Mistresses, Madams and Super-Heroes

(Long Article)

La cérémonie

“Mistresses, Madams and Super-Heroes: The Rising Affection for the Dominatrix” 

In a previous publication, with the audience studies on-line research journal Participations, I listed a short range of stereotypes found in popular culture of practitioners in the BDSM ‘scene’ – BDSM referring to Bondage, Domination and Sadomasochism, a range of practices and lifestyles which are part of the playing out of narratives or scenarios of power exchange, both sexual and non-sexual, for the pleasure of all involved. These stereotypes I labelled: the Mature Dominatrix and her typical partner, the Young Male Sub; also the Vamp Dominatrix and the Public Authority Male Sub. The Mature Dominatrix is a sexually rapacious yet motherly figure, often from a working-class background, epitomised – or perhaps established in our imagination by – the great British madam, Cynthia Payne. Typically, this stereotype will be seen with her binary opposite, the naïve, weedy Young Male Sub who is humiliated by her admonishments and punishments. The Vamp Dominatrix is a more enchanting, sensational stereotype, she is younger and more attractive and is more likely to appear to be middle or upper class, or perhaps an exotic Other from France or Japan. She is far more dangerous in her practices than the Mature Dominatrix, and so is easily able to take in hand the Public Authority Male Sub in his more hard-core punishments. He requires, and can afford, relief from his important role in society as judge, politician, senior police officer, and so forth. The Mature Dominatrix typically appears as part of a satirical comic episode or advertisement, and whilst the Vamp Dominatrix also appears in such an episode, the laugh is more on the Male Sub than on the dangerous female herself. It is not too hard to see that part of the popular consumption of these stereotypes, one of the things that allows them to be popular, is the satirising of the normative behaviour of the masculine male by causing him to submit to a dominant female. The submissive female does not conform to our sensibilities: the woman who wishes to submit to a dominant male, despite being in a role-played SM scenario may be regarded as setting back feminism about fifty years.

Today, I would like to move on from these stereotypes to explore representations of the Dominatrix in the context of representations of women, apply some key critical frameworks and highlight some other roles and environments in which she operates, sometimes under a very different guise. Very little is written about the Dominatrix as represented in the media, and what can be found is within relatively recent work that is principally concerned with the increase of ‘tough’ or ‘dominant’ roles for women in the movies from the 1980s onwards, and it is to some of these sources that I would like to turn before I propose a number of things.

If a hierarchy of dominant female characters were to be made it might begin with a wide, general category of dominant women. Within this broad category could be found, for instance, action heroines. They are the Lieutenant Ripleys, the Sarah Connors, the Nikitas of the 1980s and 1990s onwards, described variously by critics as ‘figurative males’ (Carol Clover), ‘Dirty Harriets’ (Cora Kaplan), ‘macho macho femmes’ (Lisa Shroder), all with ‘masculinised female bodies’ (Yvonne Tasker). Also within the broad category of dominant women could be found the list of tough women types from Yvonne Tasker: the tomboy, the feisty heroine, the protective mother, the official female partner, the wife/partner and the female partner as racial other. Alongside these tough-but-good women can be found the female psychopath, as analysed by Deborah Jermyn in her exploration of Single White Female, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle and so forth.

Each of these female characters, both good and bad, is tough, in the sense that they are often physically strong, they are goal-orientated, and they are active subjects in terms of affecting the course of the narrative. It is no surprise, then, that they are often regarded as ‘figurative males’, since they may be considered to demonstrate a number of signifiers of masculinity, according to the patriarchal binary opposition of active male subject / passive female object. Sherrie A. Inness traces the development of these dangerous, tough women across the twentieth century through movies, TV and comics, and asserts that there is an evident increase of such characters in recent years, down to the effects of second-wave feminism. Representations of the Dominatrix, similarly, have become evident and she can be found to sit comfortably in this hierarchy, perhaps more prominently than many.

Previous to the 1980s, the Dominatrix was rarely seen on screens outside of the private members’ club or the niche cinema in London. An exception would be Ariane, the professional Vamp Dominatrix of Maîtresse, from Barbet Schroeder in 1976, who teaches Gerard Depardieu the ‘ropes’ in her Paris dungeon, and to whom I shall be referring a fair bit today.

The Dominatrix then, is another woman who fits comfortably within the overarching category of dominant women. Perhaps she is the dominant woman par excellence, the epitome of tough, dangerous, dominant women. But as well as this character, I shall also discuss another category that I shall identify as the Temporary Dominatrix, a figure that is – perhaps – more common than we might realise.

Before I turn to representations of actual Dominatrices, I would like to highlight an article from Jeffrey A. Brown: “Gender, Sexuality and Toughness: The Bad Girls of Action Film and Comic Books” (2004). Jeffrey A. Brown comments regarding the action heroine: “At a fundamental level every action heroine, not just those who are explicitly sexualised, mobilizes the spectre of the dominatrix” (p. 50). Within the representations of these tough women, there is something of the dominatrix to be found, and from what he argues it is not simply a matter of the look of the woman. Brown challenges a view from Elizabeth Hills, that action heroines are regarded as ‘pseudo males’ because they are subjected to psychoanalysis, which itself depends upon the binary opposition of active male / passive female.

Hills’ perspective is that these women transcend gender, they break its boundaries. Brown, alternatively, argues that this character is transgressive: “not because she operates outside of gender restrictions but because she straddles both sides of the psychoanalytic gender divide” (p. 52). In a sense, then, she is both masculine and feminine, both active and passive, both subject and object.

Brown goes on to discuss the film Barb Wire in which Pamela Anderson plays Barb, a contemporary re-write of Bogart’s Rick from Casablanca in a dystopian crime-filled urban America. He writes that Anderson is seen “performing both femininity and masculinity at the same time” and that she has a “cartoonishly sexualised body” (p.58), one that is, in fact, a “dangerous weapon”. The combination of gender performances, an exaggerated “hyperfeminine” body, and big guns, turn her into a dangerous weapon in and of herself. He then goes on to argue the following, which is core to my own approach towards the tough, dominant woman on screen: “The fetishization of these Bad Girls with guns, swords, and whips does not so much mark them as masculine as it marks them as dominatrixes. It is no coincidence that Pamela Anderson is clad in leather bondage wear throughout Barb Wire” (p. 64).

Both in performance and in mise-en-scène, tough women on screen repeatedly appear, if not literally as a Dominatrix, at least in her guise, even her manner. Think, for example of the costuming and active determination of vampire superhero Selene (Kate Beckinsale) in the Underworld films (Len Wiseman, 2003 and 2006), or Selina Kyle’s alter ego as Cat Woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) in Batman Returns (Tim Burton, 1992). Rubber, PVC, even whips are part of the look of these women, helping to accentuate and display their fit, powerful bodies. Brown’s comment on this kind of female is that she “mocks masculinity as she enacts it” (p. 69) – although she performs masculinity alongside certain exaggerations of patriarchal signs of femininity, she also signifies a threat and a challenge to patriarchal control, to masculine control, by her very nature as gender transgressor. It is in this respect that she sits as both fetishised object and active subject, even an exciting role-model for the female spectator.

And this appeal need not be found in the super-heroes and villains, they can also be found in the dangerous women of films such as Basic Instinct and Single White Female. Deborah Jermyn’s discussion on the female psychopath proposes that she is violent, cunning, monstrous, yes, but can also be read as “offering progressive or oppositional possibilities for female spectators, for confronting dilemmas and exercising a behaviour in which they are not usually allowed to indulge” (p. 252). Like several critics, these tough women, both heroines and villains, are being regarded by Jermyn as a door to new possibilities for female viewers, an invitation to find the dominant woman within.

And, like the Dominatrix herself, the tough female character both fascinates and repels, rather like the monstrous-feminine as understood by Barbara Creed. Perhaps there is a space, then, for the fascination to be a valid viewing pleasure for the female spectator as well as the gazing male spectator.

Much of what has been written about tough women can be applied to the Dominatrix herself, and it is to a brief study of her that I now turn. Whether constructed in a comic or a dramatic mode, she is a spectacle. Typically, as with the Keep Britain Tidy advertisement from 2005, the Mature Dominatrix is cast to-be-laughed at as much as to-be-looked-at. The Vamp Dominatrix is, as I mentioned earlier, less the function of the joke than is her male client – as seen in Payback, in which Mistress Pearl (Lucy Liu) enacts ever-increasingly sadistic practices upon a male submissive. As you can see from these examples, the women display visual signifiers of femininity in their hair, make-up and costume. It is in their dominance that they demonstrate the straddling of gender, as argued by Jeffrey Brown, performing signifiers of active, strong masculinity through orders, insults, humiliation and (usually) mild violence or bondage.

Mistress Pearl is a useful example of the Dominatrix on-screen. Her presence in the film, operating as a form of light-relief from the film’s dark and violent events, is consequently in the margins of the narrative. She is part of a sub-narrative strand and so is marginalised. The placement of the Dominatrix in the margins, with a minimum of screen time, contributes to her two-dimensional stereotyping and her function as narrative shorthand for perversion.

She may even contribute to a range of signifiers of a corrupt and disintegrating society, as can be found in Gregg Araki’s Totally F***ed Up (1993), in which a Dominatrix is seen on screen for a matter of seconds only, dragging an unconscious body down concrete steps, while a central character walks by. The episode remains unexplained and unresolved. She is never seen again.

The marginalisation of the Dominatrix does not stop with this kind of narrative displacement. Films which explore the life of the Dominatrix as the core narrative concern also reveal her to be marginalised. Two films that I shall return to several times today, Maitresse (the French film from Barbet Shroeder) and Preaching to the Perverted (by Stuart Urban), both place their Dominatrices in hidden or marginalised spaces.

Tanya Cheex (Guinevere Turner) runs her extensive BDSM business from a deserted part of East London, in a quiet street that only receives visits from the milkman (played by Keith Allen) and various delivery men.

Ariane (Bulle Ogier) runs her business from her city apartment in Paris, a ‘normal’ dwelling one might say, in which a hidden dressing room can be reached by a set of hydraulic steps, and a marble-walled dungeon is hidden behind a screen. Rather like the down-at-heels Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell) of Edward Dmytryk’s Murder, My Sweet (1944), whose detective business is situated in the cheap, dark, abandoned part of the city, both of these Mistresses ‘hide’ their businesses. Despite the noticeable pink motif of perversity on the front door of Tanya Cheex’s business, it exists in the margins of London, and Ariane’s work is conducted in an anonymous apartment block behind closed doors. Both women’s clients are similarly anonymous, with features often completely hidden by a gimp mask, and access to Tanya’s website is so well-restricted that it takes Peter, the Christian working for the government to prosecute her for actual bodily harm, an entire day to crack.

These hidden places help to reinforce the forbidden nature of the practices in the dungeon, but they also situate the Dominatrix herself in hiding. She cannot exist as the Dominatrix outside of these places, or else she risks further marginalisation – as experienced by Tanya in Preaching to the Perverted when police move her on as she talks to children in the street about their dog. She suffers here the kind of treatment accorded to the streetwalker, the prostitute, and of course that is a key factor in public attitudes to the Dominatrix: that she is herself a whore who sells sexual practices for money. Regardless of the inaccuracy of this assumption for the real Dominatrix, she is certainly widely regarded as a prostitute and this contributes to her construction on screen.

When two petty thieves break into Ariane’s Paris apartment, one, Olivier (Gerard Depardieu), is invited to help her humiliate a client by urinating on his face. Olivier’s partner-in-crime then asks, “What is this place? A brothel?”

It is an assumption that has, one might argue, some validity, given the well-known stories of Cynthia Payne’s luncheon-voucher business in Streatham in the seventies and eighties. Her business was the subject of a film dramatisation starring Julie Walters, Terry Jones’s Personal Services (1987), in which sex takes place under the same roof as bondage, transvestism and corporal punishment. But whether a typical aspect of the real business of a Dominatrix or not, it is not uncommon to assume that sexual practices are included. More on that later.

A second assumption is that the Dominatrix operates in the social sphere of the upper class, and the two films bear this out. Ariane takes Olivier to a country estate where she introduces him to a range of sadomasochistic practices, overseen by a servant (who is later revealed to be the owner of the estate).

Similarly, in Preaching to the Perverted, Tanya takes Peter to a large country house where a weekend of perversity is enjoyed by a range of participants, including the owner, Mr Cutts-Watson played by Roger Lloyd-Pack. It is a cliché of BDSM narratives, dating back further than Pauline Réage’s Story of O (1954) and its vivid events at the château of Roissy, further than Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs (1870) to the notorious French aristocrat, the Marquis de Sade himself, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The upper class cliché is similarly borne out by the male submissive stereotype, the Public Authority Male Sub, who is busy, responsible, intellectual and wealthy. The aristocratic arena, and the personalities found within it, add a class-dimension to the Dominatrix’s ‘otherness’, who thus endorses a class-based society.

So, constructions of the Dominatrix on screen have a range of familiar signifiers: she operates in marginalised spaces, she is marginalised by everyday society whilst accepted within upper-class society, and she is commonly regarded in the same light as the prostitute. These aspects, however, take little account of the spectacle of the Dominatrix. I have mentioned earlier the views of critics such as Brown and Hills who incorporate ideas of gender performance into their assessment of tough and dangerous women on screen. We should return to this concept of performance in observing the Dominatrix, since so much of her business involves performance.

A dominant element of the Dominatrix on screen, and one could argue off screen, is performativity, a critical concept of gender also (from Judith Butler and others). Tanya Cheex in Preaching to the Perverted literally enters the ‘play-space’ through curtains as if walking onto a stage. Her hair, make-up and costume all conform to the expectations of the Dominatrix – she is playing the role – and as such appears to have constructed herself to-be-looked-at. The club nights hosted by her business, the House of Thwax, include stage performances, such as a pseudo-slave auction or the use of a violet wand on a woman dressed as a nun. Ariane is even seen preparing for her ‘role’ as Dominatrix, sitting in front of a mirror resembling that found in a theatre dressing room. The performative aspect of the Dominatrix’s look and behaviour parallels the performative nature of BDSM, in which role-playing is a mainstay of its common behaviours. Costumes, scenarios, name-calling, all are repeated conventions of the ‘genre’ of BDSM pleasures, expectations that are desired and fulfilled. The Dominatrix herself plays the role of the immovable Mistress who is harsh, tough and knowledgeable.

Given that the majority of the clients found in these films are male, there is a direct power exchange performed in which the male becomes passive and the female becomes active. Thus, an interesting dichotomy arises in which the Dominatrix becomes masculinised active subject, whilst remaining feminised object to-be-looked-at. In accord with Jeffrey Brown’s conclusions about tough women on screen, the Dominatrix ‘straddles’ gender performances, potentially offering a breadth of viewing pleasures to male, female, straight, gay and beyond. Despite the undeniable evidence for her construction as male fantasy, because her clients are typically male submissives, men are repeatedly constructed as objects. No doubt much could be said about fetishisation of the dominant woman, the threat of castration embodied in male submissives, and pre-Oedipal fantasies, but certainly it appears that the joke is quite firmly on the men themselves, tied up, suspended, punished, and even placed in nappies. Tanya Cheex, as part of her transgressive performance, is accorded the gaze at these male objects as she enters the play-spaces of her business, with a series of point of view shots at her clients. The joke extends to a rather childish trick verging on misandry (hatred of men) which awaits male visitors to the venue, who receive an electric shock if they press the doorbell for ‘Men’. And, of course, the spectacle of men punished on screen amplifies their objectification, in scenes from Maîtresse, for example, in which clients are punished in real-time on screen, and red welts can be seen to emerge on the skin. It is these characters, these male clients, that now suffer the two-dimensional fate of so many stereotypes, both male and female. Even in films such as the comedy Personal Services, which works so hard to validate its characters, the male clients are construed as lonely and often sad, as isolated as their Mistresses.

The Dominatrix, then, can be found on screen to be a transgressive character who directly disregards conventional boundaries of gender behaviour. Despite her complete acceptance of clichéd hyperfeminine costuming and presentation of her body, she enacts a reversal of the patriarchal power struggle in which ‘women win’, and so offers a space for the female viewer to vicariously enjoy breaking the rules.

However, what is ‘won’ in terms of the Dominatrix’s transgression is summarily ‘lost’ in the name of character complexity and an apparent ambition for authenticity. Ariane of Maîtresse is in the Domme business in order to support her son, and she is effectively enslaved by the rich and powerful businessman, Gautier, who is also the father of her son. During one dungeon session she begins to hyperventilate and rushes to Olivier claiming that she “can’t give what they want anymore.” Later, after one of several arguments, she tells Olivier that her problem is not with what she does, but with her affection for him which, she says, scares her. The impermeable Dominatrix is swiftly compromised, made vulnerable, a woman who fears and loves, a woman who runs out of ideas and strength, and thus needs the arms of a man to comfort her.

Similarly, Tanya finally admits to Peter, the Christian infiltrating her business for the government, that her darkest fantasy is ‘vanilla sex’, meaning conventional, heterosexual sex. That which is ‘normal’ in mainstream society is perverted to her character, and she goes on to despise both herself and Peter for engaging in it. The episode suggests that even the most professional and transgressive of Dominatrices must succumb to normative, heterosexual attraction. At another stage in the film she reads her diary entries written as a young girl wishing for a heroic knight to save her. Both examples, then, show the Dominatrix to have flaws, because they have everyday desires and neuroses, in what, no doubt, is an effort to create a three-dimensional female character.

To a degree, the films redeem themselves, but in very different ways. The narrative of Maîtresse spirals into an open, rather avant-garde ending involving a sex whilst driving and hysterical laughter as Ariane and Olivier stumble away from their car wreck; unconventional to the last. Ariane is not made normal, she is not finally reconciled with the patriarchal family unit, and she serves her own sexual needs. Tanya, after a court-case in which Peter is found in contempt of court for her sake, is last seen heavily pregnant with Peter’s child and collecting him from prison. She reveals that she has kept the child because she is Pagan and respects the circle of life. The film ends with Peter working as her manager, and her business continuing as usual, despite a genuine nursery being on the premises. She does, therefore, take on the conventional role of mother, but retains her freedom as working woman. Although she clearly has an affection for Peter, she makes it clear that he will not have regular sex with her, and the film ends with a gaze at her enigmatic, and rather sad, portrait.

The two films go some way to breaking down some of the assumptions about the Dominatrix, and they inject some complexity into their characters. It is ironic, though, that in so doing the Dominatrix herself loses much of her subjective control and appeal, and is partially reclaimed by patriarchal sentiments, despite retaining an element of enigma at the end of each narrative. This kind of treatment, in this kind of depth, is relatively rare, although central Dominatrix figures are becoming more common – such as Lady Heather in, so far, four episodes of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation on American television. Rather more common is the final category that I would like to explore today, the Temporary Dominatrix.

The label given here I can credit to the article by Chris Straayer, “Redressing the Natural: The Temporary Transvestite Film” in which the temporary transvestite is found to cross-dress for a purpose other than the enjoyment of transvestism, to get a job, for example, or to escape gunmen. Once the objective is accomplished (the job is secured, the gunmen are arrested), the cross-dresser is then free to return to normative gender behaviour. I would like to argue for recognition of a comparable character type, the Temporary Dominatrix, albeit a role that is played far more briefly in the narratives I will identify. She is a woman who momentarily dons the garb and conduct of the Dominatrix for a particular gain and, once that goal is achieved she reverts to her normative behaviour.

I return, firstly, to Barb Wire. Barb, for the purpose of fulfilling her night-job as bounty-hunter-stroke-hit-woman, schmoozes her way into the apartment of a man who lives nextdoor to one of her targets. She has gotten into his room by soliciting him in the street (a return to the prostitute assumption of the Dominatrix) and dressing in black, revealing leather, and a collar. Anderson’s look and performance in this film already raises, as Brown puts it, the ‘specter of the Dominatrix’. Here, however, Barb plays the role of the Dominatrix for a brief period, tempting her sweaty, overweight victim into his full-body gimpsuit before using his wooden paddle to knock him unconscious. Once the man is out of the way, she is able to dispense her hitwoman duties on his neighbour nextdoor. Despite the fact that Barb hits her victim so hard that the paddle is broken, she puts on a very convincing Dominatrix act. It fulfils typical expectations of the Dominatrix, being toughness, humiliation of her male submissive and some form of corporal punishment or restraint. She appears to slip into the role seamlessly, strictly asking the man when he emerges from the bathroom if he has washed his hands. She is a natural. And so one might expect from such a character as Barb.

A second example comes from One Night at McCool’s (Harald Zwart, 2001). Jewel, played by Liv Tyler, uses a combination of guile and sex appeal to manipulate and devastate three men. Responsible for a murder that she aims to pin on one of her devotees, she persuades a lawyer to provide her with legal advice by tying him to a bed and punishing him with a leather crop, making him shout out “I will offer you legal advice!” Again, she seems to be a natural Dominatrix, knowing what to do, how to tie effective knots, what commanding tone to adopt and so forth, and swiftly gets what she wants. She wears elbow length gloves, stockings, corset and a black wig – quite strongly reminiscent of Ariane in Maîtresse. The scene immediately following this shows her returned to her summery, flowery dress and flowing red hair. Her episode as Dominatrix was brief and purposeful, and no less part of her manipulation of emasculated men than her strongly sexualised and very soapy car-washing routine. Like Barb, it is not that surprising to find such a female character, effectively a gold-digger, playing the role of the Dominatrix temporarily.

A third example can be found in which another gold-digger, this time played by Sigourney Weaver in Heartbreakers (David Mirkin, 2001), uses the role of the Dominatrix in order to relieve herself of the attentions of a previous victim who has come calling again, Dean, played by Ray Liotta. As a more mature, yet equally seductive, Temporary Dominatrix, Weaver’s character Max ties Dean to a hotel bed to keep him out of the way of her current crime. She ties all the right knots, and says all the right words, eventually leaving him restrained, blindfolded and alone. Time could be spent exploring the irony of seeing Weaver herself, the subject of much debate on the representation of tough women, performing the act of the Dominatrix, perhaps fulfilling many a fantasy. Far more than Pamela Anderson and Liv Tyler, Weaver has consistently represented the dominant, dangerous woman on screen, and thus it may come as no surprise that she performs the Temporary Dominatrix so well.

The conclusion that could be drawn from these examples is that the dominant, dangerous woman can effortlessly and convincingly enter the role of the Dominatrix for her own purposes. She is likely to be the kind of woman that is strongly independent, has a lust for money and is both naturally seductive and traditionally attractive.

However, it is possible to find the Temporary Dominatrix emerging in some less likely places. In the scene following Max’s departure, a maid comes calling to clean the room. She is a version of the black mammy stereotype, identified in movies and popular culture by Donald Bogle as asexual. She shows no surprise at a man being tied to the bed, but launches into a complaint that the guests of the room have never tipped her. In an effort to make her leave, Dean directs her to take twenty dollars from his wallet. When she then finds a second wallet, he cries out to be released from the bed, to which she instantly replies “That’ll be another twenty.” This is not simply a financially savvy maid – this is an everyday woman, with an everyday job, who has a streak of the Dominatrix about her. A Friends of the Earth on-line campaign advert about global warming constructs the same character: this time Bella Emberg (the co-star of Russ Abbott’s comedy shows), as hotel maid, bursts in on a Dominatrix with a politician, and launches into a vitriolic attack on him for ignoring environmental issues.

Could it be that there is an implication that inside every subservient woman lurks a dominant woman? Or even, inside every woman can be found a Dominatrix waiting to be unleashed? Maybe it sounds absurd, but the instances of female characters bursting into a brief performance against-type are not that uncommon.

Think of one final example, this time an apparently naïve, gauche female character, Michelle (Alyson Hannigan) in American Pie (Paul Weitz, 1999). The majority of her performance is made up of breathy, gulpy stories about ‘one time at band camp’, until the climactic moment when she climbs on top of central protagonist Jim (Jason Biggs) ordering “Say my name, bitch!”, drawing one of the biggest laughs of the film. And this raises an important issue – is the Temporary Dominatrix played for laughs, as if to say that it is ridiculous that women might have a dominant streak hidden within? Or does the Temporary Dominatrix offer a post feminist space for the female viewer to entertain dominant behaviour without committing herself to literally becoming a Dominatrix?

There is no simple answer given that the laugh may be on either the dominant woman or the dominated man, she may be either a primary or a secondary character, she may be unassuming or consistently dangerous. Whatever she is, she appears as both spectacular object and effectively active subject.

– Cine Excess II Conference, London, 3rd May 2008 By Jenny Barrett

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