BDSM — bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism — is not a side motif that culture discovered after Fifty Shades. It has been in newspapers, novels, specialty presses, advertising, pop songs, photography, theatre, film, television, and games for decades, sometimes as coded glamour, sometimes as moral panic, sometimes as the actual subject. For kink readers the useful history is not a list of every title that ever showed a whip. It is the record of how the scene built its own magazines, how mainstream outlets treated practitioners as either torturers or punchlines, and which films, songs, and web projects actually bothered to get the dynamic right.
Newspapers, magazines, and the McGeorge problem
Through the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries a run of periodicals treated BDSM as a subject, not a scandal. Small independent houses and organized groups both published; many later folded or moved online. The German-language magazine Schlagzeilen began in 1988 as an internal group newspaper and became the important BDSM periodical in German-speaking countries. That is not a footnote. Scene media is how a subculture talks to itself when the mainstream only wants a raid or a punchline.
Mainstream papers showed up when a practitioner had another job they found embarrassing. In 2002 The Washington Post ran a piece identifying Jack McGeorge, a munitions analyst for UNMOVIC, as a leader in Washington, D.C.’s BDSM community. Commentators immediately compared his kink work to torture under Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi administration. Other writers, more usefully, compared the discrimination aimed at BDSM people to the older treatment of homosexuals. The McGeorge episode is still the cleanest American example of a newspaper treating a leather title as a security story.
In Germany, Alice Schwarzer’s feminist magazine EMMA used its PorNO campaign against hatred toward women and violent pornography to argue for a pornography ban. Schwarzer equated sadomasochistic practice with violence against women. Her line on female masochism — “Female masochism is collaboration!” — has been attacked ever since for treating gender as a war and any woman who kneels as a traitor. EMMA also went after Helmut Newton for the “pornografization of fashion photography” and for what it called his unrestrained sadomasochistic obsessions. BDSM support groups and scene publications have spent years answering that kind of coverage: the camera is not the crime, and a consensual scene is not a war crime.
Literature: the canon, the tabloid shelf, and the consent correction
Sadomasochism is a standing literary subject. The books kink people actually hand each other still start with Anne Desclos’s The Story of O (as Pauline Réage), Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, and Eric Stanton’s comics. James Joyce slipped a literary curiosity into Ulysses as Martha’s letter to Leopold Bloom. Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s 1925 Naomi — originally Chijin no Ai, “A Fool’s Love” — is a tragicomedy about Japan’s 1920s “modern girl,” with echoes of Pygmalion (1913) and Of Human Bondage (1915), and it predates Lolita by thirty years. Ingeborg Day’s 1978 memoir Nine and a Half Weeks: A Memoir of a Love Affair, published as Elizabeth McNeill, became the Hollywood film 9½ Weeks. Justine Ettler’s The River Ophelia (1995) tracked empty, sometimes violent student and yuppie sex with a surreal edge.
Anne Rice, writing as A. N. Roquelaure, put explicit BDSM into the Sleeping Beauty trilogy: The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983), Beauty’s Punishment (1984), and Beauty’s Release (1985). In July 2006 Germany’s mass tabloid Bild-Zeitung, Europe’s best-selling paper, partnered with Random House on a nine-volume Bild-Erotik-Bibliothek. Three of the nine were openly sadomasochistic: Rice’s Exit to Eden (as Anne Rampling), Story of O again, and Laura Reese’s explicit Topping from Below. That is what commercial potential looked like before the internet made every ebook store a dungeon.
E. L. James’s Fifty Shades trilogy dragged BDSM into airport-bookstore romance. The scene’s verdict has always been split: credit for making the words speakable, and hard criticism for getting protocol, consent, and power wrong. Later kink fiction often answered that failure by putting agency on the page — Penny Aimes’s For the Love of April French is one example the source flags. Fetish as theatrical ritual can look like literature; it is not the same thing. BDSM writing does not carry a single philosophy or morality. It represents the practices inside whatever zeitgeist the author is sitting in. Alfred Kinsey’s 1953 Sexual Behavior in the Human Female already quantified the appetite: 12 percent of women and 22 percent of men reported an erotic response to a sadomasochistic story, and the same volume recorded erotic responses to being bitten.
Specialist houses grew up to feed that readership: Circlet Press, Daedalus Publishing, Greenery Press, and Nexus Books under Virgin. The instructional and political shelf matters as much as the novels. In November 1981 the lesbian-feminist group Samois published Coming to Power: Writing and graphics on Lesbian S/M; Alyson’s 1982 reprint took it worldwide. Short fiction sat next to basic how-to and safety. It is widely treated as the first introductory BDSM book with international reach, and later primers copied the mix. Jay Wiseman’s SM 101 (Greenery, 1998) remains the comprehensive reference, including lifestyle questions and BDSM during pregnancy. Philip Miller and Molly Devon’s Screw the Roses, Send Me the Thorns (1995) is the heavily illustrated practice-and-safety manual. Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy’s The New Topping Book (2002) and The New Bottoming Book (1998) split the psychological, practical, and technical work by role and still include partner-search advice. Patrick Califia and Robin Sweeney’s The Second Coming: A Leatherdyke Reader (1996) is the sequel to Coming to Power. Mark Thompson’s Leatherfolk (1991) collected twenty-eight essays from known sadomasochistic writers and activists. Lady Green and Jaymes Easton’s Kinky Crafts (1998) is the DIY toy book. Gloria Brame, William Brame, and Jon Jacobs’s Different Loving (1996) surveyed dominance and submission as a world. Later academic and scene titles — Kleinplatz and Moser’s Sadomasochism: Powerful Pleasures (2006), Staci Newmahr’s Playing On The Edge (2011), Margot Weiss’s Techniques of Pleasure (2011) on San Francisco, Clarisse Thorn’s The S & M Feminist (2012), Lee Harrington and Mollena Williams’s Playing Well With Others (2012), Anne O. Nomis’s The History & Arts of the Dominatrix (2013), Rajan Dominari’s Welcome to the Darkside (2019) — turned the same subject into ethnography, feminism, and community orientation rather than just dirty stories.
Marketing: camels in leather, Madonna with a crop, Mini gets spanked
From the early 1990s, continental European ad campaigns treated BDSM iconography as a lifestyle shorthand. In Germany, Camel and West cigarette billboards used a camel in “typical” leather and a dominatrix with a whip. West had to pull the ad for “offense against morality”; the motifs kept coming back anyway. In March 2007 H&M sold a Madonna-designed collection on German television with Madonna — already regularly attacked for sadomasochistic imagery — as a dominant lifestyle icon taking a crop to an “inappropriately” dressed female pupil and rebuilding her outfit to lines like “Don’t think it – you need to know it.” In Canada, Mini sold the 2005/2006 winter package for the Mini Cooper as an interactive BDSM session: a dominatrix walked the user through spanking tools on the car to explain optional equipment, under the slogan “Dominate winter.” In the United States, Anheuser-Busch repeatedly sponsored San Francisco’s Folsom Street Fair. Diesel jeans ran sadomasochistic fashion ads. Once the look is selling cars, beer, and teen tops, the argument that kink is unspeakable is already lost.
Music: from Venus in Furs to a banned Hurricane
The Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs,” off The Velvet Underground & Nico, takes its title and temperature from Sacher-Masoch; the band’s name comes from a book on American paraphilias that included BDSM. Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” may be the best-known pop song with BDSM connotations, mostly because of the video. Adam Lambert’s “For Your Entertainment,” Puddle of Mudd’s “Control,” and Madonna’s “Erotica” speak from the dominant’s chair — so does Unknown Hinson’s “Baby Let’s Play Rough.” Nedra Johnson’s “Alligator Food” and Lady Gaga’s “Teeth” write from the submissive side. Jace Everett’s “Bad Things,” the True Blood theme, alludes rather than demonstrates. German punk band Die Ärzte’s “Sweet, Sweet Gwendoline” introduced John Willie’s bondage heroine to a pop audience that had never seen a fetish comic; gothic rock act Umbra et Imago, a fetish-goth staple, cut its own “Sweet Gwendoline.” Industrial music carries more BDSM thematics than most genres and shaped Rivethead fashion; Rammstein’s “Ich tu dir weh” is openly about hurting someone you want. Depeche Mode made the undertone a brand — “Master and Servant” is the cleanest example.
The rest of the playlist is long and uneven, which is why it belongs in prose rather than a dump. 2 Live Crew’s “S and M,” Adam and the Ants’ “Whip in My Valise,” Blue Öyster Cult’s “Dominance and Submission,” Janet Jackson’s “Rope Burn” on The Velvet Rope (1997), Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer,” “Happiness in Slavery,” “Meet Your Master,” and “Sin,” Rihanna’s “S&M” on Loud, Guns N’ Roses’ “Pretty Tied Up,” Green Day’s “Blood, Sex and Booze” and “Dominated Love Slave,” Måneskin’s “I Wanna Be Your Slave,” and Thin Lizzy’s 1979 “S&M” are the ones that actually put the power exchange in the lyric or the clip. In 2010 Christina Aguilera’s “Not Myself Tonight,” off Bionic, built a high-concept video around a bound, gagged slave and a latex dominatrix with a riding crop and a chorus of look-alike slave girls. The same year, Thirty Seconds to Mars’ “Hurricane,” directed by Jared Leto as Bartholomew Cubbins, stacked bondage and D/s imagery so hard most networks banned it; it still took three 2011 MTV VMA nominations for cinematography, direction, and editing. Pop did not discover kink in 2011. It just stopped whispering.
Art, fashion, photography, theatre
On the page, John Willie’s Adventures of Sweet Gwendoline ran as a serial in Robert Harrison’s mainstream girlie magazine Wink from June 1947 to February 1950 and then kept being reprinted. Guido Crepax adapted Histoire d’O in 1975. Eric Stanton, Hajime Sorayama, and Robert Bishop defined the graphic-design side of fetish. In sculpture, Bruno Zach’s art-deco “The Riding Crop” (c. 1925) is a dominatrix in bronze. Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood built 1970s punk clothes out of restrictive BDSM ideas, especially bondage trousers that strap the wearer’s legs together. Larry Townsend’s The Leatherman’s Handbook II (1983; the 1972 first edition omitted the chart) still stands as the usual authority on handkerchief code: black for sadomasochism, grey for bondage, left for top/dominant/active, right for bottom/submissive/passive, in gay-male and BDSM cruising across the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe. Townsend also warned that people wear colors because the hankie itself turns them on, or because they do not know the code — so you still have to negotiate.
Robert Mapplethorpe’s most fought-over work documented New York’s homosexual male BDSM subculture in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Barbara Nitke’s 2003 book Kiss of Fire: A Romantic View of Sadomasochism was among the first mainstream photo collections to treat BDSM as its subject. Ellen von Unwerth keeps returning to dominance, female sexuality, and femdom, including a Rihanna-as-dominatrix sitting. Helmut Newton earned the tag “King of Kink” for building fashion narratives out of BDSM, femdom, and power play. On stage, Peter Kern’s Austrian Worauf sich Körper kaprizieren updated Jean Genet’s 1950 film Un chant d’amour, with Miriam Goldschmidt as a dominant woman putting her husband (Heinrich Herkie) and butler (Günter Bubbnik) through sadistic paces. Anna Schwemmer’s German play Ach, Hilde follows a young woman who, dumped by her boyfriend, becomes a professional dominatrix.
Film and television: from coded frames to Secretary and Billions
Early features buried BDSM in the corners. The 1960s and 1970s then adapted the literary canon — Venus in Furs (1969), The Story of O (1975) — while Spanish director Jess Franco built exploitation pictures off the Marquis de Sade that censors banned in country after country. Adrian Lyne’s 9½ Weeks (1986) is the film that took the subject to a wide paying audience and made real money doing it. From the late 1990s, Preaching to the Perverted (1997) — widely read as an answer to Britain’s Operation Spanner — and Steven Shainberg’s Secretary (2002) started balancing box-office needs with something closer to lived D/s. Mainstream representation of alternative sexualities, BDSM included, climbed sharply from the 1990s into the early 2000s, a trend already visible in 1983 and still not slowing. Documentaries widened the frame: SICK: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (1997), Bound for Pleasure (2002), Wir leben … SM! (2004), Graphic Sexual Horror (2009), and KinK (2013). Canada’s KinK (2001) was the first television series anywhere devoted to the subject. 9½ Weeks, Tokyo Decadence (1992), and Secretary later turned up, sometimes cut, on television in several countries.
Under that mainstream shelf sits a huge direct-to-DVD and download market. Most of those films have no explicit sex; a minority are porn. They sort into bondage, corporal punishment (domestic and school spanking), pony play, and dungeon master/slave work. The adult industry answered the same demand with S&M features; the ones the source singles out are the award-winning The Fashionistas (2002) and The Fashionistas II (2003).
Scripted television and film kept using the dominatrix as a character type and, less often, as a real practice. ’Allo ’Allo! played BDSM for sitcom in “The British ’ave Come (The Fallen Madonna)” (1984) and “Pretty Maids All in a Row” (1987). Lucy Liu’s Pearl in Payback (1999) is a Chinese-mafia dominatrix and hit woman. Law & Order: SVU opened its books on a dead businesswoman in the scene with “Stocks and Bondage” (1999). CSI’s recurring Lady Heather is a professional dominatrix; CSI: NY’s “Hush” (2005) is a case inside the BDSM community. Jennifer Tilly plays a part-time hired dominatrix and leather-clad dancer in Dancing at the Blue Iguana (2000) and, in Fast Sofa (2001), a porn star bound, gagged, and whipped by her manager. Peta Wilson’s cable film Mercy (2000) puts her in a secret S&M society as a submissive. Nip/Tuck used Tia Carrere as Mistress DarkPain. Desperate Housewives gave Bree’s husband Rex a secret dominatrix. Lucy Lawless turns up as a German dominatrix in an Amsterdam fetish club in EuroTrip (2004). House’s “Love Hurts” (2005) treats a patient who has a dominatrix. Jane Wiedlin used the fourth season of VH1’s The Surreal Life (2005) to walk on in dominatrix gear, talk about her BDSM life, and watch other cast members try S&M in a makeshift dungeon. Secret Diary of a Call Girl (2007) sends its lead to dominatrix lessons. Boardwalk Empire season 3 gives Gyp Rosetti sadomasochistic sex and autoerotic asphyxiation. History Channel’s Vikings (seasons 3–4) has Count Odo beating and torturing Therese for arousal. Showtime’s Billions (2016– ) puts psychiatrist Wendy Rhoades on top of her husband, U.S. Attorney Chuck Rhoades, in an ongoing D/s marriage — one of the few network-adjacent dramas that treats the practice as a character fact rather than a corpse. Submission (2016) follows Ashley from a dead relationship into BDSM after she finds an erotic novel titled SLAVE. Marco Polo season 2 puts Ahmad and Mei Lin in rope bondage and pegging. Netflix’s Bonding (2019) is about a dominatrix and her assistant. Love and Leashes (2022) is a Netflix office romance built around a preference for dominant women. That is a lot of titles. The ones that actually changed how kink looks on a screen are still 9½ Weeks, Secretary, the documentaries, and the handful of series willing to hire a consultant.
Games and the web
Anna Anthropy’s 2008 platformer Mighty Jill Off follows Jill, a boot-fetish bottom in a lesbian BDSM relationship, climbing a tower after her partner kicks her off it. Critics treated it as an actual reading of D/s, not a costume. Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Kieron Gillen called it an interesting examination of the master/slave relationship; Alec Meer called it a wry look at why game protagonists accept torture to reach an objective. James DeRosa praised Anthropy for using a hypersexualized bondage platformer to take apart essentialist male and female sex roles in games and to make difficulty itself part of the power exchange. Anthropy’s Encyclopedia Fuckme and the Case of the Vanishing Entree is a dating sim whose submissive protagonist is trying to escape a dominant cannibal who intends to tie them up and eat them. Online, the same culture that once lived in Schlagzeilen and Greenery Press catalogs now lives in podcasts and scene sites — Dollie Llama and ThornDaddy’s Diary of an S and M Romance, KinkyCast, Rope Weekly on shibari, couple shows, education feeds, Mollena Williams’s “The Perverted Negress.” The medium changed. The argument did not: BDSM is a culture with a press, a bookshelf, a cinema, and a web, not a single dirty picture that wandered into the news.
