The “Fifty Shades of Grey” sequel opened recently and it did extremely well at the box-office in the US and overseas. In fact, the film had the fourth largest international opening of all-time for an rated-R movie. It seems that America, and much of the Western world is obsessed with bondage.
It appears that in times of great sexual experimentation and excess, a counter-reaction develops that seeks extreme order out of chaos. The beginnings of this modern pop-culture movement originated in the sexual-revolution of the late-1960s and 70s with the incredibly ugly Nazi “love camp” exploitation and “women in prison” films. This pornographic genre moved into the mainstream with Liliana Cavani’s controversial 1974 film “The Night Porter.” But with the proliferation of hardcore porn in the 1980s, brought about by the technological advances in home-video-systems, the singer Madonna almost single-handedly incorporated the aesthetics of bondage into the collective cultural lexicon.
Since her early pre-fame days in New York City, Madonna was keenly aware of the various “gay” kink subcultures and she borrowed many of the visuals from them and incorporated it into her later style. Not coincidentally, at the height of the AIDS crisis in the early-90s, Madonna main-streamed sadomasochism, predominantly through her music video for “Justify My Love.” As a plague ravaged those who most enthusiastically embraced the decadence of the disco era, “gay” men, a penchant for S&M began to sweep through America and the West that echoed back to the flagellants who roamed across Medieval Europe during the Black Death.
Today, much of the ground work laid by Madonna has been taken up by the successors she spawned, notably: Britney Spears, Rihanna, and Miley Cyrus. And, although popular-music has always been to a certain degree celebratory of the transgressive, bondage-chic has moved into so called high-culture as evidenced with the recent covers on “Vogue” Magazine featuring Katie Holmes in 2011 and Gisele Bündchen in 2015. Currently, the on-line store for Sears, one of the oldest and most respected companies in American history, sells a male bondage harness.
It’s been my experience that sexual freedom creates self-enslavement – with the most extreme example being the BDSM phenomena. In a very real sense, the sexual revolution that took full flower during the fabled 1967 “Summer of Love” in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury resulted in the eventual creation of the Castro District “gay” male dungeons – just a few blocks away. Because when sexual freedom unleashed chaos: non-monogamy, multiple partners, homosexuality, the natural instinct in Man was to reassert the norm. But in a world increasingly lacking strong moral guidelines, this reassertion took a strange swerve towards bondage as the ultimate constraint against fragmentation.
When I entered the “gay” community in 1988 at age 18, I did so as a youth hungry for affection, love, and of course sex, but I was looking for something more. There was a deep spiritual longing within me that I could not explain or even recognize. When I was a kid, I saw Jesus as an affable hippie. As for the Mass, it was a poorly performed and loosely conglomerated folk-rock love-in. If I wanted to go to a concert, I could pray at the altar of Madonna. Then, at the height of her powers, Madonna piecemeal resurrected (like Frankenstein) the disregarded remnants of pre-Vatican II Catholicism symbolized in the dancing robed monks during her live performances of “Like a Prayer.” It was beautiful and monstrous. But there was stitched together stability here that somehow reassembled the scraps of a past order. These became ecstatic moments that, till that point, formed the height of my lifetime religious experience. They were orchestrated rituals in a world that had abandoned mystery in favor of the mundane.
Sex was sacred and sex was the sacrament, but even that started to lose its potency once I habitually knelt in front of a hundred men. The possibilities available in a limitless space where the tempering influence of women did not exist, was at first euphoric and then turned into frenzied boredom. The quick thrilling danger of a hook-up on the dance floor became routine; the hot moment of first-date sex always ended with cold wet spots in the middle of the bed – so each of us slept on the opposite edges of the mattress; the body was constantly on display, but it looked like artificially injected grocery store meat wrapped in cellophane. I felt aimless and oddly disconnected. In order to rejoin the living, I sought self-healing through increased contact with humanity, but more sex made me feel increasingly inhuman. In desperation, I was less and less discriminating – a warm receptacle was enough: men, women, and those who were somewhat indefinable. The free-love of the 1960s proved to be anything but freeing.
In the midst of meaningless drifting, the hard shiny buckles and stiff black-dyed rawhide of the leather community materialized solid and substantial like ancient armor. In the world of BDSM, there was a knightly ethos of prescribed behavior. Roles were clearly defined and deviations were never tolerated. There was an immediate stark contrast between the discipline of the leather bars and the Dionysian frenzy of the dance clubs. This was deadly serious performance art dominated by aggression; in male homosexuality, masculinity determined your placement in a limited scale of dominate or submissive with no variations in between. The young were encouraged to be boys (twinks) while beefy mirror images of our dismissive fathers are enthroned at the top of the food chain.
In the heterosexual milieu, these standards persist except when the male reverts to the infantile or submerges into the hyper-feminine and is subsequently controlled and subjugated by the vengeful unforgiving dominatrix. It’s this singular icon of the whip-carrying woman that has proved the most influential in modern culture. Here, it’s significant that a frequent scenario in male submissive fantasies are the often elaborate punishments reserved for those who step out-of-line. In the contemporary disordered male mind, filled with confusing pornographic images, memories of empty encounters, and uncertainty as to the function of masculinity, the dominatrix represents the ultimate failure of the modern male to rise above the current sexual anarchy. Because, here, the man does nothing but submit and surrender. Interestingly, gay men can only approach this all-seeing female in the guise of camp, either through drag queens or superstar divas.
This is all incredibly reminiscent of late-Imperial Rome, particularly during the Severan Dynasty, when manipulative and scheming women managed state affairs. In this period, men deviated in opposite directions tragically embodied in the wildly contrasting personas and temperaments of two emperors: the hyper-masculine and masochistic Caracalla and the ephebic transgender Elagabalus (see pictured below); the latter, the supposed illegitimate son of Caracalla, pushed onto the throne by the Severan women, encouraged his male lovers to savagely beat him as a part of their sexual games which involved the emperor play-acting the character of a street-harlot. Not coincidentally, Elagabalus was also a devotee of a bizarre cult. Both emperors exhibited instinctual protective withdrawals from a culture in chaos and a domestic and civil order in disarray.
With women, as envisioned in the “Fifty Shades of Grey” universe, the dominating man proves attractive because he is the polar-opposite of the ambivalent cisgendered male who has testes but has been socially neutered. Like the submissive males that desire the dominatrix, Anastasia, the heroine of “Fifty Shades,” is a highly successful career woman who, within the sterile walls of corporate America, is seemingly the master of her own destiny. Similarly, the US middle-class woman, who made the original book a smash best-seller, is the head coordinator over a wide field of influence: family, work, daily appointments, dance and karate classes, little-league; whereas the man is absent or relegated to the position of a larger adolescent requiring constant oversight; this view of men is most sickly envisioned by the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon with their depictions of bumbling child-like fathers; the worst being the dopey dads in Disney’s “Good Luck Charlie” and Nickelodeon’s “Drake & Josh.”
Where men have submitted, for whatever reason, to being micromanaged by their wives or partners, women have escaped into the world of literary fiction and men into the cyber-stream of pornography. For example, the a popular trope in dime-store romance novels is the rogue-pirate, or some other heroic swashbuckler, who literally sweeps the often captive women away from her previously dreary existence. In a sense, “Fifty Shades,” is the extreme version of this genre – wherein the fantasy becomes the “safe-space” amidst a chaotic world of endless demands. Essentially, women literally lay-back and allow a man to take over. On the other hand, according to free-porn powerhouse Pornhub, the 30th most visited website in the US, their most popular searches in 2016 included perennial favorites “step-mom” and “MILF.” Typically incorporated into these older women incestuous mother-son-stepson scenarios are bondage themes. Here, some men are regressing into childhood, such as the passive male with the dominatrix; others, in which the fantasy involves the abuse of the woman, are lashing out at the perceived overbearing female. In this world of ritualized violence, there exists an intransigent dogma of establish actions and hierarchies. It’s a sick return to order.
In a society where biological and traditional gender roles have become increasingly confused, many are attempting to reassert and stabilize their bearings through bondage – either as a viewer or a participant.
Interesting. I read something last week that stated that patriarchy (which feminism loves to hate) is actually part of the natural law. I think that having “equality,” or what is actually “sameness” enter into marriages (or even the sameness of homosexuality) makes us long for differentiation again. Then, since patriarchy has been decried, we twist the original unequality or complementarity of the patriarchy into the BDSM dynamic, or we have drag queens creating a caricature of the female, or the masculinity of domineering women. You’re really on to something here.
Terri Nunn with her band Berlin put out a song and video not long ago titled “Animal”. In the music video i was shocked to see this 1980’s electronic pop siren still beautiful in her 50’s performing in black bondage leather on a throne in a sex dungeon. The whole video was filmed is some well known sex dungeon with some famous trans person and leather people with S&M masks, etc.