BONDING (NETFLIX) – a client’s view

I’ve never written a TV review on here before, but then there havent been many TV series that show submissive male clients in session with their professional Dominatrix. “Bonding”, just out on Netflix, does exactly that, while also portraying the life and loves of the Dominatrix away from her dungeon.

This is the world I have most written about, so it seemed relevant.

(Spoiler alerts – you may want to watch the show before reading this)

I really wanted to like it, hoping this might, at last, be a representation of this strange world I inhabit that I could fully get alongside. The auspices weren’t great: Dominatrix, Miss Ria Harsichord, in an excellent Huffington Post article, described it as “Just another half baked representation of sex work”. Mistress Evilyne, interviewed in The Telegraph was more positive, though she had room for plenty of criticism too.

The whole community has, with justification, hated how Twitter has allowed Mistress May, a fictional Domme a “verified,” blue tick, at a time when real sex workers are struggling to promote themselves on all social media platforms.

I actually did find a lot to like. At its heart, it’s a lighthearted romcom and I found the principal characters both interesting and believable. Mistress May is young for a pro-Domme, but not ridiculously so, and I could imagine submitting to her. She had a convincing presence and carried herself as a Dominatrix might. The supporting characters seemed well drawn too.

Others, more qualified than me, have pointed out some of the questionable aspects of the way her sessions were portrayed. I spotted many of these errors myself, and the show clearly needed more input from a professional Dominatrix.

What did I least like?

The clients.

In the way their kinks were portrayed, the series seemed to be inviting the audience to laugh at the clients and find them and their ‘perversions’ ridiculous. As a client myself, with my own particular set of fetishes and kinks, I didn’t want to be encouraged to laugh at those of someone else. Something about the acting and the direction of these parts seemed to put each of these men in front of us and ask us to laugh at them. I had the feeling that small changes would have made it easier to understand how serious and real was their engagement in their session, however odd what they were doing might seem from the outside.

We weren’t asked to laugh at the gay men for being gay; or at the Dominatrux for being dominant; why ask us to laugh at the submissive men for being submissive?

If we want to normalise Femdom kink and bring it into the mainstream, it is not enough for professional Dominatrixes to be taken seriously, as Mistress May was in this series; their clients need not to be figures of ridicule. The series seemed deliberately to select submissive kinks that would be hard for the audience to relate to: domestic servitude, being pissed on, animal play, and hold them up for our scorn.

I understand this show was made as a comedy, but its good laughs were gentle, classical, romcom laughs, driven by character and situation, and were done well. Inviting the audience to indulge their  prurient sense of superiority and laugh at these men and their unusual proclivities seemed to detract from an otherwise brave and well developed story.

I had this simple test for this show:

“Knowing that a vanilla friend had watched it, would I be more or less likely to tell  them that I regularly see a Dominatrix?”

“Bonding” failed that test, which is a shame because it had no need to.