Speaking of class, it should be added that Bettie Page was paid to play the role of "Bondage/S&M Queen of America." So, for her it was basically wage labor, not her pastime, unlike in the case of Sade, Sacher-Masoch, or the character in The Story of O. Page eventually quit modelling and (re)embraced evangelical Christianity.
Capitalism can, and to a certain limited extent has, democratized what was probably once only a ruling-class fantasy, so that working-class men and women -- though probably predominantly of better-off and/or better-educated strata -- can embrace it. If a fantasy of aristocracy remains an important element in working-class BDSM fans' imagination, that is because an image of aristocratic life can represent a fantasy of life beyond not only exchange value but also use value.
That said, to enjoy BDSM fantasy and practice, your life has to be free from a chance of your fantasy -- e.g., getting flogged without your consent -- becoming reality. If many Black folks, like Charles, tend to have much more trouble embracing such a fantasy than white folks, that is probably because getting flogged was a part of the relatively recent and politically remembered history of Blacks. White indentured servants, sailors*, etc. too, could and did get flogged, but white workers, unlike Black workers, by and large do not have popular memory about their own history.
* Flogging plays an important function of raising a question about free labor and economic servitude, republican freedom and political bondage, in Herman Melville's fiction, for instance in Billy Budd:
<blockquote>Giving no cause of offence to anybody, he [Billy Budd] was always alert at a call. So in the merchant service it had been with him. But now such a punctiliousness in duty was shown that his topmates would sometimes good-naturedly laugh at him for it. This heightened alacrity had its cause, namely, the impression made upon him by the first formal gangway-punishment he had ever witnessed, which befell the day following his impressment. It had been incurred by a little fellow, young, a novice, an afterguardsman absent from his assigned post when the ship was being put about; a dereliction resulting in a rather serious hitch to that manoeuvre, one demanding instantaneous promptitude in letting go and making fast. When Billy saw the culprit's naked back under the scourge gridironed with red welts, and worse; when he marked the dire expression on the liberated man's face as with his woolen shirt flung over him by the executioner he rushed forward from the spot to bury himself in the crowd, Billy was horrified. He resolved that never through remissness would he make himself liable to such a visitation or do or omit aught that might merit even verbal reproof.</blockquote>
The flogging in question is practiced on a British man-o-war fighting against revolutionary France -- the symbol of republican freedom -- in the aftermath of the Nore and Spithead mutinies. The story prompts the reader to consider: is America like revolutionary France or counter-revolutionary England? -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>