How BDSM Went Mainstream on TV
2016 is when it finally became clear: Kink isn’t just for weirdo side characters anymore.
Source: Gq.com.
USA – At the end of Transparent’s second season, Sarah Pfefferman (Amy Landecker) is adrift. She’s left her fiancée at the altar, and is caught between her constant support roles for her children, her siblings, and even for her immature parents. Then, during a spontaneous trip to a women’s music festival, she comes upon a clearing full of tattooed people in leather banging on drums and paddling each other.
Sarah asks one of them about a woman being led around on a leash. “She’s my naughty doggy,” she hears in response. Soon Sarah wants to try out “consensual power exchange,” and gets flogged against a tree—sending Sarah mentally hurtling through long-held fantasies about her high school disciplinarian. Played by adult film performer Jiz Lee, this is Pony, and soon, Pony is Sarah’s dom. Throughout the third season, Sarah goes to Pony as a form of release, working through her own neuroses while getting flogged.
In the last few years, BDSM as a lifestyle and set of sexual practices has become more visible than ever in pop culture. Though there have been a few films that attempted to depict practitioners, most Hollywood productions have used BDSM as a signal for danger—say, in the leather-and-chains horror of the Hellraiser series, or the sadistic murders of Bond Girl Xenia Onatopp. Some of this use of iconography makes sense—chains and whips are, after all, kinda scary. But mostly, it’s designed to make BDSM practices both “other”—that is, something “normal” people didn’t do—and titillating. Adults watching Hellraiser may have been scared away, but a lot of their kids weren’t.
This use of BDSM as shorthand for non-traditional sexuality blends especially into TV, where it fits seamlessly into the cop genre. Think of Lady Heather, a recurring dominatrix character on CSI who primarily serves as an “exotic” love interest for protagonist Gil Grissom. Or a slew of episodes of Law & Order: SVU where the squad does something that could be described as “delving” into an “underworld.” Or “Love Hurts,” an episode of medical cop show House where, in a twist, the patient of the week (John Cho!) turns out to have a dominatrix.
Shock value has long been the name of the game. But in the past few years, BDSM has become increasingly mainstream on TV—largely thanks to the collected works of Ryan Murphy. Nip/Tuck featured a character named Mistress Dark Pain, who at one point rips a fishing hook out of a financier’s nipple. It’s over-the-top and grotesque, but, crucially, no more so than anything anyone else does on the show—everyone in Nip/Tuck, and in the larger Murphyverse, is a deviant at heart. Murphy’s taste for leather runs through American Horror Story, which heavily promoted its first season with the image of a rotating man in a gimp suit, and which might as well be called Antiques Roadshow: Fetish Gear Edition. As Murphy’s sensibility has become ever-more ubiquitous, the shock value has subsided, and it becomes easier to imagine something like Castle’s surprisingly BDSM-friendly episode “The Mistress Always Spanks Twice,” or Pony and Sarah’s far more banal subplot on Transparent.
There are some deviations between Sarah’s experience and that of most real people involved in BDSM; in particular, Lee says, “it’s not often you have a [woman] as a client in sex work”—something the show explicitly acknowledges when Sarah scares Pony into quitting the business and has a hard time finding a replacement. And these scenes are an indication of what some current TV shows and movies are doing right. The Transparent producers asked if Lee if wanted to have a consultant on-set specifically during the filming of BDSM scenes. Lee asked longtime friend Nina Hartley—a porn star, sex educator, and BDSM lifestyle player—to take the job.
Most Hollywood depictions of BDSM are a sore spot for Hartley: “What they always get wrong,” she says, “is missing/being deaf to the emotional/orientational/romantic/loving underpinnings of BDSM behavior. They may be able to copy the clothes, language, action or other visible aspects of such a dramatic sexual dance, but if they’re fundamentally conventional in their own sexual outlook they will forever be tone deaf as to the ‘why’ of it all.”
“Often, straight productions use BDSM elements or imagery as comic relief or as a signifier of some mental/emotional disorder,” she says. “It’s not. BDSM is a sexual orientation and a person can have none of it, a small dose, all the way up to all-kink-all-the-time.”
In an email to me, though, Hartley took pains to emphasize the way Transparent endeavored to “get the details and emotions right and not make a mockery or parody of simply the behavior.” As another positive depiction of BDSM, Hartley offers Showtime’s Billions, in which Paul Giamatti’s character and his wife, played by Maggie Siff, have a dom-sub marriage.
There are jokes during Transparent’s BDSM scenes, but they’re almost all at the expense of Sarah’s neuroticism. “I never felt like they would shame BDSM folks, [or that] I would become the butt of the joke.”
For Hartley, these portrayal problems mostly exist because the people making movies have never actually experienced the thing they’re trying to capture. Hartley’s husband is porn director and writer Ernest Greene, and “Until I had the experience of BDSM/power exchange with a partner whose fundamental sexuality is based on consensual power exchange,” she says, “I had no idea why someone would put on a collar and call themselves a ‘slave.'”
Accordingly, Transparent’s self-consciously queer, sexually diverse production staff was a natural place to get a BDSM relationship right. Lee describes their experience as being like “indie production, but with money.” There are jokes during the BDSM scenes, but they’re almost all at the expense of Sarah’s neuroticism. “I never felt like they would shame BDSM folks, or sex workers, or that they would throw me under the bus and I would become the butt of the joke.”
Of course, it would be impossible to discuss Hollywood’s depictions of BDSM without addressing the big grey elephant in the room. Jacky St. James, a long-time porn director, sighs when you ask her about Fifty Shades of Grey. “What bothered me particularly about that wasn’t the story.” She pauses and laughs. “It is what it is—it wasn’t the writing.” Instead, she says, “it was the fact that it was a very dangerous depiction of BDSM that was, in some ways, educating the public incorrectly.” In St. James’ telling, even the ostensibly positive parts of Fifty Shades—in particular, the contract between Anatasia Steele and Christian Grey—don’t make up for the fact that the contract is breached, and the relationship is decidedly, toxically unhealthy.
In part as a response to Fifty Shades of Grey, St. James pitched Showtime on Submission, a six-episode miniseries that depicts, in her words, “imperfect people in BDSM relationships.”
There are, admittedly, boundaries in what a movie or (especially) a TV show can depict in its pursuit of getting BDSM “right.”
For St. James, the key to filming submission was this: Shooting a BDSM scene, even for a Hollywood production, requires essentially the same boundaries as a genuine relationship. Because where vanilla sex scenes can be simulated, it’s much harder to pretend someone is being hung from a ceiling. In one of Submission’s most intense scenes, Ashley is mummified—covered fully in Saran wrap. On set the day they filmed it, the production team had additional coverage angles planned in case she responded too negatively to the process, and a consultant was on set to communicate to actress Ashlynn Yennie exactly what was going to happen and ensure she was capable of using a safeword to stop filming.
There are, admittedly, boundaries in what a movie or (especially) a TV show can depict in its pursuit of getting BDSM “right.” St. James initially wanted to explore breath play in Submission, but didn’t pursue it, anticipating pushback from Showtime. But generally speaking, the landscape has rarely been friendlier to accurate, fictional depictions of BDSM practices.
Embracing the sillier side of BDSM—the sillier side of relationships, really—is one of Lee’s favorite elements of the Transparent role, from the frequent jokes about Sarah to the way Pony takes payment on a Square reader, which they describe as “just hilarious.” Hartley is a bit more serious, laying out a vision of Hollywood productions about BDSM that fully involve “those individuals who are leaders in the kink community, known teachers, pioneers, educators, etc. and actually listen to what they say.”
It’s possible, of course, that focusing on the accuracy of portrayals of BDSM has, to an extent, thrown a fence around the places BDSM storylines can go, artistically. But St. James thinks getting it right is important, if only so you can ignore the right-wrong question, period, in the future. “The next time, if you garner the respect, or at least the audience gloms onto it and enjoys it,” she says, “then you have a little more room to play.”
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