Nick, the old rascal, illustrates the day-to-day goings on at Pandora's Box via interviews with the mistresses, and indeed with a few of the clients, with footage from the sessions themselves, and with grainy CCTV footage that is, The Duke would announce without fear of contradiction, among the most elegant, hauntingly beautiful CCTV footage I've ever seen in my life.

Maybe the footage Chuck Berry was getting from that ladies room way back when was even more elegant and hauntingly beautiful, but the rogue refuses to answer a single fucking phone call from yours truly, so I doubt I'll ever know.

I know this, though, sure as I'm sat here and now;

Fetishes is a beautiful piece of work. Humane, intelligent, sad, touching, witty and blackly comedic, yes. It's not Nick Broomfield's best film, not in any universe that holds Aileen Wuornos- The Selling Of A Serial Killer or The Leader, His Driver And The Driver's Wife or Biggie And Tupac, but it's up there, that much is clear, clear as the welts on a fella's thighs fresh out Mistress Raven's boudoir.

Nick doesn't wanna fling a loada sensationalist toss over the screen, he wants to illuminate the personalities, wants to demystify the dominatrix and, indeed, the fella in the mask having his nuts whipped every so often. Who are these people?

Turns out, perfectly average folks is who they are. Folks who get all the stressed in the world six days a week and find that the only thing keeps them sane is having a woman in black leather force them to clean shoes with their tongues.

Turns out the Mistresses are just ladies who earn a living taking the weight of the world offa the shoulders of folks rich enough to have the weight there in the first place. Turns out they get depressed as hell by it all sometimes, and who wouldn't? That's a hella lot grief they're responsible for alleviating. All that shit has to go someplace.

And there's a hella lotta shit to be eased, you'll not be surprised to learn. As a result, some of this tomfoolery is mighty disturbing, is what The Duke would announce with regards the nature of it all.

To wit;

The particularly distressed fella who pays for to be humiliated, abused and degraded in order to keep his occasional anti-social impulses at bay. His torment reaches a plateau of some kind when he is forced to have his head shoved into a toilet, and there he stays, until such times as his mistress bids him elsewhere.

Article Author: Duke De Mondo

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