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.

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Review: Sadomasochism and the BDSM Community in the United States, by Steven K. Stein

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Apr 182021
 

Stein, Stephen K. 2021. Sadomasochism and the BDSM community in the United States: kinky people unite. New York : Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group

Stein’s first chapter, which attempts to describe the proto-BDSM culture of the early and mid twentieth century, is a necessarily scattershot collection of data points. Research any historical field long enough and the gaps in the record become clear. We know so little about the sadomasochistic subculture prior to the 1970s. There’s some data about the gay subset, precious little about straights, and practically nothing about lesbians. Stein had access to the Kinsey Institute, the Carter Johnson Leather Library, the NLA Archives and more, and even then he couldn’t shed any new light on American BDSM before 1970. 

Stein treats the BDSM culture as a whole, whereas I think it is more accurate to describe it as three parallel but separate streams (gay, lesbian, and straight), each with their own economy, and culture, that occasionally influence each other.

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Hurt Me Plenty, teaching BDSM and consent through videogames

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Dec 152015
 

Hurt Me Plenty is a pay-what-you-want videogame that simulates being a top in a BDSM encounter. It presents a 3D male (apparently only male) figure whom you beat with various implements, based on mouse movements. More importantly, you also have to negotiate with the character, and establish a safeword, and give aftercare. If you play too hard, don’t heed the bottom’s safeword, or otherwise breach his consent or give an unsatisfactory experiene, you will be locked out of the game for a certain amount of real-world time.

It’s not just a matter of “Your princess is in another castle.”

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Fifty Shades of Grey, the film, reviewed

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Jun 242015
 

My apologies for addressing the film adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey so late. I obtained one copy of the film through admittedly dubious means (let’s just say the text messages are in Spanish), and another in which the subtitles were in originally in, I think, Thai, then covered up by another layer of subtitles in Spanish, and all the explicit sex was cut.

Beyond all that, I could only watch about five minutes at a time. Somebody asked me how I got through the film and I joked, “I kept a fifth of Scotch handy.”

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Kink history podcast roundup

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Apr 172015
 

An assortment of podcast episodes on the history or society and culture of consensual sadomasochism.

Masocast: Tara Indiana

An interview with a veteran professional female dominant, Tara Indiana, who talks about the changes in the New York prodomme scene since the 1990s.

CBC’s Ideas: Consent to Harm Part 1, Part 2

A two-part documentary on the idea of consenting to bodily harm, and the ramifications in BDSM as well as in sports and other realms. Includes an interview with Andrea Zanin of Sexgeek.

Stuff Your Mom Never Told You: The Professional Dominatrix

A short cultural history of professional female dominants.

On the Media: Safe Words

The second half of this episode is about the mobilization of the kink community in response to the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon.

 

 

Review: Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades of Grey, edited by Lori Perkins

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Apr 032013
 

Perkins, Lori, ed. Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades of Grey. Benbella Smartpop, 2012 Amazon

Much like Christian Grey himself, the Fifty Shades trilogy is everywhere, overwhelming and relentless, dominating bestseller lists, metastatizing into countless imitators, and spawning an entire industry of gifts, CDs, boardgames and other branded merchandise, plus a feature film. Through sheer repetition and ubiquity, we find ourselves trying to accommodate it, even to make excuses for its flaws and offences. Some of the authors in this essay collection try too hard to put a positive spin on Fifty Shades. Even the collection’s  editor, Lori Perkins, says:

Some have wondered how a “classic” can be so “poorly written.” But I contend that it is not poorly written, but rather written in an everywoman’s voice, a necessary part of its success I once worked with an author who used plebian language…. When she returned my edits, she told me that she did indeed know the word “simultaneously,” but when she was fantasizing, she always used the phrase “at the same time as,” and she knew that her readers did as well. [Pg.3]

EL James’ prose is not “plebian” or “in an everywoman’s voice”, it’s just plain bad. You don’t need an MFA to read or write good prose or hot prose.

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Last Chance to Take the NCSF Consent Survey

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Sep 192012
 

The National Coalition on Sexual Freedom is running a survey on consent in BDSM, and they plan on closing it in two weeks. I think this is a worthy cause towards gathering data on an important issue.

I have some quibbles with the design of the survey, as some of the questions about personal rights extend well beyond the realms of BDSM. For example, one involves how much you believe a person can consent to being killed, which is far more likely to come up in the context of debilitating illness than anything resembling BDSM.

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