The History of BDSM – Page 13 – Documenting my research in the history of consensual sadomasochism

Billions, season 5B: The Celluloid Dungeon

Dec 122021

Shooting of season 5 of Billions was interrupted by COVID, and the second half of the season didn’t air until 2021. Of the various plot threads picked up, the only one that concerns us is Chuck’s sex life. We last saw him involved with the sexually adventurous Cat, but as of S05E08 “Copenhagen”, it’s over.

Chuck: “I liked it. Of course I liked it. Give me pistachio ice cream, I’ll eat it and smile, as Diamond David Lee Roth would say. But it was uncomfortable. Just too many limbs. Too many questions. Oh, what to do? Give me rum raisin, on the other hand, I’ll inhale the whole point and root around the fridge to find another one. Then that’s what I was missing.”
Other guy: “Cat seems pretty liberated. Have you broached the subject of what you really want?”
Chuck: “As you said, she’s smart and she’s sensitive and she saw, she saw that it would never work, not all the for me, not without, you know… [clicks tongue] And so she said something along the lines of, ‘We’ll always have Paris.’ Only the words she used were harsher, and all about wasting her time.”

Earlier seasons of Billions made Chuck’s masochism a major part of both his personality and his relationship with Wendy. Now it’s been demoted to the same importance as his taste in ice cream. Apart from snide comments from other people, Chuck’s sex life doesn’t come up again.

Note that trailers for season 6 suggest that Chuck will continue to practice kink and he may even see Troy the pro-domme again.

Law & Order: SVU S14E03: The Celluloid Dungeon

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Nov 232021

“Twenty-Five Acts”, aired October 10, 2012 IMDB

The Law & Order franchise often fictionalizes real-world events. In this case, it alludes to the publication and popularity of the Fifty Shades trilogy, in an episode aired only 6 months after the trilogy was re-released by Vintage. (FSOG was first published May 25, 2011 by Writers Coffee Shop, and the trilogy was re-released by Vintage in April 2012.)

I thought that this episode also referenced the case of Jian Ghomeshi, a Persian-Canadian radio host and interviewer who allegedly strangled his girlfriend and excused it as consensual BDSM. However, in an odd moment of life imitating art, I found that this episode actually aired 2 years before the allegations about Ghomeshi went public in 2014.

The author of the hot new erotic novel Twenty-Five Acts, Jocelyn Paley, appears on a talk show. The host, Adam Cain, meets her for dinner, and she secretly gives him her panties under the table. They go back to his place. After some sex she initiates, he crosses the line, throws her on the bed and chokes her with a belt.

Link Digest, November 2021

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Nov 152021

Shunga Gallery is a site focusing on erotic art, and goes deeper than just providing a gallery. The pages on BDSM artists Erich von Gotha and Joseph Farrel include short biographies.
Kinbakunomicon has a new English translation of a 1959 article from Kitan Club magazine, “The Beautiful Feelings of Shibari” by Shinryo Masaki
Thrillist profiles the still-functioning (as of 2018) BDSM regions of the virtual world Second Life.
The Sex Workers Archival Project twitter has scans of a 1995 Bondage Life interview with Mistress Olivia Outré, who was a 20 year bondage work veteran at the time.
Actress Gwyneth Paltrow has launch an anti-porn campaign, calling in harmful to women. This is the same Gwyneth Paltrow whose GOOP brand sold a variety of harmful “lifestyle products” to women, not to mention a few BDSM items.

Interview with Kinky Cocktail Hour

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Nov 122021

I’ve been interviewed by Saffer Master and Lady Petra on the Kinky Cocktail Hour.

Fifty Shades of Black (2016): The Celluloid Dungeon

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Nov 112021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Link Digest, October 2021

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Oct 152021

CBC’s Ideas podcast has a series called Body Language. One episode talks about the “the right to sex“, the thorny issue of sexual ethics and politics. In the BDSM world, we tend to treat consent as the be-all and end-all of sexual ethics, but that leaves issues of sexism, racism, transphobia, classism and so on, unaddressed.
The Official Bettie Page Podcast, episode 5, discusses the 2005 biopic, The Notorious Bettie Page, and some other documentary and biopic film projects about the iconic pinup and bondage model.
The Rialto Report covers the 1977 launch of the Ultra Room at the Mitchell Brothers’ O’Farrell theatre in San Francisco, a lesbian bondage show surrounded by two-way mirrors. This includes an interview with the room’s first headliner, porn star C.J. Laing, and photos.
A Refinery29 post by Gina Tonic asks what it means to be a bottom. “…the labels ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ are often used interchangeably with the labels ‘dom’ and ‘sub’ – but is this always true?”
20 years ago, Fetish Diva Midori published The Seductive Art of Japanese Bondage, probably the first book published in English on Japanese bondage. Since then, kinbaku/shibari has grown immensely in popularity outside Japan, and some kinksters practice it exclusively. Spectrum Boutique interviews Midori about this pioneering project.

The Story of Joanna (1975): The Celluloid Dungeon

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Oct 152021

The Story of Joanna (IMDB) is a 1975 X-rated drama directed and written by Gerard Damiano and starring Terri Hall in the title role and Jamie Gillis as Jason.

Joanna comes from the “Golden Age of porn” in the 70s and early 80s when some hardcore adult films were made with higher production values for release with X-ratings in mainstream theatres, trying to reach a broader audience. This was also the heyday of mainstream softcore erotica films like Just Jaeckin’s Histoire D’O (1975) and the original Emmanuelle (1974), and edgier material like Nazisploitation classics The Night Porter (1974), Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS (1975) and Salon Kitty (1976). (I’ve heard that Damiano wanted to film Story of O but couldn’t get the rights, and made his own knock-off.)

Link roundup, September 2021

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Sep 202021

The History of the Dominatrix talks about male masochism as a complex of behavior that goes back far earlier than 19th century Europe.
On Them magazine, Danny Thanh Nguyen talks about being a gay BDSM top who does not fit the masculine stereotype.
The Conversation talks about Fifty Shades of Grey 10 years later, mainly from a publishing perspective.
OnlyFans said they would ban adult content, then reversed their decision, in August 2021. Bitch Media talks about the causes and implications of a new wave of censorship of adult content on platforms.
The American Sex Podcast interviews Kitty Stryker about the OnlyFans flip-flop and goes into the peculiar history of censorship and pornography in the USA.
Related to the above, auction site Ebay has also banned the sale of adult material, which has implications for academics studying the history of pornographic media, says the New York Times.
IN magazine explores the history of the archetypal gay male leather accessory, the chest harness.

Bitter Moon (1992): The Celluloid Dungeon

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Sep 182021

Mimi (Emmanuelle Seigner) meets Nigel (Hugh Grant) in the company of her husband Oscar (Peter Coyote)

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

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

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

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

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

Link Roundup, August 2021

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Aug 152021

Kids comics of the 1940s and 1950s seemed rife with children being spanked, as revealed by the Teen Sleuth Haunted Library. Strangely, the Comics Code Authority, implemented in 1954, said nothing about the corporal punishment of children.
The Rialto Report explores the strange history behind the sadomasochistic film The Image (1975), including the first meeting between the film’s director Radley Metzger and the original 1956 novel’s author Jean de Berg, and the story of the film itself. Did you know that while there were exterior scenes shot in Paris, most of the interior scenes were shot in a building in New York City owned by the notorious Roy Cohn, former attorney of Donald Trump?
The FeatureBang podcast explores the 1975 art-porn movie The Story of Joanna, directed by Gerard Damiano.
The KinkyCast interviews Susan Wright of the NCSF, talking about how the new Model Penal Code decriminalizes consensual BDSM.
Actor Brendan Scannell, who played Pete on the Netflix dramedy Bonding, talks about his Emmy nomination and his experiences on the show.

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A Lover's Pinch: A Cultural History of Sadomasochism