Peter and TammyJo discuss Pillion (2025) in their new video.
Jun 032026
May 192026
“The Gang Gets Satirized and Doesn’t Like It” is S04E04 of the legal comedy-drama TV series The Good Fight, aired May 7, 2020.
One of the law firm’s clients is upset because he believes he is being caricatured in a popular play, C*cksucker in Chains. He says he wants them to “gawker” it, which basically means “Somebody’s talking about me in a way I don’t like, and I’m rich enough to shut them up.”
The play was written by a former employee of the law firm, and the characters and relationships do bear a carnivalesque likeness. Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski), the series’ lead, is caricatured as a lawyer who rips off her business suit to reveal a dominatrix outfit beneath. The caricature of Diane’s boss, a black man, rips off his business suit to reveal an antebellum slave costume, and is rapturously dominated by the lawyer-dominatrix, including bullwhipping and anal penetration with a dildo (off camera).
Continue reading »Apr 212026
Researching kink in the relatively new medium of video games introduced me to the surprisingly complex history of dominatrix-coded female characters.
Continue reading »Mar 162026
Submission, also known as Scandalo, is a 1976 Italian drama film, set in WWII-era France on the eve of Germany’s invasion. Wartime stress builds up within a household until the breaking point.
It’s centered around the pharmacy run by pharmacist Eliane Michaud, who employs Juliette and Armand. Her house is upstairs, inhabited by her kind but distant intellectual husband, Henri, and her beautiful teenage daughter, Justine. (“Justine” and “Juliette” are likely references to two of the Marquis de Sade’s novels.)
Continue reading »Mar 132026
Secret Life of a Dominatrix is a 2024 made-for-TV movie directed by Gabby Revilla Lugo and starring Mariel Molino and Andrew Biernat.
Secret Life is clearly post-Fifty Shades as the inciting incident is a group of women reading an erotic novel in a book club, and it also draws on the Netflix “female-centric thriller” genre. Generically, it’s an heir to the tradition of the direct-to-cable or direct-to-video erotic thrillers and melodramas of the 1990s: female subjectivity and sexual development, upper-bourgeois setting, the acute anxiety of sex and danger in a post-HIV world, sex scenes that stay well-within the lines of an R rating.
Continue reading »Feb 172026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJYskmcazFk
You can watch my friend TammyJo and I discuss Sanctuary (2022).
Feb 162026
High Maintenance is a comedy-drama series about a marijuana dealer, known only as “The Guy”, who encounters various people in the New York City area in the course of his business.
This episode, “Payday” (aired February 17, 2019), opens with a mock-kidnapping of a woman, Doc Lee (Margaret Cho), by a group of lesbians who drag her into a van and group-dominate her while a woman drives the van around town, all to celebrate her 50th birthday. Doc’s partner, Ayasha (Hye Yun Park), joins in. (I wonder if this was inspired by Patrick Califia’s short story “The Birthday Party”.) Later, Doc and her partner join the women at a bar for drinks. It’s all very fun and normalized for these people.
Continue reading »Jan 052026
CSI usually follows a certain format: e.g. we rarely see action that isn’t from the perspective of an investigator or a detective. Episode S11E04 “Sqweegel” (aired October 14, 2010) radically departed from this rule, so much so that some scenes look more like a slasher or giallo film.
Someone is slashing famous people around Las Vegas with a straight razor. Through the usual forensics business, the CSIs find that the assailant was wearing a latex suit. One of them even comments, “Time to get kinky!”
Continue reading »Jan 012026
The revival series CSI: Vegas starts its second season with a dead sex worker, unsurprisingly. One of the first lines of dialog is a CSI looking at the bondage gear and saying, “The more things change, huh?” The cast of characters is mostly new, but the dynamic is largely the same.
The victim is pro dominatrix Lynn Zobrist, stabbed in her home with piece of a broken mirror. The perpetrator also took the time to drag all of the furniture out of her dungeon, cover the walls, floor and ceiling with glued-on mirrors, and leave Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” playing on repeat. Her housekeeper described her as “sad” and alone except for her clients.
Continue reading »Dec 212025
Body of Proof is another post-CSI investigative procedural, this time focused on the life and work of medical examiner Dr. Megan Hunt (Dana Delaney). The season 2 debut “Love Thy Neighbor” (aired September 20, 2011) bears a strong resemblance to the CSI episode “Swap Meet“.
An apparently accidental death in a suburban cul-de-sac turns out to be not-so accidental; the deceased has ligature marks on his wrists. “I used to live on a cul-de-sac like this. Nothing is ever what it seems,” says Megan (a metatextual joke as Dana Delaney also starred on Desperate Housewives). The clues suggest infidelity and one of the detectives searches a house and finds a locked cabinet. It opens with the mysterious key found on the victim, to reveal padded handcuffs, floggers and leather hoods. “Guess we know who tied him up now,” says the other detective. The couple who own the house look embarrassed.
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