Let me share some statistics with you:

• This 2017 survey says “40% of your fellow Americans identify as kinky,” with 25% citing a specific fetish
• This nationwide survey says “over 36% of Americans identify as having a specific kink or fetish and over 27% of Americans in a relationship have a sex act in mind that they want to introduce to their partner, but haven’t”
• This 2026 Fast Company article claims “nearly half of people practice kink, but nontraditional sex still carries a strong stigma”
• The Fifty Shades of Grey book trilogy, a romance series with a BDSM focus (albeit a blind and clueless depiction of the lifestyle), had sold over 150 million copies worldwide by October 2017. Its film adaptation raked in $569 million on a $40 million budget.

The success of Fifty Shades, printed upon trees tragically killed for the purpose, exposed something very odd in our culture. Apparently a lot more people than we’d imagined were starving for kink smut.

You don’t hear about kink relationships every day. You do hear about LGBTQ+ relationships. A 2025 Gallop poll says 9.3% of Americans identify as LGBTQ+. That’s the whole rainbow flag there, trans and non-binary and genderqueer and all.

It’s amazing how much time we spend fighting a worthless culture war about less than a tenth of the population. I look forward to the day of pansexual acceptance. Not because I’m a bleeding-heart liberal; I just want the dumb war over. People like different things, let’s get over it.

With that said: Go to the back of the gender spectrum closet and knock at the hidden door there, and you’ll find the BDSM closet. Gays and lesbians fight to have their lifestyle normalized, but the scary, kinky people have still years to go before they can glimpse sunlight—even though the overwhelming majority of the kinksters are straight. It’s equally amazing how at least a third of the population partakes of the exotic thrills of sadomasochism, and yet it’s an even bigger taboo to talk about.

I love taboos. They’re like sore pressure points you can lean on just a little and make everybody squirm. Sure, we’ve made some progress in pansexual acceptance, but the fact that we can’t handle a simple fetish without ridiculing it (or eroticizing it) shows we have a way to go, even as moral crusaders blow their big bazoos about men holding hands in public, before returning to their Fifty Shades copy dog-eared to the part where Christian pees on Anastasia.

Isn’t that weird in and of itself? It got me wondering, since the BDSM people mobilize for kink-lifestyle acceptance on Fetlife and have their own pride flag and everything, where is the normalized depiction of a dominant/submissive relationship in media? My quest for such a film is documented in my Medium essay “BDSM in Mainstream Cinema | Will Kink Ever Get Any Respect?”

There, Secretary (2002) wins my award for “most down-to-earth depiction of power exchange relationships.” A runner-up happens to be a weirdie reviewed here as well, The Duke of Burgundy. Yes, as bizarre as that film is, it’s still a pretty even-handed depiction of a domestic role-playing household, and a lesbian one at that—two alternative lifestyles for the price of one!

So now I might as well finish my quest and review the other half of the BDSM-genre films, the highly abnormal depictions. The weirdest possible, of course. I’ll document my thoughts here, and we’ll re-huddle at the end to inventory our new insights into the freakiest, most broken, most perverted, most inhibited species on Earth: people.

Join me on my safari into the weird Leather Underground!

Movies reviewed in the series:

• The Laughing Woman (1969)
• Secretary (2002)