I liked the lesbian sex scene featuring hardcore Lesbian Porn Diva Raven Rockette, but otherwise this segment was a bust. Auteur Jacky SJ's building to S&M content gradually had this marking-time episode highly suspect in terms of our heroine's motivation, though star Ashlynn did a good job acting and getting naked as usual.
'Tis a pity that St. James insists on foisting the clichéd female fantasy of craving submission to a strong, cruel man -a premise that I still find enjoyable in one of those Gainsborough period romances from Britain so popular in the 1940s (though I prefer the Gainsborough strain of women taking charge and dominating the screen as in "The Wicked Lady"), but in 2016 this material is hogwash. Our heroine has to spout contradictory dialog and convey diametrically opposed attitudes scene to scene to make Jacky's house of cards construct play, and it doesn't play well.
Of course the Master villain of the piece is overplayed and slanted to utter cruelty, callousness and just sheer loathsomeness, especially in his treatment of the Skin Diamond character who dotes on him with no recompense. Since Skin is the most appealing player, and fast becoming Showtime's favorite hardcore-turned- soft-core actress (also currently in the comedy "Channel Sex News" on demand there), watching him mistreat her is a bit much. So he's a creep and his male- dominated BDSM b.s. is just that, b.s. For me it's Jacky's b.s., and this character reflects badly on her as the series' straw man -hate the guy but for convenience buy into his nonsense so women can get off on being mistreated.
In the '70s Lina Wertmuller was a trailblazer in cinema with her inverted "grotesque comedies" starring Giancarlo Giannini, in which she put forward her feminist argument but had the key auteur-spokesman character always the man (GG). Jacky's inverted nonsense in her many movies and now this bowdlerized Cable TV series presents the allure of "letting go" and "giving up control" to somebody else, when in fact this irrational behavior is being lightly (and ineffectively) criticized at the same time. For me, the series would work perhaps by eliminating the male: say, having Skin as the Mistress, no need for a Master. In lesbian porn the themes of women dominating each other, especially the durable older/younger ploy in hundreds of lesbian videos, plays far better on the silver screen than watching yet another brute give the ladies a hard time, and pretend they love it.
