Vandersexxx: BDSM in Eurotrip

Josh and I talked briefly about this scene from Eurotrip in class, but I felt an in-depth analysis might be interesting too. This is the best clip I could find of the scene; unfortunately, I couldn't get one with only the Vandersexxx parts.

Eurotrip is a raunchy comedy about one American teenager, Scott, and his three friends traveling through Europe in search of his sexy pen pal after a harsh breakup at his high school graduation. In this scene, Scott's best friend, Cooper, leaves his friends to go to an Amsterdam sex club named Vandersexxx. His relentless pursuit of sex in the movie smacks of the Sex as Masculinity component of the heterosexual social script as defined by Kim & colleagues (2011). He enters the club and is excited to find himself surrounded by beautiful, topless women. Shortly after this, one of the other characters, Jamie (who is established as comically geeky, feminine, awkward and sexually inept by his failure to follow the Sex as Masculinity subscript) finds himself in a sexual encounter with a woman in an alleyway; this proves out to be a major source of irony given the surprises the sex-crazed Cooper is in for.

Enticed by the promise of having his wildest fantasies fulfilled, Cooper is drawn further into Vandersexxx. Unaware of the intense experience awaiting him, he laughs when he's told about the "safe word." Before he realizes what's happening, the women of Vandersexxx handcuff his hands above his head and the club's matron tears off her trench coat to reveal a leather dominatrix outfit. Two huge leather clad men come into the room and Cooper realizes that this is a different kind of sex club. One of the men puts electrical clamps on Cooper's testicles, taking BDSM to an extreme. The next time we come back to Vandersexxx, the dominatrix is using a clapping toy monkey with cymbals around Cooper's genitals when he tries to say the safe word. The dominatrix seemingly deliberately mishears him, and screams for the men to bring on another toy, which turns out to be a three-pronged dildo power tool. The next thing we see is Cooper waddling down the street, visibly in pain.

While Weiss's work (2006) on the mainstreaming of BDSM criticizes the "safe," normalized portrayals of BDSM in the media for only permitting acceptance of certain types of SM, Eurotrip presents a seemingly more harmful portrayal of BDSM. By portraying BDSM as involuntary, scary, foreign and inherently homosexual, the movie eliminates any chance that the heterosexual, non-BDSM practicing American viewer accepts or condones SM practices. This scene draws humor out of the extremity of the Vandersexxx BDSM experience, but that same extremity would inevitably cause conservative viewers to condemn BDSM as being too strange and too foreign to ever accept. This type of portrayal interrupts and even reverses the supposed progress toward mainstream acceptance, understanding and tolerance of BDSM that Weiss (2006) investigates.

References:

1. Kim, J. L., Sorsoli, C. L., Collins, K., Zylbergold, B. A., Schooler, D., & Tolman, D. L. (2007). From sex to sexuality: Exposing the heterosexual script on primetime network television. Journal of Sex Research, 44(2), 145-157. doi: 10.1080/00224490701263660 
2. Weiss, M. (2006). Mainstreaming kink: The politics of BDSM representation in U.S. popular media. Journal of Homosexuality, 50(2/3), 103-132. doi: 10.1300/J082v50n02_06