The History of BDSM – Page 22 – Documenting my research in the history of consensual sadomasochism

The L Word S02E11 “Loud and Proud”: The Celluloid Dungeon

Jun 072020

“Loud and Proud”, aired 1 May 2005 IMDB

The L Word was a night-time soap about a group of lesbian and bisexual women in West Hollywood, with multiple continuing storylines.

“Loud and Proud” is centered on Pride Weekend in LA. In the previous season, Jenny arrived in West Hollywood and began exploring her sexuality, which caused some complications with her boyfriend. Jenny broke up with him and joined the other characters.

The cold-open shows two women having a BDSM session, in the red-on-black color scheme we will see repeatedly in this episode. The bottom is cuffed to a St. Andrew’s cross. There’s no nudity, and only a couple of light impacts with a flogger.

The top says, “I’m going to give you a minute to think about how badly you want me to fuck you.”

Law & Order: Special Victims Unit S01E22: The Celluloid Dungeon

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Jun 052020

“Slaves” aired May 19, 2000 IMDB

“Slaves” treads some of the same ground as “Stocks & Bondage”, earlier in the first season, as the primary antagonist is a man who psychologically controls multiple women. In this case, there is no financial element to the crimes.

A street vendor turns in a note asking for help from an unknown woman. The detectives track down the woman named in the note, the aunt of a Romanian immigrant woman, Elena. It would have ended there, but the aunt turns up murdered.

Detectives Munch and Stabler grill Morrow

Law & Order Special Victims Unit S01E09: The Celluloid Dungeon

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Jun 012020

“Stocks & Bondage” First aired November 29, 1999 IMDB

“Stocks & Bondage” opens with a familiar scene: a woman found dead in bondage gear. However, as the detectives investigate, the case turns out to be more about shady financial dealings on Wall Street than sexual deviance.

“Stocks & Bondage” includes some of the same tropes as the earlier Law & Order episode “Prisoner of Love”, particularly the discussion over whether the death that started the story is an accident, a suicide, or a murder. Unlike the dual focus on detectives and prosecutors of its parent series, Special Victims Unit is mostly about the investigation, not the legal complexities.

Detective Benson views the body. Notice the handcuff visible in the background.

ELust Sex Blogs #130

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May 282020

Welcome to Elust 130

The only place where the smartest and hottest sex bloggers are featured under one roof every month. Whether you’re looking for sex journalism, erotic writing, relationship advice or kinky discussions it’ll be here at Elust. Want to be included in Elust #131? Start with the rules, come back June 1st to submit something and subscribe to the RSS feed for updates!

~ This Month’s Top Three Posts ~

Communion

Wedding night orgy: new, filthy traditions

Body Love: Q is for Queefing

~ Featured Posts by our Guest Editor Quinn Rhodes (ze/hir) ~

There’s a theme to the pieces I picked for my featured posts, and it’s that they both made me feel valid in my gender identity. I never expected coming out as trans to be easy, but being a vocal genderqueer sex blogger has really not been fun so far. Thank you to all the folks (including e[lust]!) who have stood with the trans and non-binary sex bloggers over the last month, and thank you to the amazing trans writers who inspire me to keep exploring my own gender – and talking about it!

#1 It’s all a bit pants by A to sub B (she/her/they/them)

“Tell me I’ve been a good girl and I’m going to be grinning but tell me I’ve been a good boi and fuuuuccckkk, I’ve melted into a puddle.”

I felt soooo seen by this post. Bee talks about their experience with gender and lace panties and feeling like we need to conform to gender stereotypes. It can be really hard and I’m sorry Bee is finding it all a bit pants, but I’m really glad they’re exploring their gender expression and presentation.

#2 Queer Names for Your Genitals
by Mx Nillin (they/them)

“One of the most essential parts of reclaiming autonomy over myself as a queer enby was taking back the language used to describe my body.”

As someone who has spent a LOT of time over the last few months thinking about what I want to call my junk, I loved this post. Nillin shares a bunch of words they’ve seen other trans and non binary folks use to refer to their genitals, and I’m now slightly tempted to refer to my dick as my “ominous parts”.

All blogs that have a submission in this edition must re-post this digest from tip-to-toe on their blogs within 7 days. Re-posting the photo is optional and the use of the “read more…” tag is allowable after this point. Thank you, and enjoy!

Bored to Death S02E01: The Celluloid Dungeon

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May 172020

“Escape from the Dungeon!”, aired September 26, 2010

Bored to Death is an American comedy TV series (IMDB) about Jonathan Ames, a struggling writer who moonlights as an “unlicensed private detective”.

In “Escape from the Dungeon!” (S02E01), Jonathan meets Drake, a mounted NYPD officer, who needs his name removed from the hard drive of the BDSM dungeon he frequents before it is raided by the police. He says the dungeon is involved in money laundering, not that it will be raided for sex work charges.

Mistress Florence (Kristen Johnson) is not impressed with Jonathan

Link Roundup, May 2020

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May 172020

Tina Horn’s Why Are People Into That podcast has a two-part discussion of the erotics of fascism. Part 1, Part 2
The Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast has an episode on the original Hellraiser film and the short story it was based on, Clive Barker’s “The Hellbound Heart”. It includes a lot of discussion on the relationship of pleasure and pain.
The Risk podcast has Mollena Lee Williams-Hass telling her story about her childhood influences of eroticized slavery and her development as an African-American woman in the kink world.
DominaFiles.com profiles Belle Du Jour, arguably the foremost prodomme in NYC in the 1970s and 1980s. “Belle was introduced to B&D back in the late ’60s/early ’70s by a man she was seeing. She owned a cosmetology business at the time. Keeping that business running, she branched out into professional dominance and it wasn’t long before she was New York’s most successful SM entrepreneur.”
One of the oldest cliches of “damsel in distress” bondage is the woman tied to the railway tracks before an onrushing train. Atlas Obscura probes into this and says it was actually very rare in the silent film rare. The earliest known instance was “an 1867 Victorian stage melodrama called Under The Gaslight,” in which a man is tied to the train tracks and saved by the leading lady. The evidence suggests that this trope was far more used as parody than in earnest.
Flaunt has an interview with Rick Castro, a gay fetish and BDSM photographer from the 80s who also worked in mainstream fashion photography, where he brought in kink influences. “I would sneak it in, sneaking more each time until eventually I had Veronica Webb in full rubber – Versatile Fashions From Anaheim which did all the kink- from top to bottom.”
Kink, like everything else, changes with changing technologies and changing conditions. Some sex workers have adapted to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic by moving online. One non-binary pro dominant uses the Nintendo Switch cute-animal game Animal Cross: New Horizons to connect with their clients. “Winter advertises their services through Twitter, and in the game they force clients to water their flowers and pay them bells, the Animal Crossing currency.”
Astrid Ovalles, maker of the new lesbian BDSM drama Road of Bygones, writes in the Advocate of the poor depiction of kink in mainstream media. She completely dismisses Fifty Shades (“let us erase the Fifty Shades debacle from our tainted memories”) and asks for better representation. “Presently, there are few kinky shows that exist. Regrettably, they give in to representing kinksters as victims of abuse….”
Race Bannon writes in the Bay Area Reporter on the tearing down of the once-rigid divides in the kink/queer world. “It seems to me that as each day passes we live in a greyer sex and eros world, less confined by entrenched black and white thinking.”

Legend of the Seeker S01E08: The Celluloid Dungeon

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May 102020

Episode S01E08, “Denna”, aired January 10, 2009

Legend of the Seeker (IMDB) is a 2008 fantasy television series based on the Sword of Truth novel series by Terry Goodkind. It’s pretty boilerplate, hero’s journey, high fantasy.

Legend of the Seeker shares some production staff with the TV series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess, and the Spartacus TV series, which frequently hinted at or showed various forms of queer or kinky sexuality. In turn, those series are descendants of the sword-and-sorcery genre of fiction, which frequently referenced sadomasochistic sexuality. E.g. the covers of the 1930s pulp Weird Tales by Margaret Brundage.

Unlike most of the media we’ve explored so far, Legend is set in a fantasy world of magic and strange creatures. Therefore, we should hold it to different standards of realism and consent.

Tales of Gor RPG

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May 042020

Tales of Gor (Postmortem Studios, 2017) is the licensed tabletop role-playing game adaptation of John Norman’s notorious Gor series of sword-and-sorcery novels, written by James “Grim” Desborough and illustrated by Michael Manning. Gor is notorious for heavy themes of slavery, sadomasochism, male dominance and female submission, and for long philosophical digressions justifying those themes. Since 1966, there have been more than 30 novels published in the series. The series has inspired a strong cult following, including a small branch of BDSM culture devoted to Gorean style slavery, both in real life and online in Second Life.

Law & Order: Criminal Intent S09E11: The Celluloid Dungeon

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Apr 272020

Law & Order: Criminal Intent’s episode “Lost Children of the Blood” aired July 25, 2010

A college student found drained of blood in her dorm room leads Detectives Nichols (Jeff Goldblum) and Stevens (Saffron Burrows) to the underground culture of blood fetishists.

The victim, Sarah Price, has quotes from Carl Jung and Michel Foucault all over her dorm room. Nichols finds a deluxe copy of Jung’s Red Book. “He [Jung] thought everybody should have a red book. All disturbing thoughts written down and filed away.”

Sarah’s boyfriend Kyle admits that they did go to a club together, and did blood play.

Kyle: “It was just exploring boundaries. Sarah and I wanted something real and authentic.”

Elust Digest #129

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Apr 262020

Welcome to Elust 129–

~ This Month’s Top Three Posts ~

Unfortunately there will not be a top three judges selection this month. I did not feel that I would be seen as an impartial judge to make the selection. So I have decided to just post the full list. But have no fear, we will back to that next month with our judges in place. If you wish to apply to be an Elust judge you can do so here. If you would like to be a judge I would suggest you read this post on being Sex Positive first.