Bob and Melissa lead monogamous lives together, but have a different definition of monogamy than many people might. They will do BDSM with another couple, but there will be no intercourse or sexual touching. Group play happens rarely, though, because they look for fellow BDSM couples the way you might look for compatible golf partners—you want a couple you get along with off the course. Melissa, being bisexual, sometimes likes having a woman join them for sex, which Bob doesn’t seem to mind, and which doesn’t count as not being monogamous either.
Most of Melissa’s friends know about her sexual life. When she worked for a previous defense contractor, she had security clearance in a government facility. “All had to be on the up-and-up, so I came out at work. Everyone wanted to be my friend and find out about it. A lot of people said, ‘I am so jealous of you. I wish I could do anything I wanted and not be afraid.’ Out of about sixty people, ten said that to me.”
Bob has been much more circumspect. Fetish Con is his first real outing in public and he feels “like a scared kid in a candy shop. It’s like such a big part of my life that has never been talked about, it’s been considered taboo.”
When I contact Melissa and Bob some months after the convention, they will sound even happier. “Really, we are so happy it’s ridiculous. It is quite disgusting.” Just one problem, though. Since they both work full time, they will look for a maid, but with the debt burden they already carry, they can’t pay cash. Instead, Melissa will interview men who want to clean house in return for being dominated. “I’ll have fun pointing out all his mistakes with the paddle!” Melissa will say. And Bob will approve because look, man, he wants a clean house and “if Melissa has to beat him, that’s okay.”
“Ladies, we are being far too nice to our men,” Chanta Rose scolds. Her accent, Australian by way of England, makes her sound appropriately authoritative in that British public-school way, and her modest floral-print dress, the way she has fixed her blond hair in a bun, reminds me of the teacher of the Junior League dance lessons my mother made me attend at the Knights of Columbus hall. The memory makes me shiver. I had a tough time in dance lessons. Being twelve, dressing up in my orange sport coat and a clip-on tie, and bowing at the waist with my left hand over my belly button to ask a twelve-year-old girl for a dance struck me as absurdly unnatural, like mixing peas with Hershey’s chocolate sauce. It just wasn’t done. I hoped this was not going to be mandatory in order to get girls.
I suspect some of the men in the meeting room of the Hyatt, where Chanta, who happens to be a friend of Madison Young’s, is teaching Bondage for the Male Submissive, can relate to the feeling. Their arms are being tied behind their heads by women using hemp rope and a very elaborate technique demonstrated on a male volunteer by Chanta from atop a wooden platform set up in the middle of the room. Most guys are laced up in an array of complicated knots, their elbows now pointing toward the ceiling, their wrists crossed, their palms somewhere near their scapulas.
Doubtful looks shoot up at Chanta as she exhorts the women, especially when she tells them this would be a great bondage position to start the day.
“Yeah,” one guy interrupts, “but I’ll be late for work!”
“Being late for work because you are tied up and being sucked off is not a bad thing,” Chanta barks impatiently.
Yes, well, there is that. He gives a little nod and tries to shrug his immobilized shoulders.
Others need no cheerleading. A man about forty is being tied up by a woman who has to be at least sixty. She is dressed in a one-shoulder black Lycra top and tight, stretchy pants. He seems eager. An elderly couple, each about seventy, he with a long white ponytail, she with giant hoop earrings and a beehive hairdo, are being downright studious. The other twenty or so couples are a mixed bag of ages and experience. Some are novices.
None of them, though, are meeting Chanta’s demanding standards. So she explains again why it is important to get it right. “You know when a guy is eating your pussy?” she begins, suddenly sounding not at all like my dancing-class teacher. “Well, his head can’t quite get the right angle.” The men and women splayed around the room nod in recognition of the problem. Yes, we see. Yes. “This is that clit-in-his-face position.”
The goal, she explains, is to create a weblike contraption of rope and forearm behind the head, forcing it up into the desired attitude. Some of the women adjust their ropes, mainly trying to make the bonds tighter, but Chanta is still dissatisfied. The women are not following directions with enough gusto. The fact that the men are not adolescent Romanian gymnasts may have something to do with the current troubles, but Chanta will brook no excuses.
She grabs her model and spins him around, pulling on an elbow. “Do you see? He can’t wiggle.” Sure enough, the elbow barely moves. On the other hand, the skin on his arms is beginning to plump like water balloons between the bands of rope. The women in the room, seeing this, are unable to call upon their inner hostage taker.
Chanta scans their faces, gives a subtle cluck, and steps off her stage. She roams from couple to couple. “He could get right out of this!” “No, no, no.” “Oh, dear. He’s not a baby, love. He’s a big boy. He can take it.” The women nod, like Boy Scouts learning the bowline who finally see the bunny’s route. A few release their knots, tug harder on the ropes, and retie, some achieving impressive results.
Chanta returns to her perch, spins her model around again, then crouches behind him. She begins reaching up under the inseam of his shorts. “Now,” she continues, “you can incorporate cock-and-ball torture into this.” (Hey! Maybe I’ll finally learn cock-and-ball torture!) Chanta stands up quickly, interrupting herself. “Oh, and that reminds me. If you”—she indicates the men—“are someone’s demonstration bitch, and you have a drippy cock, for God’s sake wipe it off. Especially if you’ve just come from the bathroom, wipe it!” This man isn’t naked as her eager volunteer models often are, this being the Hyatt and certain regulations against naked public cock-and-ball torture being in effect, but I gather this is something of a professional hazard for bondage instructors, something like dance teachers who remind twelve-year-old boys to dab their sweaty palms. A few of the guys laugh, but I am grateful for the tip, reckoning it just the sort of social wisdom like “Never walk in the line of another’s putt” or “Shirt cuffs should show half an inch” that might come in handy someday.
“Okay, so I am all for tying down the balls…”
This is not a class to teach you how to handcuff a lover or use old neckties to tie their ankles to the four-poster, or even Bond Dave’s scarf-tying seminar. A few of these guys are on the verge of a dislocation. Yet nobody is decked out in their fetish wear. Nobody looks like a lost cast member from Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I haven’t seen many of these couples around the convention. Most of them look like they read the Sunday paper events listings to each other over coffee this morning and figured this Bondage for the Male Submissive workshop sounded more fun than a flower show or a contract bridge lesson.
A young couple near me at the back of the room is being especially serious. She is petite and pretty in a tube-top dress of black-and-white paisley, and flip-flops that show off a new French-style pedicure. He is tall and handsome, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt that says “Professional Gaming League.” His hair is cut short, like the young professional I imagine he is. They wear wedding rings. I picture them driving a Volvo station wagon.
She is a good student, studying every knot, every twist and bend Chanta Rose demonstrates, and then duplicating them almost exactly on her husband. Such precision is her nature, she says.
Linda is twenty-seven and works as an investment banker for a big-name financial institution. Like her husband, Chris, who is thirty-one, she studied finance in college back in Tennessee where they both grew up. They have come to Chanta’s seminar after seeing a BDSM and fetish show at a nightclub. One of the models asked Linda if she would be a model for an upcoming event, something Linda did not pursue, but the show and the i
nvitation made them curious about Fetish Con. Bondage for the Male Submissive just happened to be on offer when they arrived. It’s the first time Chris has been tied up.
Neither of them dreamed about being tied as youngsters or considered any alternate meanings to old westerns. As far as they know, they have not harbored latent fetish drives. Nor have they ever attended a fetish convention. Coming to one wouldn’t surprise any of their friends, though. “Homosexuality, bisexuality, transsexuality—it’s all accepted and welcome,” Chris says. They do have friends they won’t tell about being here, the ones who lean fundamentalist, but not because they feel ashamed. They don’t want to make anybody uncomfortable.
Both were raised in churchgoing families. “I was a Bible beater,” Chris recalls, from Joe Beam’s old denomination. “Church of Christ. No music, no dancing, my Christian high school did not have a prom.” There was no sex education in his school or from his family except “fire and brimstone” about the evils of premarital sex. “I knew early on I did not identify with that personally. As time has gone on, you find a middle ground, what’s okay with you, with your relationship with God, and you incorporate that into your personal life. I think I have a personal relationship with God that is part of my life structure, but it would be nondenominational. I would go to any church to get a chance to worship the Lord.”
Religion and sex are not connected in Chris’s mind. But he does believe that “when we are intimate together, that is the highest celebration of my love and his word. If I did it with a rope tied around her wrist or a clutching embrace, what does it matter?” He and Linda, who happily had premarital sex, also use porn sometimes, of many different genres. It’s just another instrument, like rope.
Both say they are liberals who happened to vote Republican in 2004. They often feel torn between their liberal social leanings and conservative economic philosophy and wish they didn’t have to choose. Someday, they won’t, they believe, because they find people their age just aren’t concerned about the way other people have sex. They cite reasons I have heard before, like digital media and an omnipresent sexuality that serves up every possible variation. To be sure, they do have concerns about the sexual climate in the country, mainly the sexualization of children, especially young girls. “I hate seeing a third-grader looking like a twenty-five-year-old out at a club,” Linda says. But the sexual terrain they are navigating as newlyweds is vastly different from any generation that has come before, even the vaunted “free-love” generation.
“People our age and younger are not scared to explore many different parts of their sexuality,” Linda explains. “Being bisexual or homosexual is just much more widely accepted than even five years ago.”
Nothing is off-limits for them. “Everything is open for discussion,” he insists. “If there was just something she absolutely desired, I would probably try to overcome whatever personal issues I had to get there because it would be important that she feel fulfilled, and I think vice versa.”
The party on the final night of Fetish Con, Guilty Pleasures, is more manageable than the chaos at the Castle. The sound track is the same—fetish seems to have an official list of industrial and goth music—but Club Chambers is less nightclub and more “play space” as designed by Hieronymus Bosch. The entire second floor is given over to instruments of torture, and many people from the convention are using them.
When I arrive, Mia Voraz has her submissive, duct-tape man, strapped to a big steel X-shaped structure in the middle of the room. He’s out of his tape and stripped to a black jockstrap and black socks, a steel collar held fast with a padlock around his neck. Mia is hitting him with a hairbrush.
Wait. Now she is caning him like a sadistic schoolmaster, creating a cross-hatching of diagonal red stripes on his butt, his legs, his back. She works on him for about fifteen minutes, then releases him and orders him to pick up his pants and shoes and get dressed. He follows her dutifully as she walks away.
In one corner, an elderly man lies curved over an incline, his ass shining up through leather chaps. His wife, kitted out like a dominatrix French maid, her reading glasses perched at the end of her nose, is using a kitchen whisk to transmit electricity from a violet wand to his back, butt, and legs. Blue sparks fly out of the whisk as she rolls it over his body and he jerks up and down. Then she shocks the bald spot on the back of his head with the attentiveness of a grandmother knitting.
A woman lies tied up in a coffin on a small stage. A man, about six foot five, with a chiseled body is prancing around in his socks and a tiny white G-string, chatting up women, which seems to be working pretty well for him.
A professional flogger—there is such a thing—a thin man, with long black hair, his naked torso gleaming with sweat, his black eyeliner beginning to run, is making a show of twirling two cat-o’-nine-tails across the backs of young women who take turns in his iron cross. This is a show, really. It is performance and an audience is appreciated, because, like the theater, the object of fetish is to create a new world to escape into, a place better than reality.
But there is a determined self-consciousness about it all that feels forced. For three days I have been noticing a young woman, tall and thin with extraordinarily black hair, walking around the lobby bar of the Hyatt and at these parties. I have been noticing not because she is beautiful, but because she always has a dress or a top that reveals a big tattoo on the small of her back: “God Forgive Me,” in gothic print. Like the name of the party promoter, Jsin, it seems too precious. I spoke to the sales manager of the Hyatt yesterday and he said he liked having the fetish people there because they bought rooms in August in Tampa and they policed themselves and were better behaved than a lot of other so-called mainstream business organizations he has hosted. The Hyatt doesn’t care if she is into fetish. So she appeals to God.
Tonight, while we were waiting for the shuttle bus to take us here, about twenty of us had gathered outside the lobby door of the hotel facing the street. It was hot out and PVC doesn’t exactly breathe. So people sat wilting on a flower bed, griping about when the bus was coming or chatting desultorily in small groups. A carful of local young men drove by slowly, the occupants staring at us and then shouting, “Freaks! What a bunch of fuckin’ freaks!” To which everyone stood and whooped and hollered and shouted, “Yeah! We’re freaks! Betchur ass!” and they remained enlivened, standing outside the Hyatt hotel in downtown Tampa, their sin reaffirmed, until the bus arrived.
CHAPTER 8
Playing with Fire
I DRESS UP, BUT AT A SEX CLUB, CLOTHES DO NOT MAKE THE MAN
It is very important that I feel in control.
—Paradox, 2007
I want to beat the asinine grin off his face. He is lying there in her arms curled like an infant against a mother’s breast and all I can think of is wanting to slap him so goddamn hard he’ll know what real pain is. Get up! Stand up, you pathetic noodle! You giggling little schoolgirl. You mewling, murmuring, disgusting kitten.
I feel such an overwhelming contempt I am alarmed. This man has done nothing to me. I don’t even know him. He is in computers—that’s all I have been told. Maybe he’s the nicest guy in the world, but he is really pissing me off.
This is it? This is the end of my journey and I get this guy, a white-haired, bearded, sixty-something “computer guy” nuzzling into her lap as if he’s trying to return to the womb? This is what we’ve all been looking for? Mommy? Come on, you sonofabitch, tell me it’s more than that! Tell me we’re looking for heaven or hell or enlightenment or something to replace flat-screen TVs and McMansions. Tell me this huge burst of sex we’re living through is about something more than wanting to chuck it all for milk and cookies and a pat on the head.
Maybe it’s just my pants. They are punishingly tight. My testicles are aching yet again, screaming at me because they have been turned into a meatball panini by the PVC inseam. When I take these fucking pants off, I expect my boys to have become two-dimensional. I am also sucking in m
y gut because I am wearing a clinging muscle T-shirt with a skull on the front and I am too vain to show my body fat. Goddess Heather explained how to produce washboard abs, but I have not had a chance to implement her program. I’ll get right on that.
Not that anybody would notice or care. Nobody else here seems at all concerned about their own bodies. Over on the dance floor, a topless woman, about thirty-five, wearing a short, flippy pleated skirt, is swaying hypnotically to the music. Metal again. Several feet in front of me, three obese people, two men and a woman, are taking turns lying on a mattress as one partner or another works their nude bodies over with a violet wand. Two feet behind me, a mostly naked woman is lying across the lap of another woman who has made a fist of her right hand and is shoving it in and out of the naked woman’s vagina as if churning butter. Meanwhile, a tall, bald man in his fifties, wearing a sleeveless reptile-skin shirt and leather pants, is throwing jabs at the back of the mostly naked woman’s thighs—jab jab jab, Joe Frasier working the heavy bag—as the fist churns in and out.
Jab jab jab. In, out, in, out.
I arrived in Seattle several days ago to put myself in the hands of Allena Gabosch. I had asked Allena, the director of an organization called the Center for Sex Positive Culture, popularly known as the Wet Spot, to mentor me. I wanted to know what it felt like to be a member of a sex club where BDSM, fetish, swinging, pretty much the entire gamut of America’s sexual menu, played out. I thought becoming one with my inner perv, overcoming my intransigent vanilla persona, would allow me to reach a new depth of understanding.
Allena was a good choice. She is hopelessly funny and has a sense of humor about the scene and the people in it. Yet she is also a big, dominating, tattooed, tender, earth mother, with long, dark, stringy hair and a gapped-toothed smile and a lot of pounds she would like to shed because she thinks skydiving ought to be her next adventure. Finally, Allena has the advantage of having been around awhile. She has seen how much sex, and our attitudes about sex, have changed over the past decade. Mostly, she is encouraged, but she is no blind cheerleader.
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