You've Made Mistress Very, Very Angry': Displeasure and Pleasure in Media Representations of BDSM

It has long been a convention of mainstream Western filmmaking to characterise the fetishist, the sadomasochist and the dominatrix if not as psychopaths, at least as individuals with self-destructive obsessions or behaviours that are dangerous to society. These so-called ‘perverts’ and their practices are also lampooned regularly in the mass media and continue to be narrative short-cuts in situation comedies, advertisements and so forth, stereotypes there partly to represent and fix the maladjusted sexual deviant living in ‘normal’ society. This paper considers some of these stereotypes from an alternative viewpoint, that of the BDSM community in Britain, based on a questionnaire conducted during May 2006. Since the range of practices that go to make up this lifestyle are predominantly based upon implied or fantasy narratives and vivid stereotypes, it seems appropriate to propose that pleasure may be drawn by the fetish and BDSM communities from their representation in the cinema.