Secret Life of a Dominatrix is a 2024 made-for-TV movie directed by Gabby Revilla Lugo and starring Mariel Molino and Andrew Biernat.

Secret Life is clearly post-Fifty Shades as the inciting incident is a group of women reading an erotic novel in a book club, and it also draws on the Netflix “female-centric thriller” genre. Generically, it’s an heir to the tradition of the direct-to-cable or direct-to-video erotic thrillers and melodramas of the 1990s: female subjectivity and sexual development, upper-bourgeois setting, the acute anxiety of sex and danger in a post-HIV world, sex scenes that stay well-within the lines of an R rating.

Secret Life is a little disappointing in the last regard, as there aren’t even any bare breasts, presumably to meet the requirements of the free streaming service Tubi. (One might ask, what is the point of a PG-rated erotic thriller?)

May, our protagonist, talks about a book called Secret Life of a Dominatrix with her book group. She’s stuck in a stifling marriage with Kurt, who is frequently absent with work, and an equally unsatisfying job. Kurt is not-so-subtly pushing her into the role of stay-at-home tradwife, and brings up her failed pregnancy and her affair with another man the previous year. For that, she gets to watch Hallmark romances with him, followed by uninspired missionary action.

Meanwhile, news reports in the background mention someone killing sex workers, dubbed the “Red Light Ripper.” May finds things like coming home to an open front door, or slashes in her car’s tires.

A member of May’s book group wrangles invitations to the exclusive fetish club Hide & Seek, and they take the opportunity to dress up. May looks awkward, wearing a cheerleader outfit. I will commend Secret Life for having kink party scenes at Hide & Seek in which the people have a variety of ages, ethnicities and body types. May and her friends take in the sights. May is taken with the venue’s owner/manager, Governess Anna, and says she wants people to look at her the same way.

Anna takes May down to the dungeon. It’s not clear whether this is a fetish club with a pro-dungeon attached, or somehow both? May is initiated into kink, though with a few struggles along a way. She grows as a dominant and re-establishes her home business too, while Kurt drifts further away. Meanwhile, the “red light killer” strikes again and again.

When May discovers that Kurt has also been going to Hide & Seek in secret to dominate women, she keeps at her dual life. She becomes friends with the staff at Hide & Seek, and gives them custom jewelry. However, Dee is soon killed by the ripper. May meets with her ex-lover, a cop, and is motivated to try to reconnect with Kurt by submitting to him.

Kurt isn’t just cheating on May, he’s the killer too. He’s been leading a Jekyll-and-Hyde life, squeezing May into a cutesy-couple Hallmark movie life while taking out his misogyny on other women. May manages to escape her bonds and strangle him to death with a whip.

Secret Life is a mess as a work of film. The story feels like somebody wanted to do a narrative of female sexual empowerment, and then some outside agency insisted on grafting on the thriller elements. The subplot about May’s previous affair is awkward; her former lover is introduced late in the film as if he is going to be a major character, but he never appears again.

Other things are just unexplained. Is Governess Anna’s establishment a pro-domme house or a kink club, or somehow both? Is May a client of Governess Anna or an employee? Where did May get the money to buy all her fetish outfits and gear, and re-build her jewelry business?

Finally, Secret Life commits a mortal sin of writing: after May’s final confrontation with Kurt, it cuts to the book club arguing about the ending. What we have seen has been the book series. May even talks about it as if she was the author all along. In other words, “It was all a dream.” I suppose we should be glad that Dee, the black sex worker killed by Kurt, is actually alive and well. But the ending confirms that Secret Life lacks the conviction to be erotically empowering or entertainingly sleazy.

You can watch my friend TammyJo and I discuss Sanctuary (2022).

High Maintenance is a comedy-drama series about a marijuana dealer, known only as “The Guy”, who encounters various people in the New York City area in the course of his business.

This episode, “Payday” (aired February 17, 2019), opens with a mock-kidnapping of a woman, Doc Lee (Margaret Cho), by a group of lesbians who drag her into a van and group-dominate her while a woman drives the van around town, all to celebrate her 50th birthday. Doc’s partner, Ayasha (Hye Yun Park), joins in. (I wonder if this was inspired by Patrick Califia’s short story “The Birthday Party”.) Later, Doc and her partner join the women at a bar for drinks. It’s all very fun and normalized for these people.

Later, we see Doc and Ayasha’s day-to-day relationship, notably the friction over the wealth discrepancy between middle-class academic Doc and working-class Ayasha. Doc decides to start sending money as “payment” to Ayasha for sex acts. This montage includes bondage, flogging, puppyplay, strap-on play, queening, a threesome, and other kinks. (They’re both switches.)

When the Guy drops by for their regular purchases, he refuses to take an e-transfer from Doc, so Ayasha pays him in cash. Later, Doc pays the same amount to Ayasha, which upsets her. Doc says she’s already transferred hundreds of dollars to Ayasha this month, so what’s some more? Ayasha says that she considers that their “play money” and she didn’t even transfer it into her bank.

This is kind of a version of findom, in which the exchange of money is itself the medium of power exchange. The problem comes when it becomes clear that Doc and Ayasha have different ideas about the role of money. Doc sees this as really paying Ayasha for services, something she can afford to do. Ayasha seems it as just a game, with no bearing on their non-scene life. (Presumably she expected to give the money back at some point.) Calling this exchange a real payment suddenly throws into stark relief who has money and who doesn’t. Doc refusing to let Ayasha pay for their marijuana purchases is a power play that Ayasha doesn’t like.

Ayasha: “I liked feeling like a hooker and not some charity case.”

Ayasha is upset for a while, but then she turns the situation around by using the e-transfer app to demand payments from Doc, and Doc agrees.

“Payday” treats the BDSM play between Doc and Ayasha as just an everyday thing. The real source of conflict is their differing relationships with money, which are only tangentially related to BDSM.

Margaret Cho has a background in BDSM, according to The Advocate: “Her parents owned a gay book store; Cho worked at a lesbian BDSM collective and had a brief stint as a dominatrix.”

Cover image courtesy of Circe.

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The History of BDSM, CSI S11E14 “Sqweegel”: The Celluloid Dungeon

CSI usually follows a certain format: e.g. we rarely see action that isn’t from the perspective of an investigator or a detective. Episode S11E04 “Sqweegel” (aired October 14, 2010) radically departed from this rule, so much so that some scenes look more like a slasher or giallo film.

Someone is slashing famous people around Las Vegas with a straight razor. Through the usual forensics business, the CSIs find that the assailant was wearing a latex suit. One of them even comments, “Time to get kinky!”

Stokes and Willows visit a fetish clothing store for research.

Willows: Doberman head, nice. That’s new.

Stokes: What do you mean, “that’s new”?

Willows: You got to keep up with these things, Nicky. All sex crimes start with fantasies. When it goes from the big head to the little head, that’s where we come in. You follow? I mean, you didn’t think I came here recreationally, did you?

Stokes: I don’t know. You just referred to a dog mask in a sex shop as “nice” and “new”. I had to ask. Are you okay?

Willows: Are you?

Willows takes professional pride in knowing about fetish clothing, and chides Stokes for not knowing about it, but she’s defensive about the possibility that she actually does anything with fetish clothing.

(Interesting that Joey, the shop clerk, greets Willows by her first name. If you squint, you can interpret this exchange to mean that Willows is purchasing fetish gear for her own purposes, and keeping it secret from her co-workers. Maybe she’s into it, maybe she’s modelling or camming or pro-domming on the side.)

Her claim that “All sex crimes start with fantasies.” is more troubling. In the world of CSI, crime is not the result of social structures like poverty or racism, but of the psychology of aberrant individuals. In that logic, monitoring the productions of the sex toy industry is a way of understanding sexual criminals. It’s uncomfortably close to Robin Morgan’s second-wave feminist maxim “Pornography is the theory, and rape is the practice.”

Joey links the latex lube the CSIs found to a guy who ordered custom-made two latex full-body suits. As usual in CSI, he hands over his records without hesitation. The only name the CSIs can link to him is “Ian Moone”, an anagram for “I am no one.”

The perp strikes again, this time slashing up a woman in her card in mid-carwash, with her young daughter in the back. The kid calls the perp “Sqweegel”, after the sound of the mops on the car window.

Sqweegel is part of a tradition that goes back to the original master criminal, Fantômas, a evil-doer and master of disguise who has no internal identity. In visual media like film and television, this is often represented by form-fitting, whole-body coverings. In this case, Sqweegel wears a full body, skin tight black latex suit and hood, with zippers on the back and mouth. Supposedly, this makes him forensics-proof; his face is covered, and he leaves no fingerprints, hairs or skin cells, or fibers from his clothing. He has heterochromia (different colored irises) but that might be faked. As I’ve commented before, film and TV tend to use men in fetishwear to represent the loss of identity, e.g. Cruising, O Fantasma, I Love A Man in Uniform, etc.

The episode makes Sqweegel almost superhuman: able to infiltrate his targets’ homes and surveil his prey for months in secret, squeeze into tiny spaces like the spare tire bay of a car, hang upside-down by his toes, and somehow vanish in public places. His performance, by contortionist and stunt performer Daniel Browning Smith, gives him eerie, inhuman movements, and his voice is dubbed. Furthermore, the episode shows that his victims are “false heroes” with dirty secrets, making him a kind of anti-hero. For a show supposedly based in real forensic science, this is a supervillain.

Sqweegel actually first appeared in Level 26: Dark Origin (2009), a digital novel co-written by CSI creator Anthony E. Zuiker.

The revival series CSI: Vegas starts its second season with a dead sex worker, unsurprisingly. One of the first lines of dialog is a CSI looking at the bondage gear and saying, “The more things change, huh?” The cast of characters is mostly new, but the dynamic is largely the same.

The victim is pro dominatrix Lynn Zobrist, stabbed in her home with piece of a broken mirror. The perpetrator also took the time to drag all of the furniture out of her dungeon, cover the walls, floor and ceiling with glued-on mirrors, and leave Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” playing on repeat. Her housekeeper described her as “sad” and alone except for her clients.

Penny, a young CSI, examines the victim’s Instagram and comments,

Penny: “You know, about BDSM? I’m a little embarrassed to admit, but it’s never appealed to me.”

Max: “I love your generation. So this is what embarrasses you? Sometimes people, like, spend a lot of energy holding it all together. So they need someone else to take control.”

Penny: “No, I mean, I get it in theory. I don’t know. Maybe when I’m a boss, I’ll be into it.”

Max also says:

Max: “But I guarantee you, most of these guys are heartsick right now. I mean, the work she did– some people needed it that way.”

They also visit “yapper”, Lynn’s nickname for her psychiatrist, who is not Dr. Heather Kessler. She says Lynn had been abused as a child, and struggled with violent ideation. “I did worry that BDSM was the wrong career. Temptations,” she says, not distinguishing between pro-domme work and BDSM. “She did say it was like a release valve.”

In the interview room, one of Lynn’s clients gets inappropriate with Max and Willows about them interrogating him.

The killer is proven to be Alan Herskovitz, a socially marginal hoarder who is linked to Lynn Zobrist not because of her sex work but because they both received electroconvulsive treatment as children from a sketchy doctor. The rest of the episode sets up a conspiracy arc of other people who received the same treatment as children.

I suppose stating that Lynn Zobrist was murdered for reasons unrelated to being a pro domme is an improvement, but it does continue the subtextual association of sex and death endemic to CSI as a franchise. That this is in the season premiere has the whiff of exploitation.

CSI already feels like a relic of another time, pre-COVID and pre-Trump, when people had more confidence in scientific and government institutions. While Gil Grissom tried to make investigation a purely scientific process, Max Roby, the new lead, is passionate about her work and more interested in questions of truth and justice.

Cover image courtesy of Goddess Severa.

Elust is the only place where the smartest and hottest sex bloggers are featured under one roof every month.

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Body of Proof is another post-CSI investigative procedural, this time focused on the life and work of medical examiner Dr. Megan Hunt (Dana Delaney). The season 2 debut “Love Thy Neighbor” (aired September 20, 2011) bears a strong resemblance to the CSI episode “Swap Meet“.

An apparently accidental death in a suburban cul-de-sac turns out to be not-so accidental; the deceased has ligature marks on his wrists. “I used to live on a cul-de-sac like this. Nothing is ever what it seems,” says Megan (a metatextual joke as Dana Delaney also starred on Desperate Housewives). The clues suggest infidelity and one of the detectives searches a house and finds a locked cabinet. It opens with the mysterious key found on the victim, to reveal padded handcuffs, floggers and leather hoods. “Guess we know who tied him up now,” says the other detective. The couple who own the house look embarrassed.

In separate interrogations, the wife denies having an affair with the deceased, but says she did restrain him with the furry handcuffs. The husband says he knows full well his wife was sleeping with the deceased, and he set them up. She says she was bored with just one man, and her husband says he threw a block party. Turns out the block is full of swingers, or “play couples” as the wife clarifies. “And it has made my marriage stronger than ever,” says the wife. “Monogamy is dead, detective.”

Much like in “Swap Meet”, this revelation is set to light comedy background music.

The wife says the deceased, Daniel, was with her the previous night, and she tied him up, but he wasn’t into it. Daniel told the wife he wasn’t into the lifestyle anymore and “it had consequences.”

Megan jokingly calls it “a wife-swapping cul-de-sac.” Both she and the detective laugh about the situation.

Again like “Swap Meet”, the husband says there are explicit rules to prevent and manage jealousy, which he enumerates. Though he also admits that one wife left with her kids, as she couldn’t handle it. Megan tells him that Daniel was immune compromised, possibly with HIV. The husband says that is one of the rules, that everyone gets tested frequently, and insists that Daniel was “clean”.

The other medical examiners goof around a bit with the BDSM gear that was confiscated. The older ME confirms that the cuffs match the marks on Daniel’s wrists, though it was already known he likes to be bound. The younger swings a studded paddle around, and almost non-consensually whacks the older ME with it, before the older stops him. This is the usual combination of humor and disgust seen in such episodes.

They learn that Daniel didn’t have HIV or any other disease, making the cause of his immune suppression a mystery.

On the way to meet Kevin, the guy whose wife left him over the non-monogamy, Megan speculates about the math of the situation, while the detective, Peter, tells her that such questions would be insensitive. Kevin says he was having feelings for another wife, Andrea, and his wife picked up on that.

The story takes a sharp turn when they find out the women of the neighborhood where also involved in a marketing scam to sell sketchy time shares, and everybody in the neighborhood has been slowly poisoned by the byproducts of Kevin cooking meth in his backyard shed.

Back at the lab, there’s a comedic epilogue about returning the BDSM toys to the police, plus a “desperate housewife” joke.

This episode is really more about swinging and non-monogamy than BDSM, which loosely ties into the B-plot about Megan adjusting to her ex-husband living with his girlfriend who is also Megan’s ex-boss. Kink gear becomes the metonymy for sexual deviance in general. However, it comes off poorly compared to “Swap Meet” in which the murder is thematically linked to the hook of swinging. This story keeps hitting the trope of corruption beneath idyllic suburbia, if you consider consensual non-monogamy as a “corruption”. If you don’t, the episode is thematically divided.

Lead actress Dana Delaney is no stranger to kink, having played the leads in Exit to Eden and Live Nude Girls. She also wears high heels with platforms in long shots, presumably so she doesn’t look tiny next to the rest of the cast.