S&M in The City

Sex and The City often explores unchartered territories of sex, and it was not surprising when they featured BDSM in season 2 episode 12. The beginning of the episode starts with Carrie narrating how in NYC every restaurant is trying to be the next big thing as the camera pans over a seemingly normal restaurant. Carrie keeps talking about NYC's desire to adapt to new creative things and then the camera shows a women tied up being whipped by a man. The latest, new restaurant in NYC is a BDSM restaurant where the waiters wear barely-there leather and ball gags. Samantha’s PR agency was managing the PR for the opening night of the restaurant, and it is often Samantha who gets the girls into slippery sexual situations like this. As the waiter comes over, the girls discuss this idea of having fetishes so openly discussed and serving you food. While Samantha defends the restaurant by arguing everyone has a fetish and that this restaurant is just being more open about, she whips the waiter as he stops by the table.

 Episode of Sex and The City Here

    With such representations of BDSM you could argue that it is mainstreaming kink, but if you truly look at the portrayal, is it just acknowledging that it exists and not really normalizing it? Carrie talked about how in NYC restaurants needed to stay trendy, and this new S&M restaurant was trying to do that. By using the dangerous, outside the law, and taboo nature of BDSM, the restaurant is trying to attract people to come because it is such a rogue concept for a restaurant. This specific interaction with BDSM in a popular TV show does not show that BDSM is being normalized in culture. I think it shows the acknowledgment of its existence, but it turns it into a theatrical event rather than a fetish. Of course Samantha defends it as a sexual expression of freedom, but realistically the restaurant is using BDSM as a means to attract customers and make more money.

    The representation of how the girls interact with the waiter is interesting as well. Carrie uses her humor to try and deflect the idea that a man is serving her cosmos wearing nothing but leather underwear. Miranda and Charlotte don’t understand who would work in such a place, and Samantha endorses any type of sexual expression and believes it is healthy. The girls mainly focus on the clothes and the whipping, which are the common mainstream associations with BDSM. These different ways of looking at BDSM show that it is not normalized in mainstream media. In the Mainstreaming Kink article, Weiss discussed how “exposure to BDSM does not make its way fully into American sexualization. Bits of S&M move into mainstream but other bits stand on the outside.” 

    The show does not focus on branding or cutting or other more intense aspects of BDSM, instead it equates it to an idea of liberated fetish. It is clear that the girls are uneasy with the ideas of fetishes, and that while they were exposed to it for a couple of drinks, they were not normalized the different aspects of BDSM. In the end of the scene at the restaurant Samantha gives Carrie her top hat and whip to bring to her boyfriend, and when she arrives at his door he seems stunned and she has to reassure him that it is a joke. While it was in the 90’s I think this show captured how society tends to look at BDSM as a broad fetish where we have assumptions of whips and chains, but in reality the public isn’t informed on the topic and it is still considered a wild taboo.

Citations


Weiss, M. D. (2006). Mainstreaming kink: The politics of BDSM representation in US popular media. Journal of homosexuality, 50(2-3), 103-132.
 
“La Douleur Exquise!” Sex and the City: The Complete Second Season. Writ Darren Star, Michael Patrick King, and Candace Bushnell. Dir. Susan Seidelman. HBO DVD, 1998. DVD.