Has bondage transitioned from a sidelined kink to the sexual mainstream? Or has it been part of it all along…
Source: Cosmopolitan.in
INDIA – The term ‘BDSM’ has been whispered for an epoch. The practice of ‘Bondage, Discipline (or Domination), Sadism, and Masochism’ was once a sexual subaltern; one that piqued curiosity but was never ‘for us’, the ‘normals’. ‘Kink’ in itself had a problematic connotation at its heart—a synonym for ‘flaw’ or ‘imperfection’; a thing that deviated from the sexual median, othering it from mainstream sex. Until, of course, the mainstream decided to co-opt it.
To be fair, BDSM was always laced through the archives of literature and cinema, should we have chosen to find it. It tried to roam free among us, shunned by a society that could not fathom the power of this extremity-based dynamic. John Wilmot’s Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery (1684) or Justine by Marquis de Sade (1791) date the practises back centuries, while cinema like Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967) or La Prisonnière (1968) by Henri-Georges Clouzot prove that it had been playing out onscreens for an engaged audience despite its purported ‘nicheness’
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