Wah. :[

Master and I have gone to our respective homes for the holidays. While I was able to spend a good week with him in his hometown, it's very difficult to have good sex in a three-bedroom house with five to six other people in it. :/

While Master and I were hanging out in his family's pub, House, M.D. was playing on one of the TVs. It was an older episode that I'd somehow missed (I'm a rather rabid fan >.>) in which the patient of the day was a sub/bottom who also had a fetish for breath play* and was in a rather strict 24/7 relationship with a Domme. I didn't quite catch if she was a professional or not (the volume was too low to hear in the bar and the clost captioning was shit), but it seemed like a genuine loving relationship - not just a business arrangement.

Of course, there were good and bad things in this portrayal in the show. On the one hand, Chase was/had been a part of the scene, so he was sympathetic to the patient and his Domme; he guessed the nature of their relationship right away, but didn't want to "out" them and stayed silent (whether he should have as a doctor is another thing), and he stood up for them when Cuddy barred the Domme from the hospital. And the smile on his face when he watched the two reunite was priceless!

That was outweighed by the general disgust of the rest of the cast, though - mostly Foreman and the clinic's laywer, as well as Cuddy. And the patient's family, of course - but they were quite obviously painted as the "villains" in the episode: people so intolerant, so insensitive towards their son that they were almost willing to sit back and let him die. House took them to task quite thoroughly for that; and for his part, House cracked his off-color jokes about leather and so on, but for the most part didn't give a damn about what the patient did in the sack - very House of him, really.

As for the portrayal of the Domme and sub... I'm mixed. Though it was nice to see a D/s relationship that didn't have chains and latex all over the place, and the Domme was obviously very intelligent and cared deeply about her sub, I didn't like how the sub was portrayed as a spineless, sobbing twit without the Domme. I mean, Jesus Christ, I may be a sub, but I have enough self-esteem to make critical medical decisions about myself! For fuck's sake!

I also was perturbed that it was the sub's kink that made him wind up in the hospital. I mean, even though the general tone was vaguely sympathetic, the fact that the sub had to give up his fetish or die gave seemed to give a "he got what was coming" message. But I may be reading to much into it - and I wasn't able to catch all of the episode before they turned to a football game, so maybe I'm missing a critical part that changed the entire meaning of the episode.

*I've noticed that whenever BDSM is featured in the media, it almost always involves erotic asphyxiation - to an extent much further than it seems to feature in the actual community. I wonder what it is about breath play that makes it particularly alluring to TV writers; perhaps the fact that it's so obviously dangerous makes it easier to vilify? After all, you wouldn't want the viewers to get any ideas.