Red Shoe Diaries S01E13 “How I Met My Husband”, Aired June 26, 1993 IMDB
“How I Met” starts off like a cross between a music video and a fashion show. Mistress Miranda’s dungeon is having an exhibition, with women and men in fetish gear strutting on a catwalk while a female announcer talks about the outfits and how much they cost. The frame is “dressing for power”. “Remember, leather, rubber and steel equals power and control.” It’s very aspirational and consumerist, locating kink in a fantastic world of wealth and glamour.
The protagonist, Alice (Nieth Hunter) is a newcomer to this (you can tell by her print dress), seeking “control”. Mistress Miranda (Sue Kiel) takes her on as a domme-in-training. She shows Alice different scenes as they walk along a hallway. She also explains the rules, the first being, no sex with a client.
As I’ve pointed out before, many people seem incapable of conceiving of a dominant woman who is not a professional, and this episode repeats that trope. There’s also the trope that the pro-domme must be a sexual object, but not a sexual subject. Sex must be incompatible with female dominance.
One of the dungeon’s clients is Giuseppe (Luigi Amodeo). He feels guilty, having failed his mother, because, while he traveled from Italy to America to become a chef, he works as a male exotic dancer for women who “tip” him for extra services. (It’s the stereotype of Italian men being fixated on their mothers.) Mistress Miranda says he’s perfect for Alice’s first client. (No negotiation scene, of course.)
Alice, in her new “Mistress Eve” persona, and wearing a mask that does her no favors, goes into the room and scolds him. The most physical thing she does is some light slapping. He promises not to do it anymore.
Alice (not in her “Mistress Eve” attire) watches Giuseppe perform at a club for women, then join one of the women in her luxury car for a more intimate performance, for cash.
At Giuseppe’s next dungeon session, “Mistress Eve” shines a light in his face and yells at him about lying to her. She tells him to say, “I humiliate myself by groveling at the feet of women.” (“Mistress Eve” isn’t going to be a very good pro-domme if she doesn’t want her client to be masochistic.) He promises again. In the hallway, Miranda tells Lisa rule number two: never get involved with a client.
Giuseppe tells his fans he is quitting the business. Alice follows him to a restaurant and they start talking. She propositions him but he turns her down.
In their third dungeon session, Giuseppe says to “Mistress Eve” he wants to be with Alice, but for love, not money. “Eve” asks how Giuseppe would seduce that woman. Mistress Miranda enters the room to break it up. She forbids Alice to see him, as they’re getting too close. Alice takes off her mask, and Giuseppe is angry and runs out.
Alice and Giuseppe meet at the restaurant again, and he says he doesn’t know which version of her to believe. He wants both, but he can’t “bring her home to meet mama.” Alice says don’t lie about how they met, as his mother would never believe the story anyway.
We shift to a montage sex scene of Alice and Giuseppe on the model runway from the opening scene, intercut with the concluding vignette of Jake reading Alice’s letter. She talks about how they fell in love and got married despite the odds. While Alice is shown holding a riding crop, but doesn’t use it.
The basic story of “How I Met My Husband” is kind of a gender-reversed Pretty Woman or Carmen or the song “Roxanne”, the fantasy of rescuing a sex worker with true love, but it doesn’t hold together. Giuseppe hardly seems exploited by his situation, and Alice is just hypocritical as she’s working as a pro-domme herself. (Though there’s no mention of her actually needing money.) Probably better to view it as a pretty fairy tale, which is the kind of ending it has: they married and lived happily ever after.
Red Shoe Diaries is not about social realism, but the fantasy of women’s sexual adventure and glamour. In this version of reality, being pro-domme only requires wearing a fetish outfit and yelling at men. There’s no discussion of the deeper issues of BDSM, like consent or negotiation or the intricacies of sadism and masochism. It’s a fantastic transgression of norms, which are neatly restored by the end.
Giuseppe is an example of the seductive male in King’s oeuvre, called the “low man” in by some critics, such as John in 9 1/2 Weeks. Christian Grey in FSOG is also a low man. Even if he’s wealthy now, he comes from earthy peasant stock, and he’s retained the sexual magnetism that bourgeois men can’t hope to have.
As Zalman King himself said in an interview in Jump Cut:
The characters I write are basically written to inspire women to become involved with them. It’s like they found the key to the lock. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to say this in a gentle way: there are keys to locks, if you want to play certain cards, even with very beautiful women, in my experience. Mickey Rourke, the guy knows how to seduce women and not frighten them.
You can see it watching guys who really know how to operate, I’m not talking about guys you meet in a club, I’m talking about guys who basically get the key to that lock. I have a lot of friends who are pimps, believe it or not, mainly because I film them for other stuff that I am doing and I have endless interviews with pimps talking about their strategy in terms of manipulation of women.
Lehman 2012
Peter Lehman and Susan Hunt in Lady Chatterley’s Legacy (2010) call this archetype the “body guy”.
In the genre’s classic form, a beautiful, intelligent, but discontented woman is engaged or married to a cultured, intellectual, upper-class male. The woman’s discontent is quelled when a working-class man, often tied closely to the land, awakens her sexuality and energizes her life. The body guy’s masculinity and sexuality are so compelling that he rescues the woman from the stultifying world of the successful “mind guy,” who is boring, controlling, and, significantly, a poor lover who fails to recognize, let alone fulfill, her sexual needs. [Pg.1]
Dramatically, the tension comes from “will she, won’t she?”, the woman’s internal struggle between restraint and passion. The authors trace this conception of sexuality and gender back to DH Lawrence’s notorious 1928 novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lawrence may have been progressive in articulating woman as sexual subject, not object, but he also held that the solution to the “woman problem” was a good heterosexual fucking, probably with a groundskeeper or other lower-class man, preferably with simultaneous orgasms. “…it is this total belief in the power of the phallus as the basis of awakening and fulfilling female desire that is truly curious. And … it is even more curious that it is alive and thriving in the beginning of the new millennium.”[Pg. 26]
I think that the theme running through Zalman King’s works is a woman’s encounter with a “body guy” who does break her out of her repression, but the experience doesn’t break her. The original book of 9 1/2 Weeks ends with Elizabeth’s lover dumping her in a hospital and her spending time in a mental institution. King and his wife Patricia Louisianna Knop rewrote the story so that it ended with Elizabeth shrugging and moving on with her life, no trauma. It becomes comedy, not tragedy.
