I saw this on DVD a while ago. The Bluray contains deleted scenes and other goodies, but this was a good chance for me to revisit the documentary.
To preface, I found this to be disturbing when I first watched it. Girls in bondage is kinky, but actually hurting women is not.
I had read about sexual sadists, and one of the things that I remembered was that they typically take rejection very badly. They have revenge fantasies. I met a bondage producer who was of a similar variety, meaning that he liked to hurt the models, and I asked him why. I didn’t know if he had enough introspection to know, or if he would be honest, but he replied with one word; revenge, so it seems that what I had read about these kinds of people had some truth.
A fetish is an object that is required to achieve orgasm. It isn’t something that is kinky, so bondage is not a fetish (it is not an object). I just want to clarify that.
Paraphelias have no psychological explanation. Attraction to feet or other such nontraditional things are paraphelias. There are guesses of course, like one branch of psychology would guess that maybe when a boy had a babysitter who wore heals whose foot maybe accidentally came into contact with the kid’s groin… post hoc sort of explanations like that, but as mentioned, these are guesses. There is no conclusive explanation of why such attraction or desire occurs.
I am stating this so that you know what kind of mindset I had when I originally viewed this documentary. I was open to seeing something kinky, but I also felt like I should be prepared for watching something that might be made by a person with a pathological condition.
The documentary seems to be about the history of insex.com and the guy who started it. The extras has an interview with the co-director who stated that there was a wish to make a feature film, but the documentary would be made to raise money for it, or something like that.
Before I make some observations, let me just state how amused I am by the thought of a repressed person seeing any of the footage. These imbeciles can’t handle seeing a mere nipple (or they can’t stand seeing one without hiding and never admitting to seeing a nipple). Imagine how they would feel seeing the things being done to bare body parts in this movie.
The main guy seemed to have some insight into what made him this way, but please bear in mind that Ted Bundy blamed his behavior on porn. Firstly, Ted and other serial killers are liars. Secondly, or maybe I should have said “firstly” Ted Bundy has no education in psychology. How can he say something like porn made him rape women? Men rape because they are rapists. If they enjoy porn, that is not the cause of their behavior.
How does it apply to the guy in the documentary? He cites a moment when he was young and tied up by his sister and her friends. They tickled him and he thought that he pissed himself. When he went to the bathroom, he discovered that he had his first orgasm. He claims that this is what made him that way.
Uh…. when I had my first orgasm, I almost yelled in surprise and pleasure. I don’t know how someone can have an orgasm and think it’s urination. Yeah, when I am at a urinal in a public bathroom I am afraid of ejaculating instead of urinating. I don’t want to give anyone the wrong idea. “Are you using the urinal or are you just happy to see me?”
The other bizarre reasoning is that, if someone ejaculates while tied up and tickled, that means that he is excited about being submissive. That guy liked dominating women. That childhood tickling story would have better been used to say, “I experienced sexual feeling while tied up and tickled, but that was a long time ago. I like to inflict pain now that I have matured.”
Blah, blah, blah. My point is, never take any explanation seriously. But that is not the reason why you should watch this documentary. It happens to be one of the few documentaries that actually shows you what is being referenced. It’s not like a mainstream person narrating “Watch as this man suckles on a model’s nipples” and then the camera cuts to a woman’s eyes, squinting (no boob anywhere on the screen). Write that in your gay diary, but let a heterosexual film maker capture breasts on the screen.
I make that comment because the shy and polite way that mainstream people is the equivalent of making a movie about football and never showing the ball on the screen. Oh, less is more. No. Less is less. Stop being gay.
Back to the non-gay documentary….
You get to see everything. Nothing is implied. It’s all visible.
That is one reason why you should buy this documentary, even if you are gay. I seriously mean this. This documentary is one of the few that actually show you what is being discussed. There is no courtesy to weak-minded viewers. As such, we need to support people who are unabashed and unapologetic. There is no safe space. There might be a safe-word, but there is no safe space.
Some of the models are shown acting instead of really feeling fear or trauma. There are behind-the-scenes moments in which a girl looks like she is almost at the end of her tolerance, but the camera stops taping, and the guy asks the model, “Are you ok? You were just acting, right?” and the model responds in a normal voice, no longer weeping or panting. And when the camera starts taping again, the director requests more terror or whatever, and the model obliges.
Even though I know that those particular scenes are only being acted, I still cringe. But there are others in which I think I see real torment, and the interview afterward seems to be a testimonial about how the model wanted to see if she could take it… that makes me feel like I stood by passively while witnessing an atrocity.
It is at this time that I should point out something. Humans are diverse, psychologically and physically. I personally can’t imagine going through pain willingly, but as an example, I know two friends who had teeth extracted without anesthesia to see if they could do it. I also know people who have faced their greatest fears on purpose. I am not such a person. When I saw rites of passage in primitive cultures, ones that inflicted pain, that explained that this prepares the young person for the pain that will often come in life, I remarked, “Fuckin’ primitives… If pain is part of life, let me just feel it when it happens, not on purpose to prepare for future pain.”
Some martial art schools warn that you will be hit during practice because if you get hit in a real fight and never experienced it before, you will be frozen. Wrong. When I was a kid and I learned about the fight or flight response, I wanted to test it. I started a fight and got my ass kicked. Nothing hurt. Well, it hurt later, but the punches didn’t register as pain at the time. Granted, this is a strange way to verify if what I read about the human body was true, but I just had to know, ha ha.
I saw an interview with a CIA person who said that the threat of torture is effective because most people think they have less tolerance to pain than they really do. Why am I stating this? It’s because I watched this documentary absolutely baffled by the tolerance of pain, as well as wondering why someone would want to inflict pain. You might have vengeful fantasies, like when your friend fucks your girlfriend, or whatever, but you probably wouldn’t do anything in real life. Imagination is a good way to relieve bottled up energy, especially negative energy.
So why do something like this sadistic stuff in real life. I can’t figure this one out. Like, if the guy who is inflicting the torture and humiliation is just playing with a willing participant in his game of pretend, why does he require something so tangible? Is fantasy not enough?
I am not asking this judgmentally. My statement about there being a diversity of personalities means that there is also a diversity of cognition. Some people can’t think abstractly. Some people need to see something in front of them rather than to imagine it. The list goes on. This makes viewing the documentary more interesting. As I watch, I try to understand the people on the screen. I can’t, of course, and this is not my area of interest, but the documentary is a puzzle in this regard.
Some people like bland food. Some people can’t handle spice. Some people seek the hottest spice. It’s not for me to tell people how to eat. Except, I prefer if you don’t eat me. That is the one rule I think is acceptable for me to impose.
The footage of the girl sometimes is delightfully kinky, but some of it is unpleasant and not sexy. in my opinion.
I wonder if there is a parallel in horror. There is some gore that I think is cool or interesting, but there is a certain viewer who likes gritty hyper-realistic gore that isn’t well lit, stylized, or well shot. I met people who like this kind of gore, and one thing they have in common is that they are not social people. They don’t have charisma, so perhaps they have been rejected often. They also don’t seem to be educated. The movies they love don’t need to have stories.
I interacted with some people who liked sadistic bondage (rather than kinky bondage) and I wondered why, when they reviewed movies, they wrote everything that happened in the movie. Those aren’t reviews. Those are just reports about what happens in the movie. When I asked why they did that, the response was unanimous. They invent their own movie when they watch a movie. They don’t care about the story. They make up their own scenarios.
Odd.
The documentary closes with a cautionary tale. The site attracted the attention of the authorities or the government or whatever. According to the story that was told by people in the documentary, rather than to charge the guy with obscenity, the credit card companies were informed that terrorists funded their exploits via bondage sites, and payment processing privileges were revoked, thus ending the site. I have no idea if any of that is true, but I do know that some merchants were shut down that way for selling things that offended certain people, but that wasn’t done by authorities.
In my personal history, a company that had sold huge amounts of my movies suddenly were warned that if they carried any movies with “rape” in the title, like “Forgive Me for Raping You” then their credit card privileges would be revoked. Also, no movie could have violence against women on the cover, or women not having a good time. Looking back, I shouldn’t have made changes (I changed the movie title to “Forgive Me”). Only one merchant suffered the threat. No one else did. And that merchant eventually became irrelevant anyway. Just to be clear, my movies didn’t cause the downfall. That merchant carried some extreme stuff, and the merchant was big. My stuff was just collateral damage.
This Bluray is a worthy purchase for several reasons, but please keep in mind that you should never instantly believe what you hear in a testimonial or an interview. Enjoy.