Curioser and Curioser: Marilyn Penn
After the Me Too movement, the jail sentences for men as old as Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, the firing of too many men who were heads of successful studios and businesses, the groundswell to impeach Governor Cuomo, we get the full page and ¾ article in the Sunday Times titled “You Will Pay to Be Humiliated” by Alexander Weiss (April 11). It concerns a “professional Black dominatrix “who extorts money from her willing slaves simply by appearing on Twitter and a short video online and commanding them to shell out until she’s satisfied with the amount. There’s no explaining the myriad ways in which people get their kicks from degradation, but presumably, there are subjects that the Times wouldn’t stoop to indulge in and after all the knocks to Trump for his dalliance with a porn star, we are entitled to be bewildered by the paper’s celebration of this woman and her vocation.
Mistress Marley claims to be a college graduate who puts her life-work in an exalted historical context : “…as a Black woman, I see my financial gains as reparations, because the majority, if not all my clients, are white men.” So the photos of Marley tightly bound in a corset and holding a white man on a leash are really just an attempt at retributive justice – not an attempt to titillate readers with some hard core bondage. There is further validation from a psychology professor who explains how “liberating” it is for men to give their money away: “I believe that findom (financial domination) can actually be a really healthy way to manifest the part of human nature that is about power asymmetry and hierarchy.” A doctor is on hand as well to offer this enlightening parallel behavior: “If I’m into golf and golfing is important to me, I will wait to spend money on other things, but I’m not going to go broke buying golf clubs.”
By now everyone must know that the most financially successful product on the internet is porn – specifically child porn. People have been corrupted into dallying into this most heinous of activities by the ease of its availability – safe in one’s own home. Perhaps this has given the Times the freedom to now offer almost two pages of illustrated salacious behavior, justified by “professionals” who consider bondage and extortion therapeutic .
We don’t need to wonder how the Times would feel about Privileged White dommes , as they are known, humiliating and fleecing Black “slaves” – they don’t have the grit to show that.
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