ER was an American medical drama TV series. Episode “Secrets and Lies” (S08E16, aired March 7, 2002) starts off with the hospital staff dealing with a patient (Brad Grunberg) in heavy bondage gear. He refuses to take off his hood, to keep his identity secret. The pro domme, “Dominatrix Medusa” (Patricia Thielemann) who was in session with him, has also come along, as she owns all of the gear and wants to recover her equipment without damage. One of the paramedics refer to her as “Cruella DeVille”. Medusa complains that her client lied about his weight and pulled her sling right out of the ceiling.

In the ER, Medusa provides tips on how to examine the patient without damaging her gear. One of the doctors also notices she has a dislocated thumb from when her client fell on her. He offers to reset it but warns her it will hurt. She scoffs, and doesn’t flinch when he puts her bone back in place. There’s also some jokes about a genuine horsehair tail.

Once the patient and the domme have left for radiology, the ER staffers find that Medusa left behind her duffel bag. Some are curious about the contents, others are reluctant. Two women open the bag. The camera POV is inside the bag, so we don’t see the contents, but we do see their amused and surprised reactions. One staffer accidentally activates a blowup doll, another turns on a vibrating dildo in a strap-on harness (kept almost entirely off-camera).

Another hospital staffer comes in and they stop, embarrassed. She criticizes them for risking financial liability to the hospital if a patient walked in, especially for goofing around with a patient’s belongings. Later, someone plants the strap-on in her locker, much to her surprise.

The remainder of the episode is a Breakfast Club-like scenario with the medical staff in a classroom for a seminar on sexual harassment, except the instructor is delayed by winter weather.

As a broadcast, primetime show, there’s only so much a series like ER can show. The doctors and nurses display the usual combination of amusement and disgust at the contents of Medusa’s bag, though they are strictly professional when dealing with Medusa and her client as patients. The scene merely serves as a comedic interlude that sets up the doctors and nurses’ unprofessional behavior and subsequent isolation. BDSM is just another oddball thing that brings people to an ER.

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September 16: London, UK

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Le jeu avec le feu (Playing with Fire) is a 1975 French comedy-drama, directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet.

A group of men are kidnapping young women all over Paris and holding them for ransom. They send a ransom note to a wealthy man, “the banker”, before before they kidnap his daughter, Carolina, which persuades the banker to hire a private detective to protect her. This detective is secretly one of the kidnappers, so he talks the banker into letting him take his daughter into hiding in a specialized clinic, which is actually a brothel. So, they’ve managed to kidnap a woman without her or her father knowing she’s been kidnapped. That’s just the beginning of the plot twists.

A major portion of Le jeu is crime-drama-as-absurdist-farce. Men kidnap young women in broad daylight and in front of multiple witnesses. Characters constantly change costumes, identities and loyalties. Two men meet on top of the Arc de Triomphe to negotiate the ransom for a woman they both know (or think they know) hasn’t been kidnapped. The criminals complain about the difficulty of holding people for ransom in a depressed economy. Not to mention breaking the fourth wall.

Another major portion is European softcore, of the “woman in captivity” variety. Carolina can freely wander around the brothel and look in to various rooms, containing kinky vignettes; Carolina observes but does not participate. This includes even a brief scene of bestiality with a girl and a dog.

After various plot machinations, there’s an elaborate car chase, and it turns out Carolina and the kidnapper were in on the scam from the beginning, and they live happily ever after.

The problem with Le Jeu is that the male characters know this is a comedy, but the women look like they aren’t in on the joke. In the aftermath of the Jeffrey Epstein and Gisèle Pelicot affairs, I can’t quite laugh off women being kidnapped, gaslit and drugged to be sexually abused by men. I would have liked this a lot more if it was played entirely as a farce and nobody really got hurt.

Alain Robbe-Grillet was married to Catherine Robbe-Grillet, a dominatrix and erotica writer. Actress Anicée Alvina (Carolina) starred in Robbe-Grillet’s previous film Successive Slidings of Pleasure (1974), along with her co-star Jean-Louis Trintignant. Sylvia Kristel is best known as the star of the original Emmanuelle and many other European softcore movies.

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

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

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

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

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The Author Stew, Your Number

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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!

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Courtesan Finder, FMTY: Fly Me To You Explained

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Schey Place Books, Weighing the odds: Fictional Exposure Explored

Ramone Quides, The Hairband

Simone Francis, The Contract – FemDom Story

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

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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