The History of BDSM

I have not seen Wuthering Heights (2026), nor do I have more than a passing familiarity with the story. The fetishistic and sadomasochistic elements of the new adaptation have sparked some discussion. I leave it to my friend and colleague, TammyJo Eckhart, to explore this topic. The following is reposted from her Patreon with her permission.

Maybe you’ve seen the online reviews and news articles about the “kinky” nature of this film. I’m gonna to mention that, but this is really a jumping off place for discussing my two favorite topics – history and consent.

There will be spoilers for the 2026 movie, but I will try to keep them minimum and based on “kink,” consent, and history.

I had some high sexy hopes for this movie before I watched it on June 23, 2026, because of all of the complaints about how it introduced kink into the story that overwhelmed everything else. I’m not sure what film those reviewers and commenters were discussing but that wasn’t the movie I saw.

I know that I have a high bar for kink given that my colleague, Peter, and I try to put out a new kinky movie discussion video every couple of months. I also know that as someone who lives this life 24/7/365 days a year, my definition of what is and is not kinky is probably not reflective of the mainstream culture. To understand why I don’t see this as a BDSM work, I need to explain some historical context.

The novel and this movie version should be set between 1771 and 1802 in the Yorkshire moors of England. This is not a time period when individual rights are NOT respected for almost anyone, king and landed nobles included. Catherine Earnshaw’s family may be nobles, but most of their wealth is land and the people connected to it. Her father is a drunken a-hole who has gambled which makes them indebted to creditors. You see that in the mess of their large estate as well as the sparse furnishings. When Earnshaw returns one night with a boy in tow, he may not have bought him with money, but everyone there knows that the boy now belongs to the estate and by extension to the Earnshaw family whose daughter, Catherine, renames him Heathcliff (after her dead brother, by the way).

Heathcliff chooses one person in particular to give his loyalty to because of her treatment of him, Catherine. He gets between her and her family, he accompanies her out on the moors, he tries to protect her from his sexual desires as well as seeing displays of others engaged in sex. There relationship isn’t based on a negotiated consent because that would make no sense given that time between someone of such two different social and legal statuses.

There is also strict legal and social differences between men and women during that time. If both people are of the same class, then the men’s rights would be greater than the woman’s. That doesn’t mean that they can’t care about each other. We see that in the barn scene between stablehand, Joseph, and maid, Zillah. Yes, they do have sex while she is wearing a bridle, but from the language and the actions, the maid is in charge and the stablehand cares about her safety. First, he hold up a whip but she shakes her head. When he holds up the bridle she smiles broadly and they place it on it. At this point Heathcliff covers Catherine’s eyes and mouth to keep her from revealing where she (and he) are but also I think in an attempt to protect a lady (which she is) from seeing something so base as intercourse. We still hear what is said which is that Zillah wants it all harder and Joseph agrees but also continuous praises her while doing so and then afterwards. It isn’t simply sex, there is a kink element to it, but I think of the two servants, the maid is in charge while the hand is topping.

Another kink element in the movie is the way that we see Heathcliff treat Isabella once they have a civil marriage ceremony to help him get back at Catherine for her cutting short their affair years after she’s been married. Heathcliff may not be a lord, that is unclear in the movie, but he has money (somehow) and buys the Earnshaw estate. He doesn’t do much with it because he is used to it being rundown and poorly kept. Taking Isabella to that estate he hopes will enrage Catherine enough that she’d demand he attone in some fashion. Isabelle is his partner in this, though she seems fooled a bit into thinking she might keep him for her own. That is difficult to say because once she is removed from the Earnshaw estate, she disappears from the movie.

The scenes of Isabella and Heathcliff get the most attention in the reviews that focus on the kink. I want to call attention to a couple of factors I wasn’t expecting but where clearly there in the film. First, when Heathcliff comes into her room and proposes this scheme to her, he is straight forward about how he will treat her and asks if she wants him to stop. The only word we hear from her after he lays out several times how poorly he will behave and asks for her to tell him to stop, is “No” because she wants to try this. Why? I have no clue. Up until this point, Isabella has acted like a spoiled princesses whose guardian Edger married Catherine. In part, I suspect that marriage was one to please Isabella more than Edger given how free his ward is to treat Cathering of a sort of doll for her to dress up and demand attention from.

The abusive treatment that we see Heathcliff give to Isabella is through the lens of letters that she writes upon his pleas to Catherine. Plead he does because Isabella can read and write and he cannot. He even gets on his knees during these letter writing snippets and she grabs him by the front of his shirt demanding that he “treat her nice” if she does this. The highlight of the “abuse” comes when Catherine’s lady-in-waiting, Nelly, comes to visit. She finds Isabella chained up like a dog and acting like a dog. However, note that Isabella looks only slightly disheveled as though it was done on purpose. She even winks at Nelly at the end of that scene and then we see Heathcliff kneeling again while a letter is written.

How much of what Heathcliff and Isabella do is reflected in these performances we cannot know, because it isn’t about them, it is about Heathcliff wanting Catherine to come back to him.

Nelly has been intercepting the letters as well as playing Edgar and Catherine against each other during this time. Nelly’s family probably had fallen on hard times forcing her to become a lady-in-waiting to Catherine since childhood. When Catherine discovers that Nelly knew that Heathcliff heard only part of the discussion about the marriage with Edgar, she is furious. Nelly’s choices are entirely based on her position; whatever affects Catherine affects her. She would probably end up on the street herself if she allows Catherine to fire her, so she She isn’t a good person for what she does, but these are the historical realities for her decisions.

Catherine really doesn’t an easy choice. She is pregnant with her husband. She is dependent on Edgar’s money and he on her noble family title. In the scenes of the years after the marriage when Heathcliff has been who-knows-where, Catherine has moments of joy and happiness, but also periods of boredom and longing for something more exciting. In a world where her husband had legal and social rights to harm her in a multitude of ways, his gentle and generous nature might be seen as ideal by many women and their families. Is she a masochist? I doubt it based on how we see Heathcliff and Edgar treat her. I think she wants passion and she wants to be able to tease her partner and feel some pushback from him.

Heathcliff has pledged himself and his love to her when they were children after he took a severe beating from her drunken father in her place. His love seemed more drawn from feeling grateful mixed with the ages they were as they discovered sexual feelings. He didn’t tell her more because of their social and legal positions in the beginning and then because he only hears part of her reasoning for accepting Edgar’s marriage proposal and is angry. How much consent did he have in his entire for what he experienced and later felt?

It is a beautifully shot film and very intense but not because of the “kink” in our 21st century BDSM meaning of that term.

If you’ve seen it, I’d love to hear what you thought about it.