Vulva Va Voom and Company from Tampa Florida presented Vulva Va Voom’s Medical Masochism at the Orlando International Fringe Festival. I was particularly intrigued because Beth Marshal, who ran the Fringe for years was playing the part of one of the medical staff. Billed as a Bondage, Dominance, Submission, and control (BDSM) carnival game that meets a psychiatric sideshow.
This was an Alice in Wonderland vision of bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism. The American Psychiatric Association “depathologized” kinky sex – including cross-dressing, fetishism, and BDSM.
Vulva was the patient being treated. She was very frank about her disorder. In many ways this is a one woman show with the medical staff on the sidelines looking like the mad hatter and a field mouse. I always like learning what I can about a performer. The show led up to the final treatment which involved Vulva lying down on a bed of nails. The line between what was staged and real pain was blurred. A strange addition to this masochism was inviting the audience to take social media pictures of the public torture.
Was this theater? It was indeed like a freak sideshow where the audience wanted to witness pain. Though the costume implied burlesque and sexuality there wasn’t any on stage sexual overtures. I used to work on Times Square back in the 1980s where you could hear the sex acts through paper thin walls. Doom scrolling through social media forces us to witness endless violence and pain.
I admired the bravery of the performer but could not figure out if this was entertaining or disturbing. Was she acting or did she truly believe that torture was a treatment for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)? I wondered just how sharp the nails were on the bed she lay down on. If there was blood, I didn’t catch it in my sketch. I am still not sure if what I saw was entertainment or confession mixed with torture. The show was definitely VERY Fringe.