Just when I thought I was through with this damned thing….
I will be one of the guest speakers at a colloquium on the new Fifty Shades Darker film, set to debut on Valentine’s day, 2017. This should be a great discussion on how BDSM and the mainstream interact.
Time: Thursday, 23 February, 2017. 7:30 – 9:00 PM
Location: SFU-Vancouver, 515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, Room 7000.
T-Mobile recently launched at least two ads which make an interesting snapshot of how the mainstream views kink.
- A blog of vintage damsel in distress images.
- Whipping as a treatment for depression. (Take this one with a whole shaker of salt.)
- Interview with Steve English, founder of Amsterdam-based DeMask.
Once you start to explore the history and deeper ideas of sexuality, you inevitably come across the topic of the fetish, and the particularly gendered origin of the concept. For a long time, it was assumed that women simply did not have fetishes, and that they were a particularly male malady, much like masochism, tied into Freudian ideas of compensation of female castration. When women exhibited behaviour that could be seen as fetishistic, like kleptomania, it was explained away as something else.
More recent, feminist thought about sexuality has suggested that female fetishism does exist, but it hides in plain sight. One of the ideas of female fetishism is attraction to injured or wounded men.
I will give my “Cultural History of BDSM” presentation on Sunday, January 29th, 2017, in Burnaby, a suburb of Vancouver, BC. This will be a part of West Coast Bound, the three-day conference presented by Metro Vancouver Kink, an organization I helped found. It’s an excellent conference, with top-level presenters like Fetish Diva Midori, Laura Antoniou, Lew Rubens, Allena Gabosch, Morpheus, and Topologist, as well as the usual vendors and parties.
- The Kinkycast has an interview with Colin Rowntree of Wasteland.com, one of the earliest BDSM-oriented websites and porn producers, dating back to 1994.
- The Advocate has a photo tour of NYC’s kinky gay world.
- Glamour magazine says BDSM people are “consent experts“.
- The Geek Anthropologist on Fifty Shades of Grey, Consumerism and BDSM: Selling Subversive Identities
Dressing For Pleasure is a 1977 25-minute documentary directed by John Samson, who made a career out of films about outsider topics (e.g. tattoos, competitive darts, the sexual lives of disabled people). Continue reading »
Brownmiller’s statement probably had a lot to do with the anti-SM strain of feminism in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In her view, masochism is merely a myth of patriarchy, an excuse for rape.