I can’t stop thinking about Jamie Foxx.  I went to see “Django Unchained” last week.  He and Christoph Waltz are the baddest badass bounty hunters in the history of cinema. This isn’t a film review so don’t get bored with me yet! I just wanted to say that I understand a lot of folks are in a brouhaha about this movie even if they haven’t seen it.  Who does Quentin Tarantino think he is?  An honorary black man?  White people aren’t allowed to use the N-word unless they have special designation.  High horseman Spike Lee thinks it goes against the law of the universe to mix film genres, he twatted: “American slavery was not a Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It was a holocaust. My ancestors are slaves. Stolen from Africa. I will honor them.”  And what have you done lately, Spike Lee?  Jealous much?

If I’m going to sum it up in a sentence, it would be:  Django is a bro film/love story set in pre-Civil War south with horses and an awesome soundtrack. The only thing “spaghetti” about it is the name “Django.”  By the way, I wonder if 9 months from now that is going to be a popular baby name?  I’d do it.

Django is Jamie Foxx, a freed slave/bounty hunter, in search of his slave wife Broomhilda von Shaft (!) whose name sake, Brunnhilde, is the story from Wagner’s four operas which is like a twisted version of the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty. Django and Dr. Schultz go through a good chunk of celluloid trying to rescue her. This is why women would love this movie:  Bitches love saviours.

But that’s not why I’m obsessing over Jamie Foxx as Django.  It’s just one scene and a bit of a SPOILER ALERT in the next sentence if you don’t want to know:  Django hanging upside down, buck naked, his pendulous junk in peril.  Major lady boner.

Before you get all like, what is wrong with you, Peterson, so politically incorrect, what kind of sadist gets off on human misery and degradation, let me explain.

When I was a budding adolescent, I watched the miniseries, “Roots,” with fascination, shock, and awe.  I knew about American slavery of course, but not about how it happened or progressed through the generations.  The series was filmed in the seventies so it was really disturbing to see actors who played Goodnight Daddy Walton, Mr. Brady, Ben Cartwright, and Lou Grant being scary whip wielding assholes, I think it added to the shock value and made a stronger statement to privileged White America, who maybe learned a thing or two about history.

There was one scene that stuck out and shook my emotional core and it’s this one where Kunta Kinte is “taught” the hard way that his new name is Toby:

“Your master gave you a name.  It’s Toby.  WHAT’S YOUR NAME?”

“Kunta Kinte,”  he answers, defiantly.  Then he gets flogged.  It goes back and forth for 3 minutes. As a young teen, I watched it through my fingers.  Each time the whip struck, I yelled at the tv:  “JUST SAY TOBY!”  What the hell?  What I also remember was feeling strangely excited in my budding lady parts.  How confused was I.  Is this perverted and wrong?  I didn’t know but I couldn’t get it out of my head.

I obsessed over that scene for most of high school.  Sometimes when I was getting dressed I would blurt out:  “WHAT’S YOUR NAME?” in a Scottish accent (it’s how I finally learned to trill my r’s) and whip my belt around. Or sometimes when I walked the dog in the woods, while he was chasing squirrels, I would flog a maple tree with his leash and shout:  “YOUR NAME IS TOBY!” I can’t imagine what it looked like to the couples that made out in back of the sugar shack who were witness to my odd behaviour.  Crazy town.  Don’t judge me just yet.

Flash forward a few years later when I was a twenty-year-old fresh maiden, I had started “dating” this dude who was doing his PhD in psychololgy at McGill.  He was a bit older and ever so slightly wiser, a preppie who wore polo shirts, chinos, and Topsiders…totally not my type, if I ever have an actual “type” they usually don’t order from an L.L. Bean catalogue.  As cute as he was (a gingerish Jew, he looked like Starsky from Starsky and Hutch, the original tv show not that weasel Ben Stiller), he was really sweet and quiet and kind of boring to talk to but! we had that sexual chemistry that as it turns out, only happens once in a Haley’s Comet and had I have known that then, I would have kept him locked in my basement forever.

By dating, I really mean going over to his apartment and banging our brains out.  Every day was a throw down, we were like crazed humping jack rabbits when we were together.  It didn’t take long for his kink to come out.  There were some wild times.  He like to spank, pull hair, bite and scratch but all in a nice way. “I’m so sorry,” he would say sweetly when I showed up with fresh bruise cluster on any given body part. His mother bought him a bunch of ties from a Ralph Lauren outlet store and when he was showing them to me he said:  “Let’s use these to tie you up on the bed!”  And me, “Certainly, sir,” as Cannot Say No is my middle name.

So he tied my arms and legs to the bed posts so I was completely splayed out.  And when he was done tying his expert knots, he looked down at me and said, “Whoops, I forgot to take off your underwear first.”  And me:  “Do NOT rip them, they are Calvin Klein, 12 dollars a pair.”  Fifty Shades of Grey hashtag failure.

He was always very considerate and polite.  In the shower he asked, “Would you mind if peed on you just a little bit?”  This was before the internet where every quirk and folly is somebody’s Tumblr blog, I didn’t know “Golden Shower” was an actual thing but in the context of our relationship, it seemed like a good idea.  “Go ahead,”  I said, because being peed on is going to make a great story someday.  That is how I think.

“Starsky,” we’ll call him, had a thing for Natassja Kinski, and in the 80’s it was that iconic Avedon photo of her laying naked entwined with a giant snake that had every man’s dick hard.  Not him though.  It was her wearing a bear suit in the movie “Hotel New Hampshire” that got him excited. Here:

I don’t know where he got it, but one day there was a bear suit laying on his bed.

“Will you please put it on?”  he asked.  What do you think I did?  Of course I put on, paraded around his apartment while making some token growling sounds.  It was June and super hot out so he asked, “Do you want to go out for some ice cream?”  In the bear costume.  The rest of that day was blur, I think I might have passed out at some point and it turned out thankfully, the costume was a rental and he only had it for the weekend because if that was going to be a regular thing, I wouldn’t have been so compliant.  Just saying, I have boundaries.

One day he asked me:  “What do you like?”

Me, squirming: “What do you mean?”  Believe or not, even to this day any kind of sex talk embarrasses me.  That is why text messaging was invented.

Starsky:  “You know, what would you like to do?  What is it that you like?”

Me:  “Um, I don’t know….Mostly missionary?”

Starsky:  “Mostly missionary?!  That’s so boring!  Come on, let me do what you want to do!  What about some role playing?”

So I thought about it and it didn’t take me long to come up with “What’s Your Name?.”  He hadn’t even seen “Roots” so I explained it to him:  LeVar Burton won’t say his slave name out loud so he gets whipped by Vic Morrow.  We can use his Ralph Lauren neck ties to hang on the hook in closet and maybe one of his canvas Eddie Bauer belts for the whip.

So he says: “So which one of us is LeVar Burton and who gets to be Vic Morrow?”

Me: “Ummm, well, I’m Vic Morrow, I can do the Scottish accent. (I rolled an r till I ran out of breath) You’re LeVar Burton.”

Starsky: “I don’t think so.  You should be Toby.”

Me: “HIS NAME IS KUNTA KINTE!  Oh, for Godsake, forget it!”

We never acted it out, of course, because it was my idea and he couldn’t stand not being in control. Always a top and never a bottom. Typical psychology student.  We broke up soon after.  It turned out he had another girlfriend all that time, who was going to a school out of town, a tiny redheaded girl who looked like a younger version of his mother.  He ended up marrying her. Analyze that.

Flash forward again, a year later, my Stanley Kubrick film class was showing “Spartacus” with Kirk Douglas. It was kind of boring and one of those films you can nap during and not really miss anything. Kirk Douglas is so over-the-top, always clenching his jaw with his cavernous chin dimple that a small kitten could perish in, but in one scene Spartacus is getting his ass whipped.  Familiar lady boner occurs and I perk up.  In the cage with Jean Simmons, he says, “I am not an animal!”  I realize then that it’s not a slave degradation fetish I have, it’s the stoic response to the torture that gets me hot and bothered.  I’m not a pervert after all!

By the way, if I did have a fetish Tumblr blog, it might be called “Starsky and Me” (I’m such a Hutch)…look how happy they are together! *sigh*