Basic Trope: People into bondage are portrayed as philosophical/intellectual.
- Straight: Mistress Alice, a Dominatrix, is brilliant and philosophical. Bob is a Cute Bookworm and is submissive.
- Love-Slave Alice is highly intelligent.
- Exaggerated: Mistress Alice isn't an ordinary dominatrix, but also an Omnidisciplinary Scientist with an Improbably High I.Q. (possibly the highest among human race). And she uses her technological expertise (almost exclusively) to create mind-boggling BDSM machines!
- Downplayed: Alice's sex life is suggested to involve a bit of light bondage, and she's college-educated and fairly bookish. She's neither a dungeon mistress nor a PhD, though.
- Justified:
- She became a dominatrix to put herself through law school.
- Mistress Alice likes the psychology behind it all.
- Mistress Alice went to a highly liberal Strawman U that exposed her to both deep philosophical concepts and kinky sex.
- After a long day at the office, Alice finds relief in taking her frustrations out on Bob, or in him ordering her around.
- Inverted:
- Mistress Alice is The Ditz.
- Alice is intelligent and entirely vanilla.
- Subverted: Alice becomes a Dominatrix to put herself through law school, but discovers that she isn't into it, and quits the job.
- Double Subverted: …because she wants to Dom for love, not money.
- Parodied: All the high IQ society talks about is bondage.
- Zig Zagged: Alice likes BSDM. She is noted as an amazing computer tech. But she then fumbles with a computer. Actually, the personal settings were odd. Not that it helped when they got changed. But that's because the data she needs is in a random place, so it just looked like Alice was stumbling around.
- Averted:
- Casual Kink or Bondage Is Bad
- Alice is not into bondage.
- Alice is into bondage and isn't particularly intelligent.
- Enforced:
- "Our Evil Genius isn't quite scary enough." "Make her into bondage. That'll freak people out!"
- "Alice is a great Ms. Fanservice, but doesn't have enough personality outside of liking bondage. People might complain." "Well, maybe she's the smart one?"
- Lampshaded: "Do you keep the bullwhip behind the PhD?"
- Invoked: "We need somebody who is smart but also has a sexual notability."
- Exploited: The villain uses BSDM in order to get the smart one to work for them by displaying an apparent comfort to them.
- Defied: Alice is smart, but the only reason she has the mask is to scare people, she really dislikes unnecessary pain.
- Discussed: "So you're into some pretty kinky stuff, then? Why is it always the smart ones?"
"That's actually the subject of my thesis!" - Conversed: "How come kinky characters are always either evil or these total ivory-tower intellectual types?"
- Deconstructed: Because of her intelligence and bondage fetish, Mistress Alice has trouble finding friends or romantic partners, and feels doubly isolated.
- Reconstructed: In her desperation, she puts aside her not-dating-coworkers rule. She finds that several of her coworkers at the lab are also into BDSM, because they're as smart as her.
- Implied:
- Alice is shown to be very smart. At one point, someone finds handcuffs in her closet.
- Alice is a dominatrix, and little attention is paid to her intelligence. However, when one of her lovers quotes Nietzsche, she gets the reference.
*whip crack* Back to Brains and Bondage.
