“Demons to some. Angels to others”: BDSM and how Vanilla Sex Regulates Sexuality in Hellraiser and Strangeland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
[Introduction] Setting the Mood Sex is typically seen as special, thrilling and transcendent — or, alternatively, as a menacing force with the power to upset social order and diminish us to beasts. In the horror genre, representations of sex are often expressed through the imagery of BDSM (Bondage, Domination, Sadomasochism), and are aligned with monsters, torture and scary settings. The reality of the BDSM subculture is disfigured by mainstream horror films, which demonize BDSM and use it as a portable method of garnering screams. Horror as a genre allows audiences to flirt with danger, while reinforcing boundaries between pathological non-normal sexuality and protected and privileged normal sexuality. BDSM has gained considerable scholarly attention in the last two decades within and beyond sociology, particularly in the areas of sexual deviance, identity disclosure and development, stigma management (Bezreh, Pitagora, Simula), and more recently, BDSM’s diffusion into the mainstream culture (Weiss, Scott). Further, research has examined how popular culture perpetuates misconceptions about BDSM, and frames practitioners as victims of trauma, abuse, and rape (Brock, Bezreh, Rubin). This pathologization of BDSM, in part, stems from the assumption that BDSM is a mental illness, a consequence of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’s (DSM) historical conflation of psychological disorder and sadomasochism. Additionally, Western horror cinema has had a pivotal influence on popular discourses about BDSM. Less scholarship, however, has examined the relationship between horror and BDSM. This paper contributes to the scholarship on BDSM portrayals in popular culture by examining BDSM representations in two Hollywood horror films: Strangeland (1998) and Hellraiser (1987).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".