Tag Archives: spooks

A Pinch of Assault

Leave a reply

It started with this, when someone on IC said:

“Wow oh wow. Did anyone see Eastenders on Tuesday night when Archie pushed Janine in the face against the wall?”

And someone else replied with:

“You mean the scene where he assaulted her? What does that have to do with BDSM?”

My gut reaction was to jump straight in with a snide, sarcastic, and generally sneering post saying: “You do know it’s not real, right?”

Yet it brings up some fascinating questions about the boundaries between fantasy and reality. In my world, a woman being assaulted is obviously wrong, BUT a fictional character being pushed up against a wall and threatened by another fictional character on the telly, fully scripted, directed, and played by actors, is sexy as hell.

Most of what happens in BDSM role-play could be construed as assault if perceived outside the context of fantasy – the classic scenarios of a military interrogation, a teacher caning a helpless pupil, some police brutality, whatever happens behind the barbed-wire fence of a prison camp, slavery of any sort, beatings, asphyxiation, anything involving rope or handcuffs, and so many others – they would all be abhorrent if *real*… Yet of course they’re something completely different when they’re safe, sane, consensual role-play, between adults. In BDSM, fantasy and reality live on entirely different planets.

Here’s a blog post I wrote last year about the controversial waterboarding scene on “Spooks”. If you can’t be arsed to click on the link, I’ll summarise: a man being tortured in a Russian prison = bad; An attractive actor in an exciting tv show playing the part of a man being tortured in a Russian prison = very, very good.

I’ve been catching up on a lot of “24” recently, and am now only three and a half days behind what Bauer’s been up to. A lot of the intensely violent gunpoint scenes between Jack and Nina would, of course, be horrific in real life, but they’re not real life. They’re fantasy. And they’re the hottest thing I’ve seen on the telly in a long time. Other people’s YouTubery here, here, and here.

Image


Board Games

2 Replies

Last week, a flurry of articles emerged in the national press about the truly magnificent UK drama series “Spooks/MI5”. The furore appears to be the result of a scene due to be screened on BBC1 tonight, where the character Lucas North (Richard Armitage) is “waterboarded” during an interrogation.

Now, for those unfamiliar with waterboarding, it’s a method commonly used by the CIA to extract information. A suspect is bound against a board, a cloth is placed over the nose and mouth, and a stream of water is poured onto the face. This simulates the experience of drowning, stimulating the gag reflex and fight-or-flight reactions, and there is thought to be a risk of long-term psychological and respiratory damage. The debate continues as to whether this constitutes real torture. Much as war itself has been a rebranding exercise over the past decade (invasion and occupation has become “regime change” these days, snipers are now “sharp shooters”, and a massive bombardment is termed a harmless firework display of “shock and awe”) this method of gruesome punishment first thought to have been used during the Spanish Inquisition has been given the kind of name that would suggest a sporting activity one might like to try on a weekend break at Center Parcs. It’s a sad irony that waterboarding is most widely used by the self-imposed guardians of the “civilised world”.

Most people would agree that torture, in whatever form, is abhorrent when done for real. Yet the press hysteria over tonight’s television is surprising. The controversy itself may just be a publicity stunt – after all, the articles spread across several publications were suspiciously similar, and probably originated from a BBC press release. Yet the public appear to have shown more outrage at a drama series that has responsibly depicted waterboarding than at the real thing.

This is a tragic reflection of how BDSM is perceived by those outside it. In a fantasy scenario, sensations and emotions can be explored in a controlled environment, just in the same way as Richard Armitage experienced “real” waterboarding for a matter of seconds during filming, before using the safe-signal and being allowed to stop. Yet scenes of consensual bondage, implied threat and mock-torture are treated as somehow worse than the real thing by their critics. Factions of the press, legislators, and outspoken puritans see waterboarding as a necessary method of extracting information in the “War on Terror”, and see BDSM as something altogether more harmful. The fantasy and the reality of torture are so entirely removed from one another that it saddens me when the lines are blurred by those who simply don’t understand. I read an article a few years ago about the use of Dominatrices as interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, and was appalled. What we do is a fantasy. As soon as all parties no longer consent, it’s abuse, and it’s something I would never want to be involved in.

Well anyway, if you take nothing else away from this, then do watch BBC1 at 9pm tonight. It really is very good. Also, Ros (Hermione Norris) is so supremely wonderful that she deserves her own religion. But more about that another day. In the meantime, this.

Image

Spooked

7 Replies

So. The infamous Max Mosley affair… Well, where do I start? From the day it broke, it’s been one of those stories that gives the impression that there’s probably a lot more going on than the squalid, shouted headlines from the News of the World and its related rags would suggest. I haven’t commented until now, except just to point out that I, nor anyone outside the infamous “Nazi” session that day, really know what happened, who paid what to whom, and why. The witch-hunts continue from all angles, unabated, and the press continue not to know the difference between domination and prostitution.

The thing is, I have a theory. It could be entirely wrong, and probably is, but I feel the need to share it for the sake of balance, as it’s tunneling inside my head as I type and will keep on chewing at my brain until I put it into words. The BDSM community is being spectacularly misjudged by the public and press right now, and I’m hampered by a nagging feeling that Mistress Abi may now be being just as spectacularly misjudged by the BDSM community.

Now before you stop reading and pick up a flaming torch in protest to march up to my front door with, I make no claims that the following is what actually happened. Also, I’ve never met or spoken to Mistress Abi, and I know no more about her than anyone else who’s read the same articles in the gutter press and seen the outcry about her on message boards. Being a conspiracy theorist by nature, I’m always half convinced that nobody is ever really told anything about anything, so I find it hard to take anything in the press seriously. So, I have a theory, and I offer no guarantees that it isn’t anything more than the fevered ramblings of a fellow Pro-Domme with espionage fantasies and a natural mistrust of the newspapers.

Are you sitting comfortably (or at least as comfortably as you can while you’re still holding a flaming torch)? Then don your tinfoil hats and I’ll begin:

Firstly, a bit of background. For those outside the UK, the News of the World is the downmarket sibling of another Murdoch-run tabloid, The Sun, which itself is a step down from The Times – yet another News Corp paper, basically the same as the Sun and the News of the World in its attitudes and politics, but designed for people who can also read one or two long words – not just look at pictures of breasts, browse football scores, and get het up over biased headlines about Johnny Foreigner, the modern world, or any form of sexual deviancy.

Politically, the News of the World dresses firmly to the right. Since its first manifestation in 1843 as cheap wank-fodder for the freshly literate working classes, it has always been famed for its salacious coverage of vice prosecutions and celebrity sex scandals, offering graphic titillation under the guise of moral condemnation. It’s a trend that remains to this day, and in recent years, members of the BDSM community have been methodically “outed”, their careers and family lives ruined in an instant for the sake of a smutty, pun-based headline. Yet a new trend has emerged. In the past few months, I’ve noticed that The News of the World seems to have gone for a rather specific purge on public sector workers. Oh yes, Civil Servants – the easy scapegoats for all Britain’s ills if you’re a right-wing tabloid-guzzling halfwit.

And so, to discover that the husband of a professional Dominatrix works for MI5 must have sent the News of the World journalists into a state of pant-pissing hysteria. It’s the sort of scandal that most of Murdoch’s hacks can only dream of exposing. Yet this information has only emerged now.

It’s the general consensus in the press that it was Mistress Abi who shot and sold the incriminating video of Max Mosley. The assumption was that she did it for the money. Which, to me, never really made much sense. You see, the most successful Pro-Dommes have an unspoken code of conduct in which discretion is possibly the most important factor. To sell a story to the News of the World would be professional suicide for any woman in this industry, and of course the loss of future earnings would eclipse whatever sum the newspaper might pay. So why on earth would she do it? Well, my theory is that she may have had no choice.

I’ll reiterate that this is merely my own speculation, but there’s a possibility that the News of the World was about to expose the story about Mistress Abi’s husband being an MI5 operative, and she had to offer them Mosley to keep them quiet. And they did keep quiet, it seems. Mosley filled the column inches, Abi was demonised from every direction, but the MI5 connection was kept safely out of sight. Yet as of yesterday, the story has leaked out in other publications, and suddenly Thames House is keen to claim ignorance. Somehow, MI5 imply, this one just slipped through their stringent vetting procedures. A spouse in the sex industry would be a blackmail risk, apparently. Yet I’d have thought that a woman whose job it is to get into the heads of high profile gentlemen would be a considerable asset to MI5. And perhaps she was. Or not. We’ll never know.

But then, this entire theory could be a load of crap. What would I know? I’m just a Dominatrix.

CLICK FOR BITCHBLOG FRONT PAGE