Why ‘The Addams Family’ Has The Healthiest And Kinkiest BDSM Relationship Ever
By
Michael Avery in
Amazing
On 9th December 2016
Where do we look to find examples of healthy relationships?
In our own lives, these may be sparse, although ideally we’d learn our earliest lessons of love, honesty, commitment, and devotion from our parents, grandparents, or other close family members. For many of us, however, divorce, death, or other complicated situations made this impossible.
That being the case, you may have turned to fiction, namely movies, TV, and literature, for examples of what it was like to be in love. Of course, this usually is no way to imagine our own love life at all, given the unrealistic expectations it can lay out for us.
Furthermore, precious few of these fictitious relationships transcend the realm of platonic love and explore their sexuality. Of course when they do open up this taboo subject, there’s often hell to pay from various critics across the board, especially those stressing how said book or show is decaying our morality.
They're Kinky and They're Kooky
As it turns out, there has been one pervading example of a not only healthy, but healthily raunchy couple in the front lines of American pop culture for the past several decades, and it's about time they got the respect they deserve.
Sex in Pop Culture
Americans are pretty prude.
While we write off other cultures, such as the French, Italian, or Spanish, as being too PDA-friendly or sexually explicit, the truth is that our Protestant history has left us eternally worried about the many taboos our ancestors have engrained in our society. To many, talk of sexamong the most natural and necessary of human actionscan make us faint (or very angry), although cruder talk of everything surrounding the deed, from dating and romance to pregnancy and abortion, is omnipresent on TV and in the news.
And though many of these taboos still persist (along with all of their repercussions), our society has lightened up quite a bit. Yet before it was even popular or accepted, The Addams Family was already pushing the boundaries of sexuality in American pop culture.
Satirizing the American Family
In 1938, Americans were first introduced to the Addams family, a macabre menagerie of grim and delightful characters invented by cartoonist Charles Addams for The New Yorker.
Based on the wealthy families and towering Victorian manses of his hometown of Westfield, New Jersey, The Addams Family were Addams's way to satire the typical American family: an inverse of our morals, rules, and roles embodied by the wealthy, detached, and morbid characters.
Though neighbors and visitors are often appalled by the Addams's way of life, the family is close-knit and kind, quirky and philanthropic. In contrast to the idea of "keeping up with the Joneses," the Addamses remain either oblivious or uninterested in the "normal" way of life. As far as Gomez and Morticia are concerned, they have everything: Including a passionate relationship.
Marriage and Kink
Even within the Adams Family universe, we see Gomez and Morticia contrasted with relationship tropes that we are all-too-familiar with, even from our own lives. The tired, weary, marriage-worn couples like Tully Alford (the Addams's lawyer) and his wife Margaret, who we meet in the Addams Family movies from the '90s.
Yet Gomez and Tish go a big step further than merely keeping the fire going in their marriage. In fact, they are an early (and healthy) example of BDSM, or a relationship entailing Bondage and Discipline/ Dominance and Submission/ Sadism and Masochism. A natural step from their dark and nonconformist ways, consensual BDSM is the very heart and soul of Gomez and Morticia's love for each other. In the 1960's TV show, Morticia even referred to the torture chamber as "the playroom" and in the 90's movies, when the villains have strapped Tish to the stretching rack, she clearly enjoys it. At another point, she says to her husband, "Don't torture yourself, Gomez. That's my job."
But there's something else that makes their normalized BDSM even better. Keep reading.
Consent and Role Reversal
Today, if Americans are asked to name an example of a BDSM couple from film or literature, many of them would most likely think of Christian and Anastasia from Fifty Shades of Grey. This couple, however, is inseparable from the polemics surrounding them, largely the criticism that they aren't a healthy couple at all, but rather an example of abuse and coercion disguised as kink.
Between the Addamses, however, the kink, bondage, passion, and light torture are not only clearly consensual but comfortably flipped between the two. Gomez and Morticia demonstrate more than just healthy BDSM, they are a switch couple as well, meaning that either one can be dominant or submissive in a given moment. (Though let's be honest, Morticia seems to have the power more often.)
Addams Family Values
Perhaps the most important thing about Gomez and Morticia's healthy sex life is that their kinks never get in the way of raising a happy family.
Though Wednesday, Pugsley, and even Pubert are seen engaging in dangerous and life-threatening behavior, we know at the end of the day that they will be okay and that their parents and family love them very much. It's simply the Addams's way. So what if they're not "normal"? As Morticia once said, "Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly."
If engaging in the occasional kink is an effective way to keep a marriage feeling new, fresh, and together, perhaps more Americans ought to be trying.
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