Global Decadence

Watching the nineties Japanese film “Tokyo Decadence” I felt a disarming familiarity with a foreign world, the realization that S&M is a culture unto itself, one that transcends every other culture into which it is placed. From America to Europe, to the Middle and Far East and beyond, tops and bottoms – fetishists of every stripe – repeat the same actions and scenes in a universal ritual, desires as innate as the human linguistic capacity itself. S&M stands for sadism and masochism, but sadist could just as easily substitute for submissive/slave and masochist for master/mistress – two sides of the same coin right down to their letters.