America Unzipped

by Brian Alexander

  Back in the bar I meet a fellow named Bruce, who happens to be from Ohio, also not far from where I grew up, and so we laugh about all the Buckeyes in the Porn Palace. Bruce was “in computers,” which is what computer guys say when they instinctively know you are incapable of understanding what it is they really do. I ask him what, exactly, he does, and he explains it, but of course I am incapable of understanding anything. This is partly because the computer terms are so much gibberish to me and partly because Bruce appears to have swallowed a dozen Ritalin. His eyes are bugging. The mass of brown curly hair on his head has turned into nervous little springs mounted on his skull and he speaks without punctuation. But I gather that when Bruce was in college back in Ohio he invented some sort of computer program, and then ended up working at Apple and making fistfuls of money when twenty-year-olds could still show up in Silicon Valley and make fistfuls of money, but blew it all on good drugs and hookers and professional dominatrices in Europe and Asia, but it was worth it, man, you know? Because you got to live, man, and you don’t want to wait to do that stuff until you’re old, and now he works here at Kink and really likes it because there is so much state-of-the-art gear and he can’t seem to stop talking like this and staring wide-eyed and unblinking and grinning at me as he describes his debauched years that I’ve stopped understanding anything he’s saying, except that BDSM is like a higher existence, you know? Practically spiritual, but it runs up your credit card debt and you gotta pay that off so you need to get a job.

  I managed to offend some of the queer employees earlier in the day when I suggested that labels on sex seemed a little old-fashioned, that I didn’t care if somebody was queer or gay, or bi, or straight, and that as I traveled around the country I didn’t find many people who cared much either. I said something like, Gee, seems to me you sort of put yourself in a ghetto by waving the queer flag and not just living your life however you want to live it. This was taken as a signal to lecture me on the oppression they were suffering right now—not thirty years ago, or twenty years ago, or ten, but right now. In San Francisco? I said. Are you kidding me? How oppressed can a queer in San Francisco be? But I had underestimated how important it is to be oppressed, and questioned their right to feel oppressed, and they got mad at me.

  Now a few of them are eyeing me from the bar, so I move to a big red couch and sit down, trying to disappear. A pretty woman with coal black hair, about thirty, wearing a red corset and diaphanous white blouse and black pants, sits next to me. Does she work here? No. Her name is Domina Selina Raven. She wants to know who I am, why I’m here.

  “I’m hanging out with Madison Young for a couple of days.”

  “Oh, Madison. She’s one of the smart ones. She has a good head on her shoulders about this business.”

  Selina’s a good judge. She’s a professional dominatrix who has taken over a dungeon formerly run by an older pro-dom who is semiretired—seen people come and go, you might say.

  I ask how one becomes a pro-dom, how one goes about becoming semiretired. Is there a 401(k)? And just how does one find oneself on such a career path? She laughs and says, “I went to Catholic school,” as if that explains it all in a simple declarative sentence.

  In fact, she graduated from the same Catholic high school in California where I once briefly taught remedial English, the same Catholic high school golfer Phil Mickelson and screenwriter and director Cameron Crowe attended, though I suspect the school doesn’t brag much about Domina Selina Raven. “My Catholic upbringing instilled the following concepts in my mind: pain is educational, the end result of pain and suffering is redemption, and it is possible to achieve a state of spiritual enlightenment through mortification of the flesh.”

  After high school, she attended Mills College, the highly regarded women’s liberal arts school near Oakland. She’s been going through a rough time lately, partly because she recently broke up with a woman after having been with her for a year. “But then I realized I just really like dick.”

  “There seems to be a lot of that going around,” I say.

  Selina asks if I have been to the roof yet; there’s another bar up there and a hot tub. I haven’t, so we climb the stairs and, yes, there is another bar on the roof and a hot tub steaming, and white fluffy towels at the ready, but nobody is using the towels or the tub because of the wind and rain. Donna is sitting at the bar, necking with a stocky young woman—or transfolk—dressed in a suit and a fedora that make her look like a Sam Spade impersonator. She has created sideburns by arranging strands of her hair and pasting them to her temples.

  Two guys spark off some dope and use a Coke can as a pipe.

  “How did you like your visit here?” Raven asks.

  Others have asked me this same question all day. I’m not sure what they were expecting, but I sensed disappointment when I used words like fascinating or interesting, noncommittal words meant to get me out of the conversation. I think they want to hear that I was appalled, shocked, horrified, outraged, turned on.

  But I wasn’t. I was bored. I sat behind the bright lights, stayed out of Chuck’s way, and was bored, bored, bored. I was surprised at being bored, because you wouldn’t think a guy would be bored watching a cute girl get tied up by another cute girl and then be hit with a cattle prod and fucked by a giant dildo, and spit on and licked and electrocuted, would you? I mean, something in that mix ought to have stimulated some reaction in me, no? But I got nothing. My sensitivities were not shattered, my libido was not plucked, my moral indignation remained happily asleep.

  I was bored the way I am bored by monster truck rallies, big wave tow-in surfing, Wal-Mart, glazed Krispy Kremes with added sugar, the giant animated robot warriors and fireworks and blasting music of the overture to Monday Night Football, car chases on the news, Internet bloggers, violence, Hillary Clinton and Britney Spears and Paris Hilton and Dick Cheney and 50 Cent, bling and cribs, the Ford Expedition, extreme soft drinks, liberal piety, conservative insanity, and twenty-eight-ounce sirloins at an all-you-can-eat buffet.

  But the people at Kink are genuinely nice. I like them, even the queers. I mean, though I unintentionally offended them, they didn’t throw me to the ground and kick me with Doc Martens or anything. And everyone did try so hard at shock I did not have the heart to deflate them.

  Now, though, standing on the roof talking with a weary-sounding Selina Raven, I say, “Sometimes I think we’re all just incredibly bored.”

  “Yes,” she says with a rueful smile. “Hell yes, we’re bored.”

  As I walk out the door, I see Chuck and I grab his hand and thank him for letting me sit in.

  “Hope I wasn’t in the way.”

  “No, man, it was fine.” He smiles the way the only kink-free straight man in the room could smile, and says, “Some crazy shit around here, huh?”

  “Yep. Pretty crazy.”

  The next morning I take the BART train over to Oakland to watch James and Madison create some content for her website. When I arrive at James’s virtually empty loft atop a commercial building near the Oakland Tribune, he is prepping his cameras. Tina has not yet become Madison.

  James used to run his own website, Nawshibari.com, but he gets health insurance and something close to $100,000 working for Kink. He’s forty-one years old now, and health insurance and six figures mean a lot more than they did when he was knocking around as a carpenter back east or up in Washington State experimenting with fetish photography and learning shibari rigging.

  Since his cameras are all digital he can shoot as many images as he wants and toss out most of them without sacrificing any dough. So he and Madison improvise. She only needs a few good shots for a decent website update to keep the paying customers happy for another week.

  Compared with yesterday, these are glamour photos. She wears makeup and lip gloss and high heels. She takes her panties off and poses in a pink satin camisole with her hands against a wall, sometimes taking suggestions from James but more often directing him.

  Jam
es pauses to put some music on a CD player. There are no chairs, so Madison, waiting, crouches down on her heels, her elbows on her knees, to think. She is wearing her camisole and her high heels, and the silver ring in her labia dangles a few inches above the floor. I suspect, for just a moment, this is a pose for my benefit because to me this is sexier than anything I saw yesterday. Then I tell myself, No, Madison Young is just used to being naked in front of people, so stop being so vanilla. But James keeps calling her Tina, and then catching himself and saying Madison, as if I’m not supposed to know Tina Butcher, and so I wonder if I am an art project, if Tina Butcher is using Madison Young to reinforce and then destroy my socially constructed view of women and sex. Either way, thinking about it has made it pretty unsexy.

  She and James decide they need a video clip for her site and it ought to be a suspension. Since Madison is a little sore from yesterday, nothing too fancy. James ties her up and suspends her from the hooks in his ceiling and pulls her off the ground and takes the video of her squirming and moaning. The CD playing in the background is from a trip-hop band, Portishead. The girl singer whispers, “Nobody loves me it’s true…Not like you do.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Apple Pie Days, Latex Nights

  I LEARN THE ROPES AT A FETISH CONVENTION

  If he doesn’t return to consciousness within five minutes or so, call 911.

  —The Seductive Art of Japanese Rope Bondage,

  by Mistress Midori, 2002

  I have been here for exactly ten minutes and already a woman I do not know has grabbed my crotch and licked my ear; another woman in a 1940s-style pinup dress—all polka dots and bosoms—has pressed her chest against my arm and demanded I buy her a glass of wine; an elderly woman wearing an evening gown, pumps, panty hose, heavy pancake makeup, rouge, and an ankle bracelet casts flirty glances at me and I’m pretty sure she is a man; and right now there is a guy wearing a rubber hood over his head, crawling on all fours licking the black steel-toed boots of a woman in a mesh dress who is leading him around by a chain attached to a collar around his neck.

  And this is just the meet-and-greet.

  Seriously, my balls hurt. All I did was ask a question. A woman was handing out the paper title sheet for a DVD. She gave one to me. It said, “Cock and Ball Torture.” A how-to, I gathered. I got the gist; the words cock-and-ball torture are self-explanatory. But never having had my cock or my balls tortured (unless you count riding a Sting-Ray bike with a banana seat), I did not know how one went about it, so I said, “What does cock-and-ball torture mean?” admittedly an imprecise question, which apparently constituted an invitation to grab my treasures and squeeze with the force of an angry NFL lineman. While I was gasping for air, she leaned into me and licked my ear.

  I staggered to the bar so I could lean against it and buy a drink to numb the ache. A forty-three-year-old redhead in a polka-dot dress named Rachel Steele sidled up to me and introduced herself as a MILF. She wasn’t always a professional online MILF; she used to work for Wal-Mart. But posing for naked pictures for her own site, or doing bondage and fetish work for others, beats standing around on your feet all day, and if I was a gentleman we would not have talked this long already without my offering to buy her a plastic cup of wine. Judging from her red-stained teeth and the way she seemed to struggle to focus her eyes, she didn’t need another cup of wine. Then she shoved her boobs into my shoulder and said I was handsome.

  “Oh, come on!” I said. “If you really want me to buy you a wine, okay, but don’t bullshit me.”

  She laughed and winked, and when the bartender handed her a new plastic cup full of red wine, she almost put it down my shirt. “Thanks,” she said, before slipping me her business card and hobbling away.

  So now here I am, still clinging to the bar, my balls throbbing, watching women in rubber dresses and men in capes and the guy on all fours crawling back and forth. My first fetish convention is off to an interesting start.

  I have come to Fetish Con in Tampa, Florida, an event that attracts hundreds of attendees and scores of exhibitors of fetish-related products to the downtown Hyatt, because some readers have written things like this, from a fellow in Chicago: “I have an odd fetish, and want to know if it’s something to be concerned about. As an adult I like wearing diapers and babyish things. I guess I would consider myself more of an Adult Baby. Is this or any fetish dangerous to have? Thanks.”

  Exactly what fetish is gets very complicated. Psychiatrists, and especially Freudian psychoanalysts, use it to indicate a paraphilia. (If you can masturbate only with a woman’s shoe, you’ve got a paraphilia.) But these days fetish is an umbrella that includes BDSM and pretty much anything else kinky.

  I think fetish has become part of our conversation thanks to the work and passions of people like Madison and the folks at Kink.com and other Internet porn sites. They push the edges further away and the void between the edge and the middle fills with the constant churn of pop culture, bringing shibari to Vogue and fetish to TV. My adult baby wrote to me after CSI, then the most popular show on network television, ran an episode about a murdered tycoon who was also an adult baby fetishist. So I have come to Tampa to see if all this “content” isn’t pushing mainstream sex beyond toys and porn and AdultFriendFinder hookups, if mainstream America is wrapping its arms around fetish in real life.

  So far so good.

  Once I’ve caught my breath, I roam around the meet-and-greet to meet and greet, being careful to say nothing that could endanger my genitals. Eventually I find Vesta, one of the event’s organizers. She is dressed in purple tights with a face mask and a cape, a short, pudgy, blond superhero. When she is not a superhero, she works as a nurse with a military affiliation and lives with her husband, a retired military man. When I introduce myself, she hugs me warmly but I cringe—a little posttraumatic stress—until I’m sure she’s just being friendly.

  Vesta and her friend Genesis Lynn have been running Fetish Con since 2001, making it part of a circuit of similar events with names like Thunder in the Mountains (in Denver) and Beat Me in St. Louis that have arisen as bondage, fetish, and S&M have grown in popularity. Fetish balls (think Cinderella in rubber) have been popular for some time, especially in Europe, but they are typically one-night party events. Fetish Con and its brethren offer educational seminars, parties, fashion shows, shopping, and networking. (I am hoping that tomorrow I will learn about “mouth stuffing” with Bond Dave, a master scarf bondage expert.)

  The meet-and-greet is going on in space that has been cordoned off from the rest of the hotel, but some of the fetish conventioneers have gone down to the lobby bar and are mingling with guys in jackets and women in slacks, some of whom are attending a legal conference. The lawyers are casting sidelong glances at the tight corsets and Morticia Addams dresses of the fetish women, but I can’t tell if the looks show fear, humor, disgust, or admiring curiosity. All the above, I think.

  I order a beer, and a woman wearing shorts and a T-shirt makes way for me at the bar. I ask her what she thinks of these fetish people. But she is part of the fetish group. Her name is Sheridan Nicoll, she says, and then quickly adds that this is the name she uses for modeling purposes. Her boyfriend, the marine who just left for Iraq, knows her by another name.

  Sheridan has moved to Tampa recently from Cleveland. I have met many Buckeyes on this journey, and I have been astounded by the number of Catholics I have encountered, so I take a wild swing at the ball and say, “I grew up in Ohio. You aren’t Catholic by any chance?”

  “My family is very Catholic. I went to Catholic school.”

  Sheridan introduces me to another woman, also dressed in a plain vanilla wrapper, who identifies herself as Paige Turner. (Cute noms de fetish are common, I learn.) Paige, forty-six, is something of a mother hen to local fetish models, and when I explain what I’m doing at Fetish Con, Paige enthusiastically welcomes me to the fold and promises to provide whatever guidance I might need. She led a vanilla life herself for a long time,
she says, but while working in a boat factory in Connecticut, she turned kinky.

  Unlike Sheridan, who isn’t really a fetishist but is happy to play one for money while she studies criminal justice, Paige would do it for free. Not unlike Susan back in Maryland, Paige loves the idea of being forty-six and having men get erections at the sight of her pictures. Most often she does straight bondage, getting tied up in cute costumes, for example, but she has also made a specialty of “forced orgasm,” a bondage practice in which a woman has a powerful vibrator like the Hitachi applied to her clitoris, as Donna did to Madison. The difference, however, is that the “top,” the person in control, doesn’t release the vibrator after the “bottom” has an orgasm. The machine just keeps buzzing away and the bottom comes again and again in a mixture of agony and ecstasy.

  “I should be doing a forced orgasm while you’re here,” Paige tells me. “Come and watch.” Then she introduces me to her husband, Jerry, known in local fetish circles as “the Bad Man.” Jerry won’t be the one to give her a forced orgasm; that would be another guy. Paige’s son is here, too, with his girlfriend. Fetish is a family affair.

  Other than possibly losing my ability to have children, the night has gone well, I think. I had been concerned that I was so vanilla, I might be an unwelcome presence. Instead, people seem eager to help and to explain. I hear over and over again how much misunderstanding exists about fetish and about BDSM. Most attendees think it is long past time to shed the scary, freaky image those of us outside the fetish world have of those inside it. When Paige talks about it, she can sound like a woman talking up a small-town bowling league, just a bunch of people with a common interest getting together for good clean fun, a little knot-tying, and some dress-up.

  The six-foot pink bunny refuses to speak because rabbits don’t talk. But I persist with yes/no questions until he cocks his big bunny head to one side and heaves an exaggerated sigh and uses pantomime to tell me that he works as a bartender, lives in Tallahassee, bought his bunny suit on eBay, has a girlfriend, and is a male somewhere between the ages of thirty and fifty. Oh, and being a furry is his first real fetish. He has dabbled in fetish—he made a “so-so” gesture with his paw—but being a furry is his first immersion. I won’t swear to any of this because I am not fluent in rabbit sign language, but I think I’m close.