Cover image courtesy of Domina Gea. Photography by L. Thomas.

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Erotic Non Fiction

Morgan Destera, So I Went to a Swingers’ Club…

Femina Viva, Realising the futility and necessity of putting ourselves in boxes

Books and Movies

The History of BDSM, I Want Your Sex (2026): The Celluloid Dungeon

Hellga, Book Review of “Money for Something” by Mia Walsch

Poetry

The Author Stew, Your Number

Product Reviews

Liz Black X, MYLO Earth Review: A Sculptural Piece That’s Surprisingly Versatile

Sex Toy DB, The Essential Hismith Upgrade Just Got Even Better: Lube Launcher 2.0 Review

Sex Work

Miss K Stinger, Double Mistress Judicial Caning Sessions London

Sex Worker Search, Why Can’t Escort Directories Age Verify via Third Party Double Blind ID check?

Oz Bigdownunder, A Duo with Mistress Charlotte. Sissy Virgin’s First Face Fuck

Milady, Exciting Duos Available: Meet Me & Mistress Jessica!

Sandra, Lick it Good

Courtesan Finder, FMTY: Fly Me To You Explained

Erotic Fiction

Schey Place Books, Weighing the odds: Fictional Exposure Explored

Ramone Quides, The Hairband

Simone Francis, The Contract – FemDom Story

Thoughts & Advice on Sex & Relationships

Tantric Sexual Healing, When the Brain Becomes Erotic: Tantra, Sapiosexuality, and the Body of Consciousness

Tom Rockets, Sex in the Shower: What Water Does to Your Lube

Buzz Vibes, 200 Ways to Keep Sex Interesting? No, Just One: Stay Curious

Thoughts & Advice on Kink & Fetish

Mx Valentina, The Architecture of Submission: A Case Study in PowerDyamics

A Lover’s Pinch was published through the conventional process of finding an agent, submitting the manuscript to the agent, the agent submitting the manuscript to various publishers, and waiting for one of them to accept it. It did earn through its advance, which not all books do, and I still get a small amount of royalties from sales. However, I have some questions about the deal, and if I ever go through a publishing company again, I will do some things differently.

Conversations with other authors who write about similar topics make me wonder, however, if going through a publishing company is even the right path. The Celluloid Dungeon has a niche, controversial topic, and I might have more success promoting it than a publishing company. No matter how much (or little) effort a publisher puts into marketing a title, they still get their cut. Reviewing my royalties statement shows that the portion of total sales of paper copies that come from my direct, person-to-person sales keeps rising. In 2025, 25% of paper sales were through my own efforts.

However, self-publishing Celluloid Dungeon, in a way that meets my standards, will cost. Even if I do all the editing, copy-editing, proofreading, layout and cover design myself, I’d still want an index, and that costs thousands of dollars. I also want it to have a strong visual appeal, and that means paying licensing fees for photos, running at least a few hundred. I’m looking at four figures to do it right.

There’s also the problem of which companies to use. Amazon KDP is the 800 lb gorilla surrounded by 10 lb monkeys, at least in terms of ebooks and online sales. Getting it into brick & mortar stores means going through the IngramSpark system (even if you use another company) and they take their cut. But fighting for shelf-space in retail is no sure thing. There’s also direct sales companies to consider, if this title is best suited to that.

Vikings (2013-21) is a historical drama TV series, broadly based on the life of legendary leader Ragnar Lothbrok. While I’m no expert on this particular period, the series plays pretty loose with history. E.g. the series began in season 1 with a story based on the Lindisfarne raid of 793, but one major plot arc of season 3 is based on the Viking siege of Paris in 845, and characters have only aged a few years.

For this blog’s purposes, we are concerned with a subplot of the siege of Paris arc. The leader of Paris’ defense against the Vikings is Count Odo (played by Owen Roe, loosely based on Odo of France), who chafes under the rule of Emperor Charles. Odo’s lieutenant Roland (Huw Parmenter) sends his sister, Therese (Karen Hassan), to seduce the count. So far, so typical for this kind of show.

What’s not typical is that Odo is a sadist, and even less typical, he is a consensual sadist. In his first private moment with Therese (Season 3, Episode 10), he takes her to his dungeon.

Odo: If you would submit.
Therese: To what?
Odo: To being chained up and whipped. Of course, I will allow you to choose the whip. Some are more severe than others. You will always be able to call a halt, though I would prefer to decide myself. It would keep my interest.
Therese: Undoubtedly.

Odo puts her in the metal manacles. In the closeup, it’s clear the cuffs are padded. It’s not clear if these are supposed to be padded in the diegesis of the scene, or if this is an error. It does look like Therese could easily slip her slender wrists out of them if they weren’t padded.

Odo: Tell me when to strike. Say strike.
Therese: Strike.

Odo does strike her. Therese’s response is hard to gauge. Is she play-acting reluctance to seduce Odo, or is she genuine repelled by this, but resolved to carry on out of loyalty to her brother?

In Season 4, Episode 2, Therese gets even more intimate with Odo. After nudging him towards usurping the Emperor, she picks out a crop or quirt for him to use on her, and even teases him with it. He hesitates:

Odo: This is more of a brute than we have used before, and it will hurt you more.

Therese doesn’t flinch; if she’s not into it, she’s playing her part well.

Later in the episode, Therese’s wounds are tended by her brother, and they have an incestuous affair.

By Season 4, Episode 6, Odo is drunk and openly talks of deposing Charles to Therese, who now only half-heartedly plays the game of seduction. She offers to undress, but instead Odo chains her and pulls her dress up to her waist, before whipping her. He still asks her for her permission, and only starts when she says, “Strike.”

In Season 4, Episode 8, Therese turns the tables on Odo, and says she wants to switch, using the same language as he did with her. He agrees to this. In Odo’s dungeon, she has him chained standing and stripped to the waist. He gives her the word to “Strike!” and she does, then hands it over to her brother Roland, who gags Odo and beats him to death. Therese watches this, looking pleased with herself.

After killing Odo, and painting him as a traitor to his emperor (which Therese goaded him into), Roland and Therese attempt to ingratiate themselves with Charles. He has them garotted to death anyway.

It’s a cliche to associate sexual deviance with moral and/or political deviance, but this plotline breaks from the usual tropes. Odo commands brutal violence in defense of Paris, and plots against his lord, but he’s not depicted as any worse (or better) than other figures in this milieu. He’s played as an older, heavier man (with a prosthetic arm), contrasted against the rugged Vikings, but also against the foppish Emperor. He is no more politically deviant than anybody else.

I don’t know why the writers and producers of this series decided to have this dynamic between Odo and Therese. It would be plausible to have a non-consensual sadist character, who doesn’t care in the slightest about his victims, but not as interesting. It makes Odo a more interesting character, instead of just another ruthless, treacherous noble.

There’s also the question of whether this kind of relationship could have existed at all in this time period. This was long before the creation of modern, liberal concepts of personal rights, especially for women. Why does Odo insist on getting Therese’s consent, when he doesn’t need her consent for ordinary sex? His insistence that Therese choose the whip to be used on her, and that she can call halt, makes him oddly vulnerable. It may be that no other women will put up with his desires, and Therese’s willingness to submit to him paradoxically gives her power over him.

I wouldn’t say a relationship like this, in this time and place, is impossible, but it strains credibility.

See this blog post for more discussion of this Vikings plotline

The following contains spoilers for I want your sex (2026), starring Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman, and directed by Gregg Araki.

Elliot Bell is an aimless, unemployed 20-something man. He gets a job as an assistant to an eccentric artist, Erika Tracey, which leads to him being her lover and her submissive.

The film initially sets up a generational contrast. Elliot is the prototypical Gen Z (or Zed) male: ambition-less, timid, passive, and stuck in a protracted adolescence, or even childhood. His girlfriend, Minerva, is too busy studying for her MD for sex, and regards him with at best, boredom, and at worst, contempt. His female friend and roommate Apple is, like him, too cautious to act on their mutual attraction.

Erika is a (late) Gen X woman, an aggressively sexual, shock artist who wears fetish wear in her art studio. She brings Elliot (apparently the only heterosexual man in her employ) into her office and broaches the idea that he become her sexual partner. Erika gives Elliot a copy of a Harold Robbins novel, as if it were a relic of a bygone era. Elliot reads it in bed, then masturbates, thinking about her.

Elliot becomes the lover and submissive of Erika, in a series of scenes shot like David Lachapelle editorials. I should emphasize that there are no scenes of negotiation between them. Elliot does become infatuated with her, his passivity responding to her overwhelming presence and control. Erika does seem to have some emotional attachment to Elliot, but she’s also fickle.

The turning point comes when Erika calls up Elliot and demands a threesome. Elliot recruits his friend and roommate Apple. They both drink heavily before they go to Erika’s house. Somewhere along the line, this scene goes from comedic awkwardness to rape-y coercion. Though Apple has hinted at bi-curiosity before, Erika goes after her like a thirsty vampire, largely ignoring Elliot. Erika barks orders at them both, until Apple quits.

As a kinkster, this is when I lost all sympathy for Erika. Peel back her sexually liberated persona and she’s just an exploiter who doesn’t give a damn about anybody else’s desires or boundaries. Maybe Elliot is masochistic enough to handle it, but Apple is not. This ends Elliot’s long relationship with Apple, and leaves him nowhere to live.

I Want Your Sex is very stuck in the male gaze. The main spectacle is Olivia Wilde in a series of sexy outfits. Cooper Hoffman is not a subject of the gaze in the same way. (His chunky body makes him look like an overgrown child next to her.) The only time the movie shows male frontal nudity, is when Elliot sees the stud Minerva has been sleeping with behind his back. This sends our protagonist into total shock.

On the night of Erika’s big show, a critic’s comment sends Erika into a downward spiral. She wants to have a quickie with Elliot and sends him to wait in a stall in the ladies’ bathroom, but then gets distracted. When Elliot eventually comes out of the bathroom, he finds that Erika has used a video she took of one of their sessions in a video installation. In front of the media, Elliot dresses down Erika for violating his trust and privacy, which leads to her being “cancelled”, and him getting fired.

Against all common sense, Elliot goes back to Erika’s house, where she’s (apparently) drunk, and she gets him drunk. He blacks out, wakes up wearing a pink bra and panties, and finds Erika floating face down in her pool. He tries desperately to revive her, then calls the police, only to find that Erika has disappeared. This leads to the film’s framing device of Elliot telling his story to a pair of police detectives. They release him because they couldn’t find a body.

Finally, Erika turns up, alive. She explains to Elliot that her studio had been losing money and the failure of her show meant she couldn’t get out of debt. (Erika’s luxurious house with a pool and fancy car makes me suspect her money troubles are her own fault.) The only way (she said) she could not go broke was to fake her own death, and set up Elliot as a witness. This made art speculators buy all of her pieces immediately. (She did explain to the police that she’s not dead, so Elliot is off the hook for that.)

When Elliot says that she roofied him, making him think he might have killed her in a drugged blackout, which lead to him being interrogated by the police, she says that he’s now famous because of his relationship with her, and he can leverage that to get a career started. There’s a message for the modern age: “Fame, at any cost, no matter who you step on along the way.”

In a flash-forward to a year later, Elliot is a successful podcaster, interviewing Erika about her new book. Her hooks are sunk so deep into Elliot that he’s still drawn to her years later.

Pillion did a better job of exploring a dom-sub relationship from an inexperienced male submissive’s perspective. Collin is as awestruck by Ray as Elliot is of Erika, but Collin also sees Ray’s moments of affection and care. Erika may, in her way, like Elliot, but we never see her doing anything to help or support him. Elliot has to find out the hard way what kind of person she is.

The film wants to portray Erika as a complicated character, a charismatic bitch with a heart of gold. In practice, she’s pretty simple: she uses people, to advance her artistic career, to feed her ego, or just to screw with them. Her apology to Elliot is supposed to be her moment of vulnerability, but it looks more like her being even more manipulative.

Gregg Araki is the out gay male director and co-writer of this film, and the film takes an outsider’s perspective on heterosexual relationships. The directorial stand-in character is Zap, a gay man who is Elliot’s co-worker at the studio and later friend. Compared to Elliot and his failed-to-launch sexual and romantic life, Zap inhabits a completely different world of frictionless, man-on-man hookups, dates and weekend-long orgies. In his implied view, Elliot’s emotional vulnerability is quaint and naive; why not toughen up and separate physical and emotional intimacy entirely? This gap in expectations may be why Erika’s actions in the threesome scene don’t make her irredeemable in the eyes of this story.

There aren’t a lot of mainstream films about female dominant/male submissive relationships, and even fewer good ones. I Want Your Sex is not a romance; it’s a vulnerable person being taken advantage of. That the person taking the advantage is beautiful and female shouldn’t make a difference. It’s still statutory rape if it’s a teenage boy and an adult woman. Olivia Wilde, as Erika, has directed feminist films like Don’t Worry, Darling; you’d think she’s have a better understanding of sexual power dynamics than this.

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.

For SEO purposes, non-identical re-posts of Elust are much better for search ranking, and it’s much more appealing for your readers.

Click here to Subscribe to email updates if you’d like to receive Elust as an email once per month.

Books and Movies

O Miss Pearl, “The Everlasting” by Alix E. Harrow [Femdom Book Review]

History of BDSM, Killing Me Softly (2002): The Celluloid Dungeon

Thoughts & Advice on Kink & Fetish

The BDSM Store, BDSM Punishment Generator

Hannah McKnight, I Want to be a Crossdresser

Sex & Relationships

Morgan Destera, And I Scream at the Top of My Lungs “What’s Going On?”

Tantric Sexual Healing, Erotic Intelligence: Can Sexual Practice Increase Wisdom?

Femina Viva, Are we all alone? Is life just one big futile exercise for connection?

Product Reviews

Buzz Vibes, Best Masturbators Australia (2026): Our Top Picks for Every Budget

Safe Lust, b-Vibe Rocker Prostate Plug Tested: Rocking the Spot

Liz X, Heavy-Duty Automation: A Review of the Honey Play Box Warrior Masturbator

Girly Juice, Velora Dune banana-shaped vibrator

Oz Bigdownunder, Orgasm Monster Pro 2 Review

Sex Work

Hellga, Fisty Cuffs

Charlotte Cheshire, Luxury Companionship for Every Body: Finding a Disability-Friendly Independent Escort

Mx Valentina, Bespoke Encounters

Ur Little Secret, PSE Meaning: What Is the Porn Star Experience with an Escort?

Sex Worker Search, Fairphone Sex Work Phone Update

Sandra, In Flight Entertainment

Teena Laurent, On Companionship Without Condition

Milady, What’s in My Kinky Tote Bag?

Mila Dall, Music, neuroscience and the link between sexuality and creativity

Maybe you’ve seen the online reviews and news articles about the “kinky” nature of this film. I’m gonna to mention that, but this is really a jumping off place for discussing my two favorite topics – history and consent.

There will be spoilers for the 2026 movie, but I will try to keep them minimum and based on “kink,” consent, and history.

I had some high sexy hopes for this movie before I watched it on June 23, 2026, because of all of the complaints about how it introduced kink into the story that overwhelmed everything else. I’m not sure what film those reviewers and commenters were discussing but that wasn’t the movie I saw.

I know that I have a high bar for kink given that my colleague, Peter, and I try to put out a new kinky movie discussion video every couple of months. I also know that as someone who lives this life 24/7/365 days a year, my definition of what is and is not kinky is probably not reflective of the mainstream culture. To understand why I don’t see this as a BDSM work, I need to explain some historical context.

The novel and this movie version should be set between 1771 and 1802 in the Yorkshire moors of England. This is not a time period when individual rights are NOT respected for almost anyone, king and landed nobles included. Catherine Earnshaw’s family may be nobles, but most of their wealth is land and the people connected to it. Her father is a drunken a-hole who has gambled which makes them indebted to creditors. You see that in the mess of their large estate as well as the sparse furnishings. When Earnshaw returns one night with a boy in tow, he may not have bought him with money, but everyone there knows that the boy now belongs to the estate and by extension to the Earnshaw family whose daughter, Catherine, renames him Heathcliff (after her dead brother, by the way).

Heathcliff chooses one person in particular to give his loyalty to because of her treatment of him, Catherine. He gets between her and her family, he accompanies her out on the moors, he tries to protect her from his sexual desires as well as seeing displays of others engaged in sex. There relationship isn’t based on a negotiated consent because that would make no sense given that time between someone of such two different social and legal statuses.

There is also strict legal and social differences between men and women during that time. If both people are of the same class, then the men’s rights would be greater than the woman’s. That doesn’t mean that they can’t care about each other. We see that in the barn scene between stablehand, Joseph, and maid, Zillah. Yes, they do have sex while she is wearing a bridle, but from the language and the actions, the maid is in charge and the stablehand cares about her safety. First, he hold up a whip but she shakes her head. When he holds up the bridle she smiles broadly and they place it on it. At this point Heathcliff covers Catherine’s eyes and mouth to keep her from revealing where she (and he) are but also I think in an attempt to protect a lady (which she is) from seeing something so base as intercourse. We still hear what is said which is that Zillah wants it all harder and Joseph agrees but also continuous praises her while doing so and then afterwards. It isn’t simply sex, there is a kink element to it, but I think of the two servants, the maid is in charge while the hand is topping.

Another kink element in the movie is the way that we see Heathcliff treat Isabella once they have a civil marriage ceremony to help him get back at Catherine for her cutting short their affair years after she’s been married. Heathcliff may not be a lord, that is unclear in the movie, but he has money (somehow) and buys the Earnshaw estate. He doesn’t do much with it because he is used to it being rundown and poorly kept. Taking Isabella to that estate he hopes will enrage Catherine enough that she’d demand he attone in some fashion. Isabelle is his partner in this, though she seems fooled a bit into thinking she might keep him for her own. That is difficult to say because once she is removed from the Earnshaw estate, she disappears from the movie.

The scenes of Isabella and Heathcliff get the most attention in the reviews that focus on the kink. I want to call attention to a couple of factors I wasn’t expecting but where clearly there in the film. First, when Heathcliff comes into her room and proposes this scheme to her, he is straight forward about how he will treat her and asks if she wants him to stop. The only word we hear from her after he lays out several times how poorly he will behave and asks for her to tell him to stop, is “No” because she wants to try this. Why? I have no clue. Up until this point, Isabella has acted like a spoiled princesses whose guardian Edger married Catherine. In part, I suspect that marriage was one to please Isabella more than Edger given how free his ward is to treat Cathering of a sort of doll for her to dress up and demand attention from.

The abusive treatment that we see Heathcliff give to Isabella is through the lens of letters that she writes upon his pleas to Catherine. Plead he does because Isabella can read and write and he cannot. He even gets on his knees during these letter writing snippets and she grabs him by the front of his shirt demanding that he “treat her nice” if she does this. The highlight of the “abuse” comes when Catherine’s lady-in-waiting, Nelly, comes to visit. She finds Isabella chained up like a dog and acting like a dog. However, note that Isabella looks only slightly disheveled as though it was done on purpose. She even winks at Nelly at the end of that scene and then we see Heathcliff kneeling again while a letter is written.

How much of what Heathcliff and Isabella do is reflected in these performances we cannot know, because it isn’t about them, it is about Heathcliff wanting Catherine to come back to him.

Nelly has been intercepting the letters as well as playing Edgar and Catherine against each other during this time. Nelly’s family probably had fallen on hard times forcing her to become a lady-in-waiting to Catherine since childhood. When Catherine discovers that Nelly knew that Heathcliff heard only part of the discussion about the marriage with Edgar, she is furious. Nelly’s choices are entirely based on her position; whatever affects Catherine affects her. She would probably end up on the street herself if she allows Catherine to fire her, so she She isn’t a good person for what she does, but these are the historical realities for her decisions.

Catherine really doesn’t an easy choice. She is pregnant with her husband. She is dependent on Edgar’s money and he on her noble family title. In the scenes of the years after the marriage when Heathcliff has been who-knows-where, Catherine has moments of joy and happiness, but also periods of boredom and longing for something more exciting. In a world where her husband had legal and social rights to harm her in a multitude of ways, his gentle and generous nature might be seen as ideal by many women and their families. Is she a masochist? I doubt it based on how we see Heathcliff and Edgar treat her. I think she wants passion and she wants to be able to tease her partner and feel some pushback from him.

Heathcliff has pledged himself and his love to her when they were children after he took a severe beating from her drunken father in her place. His love seemed more drawn from feeling grateful mixed with the ages they were as they discovered sexual feelings. He didn’t tell her more because of their social and legal positions in the beginning and then because he only hears part of her reasoning for accepting Edgar’s marriage proposal and is angry. How much consent did he have in his entire for what he experienced and later felt?

It is a beautifully shot film and very intense but not because of the “kink” in our 21st century BDSM meaning of that term.

If you’ve seen it, I’d love to hear what you thought about it.

At the beginning of 2026, I promised myself that I would finish a rough draft of The Celluloid Dungeon by June 30th. I was one day behind, but I did it.

The manuscript is in pretty rough shape, but it’s all there, no gaps or “find reference” notes. It’s over the maximum word count of 150,000 I set as a limit, and that’s even without the “Master Shots” chapter I had planned on the technical aspects of shooting BDSM for film and video. I think I can trim it down to under the limit, with the ruthless application of “kill your darlings.”

That raises the question of, what next? Earlier this year, I severed ties with the agent who had helped me publish A Lover’s Pinch, by mutual agreement. That leaves me currently agent-less. If I go through the commercial path of publishing, that means the work of finding an agent, the agent finding a publisher, and waiting for the publisher to publish it. To be frank, I am dissatisfied with this process, and if I did do it, there are a few things I would insist on doing differently.

However, conversations with other people who write in this particular sub-field of history have shown me the merits of self-publishing. I would retain full creative control and cut out the middle-man.

I would want The Celluloid Dungeon to be as professional and credible as possible. That means professional indexing, editing, proofreading, page layout, cover design, etc, and all of that costs money. Furthermore, I want the book to have as much visual material as possible (film stills, publicity photos, posters, etc), and in many if not most cases, that would require paying licensing fees. My current financial situation means that paying for all of that out of pocket is a possibility, but I would also consider various forms of crowdfunding.

I am under no delusions that The Celluloid Dungeon will be a blockbuster. It’s a niche interest book for a niche audience. So it might be best to treat it as such, the item of exchange between me and the small readership who will appreciate it.

I discuss the body horror classic Videodrome (1983) with Nicholas Tanek and Mistress Genevieve. Also available on Spotify (behind a paywall).