The reason why Showtime’s Billions can get masochism so right while getting BDSM so wrong is because masochism does not belong to BDSM.
That the show’s first episode opens with weird sex, setting a major theme for the rest of the series, was inevitable. Following Randian hedge fund manager Bobby Axelrod (played by Damian Lewis, an uncannily appealing personification of the old Woll Smoth meme) and Chuck Rhoades, the US Attorney who loves to hate him (played with wolverine verve by Paul Giamatti), the show returns often to Rhoades’s sexual proclivities as a disgusting little pain slut. A powerful straight white man who channels his obsessive insecurities into sadomasochism is a trope worn smooth as old leather.
As with any Trump-era drama chronicling the lives of the obscenely wealthy, Billions is about power; I envision a sheet with holes cut out for eyes and mouth, animated into ghostliness by the money, sex, and liberal politics beneath it. The sex games, as they at one time would have been described, between Rhoades and his wife, Wendy—whose employment as corporate therapist to Axelrod underpins his hatred for the ginger fintech folk hero—are the kind of kinky that strives to shock, but not by breaking any new ground. Like I said, in a show like this one, this flavor of weird sex was inevitable. (If you want groundbreaking, go check out Succession’s ageplay arc. Spot-on, horny as fuck perfection.)
Billions’s weird sex1 was not only inevitable, but inevitably bad. The rope bondage is sloppy. Rhoades’ pain tolerance is incoherent (anyone who can take a cigarette burn isn’t scared of your tens unit). Wendy gives him a golden shower outside of a bathroom2. At one point, frustrated with her husband’s distraction and wielding her puny little violet wand, Wendy says, “This makes cattle concentrate!” No, Wendy. Cattle prods make cattle concentrate.
In Rhoades, I see a masochistic personality type embodied by straight male (and often white) clients3 everywhere: an intimacy-averse control freak obsessed with rule-following, addicted to black-and-white thinking, and hungry for power in a way he’s too pussy to own. To differing degrees, I see these qualities in myself. As Rhoades’s sworn enemy, Axelrod is not his inverse—a sadist—but a control-freak of a different stripe. Axelrod wants total control over the highs. Rhoades wants total control over the lows. As the narrator of Venus in Furs opines: “The moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped, deserves to be whipped.”
Masochistic types seek out BDSM as one of many ways to do masochism. BDSM is a receptacle, a structure, an MO, an outlet, or, if you let it, a place for community (tricks, in their capacity as tricks, can’t share in this community; one might as well say one is in community with other Walgreens shoppers). In the latter respect, masochism is an identity, but even for those of us who think of it that way, it’s not totalizing. In his daily life, Rhoades is far more sadistic than Axelrod is. Terms like “sadist” and “masochist” obscure the real power, and power relations, of both men who, as a glorified cop and a literal billionaire, come about as close as individuals can to running the fucking world.
The fantasy of powerlessness is just that, and anyone telling you otherwise has a bridge to sell you (if he’s not too busy suing you).
So why make this point, that masochism does not belong to BDSM? Because I think it bears repeating that desire and ethics are not the same. That identity and action are not the same. That interest in sensation, patronage of sex workers, and a commitment to suffering does not a leatherperson make.
At some point during Brooklyn’s first leatherdyke picnic, organized a few weeks ago by Daemonumx and Jade, someone stood up and, speaking to everyone in earshot, said, “God, this is good. This feel so good.”
I didn’t know that person, or most of the people in attendance. What I had anticipated would be a small get-together—a half-dozen huddle on Nellie’s Lawn in Prospect Park—ballooned to at least 50 dykes talking, flirting, cruising, eating, sharing, and peeling off to piss in the trees over the course of six hours. It was wonderful. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt that good in a gathering of that kind. That it happened after over a year of isolation on a bright summer day only made it feel more like a dream.
I was struck by how diverse we were. Cis and trans, black and brown and white, boy dykes and girl dykes, and other kinds of dykes, too. Dykes of all body types and experience levels and interests. Dykes who bussed in from Philly and drove down from Boston for the day. Dykes who were workers and dykes who were civilians. Dykes in head-to-toe leather, dykes topless, dykes in matching outfits, dykes in street clothes. Dyke Daddies and dyke Mommies and dyke littles. Dyke fags and dyke bitches. Dykes flagging with hankies, fingernails, and other things, all there together because of leather—a desire that both transcends and centers the fuck. Bottoms, tops, we all hate cops.
Masochism does not belong to BDSM. But you can belong to leather, if you want.
David tweets at @k8bushofficial.
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For transparency, I’m only 1 season in.
This one’s up for interpretation, but I personally think pissing on your own bedroom floor without a chuck or anything is demented. You have a shower. Use it!
Ask me why masochists are the most annoying kind of fetish consumer.
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