Episode S03E02 “When the Battle is Over” Aired 22 Sep 2017

Jiz Lee returns as Pony, having regular domination sessions with Sarah.

Sara struggles with joining the board of her Jewish temple, and says some slut-shaming things about her ex-husband’s Millennial girlfriend. She’s insecure about being a wife and mother with her ex-husband in all ways except sexually.

In session with Pony, Sara is miles away. She’s on a St. Andrew’s cross, in her underwear, being spanked by Pony, rambling about flyers for her temple. Shot of her face in the cross. 

Pony: “Shut up, slut.”

Sara apologizes, but a moment later she resumes complaining, talking about the Jewish concept of doing volunteer work without telling anyone about it, while Pony lightly flogs her. Pony looks annoyed and stops flogging. 

Pony: “Sony, if you want to come, you have to focus.” 

Sarah decides to stop and pay Pony for the last fifteen minutes, trying to frame it as an act of charity. Pony needles her by saying she’s not supposed to tell anyone about it. 

***

Episode S03E04 “Just the Facts” Aired 22 Sep 2017

Sara acts like a wife and mother to her ex-husband and kids, and gets into an aggressive spin class, led by her ex-husband Len’s much-younger girlfriend. They meet for the first time. Sara tries to understand the other woman’s attraction to Len, who says he is attentive and present and makes her feel safe. 

In her regular session with Pony, Sara’s insecurity about her sexual attractiveness makes her want to switch. Pony is surprised but agrees. Unusually for TV, they do a brief negotiation that establishes Pony’s safeword. 

Sarah still wears her print dress, with fetish boots and a black horned mask, and wields a paddle. Pony is on a low bench, with their butt up and face towards Sara, pants down and panties still on. It’s an awkward position, but it keeps Pony’s face and butt in the same frame, facing Sara. 

In contrast to Pony’s usual cool butch attitude, they use a soft, child voice:

Pony: “I woke up like this. I don’t know what happened. Can you help me?”

Sara is awkward in this role. Her boot heel gets stuck in the spanking bench, but she carries on. 

Pony: “Can you help me?”

Sara: “You need help?… You know, I’m sorry, just — I can’t–”

Sara takes off the mask.

Sara: “It’s like I’ve gotten totally in my head. Can we just– Can I just be me and you be you?”

Pony: “Yes ma’am.”

Sara: “Please don’t call me ma’am. I hate ma’am. Can you do ‘boss’?”

Pony: “Yes, boss.”

Sara: “I like ‘boss’.”

Sara gets more aggressive, hitting the bench near Pony with the paddle. Pony remains impassive. Sara yells into Pony’s face.

Sara: “Shut up, you stupid, fucking twat! You know what I should do? I should beat the shit out of you. That’s what I should do. I should fucking cut off your fucking head!”

Pony: “Red.”

Sara: “And piss down your throat–”

Pony: “Red.”

Sara: “You ugly, fucking cunt.”

Pony: “Red!”

Sara stops and looks horrified.

This is another scene that is cut off too soon, before we see the immediate aftermath of this scene. Does Pony cut Sara off? Do they renegotiate? Or does Sara just repress and ignore this like so much else in her life? Perhaps the whole point of Sara’s sessions with Pony is that Pony doesn’t have to be treated like a person.

The remainder of Sara’s scenes in the episode show her in a parent-teacher conference with her ex-husband. They offload their kid’s potty training problems onto his teacher. Len leaves to have a date with her girlfriend, and Sara throws herself into using her old school gym as a space for Jewish temple events.

Episode S03E09 “Off the Grid” Aired 22 Sep 2017

Sarah shows up for her regular session at Pony’s dungeon, but a stranger answers the door. He claims Pony suddenly left town to work on a family business, and that Sarah was part of the reason. “She didn’t really elaborate.”

Sarah is dismayed and asks what she’s supposed to do. The guy at the door says Pony left all her gear behind, and offers to “just flog the shit out of you.”

Sarah: “No, no, no, no. It has to be a woman.”

Guy: “Oh. Good luck with that. Pony is the only lady pro dom I know that works with chicks.”

Sarah: “Okay, that cannot be true.”

Guy: “There’s no money in it. I mean, it’s not really that hard for a woman to find someone to treat her like shit for free.”

While there probably aren’t a lot of women patronizing sex workers, I had always assumed that Pony was seeing mostly male clients and her sessions with Sarah were an exception. If Sarah is willing to pay Pony for regular sessions, she can probably find another pro domme. 

The joke about women who want to suffer have no trouble finding it is awkward, as it conflates women in abusive relationships with women who are actual masochists. In my view, masochists (of any gender) don’t just want to be mistreated; they want to be mistreated in very specific ways, at the time and place of their choosing. In other words, the masochists exerts control over their sadist, and if the sadist exceeds that control, the masochist will leave “the game.” 

In her next scene, Sarah finds her pet turtle has gone missing and loses it, yelling at her ex-husband Len and their children. Someone has abandonment issues. 

That night, Len and Sarah are in their bedroom. Sarah apologizes for losing her temper and Len gives her a backrub. Sarah complains about Pony’s departure. 

Len: “Well, how hard can it be? What does she do, just, like boss you around and slap you a little?”

Sarah: “Sort of, yeah. With some hair pulling, you know.”

Len: “Like this?”

He grabs her hair.

Sara: “Ah! Oh my god, ow. That actually hurt. That was pretty good.” 

Len escalates to light spanking on Sarah’s butt, with her approval, and some dirty talk, then uses his belt to wrap her wrists and bind them over her head to the bedpost. Sara seems into it. 

Len: “I know what you want. I know you better than anybody in the whole world.”

Sara’s mood abruptly changes.

Sara: “Can– I need to get– Can I get down?”

He releases her. They both apologise. Sara refers to “the arrangement.”

Len: “It’s okay. I was just joking. I was joking around.”

Sarah: “No, I liked it. It was good. I just– I don’t want to fuck everything up or anything.”

Len: “It’s fine.”

There’s a lot going on here. One dynamic is Len’s jealousy over Pony’s physical intimacy with Sarah, as he keeps comparing himself to Pony. Also, his dirty talk may have gone over her limits. His comment that he knows her better than anyone is what puts Sarah over her edge, perhaps activating her fear of being completely controlled by another person. 

One possibility is that, because the terms of Sarah’s relationship with Pony are negotiated and explicit, Sarah can be emotionally and sexually open with her. In her relationship with Len, everything is suppressed and unspoken, so she can’t articulate her desires and limits, and thus can’t trust him enough. As is so often the case in mainstream media, there is no negotiation before or debriefing after play. Sarah can’t articulate her masochistic desires to Len, and therefore Len can’t meet them.

I discuss the BDSM-themed Korean romantic comedy Love and Leashes with my friend and colleague TammyJo Eckhart, a historian and author.

Currently on Netflix, Love and Leashes follows a submissive man and and a dominant woman as they learn about each other and deal with a prejudiced society. You can also read the English translation of the original webcomic.

Love and Leashes is a 2022 Korean romantic comedy, currently streaming on Netflix, about two office workers who begin a dominant/submissive relationship, based on a webcomic.

Note: I do not speak Korean, and I’m going entirely by the dubbing and subtitles. There are likely many cultural and linguistic nuances I am missing. E.g. “Master” is frequently used, but not “Mistress”. 

Jung Jihoo transfers to the public relations department of a corporation, where he meets a woman with a nearly identical name, Jung Jiwoo. She’s highly intelligent and competent, but ignored or belittled by the department’s sexist boss. Jihoo is actually her superior in the hierarchy, but he tries to listen to her and compromise. 

Jiwoo is attracted to Jihoo, but is reluctant to act on it. Her mother and friend both urge her to act on it, but in a stereotypically “feminine” way, which is at odds with her direct personality. 

Because their names are so similar, Jiwoo accidentally picks up a personal package delivered for Jihoo, and finds a studded leather collar and leash with the nameplate “Miho”. Jihoo tries to cover for this, but she figures it out, and says nothing. 

Jiwoo initially assumes Jihoo is a dominant. Out running, she stops to look into an adult store, and has a fantasy of him putting a collar on her, but she stops him, saying, “I don’t even like wearing turtleneck sweaters.”

When Jihoo injures himself at work, Jiwoo takes him to a hospital. Afterwards, he says she must be a dominant, and is overjoyed to meet another kinky person, implying that he has never met another kinky person before. Jiwoo says no, but her curiosity is sparked, and she researches BDSM online and talks to her bar hostess friend. 

Jiwoo approaches Jihoo and says she is curious about being a dominant, and gives him a contract. They will meet once a week for play for 12 weeks. Their scenes, mostly set in hotel rooms, are artistically shot. More importantly, they depart from the usual male gaze style with many shots that are of her POV looking at him in vulnerable positions. The activities include puppy play, foot and high heel play, hot wax play, flogging impact play and rope bondage. Note also that there is no nudity in this film. 

Love and Leashes is one of the rare mass media works that explores a woman growing into a dominant role. We see her in an adult store selecting toys, preparing her own rope, and practicing rope bondage on a stuffed toy. She tries different kink activities, keeps some, and discards others. Jiwoo makes realistic stumbles and mistakes as she learns about herself and about Jihoo. E.g. she cuffs his hand to hers, but forgets that they have to get out of a car together. After Jihoo gives her a pair of high-heels and she uses them on him in a trampling scene, she goes home and presses her bare soles against the wall, like she is reliving and re-evaluating the experience. After another scene, it’s strongly implied she masturbates by herself.

She wears different outfits for her scenes: some casual, some formal, and in one case, a classical dominatrix-style dress. Compare this to the episode of Secret Diary of a Call Girl (previously discussed), when Belle goes on a shopping spree and buys a kind of pre-fab dominatrix outfit. 

Jihoo has his own problems, such as a former lover who rejected him when he told her about his kinks, yet still emotionally abuses him. This has left him with a fear of intimacy. While he is physically vulnerable with Jiwoo, he is not emotionally vulnerable. He turns down Jiwoo’s inquiries about adding sexual activities or dating, creating friction. 

The series depicts the BDSM culture of Korea as being almost entirely online. Both the leads communicate with other kinksters through online forums, and Jihoo is ecstatic at meeting another kinkster in person. It’s mostly by chance that Jihoo and Jiwoo know another kinky person and help her after a bad date. Adult stores and Japanese-style “Love hotels” are institutions available to them. 

The story ends with both characters overcoming their shame, both personally and professionally, and having an intimate and passionate relationship.

To be honest, I would not have thought that one of the best and most humane treatments of BDSM relationships I have ever seen would have come from Korea.

IMDB Aired November 15, 2001. 

Co-writer Jerry Stahl also wrote the notorious CSI episodes “Fur and Loathing in Las Vegas” (2003) (dealing with furry culture) and “King Baby” (2005) (dealing with infantilism). He also co-wrote the screenplays for the cult porn films Nightdreams (1981) and Café Flesh (1982), under the pseudonym Herbert W. Day. 

Melinda Clarke makes her first appearance as Lady Heather. She also played a brothel madam in the Firefly episode “Heart of Gold” (2003) and the body-modified zombie lead of Return of the Living Dead 3 (1993).

As so many of these types of episodes, it begins with the discovery of a dead sex worker. In this case, it’s a nude young woman found buried in a sandbox. Also typical, the victim’s body is treated as a puzzle to be solved that will lead to the discovery of their true identity. 

Grissom’s solo examination of the deceased’s nude body is shot and scored like a love scene, to Sigur Ros’ “Svefn-G-Englar”.

ME: “Her body’s a road map of abuse, but there’s no sign it was sexual. She hasn’t had intercourse in months.”

Willows: “I’m thinking trade-in. Some lowlife was tired of beating on the old model, so he punches her ticket and starts shopping around for version 2.0.”

Grissom: “Here’s a woman who’s been beaten on a regular basis, but look at the care she’s lavished on herself. Manicured fingernails, manicured toenails. Perfect teeth, hair.”

The victim’s breast implants lead them to a doctor, who leads them to an address in an old house, ruled by Lady Heather (the character’s first appearance in the series, played by Melinda Clarke). 

Lady Heather: “Let me guess. Three police officers looking for respite from having to control and dominate our big bad city.” 

She allows them in, without asking about warrants or probable cause or calling her lawyer. There are plenty of real-world cases of police harassing pro-dommes. Heather’s willingness to cooperate with the police puts making her sympathetic to the viewer over realistic concern about the privacy of Lady Heather, her employees or her clients.

The police officers explain this is business, not pleasure, and inform her of Mona’s death.

Lady Heather: “Never lost one of my girls.”

Grissom: “You don’t seem very upset about it.”

Lady Heather: “What you see and what I feel are two different things.”

[…]

Lady Heather: “It’s when I don’t hear screams that I start to worry.”

Grissom meets with Heather in her office. While speaking with her, he barely looks at her, and instead closely examines objects around her room, sometimes even picking them up. This is established as Grissom’s way of dealing with people. Heather is apparently unbothered by this breach of etiquette and privacy.

Lady Heather: “Does all this fascinate you?”

Grissom: “Yes. I find all deviant behaviour fascinating in that to understand human nature we have to understand our aberrations.”

Lady Heather: “And you think what goes on here is aberrant?”

Grissom: “I would say that whip marks and ligature contusions on a young woman are aberrant. Wouldn’t you?”

Lady Heather: “Every job has its peculiar hazards. Rock stars damage their eardrums. Football players ruin their knees. In this business, it’s scars. But no one who works for me has ever sustained a serious injury.”

Grissom: “Mona did. She died.”

Lady Heather: “Not because she worked here. That’s your assumption. What happens here isn’t about violence. It’s about challenging preconceived notions of Victorian normalcy. Bringing people’s fantasies to life, making them real and acceptable.”

Going on the defensive, Heather employs several strategies of normalization in her conversation with Grissom: first by comparison to other, accepted activities, second by claiming positive social value. 

Grissom: “The whip marks on Mona Taylor were fresh.”

Lady Heather: “That can’t be. Mona was dominant with her clients. I know that sometimes she saw clients off the books. I let her because she brought in so much business. I just assumed she knew what she was doing.”

Grissom: “ My guess is that one of her off-the-book clients is a regular.”

This undermines Heather’s authority, first that she didn’t know Mona switched professionally, and second, that she allowed Mona to use her house and facilities off-the-books, and third, that she assumed Mona would be safe enough without vetting the client or the activities. While Heather is observant, she doesn’t have much agency in this story. 

Stokes and Willows examine the pool house and one of the rooms there. While Heather’s house is Gothic-Bohemian, the room where Mona worked is post-industrial: bare concrete, peeling paint and so on. The two CSIs debate BDSM as outsiders, a common trope of this sub-genre. 

Stokes: “You know what I just realised? None of this weirds me out anymore.” 

Willows: “People are just as twisted in their own living rooms. The props here are different, that’s all.” 

Stokes: “Not everybody’s twisted.”

Willows: “Everybody, Nick. Wake up and smell the species.” 

Stokes: “Catherine, do you really think those freaks out there running around with their little dog collars on, getting spanked, are the same as you and me?”

Willows: “Just because you never did doesn’t mean you never could.” 

That Stokes refers to “freaks out there” shows that he is, in fact, weirded out by it. 

The ME announces that Mona Taylor died of asphyxiation. That and a red circular mark on the inside of her nose makes Grissom think of breath control.

Willows returns to the house to examine the hoods and breathing straws. Though she admits they don’t “technically” have a warrant, Lady Heather has no reluctance to show her around. 

Willows’ backstory is she was once a stripper and is familiar with sex work, so she speaks with LH as a sex work insider, asking her how much money she makes, who makes her outfits, etc. They also connect as single mothers and as career women. (Note this conversation occurs in the house’s kitchen.)

Lady Heather: “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I think you’ve got everything it takes to make a great dominatrix.”

Willows: “I take that as a compliment.” 

The CSIs find Mona’s DNA on one set of straws, along with the DNA of another person. The liquid latex contains the imprint of an expensive lady’s wristwatch, which leads to the credit card receipt at a jewellery store, which leads to a rich house in the suburbs. A harried stay-at-home dad, Cameron Nelson, with a baby, denies knowing about the watch. 

They next question high-powered corporate lawyer Eileen Nelson. Unlike the career women Willows and Lady Heather, she lawyers up immediately, and she keeps no pictures of her family in her office, removing her from proper femininity. Willows also theorizes Nelson had an affair with her boss. 

The CSIs search the Nelson house (at least this time they have a warrant), and find a scrap of latex in her watch box. 

Grissom meets with Lady Heather again, for a flirtatious conversation over tea. He shows her a newspaper picture of the Nelsons at a society event. At a glance, Heather reads their body language to analyze their marriage. 

Lady Heather: “It’s obvious. Look at the way he’s clenching her hand with both of his and leaning toward her. See how she’s twisting away, presenting herself to the wealthy alpha male. He’s insecure, she’s insensitive. That’s a setup for matrimony, not passion. She wants the dominant male to choose her so she can stop being dominant.” 

Grissom: “You’re very good. You could work for me.”

Heather: “You wanna be my boss?”

Grissom: “You never know. We both might learn something.”

Heather: “Oh, I’m sure of that.”

Another instance of Heather bonding with a regular cast member as a fellow professional. 

Further investigation links the Nelsons to the sandbox. In interrogation, Eileen acts as Cameron’s attorney, and keeps telling him to shut up.

Grissom and Willows spin a theory, shown in flashback, that Cameron (looking far more dominant) did a scene with Mona. 

Willows: “Psychologically, she was a surrogate. In fetish club terms, she was a slave. Cameron would put a mask on her face and cover her body in liquid latex.”

Grissom: “He made her into nothing in order to make her into you.”

The flashback shows Cameron whipping Mona and then blocking her air hoses.

Willows: “Cameron couldn’t dominate you, so he dominated Mona. Only, his last appointment, he got carried away.”

Cameron: (in flashback) “You corporate bitch! You think you’re too good to touch your own husband? How about I make you beg for air? Huh? I make you beg for it.” 

Mona slumps and Cameron realises what he’s done.

Cameron confesses and walks out of the room, saying he doesn’t care what happens to him as long as he gets away from his wife. 

***

At only 42 minutes, and less because of the B-plot, there’s only so much screen time given to discussing BDSM. 

“Slaves of Las Vegas” goes so far to normalize the character of Lady Heather that it makes the story implausible. Even in Las Vegas, Heather would have good reason to distrust police, and she would call her lawyer the moment a police officer appeared on her property. In the logic of police procedurals, her refusal to cooperate with the authorities would mark her as suspicious. The effort to paint her as innocent also made her unaware that Mona Taylor was bringing in off-the-books clients, and that Cameron moved Mona’s dead body out of the house. For a person intelligent and observant enough to impress Grissom, she’s woefully ignorant about the activities in her own house.

It also goes out of its way to demonize Eileen Nelson as an unfaithful, unfeminine bitch, even implying she is ultimately to blame for Mona’s death, instead of Cameron’s malice and/or carelessness. 

One of the oldest cliches about femdom/malesub is “corporate executive in the boardroom, submissive in the dungeon.” This episode asks us to accept the opposite, with a man who feels emasculated and neglected by his wife playing out a power fantasy with Mona. Cameron being saddled with raising the baby mostly by himself might just as easily trigger a need for someone to take responsibility for him, and engage a pro-domme as a submissive. 

Eileen also plays out a variation of this theme, suggesting she is uninterested in her feminized husband and only attracted to her wealthier boss. He even accuses her of sticking him with a child fathered by another man. 

Contrast Eileen with Heather, who despite being a sex worker, is far more conventionally feminine and associated with domesticity. Furthermore, she completely cooperates with the police officers, instead of demanding her rights. 

Lady Heather is presented as a match for Grissom, an acute observer and analyzer, capable of seeing through his cultivated poker face, the Irene Adler to his Sherlock Holmes. It’s not surprising that she returns in other episodes. Yet she remains passive, with little agency, even when faced with the death of one of her employees. Lady Heather doesn’t talk with any of the other women at her establishment, nor any of the clients. We hear scenes in progress, but we don’t see any of the people, except for the domme and the client in the pool room. 

Much like Lady Heather psychoanalyzing a marriage based on a single still photograph, “Slaves of Las Vegas” takes a snapshot of a very complex situation and throws out a plausible but glib and reductive analysis. This episode shares the same problem of many other procedural episodes on BDSM, including a pretence of scientific objectivity that merely masks a prejudiced and paranoid view. Remember that in a previous episode, CSI featured a lesbian couple who committed murder to avoid being outed (S01E05). Other episodes have treated trans people as deceptive mysteries to unravel. (Not unlike the previously discussed episode of Da Vinci’s Inquest.)

IMDB Aired February 13, 2003

Melinda Clarke returns as Lady Heather. (Also features a cameo of Elizabeth Berkley of Showgirls infamy.) Note that this episode’s story was co-written by Josh Berman, who also wrote the episode of Bones focusing on ponyplay, “Death in the Saddle” (S03E03).

A pair of male sex workers murdered by injections of insulin lead the CSI team back to Lady Heather’s house. It appears they got the same house for interiors and exteriors as the previous episode. 

Just as before, Lady Heather is completely cooperative with the authorities, and readily acknowledges the men were on her payroll. It isn’t clear what they did, however. Also, the staff and clients are completely unconcerned with police officers walking around. 

Detective Brass astutely points out that these are the second and third people in Lady Heather’s employ to end up dead in suspicious circumstances. 

Again, the investigators are allowed to walk through the house without any concern for the privacy of the staff or clients. Lady Heather has also branched into live video streaming. 

Lady Heather provides credit card records for her chat rooms where the male victims worked. Improbably enough, the victims’ clients were all ladies. They narrow it down to women with dark hair, and this leads to a wealthy couple, Steven and Rebecca McCormick.

This time, the husband is the dominant in the interview, and the wife barely speaks. 

Steven: “I guess you could say Mr. Richards [one of the victims] worked for me. We were hoping that he might help ease some of Rebecca’s sexual difficulties.”

Willows: “Extra-marital sex to help relationship problems.”

Husband: “The problem wasn’t with our relationship. It was with my wife’s lack of experience.”

Grissom: “Which Mr. Richards helped you with?”

Rebecca: “Yes.”

Flash of Rebecca in a wedding dress, bound standing at Lady Heather’s house, with one of the dead guys (in a chest harness) whipping her. “Do you take this man to be your…” The husband is crouched on the floor watching, and shouts, “Beg!”

Grissom: “And these sessions were held at Lady Heather’s?”

Steven: “Yes, Lady Heather thought it would be best if I was involved.”

This gets into the uncomfortable area of BDSM as therapy and professional dominants as therapists. As the saying goes, “BDSM can be therapeutic but it is not therapy.”

Turns out Rebecca was seeing one of the male pro-doms on the side. A flashback shows her in lingerie posing for a webcam, while one of the doms calls her a “stupid bitch.”

Grissom visits Lady Heather at her house. They walk-and-talk with glimpses of women going by in fetish costumes. 

Lady Heather: “Steven McCormick wanted his wife to have a session. That’s not uncommon. When a client achieves liberation, they often want their spouse to share that feeling. Though, in this particular instance I advised the husband to pursue avenues more suited to the temperament of his marriage.”

More pseudo-therapeutic talk from Lady Heather. 

Lady Heather: “Steven came to me three years ago in a state of confusion. I helped him clarify his need for dominance.”

Flash of Lady Heather talking to Steven who has a woman on her knees in front of him. “You will control her only as well as you can read her. Now read.” Steven backhands the woman before him. 

Lady Heather: “Our work enabled him to marry.”

Grissom: “But he chose a woman who didn’t understand the dynamics of a dominant-submissive relationship.”

Lady Heather: “Unfortunately, the language we speak in here doesn’t necessarily translate to the world out there.”

Grissom: “No, in here the submissive has the power. All he has to do is say the safety word and everything stops.”

Grissom and Heather have an intimate moment, when she observes that he may be losing his hearing. He steps forward and places both hands on her head. 

Grissom: “You can always say stop.”

Lady Heather: “So can you.”

Cut to black.

The next morning, Grissom and Lady Heather have tea together, which calls back to their conversation about tea in the previous episode. Heather mentions that she is diabetic and uses the same type of injector used to kill the two men. Grissom immediately calls for a search warrant. 

Lady Heather: “I think I just heard you say stop.”

Brass, who has been hostile to her since the previous episode, interrogates Lady Heather. This is the first time we have seen Lady Heather outside of her house.

Brass’ theory is that Steven McCormick invested in her business and in exchange she murdered the two men his wife was sleeping with. 

Lady Heather: “I could help you, Mr. Brass with your inadequacy.”

LH answers questions as if she knows Grissom’s listening in behind the mirror, which he is. 

LH: (to Grissom) “I’m disappointed, but not surprised. Because I’ve committed the one unforgiveable act. […] I know you, and I know that in your heart you don’t believe I did this.”

Brass: “Lady Heather, this has nothing to do with the heart. It’s all about the evidence.”

This is a recurring theme in the series, often voiced by Grissom himself, and critiqued by his subordinates.

Rebecca McCormick turns up dead, strangled by a feather boa, which Grissom links to one of the women he saw at Lady Heather’s, named Chloe. 

Lady Heather: “She uses it as a garotte. A way to control her breathing, to heighten the experience for the dominant client.”

Given breath control’s controversial status, it’s surprising this goes unremarked.

They link Chloe to the other deaths. 

Grissom: “I owe you an apology.”

LH: “Apologies are just words.”

She just walks out.

Chloe is arrested and confesses that she did it for Steven, who is also arrested. Steven denies telling Chloe to do anything. This means both Steven and Rebecca were having affairs with people they met via Lady Heather’s house. 

Grissom: “Chloe thought that killing your wife’s lovers would please you. And it did please you.”

Steven: “I told her to stop.”

Grissom: “But she didn’t obey you. She killed your wife. You couldn’t make Chloe do what you wanted. All that time at Lady Heather’s and you never learned that the submissive is the one in control.”

That night, Grissom sits in a car outside Lady Heather’s house, looking at it. 

***

Another CSI episode which reiterates the idea that, if you have a non-normative sexuality or gender expression, you’re almost certainly a killer or a victim. Just as before, people who step into Lady Heather’s dominion get entangled in infidelity, jealousy and death. This highlights the limitation of the investigative procedural as a framework: if no one has been murdered, there’s no reason for the procedural to talk about it at all. 

Even more so than the previous episode, “Lady Heather’s Box” emphasises the trope of dominatrix-as-caregiver. Lady Heather talks about the McCormick’s like she’s a professional therapist and they’re her clients. The thing is, she’s not supposed to be responsible for their marriage or mental health. If she was responsible, the three dead people are indirectly her fault. Lady Heather is presented as a responsible and intelligent professional, but she is never legally or ethically implicated in the three deaths in this episode. 

The BDSM-as-therapy trope has another problem in that it implies BDSM practitioners are “sick” and need help. This ties back into the pathologizing, paranoid “eye” of these programs.

Exactly what happened between Grissom and Heather is unclear. It starts with him touching her hair, a strongly dominant gesture, and she doesn’t object. Does that mean they had a scene with Grissom as the dominant and Heather as the sub? At tea the next morning, it’s he who serves her, but this may be more politeness than submission. Grissom certainly fits the stereotype of the nerdy, somewhere-on-the-autism-spectrum kinkster, and it makes sense that he would have a rapport with someone who is remote yet hyper-observant. And then he spoils their connection. 

It’s said there are two kinds of people: the ones who feel better when the cops show up, and the ones who feel worse. Sex workers generally fall within the latter category. Even pro dommes who technically operate within the law are not immune to harassment and prosecution from police. As I said before, the most implausible part of “Slaves of Las Vegas” is that Lady Heather wasn’t even slightly wary of Grissom and company. Even when interrogated by the hostile Brass, Lady Heather does not call her lawyer. 

When suspicion turns to Lady Heather, this reality finally intrudes in the world of CSI. Though she and Grissom have some kind of intimate shared experience, he immediately calls the authorities the moment he learns of even circumstantial evidence that might tie her to the murders. He’s one kind of person, she’s another. 

In her one-sided conversation with Grissom, she says this is all about emotion: his fear of intimacy, and his failure to trust. As always, Grissom takes refuge in dispassionate science. This clears Heather of suspicion, but she does not accept Grissom’s apology. She wants something deeper to show his sincerity.

The episode ends on another open-ended scene, of Grissom sitting in a car parked outside Lady Heather’s house. It will be a few years before she returns to the franchise, so Grissom’s relationship with her will remain a mystery.

“Pirates of the Third Reich” aired February 9, 2006, IMDB

Jerry Stahl returns as co-writer for the third chapter in the Lady Heather saga. The director, Richard J Lewis, also directed “Lady Heather’s Box”.

“Slaves of Las Vegas” normalized Lady Heather in her conversation with Catherine Willows, as a business owner, career woman, and single mother. This episode throws that into ruin. Zoe Kessler, said to be going to Harvard in Lady Heather’s first episode, is found dead in the desert: emaciated, poisoned, shaved bald, branded with a number, and missing her hand. This marks the fifth person in Lady Heather’s immediate circle who is murdered.

Lady Heather is called in. This episode makes almost no mention of her work as a dominatrix (or rather running a house of domination). She also tells how Zoe had an affair with her therapist and got pregnant. Heather reported the therapist, which caused Zoe to break off communication and drop out of school. (The result of her pregnancy is unconfirmed.)

Heather: “I appreciate that it would have been difficult to have someone like me as a mother. But if I stressed anything, it was empowerment and independence.”

I’m not faulting Melinda Clarke’s performance. Her scenes, especially with Grissom, are taut. 

Heather: (to Grissom) “You forfeited the right to give me advice some time ago. But thank you.”

She’s willing to risk criminal charges to reveal that a man doesn’t want police poking around his property near where Zoe’s body was found. She’ll even sleep with the man to get his DNA in a condom. She’s walking a fine line between her desire to avenge her daughter’s death and staying within the legal system Grissom represents. 

The problem is the plot of this episode. The killer turns out to be a guy who decides to be a one-man Third Reich and perform Nazi experiments in his basement. Zoe was kidnapped and gnawed her own hand off to escape. There’s a long sequence of exploring the archaic underground laboratory, complete with Se7en-style journals. If you want a one-dimensional cliched villain, a neo-Nazi mad scientist is an obvious choice. 

That’s just the end point. Along the way there are identical twins, sleep studies, a stolen 16th century etching, flowers that smell like rotting flesh, a transplanted eyeball, internalized anti-Semitism, artificially conjoined twins, and a lobotomy. It’s both repulsive and ludicrous. Grissom mentions the principle of parsimony, or Occam’s Razor: keep it simple. The creators of this episode should have kept that in mind. 

Grissom finally tracks down Heather who has kidnapped the killer, and is bullwhipping him bloody. 

Grissom: “Heather, I’m saying ‘Stop’!”

This, their safeword, is enough to get her to stop resisting and collapse in Grissom’s arms. 

As an ending this is hardly satisfactory. Heather did kidnap and assault a man. It also plays into the old idea that women are too emotional and need rational men to rein them in.

CSI S09E05 “Leave Out All The Rest” IMDB Aired November 6, 2008

The discovery of a dead body (what else?) with the marks of S&M leads Grissom back to Heather Kessler. 

In this case, it’s a set of markings from needle play around the man’s nipples, out of place next to all the corpse’s other injuries. 

Grissom: “S and M?”

Willows: “Gone very, very wrong.”

ME: “These stab wounds are brutal, random and postmortem”, 

Willows: “Which is inconsistent with S&M.”

ME: “Well, it’s hard to take pleasure in someone’s pain once they’re dead.”

Willows: “Which is the ‘gone wrong’ part.”

After the low point of the last episode, in which Heather was offering herself up to be murdered for money to provide for her grand-daughter, she’s somewhat recovered. No longer a dominatrix, she’s finished a Masters in psychology and is a practising therapist. 

Heather’s transition to therapist from dominatrix who acts like a therapist makes a degree of sense. It’s consistent with the trope of pro-dominatrix-as-caregiver that turns up so often in mainstream media. (E.g. Going Under, Personal Services). It further desexualizes an already desexualized character. In this episode, Grissom is grieving his beakup with Sara Sidle, and his emotionally stunted interactions with Heather are with her as a caregiver, not a lover.

Also note that after being much more mobile and active in the previous two episodes, Heather reverts to being stationary in her home. 

Examining the victim’s home reveals a trunk full of BDSM toys, and that he had a live-in lover who was a dominant, but was having sex with another woman. Heather makes the shaky assumption that because the victim didn’t have a dedicated room for play, he must have played in other establishments. That leads to a club card for Lower Linx. 

Heather: “Lower Linx is part of the amateur scene. They have a well-equipped back room. You have to know the right people. Rents by the hour.”

Wouldn’t it be simpler to say that they do parties and people use their equipment?

We get another sequence of Brass and Stokes entering Lower Linx, where everybody is a lot prettier, younger and whiter than they should be. In their cop’s-eye view, everybody immediately looks suspicious. This is backed with the original “Venus in Furs” track from The Velvet Underground & Nico. 

Whereas Lady Heather was completely welcoming when police officers came to her establishment, Michelle, the manager of Lower Linx, is immediately uncooperative to the investigators. In the logic of CSI and police procedurals in general, this marks her and her establishment as suspicious. She also denies having security cameras.

Michelle: “Being Big Brother is your job.”

Brass: “Well, Big Brother would like to see the back room.” 

Michelle tells them to get a warrant, but the cops just hang around her bar until she gives in. She leads them to a back playroom. Reaction shot of Brass and Stokes as if they, and the audience, are supposed to be put off by this. Examination of the toys reveals ones that match the marks on the victim’s tongue. 

Back at Heather’s place, she examines the pictures of the victim’s home and psychoanalyzes him and his live in partner. This is psychological profiling, a forensic system which has undergone a lot of criticism, much like forensics in general. Her judgements are even flimsier than usual, asserting that Ian’s lover Justine wasn’t his dominant, and not his killer. 

In this case, she’s correct, as Justine turns up dead, burned to death and identified by her breast implants. 

Heather serves tea to Grissom in her Victorian-style home 

Heather: “In the heterosexual world, men want to be dominated by women, and women by men, so Wallace would have had a female dominant.”

This is one of her strangest pronouncements. While it’s generally true that there are more submissives than dominants in the straight world, it doesn’t follow that there are no dominants. 

Grissom: “Well, we’ve confirmed that through physical evidence. She also slept with him.”

Heather: “Which is why one should always go to a professional. They know the boundaries.”

Another unfounded assertion from the world of professional domination, implying that dominants and submissives should never have sex together. 

Grissom: “I feel the same way about crime scene investigators.”

Heather: “And no one has more rigid boundaries than you.”

[…]

Heather: “If your dominant is the killer, she would most likely choose a slave to assist her. Someone she can trust and control.”

Grissom: “Which would be a man.” 

Heather: “Amateurs often play scenes in groups. And a domme would select a slave that shares similar fantasies and fetishes.”

Heather continues to mark bizarre proclamations. Professionals never do group scenes? And a female domme who wanted to commit murder would automatically turn to her submissives, and not anyone else in her life? I’m increasingly convinced all of this is based on the writer’s guesswork and not any actual research. 

That’s apparently enough to pull Michelle Tourney in for interrogation and they grill her about denying knowing the first victim. Again, she asserts her rights and asks why he wants all this personal information, and he bluntly says, “It doesn’t matter. I have a warrant.”

Michelle: “Yes, I facilitate people’s BDSM scenes. It’s a way to make money. It’s not something I practice. I’m an entrepreneur. I majored in theatre.”

She admits Ian Wallace came in a lot, and they slept together. She denies having been to his house, or him having been to hers. 

When Nick tries to get a DNA sample, she refuses and calls him a fascist for insisting. Stokes has to ask the cop in the corner to threaten to arrest her for obstruction. She gets up and the cop forces her to sit down. Nick looks smug as he takes the sample from her mouth. 

Michelle: “Turns you on, didn’t it? I bet you’re standing at attention. Hypocrite. You’re no different than the freaks who rent my back room.”

The show almost critiques itself when Michelle accuses Stokes of being aroused by his exercise of power, to coerce a woman into having her DNA extracted by inserting something into her mouth. Stokes doesn’t deny it. While Grissom has always advocated forensics as a purely objective, dispassionate matter of collecting and analyzing information, this scene suggests the libido is part of police work, especially if it means having power over young, attractive and unwilling women. 

Heather reviews the multiple stab wounds on the first victim, and says it’s the mark of a sexual sadist.

Heather: “That’s highly unusual.”

Grissom: “Why? There must be sexual sadists that seek out that world.”

Heather: “See, sexual sadists are typically charming loners. They would be repulsed by a consensual, safe and communicative lifestyle. When a submissive says stop, you have to stop. That doesn’t work for a sexual sadist. They get off on the terror of their subjects.”

Grissom: “So you think that S&M play was not involved in the murders. They were separate events.”

Heather: “That would be my expert opinion.”

Suspicion turns to an insurance salesman, whose attorney does a great job defending him in the interrogation room. (Where was she when Michelle was being questioned?) It turns out that the insurance salesman was being dominated by his attorney, who was also dominating the first victim. 

Unusually for CSI, the episode ends without narrative closure. The investigators review the evidence and admit they can’t link the suspects to the crime scenes, and consider the possibility that Ian and Justine were murdered by people unrelated to the BDSM scene.

Stokes: “The S&M factor gave us all tunnel vision.”

While Grissom visits Heather to consult on the case, she realizes that he’s actually distraught over Sara leaving him to work on an oceanographer ship. The episode ends with her offering him her guest room, and him asking her to stay in the room with him. 

***

It seems that knowing about BDSM makes you an expert, the highest authority in the world of CSI, but actually doing it makes you a deviant, inherently suspect. Heather had to be even further removed from the practice of BDSM to make her fit into the series’ ideology. Heather and Grissom’s relationship is implied to be emotional but platonic, something they’d both prefer. 

In the world of CSI, crime is usually the result of individual psychology, not broader social issues like economic inequality, racism, sexism or homophobia. In the previous Lady Heather episode, the focus was on the man who wanted to pay to kill her, not her husband’s prejudice against her as a sex worker and/or BDSM practitioner. In this episode, Heather’s assessments of the people involved are accurate (easy in fiction), but she missed the key point that none of these people killed anybody. There was no need to investigate them in the first place. 

Whenever CSI investigates a sexual subculture, it invariably discovers a tangle of secrecy, lies, jealousy, infidelity and other problems. In this case, however, it did not culminate in murder. Whatever personal problems these people had, was it the state’s business to violate their privacy? All of the coercive investigations and psychological profiling of the kinky people proved to be irrelevant, and two murders remain unexplained.

Note: the two murders in this episode are resolved in later episodes of season 9.

My friend TammyJo and I discuss Going Under (2004), which I previously discussed.

IMDB

My Mistress is a 2014 Australian drama film. A teenage boy, struggling after the death of his father, forms a relationship with a lonely older woman who turns out to be a pro-dominatrix. 

Despite the title and the promotional images, My Mistress is not primarily about a BDSM relationship. It belongs in the category of films about the male fantasy of being initiated in sex by an older attractive woman. E.g. Private Lessons (1981), Class (1983), My Tutor (1983), They’re Playing with Fire (1984), and even Weird Science (1985). Right away, we’re getting into some difficult areas about consent and double-standards about sex between younger men and older women. (For the record, the age of consent in most of Australia is 16.)

Charlie, a teenage boy, aimlessly bikes around his neighborhood. He sees an older woman with a French accent, Maggie, move into a house nearby. He returns home, only to find his father has committed suicide. Soon after that, he learns his mother has been having an affair. 

Distraught, Charlie forms a casual relationship with Maggie. He bikes to her house and goes inside. He goes upstairs to find her playroom where she is in full dominatrix dress and in mid-session with a man. He runs off. 

Charlie then insinuates himself into Maggie’s life by answering her help-wanted ad for yard work. He also lies about his age, saying he’s 18. She agrees on condition that he doesn’t come into the house or tell anyone what he sees there. 

After working on Maggie’s property, Charlie has a dream or fantasy of him standing in front of the valkyrie painting, looking at Maggie in full dominatrix mode, toying with a bullwhip, facing away from him. He puts his hands around her corseted waist, kisses her. She turns around and drapes the whip around his neck, then tightens it. They kiss. 

Charlie does spy on Maggie’s clients coming and going. When she invites him in for lunch, he asks her why they come to her. Her answer is reminiscent of Shirl in Personal Services.

Maggie: “They don’t want it. They need it.”

Charlie: “Yeah, but why?”

Maggie: “I make them forget.”

Charlie: “Forget what?”

Maggie: “Their private pain.”

Charlie: “And they pay you to do it.”

Maggie: “A lot.”

Charlie: “To smack them on the bottom.”

Maggie: “Spanking heals, sometimes.”

Charlie: “Seriously?”

Maggie: “Is that what you want?”

Charlie: “No.”

Maggie: “Sounds like it.”

While Charlie has more fights with his mother, Maggie visits her young son at a playground and argues with one of her clients who is also a social worker, who also criticizes her choice of gift for her son. 

When Maggie comes home, she finds Charlie has handcuffed himself in her dungeon, and refuses to give her the key. “Make me”, he says. Already angry, Maggie hits him with a crop. We don’t see the conclusion of this scene, but later Charlie’s mother sees the marks on his backs, which he explains as an accident. 

Back at Maggie’s, Charlie offers himself to her. She initially refuses, then comes back and guides him through a formal tea. She lightly whacks him with a crop when he is impolite. Charlie laughs it off at first, then takes it more seriously. 

Next time, Maggie puts Charlie in a coffin with a see-through hole and has him watch as she does a puppy-play scene with a man. Charlie can’t help laughing during this, which nearly spoils the scene. 

After, Charlie and Maggie talk. 

Charlie: “Am I going to be one of them when I get older?”

Maggie: “Could be worse. You might become a social worker.”

Maggie recruits Charlie as a driver and they go to watch her son, where they also talk about Charlie’s loss of his father. 

Back home, Maggie, in full dominatrix gear, instructs Charlie on how to remove a leather harness from her. Like the other kink scenes, there’s no ending or resolution to this. It just ends abruptly. 

Maggie’s mysterious client turns out to be her safety officer/social worker (presumably a violation of ethics), who is with her when she learns her custody of her son will be reinstated. 

Maggie tells Charlie she can’t leave because she had a drug problem and it made her neglect her child so much he ran into traffic. This time, Charlie comforts her. To avoid her safety officer, he takes her back to his room, where they sleep together without sex. 

The next scene is Maggie, in Mistress mode, telling Charlie how to put on her stockings, and saying he’ll be punished if he touches her. He does it anway, and she uses this as a pretext for a flogging scene. However, it escalates to the point at which he has to use the safeword she gave him. Maggie staggers back as if she came out of a trance. 

Again, there’s no follow up conversation to this scene.

Charlie’s mother tells Maggie to leave him alone. 

Maggie tries to tell Charlie to go away, but he has a tantrum, throwing junk into her pool until she lets him back in. They have their last tea, and Maggie says they will have sex, then never communicate again. 

He says “Yes Mistress”

Maggie: “No. It’s between you and me now. No more ‘Mistress.’” 

After this, Client X intervenes and gets into a fight with Charlie. Maggie stands on the staircase and cracks her bullwhip. She tells both of them to get out of her life. 

Charlie reconciles with his mother, and he and Maggie have one more meeting. 

Later, Charlie is out running with other students when he sees Maggie with her son at a playground. 

Obviously, My Mistress is rife with consent and boundary violations. Much like Going Under, it doesn’t show an ideal BDSM relationship. Unlike Going Under, My Mistress isn’t interested in psychological realism, preferring to stay in the fantasy version of younger man/older woman pairings. 

This extends to the film’s slightly dream-like atmosphere and the way the leads are shot. While we see Charlie in near-nudity, the camera’s gaze doesn’t linger on him. He’s not a “thing to be looked at” the way Maggie is portrayed as beautiful, with multiple shots focused on her feet and legs. Her accent and occasional use of French marks her as exotic and otherworldly, removed from Charlie’s bland suburb. 

This makes the BDSM almost irrelevant. Charlie’s scenes with Maggie are oddly grafted on to the narrative, much as only one room of Maggie’s house is used for BDSM and it is isolated from all the other rooms. We don’t see any discussion before or after between them. The scenes just abruptly stop. Charlie participates out of a general interest in sex, typical for a teenage boy, but perhaps not these acts specifically. They are ultimately unsatisfying for him and for the film’s narrative. It’s the long-delayed intercourse that provides the climax to their relationship. 

Charlie’s own sexuality is not clear. We don’t know if he dates or has any sexual experience before. It’s only in the final scene that we see Charlie having any interaction with people his own age, as he’s running in the woods with male and female fellow students. There are, however, many shots of Charlie looking at Maggie’s shoes and feet, suggesting the director has an eye for foot/shoe fetishism. 

When Charlie talks with Maggie about her clients, he asks “Am I going to be one of them when I get older?” This question suggests that he does not share the same desires as her clients; if he did, he would not be confused about why they are paying for scenes with Maggie. 

The simplest explanation would be that, still troubled by the loss of his father and the revelation of his mother’s affair, Charlie is desperate for any kind of connection with a parental figure, and he attaches to Maggie. When he offers to submit to her, he doesn’t really understand what that entails. He just wants Maggie to pay attention to him, and this appears to be the way to that.

Maggie is perhaps even more of a mystery than Charlie. We get only a vague story about how and why she works as a pro domme. Furthermore, if she’s this concerned about qualifying for custody of her son, why is she a sex worker? Is Client X blackmailing her? Can she not find some other work? If she’s not a citizen, how can she afford a house and work as a legal sex worker?

She wants someone to adore her without trying to control her. Her own guilt about her neglect of her child is a parallel motivation. Once again, a film about a pro-domme circles back to the role of caregiver. 

Mainly what My Mistress did is remind me of other, better movies about femdom/malesub relationships. It’s reminiscent of Dogs don’t wear Pants, in that the protagonist is a man grieving the loss of a loved one who stumbles into a pro-domme’s dungeon. The scenes involving the mystery of Maggie’s son are echoes of Maitresse, and Emmanuelle Beart as Maggie bears a resemblance to Bulle Ogier as Ariane. 

If you removed the BDSM scenes from My Mistress, you’d have just another film in the sub-genre of younger men being sexually initiated by older women.

Mercy (2000) (IMDB) is a late entry in the erotic thriller genre that dominated in the 80s and 90s. This kind of movie was getting stale by the turn of the millennium, and many scenes seem strongly reminiscent of Body Double (previously discussed) and Se7en. 

It starts, as usual for this kind of film, with a dead body. This time it’s a nude woman, one of a series with signs of being tied up, bite marks all over her torso, and her eyelids cut off. Detective Catherine Palmer (Ellen Barkin) forms a relationship with Vickie (Peta Wilson), a friend (and likely more) of the victim, Dorothy. 

Palmer searches the victim’s home and finds a hidden briefcase full of BDSM toys, and pictures of the victim being dominated by a masked man. She calls up a pro dominatrix via Vice and visits her dungeon in an upscale building. 

Palmer: “And what’s your area of expertise, Terry?”

Dominatrix: “Japanese silk ropes and the finer psychological aspects of the relationship between the players. I can tie you so you can’t twitch your ass cheeks. Of course it’s time consuming. It’ll cost you a couple of grand. Mostly the businessmen like that.”

The dominatrix shows a hidden room where she can observe people play, such as a woman being dominated by her husband and another man. She shows webcam photos of the victim and Vickie going to the dungeon together. (Nothing from inside the dungeon, though.) I’m not sure a pro dominatrix would so readily hand over client information to the police, but being an informant may be the price she has to pay for the police to turn a blind eye to her business. 

Vickie introduces Palmer to an elite club of women who gather for private parties. Some just chat, others move to the cuddle (and more) room in the back. 

Vickie: “There’s a worm inside me. Men tend to bring it out. But not women.” 

This is not entirely true, as we later see Vickie submitting to both men and women. 

Palmer realizes that the murder victims were all in this group, but still thinks that a man did the killings.

Palmer “[The key to the case is] Pain, and people who don’t like their sex without it. I think that’s the door that lets men into this group.”

Vickie is the mysterious femme fatale who challenges Palmer, the detective. Is she the killer or a potential victim? And will Palmer act on the sexual attraction that grows between them?

Vickie: “Do you know what I think sex is?”

Palmer: “What?”

Vickie: “A thrill. It’s like putting your head in the mouth of the only lion in the cage that’s totally unpredictable.”

[…]

Vickie: “Aren’t you just a little bit curious?”

Palmer: “What do you want to do? Take me to one of your dungeons?”

Vickie: “You’d be amazed at the use we can get out of simple kitchen utensils.”

However, Vickie’s sexuality defies categorization. She’s enmeshed in this implicitly lesbian subculture, and involved with men too. (Also, she smokes crystal meth.) 

In one sequence, Palmer follows Vickie to a motel and witnesses her playing out an elaborate Vietnam war sniper fantasy with one male suspect. The very blond and blue-eyed Vickie puts on a black wig and a latex Chinese dress (wrong country, but whatever), gives herself epicanthic eye folds with clear tape, and dances suggestively at a window while the guy watches her from another building through a sniper rifle’s scope. Somehow they time it so the fake blood pack explodes at just the right moment. Later, we find out that he is a retired USMC sniper who keeps a collection of photos of dead Vietnamese men. 

Typically for this kind of thriller, there are a lot of red herrings and false suspects, such as the therapist, Dr. Broussard, who is having affairs with his clients and is a crossdresser. (At least Mercy avoids the cliche of the transvestite murderer of women, preferring the cliche of the transvestite murder victim.)

None of the male suspects work out, and Palmer proposes to her male colleagues that what they’re looking for is a female killer. Everybody scoffs at this, as the profilers all say that female killers are rare and only kill in their homes or in one location. Palmer continues her investigation, looking into Vickie and the world of closeted, upper-class lesbians. 

Mercy attempts to apply feminist and queer critique to the erotic thriller genre. It proposes an underground network of relations between women, largely out of sight of men but still influenced by them. These bonds are strong and not always positive, enough to lead to repeated murders. 

Many of the characters talk about sexual abuse from fathers and stepfathers. It suggests the old trope of lesbianism resulting from women having bad experiences with men. Things get a little more complicated in the therapy sessions, in which the women talk about their conflicted feelings about their mothers, who were to some degree complicit in their daughters’ abuse. This is the tangled web that Palmer uncovers and eventually follows to the killer.

What Mercy keeps circling back to is women betraying each other to survive against patriarchal violence. The relationships between women are often triangulated off men. Vickie admits to Palmer that not only was she sexually abused by her father and brothers, when she ran away, she left her little sister in her place. Palmer still bears a grudge against the woman who had an affair with her ex-husband. When Palmer and the woman meet by chance, the movie briefly shifts into Palmer’s fantasy of punching her out. In reality, it’s just an awkward moment. (It also shows Palmer displacing her anger onto the other woman instead of her husband.) Mary is deeply conflicted about her own mother, for refusing to acknowledge the step-father’s molestation of her daughter even as it happened right in front of her. In other words, Mary’s murders can ultimately be traced back to feelings of betrayal by her mother, the prototype for all women. 

The film’s final plot twist is that Broussard’s female persona is enough to make him(?) a target of the killer. Instead of transference of the patient’s feelings towards the father to the therapist, it’s the feelings towards the mother that are transferred to the female-presenting therapist. This echoes Cruising (previously discussed) with its killer (or one of them) haunted by his dead, disapproving father. Here, the killer is haunted by her treacherous mother and projects her onto other people. 

Mercy doesn’t go very deep into kink; it’s just one of the many non-normative sexualities displayed, along with lesbianism, infidelity, non-consensual voyeurism, and crossdressing. 

Palmer’s detective partner: “Doesn’t anybody still get off on just good old normal sex anymore? Missionary position, then you watch TV afterwards?”

It also suggests it all comes back to childhood trauma. It’s uncomfortably close to old views of sexual deviance stemming from bad childhood experiences. 

Mercy isn’t a success, but it’s an interesting failure.

Here’s our next video discussion the Australian coming-of-age movie My Mistress (2014).

My friend TammyJo Eckhart and I go in-depth on the 2014 film The Duke of Burgundy, including topping from the bottom, shapewear, and what’s with all the mannequins.

Exit to Eden (IMDB) is a 1994 romance/comedy/thriller movie, based on the sadomasochistic novel by Anne Rice.

Exit was the first feature film released based on an Anne Rice novel, mainly because Interview with the Vampire was tied up in development hell for a long time. I suspect this was a case of the author selling the film rights on the assumption that it would never actually get made into a film. Rice wrote and published Exit to Eden between the second and third books in her original Sleeping Beauty trilogy, and it’s full of hardcore sex, hetero and otherwise.

Even more bizarre, the film was directed by Garry Marshall, a guy with a long background in American sitcoms. Why would the guy who created Happy Days direct a movie about BDSM? The Bad Gay Movies podcast suggest it was because of the commercial success of Marshall’s film Pretty Woman (1990), which managed to be a sweet rom-com about LA street prostitution.

Marshall had his work cut out for him. Exit is about Elliot, a war photographer, who travels to the Club, an elite BDSM club on a tropical island, on a quest for self-knowledge. There he meets and falls for Lisa, the head trainer.

Somebody decided middle America in 1994 wasn’t ready for a romance movie with hardcore BDSM. The film works hard (too hard, in my opinion) to reign in the sex. We do get a tropical sex resort setting, but every thing is very straight. (The closest thing to queer action is Lisa and her aide, Diana, frolicking nude in a pool.) There are only a few glimpses of full female nudity and none of male frontal nudity. Instead of the threatening aesthetic of black leather and chains, everybody wears gold colored outfits. And while many of the white-clad trainers are shown holding floggers, we never see them actually used on anybody. The most physically extreme play in the entire film is a light spanking with a hairbrush. In trying to get an R-rating, the film overshot and ended up PG-13 with some bare breasts.

In the book, Elliot is a combat photojournalist who is somewhat traumatized after seeing too much violence. The movie’s version, played by Paul Mercurio, is all boyish charm without a hint of darkness. His entire character arc is that he wants to be dominated and spanked by a woman, but can’t admit it, and Lisa helps him get over that.

Lisa: “It’s all right, Elliot. You can say it. You can like it. You’re allowed here. Do you like it?”

This is the same “dominatrix as therapist” trope we’ve seen many times before. In fact, Eden seems to operate more as a sex therapy retreat than a hedonistic community.

As Lisa, Dana Delany is the one actor in this movie who walks away with her dignity intact. There are scenes of her grieving her recently-deceased mother, talking with her father, and talk about her sexual history and flashbacks of her initiation into the world of BDSM. They appear to be remnants of a much more serious draft of this film.

Lisa: “I didn’t know such a world existed.” 

Dr. Halifax: “It’s a world in which you have all the choices.”

Lisa: “Can I choose to be master?”

Dr. Halifax takes off her cuffs.

Dr. Halifax: “The best submissives usually become the best masters. You’re a victim in life. I will teach you to always be in total control. You will never be a victim again, ever.”

Lisa: “I liked being in control. It felt safe.” 

Sheila: “But isn’t there a happy medium? Like I tie you up on night, you tie me up the next night?”

Lisa: “Of course, it would be nice not to be in control and still feel safe.” 

Sheila: “Have you ever?”

Lisa changes the subject.

The film grafts on a cheesy, “find the macguffin” plot about a couple of diamond smugglers and a couple of undercover cops searching for Elliot because he unknowingly took a picture of a wanted criminal. This provides a lot of “fish out of water” comedy from Dan Ackroyd (plus jokes about the size of his dick) and Rosie O’Donnell as the cops, Fred and Sheila. Fred is a prude who becomes a maintenance worker and Sheila deflects everything with humor, and travels to the island as a guest. O’Donnell also provides the voice-over narration, another sign of post-production covering up flaws. Supermodel Iman plays the smuggler’s henchwoman Nina, who is the only one who takes full advantage of the island and walks around with two buff men following her.

Four people on the island and they can’t find one guy? This pads out the film to nearly two hours and makes the pace drag.

The cops’n’robbers plot barely interacts with the main plotline of Elliot and Lisa. Even when Sheila finally does meet Elliot, instead of telling him a couple of killers are looking for him, she lets him participate in a roller-blade race (it was the 90s) to get Lisa’s attention. This is when the killers spot Elliot and put him in danger.

Lisa tries to expel Elliot because of her fear of intimacy, but Elliot gets her to go with him to New Orleans, where they have a romantic, if vanilla, time. The smugglers show up and resolve that plot line.

At the police station, Lisa overhears women talking about their abusive relationship with the men in her life.

Lisa: “You saw those women at the station? […] You know what they all had in common? They all gave up control.”

She goes back to Eden without Elliot. There’s a glint of a much more thoughtful story here, about Lisa’s need for control trumping her need for intimacy.

Elliot also goes back to the island and proposes marriage to Lisa.

Lisa: “You mean, like, leave here, meet your parents, buy a condo, holidays? You want me to cook?”

Elliot: “No, our marriage, love, family, fantasy, erotic, whatever we decide.”

[…]

Lisa: “Babies and bondage, I could do both?”

Elliot: “Yeah. I’d love to say, my wife is a dominatrix.” 

Lisa: “I can just see myself at the kids’ school on career day.”

While I realize there’s only so much you could get away with in a R-rated American film in 1994, Exit went too far in making BDSM palatable to a mainstream, straight audience. “Thrill” lies in between “fear” and “boredom”, and Exit erred on the side of boredom.

On the other hand, there’s a place in the world for training wheels. As deeply flawed as Exit to Eden is, it was a pro-BDSM film, right in the middle of the erotic thriller boom of the 90s, in which sexual deviance was inextricably linked to death and loss. This film presented the idea that BDSM was perfectly compatible with love, intimacy, and long-term relationships, and introduced concepts of consent and safewords.

Dana Delany also appeared in a spanking scene in Live Nude Girls (1995).

Preaching to the Perverted (IMDB) is a 1997 romantic comedy written and directed by Stuart Urban, starring Guinevere Turner and Christian Anholt.

Preaching has a lot of similarities to Exit to Eden. Both are romantic comedies that try to present BDSM to the mainstream. Both feature dominant women who are rulers of kinky realms (with female aides de camp) who have difficulty opening up to intimacy until a special man comes along.

Preaching is a superior film in many ways. There’s no extraneous MacGuffin plot grafted on. Exit tried too hard to soft-pedal kink for a mainstream audience, and barely showed anything. This film has lots of different kink activities and more queer content. It at least considers the political realm, as the police and government act against Tanya’s parties.

Tanya Cheex (Guinevere Turner) is a notorious American performance artist who does elaborate stage shows at UK fetish clubs. A tabloid newspaper gets photos of this and editorializes about who will control this American filth. (Like the British need any foreign influence to be kinky.) Conservative Member of Parliament Henry Harding decides to make her a target of a moralistic crusade, and recruits a young Christian computer tech, Peter Emery (Christian Anholt) to infiltrate the fetish underworld with a hidden camera.

Harding holds a press conference to announce his mission, with an awkward coalition of Conservatives, feminists and Christians. He strongly hints at the Operation Spanner case, which in early 1997 was being heard in the European Court of Human Rights. Then he makes the leap from men doing BDSM on each other to the protection of women.

Harding: “Not long ago, a number of perverts were jailed for nailing their penises to plaques and even sicker acts. If it had been up to me, I’d have cut their penises off! I will cite that case to combat immoral acts or material offensive to women. Conservatives, Christians and feminists, such as these ladies, all agree that the degrading of women has gone far enough.”

The same tabloid reporter that asked what the government will do about Tanya’s shows pops up in the audience and criticizes Harding for hypocrisy.

Journalist: “Come on, Mr. Harding. The only degrading in ‘The House of Thwax’ was happening to hairy-arsed men.” 

Because of police harassment, Tanya has made the locations of her shows a secret. Peter infiltrates her text-only chatroom (cutting edge tech in 1997) and gets an invitation.

Tanya is introduced floating in mid ear, covered in metal armor and with lasers coming out of her mask; an untouchable virgin goddess. She calls herself a “womon” as in “I woo no man.” While she has handsome male slaves at her beck and call, she refuses intercourse with them.

Tanya: “No. Penetration. Ever. Who do you think I am?”

Male slave: “Sorry, Mistress.”

Tanya: “No penis. Get it? My clit ring can give me more pleasure in a few seconds than that can give me in a million years. Get out. Forever!”

This is the trope of the dominant woman who is oddly asexual, i.e. a sexual object but not a sexual agent in her own right.

While films like Going Under and Exit to Eden explore the relationship between the dominatrix persona and the real woman, Tanya has completely identified with her pagan goddess image. She’d rather go to prison than compromise her lifestyle. We do get a glimpse of her childhood, which looks fairly ordinary.

Eugenie, looking at a man in Tanya’s home movie: “He looks like an abuser.”

Tanya: “My mom’s ashamed of me, now, but I grew up happy, so she keeps sending me reminders.”

Eugenie: “Of a dull past, if Mistress will permit me to say so.”

Tanya: “I used to do straight sex, go shopping, wear loose clothes.”

Eugenie: “Yuck.”

Tanya’s stubborn refusal of both physical and emotional intimacy with anyone does suggest some kind of trauma.

Peter is another difficult character. We’re told he’s a Christian, but also drawn to the possibility of a political career Harding dangles in front of him. As he goes deeper into Tanya’s party, he sees more, and even gets his nipples pierced.

Peter: “These people don’t harm anyone else.”

Harding: “You told me what they did disgusts you. I mean, you were physically sick after a night in their clutches. Now find out where that hussy’s performing next and nail her!”

He is drawn to these acts, but he can’t accept his own desires, and needs to be “forced” into it, either by his duty to Harding, by his love for Tanya, or by drinking vodka straight from the bottle. The simplest explanation is that he’s a self-hating pervert, who maintains his tenuous claim to being a Christian by setting up arbitrary rules. E.g. performing cunnilingus on Tanya doesn’t revoke his virgin status.

At a house party, there’s a lot of play, but things are a little sketchy when it comes to consent. Eugenie starts to do a cutting on a female slave who says no, and Tanya flogs her in punishment. Peter refuses to inflict pain, and instead they put him in a full ponyplay rig, including butt plug, to prove his commitment.

When Peter warns Tanya about the private prosecution coming for her, they drink together and Tanya admits her “darkest fantasy”.

They check into a hotel’s bridal suite with him in a tuxedo and her in a wedding dress. They wake up in the same bed the next morning.

Tanya: “You fucked me!”

Peter: “Wasn’t that the idea?”

Tanya: “Fuck no, it was a game. Don’t ever come near me in your miserable life again.”

She storms out in his clothes.

At the trial, Tanya is saved from prison not by a legal argument, but by Peter perjuring himself as a witness and claiming the video he made was faked.

After nine months, Peter gets out of prison to see that Tanya is pregnant, though she hints it’s a virgin birth. He becomes a member of Tanya’s extended family, with Eugenie as their child’s wet nurse and himself as Tanya’s manager. Tanya appears content with both her baby and her career. He’s adamant that he is not her slave.

In her book Vicarious Kinks, Umni Khan points out that in films like Preaching and Something Wild, the romance plotline between a dominant woman and a submissive man is resolved by making the man not submissive at all. Audiences can’t accept that a submissive man would be worthy of a woman’s love. Note that Exit to Eden ends with Lisa and Elliot as domme and sub, and it was a commercial and critical flop, though that probably wasn’t the only reason.

While Preaching is certainly a better film than Exit to Eden, a closer look reveals a lot of loose ends and unanswered questions. Preaching is a satirical fairy tale, so the characters aren’t meant to be deep or realistic. Furthermore, BDSM never gets its day in court. Peter still refers to the things Tanya does as “sick”, but he has fallen in love with her. The resolution is personal, not political. We know that the men accused in the real Operation Spanner were never vindicated, so the film is ultimately pessimistic about government and the courts. The best you can hope for is that your persecutors will be revealed as perverts and hypocrites too.

Guinevere Turner, who played Tanya, co-wrote and produced the 2005 biopic The Notorious Bettie Page. Christian Anholt also played Nigel, the male sidekick of Tia Carrere’s archaeologist/adventurer in the Relic Hunter TV Series.

L.A. Law S07E10 “Spanky and the Art Gang”, aired January 14, 1993

L.A. Law was an ensemble dramedy about a Los Angeles law firm. LIke detective procedurals, legal procedurals bring the characters into a variety of situations, and one popular topic is BDSM, usually in the form of pro dominatrixes.

In this case, the law firm takes as a client Claudia Von Rault, aka Mistress Zenia (played by Lillian D’Arc). She’s charged with involuntary manslaughter of Eric Schuller, who died during a session. The lawyers are initially reluctant to take the sensational case, but the deceased had business entanglements with the firm’s partners and they want it handled in-house. 

This entire plotline unfolds in court, and the accused is only seen in business attire, so there’s little or no visual exploitation. The prosecution sometimes waves around a leather flogger.

The lawyers debate how to handle the case, and whether to urge her to plead for a suspended sentence. Daniel, the lead, wants to go with the plea bargain. The deceased’s widow calls the accused a “whore” to her face. 

In court, the prosecutor questions Schuller’s doctor and establishes the condition of the dead’s man body, with welts on his buttocks, and also that Eric had a previous heart attack. Daniel establishes that the doctor said Schuller could resume sexual activity. 

Schuller’s widow testifies to her belief that Von Rault got her husband to put her in his will, and then killed him. 

In the witness box, Von Rault explains her work and what she did with Schuller. 

Von Rault: “There’s dominance and submission in all human sexuality. When someone hugs you part of them is possessing, holding you captive. But submissive people, those like Mr. Schuler, outnumber dominants seven to one.”

She also describes that she placed a ping pong ball in Schuller’s hand as a safe signal when gagged. That was the first time he had ever dropped the ball in years of sessions. 

Daniel: “Ms Von Rault, was it necessary to strike Mr. Schuler repeatedly and with force.”

Van Roult: “Yes, the therapy session–”

The prosecution interrupts with an objection that she’s not a qualified therapist. Daniel says she has a PhD in behavioral sciences. The judge overrules.

Von Roult: “Mr Schuler had a high threshold. If I didn’t hit hard, he felt I didn’t care.” 

Daniel: “Did you care?”

Von Roult: “He was a dear friend. It broke my heart to know the burden of guilt he carried.”

[…]

Van Roult: “Freud suggested children who aren’t punished and never spanked and then forgiven in love sometimes become masochistic. Eric Schuller paid me to be his mother, to whip him, and afterwards put my arms around him and say I loved him.”

Daniel: “What would happen then?”

Van Roult: “He would break down and cry.”

Summing up to the jury, the prosecutor calls Miss Van Rault: 

Prosecutor: “… an entrepreneur of horror, a pain merchant, and total cynic. There is a limit, even as adults, to what we may consent. Eric Schuler did not consent to his own murder, and yet that’s exactly what he got. Knowing full well of his weakened condition and earlier heart attack, Miss Van Rault beat him to death and kept the money. You must not let her get away with that.”

Daniel explains the definition of manslaughter to the jury. 

Daniel: “What Miss Von Rault does for a living may be considered by most to be distasteful, warped even, but criminal? Not by law. Eric Schuller assured Miss Von Rault of his physical condition and voluntarily consented to everything she did. She knew Mr Schuller’s body, his life story, better than his own wife. Claudia Van Rault and Eric Schuller trusted one another. It was not her intent to hurt, but to heal.”

The jury says “not guilty”.

Von Rault says “Thank you” to Arnie Becker, then bites him lightly on the lip. “Did that hurt?” she asks flirtatiously. 

A recurring trope in stories about pro dominatrixes is that they act like therapists and may even have psychological or psychiatric backgrounds. E.g. Lady Heather Kessler in CSI retired as a pro-domme and became a therapist, and Tiff in Bonding becomes a pro-domme to pay for therapist school. While there are certain similarities, pro-dommes are not caring professionals, have no qualifications, and aren’t bound by medical ethics or regulations. 

The frequency with which fictional pro dominatrixes are likened to therapists serves the dual function of legitimizing the domme as a sympathetic character, a bourgeois healing professional instead of a mercenary sex worker in a quasi-legal field, and legitimizing the practice of BDSM itself as a form of therapy, instead of symptom of a mental illness or just a perverse form of sexual pleasure. 

If the dominatrix wasn’t framed as a healing professional, the jury in the courtroom (and the viewing audience at home) would be less likely to view her positively. They might believe the accusation that Von Rault got herself named in the deceased’s will and killed him, even though it’s pure speculation that she is in the will at all. Or they might have viewed his death as the result of her negligence.

My friend and fellow scholar TammyJo Eckhart and I discuss the 1997 Preaching to the Perverted.

This is the second film named Venus in Furs released in 1969, also known as Devil in the Flesh or La malizide di Venere. It’s a semi-faithful adaptation of the original 1870 book, unlike some other films which have little to do with the original text. However, there are significant thematic differences.

The film skips the framing story of the book. The film opens in the present day at a retreat in the Swiss Alps, where Severin, a writer, is staying.

When young Wanda von Dunajew, a model, arrives, Severin is immediately taken with her from afar. He later spies on her through hidden peepholes (with the acknowledgement and encouragement of the resort’s female manager). She conveniently takes a shower at that moment, then admires herself in furs, then masturbates. The sequence is framed through the gaps in the wall.

This prompts Severin to flashback to his childhood, when he spies on the maid and the chauffeur having a tryst. 

Voyeurism and exhibitionism is a big part of the first half of this movie. Severin doesn’t just take scopophilic pleasure in watching Wanda, there has to be another person there, usually a man, who also gazes at her. Wanda actively flirts in some cases, courting the gaze. Later, Severin spies on her having an encounter with a younger man. This prompts another flashback to the maid and chauffeur. The maid spots young Severin and, while bare-breasted, slaps him, then cuddles him. 

Severin and Wanda meet face to face, and make out in plain view of a number of people. 

Severin: “In love, there are only masters and slaves. Those who dominate and those who are dominated.”

Wanda shows him a book of photographs of her, including one in an Orientalist chainmail outfit and a riding crop from when she was a stripteaser. 

Wanda: “That was a Tartar Queen number. It was always a big success.”

She apparently has the full costume with her, including the crop, and does it for Severin. She swishes the crop around and accidentally (?) hits him in the face. He finds it pleasurable. She is apologetic. He tells her to whip her again, on his bare back.

After they dance at a club, she says she knew he was spying on her, and enjoyed performing for him. He tells her he wants her to make him suffer. 

Severin talks about how the problem of love is monotony, and the woman should seek other pleasures. She tells him she feels drawn to breaking through limits with him.

Implication of cunnilingus, though no exposure. 

Severin: “I’m very happy when others desire you.”

Wanda: “You really aren’t jealous?”

Severin: “No, as long as I’m part of the game.” 

Wanda: “Then there’s only pleasure for you when I provoke other men while you watch.”

At a ranch, they watch a mare being nuzzled by a colt (young male horse) separated by a low wall. Then the colt is taken away and a big stallion is brought in to mount the mare, complete with visible horse penis. The ranch’s owner, an older man, is present and makes moves on Wanda. 

Severin is turned on by this spectacle. Wanda looks at Severin suspiciously. 

Next scene: Severin coaxes Wanda into seducing a young fisher, Andreas. He watches, of course. He follows them into the woods. Wanda and Andreas start having sex, then Andreas runs off and is replaced by Severin, followed by a sudden rainstorm.

They get married, and he gives her a beautiful fur coat. He also gives her a suicide note that gets her off the hook if something were to happen to him. “I want no limits to your cruelty.”

She feels tempted, and he wants to unleash her. 

Roadside fellatio on him from her.

Severin and Wanda check into a house in Spain, near Costa Brava. 

Severin: “I’d like to be treated just like an oriental slave.” 

Severin takes the role of her chauffeur, complete with uniform and hat. Part of the game is them cuddling in public, playing at violating the class hierarchy. People stop and watch. 

They also hire two white maids (instead of three African maids) who have their own sadomasochistic relationship. The younger of the two maids develops a crush on Severin, and exposes herself to him, meeting only with indifference.  This maid returns to the older maid, who beats her for infidelity. 

Severin urges Wanda to approach an artist, but complains when she spends an hour out of his sight with the artist. After the artist paints Wanda nude and holding a riding crop, Severin literally pushes her into the artist’s arms. 

Fitting with the source text, there’s a lot of voyeurism and cuckoldry. Sacher-Masoch treated the cuckold scene as the ultimate expression of his fantasies, the worst thing a woman can do to him, to make him watch as she submits to another, stronger man. The problem is that in such a triad (“bull”-woman-cuckold/observer), there’s always the possibility of removing the woman from the scene like a redundant term in an equation. What’s left is one man dominating another. 

In the book, Severin was obsessed with pairing Wanda with the hypermasculine man known as “the Greek”. Here, it’s a big macho guy named Bruno, but Wanda is the one who picks him up off the road and invites him back to the house. Severin alternates between griping to Wanda about Bruno’s presence and mutely watching him as he dominates Wanda. 

In the last of Severin’s fantasy sequences, Bruno has completely taken over the house. He has Severin wearing a mask like a dog’s muzzle, and “makes” him watch as he lords it over Wanda and the two maids. 

After he drives away, Severin spots a group of sex workers by a gas station. One of them, Paulie, is also played by the same actress as Wanda, though in a blonde wig and with a mole on her cheek. 

In a hotel room with Severin, Paulie comes off like a tough woman, but he suddenly turns on her and strangles her. The hotel staff come into the room and break it up, but Paulie tells them to leave him alone and that he was her friend. The staff leaves, confused but resigned. 

She falls to her knees before him and says that his violence towards her was beautiful. She tells him she wants to be “your woman” and give him all the money she earns; in other words, have him be her pimp. She offers herself to him, and asks what he wants her to do. 

The final scene is of Paulie happily whipping Severin. It suggests that what Severin really wants is a woman who will perform the role of the dominatrix, but remains below him in the privilege scale. 

This version of Venus is difficult to watch. While it looks pretty, there’s an undercurrent of misogyny in its treatment of women. For a movie based on the ur text of male masochism, there are many scenes of women being slapped and beaten. They don’t even enjoy it in a masochistic way. They just cry and beg. In one of Severin’s fantasy sequences, he imagines her being dragged into a dungeon by hooded men, bound, stripped and beaten; one of the men removes his hood, revealing himself to be Severin. 

This is in keeping in the source text, in which Severin, after his experience with Wanda, ruthlessly dominates women. (It also echoes Bitter Moon in which the male protagonist oscillates between sadism and masochism towards women, one requiring the other.)

Director Massimo Dallamano directed a number of Italian giallo films, and also worked as a cinematographer. His credits include classic spaghetti Westerns like A Fistful of Dollars (1964). Laura Antonelli (Wanda) had a long career as an actress, while Régis Vallée (Severin) only appeared in three other films. This appears to be the only screen credit of the screenwriter, Fabio Massimo.

Easy is a 2016 dramedy series about modern sex and romance. It’s loosely an anthology: most of the stories are self-contained, but certain character recur.

“Private Eyes” (season 3, episode 2, aired 10 May 2019) follows Hugh (Nicky Excitement) a technician who works for a private security company. Hugh is a kind of awkward guy, like an overgrown teenager with a fixation on martial arts. He goes on two dates, which end with polite but firm rejections by the women.

When Hugh’s boss asks him to take assignments from the private investigations side of the business, Hugh eagerly accepts. He’s thrilled by the challenge of trailing a philandering spouse, and asks for more work like this.

The next assignment is to accompany a female private investigator, Lindsay, to a femdom/malesub house party. While it’s clear that Hugh knows little about this subculture, he’s eager to prove himself to his boss, and he may be intrigued by the situation itself.

Boss: “I just want to make sure you’re comfortable with the role.”

Hugh: “Is she?”

Boss: “Um… well, yeah, she’s–“

Hugh: “Will she be– She’s the one that will dominate.”

Boss: “Um, well, I don’t know if she’ll be the one dominating you for real. I mean, you guys will play act, but–“

Hugh: “It’s all an act. Understood.”

[…]

Hugh: “This is right up my alley.[…] I mean, not yet, but I’ve always wanted to go down that alley.”

Hugh researches by watching what appears to be a porn video of a woman paddling a man. He dutifully takes notes.

Lindsay briefs Hugh on the assignment, looking for a cheating husband. Hugh will have a watch with a hidden camera.

Lindsay: “I’m really gonna be in charge once we walk in there. I’ve brought you to the party. I’m the dom, you’re the sub, and you just… you have to follow my lead.”

Hugh brings up the problem of him feeling pain and wanting it to stop. Lindsay doesn’t answer, which is in my opinion an oversight in the writing. They could have introduced a safeword. Hugh seems in character already, but addressing Lindsay as “ma’am.”

At the BDSM party, Hugh and Lindsay are in fetish outfits, and compliment each other. She puts a collar and leash on Hugh. Her nom de scene is “Mistress Lesley”.

The people at the party, hosted by Mistress Amelia, look realistic, in that they look like real people, not models. Though all the couples are malesub/femdom, both the men and the women show a range of body types. Hugh is overwhelmed at the scenes in progress as Lindsay leads him around on a leash. As soon as they are away from the host, he asks to leave, on the brink of panic. Lindsay reassures him, and he calls her “Mistress Lesley”.

They search for the couple they’re supposed to photograph. They find them in the middle of a tease and denial scene. Hugh is losing it again, but Lindsay tells him to keep it together. “Be a good boy and don’t talk.” He says he’s hungry, and they go to get a snack and wait for their targets to be alone. In the kitchen, the target couple approaches them and invites them into the same room.

Lindsay: “I’m proud of you.”

Hugh: “For real?”

Lindsay: “Yeah. Let’s go.”

In another room, the target couple are doing a Japanese-style rope bondage scene. Debbie, the target woman, encourages Lindsay to put Hugh on the St. Andrew’s cross. Lindsay takes one of the house toy riding crops and makes a few light swats at him. Meanwhile, Debbie pulls out a dildo and harness to use on her date, orally. Lindsay positions Hugh so he can take pictures with the hidden camera. Hugh is part afraid, part aroused, and getting into the scene with Lindsay.

As they prepare to leave, Hugh is enthusiastic and says he and Lindsay should be doing this more. Not clear if he means going undercover or doing BDSM. Mistress Amelia gives Lindsay her card for the next party, which Hugh eagerly takes.

Back at the security company, they applaud Hugh for a great job. He calls it “The night of my life, in a lot of ways.”

In the final scene, Hugh meets another woman for a first date, who turns out to be Mistress Amelia, the host of the play party. It goes well, until Amelia asks him how he knows “Lesley”. Hugh stumbles and says he works for her.

Easy treats BDSM in a matter-of-fact way. The episode is unusual in that it focuses on a heterosexual man discovering his masochistic/submissive side, and experiencing pleasure instead of shame or denial. That he meets with Amelia for a date suggests he has genuine interest. Nicky Excitement does appear in a later episode.

This episode was shot in a real dungeon space in Chicago.

Aired May 10, 1994

Roseanne was a popular sitcom in the 1990s, built around the stand up comedy of Roseanne Barr.

Roseanne’s elderly mother suffers a minor hip injury and has to move into her daughter’s house to recover, causing friction with Roseanne and her family. Bev’s friend Jake from the retirement home drops by and reveals that Bev injured herself during sex with him. Roseanne struggles with talking about sexual topics with her mother, and Bev is equally uncomfortable, after a lifetime of sexual ignorance and bad experiences. Roseanne and Bev awkwardly talk it out.

Over the closing credits, in the retirement home, we hear (but don’t see) Bev and Jake talking after implied sex. Jake says she is more sexually confident now and Bev says after talking with her daughter she is not afraid to ask for what she wants. Bev says she left a light on in the living room, and she emerges into view, wearing a full leather outfit, including cap, sunglasses and high heels, and carrying a flogger. She picks up a pair of handcuffs (the archetypal symbol of BDSM), turns off the light and goes back into the bedroom. Cue laugh track.

The joke is that Bev goes from a lifetime of sexual repression to full dominatrix, of course. As portrayals go, it’s pretty positive, in that BDSM can be pleasurable and liberating, even for elderly women.