Is bondage breaking out of the 'niche' restraints?

Has big, bad 'BDSM' officially transitioned from a sidelined kink to the sexual mainstream (hey there, Christian Grey)? Or has it been part of it all along...

- Saumyaa Vohra

The term 'BDSM' has been whispered for an epoch. The practice of 'Bondage, Discipline (or Domination), Sadism, and Masochism' was once a sexual subaltern; one that piqued curiosity but was never 'for us', the normals. Kink in itself had a problematic connotation at its heart a synonym for 'flaw' or imperfection'; a thing that deviated from the sexual median, othering it from mainstream sex. Until, of course, the mainstream decided to co-opt it.

To be fair, BDSM was always laced through the archives of literature and cinema, should we have chosen to find it. It tried to roam free among us, shunned by a society that could not fathom the power of this extremity-based dynamic. John Wilmot's Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery (1684) or Justine by Marquis de Sade (1791) date the practises back centuries, while cinema like Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour (1967) or La Prisonnière (1968) by Henri-Georges Clouzot prove that it had been playing out on screens for an engaged audience despite its purported 'nicheness'.

Despite the critical disdain I have for this series, I can't deny it was EL James' Fifty Shades trilogy that actually pulled back the curtain on BDSM and brought it centre stage. Through the character of Christian Grey (played by Jamie Dornan), we had the exciting, daunting world of kink on a bountiful platter, bursting with delights we wouldn't have dared to dabble in on our own. In Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson's character in the film) was our innocence, taken for a wild ride by a thrilling, all-knowing stranger, opening doors to avenues our bodies hadn't dreamed of. And so, out came BDSM from the shadows and into the zeitgeist...