Secretary

Saw Secretary, a sort of Fifty Shades of Grey-style story about a submissive little woman discovering the joys of BDSM. Unlike Fifty Shades of Grey however, this film is less sexually explicit and less creepily consent-ignoring. There's risky fun games they play, where the boss will push the secretary's boundaries, but you never get the sense that the secretary is anything but enthusiastic. That's my take on it anyway. There's very little BDSM in my life and I don't really know if I'm looking at a good relationship or not. It's very intense anyway.

The film is very delighted with its own taboo-pushing. There are voice-over monologues that serve no purpose beyond confronting the viewer with the whole "yeah, I like it when he spanks me. Problem?" thing. Also of course these monologues serve to reassure the nervous viewer (and I am nothing if not a nervous viewer) that this is all enthusiastic on both sides. Indeed, there's even a sequence in the end where the secretary (the sub) must win back the boss (the dom) in an epic endurance test. He's kind of freaked out about the relationship too, you know. Anyway, its during this sequence that the film unpacks a ton of cultural hangups about pain and the relationship of pain with pleasure. It's great. A stern woman urges the secretary to read up on her feminist literature, as though a woman's right to be treated with respect was in opposition to this woman's desires to be humiliated. A blast of good intellect in the middle of a steamy, silly movie.

The movie is sexy and goofy, the secretary moaning breathily "I'm your... secretary!" as she's being spanked. There's some strange connection drawn between self-harm and BDSM but I think BDSM is portrayed as a healthy way for this woman to handle her self-harming tendencies by putting them in hands of someone else whom she trusts not to actually hurt her. It's possible to read too much into this connection but I think it's realistically specific to this situation. The problem is one of representation. This BDSM relationship wouldn't need to thread so many needles of respectability and consent and feminist-approval and so on if there were only more BDSM relationships portrayed in films/TV shows. Not that I personally care, mind you, I just won't disagree if I see an article condemning this relationship even though I personally found it not objectionable. Bleh. What a paragraph.