I’ve been on a kick lately of watching movies relating to the BDSM lifestyle and I’ve decided that I’ve yet to come across a decent movie with an accurate portrayal of a kink lifestyle. I’m a filthy fucking sadomasochist myself, so this is of particular interest to me.
I started off my marathon with Secretary, which is a movie I saw for the first time when I was 18 and I vividly remember it as the beginning of myself admitting that this is what I’m into. Watching it the second time though… Oh gads no. Don’t get me wrong, Maggie Gyllenhaal doing chores while shackled in arm restraints will forever be one of my most fapped to mental images. There’s some pleasantly dirty stuff going on in it and that’s awesome. What really irked me though was the portrayal of masochism.
Sure, there’s lots of instances of self-harmers later in life understanding that what they were doing was just misguided sadomasochism; I get that. But in a world where sadomasochism is still listed in the DSM as a paraphilia, this gets touchy.
The freaky, awesome shit I do in my bedroom with consenting partners shouldn’t get me put under a psych evaluation, but this movie completely reinforces the idea that there is an element of abuse to D/s type play.
I followed up Secretary with an episode of Secret Diary of a Call Girl in which she takes lessons on how to be a dominatrix, and my rage continued. I’ve noticed an influx lately of women trying to enter the professional world of BDSM as self-proclaimed Dominas because it sounds like easy money to them. Not every woman can put on a catsuit and flail a riding crop around.
Pro-Dommes that are skilled and truly in love with their work are hard to come by but I have the pleasure of being amazing friends with one of the best in Toronto. What she does in her scenes doesn’t even begin to compare to what these watered-down pro-Dommes, who can barely throw a flogger, do. For a character who is shown as so caring and considerate of her clients, she took one on whose fantasy she wholeheartedly was not prepared to fulfill. Just leave him to the pros, darling. We’ll take just fine care of him.
Next, I took in Tokyo Gore Police. Not necessarily a movie about kink per se, but its imagery is certainly heavily influenced by fetish culture. A vanilla friend of mine who I’ve brought to a fetish party actually watched it with me and mentioned that the party scene is probably what people think that kink parties are actually like. And he’s right. Fetish parties are really low-key, chill parties, not a whole bunch of masked people in latex rubbing on each other (though that would be awesome…); I don’t think I can actually even name a movie with a decent kinky party scene.
And that’s where I just got fed up. Why is it that in a world where 50 Shades of Grey is a #1 bestseller, we don’t have any accurate representations of actual BDSM culture as the healthy, vibrant community it is? Is that too much to fucking ask? BDSM is treated like such a dirty little secret. Middle-aged white women can get off to some shitty book, but if an RCMP officer has a profile on a kinky social networking site he gets fired, publicly outed and shamed? Not cool, guys.
No one is lily white. We’ve all got demons in our bedroom closet. Let them out to play sometime. I promise, the world will not burn because of it.
Read more: http://www.filmthreat.com/blogs/54437/#ixzz24PDeLrRC