“Miss Rebecca Thrall”, aired October 11, 2017 IMDB

The main plot of “Miss Rebecca Thrall” concerns a scheme by Waterday Financial to take out life insurance policies on poor people, and then bribe police officers with loans to kill them, and collect the money. 

The main agent of this operation is Miss Rebecca Thrall (played by Sarah Wynter) who negotiates with both the victims and the killers. She also keeps a man in a full rubber suit and hood bound to a St. Andrew’s cross in her basement. 

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Miss Thrall is visually fetishized, even before she’s shown to be a dominatrix. When she enters a scene, the camera focuses on her spike heels first, and she usually wears black, form-fitting clothing. She’s icy cold and professional as she manipulates the poor and distressed people. 

When the FBI raids the corporate office, we learn that the bound man is the CEO and her partner in crime at Waterday. She kills him without a moment’s hesitation by putting the rubber hood on him and constricting his breathing tube. There’s no mention of what she did with the body. Later she attempts to kill the police officer she bribed into committing murder, which leads to her being arrested. 

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It’s clear that the CEO knows about insurance/murder scam, and may have started it. Thrall is the one who negotiates with the victims and the assassins, but she’s not the only person responsible for this crime. She is singled out as a more hateable villain. The sadomasochistic element is there mainly for sex appeal and to make Thrall as monstrous as possible. Her sexual deviance reflects her moral deviance and vice versa, a motif we’ve seen many times before.

iZombie, “Spanking the Zombie”, aired May 2, 2017 IMDB

iZombie is a TV series about a world in which an infectious disease gives people a craving for brains, though some can retain their human intelligence and appearance. The protagonist is Olivia “Liv” Moore, a police forensic scientist who investigates murders by literally eating the brains of the victims and inheriting their memories and personalities temporarily.

In this episode, the victim is Roxanne Greer, who worked as a pro dominatrix known as Sweet Lady Pain. This is literally all we know about her. Even though Liv has access to some of her memories and behaviours, all we see is a few visions of her interacting with clients. We learn nothing else about her, not her family, her background, how and why she got into this business, what she thinks of the work or the men she sees, or what she is like when she’s not being a dominatrix.

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What we do get is plenty of dominatrix attitude from Liv. After eating Roxanne’s brain, she becomes both seductive and domineering, and wears black, close-fitting clothing. While this might work with some men, most would probably think she’s deranged. 

Liv: [to police sketch artist] “When you want your advice, I’ll beat it out of you. Now be a good little sketch bitch and take up the pad.”

Liv experiences visions from Roxanne’s brain, and uses them to make police sketches of Roxanne’s clients. This links her to a local news anchor and a defense attorney, seen in her visions in typical male submissive scenarios (French maid costume, schoolboy costume). 

The news anchor eventually tells the investigators that one of Roxanne’s clients who somehow knew Roxanne was secretly recording sessions, stole the camera’s memory card, and used it to blackmail the news anchor. After arresting the blackmailer, they find he has served time in both prison and a mental institution. 

In order to link him to the murder of Roxanne, Liv convinces Clive to let her play “bad cop.”

Liv: “Let me work him over, see what I can do.”

Clive: “You want to be bad cop? That requires genuine intimidation, Liv. I’m sorry. You’re many things, but intimidating? I don’t think so.”

Liv: “Watch me.”

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Liv enters the interview in full dominatrix cliche mode, swinging a collapsing baton and accusing him of strangling Roxanne because she discovered him stealing the video recordings. 

He just confesses, flat out. “And let’s just say it’s for the reason you said. It’s as good as any other.”

Throughout the episode, the characters consistently dismiss or ridicule BDSM. 

Liv: “Remember where we found her? In her dungeon, surrounded by freaky sex toys and strangled by her own whip. Does that sound fun to you?”

[…]

Clive: [standing next to a sling in the dungeon] “This is where you end up when your parents don’t tell you they love you.”

Liv: “Don’t be so closed minded. A control freak like you could enjoy being told what to do for a change.”

[…]

Liv: “A regular man of the people when he’s not spread-eagled on a bondage bed wearing a gimp suit.”

Clive: “Thanks for planting that image in my mind.”

Liv: “The Baracus session was a Hallmark movie in comparison to the visions I had last night.”

[…]

Liv: “I ate her brain and had a vision of you wearing a gimp mask. You told Lady Pain you were a bed-wetting, thumb-sucking liar and unworthy of your success. Think that will fit on a bumper sticker?”

Baracus: “That’s just two consenting adults.”

Liv: “Don’t apologize. It’s pathetic.”

[…]

Johnny: “Look, hookers, strippers, yeah, but a dominatrix? I’m a married man, detective. I already give way too much of my money to a woman who abuses me.”

Then there are moments which don’t make any sense at all. When another detective berates Liv and Clive for interfering with his case, Liv says she was aroused by his attitude. Faced with Liv’s domineering behaviour, her colleague Ravi starts saying random words in hopes that one of them is his safe word, as if it’s a magic spell and not something that a person picks for themselves. 

Though iZombie’s premise allows deep explorations of individual subjectivity, this story goes no further than puddle-deep into BDSM. Roxanne is nothing more than a bitchy attitude and some fashion choices. Her clients are ridiculous, morally weak men who want to be punished for their success. Even the murderer doesn’t have an explanation for why he killed her. Does a dead pro dominatrix not even merit a motive to her murder?

POSE is a drama series set in the ballroom culture of New York City, set in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In contrast to the beauty and glamour of the ballroom scene, the performers make their livings through work of varying legality. The second season features a plotline about working as a pro domme. 

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S02E02 “Worth It”, aired June 18, 2019

One of the characters, Elektra, secretly works as a pro dominatrix at a place called the Hellfire Club. (Note that this is not the actual, no-longer-extant Hellfire Club bar in Manhattan.) 

Much like in The L Word, the heaven-like beauty of the ballroom is contrasted with the hell-like atmosphere of the BDSM parlor, an underground space with red lighting on dark walls. As Elektra descends the stairs and strides in, the soundtrack plays the original “Venus in Furs” by The Velvet Underground & Nico.

Elektra strides in like she knows what she’s doing. She walks down a long corridor of red and black lighting, past doors with glimpses of scenes in progress or preparation. She takes out a key, opens up room 13. 

There’s already a man on the spanking bench in red underwear. He asks if it is “Mistress Elektra.” She’s wearing a dominatrix outfit under her fur coat. She notes that, “You appear to have helped yourself to my wardrobe.” 

Client: “The panties are mine. I just couldn’t resist trying on your heels.” 

Elektra: “You like giving your power to women, don’t you? You disgust me!” (whip crack)

Client: “I disgust myself, Mistress.” 

Though Elektra tells her to stay where he is, he sneaks some poppers behind her back, which she spots. 

Elektra: “I do not do drugs, nor do I approve of them.”

He says this will keep him going all night, and flashes a big wad of cash. This is enough for Elektra to concede.

Later, in the break/locker room, Elektra counts her money.

Elektra: “Holy shit, I can’t believe I found a career that truly fits me.” 

[…]

SW 1: “Business is booming since AIDS.” 

SW 2: “She’s right. Hand jobs replaced blow jobs. No one could pay the bills. Sometimes I feel bad for these guys. Too scared to feel pleasure so they turn to pain.”

Elektra: “I never feel bad for a man.” 

***

In S02E03 “Butterfly/Coccoon” (Aired June 25, 2019), Elektra sees the same client, Paul, again. 

He shows her a gas mask modified to slowly deliver amyl nitrate to him. He also does lines of cocaine and complains about being passed over for a promotion. Elektra listens indifferently.

Elektra puts him in a leather suit, and binds him to a suspension sling while wearing the gas mask. Paul asks her to leave him alone until the drug kicks in, about 20 minutes. Elektra complies, saying that he’s still on the clock. [Not what a responsible domme should do.]

After hanging out in the dungeon’s break room, Elektra returns and finds that Paul is dead, choked on his own vomit. 

Elektra panics, leaves the corpse in the room, and seeks out fellow ballroom performers Blanca (at home) and Candy (at a strip club) for advice. Blanca urges Elektra to report this to the police and not get in any deeper. Candy says that Elektra will probably get charged with murder and the police will never believe people like them saying it was an accident. 

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Candy introduces Elektra and Blanca to another trans sex worker, Euphoria. She tells of a client who beat her up, shown in disturbing detail in a flashback. The cops believed what the trick says, not her. In short, the system does not work for people like them. 

Elektra tells Blanca, as her “mother” in the drag culture, to stay out of this so she keeps her hands clean. 

Candy leads Elektra to a sub-basement cosmetic surgeon. After some arguments and flashing of cash, the surgeon agrees to help dispose of the body. 

Back at the Hellfire, Elektra says that they have four hours until the cleaning crew comes. Candy says she knows the client, who was banned from the strip club for smacking girls around. They put the body in a large suitcase and move it to Elektra’s apartment. The surgeon returns with lye and pleather sheeting to mummify the body and leave it in Elektra’s closet. 

Elektra insists on saying a prayer over the man’s body, apologizing for what they have to do to survive. “At least no one will know how he died, which I’m sure he would appreciate.”

Blanca and Elektra meet two weeks later in a bar. Blanca says she understands Elektra did what she had to do. Elektra admits that even she’s troubled by knowing there’s a human being in an old trunk in her closet. “He’s mine now. And he will be with me for the rest of my life.”

The preservation and concealment of the body is loosely based on the real life story of Dorian Corey, a drag performer and fashion designer. After Corey’s death, the mummified body of a man was found in her belongings, though the hows and whys of this are a mystery.

***

S02E07 “Blow”, aired July 30, 2019

Lulu Ferocity, an exotic dancer and part of the ballroom scene, is volun-told to work in an ACT UP project, and meets with Elektra in the break room of the Hellfire Club to ask for financial support. [Is Elektra not bothering to keep this a secret anymore?]

She appeals to Elektra’s ego and vanity, and gets $1,000 of the $2,500 needed. Elektra also gives Lulu the opportunity to earn the rest, symbolized by a fetish outfit. 

Lulu puts on the outfit and follows Elektra into the club’s hallway. The soundtrack plays Billy Idol’s “Flesh for Fantasy.” They go into Elektra’s room. There’s already a man (not white) in the stocks. [You’d think Elektra would have learned the hard way not to leave clients in bondage unattended.]

Elektra calls him “Mr. Hosiery.” and introduces him to “Mistress Lucinda.” “She’s twice the mean bitch I am and costs double.” She gives Lulu a paddle. Lulu has already worked as an exotic dancer so she’s not new to sex work. At Elektra’s urging, Lulu hits his pantyhose-clad ass a few times, and giggles, getting into it. 

[No mention of Mr. Hosiery agreeing to a second dominant, much less paying a lot more than he anticipated.]

This brings in enough money for the ACT UP project. 

***

S02E09, “Life’s A Beach” aired August 13, 2019

Still working at the Hellfire Club, Elektra is in the break room, complaining about the summer heat and the lack of business. Another dominant points out that this is a seasonal trade, and their clients (generally wealthy) leave the city over the summer. She also reminds Elektra she has a client in her room. Elektra dashes off. [Again?]

Elektra finds that her client, Joe, has been bound and in sensory deprivation for three and a half hours, and wants more isolation.

Joe: “I’m paying to feel the pain of anticipation.”

Elektra: “I’m not leaving you here all night. I don’t have good experiences with leaving people to their own devices.” 

He also mentions he has a beach house on Long Island he seldom uses, which gets Elektra’s attention.

Elektra arranges a road trip to Joe’s beach house with Blanca, Lulu and Angel. The four women have the beach house for themselves over the weekend, except for the garage. This is where Joe has been confined in a cage, wearing a rubber gimp suit, a blindfold and ear protectors. The other women are dubious about this, particularly Blanca, but Elektra says they just need make sure he doesn’t dehydrate. Blanca insists they check on him every few hours.

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At the end of the weekend, Elektra releases Joe and tells him how luxurious his life is. Not just the house.

Elektra: “You have the luxury of choosing loneliness. For some people, it’s not optional.”

***

Pose contrasts the beauty and glamour of the ballroom scene with the precarious lives of the people who comprise it. They make their living in various ways, such as Elektra working as a pro domme. Though she makes enough to afford a luxurious apartment, she’s not terribly invested in the profession, and keeps leaving her clients alone. In the second episode, Elektra keeps this work secret, but later on it seems to be known to everybody in her circle of friends, and they don’t judge her for it. 

The series emphasizes the community of the ballroom scene, and the families-of-choice called “houses” that comprise it. They provide shared emotional, physical and financial support. The masochistic men Elektra services seek isolation, each alone in their separate room. No mention of a BDSM community. 

The series regards masochism as an indulgence of the privileged, which can be exploited for profit by the underprivileged like Elektra and Lulu.

Cleopatra is a 1934 historical epic/romance, directed by Cecil B. DeMille. It came at the end of the pre-Hays Code era, when American films could be more sexually explicit. Just to be clear, it is also far from historically accurate. 

The film sets up a contrast between austere and republican Rome and the decadent and autocratic Egypt, personified by Claudette Colbert as Queen Cleopatra in a series of extravagant, revealing dresses. We’ve seen this divide before between the West and the Orient. The film also borrows a lot from the Orientalist art tradition of the previous century, with Cleopatra lounging on silken beds, surrounded by slave girls in chains. 

After the credits and a quick shot of the pyramids and palm trees, the first thing we see is a nearly nude woman (in silhouette) in chains, standing and backlit. Sex appeal is front and centre. 

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The first time we see Cleopatra, she’s tied with ropes, being abducted, dumped in the desert, and told to leave Egypt by minions of her brother, Ptolemy. She walks back and crashes a meeting with Julius Caesar by having herself rolled up into a carpet, smuggled into his office, and then unrolled. 

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This much mythologized, probably fictional incident originated in the biography The Life of Julius Caesar, written by the Greek biographer and Middle Platonist philosopher Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – c. 120 AD). (The original text uses a word that describes something like a duffel bag, not a carpet.) (source) Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1866 painting Caesar and Cleopatra depicts this incident in the Orientalist style.

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Cleopatra gets Caesar’s attention with talk of the splendours and riches of India, which lies even further east than Egypt. He sides with her over her brother Ptolemy.

Back in Rome, everybody is upset with Caesar’s personal and political alliance with Cleopatra. They fear her foreign influence would turn him into a king and end the republic. 

Brutus: “Rome cannot be turned into another Orient with golden thrones for a king and queen.”

The senators assassinate Caesar in the “Ides of March” scene. Cleopatra, prepared to wed in one of many elaborate outfits, instead escapes back to Egypt.

After Caesar’s death, Rome is jointly ruled by Octavian and Mark Antony. Antony invites Cleopatra to meet in public, intending to kidnap her and take her back to Rome “in chains”. Instead, she stays on her barge. Antony goes to get her personally, and that’s when Cleopatra puts the moves on him. She “tops him from the bottom”, talking about her elaborate plan to seduce him, and showing him all the pleasures of exotic Egypt. 

This is the big set piece on Cleopatra’s barge. Cleopatra’s slaves bring in food and drink, and slave girls dance before him. She shows him “clams from the sea”, a net brought up onto the deck, and nearly nude women spill out and offer them shells full of jewels and pearls.

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Women in leopard skins enter on all fours, followed by a man cracking a whip. They do an elaborate dance number, with a lot of whip cracking. There’s an insert shot of three women catfighting in leopard outfits. Nubian slaves bring in flaming hoops and the leopard women do front walkovers through them.

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The spectacle is intercut with Antony’s stern demeanor softening as he enjoys the food and wine provided by Cleopatra. 

Antony and Cleopatra finally join together on her couch. Their coupling cannot be displayed on film and it is sublimated into an elaborate production of curtains, slave girls playing harps, slaves pulling the oars of the barge, and the slave master beating the drums. 

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When Antony is living with Cleopatra in Egypt, she lounges in a silken bed with him kneeling beside her, another common scene in Orientalist paintings, suggesting that she has enslaved him through love.

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Most of the rest of the film concerns the war between Octavian’s Roman forces and Egypt under Cleopatra and Antony. Cleopatra considers poisoning Antony to appease Rome, and gives poison to a condemned man in chains to test it, but when she sees Antony spring into action to defend Egypt, she falls for him completely. 

Cleopatra makes the title character important for her beauty and glamour, less so for her charisma or statecraft. In the key dramatic scene of Antony being confronted by his general over his betrayal of Rome, Cleopatra does not participate, ands only appears in a series of reaction shots. We don’t see her governing or fighting. The story ends with her committing suicide by having an asp bite her breast, refusing to give Octavian a captive trophy. It’s a portrayal of a woman leader whose power stems mainly from her seductive beauty, which is strongly linked to her foreignness. 

The kinkiness of this film comes through in the promise of exotic pleasures: beautiful slave girls in chains, the sea nymphs and leopardesses on the barge, and Cleopatra in slinky outfits. Even before the Hays Code, mainstream American films couldn’t really show nudity or sex, so it was sublimated into the spectacle of costumes, dancing and sets.

Going Under is a 2004 drama film directed by Eric Werthman and written by Werthman and Jessica Gohlke. IMDB

Peter (Roger Rees), a married therapist, regularly sees a pro dominatrix, Suzanne (Geno Lechner), with the permission of his wife. On a summer when Peter’s wife is out of town and Suzanne has quit the business, they try to form a romantic relationship outside the dungeon. 

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Unlike a lot of films that take a romanticized or sensationalized view of BDSM, Going Under is more observational, getting into the minds and histories of the two lead characters. We get a few flashbacks about their pasts. As a child, Peter had a speech impediment and a learning disability (he tries to type a letter that is full of spelling errors), and we see the women who coached him through them. Suzanne, a young immigrant from Germany with a troubled family, got the reputation of being “the fast girl” at her school.

In the dungeon, Peter and Suzanne do have an intimate connection that is more than just transactional. When they first meet, they use pseudonyms, but later address each other by their real first names. He gives her a book about the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii that inspired the art project she works on in her studio. 

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The dungeon scenes employ the familiar red-black color scheme of filmed BDSM, but it departs from the standard tropes. The camera doesn’t linger on Suzanne’s face or body, and instead puts more emphasis on Peter’s frontally-nude body. We watch their faces more than their bodies. In the aftercare phase, she rests her head on him, and he strokes her hair. 

When I discuss a filmed BDSM scene, I want to draw a distinction between realism and  verisimilitude. The opening scene between Suzanne and Peter definitely falls down on realism, as Suzanne does not wear gloves or disinfect the area when she does needle-play on him. Unless you assume that Suzanne and Peter are fluid-bonded (unlikely, as they are pro-domme and client at this point), this is highly unsafe. 

However, the scene does convey the subjective experience of doing BDSM, that kind of passion and intimacy. It doesn’t have realism, but it does have verisimilitude. A highly stylized drama like The Duke of Burgundy can still speak truth about kink and why people do it. Likewise, even if the scenes in Going Under don’t meet the ideal of “Safe, Sane and Consensual”, they reveal the emotions driving this female-dominant/male-submissive relationship. 

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At the end of the film’s opening scene, Suzanne says she’s quitting the dungeon and agrees they try seeing each other outside. Peter accepts this eagerly. 

We get a look into their personal lives. Suzanne is an artist who dates women. Peter is a therapist with a wife, Pat, both at the empty-nest stage as their daughter travels in Europe. Their relationship is distant, and Pat knows that he sees pro dommes, something she accepts, but does not embrace. 

Peter: “There’s a dominant that I’ve been seeing. I mean, I mean, I’ve been seeing one dominant for a while now. She told me the other day she’s going to stop working. I’ve become very attached to her.”

Pat: “Is it personal or professional, this attachment you have to her?”

Peter: “Both.”

Pat: “Both?”

Peter: “We’re going to try to get together for coffee after she’s stopped working.”

Pat: (scoffs) “Are you telling me this to reassure yourself that that’s all it’ll be?”

Peter: “No, that is all it will be. I just didn’t want you to think it was something else. I didn’t mean to…. I just wanted to tell you.” 

Again, this isn’t ideal polyamory, but an arrangement.

When Peter and Suzanne meet in public, it’s awkward. Peter is nervous, and keeps looking over his shoulder as if he is afraid of being seen with her. Suzanne is tentative. Later they get a bit more relaxed, and Suzanne talks about why she decided to quit being a pro domme. She had a client she didn’t like, but let him see her, out of “perverse loyalty.” 

Suzanne: “It’s more that I felt that he deserved to be humiliated, like he should be kicked around.” 

Peter: “Didn’t he feel he deserved to be humiliated?”

Suzanne: “I liked hurting him, Peter.”

Peter: “Are you saying you never felt this way before?”

Suzanne: “I discovered I couldn’t distance myself from the work.”

Distance is a recurring motif. In one session, Suzanne allows Peter to kiss up her bare leg, getting closer to her sex, but then tells him to stop and go back to a lower point. The power to set, and especially to change, boundaries matters to her.  Both Peter and Suzanne deal with clients in emotionally intense pairings, and they have to maintain a certain distance, just the right amount of intimacy, for their own sakes. For Suzanne to feel contempt or love or any strong emotion for her clients is a problem, and her seeing Peter may be doomed from the start. 

We get a flashback of how they met in the dungeon for their first scene together, when he was “Robert” and she was “Diana”. 

Peter is a fidgety, desperate wreck, constantly leaving her phone messages, which she rarely answers. Suzanne proves to be ambivalent about just about everything in her life, playing push/pull with Peter, her girlfriend Miho and her former madam, Juno. 

Though she didn’t have to, Suzanne meets with Juno, who offers her a job worth several months of living expenses. Juno says no, but also asks if people (i.e. clients) still ask for her. Juno says they do. 

Juno: “I wonder if you know why you’re so good at it. Why the customers really do miss you. You really could create the feeling of intimacy. Fake intimacy. But that’s why the customers kept coming back.”

Suzanne: “Maybe. But so what?”

Juno: “You’re still perverse.”

Suzanne: “There’s more than one way to express that. I’m sorry, Juno, I can’t help you out.”

During this period, Peter and Suzanne also both have unsatisfactory experiences with other partners. 

Peter goes to a BDSM club (shot on location at Paddles in NYC) and has a scene with a woman named Terry. While he seems to enjoy it, he’s ultimately uncomfortable with public play and especially with Terry’s lack of pretense, compared to Suzanne’s distance.

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Though Suzanne told Juno that she quit, she takes a high paying assignment. The client, Walter, is a classic top-from-the-bottom, constantly nitpicking Suzanne’s outfit and tone of voice, and even bringing up the fact that he’s paying for this, until she gags him. It’s not clear if this is Walter being a bratty sub and Suzanne is playing her part, or she is genuinely fed up with his passive-aggression; more confusion between the roles they are supposed to play and the genuine emotions. After the scene, Walter leaves money for her.

Walter: “I don’t believe we’re going to be able to continue these sessions until your whip technique improves significantly.”

Suzanne: “And I believe your session has come to an end. Unless you wish to pay for another hour.”

Walter: “And you do need to work on that voice. It’s still not quite right.” 

Suzanne: “Don’t try to top me, Walter.”

He goes to the door, and stops, then gives a heartfelt “Thank you.” 

He leaves, and Suzanne breaks down laughing. Then she starts crying as she pulls off her boot and her choker. 

Suzanne learns that her mother has cancer. She enlists Peter to drive her upstate to meet with her mother and her brother for a very awkward family dinner. Peter gets a good look at Suzanne’s family life and how evasive she is about her real life.

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Suzanne invites Peter in after he drives her home. There he sees her artwork, based on a book he gave her, and sees her at her most vulnerable and open. He’s more relaxed than he ever was outside of the dungeon. But Suzanne goes into go-away/come-back mode, and ultimately says they can’t be together. 

They have one last meeting in a public place. Peter is on the brink of panicking at the thought of losing her, and apologizes and begs. 

Peter: (frantic) “Let’s go out together. Let’s walk around and talk about this.”

Suzanne: “No! No, I’m not going anywhere with you together.”

Peter: “Suzanne, don’t do this.”

Suzanne: “Do what? You are the one who’s losing control. You can’t let go of the fantasy.”

Peter: “Is that all you think this has been?”

Suzanne: “All? Maybe not. But it doesn’t matter. I can’t be responsible for you.”

She leaves. 

We next see Peter, apparently relaxed, visiting with his wife and daughter in the woods, where they talk about the growing distance of their teenage daughter.

Pat says Peter is private too.

Peter: “I’m scared most people won’t understand.”

Pat: “Does that include me?”

Peter: “No.”

Pat: “You do hurt me, you know.”

Peter: (apologetic) “I know. And I’m sorry.”

There’s one last phone conversation in which Peter calls Suzanne. He mentions he saw her ad in a magazine, and she says she’s working one day a week for the money. She still refuses to see him. 

As discussed in Danielle J Lindemann’s book Dominatrix, pro-dommes often normalize their role by comparing themselves to healing professionals. 

Suzanne says as much in the opening voice-over. “I think of you as my patient. I treat you. […] I like my work. There are rules. They protect us.”

This has problems because, first, dominatrixes want their clients to keep returning, and second, dominatrixes aren’t trained to follow psychological and ethical rules like psychiatrists and therapists, which protect both parties. Peter is an actual healing professional, a therapist, one who deals with people’s vulnerabilities in a controlled environment under strict rules for the protection of both parties. Perhaps he should have known better, but his desperation for someone to hold him together as he fears disintegrating was stronger. 

Peter and Suzanne are passionate and intimate in the highly-constrained world of the dungeon. It’s when they try to get to know one another in the messy outside world, with all their emotional baggage, that they struggle. 

Suzanne can tell that Peter has become dependent on her and she can’t devote her entire life to holding him together. She can’t have a romance with him for the same reason that he can’t have a romance with one of his patients. Only in the liminal space of the dungeon, under strict rules, can they meet. Outside that hothouse, whatever connection they had becomes unstable and collapses.

I don’t know why Going Under isn’t better known in the kink world. It is one of the better cinematic treatments of BDSM I seen. (I first saw it at CineKink 2005 in NYC.) I can see why it wasn’t a commercial success. It’s not a romance, it’s a low-key psychological drama. That it is about a dominant woman and a submissive man is a strike against it commercially too. It continues the tradition of submissive men and dominant women not being allowed “happily ever after.”

Billions is a 2016 drama about the conflict between US Attorney Chuck Rhoades Jr. and hedge fund billionaire Bobby “Axe” Axelrod.

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The very first thing we see in the pilot episode is Chuck stripped and bound at the mercy of a woman in lingerie. This is his wife Wendy, who is also the in-house therapist of Bobby’s investment firm, setting up the triangle at the heart of the series.

BDSM is not a big enough theme in Billions to do an episode-by-episode review. Thus I will focus on certain episodes in which Chuck and Wendy’s BDSM relationship is a major element.

S01E01

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The first thing we see in the pilot episode is Chuck, strippped to his underwear, tied with white ropes and gagged. An unidentified woman (actually his wife Wendy) in high heels stands over him. 

Chuck’s position is the kind that can lead to being governor or mayor, and it comes with an incredible amount of pressure. He’s under a media spotlight and surrounded by political maneuvering. It’s not surprising that he deals with the stress in this way.

During a meeting, at which his father is present, Chuck says: 

Chuck: “My father always told me that ‘mercy’ was a word that pussies used when they couldn’t take the pain.”

At the end of the episode, after Chuck has goaded Bobby into a confrontation, we see Chuck return home and learn that Wendy is the domme in their relationship, as she pushes him down and presses a high heel into his chest.

That the dominatrix is Chuck’s wife and the confidante of his enemy adds a lot of story potential.

S01E03

In her job as in-house therapist for Bobby Axelrod’s company, Wendy has tremendous knowledge of and influence on the other employees. Sometimes she uses this power at Bobby’s behest, as when she talks a recently fired employee out of turning on the company. Sometimes she uses this with generous care, when she persuades a female employee to take another job so she won’t be stuck with an abusive boss. If Bobby is the “father”, Wendy is the “mother”, exercising “soft” power within the household. 

The scene opens with Chuck bound and gagged on their marriage bed, still in his white boxers. Wendy stands over him in a Domme outfit (black bra, corset, stockings, garters, lacey choker, etc) and wields a violet wand. This scene is mostly shot in alternating closeups. 

Wendy: (shuts off the violet wand) “What is going on? You are not here with me.”

Chuck: (mumbles through gag)

Wendy ungags him.

Chuck: “I’m sorry. I just can’t concentrate.”

Wendy: [re the violet wand] “Really? This makes cattle concentrate. The whole point is this keeps you in the present.”

Chuck talks about how Bobby is pressuring Chuck’s father. 

Wendy turns the violet wand back on. 

Wendy: “I’m going to leave you to stew in it.”

Chuck: (resigned) “Okay.”

Wendy: “And when I get back, you better be focused and obedient.”

Wendy punctuates her words with touches from the violet wand on his bare stomach, making him jump.

Wendy: “Have I made myself clear?”

Chuck: “Yes, yeah, very clear.” 

Wendy puts the gag back in his mouth. 

Wendy: “Stay here.” [Throws the deactivated wand on the bed] “And wait for your mistress to return.”

After Wendy takes a break in the bathroom, she returns to the bedroom and finds Chuck has freed himself, put on pajamas and is reading in bed.

Wendy: “So you just want to watch TV and eat ice cream?”

Chuck: “Yeah, perfect.”

This scene is juxtaposed with Bobby and his wife Lara in bed together, having passionate sex. 

Wendy feels unappreciated by Chuck, as Bobby Axelrod is living rent free in his head. She puts on all the lingerie and makeup and Chuck just lies there in his white boxers, not in the moment.

S01E05

Chuck Rhoades, sometimes, does not do nice things. In his war against Bobby Axelrod, he’s repeatedly misled and lied to people, threatened their families with prosecution, and sent even people he knows personally to prison.

In this episode, Chuck travels to Iowa to get a man to testify on Axe Capital’s insider trading. The end result is the guy is arrested and taken away, while his wife is left alone to look after their daughter with cystic fibrosis. 

Away from Wendy, Chuck sits in a hotel room alone. He looks up a local BDSM venue on a web site. 

He sits in a rented car outside a BDSM club, indicated by people in fetishwear entering. 

Chuck: “I’m outside a club again. I don’t know how I ended up here.”

Wendy: “I’m listening.”

Chuck: “I feel so out of control, Wendy.”

Wendy: “You want to go inside?”

Chuck: “Oh, fuck yes.”

Wendy: “Me, too.”

Wendy tells him to “take me with you.”

Chuck goes into the club and secretly puts in his phone’s earbud so he can talk with Wendy. This scene is intercut with Wendy in their marriage bed at home.

Chuck talks about going to the BDSM club like it is an addiction. Rather than telling him to stop, Wendy turns the moment into a shared experience. 

Chuck describes the action in the darkened club to Wendy, and she issues commands to him, like telling him to get on the floor and denying him the pleasure of touching himself. Wendy masturbates by herself (her hand off camera).

S01E07

Chuck has, at least officially, recused himself from the Axe Capital case to avoid conflict of interest. He and Wendy go out for dinner with another couple, who talk about working as a team on their business. At home, Chuck voices his disbelief that a married couple could be a team. Wendy slaps him across the face, which initiates a scene between them. We don’t actually see this, but the next morning, Wendy wakes up by herself. The room is strewn with floggers and bondage rope, plus a joint in an ashtray. Chuck left her a note, including his email password. Wendy is left to clean up.

We still don’t see Chuck and Wendy talking about the place of kink in their marriage. Even media that is positive about BDSM rarely shows people negotiating before a scene. 

In a previous episode, Chuck says that he feels out of control, and in this episode, Wendy very suddenly initiates a scene. Their interaction is a bit compulsive, as if they both spend each day with their armor on, and every now and then they have to go wild.

S01E11

In previous episodes, Bobby Axelrod used Donnie Cain, one of his traders who is secretly dying of cancer, as a shield against the US Attorney’s investigation. The investigators arrest Donnie, but he dies in custody before he can testify. This pretty much kills the investigation into Axe Capital.

The various characters deal with the fallout of this event. Bobby makes a misjudgment that could cost the company half a billion dollars, and Wendy asks him if he is rewarding or punishing himself. Wendy stays late with Bobby to have a much-delayed session, while Chuck is left alone. He sees Wendy and Axe together on the roof of Axe Capital. 

Later that night, Chuck goes into the city and enters a dungeon. It’s the familiar red-and-black color scheme we’ve seen in many films and TV shows. Chuck enters one of the rooms and meets with a dominatrix. Played by Clara Wong, this character is credited as “Mistress”, is a recurring character who will later be known as “Troy”. She greets him as “Mister Hernandez” and says she hasn’t seen him in a long time. 

Taking control, the Mistress says, “I can only assume you’ve been a wretched speck of shit.”

There’s a montage of her undressing him, strapping him to a St. Andrews Cross, putting finger spikes on herself, blindfolding him, and performing sensation play.

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As we saw in S01E05, Chuck feels compelled to do BDSM play. Before it was a matter of guilt, but now it is a more complicated set of emotions. 

We’ve seen other fictional examples of high-powered men who compulsively play with pro dommes as “punishment” for their guilt, such as in an episode of Nip/Tuck. But is this actually “punishment”? Perhaps they are actually rewarding themselves unconsciously for their actions. This ties into another plotline in which Wendy says that Bobby unconsciously blew a deal as self-inflicted punishment for using Donnie Cain. 

When she presses the tip of her finger-spike into his nipple, Chuck shouts, “Red!” 

Mistress immediately unstraps her. Chuck admits he’s here without permission from his wife.

Domme: “Go get permission.” 

Chuck: (getting dressed) “It’s not so simple.”

Domme: “Does Wendy not roleplay anymore? The workshop went so well. She was a fucking all-star.”

Chuck: “It’s like she’s, she’s intractable. And so distant.”

Domme: “Chuck, you guys should go see someone. You can both come here if you want.”

This is a tantalizing hint that Chuck and Wendy have been involved in the larger kink world. It also shows the strength of Chuck’s masochistic compulsion and his struggle to stay within the bounds of his marriage agreement with Wendy. It may not even be an expression of guilt, as it is a displacement for anger over seeing Wendy and Bobby together. Instead of flying into a rage at Bobby or Wendy, he instead starts to break his rule with Wendy to attack her, then stops. 

A commotion outside with the security guard reveals that somebody has been following Chuck all night and photographing him. Chuck leaves and goes home. 

While Wendy is in the shower, Chuck uses her password to get into her laptop, read her notes on Bobby, and get leads on Bobby’s criminal activities. This is arguably a more serious breach of trust than Chuck seeing a pro domme without Wendy’s permission.

S01E12

Chuck uses information from Wendy’s notes on Bobby to launch an investigation into Bobby bribing police. This works its way back to Bobby, who has a clandestine meeting with his fixer, Hall, who will “prepare the materials for her [Wendy]”. 

Bobby directly confronts Wendy and says that she fed information to her husband. He shows her printouts of what looks like BDSM club and BDSM toy shopping pages. 

Bobby: “I have your web traffic on our server here. And from your laptop. You got quite a dark side, don’t you? I would imagine this would make Dr. Wendy Rhoades look very unprofessional. And of course, the whole world, including the office of the US Attorney for the Southern District and the Attorney-General would see it too.”

Note that Bobby doesn’t personally attack her about being kinky, merely that other people would object. 

Wendy denies selling Bobby out, but goes home to have a long delayed confrontation with Chuck. Chuck goes on the offensive, calling her “one of them” for being a part of a criminal organization. 

He also confessed about going to a dungeon without her permission.

Chuck: “I went to see Troy.”

Wendy is shocked.

Chuck: “And like I said, he had someone on me and if I didn’t get lucky there would be pictures of me on the front page of today’s Post.”

Wendy: “You went to see her without fucking telling me.”

Chuck: “Nothing happened. And I couldn’t go through with anything anyway because you weren’t there.”

Wendy: “How touching.”

Chuck: “I’m cut off. I’m cut off, from you, from us. And you sit there and you try and claim moral high ground.” 

Wendy throws him out of their house. 

Next morning, Chuck cancels the investigation. 

Wendy meets with Bobby and plays a recording of Chuck confessing to breaking into her computer and reading her notes. Bobby says he will destroy the records and pay her millions of dollars. Wendy deletes the recording and quits. She won’t be in denial about what Axe Capital is and what he is. Note that she wears a leather jacket in this scene.

Chuck uses a known informant to make Bobby think there are bugs planted in Axe Capital. Bobby literally tears the place apart, looking for them. 

Chuck drops by to have a final confrontation with Bobby. Note that Bobby does not mention Chuck or Wendy’s involvement in BDSM.

Season 1 Conclusion

Billions features the old trope of the powerful man who sees a dominatrix to indulge his physical and emotional masochism, combined with the dominatrix-as-therapist trope.

However, the show is not judgmental about Chuck’s masochism. It’s a part of his marriage with Wendy, and at least sometimes it is a source of pleasure and intimacy for them. Wendy enjoys it too.

It’s also something Chuck struggles with. Twice we see him respond to emotional turmoil by rushing to indulge in kink, and twice he pulls back because he doesn’t have Wendy’s permission. It’s a sign of his human weakness, just like Bobby’s impulsiveness and arrogance are symptoms of his weakness.

It’s also a political vulnerability. Early in the pilot, one of Chuck’s staff instructs a new employee that they have to be above reproach in their office. Chuck and Wendy keep their kinks secret, but eventually it gets out, via Wendy’s web traffic at work and by one of Bobby’s minions tailing Chuck to a dungeon.

Bobby has no personal feelings about Wendy’s BDSM practices; it’s something he keeps in a blackmail file on Wendy, just in case he ever needs it. After he did use it to threaten her career and her husband’s political ambitions, it’s enough to make Wendy finally quit and leave him.

Chuck and Wendy are separated at the beginning of season 2 of Billions. Until episode ten, there are not even mentions of Chuck and Wendy’s BDSM practice season 2. Chuck gets into judo, which seems to be a partial substitute. They both have flings, by mutual consent, but only Wendy actually consummates it, with another billionaire like Bobby.

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S02E10

Wendy has returned to her old post at Axe Capital, though she insists she will have no sessions with Bobby. This prompts Lara, Bobby’s wife, to take their two kids and leave. 

Furious, Bobby accuses Wendy of making Lara leave. 

Bobby: “Maybe lying in your marriage was tolerated, looked upon with leniency, considered some sort of fucked up foreplay, but in my marriage, in 15 years, I have never lied to my wife except once, except about what was said between you and me.”

This is as close as Bobby has ever come to directly insulting Wendy or Chuck about their kink. 

While Bobby is threatening Wendy, a man in a leather hood (whom we are supposed to think is Chuck) is seeing Troy the dominatrix in her suite. When she steps out of the room to prepare for the session, the client grabs her laptop off a table and leaves.

Chuck, preparing for a campaign for governor of New York, is interviewed by Ms. Minchak about any possibly damaging details from his past or private life. Chuck keeps it professional, but he is distracted when she takes off her high heels and wiggles her stocking-clad toes. 

Troy and Chuck meet at a crowded coffee shop. They stand next to each other, but don’t face each other. Troy, using the “Mr. Hernandez” alias, tells him that her laptop was stolen by a client she had been seeing for 3 months. She thinks it is an attack on Chuck or one of her other prominent clients. 

Troy: “Should come as no surprise to you. The lifestyle attracts brilliant people, intricate temperaments, intricate tastes.”

Troy says her laptop is well secured, and that she would never release any information on him. 

Chuck: “I know that your relationships are beyond transactional.”

Troy: “The idea of blackmailing someone with something so close to their core, of punishing true expression –”

Chuck: “Understood. And thank you.”

Troy deliberately drops a bottle cap from her water on the floor. 

Troy: “Pick that up.”

Chuck bends down. Troy presses her heel onto his hand, much to Chuck’s delight. 

Troy says they should see each other again, once he has secured proper permission. 

Even though Troy is doing Chuck a favor by telling him about the theft, she still gives him a free mini-scene. 

We later see that Chuck sent a subordinate to get in good with Troy over months, steal her laptop and give it to him. He in turn gives it to Ms. Minchak. 

After going out for dinner and reconnecting, Wendy invites Chuck to come back home.

Chuck: “Is that an order?”

Wendy: “Damn right it is.”

Chuck immediately turns around. He finds Wendy in full domme gear in the bedroom. 

Even though Chuck and Troy have a relationship that is more than commercial, Chuck isn’t above dirty tricks to secure his secrets. However, Chuck’s real vulnerability isn’t Troy’s laptop, but Troy herself. Perhaps the real goal of Chuck’s ploy is to test Troy’s trustworthiness. If she didn’t tell him about the stolen laptop, he would know she couldn’t be trusted to keep his secrets. (Not to mention that laptop probably contains compromising information on many other people.)

Though Billions is fun to watch for the witty dialog and glamorous lifestyles, it also shows that many, many people suffer as collateral damage from the machinations of wealthy, powerful people like Chuck Rhoades and Bobby Axelrod. Bobby has lots of money and connections that are, to say the least, sketchy. He could apply a lot of pressure to Troy, who’s in a vulnerable position in a semi-legal sex work profession. 

If Chuck goes ahead with his bid for governor, he will be even more exposed in the public eye, and have good reason to avoid seeing Troy or otherwise mixing with kink circles. Reconciling with Wendy would mean he wouldn’t have to go without kink play in the future.

Season 3 opens with Bobby free on bail, his assets frozen, his trading license revoked, and Axe Capital on hold. Chuck has lost most of his money and alienated his father and his best friend in his scheme to get Bobby arrested, and is in the delicate position of having to ensure that the scheme doesn’t link back to him. Wendy is even more involved in Axe Capital in Bobby’s absence. Chuck and Wendy have reunited, while Bobby and his wife Lara are de facto separated.

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S03E01

The layout of a formal dinner table is juxtaposed with a woman selecting a flogger from a rack of floggers. In a dungeon space, Wendy, in dominatrix outfit, selects a flogger then walks over to Chuck, bent over a rack. 

Wendy: “Look at all the trouble you’ve caused. What a disgrace.”

Troy is lying on her back, looking up at Chuck. 

Troy: “Agreed. He’s almost beyond reclamation. I can’t stand the sight of this dog.”

I suspect Troy is in this scene to establish that this is a rented dungeon, not a space owned by the Rhoades. 

Troy: “I want to leave him here, and I’m tempted to take you with me. It’s up to you, Mistress. Leave with me or administer the required correction.” 

Is she asking a genuine question, or is it just rhetorical, part of the act?

Wendy: “He’s in need of punishment. I’ll stay.”

Troy leaves. 

Chuck and Wendy talk more, and Chuck brings up the fantasy of her being with other men. Wendy elaborates the fantasy, drawing upon her actual fling with another, younger man during their separation. Chuck responds with pleasure, especially as she punctuates her description with flogging his butt.

Chuck: “Yes, yes! This is the most excruciating thing that I can think of. I want to know what he does to you, what you do to him.”

While Chuck and Wendy are reunited at this point, there’s still a lot of tension in their relationship and it is spilling over into their play. Chuck is insecure about the discrepancy in looks between himself and Wendy, and he’s jealous of the emotional bond between Wendy and Bobby Axelrod, and he knows that she slept with another man. He’s eroticizing his anxiety. Chuck’s cuckold fantasy is a page straight out of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs (1870), in which Severin is fixated on the idea of his mistress Wanda leaving him for “the Greek”. In real life, the author was obsessed with pressuring his wife into committing adultery.

There’s still a lot we don’t know about Wendy’s side of their BDSM relationship. How long has this been a part of their marriage? Does she play with other people?

S03E06

In a secret meeting between Chuck, Wendy and Bobby, Bobby needles Chuck by saying to Wendy, “You’ve got him well trained.” This suggests Bobby knows details about Wendy and Chuck’s kink, though he hasn’t used that knowledge for blackmail.

S03E07

To get out of prison sentences, Chuck falsifies evidence to make the case against Bobby collapse, and Wendy sexually manipulates Mafee, one of the Axe Capital traders, into perjuring himself. 

At the end of the day, Chuck comes home to find Wendy in bed, in her dominatrix gear. She says she wanted to celebrate but she admits “I don’t have it in me.” Chuck says the same, and gets in bed next to her, fully clothed. 

This is a good example of using kink to illustrate their relationship. We know how much Chuck loves Wendy as a dominatrix, but right now he’s too exhausted and ashamed and guilt-ridden. 

S03E08

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Chuck and Wendy go to a dungeon together, chatting affectionately. 

Chuck and Wendy have children at home, and they’re not lacking in money, so it makes sense they would book a fully-equipped dungeon instead of playing at home. However, using an outside dungeon, presumably owned by Troy, raises the risk of discovery, as this scene demonstrates.

Troy: “They left me no choice. Said they were going to destroy my business, my life.”

“They” are Chuck’s father, Charles Rhoades Sr., and political kingmaker “Black Jack” Foley, who step out of the darkness. 

Troy previously told Chuck she could be trusted, but once she is trapped in the workings of the Rhoades family and New York State politics, she does what she has to do to survive. At least she apologizes to them as she leaves the room. 

Charles and Foley want Chuck to commit to running for governor of New York State, under their “guidance.” Their confrontation with Chuck and Wendy are also expressed through kinkphobia. 

They first demonstrate their power over Chuck and Wendy by physically intruding into their kink space, and being more powerful than the dominatrix. Then Charles goes further by telling Wendy to take off her coat, so he and Foley can see her in her fetish-wear. (The collar of the outfit is visible under her coat. Note also that Wendy usually wears body-conscious dresses in black or other dark colors.) This is the kind of thing police do when they raid BDSM spaces, such as the LAPD’s raid on the MARK IV bathhouse in 1976, or the Toronto, ON police raid on the house owned by dominatrix Terri Jean Bedford in 1994. 

Charles: “It’s time to put away childish enthusiasms. Now what you do at home is your business. But this, with a third party, who we just showed could be compromised, a candidate for governor simply cannot do it.”

Chuck is right when he calls what his father did, intruding on and humiliating his own son and daughter-in-law, to be “your kink.” Charles and Foley could just have had a sit-down meeting, but instead they set up a theatrical production to express dominance. It’s also established that Charles can be emotionally abusive. 

Foley: “You think we give into our appetites as easily as you do yours?”

Charles: “Careful, Black Jack, she might give you a crack across the ass.”

Foley’s comment also places Chuck and Wendy as children being chastised by adults, for not controlling their desires, or at least not being discrete. 

Charles Sr’s disdain for Chuck and Wendy’s kink is, obviously, rank hypocrisy, given his long history of adultery. Wendy proves as much when she stages her own theatrical intervention into Charles’ hotel date with a mistress.

S04E01

Chuck speaking with Charles, his father.

Charles: “I would slap your face and tell you to act like a man if I didn’t think it would turn you on.”

Chuck: “Ah, It wouldn’t, Dad. Not from you. That’s not how it works. Good lord.”

Another kinkphobic comment from Charles Rhoades, Sr.

S04E02

At this point in the story, Chuck is no longer attorney general, so he doesn’t have the power that he used to have. The power balance has shifted in his relationship with Wendy.

Wendy has a delicate position within Axe Capital’s very masculine, locker-room culture. Bonnie, one of the few female traders, deals with the flirtation/harassment with tough-girl indifference. When Wendy visits Bonnie’s birthday party, thrown by the other traders, she observes how Bonnie handles the men around her. 

When one of the men states he never pays for sex, Bonnie says:

Bonnie: “No, you just beg for it. […] Act like a man. Sometimes a girl just needs to get railed. [To Wendy] Don’t you agree?”

Wendy: “Nobody wants to fuck a sexual panhandler.”

Guy: “So, how does it work in your bedroom?”

Everybody looks at Wendy.

Wendy: “Action, whenever either of us fucking wants it.” 

Everybody cheers. 

The truth of the Rhoades marriage is somewhat different. 

Alone in their bedroom, Wendy initiates sex with Chuck. Chuck rolls on top of her, but things stop when he asks:

Chuck: “Can I get the box?”

Wendy: “This is working for me.”

They kiss a bit more.

Chuck: “Please?”

Wendy nods, without much enthusiasm.

Fade to: Big wooden box with a padlock. Bondage toys are scattered all over the bed. Chuck is sleeping soundly, nude, while Wendy sits next to him, unclothed, awake and unsatisfied. 

The problem in this scene is that while Wendy initiates sex, it’s Chuck who sets it to BDSM, not vanilla. Wendy heard Bonnie’s disdain for men who are “sexual panhandlers”, but when Chuck pleads with her to get “the box”, she gives in to his demands. Afterwards, Chuck is satisfied, but Wendy is not. 

We’ve seen other dominants who satisfy their partners but are left unsatisfied themselves. (See The Duke of Burgundy and Shortbus.) “Topping from the bottom” is an expression that gets over-used, and sometimes mis-used, but it applies here. Chuck sets the sexual scene with his wife, as the submissive, but Wendy, as the dominant, gets stuck doing the “work”. Maybe most of the time she’s okay with this arrangement, but not always. After all, her job is managing the volatile personalities in the pressure cooker atmosphere of Axe Capital, and she’s raising two kids. Her entire life is “taking care” of people, so when does she get someone to take care of her?

Wendy is supposed to be an expert psychologist, yet she can’t sit down with Chuck and talk about her dissatisfaction in their sexual relationship. Instead, she tracks down Troy in her new dungeon (who is not pleased to see her) and asks about switching, as if this was some obscure theoretical concept. 

Troy says she has seen it in other couples.

Troy: “They were role-players, experimenting. So yes, they switched from time to time, moved off of bondage altogether. Tried exhibitionism, voyeurism, other forms of play. But that’s not Chuck, not his arousal template. For him it’s not a game. It’s rooted deep.”

Wendy assumes that the only way she can get some TLC from Chuck is to reverse their roles. Maybe Chuck and Wendy could both enjoy a scene with a different dynamic, in which Chuck is a service submissive, serving her drinks and snacks, massaging her (we know he has a thing for women’s feet), bathing her, etc. Or maybe she could assert herself and just say “I want vanilla sex tonight, not BDSM.” 

Troy, however, states Chuck can’t switch (not “won’t”). BDSM isn’t something Wendy and Chuck do for mutual enjoyment; it’s a compulsion for him, and Wendy gets stuck with the emotional labor of managing it. Troy’s supposed expertise lets Chuck off the hook for his behavior, and puts all the burden on Wendy. 

Characters in Billions are very transactional in their relationships. Everything is a negotiation, whether for money or for favors. Furthermore, there are winners and losers. In this case, Wendy feels like a loser. 

Wendy looks to Bonnie for an alternative way of being a woman in a man’s world. 

Wendy: “Do you ever worry that at some point, the armor won’t come off? Is that why you need a guy who doesn’t beg, takes charge?”

Bonnie: “Tell me when you find one. […] You mean do I want to sublimate my authority at home, with someone who’s masculine in all the right ways, but not a douchebag? Let them take care of me but make the decisions. Or do I want to be the shot caller? Maybe pay all the bills and end up with someone who will swallow all of that?”

Wendy: “Yeah?”

Bonnie: “When I get home from work, if I didn’t go drinking, and sometimes even if I did, I lace up the Nikes and I run the Westside highway until I forget that I want anything at all. And then I come back here.”

When Bonnie says, “Act like a man. Sometimes a girl just needs to get railed.” she’s both teasing the men around her with the possibility that they might get to “rail” her someday, and expressing her fatigue with the sexual gate-keeping and pace-setting labour demanded of heterosexual women. The only way to win this particular game is to be the “tough girl” who is too demanding for them. 

But for all her sexual bravado, Bonnie lacks both pleasure and companionship. Bonnie’s solution to the problem of the costs of being in a relationship that is necessarily dominant or submissive is to stay out of relationships. Whatever sexual or emotional needs she has, she suppresses by running by herself. This is the solution Wendy also adopts at the end of the episode. 

According to IMDB, this is Clara Wong’s last appearance as Troy on Billions. It’s disappointing that we didn’t get to know more about Troy or her relationship with the Rhoades.

S04E04

On the day of the primary election for Chuck’s run for Attorney General, political operator Foley threatens to reveal Chuck’s “degenerate sex life” to make him drop out of the race. 

Chuck meets with Wendy, who says his campaign is over. When Chuck considers taking the hit and carrying on, Wendy says:

Wendy: “You’ll still lose and we’ll be a laughing stock. […] Our behaviour is so far outside that [Overton] window that it might as well be on fucking Mars. […] And don’t forget part of you wants the humiliation. Needs it, but I don’t. I can’t live with it. I won’t live with it.”

She frames this as a joint decision.

Wendy: “We’ll find the next adventure together.”

At the press conference, Chuck changes his mind. As Wendy and almost the entire cast of the show watches on TV, he says: 

Chuck: “In my private life, in the confines of my happy marriage, with my consenting wife, [long pause] practice sadomasochism. […] Uh, yeah. Bondage, dominance, all the rest. Masks, binds, ropes, fire. Wow, uh. Even just saying that I can feel my shoulders loosen for the first time in decades. I am a masochist. In order to achieve sexual gratification I need to be tied up, punched, pinched, whipped, kicked or otherwise tortured. By my loving wife.”

Chuck makes a plea to universality, that everybody needs something a little embarrassing, and frames his admission as an act of honesty and courage, desirable in an elected official. He also emphasizes that this is part of his marriage.

Wendy interrupts Chuck’s victory party and confronts him alone. Chuck is all excuses. Chuck frames his admission in terms of truthfulness and trust, but he betrayed his wife in the process.

In the previous episode, Troy said that Chuck’s masochism is something deeply rooted, and Wendy’s comment in this episode suggests it may go over the line into self-destruction, regardless of the consequences to himself or others. 

S04E05

In earlier seasons, when Chuck violated Wendy’s trust by looking at her patient notes, Wendy separated from him. Now, after an even greater violation of trust, Wendy is still with him and impotently snipes at him. 

Chuck: “If the only way I could eat this pizza was naked, in the middle of Times Square, I would.”

Wendy: “Yeah, you would. You might even prefer it. The problem is, you’d be sure to undress me, too. Whether I wanted it or not.”

For Wendy, the problem is she can’t control how people see her anymore. 

Wendy: “There’s this giant thought bubble sitting there between us and it features me with whips and chains.”

At work, Wendy avoids everyone. 

Bobby: “This makes you more of an exotic species they [the traders] have to impress with their alpha dog energy.”

He also says she is making this bigger than it is, and either confront it or let it go.

Wendy googles herself, and finds people are talking about her. She hacks the email of a former Axe Capital trader to find out what people are saying about her. While there is a lot of crass commentary about her, she finds she stops caring about it. 

Wendy: “The thinnest Google search reveals people are fucking obsessed with me. They want to know what whips I use, what bustier I wear, what Chuck sounds like when he squeals. […] Thing is, as I read it, it stopped mattering. Stopped really being about me. Stopped having anything to do with me because I don’t know these people and they don’t know me.”

She also lurks on the discussion at Taylor’s company, and sees Taylor defending her. She returns Taylor’s call of support.

S04E06

At the Rhoades house, Chuck has been sleeping in the guest room. He and Wendy talk in the master bedroom. Despite how much he wants BDSM play, he still asks Wendy for permission to see a professional dominant.

Wendy is shocked to see that Chuck has been walking around all day with a safety pin through his left nipple. His masochism may have crossed the line into self-harm. Wendy, sick of the whole situation, lets him, and takes herself and the kids out for the night. 

As Troy has severed her relationship with the Rhoades, Chuck calls in a new dominatrix to his house. This is the first appearance of Alba as Cassie. Her first act, after taking off her coat and revealing her domme outfit beneath, is to punch Chuck in the eye. Later, Wendy comes home and finds Chuck in the bathroom, covered in scratch marks and trying to conceal his black eye with her makeup. 

Chuck: “Wendy, what I did tonight, I can’t live without. And I won’t.”

One of the most common requests to pro-dommes is to not leave visible marks on the sub’s body. Either Chuck failed to specify this when he hired Cassie and she plays very rough, or he specifically ordered her to do this. We know that Chuck can be compulsive about his masochistic desires, as far back as season 1. Previously, he’s managed to keep it under control, sometimes with Wendy’s help. Now he is either unable or unwilling to moderate his actions, regardless of the consequences to his career or family. Guilt is a trigger, and Chuck may be losing control because he feels so much guilt, creating a feedback loop. 

It’s disappointing to see that, instead of exploring how BDSM works in an established marriage, Billions chose to make Chuck an out-of-control masochist and Wendy just his co-dependent wife, not a woman who takes her own pleasure in kink. (Recall that Wendy masturbated when she was on the phone to Chuck in the club in Season 1.) Wendy could have been the rarest of characters: a female dominant who is not professional.

S04E07

As the Rhoades marriage further deteriorates, Wendy puts their house on the market, and Chuck pleads with her to stay with him. 

He tells her a story from his childhood, about how his father would knowingly psychologically abuse his mother, ruining any sense of a loving home. His father told him, “A woman has a subconscious desire to be dominated. Remember that. Use it.”

Chuck: “That’s where I come from, Wend. I don’t get violent, throw things or cheat. But I can’t seem to be normal either. I’m trying, though. As hard as I know how. And I implore you, don’t put our home up for sale.”

Wendy refers to his own abusive moment on live TV, when he admitted his masochism, putting his desires ahead of hers.

Wendy’s separation from Chuck is understandable, but she’s in her own downward spiral. She uses her emotional bonds with Taylor and Mafee to help set up a situation in which Taylor has to put their company ahead of their relationship with their father. This doesn’t benefit her in any way. She is just playing along with Bobby’s grudge against Taylor. It takes Mafee busting into Axe Capital and calling her a “garbage person” to her face to make her realize how far she’s fallen. 

Chuck comes home late to find the house on the market, and Wendy breaks down crying on her nightly run. 

Is Billions shaping the story so that BDSM is purely Chuck’s problem, and Wendy is off the hook for it, making her the “normal” one?

S04E09

Wendy calls Chuck a “power bottom”.

S04E12

Chuck is in session with Cassie. He’s hanging suspended, horizontal and face down in an elaborate harness. The location is a dungeon, presumably Cassie’s. 

Chuck: “I’m not ready.”

Cassie: “Worm is always ready for the hook.”

Chuck: “No, not ready. Let me down.” 

Cassie turns the crank.

Chuck: “No, seriously. Red!” 

Cassie: “Ah, the safeword. So you don’t think you’ve earned your punishment yet? Fine. Don’t come back until you have.”

[Is he supposed to get out of that by himself?]

Wendy’s medical license is suspended after she confessed to wrongdoing, but Chuck wants to try to change it before it is official. He later does it and she just gets a verbal warning. However, she realizes Bobby actually bribed the review board and Chuck did nothing. She packs a bag and leaves. She goes to Bobby’s penthouse, and spends the night in the guest room. Definite sexual tension.

After setting up Taylor as his double-agent within Axe Capital, Chuck goes to the dominatrix. “Now I’m ready. I’ve earned it. String me up.”

Chuck is suspended again and being whipped.

Conclusion

Chuck’s on-air confession of his sadomasochism actually doesn’t have any costs to his professional life. He still becomes Attorney General for New York State. Anybody who thinks poorly of him for it already did. 

We also don’t see any impact on his children. (The Rhoades’ children barely appear in this season.)

Chuck’s act of betrayal has massive consequences for Wendy, however. Not only did he completely ignore her demand, she’s lost control of her public image, even in the realm of Axe Capital where she’s the symbolic queen. It contributes to her downward spiral over the season, until she betrays Taylor’s trust and her ethical code as a doctor. 

There’s still a lot unestablished about Chuck and Wendy’s kink practices. In season 1, we did see Chuck could be compulsive about his masochism, and his relationship with Wendy helped him moderate it. When he felt guilty and went to a club without her, he stopped and called her. She turned the incident into an experience of mutual pleasure, as seen when she masturbates when on the phone with him.

ConclusionIn this season, Wendy has lost interest in kink for her own enjoyment. Now, BDSM is something Chuck needs, and Wendy does because she views it as her job. As Wendy separates herself from Chuck, he still asks her permission to see a pro domme, and she agrees. This paints BDSM as Chuck’s thing, which it always was, and she’s just a vanilla woman. She was the victim, not the co-conspirator. 

This is the easy way out for the writers, rather than deal with the complexity of a sexually dominant woman who wasn’t a professional. It’s also disingenuous, when the first thing we ever see of Wendy is her urinating on Chuck’s chest. Even her costuming (form-fitting dark colors with gold or silver chains and spike heels) is deliberately chosen to suggest a dominatrix, as revealed by the costume designer.

Note that production of season 5 of Billions was interrupted because of COVID. 

S05E01

Now that Chuck and Wendy are separated, he’s seeing Mistress Cassie, though we only glimpse her as he leaves her dungeon in the morning. When he turns his phone on, he finds messages from Wendy about his teenage son being sick overnight. 

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S05E04

Chuck starts teaching law. Cat Brant, a sexologist and author, meets him and wants him to talk to her class about his speech admitting his masochism. Chuck bows out, but she attends his first class. When the students revolt against his strict methods, she’s the one to speak up and defend him. 

Earlier in the season, in a therapy session, Chuck admitted that he looked to Wendy for nearly all of his emotional needs, including protection. Cat seems poised to step into that void in his life, now that he and Wendy are separated. 

In Cat’s class, she talks about masochism, and asks what they thought of Chuck’s “insane speech.” 

One student sees it as the ultimate act of humiliation. Another calls it “classic masochism death-drive stuff.” A third brings up Chuck’s privilege as a cis, white, male, and it is not subversive. Cat speculates about masochism as the pursuit of autonomy in and over pain and suffering. “Rhoades played subservience in order to win dominance.” 

In the back of the class, Chuck looks skeptical.

Cat calls him up. He explains that the release he felt was “more emotional than carnal.”

End of scene. No further exploration of this theme.

S05E05

Chuck has a dinner date at his place with Cat. 

Chuck: “Does my ‘modality’…”

Cat: “I can have fun in that modality. It just can’t be the only modality.” 

Chuck: “If we say ‘modality’ again, I’m worried the whole thing will turn into a science project.”

Both laugh.

Chuck: “So ask me anything. And be as direct as you possibly can.”

Cat: “Some subs I’ve known don’t like… Shit, fine. I’m just going to ask it. Do you like penetrative sex? Does it work for you?”

Chuck: “Oh, in the right setting, it really works.” 

Their dinner date is interrupted by a call about Chuck’s father falling ill. 

Later, Cat meets Chuck at his office, and says she wants to pick up where they left off. Cut to scene of them in bed together, vanilla missionary. 

The storytelling here is a little confusing. Cat says she is comfortable with kink, one of the many traits she shares with Wendy, but we later see Chuck and Cat having vanilla sex. This is uncomfortably close to the idea that vanilla is somehow better or more psychologically healthy that sex, and Chuck’s vanilla sex with Cat is somehow personal advancement.

S05E06

Chuck and Bobby are enemies again, and Chuck plans to nail his nemesis for tax fraud on his art collection. He has to act before Bobby can move the paintings, but New York District Attorney Gramm moves in and says this is her jurisdiction. 

In conversation with Wendy, Chuck refers to “the hooker” his father got for him.

Wendy: “The sex worker.”

Chuck: “That’s what we must call them now?”

We know one of the worst experiences of Chuck’s youth was when his father hired a sex worker to “make a man” out of him. But his hostility to sex workers is rather hypocritical given that he regularly sees pro dommes. 

Wendy brings up his colleagues who are trying to make a law about sex work, or his girlfriend Cat. “She’s a renowned expert [on sex work].”

Chuck immediately goes to Cat’s apartment and borrows her library. He wants to pressure the DA by threatening to crack down on sex workers. 

Chuck: “Make your best argument, and then help me shred it.” 

Cat: “I don’t like this game.” 

[…]

Cat: “Have you ever even met a sex worker?”

Chuck: “Well, a long time ago, my father…. I don’t want to get into it.”

Cat: “Are you going to crack down [on sex workers], or is this really just a threat?”

Chuck: “Of course it’s just a threat. Which I have to mean, otherwise it’s not a very good threat.”

Chuck operates in a world where everything is negotiable. We’ve seen him trample on other people to get what he wants many times, and he’s always explained it as being for justice or the greater good. A few times, he’s expressed remorse; most of the time, he just carries on. 

Cat says that if he makes good on that threat, his “library privileges” will be revoked. “Along with all the other privileges.” 

Chuck meets with the DA and says he’ll make fighting “the scourge” of sex work top priority if she doesn’t stay off his turf. He even admits he will link it to “sex trafficking” and make it look like her failure. When she shrugs that off, he’ll put the sex workers in the incarceration system and all that entails. 

Chuck: “When it comes to the particular agenda I am pursuing, I will do it Rudy Guiliani style. I will prosecute with a crazy eye and absolutely no sense of boundaries. Besides, I didn’t put these women in this. They put their own lives up for sale. Now those lives hang in the balance. Will you ransom them back, or will you put Dutch paintings and Scandinavian values above the life and liberty of women most at risk?”

Gramm hands over the art case to him. 

When you get right down to it, Chuck is holding all of those sex workers (mostly women) hostage so that the DA will give him what he wants. In Chuck’s mind, there’s a difference between threatening to do something and actually doing it. 

But his threat has to be credible, which sits in some hazy area between “bluff” and “real”. If the DA refused, he’d have to make good on his threat, otherwise he would look weak before her and that would compromise future negotiations. It’s an argument or a rhetorical maneuver; whether there are unintended consequences is a calculated risk. 

It comes to naught as Bobby has the paintings smuggled out and deemed his apartment an art gallery.

Chuck goes back to Cat. 

Cat: “Did you make good on your threat?”

Chuck: “No.”

Cat: “Good. Would you have really followed through, though?”

Chuck: “It’s possible something inside me would have caught and backed down. I truly don’t know. Would you have?”

Cat: “Yep. Which would have been unfortunate. Because then we couldn’t have enjoyed this.”

Cat leads him to the bedroom. I expected a room full of bondage equipment, but instead there’s a beautiful woman in lingerie waiting for them, presumably a sex worker. (Played by Scarlett Schoeffling, she is only credited as “Woman”.)

Chuck: “Is this a reward, or to teach me a lesson?”

Cat: “Both. Neither. Whatever we want to make of it. Come on.”

That’s the bizarre message of this episode: You do the right thing not because it is right, but because you will be rewarded. Decriminalize sex work so that you and your girlfriend can have a hot threesome with a sex worker, not because it will protect people. 

The real question is, given what we know of Cat, would she want to be in a romantic, or even just sexual, relationship with someone like Chuck? She’s an academic and author who has written a book about decriminalization of sex work, and believes strongly in it. She’s not going to compromise her belief for something else. But Chuck wants her to help him fight against decriminalization, so he can prosecute a billionaire for tax evasion. Cat wants to protect marginalized people from harm; Chuck wants to win an argument. Those are two very different world views. 

Way back in season 1, when Chuck felt guilty, he turned to BDSM compulsively, but stopped and pleaded for Wendy to help him. She turned it into a mutually pleasurable experience. 

Cat, instead, rewards Chuck sexually for pointing the gun but not pulling the trigger. Chuck asks if “this” (not even “her”) is a reward or a punishment. Cat says, “Whatever we want to make of it.” It’s uncomfortably close to his father’s abuse, using a sex worker as a reward and as a means of control. Chuck, in turn, threatens sex workers as leverage to get the DA to do what he wants. 

“Death in the Saddle”, Aired Oct 9, 2007

Some films and TV episodes at least play lip service to the idea of BDSM being a consensual and healthy sexual variation. Others, like this one, don’t even bother. 

This time the deceased is a man found buried in the woods, his feet cut off and buried separately as is done with dead champion racehorses. (The forensics techs refer to him as “Mister Ed”.) This and other evidence lead Booth and Brennan to a ponyplay convention at a ranch near the body site. 

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As is standard for this type of episode in an investigative procedural, there’s some resistance from the venue’s owner, followed by a scene of the investigators gazing at the members of the subculture in full swing. While the pony players eat (riders at a table, ponies at a trough), Booth and Brennan talk about them, in earshot, like 19th century European explorers studying the primitive natives. 

Brennan: “This isn’t about horses, it’s about a dominant versus submissive balance of power. A variation on sadomasochism.” 

Booth: “Those people are eating from troughs. Do you think that’s sexy?”

Brennan: “Fetishism is a way of indulging in sexual activity without engaging emotionally with the other person as a fully formed human being.”

[…]

Booth: “Sex is all about engaging. You don’t want to engage, you stay home and… you know.” 

Brennan: “They have masturbation fetishes. Often involving women’s shoes or–”

They meet with Mister Ed’s rider, nicknamed “Annie Oakley” (who was famous for her skill in shooting, not riding, but whatever). 

Brennan: “Sexual fetishes are about role-playing. She probably never knew his real name.”

Annie: “We met online over a year ago. We were a match. I mean, compatible in every way. You have no idea how hard it is to find the perfect pony.”

[…]

Annie: “I fell in love with him.”

Booth: “Meaning what? A little light whipping?”

Annie: “When I say love, I don’t mean romantically. I mean the way a young girl feels about her first pony.”

[…]

Annie: “You know, I’m speaking to you willingingly, without a lawyer present. You could at least pretend to show me some respect.” 

Booth: (flippant) “Yeah, I’ll try.”

This encounter shows how the mainstream deals with deviant sexuality: Brennan intellectualizes it, while Booth laughs it off. Neither allows Annie to speak for herself. 

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On their way back, Brennan and Booth keep talking. 

Brennan: “Aristotle extolled the joys being ridden like a horse.” [A garbled reference to the “Mounted Aristotle” myth?]

[…]

Brennan: “Why are you being so judgmental?”

Booth: “When you turn someone into an object of sexual pleasure, it’s wrong.”

Brennan: “How do you know?”

Booth: “It says in the Bible.”

Brennan: “It does not.”

Booth: “Then it got left out by mistake.”

Brennan: “We are all hard-wired differently. If someone needs to shout ‘giddy up’ to heighten arousal, what’s wrong with that?”

Booth: “Maybe if Ed lived like a man, he wouldn’t have died like a horse. That’s all.” 

While questioning the victim’s wife (who never knew about her husband’s other life), Brennan draws a sharp divide between ponyplay and love. 

Wife: “Why would Ed do that? We had a good sex life.”

Brennan: “More likely, a part of him could never have been satisfied by love alone.” 

Back at the ponyplay ranch convention, Brennan and Booth continue their investigation.

Booth: “Okay, what is this? A sicko rodeo?”

Brennan: “Stylized movements. Posturing as a kind of sexual signal.”

Booth: “Who are these people?”

Brennan: “In real life they tend to be very orthodox.”

Brennan says she has done sexual roleplay in the past.

Brennan: “We all indulge in role-playing in sexual situations.”

Booth: “Not me. Completely normal here.”

Brennan: “Booth, any time you look at a woman and make the judgment that she’s beautiful, you’re objectifying her. Any time I put on lipstick and nice clothes, I’m objectifying myself. It’s more subtle than what these people are doing, but otherwise it’s the same dynamic.”

Booth: “You wearing lipstick, Bones, it’s not like this.”

There’s a red herring or two, but the evidence leads to Annie as the culprit who murdered Mr. Ed out of jealousy for not leaving his wife. 

Annie: “I left my husband for him. I left Thor for him. And he was gonna leave me? What was I supposed to do?”

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The outro of the episode is Booth and Brennan having dinner at a restaurant. 

Booth: “I lost my appetite because you made me think about all those people parading around pretending to be something they aren’t just so they could have crappy sex?”

Brennan: “How do you know it’s crappy?”

Booth makes a bold assumption without ever asking of the people involved. 

Booth: “Here we are, all of us, basically alone, separate creatures just circling each other, all searching for that slightest hint of a real connection. Some look in the wrong places. Some they just give up hope because they’re thinking in their mind, ‘Oh, there’s nobody out there for me.’ But all of us, we keep trying over and over again. Why? Because every once in a while, every once in a while, two people meet and there’s that spark. And yes, Bones, he’s handsome and she’s beautiful, and maybe that’s all they see at first. But making love? Making love, that’s when two people become one.”

Booth’s definition of good sex is extremely narrow: monogamy-normative, romantic-normative, even implicitly hetero-normative.

Booth: “Those people, role-playing and their fetishes and their little sex games, it’s crappy sex. Well, at least compared to the real thing.” 

Brennan: “You’re right.”

Booth: “Yeah, but… Wait a second. I just won that argument?”

Brennan: “Yup.”

This conversation comes at the end of an episode full of infidelity and jealousy culminating in a brutal murder, which upholds Booth’s ideology of vanilla-normativity. And even Brennan is made to agree with it. 

This episode epitomizes Vito Russo’s theory from The Celluloid Closet that queer sexuality exists in film to be ridiculed, even demonized and thus instructive about what is good and bad sexuality. Booth, the voice of moral authority, categorizes ponyplay as “crappy sex”, and therefore categorizes heterosexual, monogamous, romance-oriented sex as “good sex”. 

It’s not enough to show BDSM, there has to be a moral judgment attached to it. And even if it leads to infidelity, jealousy and murder, that’s not enough. It has to be less pleasurable than it appears. Better the viewer emulate the heteronormative, vanilla-normative relationship between Booth and Brennan. 

This episode was written by Josh Berman, who was executive producer on CSI, and consulting producer on Bones. He also has a story credit for one of the BDSM-focused episodes of CSI, “Lady Heather’s Box” (S03E15).

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Growing Up Femdom: Mass Media Reflections I

By TammyJo Eckhart, PhD

When I was a little girl, I was already dominant leaning. TV shows, books, movies, and even the stories I made up, that were girl-led, woman-led, or populated by Amazon-like societies, were filtered by my mind, so I only remember what strongly appealed to me. Today I’m a published kink author who has a PhD minor in the History of Gender and Sexuality. I know that I will still filter what I see and hear through a personal lens, but I have the tools to try to be objective. I’m glad that I’m finally able to write about some of the mainstream images of kink I remember liking when I first encountered them. I’m going to talk about some of the TV shows, TV clips, and TV movies from the tape you see a photo of, though this is an artificial limit for this post and not even close to everything I could write about. It has been over two decades since I last recorded on this tape. Do I think these are still examples of woman-led relationships, or do they play into stereotypes that harm women, relationships, and kink in general?

I’m going to go in the order of recordings on this VHS tape and only write about woman-led representations. Two of the recorded shows were not like this, just kinky in general. Six other pieces recorded did have femdom-like dynamics. The range on this one tape is wide, from a kids’ cartoon to horror. Most of these can be found and watched today through various online or streaming services, in case you want to check them out for yourself.

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The Roseanne show was one I grew up watching regularly. While Darlene and David arguably had a budding woman-led dynamic, the clearest kink-related episode was “Body by Jake,” episode 23 of season 6, which aired on May 10, 1994. Half of the episode revolves around Beverly, Rosanne’s domineering mother. After Beverly breaks her hip during sex, she and Rosanne have a talk about sex, which for the older woman has never been about pleasure, just about duty, and best done during “commercials.” When Roseanne urges her mother to try things that she might like, that is a hopeful, pro-feminism message. Then, in the final scene after some credits, we are taken into Beverly’s apartment. The dialogue between Beverly and her boyfriend Jake is honest and natural sounding. It isn’t until Beverly leaves the other room and comes into the front room in a stereotypical dominatrix costume carrying a riding crop that the laugh track starts in. For me, that was not a funny moment; it was reassuring. Even though Beverly was older, she could find something that both of them seemed to enjoy.

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Exit to Eden is one of my favorite kinky comedy movies. When it came out in NYC in 1994, I was the host of the Apple Munch, and we got as many folks as we could get together and went to the premiere dressed in appropriate attire. The movie is based on Ann Rice’s novel Exit to Eden, which came out in 1985. I had read the novel and was not pleased by it, because I felt it excused rape and ended with the rejection of kink for het relationships. I had heard that the movie was not going to do those two things, so I had hope. Mainstream test audiences didn’t know how to react to the scenes on the island, so the studio kept increasing the amount of time that Rosie O’Donnell (playing Sheila/Lucy) and Dan Aykroyd (playing Fred) were on the screen. A lot of kinky folks online expressed dismay toward the comedic elements, but I found that the character arc of Sheila, who is fairly open minded to begin with and then develops a relationship with one of the submissive attendees, Tommy, played by Sean O’Bryan, is presented in a positive fashion.

Compared to the common portrayal of BDSM as crime, crime-adjacent, or at least tragic, I still think this is a wonderful movie to just enjoy. In fact, if the comedic elements really annoy you, just fast-forward through them. The movie undid some of the aspects of the novel’s plot and characters that I find highly triggering even today, but there are some borderline consent issues that still pop up that reflect either therapy (the beating scene when Elliot, played by Paul Mercurio, is in the room of Lisa, played by Dana Delany) or the norm in het relationships (when Elliot surprises Lisa with oral sex in her bed). Yes, the film still shows Lisa, the head of the island, to be an abuse survivor, but as one myself, I can say that survivors are not rare in the BDSM community. At least in the movie version, she realizes that she can be dominant and a fulfilled woman at the same time. For me, that message of empowerment through kink is important and rare. I feel that the relationships between Lisa and Elliot as well as Sheila and Tommy were realistic; I could believe those people would make a connection.

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This next TV show episode might freak a few out, because it is from a kid’s show called Doug, an animated show which aired from 1991-1994. The episode is called “Doug is Slave for a Day” and involves a common sit-com set-up of one sibling blackmailing the other into being their “slave” in order to avoid parents learning something horrible. In fact, this trope is so common in comedy that Doug’s best friend Skeeter takes the news of Doug’s predicament as normal. This was the second episode of the third season of Doug and focused on the main character and his elder sister, Judy. One has to wonder how long Judy has been planning to enslave someone, considering she had this massage contract that she has Doug blindly sign. While there is certainly nothing sexy in this show, if I had seen this as a kid myself, it would have had a huge impact on reassuring me that my desires weren’t utterly abnormal. Plus, Judy has red hair, so I could certainly have imagined myself as a nicer version of her. If I had kids today, I could see using this as a means to talk about honesty and informed consent, neither of which should be exclusive to BDSM, should they? Of course, since Doug is the main character, he eventually turns the tables on his captor.

I was always a huge science fiction and fantasy fan. The short run series Otherworld had everything I wanted: a strong family, dimension crossing, weird societies of the week, and two strong female characters in mother Judy Sterling, played by Gretchen Corbett, and daughter Gina, played by Jonna Lee. The episode “I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar” aired on March 2, 1985, and I watched it live as well as a half a dozen times since. I didn’t know at the time that it was the last episode of the series, but at least that means it didn’t kill the series; that fate had already been decided. The story is a reversal tale where a matriarchy is set up in one of the zones that exist on Thel, which may be an alternate Earth or simply another planet with humanoid lifeforms. The zone, called Adore, is far from other zones. The names of houses, apartments, and costumes are stereotypically feminine. The family ends up in a conservative part of town where having a husband and sons is frowned upon, even though it is not illegal. The common tropes about matriarchies and slavery are here. The father’s ability to read is shocking, and women don’t want men to speak, but there are different conservative rules in play, too. The mother cannot even enter a grocery store, because the electronic door will not allow women to do that sort of domestic work, and the men cannot remove their shirts in public places. The shirt thing may be a commentary on the ridiculous double standards of dress in America, but the idea of using technology to keep one sex/gender down is actually terrifying. The family tries to adjust, but teenage son Trace struggles the most and ends up arrested and put on the auction block, where his family must convince neighbors to buy him back. I remember that the show thrilled me as a 15-year-old; today it is still amusing, but I have to wonder how many of the reversals and extremes were simply commentaries on life in 1984 and 1985, when conservatives held even more power than they do today. Author John Kenneth Muir has written about this very show, and he seems to think each episode was quite purposefully tackling contemporary issues and drawing from other classic science fiction works.

Moving Violations is a 1985 comedy film about corrupt cops trying to scam people who have traffic violations out of their cars. At one point, not far from the end of the movie, the ragtag group of remedial drivers tracks down Judge Nedra Henderson (played by Sally Kellerman) and Deputy Hank Halik (played by James Keach) as they are meeting up for some kinky games with the judge on top. The movie itself completely plays the scene of the kinky encounter for laughs, as the corrupt law enforcement acts are dressed in stereotypical kinky outfits and tossing back and forth lines like “Are you going to be a good boy?” and “Yes, Mommy.” If you pay attention, the two involved are enjoying themselves so much that they don’t notice another person falling into bed with them at one point while trying to retrieve a ledger that will prove their corruption. What I like about the scene, other than the obvious affection between the two in bed, is that the other cop who has discovered the corruption isn’t fazed by their activities; she is only interested in the fact that they are using their authority outside of the bedroom to harm others. Even though their outfits draw unwanted attention during a chase that follows, it is clear that they are equals in their scam and in their desires. That’s a positive message underneath the comedy.

Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby was a 1976 TV sequel to Rosemary’s Baby (1968). The movie is not good and doesn’t make a lot of sense. Why was a clip on my VHS tape? There was a brief scene of Rosemary (not the one from the first film), who has used magic to capture a man to force him to mate with her. I guess when I recorded this the fact of a woman having power over a man was powerful to see, and I must have seen it on television when I was a kid in order to know to tape it. Using magic, drugs, or violence to get someone to have sex with you is not kink, and there isn’t an excuse here of it being a sibling “enslavement” as in Doug. Today I wouldn’t call this scene even kink-adjacent, just part of a horror movie where sex is dangerous.

This trip down memory lane showed me how good my memory is and is not. Sadly, I didn’t get the title recorded for each clip on the VHS tape, so a few times I had to try to figure out what I was rewatching. I can say that most of what I considered femdom in those shows still fits that category across different genres and target audiences. It is often played for comedy or used to comment on patriarchy – heck, I do that in my own writing – but to a child or a young person trying to see herself in the world around her, these were important and powerful examples of what could be. I’m glad to say that I could see through the stereotypes and tropes and create a more egalitarian woman-led household as an adult.

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“You should not work to make the audience comfortable with what they are witnessing at all.”

Notes on style, Pg.4

Slave Play by Jeremy O Harris is a 2018 three act stage play. Three modern interracial couples (two straight, one gay) attend a retreat to work out the issues in their relationships via slavery-based roleplay. This reveals and strains various faultlines in their relationships and their psyches.

I should make it clear that I have not seen a production of Slave Play, and what follows is based purely on reading the script. Also, for the record, I’m a white, heterosexual cis male.

It’s a cliche that well-meaning white liberals say “I don’t see color.” This denial makes interracial cuckoldry or raceplay so scandalous, because “seeing color”, both your own and others’, is essential to the experience. Of course, it’s also where people-of-color get stuffed into a limited set of one-dimensional stereotypes. 

The characters add their own nuances to their roles in the raceplay scenes.

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The play opens with Kaneisha (black straight female) as an Antebellum slave, sweeping out a cabin. Rihanna’s song “Work” suddenly starts playing from nowhere, and she twerks to this, just as Jim (white straight male) enters, as the overseer, whip in hand. 

Jim stammers before he can say “negress”, and goes out of his way to distance himself (and/or his character) from the real slaveholders. 

JIM

I don’t own ya.

That’s

Ya know

That’s 

Master MacGregor.

Up in the big house.

MASTER.

MacGregor.

I’s just…

Kaneisha negotiates the scene on the fly.

KANEISHA

Mista Jim?

Is that better?

JIM

Mista Jim’s alright.

KANEISHA

Ok…

Mista Jim.

Kaneisha, for her part, coaxes Jim towards her preferred actions in the scenario.

KANEISHA

Oh!

Well…

I mean…

If I was you

I don’t think–

I don’t think

I’d wanna beat myself, Mista Jim.

That, 

To me,

That aint something I’d wanna do.

But I aintchu sir.

In another part of the plantation, Alana (white straight female) plays an overheated southern belle who wants her “boy” Phillip (“mulatto” straight male) to play a “negro spiritual” on his fiddle, though he’d rather play Beethoven. 

ALANA

So play something that’ll make me hoot and holla like the negresses outside waiting to run on ya later.

He actually plays Ginuwine’s bachelorette party classic “Pony”, which has the desired effect on Alana. She strips down to lingerie and throws herself at him. 

ALANA

I want to be inside you!

Ain’t that queer?

This culminates in Alana taking out a huge black dildo and penetrating Philip, while rhapsodizing about the sexual failures of white men, the pleasures of white women with black men, and the ensuing mixed babies and lynched black men. 

ALANA

You like this?

PHILLIP

I’m not sure, Mistress.

The third dyad is Gary (black gay male) as an enslaved overseer dominating an indentured servant, Dustin (white gay male). 

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GARY

Watcha ow’ing about

Dustin?!

That should feel normal for ya.

Shouldn’t it?

Seeing how you aint nothing but a white man

Waiting for a good dusting

Of MY BOOT!

Here the dominance and submission is more ambiguous, and that tension is eroticized. It’s Gary who has an emotional reaction, falls down and weeps, leaving Dustin at a loss. 

In Jim and Kaneisha’s area, she repeatedly urges him to call her racist names. Jim is the one who literally calls the safeword “Starbucks”  and halts all of the scenarios. 

This leads into Act 2, when the couples and the facilitators Teá and Patricia, a POC lesbian couple, meet for group discussion. This is all a couples retreat to process the anhedonia in their relationships, the inability to feel pleasure.

TEÁ

I think it’s really important to reiterate

That

What we all just explored

Was incredibly difficult

And triggering,

But it was also fantasy.

Right?

[…]

Therapy.

This is what you’re seeing:

Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy.

A RADICAL therapy designed to help black partners reengage intimately with white partners from whom they no longer receive sexual pleasure. 

It starts to look like, beneath the therapy-speak, Teá and Patricia are searching for landmines by poking random things with sticks, not really considering the consequences. All six of the participants are raw and exposed after their interrupted scenes. 

Jim goes out of his way again to disavow feeling any sexual arousal in the scene, saying “you made me” and “she made me”. This may be the kind of deflection common in fantasies, of imagining some outside force “making” the fantasizer do something taboo. 

Philip says that the female-dominant scenario he just played out with Alana is “not that different from dynamics we’ve had in the bedroom.” Alana denies this as absurd. Philip brings up that they met via FetLife, as part of a cuckold scenario involving her husband. Alana does her own disavowal, saying “That had NOTHING to do with race” and shifting the blame onto her husband. 

ALANA

It wasn’t racial.

I swear it wasn’t.

KANEISHA

Maybe not for you.

The two white heterosexuals, Jim and Alana, both are aroused by their raceplay scenes, and both engage in complex disavowals and deflections to avoid confronting that. Even temporarily suspending the taboo of racialize sex seems to bring out the worst in them, while their partners (Kaneisha and Philip) are aroused because their partners finally “see” them as black. The same principle applies with Gary and Dustin. 

Kaneisha is largely silent through this act, until she calls Jim a “virus”: “Your mere presence was biological warfare.” His whiteness is as unthinking, as pervasive and as lethal as a virus. 

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Act 3 is Kaneisha and Jim talking alone as she packs to leave. It’s mostly Kaneisha’s monolog about her childhood visiting plantations in the South and her relationship with Jim, including when things went wrong.

KANEISHA

…when I told my friends

They said, 

“That happens. That’s every couple

Just give it a few eeks.

A few months. DON’T CHEAT.

Just take some time…

Or see if he’s into being open?

Are either of you tied to monogamy?

Maybe invite someone in?

Are you into women?

Have you tried choking?

A little rape play?

How are you spicing things up?

Fantasy is important.”

The breaching of the raceplay taboo in her own mind simultaneously revealed that she doesn’t love Jim, and, paradoxically, aroused her because this is a moment of clarity, of heightened reality. 

KANEISHA

Because, baby,

I realized, 

The elders watching me.

They are watching me lay in bed

Every night with a demon

Who thinks he’s a saint.

And the elders don’t care that you

Are a demon, 

They lay with them too….

They just want you to know it.

And me to know it.

So I can lie with grace.

So I can lie with their blessing

Slave Play solves the problem of raceplay, at least for POCs. When she’s playing a “negress”, she’s not really submitting to him, she’s communing with her ancestors. This is a way of viewing raceplay for POCs as not submitting to the historical racial hierarchy, but connecting to a racial experience. 

Problem is, Jim tries to solve a very complex emotional/historical problem with sex, initiating a raceplay scene with her without warning. Kaneisha safewords before it gets too far, and thankfully Jim complies. 

Slave Play isn’t exactly pro-raceplay. The scenes create spaces where the usual inhibitors and fail safes on the couples’ relationships are removed, and the once repressed forces explode. It’s likely that all three of these couples are over after this. It could be seen as what happens if you do raceplay, or any other taboo play, without negotiation beforehand. 

One notable absence is the lack of a lesbian couple doing raceplay. Teá and Patricia, described in the text as “a mulatto” and “a light brown woman”, respectively, are a couple and this experiment is said to be based on interactions in their own relationship, but we don’t get a scene of them together. Maybe Harris decided he couldn’t relate to a lesbian relationship, or that he could only fit so much in a two-hour play, or that lesbians wouldn’t have their own raceplay dynamic. Slave Play’s matrix of race, gender, sexuality and role is already pretty complicated.

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Maîtresse (IMDB) is a 1976 French romance film, directed by Barbet Schroeder and written by Barbet Schroeder and Paul Voujargol. (All dialog quotations are from the subtitles.)

Maîtresse concerns Olivier (Gerard Depardieu), a young petty criminal, who tries to burgle an apartment and instead enters the dungeon of a professional dominatrix, Ariane (Bulle Ogier). They start an unlikely and troubled romance. 

When Olivier and a friend stumble into the darkened dungeon, they enter a fantastic world they know nothing about. Ariane, in her dominatrix outfit, finds them and easily holds them captive with her trained dog, Texas. She offers Olivier “Two hundred francs for three minutes’ work.”

This is for urinating on the face of one of Ariane’s clients. While Olivier’s crotch is level with the client’s mouth, he’s face to face with Ariane, who kisses him passionately. 

After Ariane lets Olivier and his friend go, Olivier sends him away, then returns to ask Ariane for a late night dinner. She asks him about where he’s from, what he does, but he says he doesn’t really have a past. He asks her what she does, but she says he shouldn’t ask questions because “Either I lie, or I don’t answer them.”

They return to Ariane’s place, and the next day she takes him along on a drive in the country. This turns out to be a trip to a chateau where Ariane humiliates the butler, Emile, and takes Olivier into a small party where she urges him to spank a young naked woman with her husband. More curious than aroused, Olivier agrees and beats her ass with his belt. 

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After the party, we see that Emile is the lord of the manor, and the real butler serves everybody. Olivier, not getting how this works, says, “Butter my toast, Emile.” Fortunately, Emile and Ariane laugh this off. 

Needless to say, this is not a model of consent or negotiation, but it does show BDSM as a means of pleasure and intimacy. 

The conflict stems from Olivier’s insecurity and old-school attitudes about gender roles. He’s confronted with a woman who is a “whore”, yet has far more wealth and status than he does. Ariane seems very in control of herself, wealthy enough to afford a housekeeper and two lavish apartments. However, Olivier notices that she keeps getting mysterious calls from a “Monsieur Gautier” and going on unexplained errands with large amounts of cash. Olivier assumes that Gautier must be her pimp, or some kind of gangster controlling her. 

He’s more or less comfortable with the dominant position, but is at pains to distinguish himself from her clients. We don’t get to know them as people, and only know about them through Ariane. 

Olivier: “Why do they do it? Can’t they come? Is it the only way they can come?”

Ariane: “Not at all. They make love often, like normal people, at home, with their wife, mistress or girlfriend.”

Olivier: “Do you ever make love with them?”

Ariane: “Never.” 

Olivier: “Never?”

Ariane: “No, never. Some things don’t mix. All I do is direct the show.”

Olivier: “So I’ve noticed. Strange, isn’t it? They’re the ones who tell you what to say?”

Ariane: “They tell me what they want. And I use my imagination to improve on it. I get into their fantasies, their lives.”

Olivier: “That’s good. I like that.”

Olivier doesn’t understand Ariane’s dual nature, the bourgeois woman upstairs and the whip-cracking seductress downstairs. Ariane doesn’t seem to understand herself. She often does risky things on impulse, and once has a major panic attack in the middle of a scene with three clients simultaneously. She staggers upstairs, gasps, “I can’t breathe,” and pleads with Olivier to help her with her corset. For a moment, it looks like she’s going to jump from the balcony, but Olivier pulls her back. Once the panic fades, she fixes her makeup and heads downstairs again, over Olivier’s objections. 

Olivier: “Enough playing the whore and then breaking down!”

Ariane: “I’m not playing the whore. I am a whore and I like it. I chose this life.”

In conversation with Olivier, Ariane says:

Ariane: “You have to be completely available. And with you here… it’s difficult. It’s getting difficult.”

Ariane can’t set boundaries, even for the practical difficulties of seeing three clients in the same session.

Later, we see Olivier and Ariane doing a scene in an alley, with him as the street thug harassing her and threatening her with a switchblade until he drags her into a locker and they have sex. When an old woman confronts them, Olivier just says his wife is an exhibitionist. They walk off, arm in arm, laughing. 

Ariane: “Tomorrow we’ll play another game.”

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The tension about Ariane’s divided attentions, the economic inequality between them, and the mystery about Gautier keeps gnawing at Olivier. During a break in one of her sessions, he grabs her and carries her over his shoulder, saying he will “have her” in front of her clients.

This is one of the scenes in the film that just abruptly ends without resolution, suggesting that the film was cut. 

Eventually, Olivier tracks down the mysterious Gautier, who appears to be an executive, and demands that he “give” Ariane to him, setting himself up as her pimp, though he says he will take a smaller cut. Gautier does so like he’s humoring Olivier. 

Olivier calls Ariane to tell her he’s “freed” her. He goes to a slaughterhouse and watches as a horse is slaughtered on camera, then he buys some horse steaks, goes back to Ariane’s place, and eats them. 

Ariane is enraged. She throws Olivier out. She yells at him for violating her privacy and ruining their relationship. 

Ariane: “He loves me enough to let me live the way I want. […] He would have given me my freedom.”

Olivier tries to return the money she gave him, but instead finds that Ariane has vanished and her dungeon is being dismantled by workers.

The mystery is finally solved when Olivier tracks down Ariane at a chateau owned by Gautier. There he sees Ariane with Gautier and a child, who addresses Gautier as “Papa”, showing that Ariane had an illegitimate child with a high-status man. 

Olivier leaves the money, but Ariane chases after him. They make out in her car while driving, crash, and walk out of the woods, laughing. 

The ending is ambiguous in that we don’t know if Ariane has quit being a pro domme. It seems to follow the same narrative as Something Wild and Preaching to the Perverted, in which a female dominant/male submissive relationship can only be positively resolved if one or both of the people give up their positions. 

Maîtresse was ahead of its time regarding sex work and BDSM, years before Cruising (1980) or Eating Raoul (1982). It shows the variety of interests and equipment needed, everything from riding whips to baby bottles to communion wafers. It also deploys the standard trope of dominatrix-as-caretaker. Also note that the costumes were by Karl Lagerfeld.

Barbet Schroeder is the Iranian-born director and co-writer. He married Bulle Ogier in 1991. They first worked together as director and star in La vallée (1972) and later on other films. Ogier had a part in Irma Vep (1996).

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Dogs Don’t Wear Pants (Koirat eivät käytä housuja) (IMDB) is a 2019 Finnish drama, directed by J.-P. Valkeapää and co-written by the director and Juhana Lumme, based on a story by Lumme. 

A depressed widower finds relief in breath control sessions with a pro dominatrix. 

Juha goes on vacation near a lake with his wife and young daughter. His wife drowns in a swimming accident. Juha jumps in to attempt to save her and nearly drowns himself. 

Years later, Juha sleepwalks through his life as a surgeon and the father of Alli, now a teenager. His only pleasure appears to be masturbating while draping his late wife’s clothes over his face, sprinkled with her perfume. 

Juha takes Alli to a tattoo and piercing shop to get her tongue pierced. She sends him away, and he goes downstairs and wanders into the dungeon of Mona, a professional dominatrix. 

(In common with other fictional depictions of dungeons, the space is located below street level and accessed by stairs, and the predominant colors are black and red.)

Mona knocks the intruder to the floor and presses her riding crop across his throat. This impromptu breathplay gives Juha a vision of being underwater. 

Elli comes down and finds her father. Mona gets up, her heel crushing Juha’s thumbnail, and he leaves with his daughter.

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Juha later tracks down Mona’s number and calls her for a session. He very awkwardly meets her. As usual in mainstream depictions of BDSM, there’s no negotiation before the scene. 

Mona sets up a safe signal, a glass ball which Juha holds in his right hand. If he releases it, intentionally or not, it will fall into a metal bowl with a loud noise. 

Mona cuts off his air supply with a black plastic bag over his face. Juha overcomes his awkwardness and asks for more, which makes him have a vision of himself with his wife, swimming nude underwater. 

When he drops the ball, Mona pulls the bag off him, releases the manacles and leaves him to sob in the chair. 

After this, Juha is happier than before, but distracted. He books a second appointment with Juha, and purchases a black leather body harness for the event. 

This time, Juha has a vision of himself underwater, tangled in seaweed, while another figure drifts down to him. When he drops the ball, Mona takes off the bag. He sees her face, and kisses her. Mona is torn, pushing him away, then kissing him, then slapping him. She leaves him alone in the chair again. 

When Mona sits at her makeup table, Juha apologizes to her and asks to be strangled more the next time. Mona agrees.

Juha is so desperate to see Mona again that he blows off his commitments to his daughter and his work, and he shoves his hand through a glass door to get out. 

The third session, Juha secretly does what appears to be amyl nitrate. He also gives Mona his dead wife’s dress, which she wears over her black catsuit. She spots his injured hand, rips the bandage off it, undoes the crotch of her bodysuit and urinates on his hand. 

The breath control scene has Mona using a fully transparent back over Juha’s face, and kissing him. In Juha’s vision, he leaves the water and joins his wife in bed. 

Mona takes the bag off his face, and finds he’s unconscious. He has been clutching the ball so hard he broke it and cut his hand, letting the blood drip into the bowel. Panicking, Mona manages to revive him. 

Juha: “More. Strangle me some more.”

Mona is shocked by this, and almost punches him. Then she runs away, still in the late wife’s dress over her bodysuit, and calls an ambulance for Juha. 

Juha is remote from his daughter again, and his workplace is considering dismissing him. Mona is still seeing other clients, but she is unable to urinate to put out the candles on her bottom. She burns her own hands by putting them out. 

Later, she asks the tattoo shop lady for a salve for her burned hands. 

Tattoo shop lady: “Would be nice to do something else sometimes. Ordinary stuff. Don’t you think so, too?”

Mona: “Darling, I don’t like ordinary stuff.”

Juha has taken to stalking Mona, and acosts her outside the shop. She rebuffs him.

Mona: “What you want will cost you so much pain you won’t stand it.”

Juha follows her to a private fetish event/play party, Club Caviar, but can’t get in. He follows a person he thinks is Mona, who is actually a man who pepper sprays him and kicks him in the groin. 

Juha goes on a date with one of his daughter’s teachers, Satu. He gives her the same perfume his late wife wore, and tries to get her to strangle him in bed. However, she just keeps laughing, and can’t go through with it. Satu just can’t comprehend what he wants. 

Juha goes back to stalking Mona, following her to her home. He approaches her in her building’s hallway and begs for one more session. 

Juha: “You can hurt me as much as you like. But then you’ll strangle me.” 

He even says he won’t use a safeword. 

Mona: “You’ve got me all wrong.”

Mona finally gives in and demands that he crawl on all fours. She takes him into her apartment, ties his wrists to a doorknob with a pair of pantyhose, then takes out a pair of pliers and says she’s going to pull one of his teeth out. Is she trying to call his bluff or scare him away from this? 

Despite all Juha’s painful cries, he still goes along with this, even correcting her when she starts to pull the wrong tooth.

Juha: “My turn now.”

Mona wraps his face in cling wrap, waits a moment or two, then lifts it off his mouth so he can breathe. (If Juha experiences a vision, we don’t see it.)

Mona: “You came here to kill yourself. I’m not what you’re looking for. I don’t do that. I’m not what you’re looking for.”

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She frees him, and breaks down crying. Juha embraces her, kisses her and lightly slaps her face. 

Mona gets up, which prompts Juha to get up and leave the apartment. Mona returns, holding the late wife’s dress, but finds he has gone. 

Juha gets back into the good graces of his employer, and he comes to accept that his daughter now has a boyfriend. 

Juha goes to Club Caviar, and gets in based on wearing his body harness. After a few drinks, he walks onto the dance floor and dances by himself. Mona comes in and sees him dancing, and starts to dance a little herself. 

The film’s final image of Juha is him dancing at Club Caviar in his fetish harness, grinning to show off his missing tooth. He has accepted his losses, and doesn’t care who knows it. 

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Dogs has a problem of conflating two different experiences: the first is the pain and humiliation Juha subjects himself to, presumably guilt over his late wife, and secondly the confinement and deprivation which brings him closer to his image over his late wife. Juha offers to let Mona do whatever she wants to him, as if she wants to give free run to her sadism, in exchange for strangling him, but it also is integral to his experience. He wants the pain, then the oblivion. 

My chief problem with Dogs is the underdevelopment of Mona. We know she also works as a physiotherapist, and lives alone with her dog. There’s no exploration of why she became a dominatrix, and why she would indulge Juha’s wishes, especially after he’s been stalking and harassing her. She doesn’t seem especially sadistic, so Juha’s offer wouldn’t make much difference to her. It’s implied there’s some kind of special connection between them, but we don’t know enough about her character to understand. Compare this to Going Under, in which both the male submissive and the female dominant are fully developed.

Going Under is also about the submissive man wanting to be held together by the female dominant, while in Dogs the submissive man wants to be guided to his own destruction by the female dominant. In both cases, the woman rejects the responsibility. 

It’s not clear if Juha is still a masochist, and if he will have any kind of relationship with Mona. The climactic scene suggests that he is not, or not only, a masochist, as he slaps Mona’s cheek as a gesture of intimacy. Dogs does fit into the pattern of male-sub/female-dom romances in that Juha has to go beyond his masochism to be whole and suitable for a partnership.

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Before there was Dyanne Thorne as Ilsa, there was Audrey Campbell  as Olga. 

The Olga films were a series of exploitation “roughies” or “kinkies” released in the 1960s, all directed by Joseph P. Mawra, and starring Audrey Campbell as the sadistic mob boss, Olga. These films were released under several different titles and release dates. 

For the sake of simplicity, I’m working with the titles and dates from the Something Weird DVD release. This includes:

• White Slaves of Chinatown (1964)
• Olga’s House of Shame (1964)
• Olga’s Dance Hall Girls (1969)

IMDB lists two other “Olga” films directed by Mawra: Olga’s Girls (1964) and Mme. Olga’s Massage Parlor (1965), the last without Audrey Campbell. This may be a case of re-titling a film to cash in on a better known property, much like the latter two Ilsa/Dyanne Thorne films.

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Most histories of American pornographic film say that the post-stag era was kicked off by Russ Meyer’s The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959). What followed were “nudies” or “nudie cuties”, generally pretty tame stuff by modern standards, distributed to independent film theatres. 

About the same time Russ Meyer’s early films were losing their shock value, other exploitation moviemakers were turning hard, crude, sex-and-violence pictures– lowbrow items known in the trade as Ghoulies, Roughies, and Kinkies. They feature rape and murder, dismemberment and disfigurement, torture and kidnapping, domination and flagellation, bondage and leather orgies. […] These products of the dark underside of the erotic imagination have been deplored, cut by the censors, and sometimes completely forbidden. But they have made money, and they continue to be made […].       

Turan, Kenneth, and Stephen F. Zito. 1974. Sinema. Praeger Publishers Pg.19

Some of the roughies that followed were crude morality plays, which provided a narrative frame and a justification to the viewers. Others were barely coherent spectacles with varying mixtures of sex and violence, such as the Olga films.

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The American Film Distributing Corporation in Manhattan made three of the most violent and vulgar Kinkies of the ‘60s– Olga’s Girls, Olga’s Massage Parlor, and White Slaves of Chinatown— all of which were produced by George Weiss and directed by Joseph A. Mawra. The sadistic story of White Slaves of Chinatown is typical: There is Chinese water torture, bondage, and whipping; women are put in stocks, beaten with rubber hoses, hung by their wrists, forced to endure the pain of a metal bit in the mouth, strapped down, and thumbscrewed by Olga petroff, a brothel-keeper, and her sinister Chinese assistants.

Turan 1974, Pg. 24

The Olga films are a series of unconnected scenes, mostly of torture and captivity of women, plus non-sequitors like a belly-dancer performing, women changing their clothes, or Olga just sitting at a table with men and talking. The scenes are strung together into a loose narrative by a male announcer, who sounds like he’s narrating a cheap nature documentary, while detailing the operations of Olga’s multi-faceted criminal empire. Most of the scenes are without sound, combined with narration or cheap classical music recordings. Sometimes, Audrey Campbell provides narration for her character’s inner monolog.

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Tall and striking in a simple white men’s shirt and black pants (possibly coding her as a lesbian), Olga is the only commonality of the films. Most of the torture she inflicts is to discipline her minions or get information. The torture itself is actually not very convincing. The marks are clearly makeup, and the lack of sound like heavy breathing or screams makes everything detached. 

Unlike the bondage and fetish loops produced by Irving and Paula Klaw in the previous decade, these films do sometimes show exposed breasts, but no lower nudity or explicit sex. Needless to say, it’s only women who suffer in these films. You also get reflections of early 1960s cultural anxieties like Olga’s Russian-sounding name, young women getting involved in sex and drugs, and Chinatown being portrayed as rife with opium addicts and exploited women.

The third film on the Something Weird disk is Olga’s Dance Hall Girls (1969), which is actually a disappointment. It features tedious conversations about sex work, and no torture scenes. The kinkiest things that happen are two women catfighting in bras and panties, and the revelation that Olga’s sex work racket is actually a front for her witch coven. It isn’t even a “real” Olga movie, as the title role is played by Lucy Eldredge (the George Lazenby of Olga films).

The Olga films are hard to watch. They’re too cheap and shoddy to take seriously, and they’re too sadistic, yet boring, to appreciate through a camp lens. They can be taken as a distillation of the kind of action you’d see in mainstream films, without any pretense of artistry.

Paradoxically, these grotesque films, featuring neither complete nudity nor loving sexual contact, were largely exempt from the wrath of the censors, possibly because the United States has traditionally been a country that censors sex but tolerates violence.

Turan 1974, Pg. 25

A few months ago, I perused the used books section at Vancouver’s venerable queer bookstore Little Sisters. In addition to a book on Kenneth Anger’s underground gay leather film Scorpio Rising, I happened across a book without a barcode or copyright date or even an author, titled The Female Disciplinary Manual. I had heard of this before and remembered something about it being connected with some kind of schoolgirl discipline fantasy operation. As it was only $9.00 Canadian and in excellent condition with dust jacket (copies on Amazon are priced at $148 or more), I snapped it up.

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The book itself is a rather odd work, purporting to be from the 2030s when the school disciplinary regime of the early 20th century in England has been reinstated as the solution to a decadent culture. The prose is in an arch, deadpan tone that leaves the reader guessing how much of this is part of the school discipline fantasy and how much is sincere.

By happenstance, I also came across the strange story of the organization that wrote and published the book and apparently lived by its ethos. The fifty-year saga links into pagan cults, lesbian separatists, Victorian-Edwardian cosplay as a lifestyle, early text-only video games, the English schoolgirl-discipline fetish, and far-right politics.

Teasing out the exact story behind the creation of The Female Disciplinary Manual is not easy. It involves a number of people who use and share various aliases and alternate personae and ideologies in a conscious act of self-mythologization. What follows draws on articles published on Skag magazine and Fifty Years of Text Games on Substack.

In Oxford, 1971, a radical student group came together that combined feminist separatism with cultural conservatism, plus a pagan matriarchal religion called Lux Madriana and an elaborate fantasy world called Aristasia.

Much like the rich fantasy worlds created by Tolkien or the Brontë sisters, Aristasia became an ever-growing obsession for its creators, with its own customs, calendar, literature, and history, to the extent that some of the worldbuilders eventually dropped out of university to attend their own unofficial Aristasian school instead. In Aristasia there were two genders, both female (assertive brunettes and demure blondes); the decadent modern world was known as The Pit; and the word for person was not man but maid.

Source

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Some of this group settled in a house in the Irish coastal village of Burtonport, and called themselves the Rhennish folk, or “Silver Sisterhood”. A few years later, something shifted, and a different group of people occupied the house and called themselves St. Bride’s School.

St. Bride’s billed itself as something between a real school and a holiday retreat, posting ads for week-long terms where students would “spend 24 hours a day living in a different time, living a different life.” The staff and students observed a strict hierarchy, with obedient students appointed prefects to keep the others in line, and prefects reporting in turn to teachers: “Some maids like to tell others what to do,” as a visitor summarized the philosophy during the Silver Sisterhood days, “and some maids like to be told what to do.” Both the Sisterhood and St. Bride’s attracted copious media attention—which seems likely to have been deliberately sought out—and from news clips it’s clear at least some residents of both groups were the same people, though going by different names and speaking with changed accents.

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In the St. Bride’s phase, many different people had many different names and personae. “Miss Regina Snow” and “Miss Marianne Martindale”, authors of other books published by this group, appeared to have been shared identities, with different people making public appearances under the same name.

Ultimately, the women of St Bride’s needed to raise money to fund this peculiar lifestyle. Their primary source of income was providing a boarding school experience to young ladies, a role-playing getaway where visitors could experience a trip to the past and a return to good old fashioned morality. As the years went by, the focus on corporal punishment — in particular the use of caning — grew to the point where the group was described as a fetish club. For the eight years of its existence, St. Bride’s toed the line between an idealistic escape from modern depravity and a house of masochistic cosplay enthusiasts. Reading the writings of Clare Tyrell, the word discipline appears to be at the forefront of her mind. Somewhere behind the lace and crinolines, the maids of St Bride’s appeared to derive a lot of pleasure from inflicting pain onto others.

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Another peculiar twist is that while St. Bride’s fetishized the pre-WWII past, it also pioneered early text-based computer games, driven by “Miss Priscilla Langridge”. Whether this was an actual person or another shared identity is unclear. There is some evidence this personae was actually a trans woman, not something common in 1980s Ireland.

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The text game The Secret of St. Bride’s was sold via direct mail ads in video game magazines, putting the player back in a girls school in the 1920s. A commercial and critical success, Langridge followed up with more, including the much-delayed fantasy Silverwolf, with a companion comic strip, also by Langridge, based on a fiction serial that drew on Aristasian lore in the lesbian periodical Artemis (apparently also published by the same group under other names). The magic of the game is full of transformations and mergings. Other games included 1987’s Jack the Ripper, with low-res but lurid graphics that made it the first game given an 18 certificate by the British Board of Film Classification.

The games […] turn out to have been part of a wider business portfolio that also included handmade costumes (“silk, satin and lace dresses, styles from 1800 to 1940, also maidservants’ uniforms” ran a small ad) and a publishing house, The Wildfire Club, through which the school published lesbian periodicals (Artemis, The Romantic and others) and books by Martindale such as The District Governess and The Female Disciplinary Manual.

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It’s here that we come to the crux of what was going on at St Bride’s. Was it an innocuous institution for role-playing eccentrics, or was there something more fetishistic in its make-up? The answer appears to be both. On the one hand, it was a sort of “romantic retreat where 19^th century values, politeness and dressmaking were preferred to the tawdry modern world”, but in investigating St Bride’s and its subsequent iterations, the word “discipline” comes up a lot. In the early ‘90s, before the school eventually closed, Martindale was convicted of caning a pupil rather more enthusiastically than the recipient would have liked.

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In 1990, a woman named Mari De Colwyn (likely Scarlett) was convicted of “actual bodily harm” for caning an adult St. Bride’s student: “she had done a very naughty thing,” the former headmistress offered by way of explanation. The ladies eventually abandoned the house; its owners, seeking their unpaid rent, broke in one night and leaked a story to the media that the place had been filled with “material produced by neo-Nazi organizations and the sado-masochistic sex industry,” as well as correspondence with far-right organizations like Britain’s virulently racist National Front.

Source

…uncomfortable echoes of far-right thinking had been present in the St. Bride’s ethos from the start, from a focus on discipline and a “proper place” for everyone to a yearning for an earlier, “purer” time. Some of these notions had been inspired in part by readings in the Oxford days of anti-modernist philosopher Guenon, whose ideas would also resonate for people like Richard Spencer and Steve Bannon. Regardless of what the truth was, the school’s reputation had forever changed from strange to sinister, and tabloids would repeatedly characterize its members as Nazis and lesbian sex fiends through the rest of the 1990s.

Source

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In the 1990s, the group relocated to London and rebranded as Aristasia. This is when the books were published. Trying to pin down the group’s identity remained frustrating: was it a clique of harmless eccentrics, an elaborate front to publicize and cover for a professional domination operation, or something more sinister?

…some of the school’s pupils in later years would come to characterize the group as dangerously earnest, with one describing it as a cult. “There was something sinister at the heart of it,” she wrote: “The founder was a remarkable person but was leading a fantasy life—we were living in someone else’s fantasy.” While much about the Games Mistresses would shift across their decades of fronts and personas, disconnection from the everyday world was a constant theme.

Source

…Martindale’s sidetracking Aristasia into an overemphasis on fetish (whether she admitted that was what it was or not) seems to have annoyed many of her peers until she was effectively “silenced”.

Source

I won’t go into the rumors concerning the later lives of “Martindale” and “Langdrige”.

The whole St. Bride’s/Aristasia thing reminds me a bit of John Norman’s Gor books, which also sit uncomfortably between erotic fantasy and retrograde politics, and exerts an uncanny pull on certain people to the point of constructing a lifestyle. You can see similar patterns in, for example, the “Final Fantasy House” micro-cult.

RTE.ie has a 6-minute video from 1984 of the St. Bride’s house in its heyday in Burtonport, which links to other articles and videos on the group. A number of other videos can be found on Youtube by searching for “Aristasia”.

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Bitter Moon (IMDB) is a 1992 erotic/romance film, directed by the notorious Roman Polanski, based on the novel Lunes de Fiel by Pascal Bruckner

Nigel goes on an ocean cruise with his wife, Fiona, where he becomes fascinated by a beautiful, mysterious woman named Mimi. Her husband, a paraplegic would-be writer named Oscar, demands that Nigel listen to his story of his obsessive love with Mimi before Nigel has an affair with her. Like another tale of twisted love, Nabokov’s Lolita, we shouldn’t take the narrator at face value. Mimi privately tells Nigel: “You musn’t believe all he says. He’s a sick man. He imagines things.”

In Oscar’s story, he is a self-consciously literary archetype, an independently wealthy young American living in Paris to become a writer. On a bus trip, he becomes smitten with Mimi, a young French woman. 

Mimi is a cipher, with almost nothing more to her than being a beautiful French dancer, at least in Oscar’s telling. The early stages of their romance go from sweetly romantic to an adolescent’s idea of eroticism. 

Oscar: (to Nigel) “I’m only going into such detail to show you how completely enslaved I was, body and soul, by this creature whose dangerous charms have made such an impression on you.”

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Despite this romantic bliss, Oscar says he feared he would lose interest in her. Instead, he tells Nigel about how they were on a ski vacation and he watched Mimi urinate on their chalet’s television set. Note that this scene is only described by Oscar. We don’t see the actors performing it. 

Oscar: (to Nigel) “Time stood still for an instant. Then I rolled off the couch. I crawled over like a lunatic. I wormed my way between her legs and I turned over. And right away, I was engulfed with this warm, golden cascade. It spattered my cheeks, it filled my nostrils, it stung my eyes. And then something jolted my brain with multi-megavolt intensity. There was this blinding flash in the back of my eyeballs. I experienced the orgasm of a lifetime.”

Nigel: “For god’s sake, man.”

Oscar: “It was like a white-hot blade piercing me through and through. This was my Nile, my Ganges, my Jordan, my fountain of youth, my second baptism.” 

Oscar sneers at his presumptions about Nigel and Fiona’s sexual life. Nigel calls this obscene.

Oscar: “Obscene? Have you ever felt real overpowering passion? Have you truly idolized a woman? Nothing can be obscene in such a love. Everything that occurs between you becomes a sacrament.”

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Oscar and Mimi go on a shopping spree at an adult store for sex toys; Mimi treats this as a lark. 

Oscar: [narration] “I always had a suspicion it might be supremely pleasurable by a beautiful woman. But it was only now I realized what this could entail.”

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Next, we see Oscar handcuffed in a chair, with tape over his mouth. Mimi, dressed in a black PVC trench coat (perhaps a nod to Severine’s coat in Belle de Jour), appears before him and cuts off his clothes with a straight razor, before pushing him over and standing over him in her lingerie. 

In the next scene, the friction is back in their relationship. Oscar gets irritable when Mimi asks him about the women in his fiction, and she retaliates by dancing with another man at a party. This is the beginning of the cuckold theme. 

Oscar: [narration] “I’d always found infidelity to be the most titillating aspect of any relationship. That scene should have turned me on. So why didn’t it? Why did I feel so hurt?”

In another scene with Mimi as a dominatrix and Oscar wearing a pig mask, they both realize that neither of them are into it. This is the end of the masochistic phase of Oscar’s story, and the beginning of the sadistic phase. 

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When Mimi squeezes herself into a skin-tight orange latex dress before going out with him, he passive-aggressively criticizes her. She goes out in a relatively modest dress. After the dinner, they fight. She packs her bags to go, and Oscar does nothing to stop her. She literally falls to her knees and begs him to let her stay.

A breakfast argument escalates into a physical fight, and he slaps her across the face three times. She falls to the floor, unconscious. When she comes to, she doesn’t want him to call a doctor, just hold him. Instead of going to a hospital, they take in the Paris nightlife. Oscar tries to break up with her.

Oscar: “I’m degrading myself by degrading you. We’re degrading each other, for god’s sake.”

Even though Oscar leaves her in the park, he comes home to find her sleeping on his doorstep. Still bearing bruises on her face, Mimi tearfully begs him to take her back, but Oscar coolly smokes a cigarette, unmoved. 

These scenes are hard to watch, especially considering that director Roman Polanski was married to Emmanuelle Seigner when they were shooting this movie. 

Oscar: (narration) “Everyone has a sadistic streak. And nothing brings it out better than the knowledge you’ve got someone at your mercy. If she really fancied living in a living hell, I’d make it so hot, even she would want out.” 

This is the sadistic phase of Oscar’s story, constantly “negging” her into a neurotic mess, until she dyes her hair grey and wears nothing but frumpy dresses. She’s gone from girl next door to temptress to dominatrix to frumpy, neglected housewife. She stops dancing. He humiliates her in front of other women at a party. She tells him she is pregnant with his baby, which he rejects. She has “complications” and loses the baby. Oscar books a tropical vacation for two, then leaves her on the plane and fakes an illness to get off. 

After two years of screwing women all around Paris, Oscar has a car accident, though with only minor injuries. As her recuperates in the hospital, Mimi returns, now back to herself. He still rejects her. She yanks him out of bed and somehow damages his spine, leaving him paralyzed below the waist. 

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Mimi moves back in and reduces Oscar to a state of infantile dependence on her, almost literally, as when she leaves him in his chair overnight while she goes out and he has to urinate on the floor. 

Oscar: (narration) “It crossed my mind she might still love me, in spite of everything. After all, it’s no fun hurting someone who means nothing to you.” 

Mimi puts him through her own form of psychological torment, mostly preying on his helplessness and jealousy. She changes into sexy lingerie and a black PVC playsuit in front of him, so she can go out. (PVC and other fetish materials signify Mimi at her most powerful and independent.)

Oscar: (to Mimi) “Look, I know I deserve all I get. I treated you like a monster. I am a monster.” 

Mimi gives him a birthday present: a loaded handgun. 

Oscar: “I despise myself, I hate myself. I hate myself worse than you could ever hate me.”

Mimi: “Don’t kid yourself, Oscar. No one could hate you more than I do.”

In another scene, Mimi invites over a black male dancer and she shamelessly flirts with him, showing off his body, telling Oscar he is straight. Mimi and Basil dance together sensually, then go into the bedroom (now Mimi’s bedroom, while Oscar sleeps in the apartment’s main room), and we-as-Oscar hear the sounds of sex. 

These scenes are shot from Oscar’s point of view, as performances for him, not an expression of Mimi’s independent sexuality. It’s very “male gaze”. 

Oscar: (narration) “We both knew we’d never rediscover the same extremes of passion and cruelty with another living soul.”

Oscar and Mimi get married, which probably means she’ll get his money when he dies; another aspect of his emasculation. 

In the present, Oscar winds up his story for Nigel. He says he lives in constant dread of losing Mimi, but he “supervises” her affairs with other men. Is this just a contrived justification for his cuckold fantasy, or had he made himself a cuckold to eroticize his situation?

Nigel approaches Mimi to have sex, but she refuses him. Instead, Nigel and Oscar are stuck on the sidelines of the ship’s dance floor as Mimi and Fiona sensually dance with each other, a la Bertolucci’s Il Conformista. Oscar welcomes Nigel to the brotherhood of cuckolds, men who could not satisfy and control their women. Nigel threatens to hit Oscar. 

Oscar: “Go ahead if it’ll help. I deserve your hatred. I’m abominable. I’m pathetic.”

Later, Nigel finds Oscar has apparently watched Mimi and Fiona have sex in Mimi’s cabin, 

In front of Nigel and Fiona, Oscar shoots Mimi in her sleep. 

Oscar: (tearful) “We were just too greedy, baby. That was all.” 

Oscar shoots himself in the head. 

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How much of the story Oscar tells Nigel is true is hard to tell. Trying to make sense of Oscar’s narrative in terms of realism is probably pointless. It should be interpreted as sexual fantasy. Mimi is less like a person and more like a mannequin dressed up as various archetypes from the heterosexual male erotic imagination: virgin schoolgirl, dancing nymph, slutty bimbo, dominatrix, cuckoldress, black widow, etc. It’s possible, likely even, that the Mimi of Oscar’s story is a composite of various women he’s been involved with, plus another layer of fantasy. The vanilla, tritely romantic scenes with Mimi are just as much his fantasies as her maiming him. 

Then there’s the question of the why of Oscar’s story. Is Oscar ultimately a masochist and his sadistic phase was a post hoc justification for Mimi’s mistreatment and his own self-loathing? Or is it vice-versa, with Mimi’s mistreatment of him to justify his cruelty to her? Or did he indulge so deeply in his sadism that his guilt forced him into masochism? There isn’t a linear progression of cause and effect. It’s more like Oscar oscillates between the two poles of sadism and masochism, both directed at his feminine archetype. Either way, he can’t give her up. 

Setting aside Polanski’s personal life, Bitter Moon is a rather misogynistic work, and it has few champions, especially with its running time of over two hours. Seigner starred in a number of films directed by Polanski, and they were married in 1989. 21 years later after Bitter Moon, Seigner played the lead, Vanda, in Polanski’s French film adaptation of David Ives’ play La Vénus à la fourrure (2013), aka Venus in Fur. Like Mimi, Vanda is a projection of heterosexual male desires and anxieties, not a realistic character. The situation also echoes Venus in Furs, in that it’s a story told by one man to another, warning him of the dangers of women. That novel, in turn, was written by a man who was rather terrible to the women in his life, all the while obsessing over the thought of women hurting and controlling him. Perhaps the driving impulse of Bitter Moon isn’t sadism or masochism, but cuckoldry, in which the man observes his woman and other men playing out his sexual script, with his control over every detail hidden by the pretense of his helplessness; the fantasy of blameless omnipotence.

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Fifty Shades of Black (2016) (IMDB) is a comedy/romance film directed by Michael Tiddes and written by Marlon Wayans and Rick Alvarez. Obviously, it’s a parody of the wildly popular Fifty Shades of Grey franchise. 

Beyond just parodying Fifty Shades, Black derives comedy from juxtaposing sadomasochism, long seen as a “white thing”, with blackness. 

Moon Charania’s essay “The Promise of Whiteness: Fifty Shades of Grey as White Racial Archive” in Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media (Issue 8, January 2016) hypothesizes that the book and film’s story can only work because the two leads are extremely white and heterosexual. It presents a kind of hetero-white utopia in which all the cultural anxieties of the 2000s and 2010s are almost entirely absent. Almost no non-white people means no racial violence and inequality, and almost no queer and no trans people means no challenge to the primacy of heterosexuality. 

The significance of Grey’s emotional torment, Ana’s romantic attachment to Grey, and the familiarity of white heterosexual domestic love render this (attempted) violent domination both palatable and melancholic. [Pg. 84]

To excite and placate the audience, Ana and Christian as lovers and antagonists could only be white. The sudden excitement found in a powerful white man beating an empowered white woman for sexual pleasure establishes an inextricable link between racial formation and sexual subjectification. [Pg. 85]

In Charania’s view, whiteness excuses everything: Christian’s domination and sadism, Ana’s infatuation and naivete. Remove Christian’s whiteness, his wealth and privilege, from the narrative, and he’s just an abuser. Remove Ana’s whiteness, and she’s just a helpless victim. It’s not a love story anymore. 

So what happens if the analogs of Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele, “Christian Black” (Marlon Wayans) and “Hannah Steale” (Kali Hawk), are black?

Fifty Shades of Black follows its parent film closely, including even the same shots. Much of the jokes come from making the subtext of the original into text. For example, Kateesha, Hannah’s raunchy best friend and roommate, calls out the text’s exchange of sex for material goods. Christian Grey, subtextually black in the original by his association with inner city poverty and crack cocaine, is now the explicitly black Christian Black, who made his money dealing drugs.

If only by accident, Fifty Shades of Black is actually a somewhat better story than its parody subject. Mainly because, while Christian Grey is an obnoxious controlling jerk mainly because he can, Christian Black has a glint of genuine pathos beneath all the sex jokes. Far from a “master of the universe”, he’s a deeply insecure, neurotic mess because, no matter how much wealth and power he has acquired, he’s still a black man in a racist society. He can’t even live up to the myth of black male sexual prowess. His own adoptive mother can’t help uttering a stream of racist microaggressions at him. 

Christian Black’s struggle for acceptance extends into the realm of BDSM. When he first introduces Hannah to his dungeon, Hannah immediately rejects him. 

Hannah: “Fuck this shit! I’m out!”

Christian: “Please, Ms. Steale. Just keep an open mind.”

Inside the red room, Hannah examines the toys. 

Hannah: “You’re a sick motherfucker.”

Christian: “No, Bill Cosby’s a sick motherfucker. I’m just a dominant.”

Hannah: “What does that have to do with me?”

Christian: “I want you to give yourself to me sexually. Hence all the whips chains and freaky sex toys.” 

Hannah: “And what would I get out of it?”

Christian: “Me.”

Hannah: (laughs deeply)

[…]

Hannah: “And women go for this?”

Christian: “Some women.” 

There’s a brief series of flashbacks. First, Christian shows the dungeon to a white woman, who’s game to play, as long as her father doesn’t know she’s dating a black man. Second is a bleary-eyed, indifferent Asian woman, who just wants to “eat shit”. The third is a black woman who dumps him immediately and says he needs to “find Jesus”. It can be frustrating for a top/dominant to be either treated as a sensation dispenser, or rejected outright. There’s an additional dimension of anti-BDSM prejudice among black people. 

Christian Grey wants someone who looks like his birth mother to punish. Christian Black just wants someone who will accept him as a whole. A lot of his character, such as his insistence that “I don’t date. I fuck hard.”, is a defense against being hurt. 

The film solves the problem of making Christian too much of a sadist or Hannah too much of a masochist by making Christian an incompetent sadist. When Christian and Hannah actually play, the series of mishaps — Christian licks a peacock feather and gets a strand stuck on his tongue, Hannah accidentally kicks him across the room when he puts ice on her body, Christian can’t open the cuffs he put on her and has to bring in other men to release her — actually humanizes both characters, and show that BDSM doesn’t have to be perfect and serious to be good. 

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In another sequence, Christian tries to “punish” Hannah with a spanking, but no matter what he hits her with, she doesn’t feel a thing. 

Hannah: “Don’t feel bad. I haven’t really felt anything down there since I got my butt implants.” 

The impact play scenes are shot without full nudity and without closeups of impact. Forced perspective creates the impression of impact without actually seeing it. 

Some of the play is a bit unsettling, as when Christian waterboards her, while others are humorous, as when Christian reads Fifty Shades of Grey (which exists in this universe?) to her while she’s blindfolded and bound.

Christian: “This is fifty shades of fucking terrible. Who wrote this, a third-grader?”

Hannah: “Please go back to the water-torture thing!” 

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When we finally get to the “show me the worst” scene, Christian reviews his collection of impact implements, each labeled with the title of a movie with black people being beaten: “Amistad”, “Glory”, “Roots”, “Django Unchained”, “12 Years a Slave”, and “Joe Jackson”. This elicits nervous laughter over the role of black people being tortured as spectacle in Hollywood films, usually in the context of antebellum slavery. 

After a few impacts, when Christian is worn out, they stop.

Hannah: “Don’t touch me! Does it make you happy to see me like this?”

Christian: “I mean, not really. You look like a sad Gollum.”

Hannah (still in her bra and panties) switches on Christian, handcuffing him to the massage table and beating him with the same belt. 

Hannah: “This is for Kerry Washington from Django Unchained! […] This is for Lupita Nyong’o in 12 Years A Slave! […] All she wanted was some soap!”

Christian responds with pain. 

Hannah continues whipping him while ranting about Denzel Washington crying in the whipping scene in Glory and the nudity of “the little white girl in Fifty Shades of Grey!”. Then she brings back a large silver dildo.

Hannah: “I’m about to get medieval on your ass. Welcome to my world, motherfucker!” 

She shoves it at his butt. Cut to black and the sound of Christian screaming. 

Hannah: “Christian, I thought you’d like it.” 

Christian: “What’s there to like? What kind of sick pervert beats you for their own enjoyment?” 

By now it should be obvious that Fifty Shades of Black is primarily a comedy, and definitely not instructional, so it won’t bother to address the numerous breaches of consent, or other problems. 

During the reconciliation, Christian tries to negotiate with Hannah. 

Hannah: “You hurt me Christian.”

Christian: “I know. But I have softer whips. You know the kind with the pink fur on it? It takes the sting off.”

Hannah: “That’s not what I’m talking about.”

Fifty Shades of Black ultimately doesn’t resolve the relationship of its leads, just as Grey puts them back together for reasons of genre rather than logic. They just do. Despite all this, it’s slightly more enlightened about BDSM than its source material, in that it foregrounds Christian’s struggle for acceptance, hindered by his own insecurity.

Transparent Episode S02E09 “Man on the Land”, aired Dec 11, 2015. 

In this episode, mainly set at a women’s festival in the woods, Maura, a transwoman, has a difficult experience when she finds that the festival is supposed to be for “women-born-women” only, and her adult daughter Sarah hooks up with a kinky woman named Pony (played by Jiz Lee). 

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BDSM and transwomen have both been sites of controversy in women-only spaces over the decades. (I find it implausible that Maura would have registered for this event and travelled to it without knowing about the no-trans policy.)

Sarah wanders around the festival, seeing a wide range of women from granola hippie types to nudists to leather dykes. She stops outside a tent for a shamanic ceremony, led by a white woman named Ashley, aka “Crying Bear”, in Native American dress. “You might experience some deep emotions. Laughter, uncontrollable weeping is not uncommon,” she says in her New York accent. 

Sarah: “I think I have the wrong tent.”

Sarah instead turns away in favor of a kinky couple she sees going by. Pony, wearing leather pants and open vest and a rope harness around her (?) bare breasts, leads another woman on a leash and whacks her own thigh with a studded strap.

Sarah watches Pony and her sub from a distance. Pony lightly taps her sub with the strap. Sarah follows them to a gathering of leatherwomen (of varying body types and gender expressions) engaged in BDSM, including spanking and flogging. There’s also a drummer. Unlike the tent, this is in the open and in plain view of everyone. 

Sarah talks to Pony. 

Sarah: “Did I just see you walking that woman around on a leash?”

Pony: “Yeah, she’s my naughty doggy. It’s a play scene.”

Sarah: “Play scene.”

Pony: “Yeah. You know, consensual power exchange. Roleplaying. You interested?” 

Sarah: “Woof.”

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While Maura searches for her daughters and has panic attacks, Sarah (in her underwear) is bound to a tree and flogged by Pony. This sequence shows some actual impacts on what I would guess was a body double, intercut with Sarah responding with pleasure. 

At another gathering attended by Ali and Maura, the conversation turns to the festival’s controversies like the S&M camp being too big, which leads to the “women-born-women” policy. After Maura outs herself as a transwoman and leaves, Ali searches for her and has a vision of her ancestors in 1930s Germany. At Magnus Hirschfeld’s institute, their party is invaded by brownshirts, who burn books in the street and drag people off to be arrested. 

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“Man on the Land” shows how utopia can flip to dystopia in an instant. The initially welcoming experience of the festival quickly becomes tense and conflicted, and Maura is left stumbling around in the dark, searching for her family and surrounded by potentially hostile strangers. I draw on a lot of ritual theory in my view of BDSM and, like any subculture, that “communitas” feeling of belonging after initiation can be powerful. So can the alienation of feeling that you don’t belong here, if and when it stops working. 

Sarah turns down “Crying Bear’s” ritual in favor of Pony’s. Arguably they both do the same thing of emotional release (though one has less cultural appropriation), but Pony makes no claim of therapeutic value.