The Guide to Getting It On (98 page)

In almost every large city in the United States you will be able to find an established bondage club. These clubs often have extensive calendars of events, including talks, demonstrations and social gatherings. Generally speaking, you will be far safer in joining one of these established clubs than by experimenting on your own. You might also be amazed at how many educated, kind and helpful people you will meet at the established clubs.

Even if you aren’t into bondage, don’t get roped into thinking that mild-mannered people prefer being bottoms (slave or submissive role) and that aggressive types prefer being tops (master/dominator/dominatrix). There are plenty of business executives, lawyers, doctors, politicians and policemen who prefer being on the bottom. In fact, it’s a problem in the bondage community that a good top is hard to find. It’s also true that a number of people into BDSM enjoy alternating roles between top and bottom.

Lite or Heavy Bondage — Safety Considerations

No matter if you only use bondage once a year or are a full-fledged bondage brute, the S&M book by author Jay Wiseman titled
SM-101
, Greenery Press, makes the following suggestions:

• Anytime a body part that is tied up feels numb or goes to sleep, untie it immediately. And never tie anything around a partner’s neck.
  
• In anticipation of catastrophes like fires, earthquakes or an unexpected visit from your mom and dad, be sure that you have a flashlight and a pair of heavy scissors handy.
  SM-101
  recommends paramedic scissors, which can be found at medical-supply stores. They cut through almost anything except handcuffs. Keep the scissors and flashlights in a place that you can readily find in the dark. Ditto for the handcuff key if that’s what you are using. Better yet, tie the key to the handcuffs with a string.
  
• Never leave the person for long, and check them often. If any injuries were to occur, you would be legally and morally responsible.
  
• Always establish a safe word or gesture which means to stop. Some people use “red” for stop and “yellow” for easing up a little. No one who is seriously into dominance and submission uses “stop,” “don’t,” or “no more” for safe words, since any good bottom says them often but doesn’t mean them one little bit.
  

Breath Play or Erotic Asphyxiation—Do Not Do This

A reader recently reported that he puts his hands around his partner’s neck and squeezes tightly when they are having sex—at her request. She says it makes the experience feel more intense. He is now concerned because she wants him to use a leather belt from one of her coats to get a better grip.

This kind of sex is called breath play or erotic asphyxiation. It’s also referred to as scarfing or terminal sex. The side effects include death and brain damage. There are two groups of people who enjoy their sex this way. One group is made up of boys and young men who put plastic bags over their heads or tight ropes around their necks while they masturbate. They are known as baggers or gaspers.

Baggers are often white, straight and middle-class. They fit in well socially. They keep their sexual secrets well hidden. Up to a quarter of them wear women’s underwear while they masturbate on death’s doorstep.

It is thought that several boy baggers die each year in this country. Their deaths are often reported as suicides, but people who are trying to kill themselves don’t hang from door knobs and they don’t design safety releases into their death devices. Boy baggers fully intend to free themselves after squeezing out their blurry-eyed orgasms.

Horrified parents will often spruce up the death scene before the ambulance arrives. Instead of being reported as masturbation gone awry, the coroner thinks it’s a suicide and none of Johnny’s friends can understand why a kid who seemed so well-adjusted would want to off himself.

The other group of people who are into breath play are normal-appearing couples. They have no fear of the boy-bagger’s fate. They assume that the person who is applying the pressure is like a designated driver who can put the brakes on before it’s too late. “Not so!” says Jay Wiseman, the Tiger Woods of BDSM and author of
S/M 101:

“As a person with years of medical education and experience, I know of no way whatsoever that either suffocation or strangulation can be done in a way that does not intrinsically put the recipient at risk of cardiac arrest.... If the recipient does arrest, the probability of resuscitating them, even with optimal CPR, is distinctly small.”

You could be hooked up to state-of-the-art heart monitors and have a partner who is a board-certified cardiologist, breath play would still be Russian roulette in your birthday suit.

Another thing that has healthcare providers concerned is the risk of brain damage. Those like Charles Moser, a physician who is highly respected in the world of kink, worry about the long-term consequences of breath play. There’s also the matter of those pesky murder charges. “Honest, your Honor, she asked me to choke her when we were having sex.”

Fetishes: An Overview

Several years ago, a singer named Randy Newman wrote a song whose lyrics entreat his lover to take off all her clothes, except her hat. If Mr. Newman couldn’t enjoy sex unless the woman had a hat on, then we might say he had a hat fetish. The Glossary at the end of this book offers the following definition of fetish:

FETISH—1. Reliance on a prop, body part, scene or scenario in order to get off sexually. 2. The prop can either be fantasized or exist in actuality. 3. One philosopher has described “fetish” as being similar to when a hungry person sits down at a dinner table and feels full from fondling the napkin.

If both people in a relationship enjoy a particular fetish, then acting out the fetish will be a welcome event. But if only one partner is into the fetish, the other person might feel that she or he is not nearly as important as the fetish itself. For instance, if the woman in the above-mentioned song loves wearing her hat while otherwise naked, then she has found the perfect man. Otherwise, she may start to feel like a human hat rack.

Fetish Specifics

Fetishes come in many different forms; some include objects, others include actions that need to be repeated over and over.

For instance, some couples enjoy saying dirty things while having sex. But what if one partner can’t perform sexually without hearing the dirty words? This takes it beyond simple sex play and hints of a fetish, especially if the other partner feels stupid screeching things like, “Fuck me harder, fuck me harder, you big stud, Mama wants it all,” or degrading things like, “You miserable, worthless little turd.” Particularly troublesome are situations where the partner with the fetish needs to say degrading things to you, unless of course, you find something endearing about being called a smelly old cow, fat whore, or pencil-dicked imbecile.

Unbeatable & Untreatable

Men with certain conflicts might deal with them one way while women sometimes give them a different spin. For instance, more men seem to have foot fetishes than women, yet women seem to obsess about shoes more often and spend more money on them than men do. An obvious, time-honored solution is for men with foot fetishes to work in women’s shoe stores.

People with fetishes usually love them immensely and resist giving them up. Therapy is seldom effective in loosening the love for a fetish. As long as the partner is fine with the fetish and it causes no harm to others, there seems to be little reason for abandoning it. On the other hand, if it violates criminal statutes and the wishes of others (e.g., flashing or being a Peeping Tom), or it introduces a level of weirdness that a partner won’t tolerate, then the person with the fetish will face sad and serious consequences.

Normal Sexual Turn-on vs. a Fetish

Let’s say your boyfriend loves to feel your legs when you have pantyhose on. He’s a really sweet guy and you enjoy the extra attention, but your mother says it’s a fetish.

As long as it feels like he is more turned-on by you than the pantyhose, they are probably just a fun prop for him. He won’t go into sexual mourning if you swear off pantyhose for bobby sox. But what if your boyfriend can’t become aroused unless you are wearing pantyhose, or he gets off more and more by your pantyhose and you feel like a mannequin? Rather than being an erotic accessory that helps to spice things up, the pantyhose would be way too important. That’s when you’re talking a fetish.

Some people have fetishes for objects or materials like leather, rubber, latex, underwear, shoes, socks, boots, smelly feet, hair, breasts and even diapers. There are websites with adults wearing diapers, and not because they need to. Other people with fetishes have scenarios or fantasies that get them off, e.g., the guy who likes his partner to pee or crap on him. Or the fetish might be as hidden and subtle as the kind of haircut his partner has. He suddenly goes bonkers if she changes it. (Ever notice how some guys date or marry only women who are the spitting image of each other? Is it the woman he loves, or a certain look that she has?)

People with fetishes get comfort from the fetish that they can’t get from human beings. The fetish becomes the missing piece that completes their sexual circuit. The fetish gets turned into a sexual partner, an unhuman one who isn’t demanding or humiliating. (It’s far easier to control a pair of pantyhose than to control the woman who is wearing them!) The fetish provides an exciting sense of relief.

One problem with having a serious fetish is the loneliness that can sometimes be a part of it. No matter how many times you fondle them, a pair of rubber panties or a woman’s feet can go only so far in providing the closeness or friendship that many of us value in a sexual partner. In fact, some people refer to the fetish as a compromise between the fear of human closeness and the need for it.

Crossdressing

Some women occasionally dress up like men, to the point of wearing a fake penis. This is a form of accessorizing known as “packing.” One woman reports that if she’s been packing for an extended amount of time she even stops having her period—without taking a single male hormone. Once she is through packing and the fingernail polish goes back on, her periods become regular again. However, crossdressers are mostly men. Crossdressing is the way that men who have an inner woman allow her out to play.

Crossdressing could have been included in the chapter on gender-bending or transsexuals, but transsexuals often don’t consider crossdressers to be part of their tribe. It could have been placed in the same-sex chapter, but most men who crossdress identify as straight. It only belongs in the kink chapter as long as the crossdresser wears women’s clothes as a fetish, like men who can only get hard when wearing women’s panties. But for a lot of cross-dressors, gender identification is more the issue than fetish or kink.

This section was placed here because none of the other parts of this book felt it belonged, which is the dilemma that most crossdressers face. Their dilemma is described by Amy Bloom in her book,
Normal–Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude:

“Heterosexual crossdressers bother almost everyone. Gay people regard them with disdain or affectionate incomprehension, something warmer than tolerance, but not much. Transsexuals regard them as men ‘settling’ for crossdressing because they don’t have the courage to act on their transsexual longing, or else as closeted gay men so homophobic that they prefer wearing a dress to facing their desire for another man. Other straight men tend to find them funny or sad, and some find them enraging.....”