The concern of this chapter is to analyse the representation of the dominatrix in sadomasochistic pornography from Britain and America, identifying a complex interplay of performances by the dominatrix and the implications for female subjectivity. British S/M porn frequently falls into the ‘amateur sadomasochism’ category as described by Linda Williams which owns a stronger sense of the ‘real’ than the ‘aesthetic sadomasochism’ of films such as The Punishment of Anne (aka The Image, Radley Metzger, 1979).1 Stylistically, it tends towards a documentary-look owing to its often low production values. Its performers are varied in age and looks, and have an overwhelming sense of the boy-, girl- or dominatrix-next-door, in contrast to the apparent glamour of American S/M porn. Stylistically, American S/M on video often has relatively high production values, dedicated ‘film sets’ and props, and frequently stars female porn performers who are youthful, attractive, with perfectly applied make-up, coiffed hair, false nails and false breasts.
The profusion of movies coming from one particular production venture in Britain, DOM Promotions, accounts for a particular style and cueing of expectations that places this dominatrix porn aesthetically somewhere between American S/M and European S/M (often hailing from Germany or Holland and typically more hard-core). British dominatrix porn plays towards the glamour of the dominatrix on one hand and the spectacle of the activity on the other, whilst signalling that this woman might have time for ‘you’ in her diary, placing the British dominatrix, perhaps more than any other, at a border that is becoming increasingly central to debates on representations of tough and violent women in popular culture: on the border between subject and object.
A LABYRINTH OF PERFORMANCES
The overwhelming mode and essence of dominatrix porn, possibly more than any other pornography, is performance. This works at many levels and it would be useful to explore some of these to demonstrate how multi-faceted the performance truly is and how the dominatrix features within it. Arguably the most obvious is the narrative of the pornographic episode, the scenario, in which are found the dominant woman and the submissive, possibly also other actants such as a second submissive who may be permitted to aid the dominatrix in her work (contrary to some writing on S/M porn there is a fairly strong female submissive presence in many of these movies).2 Toughness, a trait that we might attribute to the dominatrix and which has been discussed in relation to tough female characters in films and TV by Sherrie A. Inness, can be regarded as a performance. Inness implies the performative nature of toughness when she writes that ‘clothing is an important element in the performance of toughness because it serves as a visual reminder that a woman has distanced herself from femininity’.3 Costume is discussed below, but the key point to take from this is that the tough woman is understood here as a performing woman. Furthermore, sadomasochistic behaviour is often regarded as performative, even theatrical, with its conventionalised characters, scenarios, props and so on. Valerie Steele in her study of fetish costuming describes the sadomasochistic scenario as ‘an elaborate erotic drama’ containing ‘ritualized sexual performances’.4 Connie Shortes similarly describes S/M as ‘a fantastic, erotically charged tableau in which the dynamics of dominance and submission are performed’.5 Linda Williams draws attention to the complexity of sadomasochistic porn when she argues that S/M behaviour is made up of ‘acts’ that in reality affect the submissive’s body, ‘yet they can also be acts in the theatrical sense of shows performed for oneself or others’.6 In dominatrix porn this is certainly the case with the added likelihood of some hard-core sexual activity as part of the dramatic performance. Frequently the scene will be set instantly through mise-en-scène, physical relations on-screen and dialogue. Punishment may proceed immediately, then reasons for the punishment are raised, the punishment proceeds, sometimes in several episodes, and the scenario eventually ends, frequently punctuated with the departure of the dominatrix from the room leaving the submissive alone to contemplate the events that have just taken place.
This simple narrative trajectory tends to omit the action that led to the submissive’s punishment; the crime is not important to see since the purpose of the scenario is the acting out of punishment, but it can be virtually anything from playing with Mistress’s doll (Busty Bondage Lesbians, Sunset Media, 2004), enjoying a punishment too much (‘You’re enjoying that too much! Let’s do something you won’t enjoy’ – Mistress Smoke, DOM Promotions, 2008), failing in a duty (‘You know why I’m spanking you? Because you didn’t put enough sugar in my tea this morning’ – Mistress Smoke), or even betraying the Mistress by visiting another dominatrix across town (Asphyxiation 69: Desires of a Dominatrix 5, Bizarre Video, 2006). Generally speaking the crimes are trivial and not in keeping with the severity of the punishment, which introduces a sense of the absurd and vaguely humourous into the narrative. How, for example, does a female submissive whose crime is being a ‘whore’ learn her lesson by performing fellatio on the Mistress’s strap-on, then being penetrated after her vaginal lips have been clamped with plastic pegs? As incongruous as the link between crime and punishment may be, it is often referred to by the dominatrix throughout the punishment by way of consistently justifying her actions. She will also consistently apply a label or name that seems spontaneously chosen at the beginning of the scenario, one that reinforces her dominant relation to her submissive through humiliating insinuations: cockroach, little piggy, doggy, little boy, little girl, little dolly, Barbie, bitch, whore, slave, subby girl.
The implicit narrative that lies behind the scenario performed on-screen is that this woman lives her life fulfilling her responsibility to teach naughty people a lesson. She labours constantly to show them the error of their ways. This is, as much as is the enacted scenario, a central dynamic of the dominatrix’s performance: to labour in her necessary role. It is, of course, all a game, a masquerade, one that is perfectly understood by those involved, since what she truly serves is a range of physical and psychological desires in the submissive and the viewer (and arguably in herself also), and it is in this that she labours on-screen throughout the length of the performance. Not only does she work to make sure that the camera is able to capture the most desirable view of the action (in common with pornography and most mainstream narrative media), but she also demonstrates a great deal of effort to enact a range of physical and mental punishments. The dominatrix of Mistress Gemma’s London Dungeon (DOM Promotions, 2008), like many others, moves from one activity to the next, from the application of restraints, to a period of partial asphyxiation, to the insertion of an electric butt-plug, pegs on the testicles, flogging the genitals and blowing smoke into the tube attached to the submissive’s gimp mask, regularly engaging him in dialogue concerning his crimes, his pain and the condition of his genitals. She is rarely ever stationary, she is almost constantly in motion, often off-screen selecting a new implement from her array of sadistic paraphernalia. She works hard to maintain and gradually amplify the level of torture to a climax of multiple, simultaneous punishments across the submissive’s body. She is, thus, a working girl, a woman whose work is never complete because people just keep on being naughty.
This level of performance, of the woman on-screen performing as a dominatrix, is further complicated when she is a professional dominatrix in her actual career. DOM Promotions’ ‘Live from the Mistress’ Dungeon’ series goes to great lengths on the DVD boxes and at the beginning of the movies to alert the customer/viewer to the ‘genuine’ nature of the material and its participants. ‘Warning!’ the DVD box proclaims. ‘This movie was filmed in a real Dungeon. Not to be confused with inferior quality productions!’ – the allegation clearly being that ‘staged’ S/M movies featuring porn performers are not the real thing. The movies begin with a notice stating that ‘all participants were given a safe-word or signal which they could exercise at any point to halt the proceedings’. The message is that this is real sadomasochism, the dominatrix is a professional, she really knows what she is doing, and for the British viewer at least she is attainable, reachable, being in London, or as with Mistress Smoke, easy to contact because her mobile number is provided inside the DVD box together with her opening hours at her dungeon in Swindon. So the labyrinth of performances evolves. Not only is a scenario and a stereotypical role performed, but a real dominatrix performs her job in a space that itself performs as a ‘dungeon’, which is not a real dungeon at all, simply a space that is given that name in the enactment of rule-based sadomasochistic games.
With so many of the activities having an overt sexual aspect to them, such as the insertion of a butt-plug, fisting, penetration with a strap-on, nipple torture and so forth, not to mention the sexual nature of the dominant/submissive scenario, the sexual performance of the dominatrix is important to consider. Moving image pornography, by Williams’ definition, is distinguished by its ‘element of performance contained in the term sexual act’.7 Albeit non-simulated sex, it is still performed by actors serving a pre-established scenario. The dominatrix herself never submits sexually to her submissive, but often engages in sexual behaviour. Mistress Beverley, for example, in Yes Mistress (DOM Promotions, 2007), enters a small dungeon space where two white males kneel on all fours, their heads down. She loudly proclaims ‘Now then, you two. Today, I am in the mood for a little bit of amusement. One of you is gonna get shagged and the other one is going to watch.’ The unlucky/lucky submissive who receives this treatment is next seen lying prone on a padded bed, his legs supported in gynae-style leg rests waiting to receive a ‘really good bitch-fucking’ from a topless Mistress Beverley. The sex act is certainly not simulated (penetration shots are provided in extreme close-up), so as in mainstream hard-core pornography what is witnessed is ‘real’. In all other ways, however, this is a sexual performance complete with gasps from both participants, including Mistress Beverley using a strap-on, the display of her bare breasts (artificially enhanced) and an eventual ‘money-shot’ in which the submissive is ordered to ejaculate on a count of ten (he makes it at eleven) and is congratulated as a ‘good boy’. Throughout, as in all of her activities, the dominatrix repeatedly alternates between blandishment and encouragement, from ‘dirty boy’ to ‘good boy’ and back again, facilitating the submissive’s pleasure. Again, she is working – working to facilitate the satisfaction of the client and working to perform her own satisfaction to make the scenario complete, the irony of which is summed up in Mistress Beverley’s statement: ‘Suffering for you, pleasure for me’ when it appears more to be ‘Pleasure for you, work for me.’
So the dominatrix is involved, one might say, in women’s work which is a labour and which is never finished. Before investigating the relationship that this has to the role of mother and the performance of motherliness, the most basic and essential of her performances should be inspected, that of ‘woman’. Principally in her costume and her body the dominatrix exemplifies the performance of exaggerated femininity encountered in much mainstream pornography. As explored by Valerie Steele, ‘the costume of the dominatrix has remained amazingly unchanged for decades’8 and includes rubber, leather, PVC, high heels, corsets and uniforms of various kinds. Making the most of a woman’s shape, often emphasising her breasts and curves, these outfits have come to connote sexuality, danger, the erotic and a pleasurable sinfulness that is celebrated by a number of sub-cultures. The majority of representations of the dominatrix in the popular media follow this look, the ‘dominatrix-look’. It is present in a covert form in many a female super-hero or villain, and seems rather like a rite of passage as a look for popular musicians in their music videos and live performances (exemplified, of course, by Madonna, the domina-diva herself). This look is also present across the mainstream pornographic product as a signifier, one could argue, of both sexually aggressive and sexually accommodating females. Reading these costumes in dominatrix porn, however, must take place in the context of mise-en-scène (the almost ubiquitous red and black dungeon, the black padded furniture, the sadistic props carefully arranged around the room) and the performance of the dominatrix herself. All contribute to the construction of a violent yet self-controlled womanhood that exists within the walls of the dungeon (she does not and cannot exist outside of the dungeon, a problem encountered in mainstream cinema’s representations of the dominatrix who is not accepted by civilised society).
It is with this construction of a violent woman that a study of dominatrix porn begins to contribute to a contemporary discourse on the presence of tough women in popular culture. Debates revolve around considerations of gender performance and mythologies of gender, often with recourse to Judith Butler’s position on the performativity of gender and on the concept of ‘masquerade’ from feminist criticism.9 The usefulness of a critical awareness of masquerade, whether as a performance of gender or of any socially sanctioned role, is that once it is noticed it reveals identity as a construction. The broadly accepted position now is that gender is made up of a series of learned behaviours, performances or masks, reaffirmed by popular culture, fashion, social interactions, language and so on. From these emerge (often unconscious) expectations of men to perform masculinity and women to perform femininity. The woman who performs masculine signifiers or traits – violence, anger, dominant or aggressive sexuality – may be regarded socially as sacrificing part of her femininity and thus is ‘less feminine’, or could equally be understood as exposing gender as a construction.
Critics such as Sherrie A. Inness, Yvonne Tasker10 and Jeffrey A. Brown11 have analysed representations of tough women in film and TV who, ostensibly, conduct a masculine performance as they karate-chop, kick and shoot their way through narratives, and they have arrived at some very interesting conclusions. Brown, for instance remarks upon the affinity that tough, heroic female characters in movies have to the dominatrix figure, writing that ‘rather than masculiniz[ing] women, the action heroine often functions within the symbolic realm of the dominatrix by both breaking down and exploiting the boundaries between the sexes’.12 What he rejects is the perception that tough women ‘swap’ one gender performance for another, and rather personify and exaggerate both masculine and feminine roles, thus contesting the social acceptance of gender roles. For this reason the tough heroine is a transgressive character who ‘straddles both sides of the psychoanalytic gender divide’.13
Brown’s observation that this inevitably associates the tough heroine with the dominatrix is telling. The dominatrix straddles this same gender divide and not least when represented in pornography. Here is a woman whose breasts, hair, nails, make-up, costume and voice all scream out exaggerated femininity, whilst her manner, her range of sadistic behaviours, her language, her constant action, even her tattoos, contribute towards a performance of masculinity, exemplified in the action of penetrating a submissive with a strap-on. As her title implies, the dominatrix performs dominance, and traditionally that is the domain of men. But, as Brown argues with reference to Thais E. Morgan’s excellent article on dominatrix pornography, the action heroine like the dominatrix ‘mocks masculinity as she enacts it’,14 creating an oddly ambiguous performance. One should add that even if her submissive is female the dominatrix’s performance is a mockery of masculinity, a kind of reversal of the pantomime dame, perhaps even more scornful since it declares that man need not even be present for the joke to work. When the male submissive is present, it should be noted, he is frequently emasculated by punishments enacted upon the penis, such as pegging, bondage or kicking, and also through language concerning the genitals or anus. An anus may be referred to as a ‘pussy’ or a ‘box’ whilst some form of penetration proceeds, further feminising the male sub. Others have their genitals referred to as ‘two little squashed tomatoes’, ‘a little hedgehog’, and ‘a shriveled up prune’, Mistress Beverley, for instance, announces loudly to one male sub, “That’s not a cock, that’s a clit!’, then bursts out laughing at her own joke.
The range of insults employed by these mistresses is impressive and often humourous which serves to remind us that these performances are forms of entertainment that the mistresses themselves cheekily play up to. A notable scenario has Mistress Smoke applying pegs to a submissive’s scrotum, then beginning to play ‘he loves me, he loves me not’ (‘And you’d better not love me,’ she warns), and one cannot help but count the number of pegs left before he inevitably suffers for loving the mistress after she exclaims, ‘Uh oh. He loves me.’ Finding humour in pornography is not necessarily unusual. Constance Penley argues that attitudes to pornography as ‘something done to women’ have obscured the fact that it contains a bawdy, self-conscious humour, ‘closer to Hee Haw than Nazi Death Camp fantasies’ she writes, which often places the male as the butt of the joke.15 Dominatrix pornography having such a propensity for verbal communication, principally from the mistress herself, allows such mocking bawdiness a liberty possibly lacking in other pornographies.
MOTHERLINESS AND MONSTROSITY
As implied by the kind of language used in dominatrix porn, ‘little girl,’ ‘bad boy,’ and so on, the power relationship that is performed is close to that of mother and child. The dominatrix does not literally play the character of a mother (at least not in any of the pornography that I have seen), but she does play the role of mother as archaic figure. Similarly, the submissive is not literally acting the character of a child, but frequently emulates signs of childlikeness and childishness, such as thumb-sucking, playing with a doll, and sticking out a tongue at the dominatrix. The act of spanking over the mistress’s lap is a typical enactment of the mother/child relationship, and in a sense all of the activities fulfill the dominatrix’s role as punishing mother.
FIGURE 14.1 Mistresses and the maternal: the older female dominatrix as a controlling mother figure
This is not the place to enter an extended psychoanalytic account of the dominatrix and what she represents, but a typical reading would place the dominatrix as phallic woman who threatens castration (quite literally in some cases) and the submissive as pre-Oedipal child desiring complete fulfillment from the mother. She could equally represent a physical manifestation of the super-ego who rebukes the submissive for pursuing the urges of the id. These are all important concerns. However, my concern here is with the pornographic text and its immediate significations. Foremost in the construction of motherliness are the tones of voice adopted by the dominatrix when addressing the submissive. One moment she will speak slowly, in a slightly raised register, as if to be heard clearly and understood, and in simple phrases that are frequently posed as questions: ‘Are you very sore? Are you going to cry?’ (Mistress Gemma’s London Dungeon), or ‘Pretty little dolly’ (Desires of a Dominatrix 5), the tone and meaning of the utterance strongly suggesting motherliness. This tone may switch without warning to something altogether more threatening and harsh, such as ‘Head. Down!’ from Mistress Gemma or ‘Give me a smile, bitch!’ from Nicole Sheridan (an American porn actress) in Desires of a Dominatrix 5, who has been ‘sexually assaulting’ then tickling her female submissive. It is part of the alternating structure of the dominatrix’s performance and perfectly matches her gender-straddling transgression: gentle mummy then cruel matriarch. This all takes place in the black and red dungeon, reminiscent of the comforting womb one moment and of fascist imagery the next. It is both a welcoming and brutal place which overwhelms the client into submission where he returns to a foetus, inactive, helpless. He or she may even return to the foetal position as does ‘Cockroach’, the male submissive repeatedly kicked on the floor with gusto by Mistress Smoke.
The parallel to Barbara Creed’s concept of the monstrous-feminine16 is unavoidable, that of the maternal figure who represents a threat to the symbolic order and who is, in herself, abject because she sits on the border between ‘proper’ gender roles. Such a construction becomes even more noticeable in dominatrix porn when one takes account of punishments such as licking mud from boots, dog training by urinating on newspaper, and anal penetration with a boot heel. These activities constitute abject behaviour that, as the implicit narrative goes, teaches the submissive his or her proper place in the transgressive symbolic order in which father is absent and mother is in charge. The irony of dominatrix pornography is that the submissive (and most likely the viewer also) adores the monstrous-feminine and wants her to stay that way. Consequently, in dominatrix porn the monstrous mother is never punished.
THE CAMP AND THE MUNDANE
In keeping with the alternating modes of performance, feminine/masculine, gentle/cruel, there is also in dominatrix pornography an alternation of the spectacular and the everyday. The various dungeon activities that take place on-screen are by their very nature extraordinary. It is not the everyday experience of most people to be encased in a rubber body bag, or to be told by a glamourous woman to sit on a leather studded chair that has a dildo fixed upright on the seat. Gertain punishments are more spectacular than others, such as Nicole Sheridan completely covering a male sub’s tongue in hot green wax (Desires of a Dominatrix 5) or Mistress Smoke putting out a cigarette in her sub’s mouth (Mistress Smoke). Typically, these moments are represented in close-up allowing a non-interrupted gaze at the effects of the violation as the camera consistently seeks out the spectacular. These are the ‘money shots’ of dominatrix porn, occasionally accompanied by the more conventional money shot of male ejaculation by a submissive or a Master.
Similarly, there will almost always be a moment when the effects on the submissive’s body become evident; the welts raise up, the skin reddens and bruises may even emerge, all occurring in real time (accentuated in the cheaper porn which is produced with a hand-held camera and thus reduces editing to a minimum). Despite the spectacular nature of the performance at moments such as these, it is ironically a sense of the real that is constructed: real time, real violent behaviour, real physical responses, none of which can be expected in mainstream cinema’s representations of the dominatrix which are far more concerned with gazing at her than at the effects of her work. Strangely then, spectacle gives rise to the reality of sadomasochism and equally the reality of sadomasochism is spectacular, a fantasy performance with very real effects on the body. The spectacular nature of the videos, together with the exaggerated gendered performances and the performance of a scenario, contributes to a deliberate camp sensibility and effect, consciously excessive in style and content and all the more charming for it.
FIGURE 14.2 Spectacular punishments as a source of sexual climax in Mistress Smoke
However, there are various ways in which the deliberate camp nature of dominatrix porn is overwhelmed. Gertainly the general predictability of the mise-en-scène, the activities and the language may threaten the spectacle of dominatrix porn, but there are surprisingly regular instances in which the performance is overtly exposed. A Brechtian moment occurs in Mistress Gemma’s London Dungeon when the leather paddle hits the too-close camera and the Mistress whispers ‘Sorry’ to the male camera-operator. Instantly, the illusion is destroyed. The woman on-screen not only does something accidental and thus loses her control over the scenario, but she also reveals her performance by apologising and, effectively, submitting. Although the scenarios of dominatrix porn are blatantly performative, these accidental moments upset faith in the fantasy of the dominatrix figure despite being somehow touchingly authentic admissions to the ‘real’ woman underneath, the one who makes mistakes and says sorry for them. When a transvestite maid drops his feminine tone of voice to his everyday deep register to ask Mistress Gemma to leave longer gaps between strokes of the cane, the dominatrix has failed in everything that she represents and thus reveals a failed seriousness, a naïve camp, as Susan Sontag might have claimed.17
The illusion can be broken in a variety of ways: the dominatrix glances at the camera, she absent-mindedly chews gum every few seconds, she sighs in boredom, or coughs, or cannot get the suction pump to attach to the nipple. Such apparent lack of professionalism can equally be found in the acting abilities of those on-screen. The beginning of a scenario with Miss Chambers in Yes Mistress, for example, is strongly reminiscent of Victoria Wood’s and Julie Walters’ comedy sketch ‘Acorn Antiques’ as the performers wait frozen for the camera to tilt up to their faces before they launch into their dialogue. The cheaper videos may have such poor sound quality that the dialogue cannot be distinguished or the director may be heard to say ‘Hold on. Stills,’ halting the action in order to take photographs for the DVD cover or website. A consequence of these accidents and inadequacies is the introduction of the everyday, the mundane, into the performance. Suddenly, the woman on-screen is a real person earning money by spanking bottoms. She is being told what to do by a director who, usually, is male. She might even show a kindness not expected of the dominatrix, as when the Mistress of S for Slavegirl (DOM Promotions, 2008) warns the female submissive not to open her eyes once her Master has ejaculated on her face. She smiles and glances at the camera, a knowing look which says ‘We all know it burns when it gets in the eyes.’ She is made real, possibly even vulnerable, laughable and exposed, but it is only momentary. Within seconds she has returned to her self-controlled, efficient performance and the power dynamic is re-established.
CONCLUSION: OBJECT OR SUBJECT?
It is the claim of Thais E. Morgan that dominatrix pornography has a critical and political consequence since it
moves towards a critical reinscription of both genders by parodically re-marking femininity in the masculine and masculinity in the feminine. The dominatrix thus figures a post-modern (female) subjectivity in the process – a subjectivity which interrogates the very ground of sexual difference from which it takes off.18
Put in the terms of my own perspective, the dominatrix performs/parodies masculinity and thus, with the performance of the (male) submissive, she embodies a critical subjectivity which casts doubt on traditional expectations of gender and encourages the viewer to play with gender performance too. Although ‘woman’ does not traditionally signify active subjectivity, Morgan’s argument goes, the pornographic dominatrix inscribes a new femininity, one that allows ‘woman’ to signify ‘subject’. It must be said that one of the reasons that dominatrix porn ‘works’ is that the women are not behaving like ordinary women, but then neither does the average woman work as an assassin, a bounty hunter, or a stripper with a vendetta, nor does she have a bionic body. Perhaps they are all sexual objects of the heterosexual male gaze, but they are equally women in action. Jeffrey A. Brown asks the question: ‘When women are portrayed as tough in contemporary film, are they being allowed access to a position of empowerment, or are they merely being further fetishized as dangerous sex objects?’ The answer, for the pornographic dominatrix, is ‘yes’ and ‘yes’. Or perhaps she is fetishised as a dangerous sex subject, and thus remains on that border between subject and object. Surely, this is the paradox described by Judith Butler (from Michel Foucault) as ‘subjectivation’, when one becomes both subject and subjected.19 This state is nowhere more evident than in the recognition of the real dominatrix on the screen. Her presence in the DVD operates as an advertisement for her wares, she is publicising herself and her business by performing her skills on camera. The viewer, potentially, could become one of her clients and she thus becomes something to be desired in a whole new manner of consumption, a commodity that can be bought. So which is she, business woman or working girl? Desiring woman or desired woman? Role model or sex object? Free agent or slave to patriarchal lusts? Whatever the answer, if one exists, it is difficult to deny the mischievousness and self-conscious artificiality of the pornographic dominatrix who at the very least exposes sex and gender as dramas and comedies that we perform.
