‘Bonding’ Season 2 is a good crash course in BDSM for curious couples

Like every holiday over the past year, Valentine’s Day will need to be a little different this time around (unless you want to be a public health risk, I guess). One of the biggest annual occasions for a date night out on the town will most likely be spent with your partner on the same couch you’ve both been watching Netflix from every night since March.

But while it can’t replace the usual Valentines Day dinner, one Netflix show could be the inspiration couples needed to explore new forms of intimacy from the safety of their own homes. 

Season 2 of Bonding, released Jan. 27, continues the story of Tiff, a part-time professional dominatrix in NYC, and her best friend Pete, an aspiring comedian who falls into becoming her bodyguard/assistant. While far from a perfect representation of either the BDSM or sex worker communities (more on that later), Bonding is the kind of casual, mainstream, and newbie-friendly introduction to kink that can serve as the conversation-starter for couples who are curious, but just don’t know where to start.

Despite its marketing (and, honestly, a good portion of Season 1), the new episodes of Bonding differ from other mainstream media representations of BDSM by mostly avoiding playing the latex and whips of kink for cheap laughs or shock value. From your Fifty Shades of Greys to your Mr. Slaves on South Park, normies have been peddling narrow, unhealthy, and demeaning misrepresentations of BDSM that not only perpetuate stigma, but also turn people off from considering the myriad alternatives to vanilla sex they’d probably enjoy trying.

A lot of folks see the chains, whips, and ball gags that mainstream media paints as synonymous with all kink and assume, “Well, none of that does it for me.” But what these depictions fail to communicate to audiences is just how wide a spectrum of sexual proclivities are encompassed within BDSM, roleplay, and kink — many of which are what some might consider less “intense” than all that. Rarely does any kink journey start in a playroom lined with walls of intimidating sadomasochistic equipment. While there’s nothing wrong with being into that style of BDSM, plenty of long-term kinksters find that none of those dynamics or fetishes are their thing either. 

Worse, the miseducation spread by such narrow and irresponsible media depictions of kink lead the public to not even realize that some more “mainstream” acts — like choking, spanking, or even certain types of dirty talk — are, in fact, BDSM, and should always be practiced with the safety measures established by the BDSM community to ensure everyone’s consent and well-being.

Bonding Season 2 stands out for focusing far less on the leather of it all, and far more on the underlying emotional connection, vulnerability, communication, and boundary-setting.

Bonding Season 2 stands out for focusing far less on the leather of it all, and far more on the underlying emotional connection, vulnerability, communication, and boundary-setting that can make ethical BDSM an incredible vehicle for deepening relationships.

Now, before I extol the virtues of Season 2 too much, I need to address the glaring flaws with Season 1 — which was guilty of a lot of those mistakes. During its release back in 2019, Bonding was pretty widely panned by the very communities it claimed to represent, with sex workers and kinksters balking at its perpetuation of harmful myths, kink-shaming humor, unrealistic portrayals, and failure to address any of the discrimination sex workers face.

From the jump, the first episode establishes the show’s entire premise on a flagrant disregard for consent, as Mistress May (Tiff’s dominatrix persona) essentially tricks and pressures her friend Pete into becoming part of the world of dungeon play. You can’t claim to be a sex-positive show if your story violates the very pillars of kink and professional BDSM, reducing sex work and roleplay to just some fun kooky comedic circumstances.

Bonding creator Rightor Doyle, who loosely based the show on his own real-life experiences as the assistant to a dominatrix friend, clearly took those criticisms of the first season to heart. Season 2 added Olivia Troy, who is a BDSM professional, writer, producer, and intimacy coordinator, to the writer’s room. To no one’s surprise, including more people with some of the lived experiences a fictional narrative is wading into really does matter.

It’s exactly in the stark juxtaposition between Seasons 1 and 2 that you can see the difference between a superficial understanding of BDSM, and the more complex and grounded realities of actually practicing it. It’s evident from minute one of the second season, when Tiff is reprimanded by her dominatrix mentor Mistress Mira, who lists all the egregious violations and wrongdoings Tiff committed — essentially echoing much of the criticism the show faced in 2019. 

It isn’t the usual lampshading you see from other TV shows, which seem to think that by calling out the problematic tropes they’re perpetuating, it gives them a free pass to keep using them. Instead, reckoning with the consequences of irresponsible BDSM and other emotional complexities embedded in kink are central to Season 2’s plot. 

Mistress Mira forces Tiff to take a Dominatrix 101 course, giving both the character and the viewers one of the most nuanced educations in what it means to be a dominant and a submissive ever aired on TV. Meanwhile, Pete’s relationship with his boyfriend shows the more organic ways roleplay can happen between partners in a non-professional setting. Sure, some of their scenes are at a BDSM leather bar. But most occur in private spaces. 

Crucially, Bonding gives equal weight to showing toe-sucking as a tender act of appreciation between them as it does to scenes where a partner expresses not being comfortable with a certain kink. A lot of the time, Pete is both simultaneously excited and disgusted by some of the stuff he realizes gets him off. He struggles to unpack exactly what kind of internalized homophobia is at play, for example, in his desire to have sex with his closeted boyfriend’s straight bro alter ego.

That’s another thing about kink Bonding gets right that other mainstream media doesn’t: When you open yourself up to the depths of your unconscious desires — especially with a partner — some unsavory stuff is bound to come up. That doesn’t mean BDSM is bad for you or inherently dangerous or particularly depraved. It just means everyone’s sexuality is complicated, and some are more ready than others to dive into both the good and not-so-good of unraveling it. Also, a lot of good can come from facing the repressed parts of ourselves in emotionally safe environments. 

In the show, the intimacy exchanged through roleplay and BDSM isn’t presented as just a bunch of hardcore porn scenes. There are probably fewer raunchy sex scenes in Bonding Season 2 than there are in Bridgerton. In place of the more visually graphic, though, it prioritizes the sensuality of vulnerable trust, delicate power dynamics, and emotional stakes embedded in BDSM.

Despite being leaps and bounds better than its first season, Bonding Season 2 is far from perfect. I can’t personally speak to how successful or not it is at addressing all the critiques from various sex workers’ perspectives. It does, at least, make discriminatory laws like FOSTA-SESTA a central plot point. The craftsmanship of professional sex work, and the humanity of the people who are great at is, is certainly also more centralized. But those are all pretty low bars to clear. And when a straight, cis, well-off white girl is the main protagonist in a story about sex work, you inevitably leave out a lot of experiences that are integral to the backbone of that community. 

Of course, you should never treat any fictional TV show’s version of sex education as anything but a starting point at most. Bonding will by no means teach novices what all they need to know in order to safely practice BDSM and kink. But often, just broaching the topic of wanting to try out something new in the bedroom is a huge obstacle for couples’ sexual exploration. Bonding is a great vehicle for conversations about what you hypothetically might be into or not into. Just be sure to then do more research and start off slow before actually bringing those hypotheticals into the bedroom.

Bonding Season 2 can’t replace all the real-world romantic experiences we’ll miss out on this Valentine’s Day. But if you give it a shot, it could very well give you and your partner a whole new world to explore during a pandemic, all from the safety of your bedroom.

Bonding Season 2 is streaming now on Netflix.