Latest news with #BDSM
Atlantic
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
The Sex-Workplace Novel Has Arrived
Twenty years ago, a reader looking for taboo sex in print had to slink to the back of the bookstore and make whispered inquiries. Today, kinky books make up an established genre, one that shares front-table space with other major releases and possesses its own classics and conventions. This robust menagerie encompasses pulpy household names, including E. L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey, which in 2011 vaulted BDSM onto the New York Times fiction best-seller list. It has a literary canon— Marquis de Sade 's Justine, Pauline Réage's Story of O —and elevated LGBTQ smut standards such as Patrick Califia's Macho Sluts. Over in the nonfiction aisle are more practical selections, a hefty cascade of volumes that explore kink from all angles: how-to, history, philosophy, psychology, memoir. The expansion of the genre tracks the broadening acceptability of erotic inclinations that were previously pathologized (and, at times, criminalized). The 2013 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) hastened this shift by redefining certain practices, including ' BDSM, fetishism, and transvestic fetishism (a variant of cross-dressing),' as behaviors rather than illnesses, according to an Atlantic article: 'Consenting adults were no longer deemed mentally ill for choosing sexual behavior outside the mainstream.' As stigma recedes, the subculture meets the marketplace. While fiction continues to revel in fantasy and the forbidden, nonfiction is bending toward demystifying and normalizing BDSM. The latter form tends to emphasize the community credo of being 'safe, sane, and consensual.' It also participates in a broader project: staking out a claim to legitimacy by assuring the public that deviance is, paradoxically, normal. Redefining the transgressive as conventional might feel self-contradictory, but the pursuit of acceptance is as strong a human impulse as the appetite for risk. Call it a respectability kink. Fiction still offers more freedom to roam outside the bounds of propriety, and the most ambitious kink novels venture beyond titillation. The author Brittany Newell sails over the guardrail between fantasy and reality with her second novel, Soft Core, by centering it on a protagonist, Ruth, and a setting, San Francisco's sex industry, that are both lively and deeply believable. Ruth is known as 'Baby' at the strip club where she works, an ever-chugging factory of arousal in which wigs and fake names and alternative personas are accessed on the fly to suit customer caprice. All this quick-change artistry offers her a welcome distraction from her existential fears, including the anxiety that her master's thesis, on surveillance, ghosts, and reality TV, was a waste of time. Having started out as something of an accidental sugar baby at 24, she is now 27. 'Youth made my general aimlessness cute,' she thinks. 'Without it, I was just a bad investment.' As someone with professional knowledge of Bay Area strip clubs and dungeons—having worked in them during that same phase of my own life—I understood that although Ruth is haunted by many things, chief among them is the ticking of the clock. Slipping from Ruth to 'Baby' at the club gives her both an escape hatch from her Saturn-return blues and a whole new set of problems. Strip clubs aren't really on the kink continuum, but I'd argue that the customer-dancer dynamic is its own form of advanced, high-stakes role-playing. BDSM is definitely an element, for instance, in Baby's relationship with her client Simon, a lonely cipher who PayPals her $800 a month for outré sexual indulgences, then later beseeches her to delete him from her phone. Newell's gifts for sensory details (a dancer 'smelled like crème brûlée'; a woman's mouth is 'like a Slurpee: endless, red and wet') and for tracing the wavy contours of human connection make her work feel like that of a glitter-bomb David Lynch. Things get wavier still when she wakes one morning to find that her ex-boyfriend Dino, a dashing, fastidious ketamine dealer who loves his dogs and lounges around in elegant women's lingerie, has vanished from the Victorian flat they share. Within a week of Dino's disappearance, the gamine and eerily familiar Emeline starts dancing at Ruth's club. Like a pampered duckling, Emeline imprints on Ruth, even hunting down her signature perfume—the titular Soft Core, which, as a besotted customer once gushed, makes Ruth 'smell like a library in ancient Egypt.' Newell's story begins to simmer with noirish detail: mysterious notes appearing in Ruth's belongings; bizarre anonymous emails materializing in her inbox; fast drives on twisty streets; fog rolling in and out, an enigmatic character unto itself. Ruth keeps thinking that she spies Dino everywhere. But does she? To fill the empty hours without Dino, Ruth takes on an additional hustle as 'Sunday,' a dominatrix for hire at the Dream House, which is not so much a dungeon as 'a pea-green four-bedroom house in a quiet cul-de-sac.' There, she broadens her client base as a compassionate consort to men who prefer to indulge darker fantasies. These include Albert. In front of Ruth, he takes on an alternative persona, named 'Allie,' who claims that Albert is her sugar daddy. Ruth doesn't remark on the irony of tending to an affluent sex-work client who is cosplaying as a sex worker. Ruth assumes—incorrectly—that she can take Dino's disappearance in stride by overworking, given, as she puts it, her 'native ability to absorb any trauma like it was just one more step in my skin-care routine. Wake up at five, wash face, stare into void, moisturize.' (I snort-laughed in recognition.) She learns, as the days pass, that dissociative endurance is not necessarily a positive attribute, and that sadness can seep into any space—VIP room, dungeon chamber—as if rising through the floorboards. Although her rootlessness and sorrow originate from experiences that predate her lover's departure, Ruth wonders if these haunting feelings are exacerbated by her profession. 'Maybe my work was partly to blame,' she thinks. 'I'd been method-acting as a dream girl, and now I couldn't touch back down to earth.' Newell skillfully renders the exhaustion of sex work, especially the weird repetitiveness of trying to keep things exciting and new for clients. Years ago in Los Angeles, one friend of mine, a kink impresario who was winding down from a draining day of video shoots by sorting through a rucksack full of black and red leather floggers, sighed to me: 'It's not the sex; it's the work.' In interviews, Newell has shared that the scenes set at the Dream House are modeled on her own experience. As a Stanford graduate who published her first novel, Oola, an obsessive love story, when she was 21, Newell might strike the reader as a hyper-literate Persephone: equally adept at chronicling the velvety, narcotic appeal of the 'libidinal underworld' and the bell-clang wake-up calls that chase off the escapist high. Her admixture of emotion, intellect, and erotic perceptivity achieves what nonfiction writers—sincere sex positivists and edgy academics alike—often fail at: an explication of the psychology of kink that maintains the heat of intrigue. Soft Core is more a study in feeling-tones than a tightly plotted thriller. It's a trippy excursion down the rabbit hole into a particular substratum of culture, maintaining a tether to the 'real' world while burrowing out to the misty shoreline where it's hard to tell horizon from sky. Each subplot sounds a distant foghorn of loneliness. As Ruth turns 28, she begins to see that she can't be sustained by a hail of compliments and cash and evanescent male companions. That's not a life; that's a never-ending ghost hunt. This book's growth arc doesn't depend on Ruth/Baby/Sunday finding someone or something she's looking for; it lands on her figuring out what she herself lacks. Transactional fascination pales next to devotion—but you need the eyes to see it. Soft Core is also a novel about a city. San Francisco has always been a frontier town—a place to pursue an outlier dream. Before it became, as Ruth observes, a 'seasick city of data and drugs' that drew hordes of gentrifying tech evangelists, people came seeking queer liberation and a vibrant leather community. And before that: punks, hippies, Beats, and on back to prospectors panning for gold. Many San Francisco seekers find themselves contending with the sour note of the utopian quest. As a canny cartographer of want, Newell takes her place among the city's storied sexual intelligentsia. Though at times her eye for the awkwardness of interrelation points to Mary Gaitskill, she's more a descendent of Danielle Willis, the latex-clad poet whose Zeitgeist Press book, Dogs in Lingerie, gave voice to San Francisco's spooky, kink-conversant stripper narrators 30-plus years ago. Outsiders often deride kink for both its earnestness and its deviance. The same can be said of sex work. In the words of the San Francisco–based sexologist Carol Queen, 'Trashing other people's sexual vision is so common. It's the highbrow's lowest road.' But the elusiveness of something (respect, satiety, understanding) often only makes you crave it more, and Soft Core shows us the magnetizing, if at times humbling, pull of raw need. 'Nothing lasts forever,' Ruth muses. 'Except, of course, longing.' That is a frontier that some of us will always be chasing. I guess some girls are just kinky that way.
Telegraph
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
China arrests 30 female writers over gay erotic fiction
China has arrested at least 30 writers – almost all of whom are women in their 20s – since February, as it clamps down on the publication of gay erotic fiction. Under China's strict pornography laws, writers who are found guilty of 'producing and distributing obscene materials' and have earned money for their work, could face more than 10 years in prison. One of the women targeted, who goes by the name Pingping Anan Yongfu, recounted the experience of her arrest on social media, despite being ' warned not to talk about it '. 'I'll never forget it – being escorted to the car in full view, enduring the humiliation of stripping naked for examination in front of strangers, putting on a vest for photos, sitting in the chair, shaking with fear, my heart pounding,' she wrote online. After her post went viral, she deleted it and wrote another one acknowledging that she had broken the law before deleting her account entirely. She is part of a group of women known for writing 'danmei', a type of erotic fiction that emerged in the 1990s and often involves a BDSM relationship between two male characters. Inspired by Japanese boys' love for manga, and increasingly popular in China, the genre is normally hosted online and tends to be targeted at women. The stories are known to be subversive and go against what is often seen as normal or right. For example, in 'danmei' stories, male characters are often portrayed as vulnerable and are able to become pregnant. The genre has become increasingly popular over the years, with 60 'danmei' stories optioned for film and TV in 2021, with the most expensive sold for over £4 million. The female 'danmei' writers who have been arrested so far this year had published their work on Haitang Literature City, a website known for hosting the genre. Late last year, another 50 writers who had published their work on the site were also prosecuted. China's pornography law specifically prohibits 'explicit descriptions of gay sex or other sexual perversions ' and gay erotica writers tend to be targeted more than those who write heterosexual erotica. While homosexuality was decriminalised in China in 1997 and removed from a list of psychiatric disorders in 2001, gay marriage has yet to be legalised and same-sex couples cannot adopt children. The government has also previously cracked down on LGBT rights groups and there have been reports of young transgender people being sent to 're-education' camps, as the government pushes forward traditional family values. One 'danmei' writer who shared her experience on social media said that she was pulled out of her college class by police officers who then proceeded to search her dorm room. Another said: 'I'm only 20. So young, and I've already ruined my life so early.'
Daily Mail
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Play about 'gay' Prince George causes outrage: Off-Broadway show depicts 11-year-old's fictionalised future using drugs and engaging in BDSM - as audiences say it's 'creepy fan-fic'
A new off-Broadway show about Prince George's future as a 'gay' 19-year-old using drugs and engaging in BDSM has sparked outrage - with audiences branding the play 'creepy fan-fic'. Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill's 'tragicomedy' is a work of speculative fiction that is set in the year 2032 and imagines what would happen if Prince George, currently 11, came out and fell in love with an Oxford educated Indian man. The show opened on May 30 and has proven a surprise hit in New York City, where its sold-out run at the Playwrights Horizon theatre has now been extended. However, Prince F****t has also drawn criticism for its offensive title and graphic depictions of sex and drug use, considering it makes no effort to fictionalise its lead character who is based on a 'real child'. It has also sparked backlash because the play opens with its cast discussing the viral photograph of Prince George excitedly inspecting a military helicopter in Hamburg when he was four. Tannahill's play revisits the discourse around the photograph before propelling its cast members - who play alternate versions of senior Royals including the Prince and Princess of Wales - into a hypothetical future. The highly-speculative show is so explicit that audience members are required to turn their phones off and place them in lockable pouches for the entirety of its 90-minute runtime, as the actors playing George and his 'boyfriend' Dev appear naked and simulate kinky sex on-stage. At one point, reports The Telegraph, George's character (performed by British actor John McCrea) appears in bondage and expresses his sexual fantasy of 'being walked like a puppy'. When one Reddit user asked whether the play would be suitable viewing for their 14-year-old daughter, an audience member who watched Prince F****t shared that it depicts the future King as being 'tied up in ropes hanging from the ceiling and blindfolded for a bondage scene, while his naked boyfriend simulates urinating on him' at one point. The comments were posted under a message praising the 'wonderful play' on the platform's Broadway sub-Reddit, as the user noted it was the 'perfect' release for Pride Month. Noting the cast is made up entirely of queer performers - Princess Catherine is portrayed by transgender actress Rachel Crowl - they wrote: 'Overall, I loved this play, especially as a gay man myself and at the start of Pride month. 'Great show, written very well, with a superb cast that showed their vulnerability openly on stage. I highly recommend it.' However, the post divided opinion in the comments section, as one person admitted the play's premise gave them 'the ick'. 'Interesting concept, really grossed out that the playwright decided to use the basis of the main character on a real person, and one who is a minor no less,' their message read. 'Feels wrong and is giving me the ick.' Several others agreed, with one audience member admitted they felt 'kind of dirty' for watching the show. Multiple Reddit users condemned Tannahill's decision not to change the names of the royals, with one person asking: 'Is it right to essentially write fan fiction about a real child? Tannahill's play has divided audiences, with several people calling the show out for being 'creepy fan-fic' about a 'real child' 'Would it have been so hard to thinly veil the commentary by changing the names?' 'Not just fan fiction, explicit fan fiction where are depicted as being into fetish and do hard drugs,' another added. A third comment read: 'Yeah, this is…not something I feel okay about. He's eleven.' Another person agreed, writing: 'Anything about the sexuality of someone who is a real child is way, way, way, out of bounds to me.' Yet another Reddit user asked: 'Why are we allowing gay kink fantasy plays about a currently eleven year old boy to exist??? This is so creepy.' Others defended the play and it's provocative subject matter, with one viewer noting the point of Tannahill's work was to question 'why we sexualise children in hetero normative ways so even force the hetero narrative' when it's clear they're queer. 'You start talking about queer childhood, they're gonna brand you a groomer,' says two-time Tony nominee K Todd Freeman in the show's opening monologue. The actor plays a reimagined version of George's father, Prince William. Another Reddit user, who also left Playwrights Horizon impressed by the production, added: 'I thought that the opening monologue really worked so well in how it connected that online debate from years back to how so many of us queer people had that experience with our own childhood photos—of seeing a photo of our kid-self and being like "damn, it really was obvious even from that young an age, huh..."' Among the play's fans is Madonna, who attended one of its recent performances at Playwrights Horizon and later shared a photo with the cast on her Instagram Story. Rachel Crowl, who brings Tannahill's Kate Middleton to life, reposted the image on her feed with the caption: 'So, um, Madonna came to the show last night and she just posted this photo she took with us. Amazing. Mind blown. She was lovely!' It's also received glowing reviews from critics, with The New York Times' Jesse Green writing: 'If the playwright means to shock, mission accomplished. 'But here's the real shocker: The thrilling.' The Wrap's critic Robert Hofler described Tannahill's new play as 'meta-theater at its best and most thought-provoking' in his review. However, he noted, it's unlikely the play by the critically-acclaimed writer behind the BBC's gritty drama The Listeners (that is based on his 2021 novel) will get a showing in the UK. In addition to the fictionalised gay storyline involving Prince George and its caricatures of the Prince and Princess of Wales, the play name-checks Meghan Markle and also makes 'pointed references' to Prince Andrew's personal life, The Times reported. When asked by the newspaper whether the production is likely to travel across the Atlantic, a spokesperson declined comment.
Metro
20-06-2025
- Metro
BA crew ‘mistakenly booked into love hotel and kept awake by moaning'
A British Airways crew were forced to spend a layover night in an Italian sex hotel after a mix-up, it has been claimed. At least 12 members of staff were booked into the Motel in Milan, which offers a variety of themed suites including a BDSM dungeon-style room complete with a caged bed and a standing cross with wrist cuffs. 'There are no limits in this place, only the heat of pleasure, torments of passion, abandonment to desires,' reads a listing for a €280 (£240) per night room on the motel's website. It's thought the staff were supposed to stay at the Hotel, a regular 'vanilla' four-star hotel next door run by the same brand. The airline said some staff were 'moved to unapproved hotel rooms following availability issues with our usual accommodation provider'. It said this happened without the knowledge of company managers. An insider told The Sun the mix-up was down to a 'comical mistake by the hotel booking team', adding that it had 'serious implications'. 'Some of the team who stayed in the sex dungeon didn't get any sleep, so they couldn't operate on BA services the following day', the source told the newspaper. 'They were kept awake by thrillseekers moaning and groaning all day and night. 'There were adult workers outside propositing staff. Crew even reported suspicious fluids in their rooms which made their skin crawl.' It's understood there were no delays to the flight the affected crew were supposed to work on the following day. British Airways is 'urgently investigating to prevent a repeat', a spokesperson for the airline added. check our news page.
Metro
20-06-2025
- Metro
BA crew 'mistakenly booked into love hotel and kept awake by moaning'
A British Airways crew were forced to spend a layover night in an Italian sex hotel after a mix-up, it has been claimed. At least 12 members of staff were booked into the Motel in Milan, which offers a variety of themed suites including a BDSM dungeon-style room complete with a caged bed and a standing cross with wrist cuffs. 'There are no limits in this place, only the heat of pleasure, torments of passion, abandonment to desires,' reads a listing for a €280 (£240) per night room on the motel's website. It's thought the staff were supposed to stay at the Hotel, a regular 'vanilla' four-star hotel next door run by the same brand. The airline said some staff were 'moved to unapproved hotel rooms following availability issues with our usual accommodation provider'. It said this happened without the knowledge of company managers. An insider told The Sun the mix-up was down to a 'comical mistake by the hotel booking team', adding that it had 'serious implications'. 'Some of the team who stayed in the sex dungeon didn't get any sleep, so they couldn't operate on BA services the following day', the source told the newspaper. 'They were kept awake by thrillseekers moaning and groaning all day and night. 'There were adult workers outside propositing staff. Crew even reported suspicious fluids in their rooms which made their skin crawl.' It's understood there were no delays to the flight the affected crew were supposed to work on the following day. British Airways is 'urgently investigating to prevent a repeat', a spokesperson for the airline added. Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@ For more stories like this, check our news page.
