Thinking Kink: Did Jared Leto and 30 Seconds to Mars Do BDSM Better?

I’d probably call myself a mild fan of Jared Leto’s band 30 Seconds to Mars—I always enjoy a good yell along to “Kings and Queens” if it comes on my car stereo, and will happily watch Shining-homage video “The Kill” just for the deliciously homoerotic spectacle of Jared Leto slamming his doppelganger up against the wall of a spooky hotel corridor. So when I heard that 30 Seconds to Mars had released a BDSM-themed video, “Hurricane,” I wondered: How did I manage to miss this? (British censors is probably the answer.)

Hurricane - 30 Seconds to Mars from RP Sitabi on Vimeo.

The video is pretty incoherent, following the band through dark sinister cityscapes, intercut with flashes of intense BDSM imagery. And the initial image—of a chunky besuited man in a black leather hood brandishing a sledgehammer, pursuing a topless (ooooh) Leto—isn’t exactly a benign representation of a kinkster. Neither is the part where drummer Shannon Leto is handcuffed to a bench and threatened by anonymous men in animal masks (don’t worry kids, he escapes).

However, it all gets a bit sexier when we see Jared sensually blindfolding and gagging a female partner (after we’ve viewed a nice shot of her ass, naturally). Of course, the girl is white, slim and cisgendered—nearly all the women in the video are. And she’s wonderfully submissive—nearly all the women in the video are, save a woman in a latex nun’s outfit briefly seen savagely beating her sub. And here’s where my “tiresome BDSM tropes” warning bell started to ring. This video may have won awards for its exploration of “the violence of sex, and the sex of violence” (Leto), but did it really break any new ground?

Whether it’s guitarist Tomo Milicevic running across a (thin, white, cisgendered, long haired) woman on all fours wearing a black PVC unitard and bunny mask, or Shannon Leto pinning a woman against a wall by her wrists, the overriding theme seems to be “submissive women are sexy” and not much else. Sure, there’s the occasional nod to alternative sexual identities—a weary-looking older man opens his shirt to reveal pendulous breasts—but apart from that we are largely served up scantily clad women for the consumption of the male gaze. Butch or dominant women are almost entirely absent from the video, and the only scene of girl-on-girl action—where a woman spits in another woman’s mouth—depicts two slim, long-haired femme girls grappling with each other. Then we have various flashes of a woman being grabbed by the throat, by the hair, or led around on a rope. You could be forgiven for thinking that the overriding message of the video is: Look how hot it is to control women!

It’s important to state that I am not a 50 Shades-burning, anti-femsub feminist. What bothers me is not female submission itself but how easily the concept and its accompanying imagery can be co-opted to support a culture that disregards female agency. And, like most BDSM imagery in the media, it’s usually lacking any context or explanation.

So yes, it is reassuring to see Jared Leto whispering in his partner’s ear as he gags and restrains her, and to see some degree of pleasure on her face. But this is not replicated throughout the video—instead the viewer is fed random shots of women’s bodies manipulated by unseen hands, with no sense of consent or even real pleasure. I asked Cliff Pervocracy, BDSM-positive feminist blogger, what her checklist for showing BDSM imagery on TV would be, and her first requirement was, “Show both partners wanting do it.” How often is this rule forgotten, not just in the use of BDSM imagery, but when any sexual imagery appears in the media?

In a culture where it is already too readily believed that women invite or “ask for” sexual violence, we’re playing a dangerous game if we show no consent or negotiation before a man grabs a woman by the hair or chokes, restrains, or whips her. As writer Stacey May Fowles puts it, the mainstream availability of BDSM images “trains viewers who don’t have a BDSM cultural awareness…to believe that what women want is to be coerced, and in some cases, forced into acts they don’t consent to.” With this video, director Bartholomew Cubbins seem to suggest that vanilla sex pervades music videos to such a degree that it’s become pretty tedious, therefore the path to true “edginess” must be kinky sex. But did he actually show us anything that outrageous? All I saw was yet another music video that depicted female bodies as malleable objects, now with added violence. Hmmm…

Thanks to Bitch user “Kborgesius” for suggesting this topic!

Previously: Swinging Both Ways (Christian Grey Included), The Appeal of the Submissive Male