We spent yesterday afternoon watching a BDSM movie named “The Pet” and my impression is that it’s a movie with a split personality. To some small extent it’s a peep-hole into some of the dynamics in TPE as well as Pet play. On the other hand it also seems like an ambush where the viewer is being pulled through a sort of involuntary moral preaching.
The plot is quite basic.
The story revolves around two characters, Peter who is an elderly wealthy person and Mary, who later becomes GG (her pet name) a young girl living on the outskirts of society. Mary’s cat, Paws, has recently died and she is facing a pile of bills from the vet, an abusive boyfriend whom she has recently broken up with and to top it all she is being evicted from her apartment. Then, all of a sudden, she bumps into Peter while she is working one of her small time jobs. He feels sorry for her and offers to help her out. He invites her for dinner and offers her a check for ten thousand dollars.The movie claims to be about BDSM, but I find that to be offensive because Peter isn’t portraying a situation built on mutual negotiation, instead he seems to take advantage of the young girl’s misfortunes. And this is the first offense to me if this is supposed to be an image of the most ordinary protocol within BDSM – Consent.
Peter offers to help her out with the burial of Paws and then invites Mary to his mansion where Paws is supposed to be buried. While she is spending time there, he offers her more money if she decides to stay with him for two days. Mary is portrayed as a, to some extent, naive young woman with a rough living and survival instincts that esteems from foster care and living in the streets.
Mary accepts his offer and then she is stripped of her clothes and collared with an electrical collar. She is put on a leash and has to sleep in a cage and Peter’s rationale for having a human pet is that he recently lost his beloved dog and is mourning the loss of her – He doesn’t feel completed.
Mary is given a pet name, GG, and quickly goes into her newly found persona as a human pet and adopts it without any difficulties. When her two days is over Peter asks her if she wants more. Mary starts to question how she ended up being naked, sleeping on the floor naked and she does so with quite a lot of resentment. Peter then comes across as manipulative and says that he misjudged her and that she isn’t what he believed her to be, she basically doesn’t have it in her. Between the lines he threatens to remove the love and security he has given her and that she has longed for and yet again he comes across as taking advantage of a victim.
This is the second offense; the movie is trying to paint an image of BDSM practitioners, especially Dominants, as manipulative and unscrupulous human beings who isn’t afraid of taking advantage of other people. This image doesn’t have anything to do with BDSM as it is extremely distorted one, which to me is an offense targeted towards the whole BDSM community.
Mary doesn’t want to be without the financial as well as the emotional stability that Peter has offered her, she has become dependant of him so she can’t turn him down when he asks her to be his pet for six months and in return she will receive 50.000 dollars.
The ill depicted dynamics, stereotypes and rationales of BDSM is not the worst crime carried out by this movie.
There is an parallel story arch running as we go in and out of Peter and Mary’s relationship. The movie is at the same time, for some inexplicable reason, trying to portrait human trafficking and connect it to slave roles within BDSM. These human traffickers harvest organs from human beings that are kidnapped or sold by their boy friends who are owes money to a mean and manipulative loan shark.
The movie doesn’t make any effort at all to polarize these two different contexts against each other in order to show the differences between consensual TPE and real illegal slavery – Instead it tries to intertwine these into each other. The reason for this is totally hidden and I start to feel, as a viewer and a lifestyler, that I am being kidnapped into a church to have Satan driven out of me. I feel tricked by the movie, I feel that the lifestyle is being tricked by this movie as well and I seriously don’t see any reason why human trafficking even should be connected with consensual BDSM in terms of pet play or owner/property relationships – Unless it’s yet another attempt to strike down on the lifestyle with the famous hammer of righteousness and moral correctness.
When the movie ends it there’s long list of countries that are being mentioned as source countries where trafficking victims are kidnapped and countries that are mentioned as destination countries for these victims. This even makes me angry and enhances my feeling of being tricked.
Human trafficking is a crime and should be handled as such, but it has nothing….and read again, nothing to do with consensual BDSM – They doesn’t even remotely mix.
In consensual BDSM submissives, pets or slaves are not generally young women with turbulent past, they are not victimized and taken advantage of by elderly men with the financial means to do what they want with other human beings. This is the image of BDSM that the movie has lured me into and it pisses me off!
It pisses me off that the movie even has this ambition; to create some sort of demonized image of BDSM and it pisses me off even more that this movie is trying to honor itself as being an insight into the world of BDSM.
The only value, in terms of BDSM, this movie gave me was that I found the scenes in Peter’s mansion to be nicely portrayed.
The moral message of this movie stinks and it will take you as a hostage in order barf the whole enchilada out right before your eyes. I had a foul smell and taste in my mouth afterwards and I probably have to spend a week or so to get the crap out that has been shoved down my throat.
[…] was totally out of ideas of what to blog about today, until I found this post over at Island of Pain. It got me thinking about whether there were any movies which actually […]