Box Hill, subtitled A Story of Low Self-Esteem, is a 2020 novella by Adam Mars-Jones, which was adapted into the film Pillion (2025). An awkward young gay man becomes the live-in submissive of a charismatic biker.
This essay includes spoilers for Box Hill and Pillion.
Continue reading »No, it can’t, and it’s not supposed to.
When conservative culture turns its attention to BDSM as a practice and as a culture, the most common view is the neo-Puritanism position that kink is a perversion, the product of an overly permissive, decadent, pornified culture. The shock provides titillation.
However, sometimes the response is different, and the conservatives see BDSM as an application of their ideals. Take, for example, Kelly Brogan and Chantel Quick’s essay “Can BDSM heal the world?” (undated).
According to her website bio, Brogan is a certified psychiatrist, or rather was, as “Dr. Brogan chose not to renew her board certification which expired on 12/31/19”. She is certified in “Integrative Holistic Medicine, ABIHM (The specialty recognition identified herein has been received from a private organization not affiliated with or recognized by the Florida Board of Medicine).”
She is also a major figure in the COVID-denial movement and an anti-vaxxer.
Brogan’s essay opens up with a fairly typical description of bottoming in a bondage session, followed by touting it as the solution to marital problems. However, my whiskers twitched when I got to:
…I believe that we now have the opportunity to mature the insidious backdrops of warfare consciousness and the idea of every man and woman for themselves into the consciousness of complementarity and mutual service.
This is known as complementarianism, a theological view that the two (and only two) sexes are fundamentally different yet complementary. It’s a “separate but equal” idea of gender relations, that in practice tries to cover up a lot of gender inequality.
Brogan and Quick go from garbled Freudian psychology to conspiracy theory.
According to many, feminism was a Rockefeller-funded, socially engineered movement that offered women the poison apple of egalitarian opportunity, and in exchange, they were removed from their homes and role of primary caretaker of their children and added to the taxpayer population.
BDSM becomes the solution to what Brogan and Quick see as the problem of distorted gender roles; complementarianism in action. Their description starts off okay, talking about consent and safety:
BDSM organizes partners into defined roles, connects them through consensual agreements, and creates the conditions for ecstatic union to be channeled through the reclamation of safe power.
But then you notice things like the assumption that the sub must be female and the dom must be male. Though they reference a book written by a dominatrix, Kasia Urbaniak, and talk about using dom and sub roles to ask for money from an uncle, the essay soon returns to the essay of essential female submissiveness.
Why submit?
Because that’s actually what we want as women. We don’t want to be the best man in the room. We want to be well-handled by capable hands so we can finally exhale. Recently presenting at a Weston A. Price conference, I responded to a question about gender dynamics, in part, with the statement, “most women I know long to be well-handled by a powerful man,” and a sensual sigh swept across the 2,000 person room.
This ties into ideas of “surrender” and “a stable, strong, courageous, and intentional man stabilizing a woman’s nervous system”. They even argue that women will unconsciously create their own conditions of confinement, which Brogan ties to her own career struggles for being called one of the “Disinformation Dozen” for her anti-vaccination work.
When talking about the benefits of BDSM, the gender essentialism comes through again.
BDSM offers a framework to resolve the all-too-common pathology of cowering, insecure men and hen-pecking controlling women; when we get into Dom/Sub dynamics, a safety and coherence returns to the field that creates the conditions for true connection.
The essay concludes with a strange contortion of presenting a traditionalist view of heterosexual relationships as being a clever rebellion against the system.
The system would love to remain in charge of determining who’s been a bad girl, who hasn’t, and who gets what punishment, but wouldn’t it be better to empower your man to do that for you? 😉
You’d never know from this essay that BDSM includes switches, or LGBTQ people, or people who don’t engage in dom-sub at all. Brogan and Quick are drawing on the transgressive cachet of BDSM to sell gender essentialism with the promise of better sex and other life benefits that BDSM can’t necessarily deliver. Kink is not the solution to the made-up problem of “cowering, insecure men and hen-pecking controlling women”. Note also that the essay draws on a dominatrix’s book, and Brogan epitomizes the kind of well-educated, professional woman who makes a career out of selling anti-feminism, alongside general crack-pottery.
In my opinion, people should keep their fantasies and their politics separate. The “tradwife” ideal works better as a femsub/maledom fantasy/roleplay scenario than as an actual plan for life. Likewise, if you are a man who wants to pay some guy $10,000 for a weekend-long re-enactment of the first act of Full Metal Jacket, go right ahead; just don’t think it will fix whatever is eating at you.
Submission, also known as Scandalo, is a 1976 Italian drama film, set in WWII-era France on the eve of Germany’s invasion. Wartime stress builds up within a household until the breaking point.
It’s centered around the pharmacy run by pharmacist Eliane Michaud, who employs Juliette and Armand. Her house is upstairs, inhabited by her kind but distant intellectual husband, Henri, and her beautiful teenage daughter, Justine. (“Justine” and “Juliette” are likely references to two of the Marquis de Sade’s novels.)
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Secret Life of a Dominatrix is a 2024 made-for-TV movie directed by Gabby Revilla Lugo and starring Mariel Molino and Andrew Biernat.
Secret Life is clearly post-Fifty Shades as the inciting incident is a group of women reading an erotic novel in a book club, and it also draws on the Netflix “female-centric thriller” genre. Generically, it’s an heir to the tradition of the direct-to-cable or direct-to-video erotic thrillers and melodramas of the 1990s: female subjectivity and sexual development, upper-bourgeois setting, the acute anxiety of sex and danger in a post-HIV world, sex scenes that stay well-within the lines of an R rating.
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CSI usually follows a certain format: e.g. we rarely see action that isn’t from the perspective of an investigator or a detective. Episode S11E04 “Sqweegel” (aired October 14, 2010) radically departed from this rule, so much so that some scenes look more like a slasher or giallo film.
Someone is slashing famous people around Las Vegas with a straight razor. Through the usual forensics business, the CSIs find that the assailant was wearing a latex suit. One of them even comments, “Time to get kinky!”
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Air date: March 23, 2023, Director: Norberto Barba, Writer: Brendan Feeney
Two women, Zoe Greene and Jenna Scott, are in a nightclub. Jenna is pushing hard for Zoe to date again after the death of her husband. Jenna introduces Zoe to a dating app and gets her to connect to “Klaus Darcy”. Zoe’s online relationship with Klaus escalates to sexting, a little D&S, and gift exchanges, like lingerie. (Zoe mentions that she and her late husband used to get “a little freaky”.)
Zoe sets up a meeting with Klaus at a hotel room, including bondage with her late husband’s neckties. She’s wearing black lingerie and a collar with an O ring. The text messages tell her to pose by the window, and she answers “Yes, sir.”
Nothing had prepared me. Some years back I had read The Story of O [sic], intrigued by the beginning, horrified after a few pages, repulsed long before the end. Sadomasochists in real life were black-leather freaks, amusing and silly in their ridiculous getups. If a friend, a peer, had told me she had herself tied to a table leg at home after a full day’s work at the office– well, it has never come up. God knows I would not have believed it. [Pg.54]
Nine and a Half Weeks by Ingeborg Day under the pseudonym Elizabeth McNeill, published 1978, is the semi-autobiographical account of her brief, obsessive, masochistic affair with an unnamed man. It was eventually adapted into the notorious Nine and a Half Weeks film in 1986, starring Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke.
I had viewed and read about the film quite a bit before I read the short novel. It differs in several significant points. (For convenience, I will refer to the POV character as Elizabeth and her lover as John, though he is not named in the book.)
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Pillion is a 2025 romance/drama, directed by Harry Lighton and starring Alexander Skarsgard and Harry Melling IMDB
A shy gay man meets a handsome biker and becomes his submissive.
[Spoilers ahead]
Collin is an out but shy and inexperienced gay man. After singing in a barbershop quartet in a pub on Christmas Eve, he sees Ray, a tall, handsome biker who might have stepped out of a Tom of Finland illustration. Later that night, Ray is joined by a group of other bikers, some of whom are submissive to others. Ray discretely orders Collin to perform a small act of service. Collin complies, and Ray slips him his number.
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My most intriguing find in the Kinsey Archives was a 51-page mimeograph of a typewritten document from 1975, Bondage Fantasies in Popular Entertainment, attributed to “G. Allen Marburger.” It’s an idiosyncratic list of bondage scenes in mainstream film and television, possibly an unpublished magazine article, as there are references to kink-media company HOM (House of Milan).
Continue reading »Youtuber Matt Bernstein speaks with Moira Donegan and Adrian Daub (of the podcast In Bed With The Right) about “The Incoherent Sexual Politics of the Right”. The right wing/conservative resurgence we’ve seen over the past decade or so swings widely from the puritan to the libertarian in sexual matters. There’s a desperate scramble to seize the sexual high ground, to present themselves as the side of beauty and pleasure, and denigrate the sex of queer people and feminists as ugly and boring.
In particular, the conversation follows the trajectory of the “tradwife” image, epitomized by the “raw milkmaid dress”. They describe how the tradwife went from the epitome of conservative female modesty and domesticity to a sexualized fetish outfit over the span of only a year or two. Classically Abby, one of the best known advocates of tradwifism, shut down her Youtube channel late last year, because of the raunchy side of her supposed supporters.
There’s a long-standing precedent of female clothing that is supposed to de-sexualize the wearer becoming sexualized and fetishized; e.g. the French maid cliche. That a fetishized version of the tradwife image would appear so quickly is hardly surprising.
It represents the internal rift in the conservative movent, between the puritan and libertine wings. The image of the tradwife in Evie magazine, as modest yet seductive, sexually adventurous yet strictly hetero and monogamous, proved untenable. They couldn’t reconcile that dialectic.
Puritans and libertines have one thing in common: they both believe they should have control over other people’s bodies. In Margaret Atwood’s dystopian The Handmaid’s Tale, the patriarchal, theocratic fascists of Gilead subdivide women into specialized groups, each with their own sartorial code: handmaids in red for reproduction, wives in blue for running households, aunts in brown to manage handmaids, marthas in green for housework, and jezebels in fetish costumes from the old “decadent” days. They’re all different parts of the same system.
