Jan 012025
 

The sexual dynamics of the American conservative resurgence have been fascinating over the last few years.

Evie Magazine is a conservative women’s magazine first published in 2019. Its aesthetics and content reflect the “trad life/trad wife” movement, creating a pastoral fantasy of rural, agrarian labour combined with an idealized hetero-nuclear family. At the fringier end of things, Evie’s content splices into ideologies like pronatalism, anti-vaccination, the benefits of “raw milk” and other health quackery, transphobia, anti-feminism, COVID denial, QAnon, etc.

It’s epitomized by the “tradwife” image, a (white) long-haired woman in a white or print dress, hair kerchief, and cowboy boots who has had borne and raised several children while running a country farm and baking her own bread daily, and yet somehow still looks like a fashion model. She does no paid labour outside the home, instead leaving that to her commuting (white) husband.

Continue reading »
May 182024
 

Remedy is a 2013 drama directed by Cheyenne Picardo and written by Picardo et al.

A young woman known only by her nomme de domme, Remedy (Kira Davies), explores the world of professional domination and submission. She has some experience with BDSM at a night club, where she met a woman named Astrid, who hooked her up with a dungeon in NYC. Her motivation isn’t clear, whether it’s money or something else. (She has an unseen boyfriend and works as a children’s tutor.)

Continue reading »
Sep 262023
 

R100 is a 2013 Japanese absurdist comedy. A depressed man enters a contract to be assaulted by dominatrixes in random places at random times.

It starts off relatively realistically. Katayama is a depressed furniture salesman dealing with raising his young son while his wife has been in a coma for years. He visits a company known only as “Bondage”. The host has him sit on a merry-go-round and view dominatrixes. The offer is a one-year contract during which different dominatrixes will assault him unpredictably. Katayama agrees.

Continue reading »
Aug 082023
 

Nymphomaniac Volume 2 is the second part of notorious director Lars von Trier’s 2013 film about a woman with sexual compulsion.

The framing story is that Seligman, an elderly academic, finds a beaten women in an alley near his apartment, and takes her home. She says her name is Joe, and when Seligman asks her how she ended up in his alley, she says she would have to tell him her entire life story. Over one night, Joe tells Seligman her biography in search of sexual pleasure, with frequent asides from both of them on topics ranging from techniques of fly fishing to the history of religious art. This dialog also acts as a kind of trial, with Joe prosecuting herself as a bad person who deserved her mistreatment, and Seligman defending her decisions and her worth as a person.

Continue reading »
Apr 062023
 
Marika Engelhardt as Lindsay and Nicky Excitement as Hugh

Easy is a 2016 dramedy series about modern sex and romance. It’s loosely an anthology: most of the stories are self-contained, but certain character recur.

“Private Eyes” (season 3, episode 2, aired 10 May 2019) follows Hugh (Nicky Excitement) a technician who works for a private security company. Hugh is a kind of awkward guy, like an overgrown teenager with a fixation on martial arts. He goes on two dates, which end with polite but firm rejections by the women.

Continue reading »
Jun 102022
 

IMDB

My Mistress is a 2014 Australian drama film. A teenage boy, struggling after the death of his father, forms a relationship with a lonely older woman who turns out to be a pro-dominatrix. 

Despite the title and the promotional images, My Mistress is not primarily about a BDSM relationship. It belongs in the category of films about the male fantasy of being initiated in sex by an older attractive woman. E.g. Private Lessons (1981), Class (1983), My Tutor (1983), They’re Playing with Fire (1984), and even Weird Science (1985). Right away, we’re getting into some difficult areas about consent and double-standards about sex between younger men and older women. (For the record, the age of consent in most of Australia is 16.)

Charlie, a teenage boy, aimlessly bikes around his neighborhood. He sees an older woman with a French accent, Maggie, move into a house nearby. He returns home, only to find his father has committed suicide. Soon after that, he learns his mother has been having an affair. 

Distraught, Charlie forms a casual relationship with Maggie. He bikes to her house and goes inside. He goes upstairs to find her playroom where she is in full dominatrix dress and in mid-session with a man. He runs off. 

Continue reading »