The crowd at was about 90% men, and of them, well more than half were in leather. Presenter Thor Stockman, himself a practicing sadist, described how Hollywood's attitude towards perverts has always been weirdly shameful and dirty, as though everyone has sex in the missionary position, coiffed like white mannequins on the cover of a romance novel. Pop culture's idea of kink runs the gamut from the embarassing Gimp in Pulp Fiction to a kink-positive blip in 1995's Jeffrey to the HOTTT leather-clad Rosie O'Donnell in Exit to Eden, as well as Al Pacino's excruciating Elene-Benes-style dancing in Cruising, with barely an accurate or sex-positive portrayal to be found.

Thor began the program by pointing out that a scene's reading varies widely depending on the audience, and it's true -- for example, although it made us laugh, a red-state audience would probably nod grimly at the The Laughing Policeman scene in which a detective trails a suspect through a storm of leathermen, go-go boys, and drag queens, then posits, "I think he's a fag." We could've done with a bit more analysis of the clips; it's easy to reduce most clips to "kink-ignorant" and move on, but we were left curious about, for example, the stripping-away of Nicholas Cage's position of power in 8mm despite the authority of his gaze -- but maybe it's best that the evening didn't go there, since once we get started talking about Foucalt and saying "hegemony" we can NEVER shut up.

After the jump: a moustache, hot lesbian action, and a man with a puppy tail.

S/M at the Movies: The Good, the Bad and the Ridiculous