GIMP masks. Nazi chic. Bondage and fetish wear. There’s a distinctly S&M vibe running through culture at the moment; a little Freudian shiver rippling across society.

If you keep an eye on fashion, you’ll see that clothing and design is now starting to play with dark themes of sexual domination and submission. This isn’t the con artists of haute couture simply chasing a new way to shock and grab attention. It’s a little signal about a disturbing current that is now coursing around our world.

Fashion – like any art form – is both influenced by and influences the society it springs from: in the 1960s clothing, just like art and theatre and film back then, was ‘permissive’, rule-breaking, about youth – closely mimicking the society from which it grew. In the Victorian era, fashion and art were as tightly laced as the phoney morality of the period. In the 1990s, fashion – and art, theatre and film – was louche, individualistic, ironic: fitting the period’s carefree, amoral, knowing cynicism.

Of late, themes of sadism and masochism are finding their way into our popular culture. At the recent MTV awards, Madonna put ‘dungeon chic’ on display, appearing as some sort of Nazi-inspired dominatrix. Partly, that’s all just good old fashioned showbiz fun. It’s also pretty impressive to see a 63-year-old so confident in her own sexuality – but then it was Madonna.

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And that’s partly the issue – Madonna is the point-woman of contemporary culture. She always has been and always will. She picks up on growing trends in music and art and fashion just before or just as they go overground. The influence of Madonna on popular culture is studied by serious academics – and for good reason: where she leads, society and culture often follow.

Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue, once said of Madonna “she makes fashion happen”. Camille Paglia called Madonna a “major historical figure”. In terms of pop culture, the claim isn’t overblown.

Not long after Madonna’s channelling of The Night Porter, lesser lights in the celebrity pantheon were also playing with fetish wear. Actor Evan Mock wore a gimp mask at the Met Gala – and Kim Kardashian (an imitator who follows in the wake of trendsetters like Madonna) wore a hooded mask and head-to-toe all-black outfit.

Nothing happens in a vacuum. Ideas and symbols bubble out of culture. There’s been some talk that perhaps these masked works of fashion are riffing on the pandemic – that we’ve all been wearing masks for 18 months now and so designers are playing with that. But there’s a difference between a Covid mask and gimp mask. There’s also been plenty of catwalk affairs featuring conventional ‘pandemic couture’. The S&M vibe points to something different going on.

Perhaps this bubbling up of bondage represents something quite dark that’s happening in culture. This isn’t an exercise in what’s called ‘kink-shaming’ these days, by the way. Nobody is standing in judgement of anyone if they want to dress up in latex in their bedroom and get off on a little spanking or whatever – each to their own as long as it’s consensual and all that.

But bondage gear and fetish wear – in public – is clearly linked to sexual themes of domination, humiliation, control, power, and submission. It’s not called sadomasochism for nothing, obviously.

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Our culture today gravitates around cruelty. The most recent addition to global culture – social media – is a playground where humiliation and cruelty are the main games. Folk seem to enter into the realm of social media in order to feel dominant and to indulge in the humiliation of strangers.

Each day, all of us, if we’re on social media, will voyeur from the sidelines as one victim or another is crushed – lashed and jeered at for some perceived wrong-doing. What follows is an almost immediate self-abasement – a grovelling apology: the victim metaphorically getting on their knees.

It’s just plain wrong to say that there isn’t something very dark and very Freudian at work here. Evidently, much of this abuse and cruelty comes from nameless and faceless people online. They are effectively masked. We can’t see them. Sometimes we may even be them.

Yet we remain online. Nobody really flees from social media appalled at the sadism. What does that speak of, if not a form of masochism?

My profession – journalism – is also seeing this cruelty bleed over from social media. Some in the mainstream, on TV and newspapers, seem to make pain and cruelty their currency – heaping abuse and degradation on those in the public eye. Often young women are the target.

Themes of domination course through politics as much as the media. Around the world, we’ve seen the rise of the idolised strongman – the Trumps, the Bolsonaros, the Putins and Orbans. Some of Trump’s most avowed worshippers even called him ‘daddy’. The Freudianism is shiver-inducing.

This isn’t the silly pseudo-porn of Fifty Shades of Grey – a little harmless titillation for the frustrated middle classes. What we’re seeing is perhaps a shudder in society that speaks of humanity’s darkest side: our desire to hurt others, and in some cases be hurt ourselves.

We need only look at the real pornography industry for the worst examples of this. Around 10 years ago, I made a documentary exploring the effects of extreme porn on young men. I consider myself relatively unshockable, a permissive liberal. I was wrong. I was shocked. Much of the porn that’s been consumed for the last decade trades in what can only be described as abuse.

Pain seems to permeate our culture from the underground of pornography to the everywhere of social media. Maybe it’s because we are all so angry? The last time bondage made its way into fashion was during punk – a time of rage, when people felt ground down by the world around them, humiliated by the society we’d created.

Is that where we are now? Angry, humiliated, powerless people lashing out online, trying to foist our pain on to others? Are these dark impulses now within our wider culture – in the sadomasochistic themes we see so vividly in art and fashion?

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