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State of the World

Fapspins, Are Webcam Sites Anonymous for Viewers? A Practical Privacy Checklist

Erotic Fiction

Fern River Club, After the Come-In (Part 3)

Thoughts & Advice on Sex & Relationships

Tantric Sexual Healing, Tantra and the Architecture of Intimacy: Rewriting Love Beyond Possession, Identity, and Fear

Awakening Your Inner Essence, When Betrayal Becomes Arousal: Understanding Erotic Survival Through a Tantric Lens

Femina Viva, Submission need not be weakness

Erotic Non Fiction

Morgan Destera, The Spirit Is Willing, Part Two: The Flesh is Weak

B R Saiph, Locked on the Precipice of Permanence: Her Decision, My Submission

Product reviews

Liz Black, Hands-Free Pleasure: A Closer Look at the VVD Rider Desire & Rider Go (Plus Exclusive Discount!)

Spices of Lust, Lovense Gush 2 Review

Sex Toy DB, Saddle Sex Machines or Sybian Alternatives: What Are They, and Which Is The Best?

Sex Work

Rogue Love Escapades, What’s in a name? The inspiration behind Rogue Love Escapades… 

Sex Worker Search, Interview With YAS Work

Danny Gold, Anal Therapy

Adam Black, Choosing the right hotel for meeting an escort 

Oz Bigdownunder, London Eye View MMF Couple Sex Marathon

Ellie Hart, Why Emotional Intelligence Is the Most Attractive Quality

Sandra, A Massage with a Twist

Hellga, Sara Graduates Sissy School

Mx Valentina, 113. Beyond the Veil: The Existential Architecture of Mx Valentina

Books and Movies

The History of BDSM, High Maintenance S03E05 “Payday”: The Celluloid Dungeon

Blogging

Sinclair Sexsmith, Announcing: The Inner Circle Sessions (Patreon Workshops for 2026)

When conservative culture turns its attention to BDSM as a practice and as a culture, the most common view is the neo-Puritanism position that kink is a perversion, the product of an overly permissive, decadent, pornified culture. The shock provides titillation.

However, sometimes the response is different, and the conservatives see BDSM as an application of their ideals. Take, for example, Kelly Brogan and Chantel Quick’s essay “Can BDSM heal the world?” (undated).

According to her website bio, Brogan is a certified psychiatrist, or rather was, as “Dr. Brogan chose not to renew her board certification which expired on 12/31/19”. She is certified in “Integrative Holistic Medicine, ABIHM (The specialty recognition identified herein has been received from a private organization not affiliated with or recognized by the Florida Board of Medicine).”

She is also a major figure in the COVID-denial movement and an anti-vaxxer.

Brogan’s essay opens up with a fairly typical description of bottoming in a bondage session, followed by touting it as the solution to marital problems. However, my whiskers twitched when I got to:

…I believe that we now have the opportunity to mature the insidious backdrops of warfare consciousness and the idea of every man and woman for themselves into the consciousness of complementarity and mutual service.

This is known as complementarianism, a theological view that the two (and only two) sexes are fundamentally different yet complementary. It’s a “separate but equal” idea of gender relations, that in practice tries to cover up a lot of gender inequality.

Brogan and Quick go from garbled Freudian psychology to conspiracy theory.

According to many, feminism was a Rockefeller-funded, socially engineered movement that offered women the poison apple of egalitarian opportunity, and in exchange, they were removed from their homes and role of primary caretaker of their children and added to the taxpayer population.

BDSM becomes the solution to what Brogan and Quick see as the problem of distorted gender roles; complementarianism in action. Their description starts off okay, talking about consent and safety:

BDSM organizes partners into defined roles, connects them through consensual agreements, and creates the conditions for ecstatic union to be channeled through the reclamation of safe power.

But then you notice things like the assumption that the sub must be female and the dom must be male. Though they reference a book written by a dominatrix, Kasia Urbaniak, and talk about using dom and sub roles to ask for money from an uncle, the essay soon returns to the essay of essential female submissiveness.

Why submit?
Because that’s actually what we want as women. We don’t want to be the best man in the room. We want to be well-handled by capable hands so we can finally exhale. Recently presenting at a Weston A. Price conference, I responded to a question about gender dynamics, in part, with the statement, “most women I know long to be well-handled by a powerful man,” and a sensual sigh swept across the 2,000 person room.

This ties into ideas of “surrender” and “a stable, strong, courageous, and intentional man stabilizing a woman’s nervous system”. They even argue that women will unconsciously create their own conditions of confinement, which Brogan ties to her own career struggles for being called one of the “Disinformation Dozen” for her anti-vaccination work.

When talking about the benefits of BDSM, the gender essentialism comes through again.

BDSM offers a framework to resolve the all-too-common pathology of cowering, insecure men and hen-pecking controlling women; when we get into Dom/Sub dynamics, a safety and coherence returns to the field that creates the conditions for true connection.

The essay concludes with a strange contortion of presenting a traditionalist view of heterosexual relationships as being a clever rebellion against the system.

The system would love to remain in charge of determining who’s been a bad girl, who hasn’t, and who gets what punishment, but wouldn’t it be better to empower your man to do that for you?

You’d never know from this essay that BDSM includes switches, or LGBTQ people, or people who don’t engage in dom-sub at all. Brogan and Quick are drawing on the transgressive cachet of BDSM to sell gender essentialism with the promise of better sex and other life benefits that BDSM can’t necessarily deliver. Kink is not the solution to the made-up problem of “cowering, insecure men and hen-pecking controlling women”. Note also that the essay draws on a dominatrix’s book, and Brogan epitomizes the kind of well-educated, professional woman who makes a career out of selling anti-feminism, alongside general crack-pottery.

In my opinion, people should keep their fantasies and their politics separate. The “tradwife” ideal works better as a femsub/maledom fantasy/roleplay scenario than as an actual plan for life. Likewise, if you are a man who wants to pay some guy $10,000 for a weekend-long re-enactment of the first act of Full Metal Jacket, go right ahead; just don’t think it will fix whatever is eating at you.

Submission, also known as Scandalo, is a 1976 Italian drama film, set in WWII-era France on the eve of Germany’s invasion. Wartime stress builds up within a household until the breaking point.

It’s centered around the pharmacy run by pharmacist Eliane Michaud, who employs Juliette and Armand. Her house is upstairs, inhabited by her kind but distant intellectual husband, Henri, and her beautiful teenage daughter, Justine. (“Justine” and “Juliette” are likely references to two of the Marquis de Sade’s novels.)

Working-class Armand, who needs this menial job so he won’t be sent to the front, makes a pass at Eliane, mistaking her for Juliette. Eliane makes no reprisal for this incident, nor Armand’s later advances on her, which he interprets as she likes it.

Armand leaves an anonymous love letter for Eliane. Henri doesn’t take it seriously. When Eliane attempts to confront Armand, he forces her to fellate him. Eliane fears the social disruption too much to reveal this assault, even to her husband. This is established by Henri’s literary discussion group talking about a similar situation in Stendhal’s novel The Red and the Black. Yet the film also implies that Eliane’s masochism and exhibitionism drive her into Armand’s games, her way of using obsessive hedonism to distract herself from the war she hears about on the radio.

Meanwhile, Eliane, Henri and their bourgeois friends carry on with dinner parties and literary salons like everything’s normal, despite air raids and artillery fire.

Armand’s demands on Eliane escalate until one night, he pushes her, naked, out of the pharmacy and into the street, then closes the door behind her. He tells her to walk around the empty square like a streetwalker. The only person who sees her is an elderly drunk, and nobody believes him. It’s hard to say whether Eliane is enjoying this masochistically or having some kind of breakdown.

Eliane finally draws the line when Armand says he wants her daughter. Nonetheless, she doesn’t fire him, and Armand moves into the pharmacy’s storage area and continues to pressure her.

Eliane confesses her infidelity to Henri, whom she thinks is sleeping, but he’s actually awake. This so upsets Henri that, later, when Justine accidentally breaks a vase, he slaps her face, leaving her traumatized.

Eliane spends her time sniffing ether with Armand in the pharmacy’s store room, and projecting her own shame onto her daughter.

As the Germans close in and the townspeople evacuate, Henri locks himself in his room with the music turned up, and Eliane sends Justine down to apologize to Armand, knowing full well what he will do to her.

Finally, the bombs fall, destroying everything.

Submission could be loosely considered a Nazi-sploitation film, as it uses sexual, and specifically sadomasochistic, dynamics as a metaphor for political dynamics. (It also feels like a cousin of In the Realm of the Senses.) Armand is the aggressor, but Elaine’s masochism, and the stress of wartime, is the weakness that he exploits, pushing her until she hands over her teenage daughter to be raped by him. It represents the capitulation of France to Germany, and to French fascists, in WWII (though it also reflects Italy’s own legacy of fascism).

The story depends on some old-fashioned ideas about female masochism in married women, that Eliane, being unable or unwilling to stop Armand, comes to enjoy her mistreatment. We see this in films as old as Belle de Jour and as recent as Babygirl. In the latter, the basic problem was, why didn’t Romy put a stop to this? The only plausible answer was that she didn’t want to. In Submission, Eliane is in a similar position, but in a more repressive and sexist society. Even if you consider the social cost of Eliane speaking up, at some point she would have to draw the line. The fact that France is being overrun by German forces day by day goes some way to justifying this plot, but not quite enough.

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.

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

Whether you’re looking for sex journalism, erotic writing, relationship advice, or kinky discussions, it’ll be here at Elust.

If you have a post included, please re-post the latest edition on your own blog, ideally with your own unique comments next to each link.

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Oz

Erotic Non Fiction

Morgan Destera, A Little Sex

Femina Viva, Love, submission, and are these my demons?

Tantric Sexual Healing, Tantra against optimisation and the refusal of efficiency

Kristina J, He Thought He Was Leading, Intimacy, Control & Desire with Kristina J

Awakening Your Inner Essence, Tantric Massage and Sexual Energy: Releasing Performance and Feeling Alive

Tantric Connections, Why Your Fears could be Guarding Your Pleasure

Thoughts & Advice on Kink & Fetish

Chastity Cages, How to Introduce Chastity to Your Partner (Without the Awkwardness)

Mx Valentina, This is Not Kink: How Feminine Authority Rewires the Nervous System

Denying Thumper, 2025 by the numbers

Erotic Fiction

Fern River Club, Margot hosts (Part 2)

Simone Francis, The Artists’ Model

Sex Work

Sex Worker Search, Ur Little Secret Privacy Policies

Adam Black, Why become a kinky high-end male escort?

Oz Bigdownunder, Nightclub Upskirting Perv Gets His Comeuppance

Hellga, Ball Busting

Sandra, Double Penetration with a Man and a Dragon

Product Reviews

Lushense, Original & Innovative Pleasure Toys Unveiled Part 2

Books and Movies

Liz Black X, Need a Vacation – Surrender to the Bliss Liner – The Complete Paradise Punch Trilogy is Live

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