For lots of obvious reasons, people love to ruin and misrepresent BDSM. It’s titillating. It’s weird. It’s there for the storyteller’s taking to destroy, distort and exploit for whatever effect they seek. Here are two great examples.
The Frenchman and I last night watched the really terrible Roger Rees movie, Going Under. I was surprised to see Roger Rees’ hard cock at least three times. Not peeking out, either, but bobbing in the breezes. Woo! Sadly, even this generous revelation was not enough to save this truly appalling film. The BDSM scenes were tepid at best and certainly not remotely realistic. The woman who played the pro domme was annoying to watch with her atrocious acting and unbrushed hair. It would have been okay if it was actually a movie about a therapist curious about BDSM who makes an appointment with a dominatrix and winds up discovering his true sexuality. But no. It had to be this confused mess about a kinky therapist with a wife who apparently lets him see pro dommes, even when it’s clear that he’s fallen in love with the one he’s been seeing for the last two years. It starts at the point where he and the domme have already crossed lines. Roger’s character is this sniveling, sneaky bastard who takes advantage of his open-minded wife by trying to seduce his domme as soon as his wife goes away for the summer to write. The BDSM players are all emotionally screwed up jackasses, wrecking every relationship they have with their runty intimacy skills.
And then someone recently pointed this one out to me: “Writing the Whip.” It’s a “diary” by a supposed professional dominatrix on the site where the 6 Word Memoir thing was born. My pal asked me specifically to read the entry about kidnapping. Are you fucking kidding me? This woman claims to have drank “several flutes of champagne” before commencing a kidnapping scene — get this — in a foreign country with a guy who doesn’t speak English. Sorry to piss on your stilettos, Mistress 21-year-old Asian Pro Domme Ivy League School Graduate*, but you’re romping in the floaty dandelions of a Ridley Scott fantasy flick.
Of course now we’re getting onto the topic of how we live in a world of “reality” victims who gorge themselves on whatever excrement someone puts out there as long as they say it’s “real.” This is just beyond silly and dumb. Can’t we just acknowledge the fantasy and say, “Yes, but I like it anyway”? Whatever happened to loving soap operas and calling them “my stories,” taking the characters to heart because they’re people you can care about? It’s just baffling.
Now back at it.
* HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
At times, inchoate ideas (emotional wounds hurt deeper than physical pain?) threaten to congeal into an actual theme, but that turns out to be, like the rest of the film, a drawn-out tease.
Hm…that Real True Story does haze a certain Um, No quality to it as you describe it.