation of her sex partners. Later, he grabs a suspect’s face and angrily demands, “The Elizabeth I met was bright and shining. The woman on the tapes is a different lady. And there’s a direct connection, isn’t there? Isn’t there?” Brenner idealizes the woman he met a couple of times before her death, and cannot reconcile that image with the dominatrix in the basement. 

Sunhill takes a different approach as she speculates into a tape recorder: “Maybe she was here for a secret rendezvous, a tryst. Maybe the rape fantasy was part of the thrill. We know she had a predilection for the gamier side of sex.”

The vibrators and other sexual paraphernalia in Campbell’s basement signify her damaged, deviant sexuality, not female sexual autonomy and pleasure. Sunhill, a rape counsellor, says that Campbell rejected the man who actually killed her because “she couldn’t want anybody.” She’s the dominatrix as damaged, misandrist nymphomaniac.

Scandal episode S04E16 “It’s Good to be Kink”, aired March 19, 2015 IMDB

Sue Thomas (Lena Dunham) is about to publish a memoir of her sexual exploits in Washington, DC. One of the men mentioned is a fixer named Leo, who is the boyfriend of White House press secretary Abby. Abby, fearing for her career, turns to her friend, Olivia Pope. 

Olivia delivers a lecture at Sue, telling her to stop publication. Sue flips the script on Olivia, hitting the third-wave sex-positive feminist, and says she’ll stop publication if somebody pays her $3 million. 

Olivia and her minions set up a mini-heist by hacking Sue’s account on “Land-O-Kink”, with the usual jokes about kink. 

Quinn: “Don’t knock it. Very popular dating app for people who are into things like whips, chains, furry role–”

Olivia: “I get it.”

[…]

Huck: “According to her [Sue’s] profile, she’s into everything. Roleplaying, erotic spanking, flogging, suspension, ropes… aren’t those the same thing?”

Quinn: “No, not at all.”

They lure Sue out of her apartment with a date, and send in a man to scan the only type-written copy of the book in her toy trunk. They then decode Sue’s codenames for her lovers, and assemble the list of DC power players. Olivia tells a room full of middle-age white men in suits to chip in to pay Sue’s demand. However, one of them, attorney-general David Rosen, refuses to pay up, on the grounds that this is extortion. 

This sets up a problem. If Sue publishes her book, that kills the careers of Abby and of  David Rosen, and that in turn kills an immunity-from-prosecution deal for Huck, one of Olivia’s employees who is a former covert assassin. 

Olivia and Co dig deeper into Sue’s life, and find that she was a highly qualified worker at the EPA who was sexually harassed by her boss because of her “wild” reputation. When she rejected him and talked to HR, he fired and blackballed her. Olivia explains to Sue that her boss stole her ability to make her living with her intellect, and all she’s doing now is making her living with her body. Olivia says they can go after Sue’s boss through legal channels, and offers her high-status job interviews in exchange for the manuscript, and Sue agrees.

Later, Olivia’s employees Quinn and Huck visit Sue at her apartment, and find one of her lovers threatening her at knifepoint. Huck throws him out, then brutally kills Sue right in front of Quinn. Sue’s manuscript is recovered and hidden in Olivia’s private safe, Quinn and Huck lie to Olivia about the murder, and Huck gets his immunity deal so he can see his family again.

Scandal portrays Washington as an intricate network of money, reputation, deals, and secrets. Sue became a loose element in that system, and it destroyed her to preserve itself, even if the individual beneficiaries of her death (e.g. David, Leo, Abby) didn’t know about it.

This episode doesn’t go into the acts or the motivations of BDSM, which raises the question of why it is there at all. Perhaps regular vanilla, heterosexual infidelity isn’t enough for career ending scandal in 2015. 

David Rosen: “There’s no sympathy for the kinky, Huck, even for occasional dabblers like me.”

Still, writing from 2020, the age of #MeToo and Donald “grab ‘em by the pussy” Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, it seems a little quaint for men in power to worry about a roman a clef full of consensual, hetero sex between adults. 

It does consider the social ramifications of kink, especially on women. What sets the episode’s plot in motion is when Abby turns to her friend Olivia, because she fears for her career. We never learn what Leo did with Sue to earn him the nickname “the dustbuster”, only that Abby yells “Disgusting!” at him repeatedly. However, Abby is actually more concerned about how it will reflect on her. As a woman in politics, she is always judged for every personal detail, including the men she’s involved with. A man might be able to weather a sexual scandal without ending his career, but that’s not a possibility for women, even if it is a scandal by proxy.

It also characterizes Sue as not as a mercenary political groupie, but as a person who was wronged because of her sexuality by the sexist culture of Washington. David and Leo lament her death, calling her smart and nice. 

It does end on a more positive note, as Sue’s manuscript rekindles Leo and Abby’s relationship, and encourages Olivia to overcome her anxiety and have a sexual fling.

Episode S05E01 “Carly Summers”, aired November 1, 2007 IMDB

Nip/Tuck is a drama series focused on a pair of cosmetic surgeons. In the season 5 opener, Doctor Sean McNamara and Doctor Christian Troy have just relocated from Miami to Los Angeles and opened a new practice. 

One of their first clients is Bob Easton, a high-powered studio exec. He wants them to cover up the bite marks on his chest. 

Sean: “Did you have a run-in with a dog?”

Bob: “When my mistress puts my collar and leash on, I’m the dog.”

Christian: “Your dominatrix inflicted these?”

Bob: “Yeah, and she’s not cheap either. Still, no Scotch, no yoga class, no hot rock therapy ever helped me like Mistress Dark Pain does.”

Sean: “Sounds like living the dream has its price.”

Bob: “Of course it does. Eat your young on a regular basis, and what do you expect? All day long I’m the one with the control, the power. Once a week, Mistress Dark Pain takes it all away from me. Sometimes twice a week during Oscar season. Every bite somehow restores the balance. Keeps me real, you know?”

While Bob recovers from surgery in the clinic, Sean is called in because their patient has summoned Mistress Dark Pain (played by Tia Carrere). We’re introduced to her in full dominatrix outfit, tormenting Bob with a fishing rod attached to hooks through his nipples. 

Mistress Dark Pain: “Of course I sterilize. I’m a professional.” (angry)

Bob says he needed her because of the stress of his job. 

Bob: “I had to call her, okay? I had to fire five people today, by email.”

Sean tells her to leave while attending to Bob. 

Mistress Dark Pain: “Let me tell you something Doctor. It’s not easy being Robert Easton. He isn’t stupid. He knows that underneath his ‘look how big my dick is’ act is just a scared little boy who feeds off everyone else’s talents and dreams. He’s nothing. I have a gift. I help keep men like Bob from imploding from too much power.”

Sean: “Well, let me tell you something, Mistress Whoever. You and your gift are not welcome here. This is a place of healing.”

Mistress Dark Pain: “You’d be fun to work with. See you later, Bobby.”

The doctors encounter Mistress Dark Pain again in the lobby of their office. She’s dressed in more office-professional attire, though with heavier lipstick.

Mistress Dark Pain: “Apparently the merger’s official, and our little Bobby has been asked to be chairman and CEO of the parent company. He’s very excited, but understandably a little stressed.”

The doctors enter the recovery room and find Bob Easton in shock, with even more bloody bite marks all over his chest. 

Bob: “It’s not her fault. She wanted to stop. I begged her to keep going.”

During surgery, Sean chastises Bob for risking his health.

Bob: “I know, I have a problem. For the record, I decided not to take the job. I’m out. You know, it’s only a matter of time until this town eats you alive.”

As effectively the supplier of Bob’s drug (if not the drug in herself), Mistress Dark Pain has a vested interest in him continuing to hire her. While she testily asserts she is a professional to Sean, she also leaves Bob in shock after a session with no aftercare. Perhaps she assumes that since the doctors are here to look after him. (This is the only appearance of Mistress Dark Pain in the series.)

As is often the case with addiction, the problem is with the drug, not the drug or the object of addiction itself. Bobby may inadvertently be rewarding, not punishing, himself via his sessions with his Mistress. He gets a big endorphin rush after he does something that gives him anxiety. Perhaps that is why, at the end of the episode, Bob returns to his high power, high stress job. 

This is the familiar trope of the executive submitting to the mistress in the dungeon. It’s not exactly unrealistic, but the services of pro dominatrixes aren’t cheap, and thus men with high-powered jobs are more likely to afford them. Men who don’t have the means have to make do. 

The world of Nip/Tuck is almost exclusively inhabited by highly dysfunctional people, so a studio executive into BDSM is far from the strangest or most self-destructive person ever encountered. Thus it isn’t clear why Christian calls Bob a “freak” and Sean refers to Mistress Dark Pain’s “sicko clients.” 

Mistress Dark Pain has found a niche in the Hollywood system, and she’s as much a part of propping up that system as Christian and Sean. In other words, they’re as much whores as she is. They’re just as mercenary and just as fake. The Mistress gives Sean her card and says he would be “fun to work with”. This could mean that he will be her client some day, or that the two of them would work together. She cuts her client up, and Sean puts them together again.

CSI:NY S01E16 “Hush”, aired February 23, 2005 IMDB

Yet another dead naked woman in bondage. CSIs Aiden and Danny investigate.

It turns out that the deceased was strapped to a device on the front of a speeding pickup truck, House of Gord-style. The truck collided with a tree, killing her. 

An abandoned truck found nearby has a strange device mounted on the front, which includes a label saying, “Place Shoulders Here”. This includes a device with a red button. The truck contains a bag with a latex bodysuit, a ball gag with teeth impressions, and straps.

Aiden: “Pulp Fiction. Nice.”

They visit the truck’s owner, Rob, in his suburban home. He’s the husband of the deceased, Debbie, and has two kids playing in the background.

Danny: “Your wife was in a car accident but we suspect that she was involved in a fetish stunt of some sort.”

Rob: “My wife is a very decent and conservative woman.”

Danny: “You sure there wasn’t a chance she was into something, she just didn’t tell you about it?”

Rob: “The truth is, Debbie and I live separate lives during the week. She works in an office in Manhattan and sleeps at the Waldorf. I never question what she does when she’s away.”

Examining the latex bodysuit in the lab is an opportunity for uncomfortable banter between Aiden and Danny. 

Aiden: “I like being on top.”

Danny: “You getting all freaky on me because we drew a bondage case?”

Aiden: “You wish.”

They find a fingerprint and (way too quickly) link it to Jennifer Stupain. The database displays “alias Mistress Jezebelle”, with a record of “public lewdness” and “obscenity in the 3rd degree”. This name is not mentioned. 

Another cliche: the investigators infiltrate a kink party. They are mistaken for “the Andersons” and don’t correct the error. (Don’t police officers have to identify themselves?) This party specializes in forniphilia, i.e. humans as furniture, and includes a few examples like a human chandelier and a side table. Jennifer hosts and introduces “Garage Joe”, who built all of this stuff. 

Garage Joe spots Aiden’s badge and flees. The investigators identify themselves. 

Jennifer: “Everything we do is perfectly legal. We’re licensed and bonded.” 

I have no idea what kind of licensing or bonding would apply to selling this kind of device. 

Without any kind of warrant, Danny and Aiden take photographs of people with their shirts off, looking for bruising that might indicate they were in a car accident. They also confiscate all the gear from the party. 

In the lab, they play around with the “robo spanker” device. 

Danny: “It says robo-spanker. Can you believe people actually make this kind of stuff?”

Aiden: “Apparently so. Garage Joe does.”

They turn it on and it swings a strap back and forth. Danny urges Aiden to try it. 

Aiden (joking): “That’s sexual harassment, Danny.” 

Hair in the bondage equipment leads them to “Garage Joe” Strahill.

Danny: “Yeah, she died. Is that a big shock to you?”

Strahil: “Yes, it is. I made the screamer hitch as an optimum mode of speed and fear for those who fetish such. Debbie was up for it, so I sold her the art.” 

Danny: “And then you tied her up and you took her for a ride?”

Strahil: “No, sir. I only sell. You use at your own risk.”

Finally they figure out that the red button on the hitch device is connected to a red light on the dashboard, as a safety feature. 

Broken glass in the truck is linked to a specific model of 8mm film camera. (Why such a primitive technology?) A warranted search of Jennifer Stupain’s house turns up the broken camera and the film. 

The interrogation, with the whirr of the projector in the background, puts pressure on jennifer. 

Jennifer: “You’re never going to get that out of me. Trust is not negotiable in my world. My function that night was simple. Make sure Debbie had a safe experience.”

Aiden: “Yeah, well, you did a lousy job because we got it all on film. The danger wasn’t outside the car, it was inside.”

In an impressionistic flashback, we see Debbie strapped to the screamer hitch on the speeding truck, with Jennifer and the driver, who is eventually revealed to be Rob. 

The interrogation room scene shifts to reveal that now they are talking to Rob. 

Danny is enraged, yelling at Rob, “You have two little kids at home. Two little kids now with no mother and no father. For what? For what?! For some kicks?!”

Rob says nothing. 

The investigative procedural genre trades in moral resolution. This episode provides it when Jennifer and Rob are handcuffed and taken away. Danny and Aiden make light banter about putting each other on the hood of the car when they go for a meal. 

There’s no mention of what they are charged with, or consideration of whether Debbie’s death was an accident or a murder. (Though leaving Debbie’s corpse by the roadside and covering up the incident will not look good in court.) In the CSI franchise, solving crimes is a purely analytical process, and moral and legal complexities are seldom considered. 

This is the B-plot of the episode, and consequently had less screen time to consider the motivations. There’s no exploration of Debbie’s character or what her masochism means to her. During the flashback sequence that leads up to Debbie’s death, Rob says, “Nine years of marriage and this is what gets you off! You want speed, sweetheart? You got it!”

Jennifer, in the truck’s passenger seat, says, “Damn it, Ron, you can’t violate her trust, slow down!”

In the present, Danny says, “The power over someone in a submissive position can be quite a turn on for a guy like you, huh, Ron?”

This is a version of escalation theory, that putting somebody in a position of total dominance will eventually lead them to abuse that power. 

Making Rob at least partially responsible for Debbie’s death creates more questions than it answers. What was going on in Rob and Debbie’s marriage? Was Rob actually involved in Debbie’s kink life before this? Did he resent her involvement in the kinky world of Manhattan while he was stuck with the kids in the suburbs? Did he try to get involved in her kink life, but go straight to forniphilia and high-risk fear play instead of starting slow?

“Hush” deals only in the superficials of BDSM. The investigators distance themselves via either nervous humor or moralistic judgement.

Family Guy, episode S02E14 “Let’s go to the hop”, aired June 6, 2000. IMDB

This is the episode of Family Guy with the infamous “your safeword is banana” scene. 

The town of Quahog goes into a moral panic about teenagers licking psychedelic toads. Lois and Peter discover a toad in the laundry, and their daughter Meg confesses to holding it to curry favor with the popular kids. 

That night in their bedroom, Peter and Lois talk about their fears regarding their kids while putting on fetish wear. Peter says he will talk to the school principal.

Peter’s “plan” is to infiltrate the school as a student, “Lando Griffin.” He solves the toad-licking problem with a musical number, and blunders into becoming the most popular guy in school. Most of the rest of the episode is Peter’s conflict between chasing highschool popularity and looking after Meg. The real underlying problem is the highschool social hierarchy, and the toads are just a symptom. 

Perhaps inadvertently, Family Guy provided one of the most non-judgmental depictions of BDSM in mainstream media. Peter and Lois’ conversation about their kids and drugs is played straight. It’s the kind of thing a married couple with teenagers would talk about while getting ready for a scene. It’s just something they do together for fun. 

You could interpret this scene to say that Peter and Lois are hypocrites for their panic over drugs while they indulge in kink, but that only works if you view kink as a problem. Showing them smoking a joint together would be a more pointed critique, but might not be allowed on television.

Eurotrip is a 2004 teen comedy. 

Eurotrip is a very parochial movie, with the American teens treating Europe as if it is a terrifying land of threatening depravity. The plot itself is premised on heterosexual gay panic: the protagonist doesn’t realize that he has become email pals with a German girl and thinks a man is propositioning him. When he realizes his mistake, he goes on a trip with some friends across Europe to find his love and make amends. 

Much of the comedy is the characters attempting and failing to enjoy European pleasures supposedly forbidden in puritanical America. (Two of the “vices”, cannabis and absinthe, are now mostly legal in the USA.)

Cooper, the obligatory dimwitted horndog, says: 

Cooper: “This trip is a once in a lifetime opportunity to broaden my sexual horizons. […] I’m talking about crazy European sex. You know America was founded by prudes. Prudes who left Europe because they hated all the kinky, steamy European sex that was going on. And now I, Cooper Harris, will return to the land of my perverted forefathers and claim my birthright, which is a series of erotic and sexually challenging adventures.” 

In Amsterdam, “the drug and sex capital of Europe”, Cooper grabs a flyer for “Club Vandersexxx”. Inside, it’s all young beautiful white women lounging around in lingerie. Madam Vandersexxx (Lucy Lawless) welcomes him. 

Madam Vandersexxx: “He is American. How sad for you to grow up in a country founded by prudes. A country overrun with crime and illiteracy. A country where a man is forced to make sex to only one woman at a time, and one must learn the woman’s name beforehand.”

Cooper: “It was horrible.”

Madam Vandersexxx: “I know. But you can come with me and let the vandersexxx begin.”

The women start undressing him. 

Cooper sits next to Madam while the other women are stroking him. She introduces to him the concept of safewords.

Madam Vandersexxx: “Sometimes, we find our clients are so overwhelmed with the pleasure, that they sometimes scream out, ‘no’, when they really mean ‘yes’. And that is why we have the safe word.”

Cooper: “The ‘safe word’?”

Madam Vandersexxx: “If at any time the ecstasy gets too great, you just use the safe word. Until we hear the safe word, we will not stop.”

She hands him a folded piece of paper.

Cooper: “Yeah, right. ‘Stop.’ All right.” 

Madam Vandersexxx: “We’re going to start slowly, teasing you with a little light erotic foreplay.”

Cooper: “Wheee!”

Cooper is delighted even with the women handcuff him to the bedframe.

Then Madam Vandersexxx begins in earnest. The women disappear, the curtains retract to reveal bare concrete walls, and she summons “Hans” and “Gruber”, two large muscular men in aprons and harnesses. They swiftly transform the bed into a standing bondage frame and equipment locker. The soundtrack changes to aggressive techno music with male German vocals. 

Cooper: “So, are the girls coming back?”

Madam Vandersexxx: “Administer the testicle clamps!”

They rip off his clothes and bring out scary-looking equipment with car batteries. 

Cooper remembers he has a safeword, which turns out to be a long, complicated word in Dutch he can’t pronounce correctly.

After some of Madam Vandersexxx’s ministrations (involving a wind-up cymbals monkey), Cooper manages to pronounce what he thinks is the safeword. Instead, she orders her minions to bend Cooper over a bench and bring out some elaborate, phallic-looking mechanized device. The target is his ass. 

The next morning, Cooper rejoins the group, walking bowlegged. “I don’t want to talk about it.” At least he got the t-shirt.

Much like the dominatrix scene in Tomcats (including a similar room that instantly transforms into a dungeon), the comedy exploits male insecurity about sexually voracious women, with homosexual panic added. 

New Zealand actress Lucy Lawless is probably best known as the title character of the TV series Xena: Warrior Princess (1995-2001), who had more than a hint of the dominatrix about her.

Bones S01E08 “The Girl in the Fridge”, aired November 29, 2005 IMDB

Bones is another forensic investigation procedural TV series. 

The case begins with the discovery of a decayed skeleton in an abandoned refrigerator. The forensic anthropologists determine that the deceased is a missing young woman, Maggie Schilling, who was held for ransom, but then the kidnappers broke off communication. She also had a condition that made her bones brittle, particularly stress fractures in her wrists.

The series’ protagonist, Dr. Temperance Brennan, says:

“She did fight, Michael. They kept her tied up like an animal. But she fought. That’s how she got those stress fractures, because she was bound and struggling.”

Tracing the drugs that killed her leads to a married couple, Mary and Scott Costello, who lived with Maggie. When the FBI, led by FBI agent Booth, searches their home, they find that the Costellos are sadomasochists, though we don’t actually see this, just a cardboard box full of toys.

Brennan: “They’re sadomasochistic fetishists.”

Booth: “Yeah, They turned the basement into a fun room.”

Temperance: “Seeking sexual gratification through the manipulation of power.” She lifts up a studded leather collar with an O-ring, with a disgusted grimace. “Probably the oldest of fetishes. Master-slave. It’s all about dominance.”

Booth: “This sort of thing comes up with the bloom goes off the rose, if you know what I mean?”

Temperance: “I don’t know what you mean.”

Booth: “You know, the regular stuff. When it gets old, you have to spice it up. It’s over. When the sex is good, you don’t need any help.”

Temperance: “That’s for sure.” [smiles]

Booth: “I’m sorry?”

Temperance: “I was agreeing.”

Booth: “Yeah, well, don’t. It kind of freaks me out.” 

Temperance: “I was just saying that I myself feel no inclination to either pain or dominance when it comes to sex.”

Booth: “Are you sure?”

Temperance: “Yeah, I’m sure.”

Booth: “Because you can be very bossy.”

Temperance whacks him lightly on the arm with a riding crop from a box of toys. Booth doesn’t react.

This is the opportunity for flirtatious banter between Brennan and Booth. Even Brennan non-consensually hitting Booth with the crop is seen as in jest. 

Booth, however, spouts off a lot of ideas about BDSM and its inferiority to vanilla sex, that seem to be based purely on his own opinions. Brennan, usually objective and non-judgemental, agrees.

As the Costellos are led out of their house in handcuffs, Booth verbally harasses them. 

Booth: “Look at him, huh? Ooh, look at him. All smiley. I bet he just loves these things.”

In interrogation, Mary creates doubt. 

Mary: “Maybe she wanted to be cuffed. Did you ever think of that?”

Booth: “Here’s what I was thinking. Female, dominant, strapped for cash, meets wealthy teenager on the outs with her parents, convinces her submissive husband to hold her for ransom.”

The Costellos’ lawyer says the bondage was consensual.

Mary’s Lawyer: “Maggie Schilling was legally an adult. We don’t deny she was in the house, even cuffed. We don’t deny there was a perfectly legal sexual relationship which by its nature got rough. But Maggie was a willing participant.”

Mary: “And enthusiastic.”

[…]

Booth to Mary: “It’s weird for you, huh? Being the one that’s all locked up.”

Mary: “The way you come at me, are you threatened or do I turn you on?”

In the forensic anthropology lab, Brennan argues with her mentor/lover, Michael Stires, and says she can prove Maggie Schilling was bound non-consensually.

She says the wear on the bones show that Maggie was tied with her legs together. 

Booth: “If this were the result of sex games, then the legs, they wouldn’t be bound together. Come on, looking for a little nookie, last thing you tie together are the legs.”

Another out-of-his-ass opinion from Booth.

In the second half of the episode, the focus shifts to the conflict between Brennan and her lover/mentor, who is an expert witness for the defense. The prosecution says that Maggie was lured into the Costellos’ home with the promise of drugs and held prisoner. The defense says that Maggie orchestrated the ransom scheme to extort money from her parents, and her death was a self-administered overdose. 

BDSM becomes only a background element, used to explain the victim’s injuries. The jury expert calls the defendants “S and M perverts”, but thankfully neither the prosecution nor the defense brings that up in court. 

This suggests that BDSM was added to the story solely for the confusion about the victim’s bone breaks.

Bones S10E03, “The Purging of the Pundit”, aired October 9, 2014 IMDB

Unlike in the previous Bones episode, “The Girl in the Fridge”, BDSM is closely integrated into both the mystery and Booth’s character arc in “The Purging of the Pundit”. 

Forensic procedurals are all about the puzzle, and in this case the victim’s masochism provides the puzzle. The body of a right-wing media figure, “Hutch” Whitehouse, is found partially consumed by animals. His corpse shows signs of being bound and tortured, including repeatedly struck in the testicles, but it also appears to be consensual.

Fuentes: “It’s like he was enjoying being murdered.”

Eventually, they determine that the victim’s nose was broken, causing his nasal passages to fill with blood. Combined with a ball gag in his mouth, this would have suffocated him. 

A major theme of this episode is trust. “Purging” takes place after Booth and Brennan have married and had a child, and after Booth has lost a partner and been in federal prison. Though now free and back on duty, he is unable to trust new team members or even Brennan. 

The conversation between Brennan and Booth about BDSM is less superficial than before. 

Booth makes one of his knee-jerk dismissals of kink, and Brennan points out that he likes to be bitten during sex. 

Booth: “It’s creepy, right? I mean, sex is about love, not about being tied up and beaten.”

Brennan: “I disagree.”

Booth: “What?”

Brennan: “Sex and violence are two of humanity’s most primal urges. An amalgamation of is a logical by-product.”

Booth: “Bones, S and M isn’t a peanut butter cup. It’s not two great tastes that go together.”

Brennan: “You enjoy being bitten.”

Booth: “Bitten? No, I don’t!”

Brennan: “When we make love, sometimes I nibble your ear. Your response is very positive to say the least.” 

Booth: “Look, a nibble is a lot different than being whipped.”

Brennan: “All degrees of the same thing.”

Brennan and Booth investigate a room the victim paid to soundproof, and discover a fully-equipped dungeon. (Unlike the earlier Bones episode, which only showed a box of toys.) Booth says she is excited by this. She says she is “fascinated as a scientist.” She looks very interested when she picks up a red flogger and swings it, though not at Booth.

DNA from bodily fluids in the dungeon lead to Booth questioning a Miss Skarsgard. 

Skarsgard: “Agent Booth, I’m a dominatrix. If the rough stuff bothered me, I wouldn’t be fit to do my job.”

She sounds surprised and shocked when informed Hutch is dead. 

Skarsgard: “This would not happen on my watch. I’m a professional.”

Booth: “Oh, professional. What do you guys have, some kind of a union?”

Skarsgard: “I’m a licensed therapist. I provided a safe, reliable service.”

Booth: “So you were his, um, therapist.”

Skarsgard: “Yes. Hutch felt great guilt that he made his money inciting the worst in people.”

Booth: “Oh, and your beatings helped him with that.”

Skarsgard: “I never beat him. He was disciplined, which fulfilled his need to feel punished. Making progress too. I can’t believe he’s dead.”

As we’ve seen before, one way to manage the social deviance of pro dommes is by invoking the concept of woman-as-caretaker. 

She says Hutch was thinking of quitting the show and becoming a moderate. She swears that when she left him, he was fine. 

Skarsgard: “He could have released himself whenever he wanted to.”

Booth: “When you left him? Well, you left him bound and gagged.”

Skarsgard: “Abandonment was important to Hutch. But the handcuffs and restraints I used had safety releases. It was up to him to decide when he had had enough. I would never harm a client.”

More investigation shows that the victim’s producer found him dead and disposed of the body. 

Producer Bob: “Handcuffs, leather, ball gag. It was revolting. I could not let the cops find him like that.”

The bondage gear, disposed of in another storm drain, provides a link to Hutch’s on-air partner and “punching bag”, designated liberal Alan Spaziano. He found out about Hutch’s bondage sessions and photographed Hutch in full gear with his cell phone to blackmail him to stay in the job. When Hutch escaped and attacked him, Spaziano hit him with the cell phone, inadvertently killing him. Then he mimicked Hutch’s voice on a phone message to give himself an alibi. 

Confronted with his own violence, Spaziano goes into denial. 

Spaziano: “This is not who I am. It was an accident.”

Both Hutch’s wife and his domme say that, beneath the domineering, cruel public persona was a man who felt guilty for what he did and wanted to be punished for it, or leave it entirely. Again, masochism is based on the guilt of the powerful. The actual murder was committed by Spaziano, the meek liberal who needed his on-air partner, the masochist who wouldn’t let his sadist quit. 

Forensic investigation shhows treat the human body as a puzzle; there is always a hidden truth to be revealed via investigation. This can get into transphobic areas, such as when “reading” a transperson is treated as a triumph of science, not an act of disrespect to the person. In this case, the victim’s masochism, revealed by close examination of his physical body, is treated as the truth of his identity, in contrast to his domineering public persona.

Sex and the City S02E12, “La Douleur Exquise!”, aired August 22nd, 1999 IMDB Title translates to “the exquisite pain”

Sex and the City was a popular dramedy series about single women in New York City around the turn of the millennium. 

The opening narration of this episode makes it clear that BDSM is just another aesthetic to be adopted, consumed, and abandoned, befitting the series’ consumerist ethos. 

Carrie (vo) “New York City restaurants are always looking for the next new angle to grab that elusive and somewhat jaded Manhattan palate. Last year it was fusion Cajun. Last month it was mussels from Brussels. And tonight, it’s S&M.”

There actually was a BDSM-themed restaurant in NYC in the late 90s, called La Nouvelle Justine. 

Carrie and her group of friends take this as an opportunity to dress up, like everything else. 

Carrie: “See, this is what happens when the mayor shuts down the sex shops. It pops up in your cuisine.”

A handsome man in a leather harness serves their drinks, and Samantha gets into the dominatrix persona. She finds fault with her drink and very lightly beats his ass with the crop. 

Charlotte: “How does he wait on tables dressed like that? It’s humiliating.”

Carrie: “Well, the summer I worked at Howard Johnsons I had to wear an orange hat.”

Samantha: (points crop at Charlotte) “Don’t be so judgemental. This is just a sexual expression. All these people have jobs and pay their bills. They’re just having fun with fetishes. I wonder what your fetish is.” 

Stanford: “Charlotte has a thing for Crabtree and Evelyn potpourri.”

Charlotte: (pushes away crop) “I don’t have a fetish.”

Samantha: “We all have a fetish. The difference between us and them is, they’re putting it out there where everyone can see. I think it’s healthy and fabulous.”

Samantha normalizes BDSM first by asserting that kinksters are part of the productive economy, and then by asserting that everybody has fetishes. 

Carrie leaves early to visit her boyfriend, known as “Mr. Big”, before he leaves for Paris. Samantha gives her the crop and the top hat. 

While Big and Carrie share sexual attraction, they get into a fight over Big’s refusal to commit and include her in his life plans. 

Over lunch the next day, Carrie is upset and asks “Why do I keep doing this to myself? I must be a masochist or something.”

Carrie (vo): “That’s when I first realized it. I was in an S & M relationship with Mr. Big.”

Carrie (vo): (typing on computer) “In love relationships, there is a fine line between pleasure and pain. In fact, it’s a common belief that a relationship without pain is a relationship not worth having. To some, pain implies growth. But how do we know when the growing pains stop and the ‘pain-pains’ take over? Are we masochists or optimists if we continue to walk that fine line? When it comes to relationships, how do you know when enough is enough?”

Way back in the 19th century, Krafft-Ebing defined masochism as a disorder exclusive to men, as a departure from the norm. Women were supposed to be attracted to stronger men who would naturally confine and torment them. It wasn’t until much later that masochism was seen as a problem for women. 

Carrie and Big have another fight when he comes back.

Carrie: “You said you loved me.”

Big: “I do.”

Carrie: “Then why does it hurt so fucking much?”

Carrie leaves.

Carrie (vo): “I was the real sadist. He might be the one with the whip but I was the one who tied myself up. Tied myself to a man who was terrified of being tied down.”

While the metaphor might be strained, Carrie does realize that her suffering is at least in part her choice. Masochism does involve control of the party inflicting the suffering. Realizing that is the first step. 

Carrie and Big break up (for now). 

Carrie (vo): “Did I ever really love Big, or was I addicted to the pain? The exquisite pain of wanting someone so unattainable. […] I wanted to go to him, but I felt like I was tied to the chair. Some part of me was holding me back, knowing I had gone too far, reached my limit. And just like that, I had untied myself from Mr. Big. I was free. But there was nothing exquisite about it.”

Three other plotlines also comment on kink, indirectly. 

Stanford, Carrie’s obligatory gay male friend, is chatting on a website about men in designer underwear. He’s reluctant to meet a man face to face, because of his nebbishy looks. Eventually, he goes to an underwear party at a gay bar. A handsome man cruises him, and strikes up a conversation over Stanford’s designer trunks, bought in Paris. 

Carrie (vo): “Stanford Blatch had never felt more special.”

Stanford’s plotline suggests that personal style can make up for a less-than-ideal body. However, he also says he got the underwear in Paris, which makes them a statement of his wealth and privilege that he can go to Paris. 

Charlotte, the group’s designated good girl, naturally loves shoes, and she drifts into a situation with a fetishist shoe salesman. In exchange for letting him put shoes on her feet, she gets designer shoes at a massive discount or for free. 

Carrie (vo): “When a foot fetish meets a shoe fetish, all reason goes out the shop window.”

The others make Charlotte realize she is trading sex for material goods. She returns the shoes, but the salesman talks her into letting him put multiple shoes on her feet, and apparently climaxes. 

Carrie (vo): “Charlotte felt like Cinderella. Cinderella in a dirty, kinky, freaked out, storybook, parallel universe.”

As Barbara Ehrenreich, et al, observed in Re-Making Love, BDSM is the perfect form of sexuality for a consumer-capitalist culture. The Stanford and Charlotte subplots show material objects can be a part of a sexual exchange. Stanford has no problem with his underwear being an icebreaker that gets him talking to a desirable man, while Charlotte can’t continue the transaction once she overcomes her denial that she is exchanging sex for shoes (even if the man doesn’t touch any part of her higher than her ankles).

Miranda’s subplot involves her getting involved with a guy whose fetish for sex in public places goes beyond kink into compulsion. This is already an ethically fraught practice, and the man escalates until he is literally fucking Miranda in front of his parents. Apart from the consent issues, nobody likes to be used exclusively as a prop in somebody else’s fetish scenario.

While people like playfully whacking others with crops (non-consensually), there’s no exploration of why anybody would want to be on either end of the whip, much less discussion of consent or negotiation. Women are fetishized, but not fetishizers. 

Strangely, the most sexually adventurous of the quartet, Samantha, only appears briefly in this episode. Kim Cattrall (Samantha) has done kinky or kink adjacent roles before, such as in Live Nude Girls.