The following contains spoilers for I want your sex (2026), starring Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman, and directed by Gregg Araki.
Elliot Bell is an aimless, unemployed 20-something man. He gets a job as an assistant to an eccentric artist, Erika Tracey, which leads to him being her lover and her submissive.
“The Gang Gets Satirized and Doesn’t Like It” is S04E04 of the legal comedy-drama TV series The Good Fight, aired May 7, 2020.
One of the law firm’s clients is upset because he believes he is being caricatured in a popular play, C*cksucker in Chains. He says he wants them to “gawker” it, which basically means “Somebody’s talking about me in a way I don’t like, and I’m rich enough to shut them up.”
The play was written by a former employee of the law firm, and the characters and relationships do bear a carnivalesque likeness. Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski), the series’ lead, is caricatured as a lawyer who rips off her business suit to reveal a dominatrix outfit beneath. The caricature of Diane’s boss, a black man, rips off his business suit to reveal an antebellum slave costume, and is rapturously dominated by the lawyer-dominatrix, including bullwhipping and anal penetration with a dildo (off camera).
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.
Anna (Ashley Dougherty) in session with May (Mariel Molino)
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.
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation series finale “Immortality”
A suicide bombing in a casino brings the gang back together for one last case. Never mind that Willows is now an FBI agent and has a conflict of interest because she owns the casino, and Grissom left law enforcement to become a maritime vigilante.
One of the pieces of debris from the bomb vest is a square of metal marked “LHK”, which Grissom recognizes as the monogram of “Lady Heather Kessler”. (She used her real last name as a pro-domme?)
After Molly, Niki and Sonya celebrate the one-year anniversary of Molly’s cancer return, she has another dom-sub session with Neighbor Guy. Along the way, Molly gets turned on with him, but her anxiety returns, represented by a vision of a man with a blurry face. She partially opens up to Neighbor Guy about her childhood sexual abuse, and that she’s never had an orgasm with another person. She tells him she wants to try to orgasm with him, and he’s eager to help.
In S01E05, “My Pet”, Molly continues seeing (and dominating) Neighbor Guy, and starts seeing Pet, a man into puppyplay, complete with costume and collar. However, she hasn’t told either of them about her cancer. She orders Neighbor Guy to finish himself off and goes into the bathroom to finish herself off with a vibrator.
Dying for Sex is a 2025 dramedy series about a woman, Molly, who is diagnosed with terminal cancer, and leaves her husband in search of sexual fulfillment.
In “Topping is a Sacred Skill”, the fourth episode of the first (and apparently only) season, Molly continues her exploration of her sexuality. In between episodes, she attended a BDSM play party and is intrigued by a dominant there known as G.
Dying for Sex is a 2025 dramedy series about a woman, Molly, who is diagnosed with terminal cancer, and leaves her husband in search of sexual fulfillment.
In S01E03 “Feelings Can Become Amplified”, Molly starts taking a medication that gives her mood swings, while also struggling with vaginal dryness. She has a peculiar relationship with a man in her apartment building (aka “Neighbor Guy”): she’s disgusted by him, but she has a “mistake orgasm” by masturbating while she can hear him masturbating through their shared thin wall.