From Cleveland, a post-modern take on fetishism as role-play fantasy.
I've had a couple of run-ins with fetishistic fantasies.None is more memorable than the time I was at a party and bumped into an excitable couple who jiggled like a noisy box of paper clips. Uh, you see, they were dressed in metallic bikinis made out of paper clips....
"People associate fetish with black leather fashion," says Bryon Thomas, manager of the Grid. "But more and more, it's about role-playing and realizing a fantasy."
At 9 tonight, the club, 1437 St. Clair Ave., Cleveland, will host Fetish Playland. The soiree unleashes a wild mix of fetish fashion and freaky thrills -- like spinning and spanking booths, torture racks and foot-worship thrones. $15....
Just another wholesome night in Cleveland, I guess.
Is it a good thing that we see more and more of this kind of "fetish is just a harmless fantasy" thing, open to anyone who can cobble together a strange costume? Are we to believe that couple had a paper-clip fetish (perhaps they did...unlikely but...) - or are they dabbling in kink to look cool?
As somebody whose books are directed to people who are either in the closet or first coming out - or those who've been doing this for ages but need a deeper, richer understanding of kink - you might think I'd be excited to see masses of people seeming to embrace alternative sexuality.
Not entirely. For people like me, who've been active in the SM world for 20+ years, this so-called mainstreaming of SM/kink has been a mixed blessing. I'm not as disillusioned as some long-time players, who feel the influx of the trend-followers and day-trippers has destroyed and diluted the meaning of kink beyond all recognition. I'm happy to see more information out there, more playful and less ashamed attitudes towards sex, and more genuinely kinky people feeling empowered to be true to their sexual identities.
But I am not happy with what the popularization of SM (particularly its most noxious manifestation as on-line fantasy games that any geek can play) means for serious adults. For one, the quantity of players has undermined the quality of players - which, frankly, was never that great in the first place. The diminishing quality has driven serious long-timer players away from the public scene, creating a huge mentoring gap that now, more than ever, is crammed with wannabes.
The 21st Century version of "the Scene" is drowning in crap - from great steaming piles of pathological liars, con artists and leather-carpetbaggers, to staggering numbers of clueless fucks who think you can lift a scenario off a website and impose it on people in real life (leading to some of the more sensational news stories we've seen about people so lost in the SM fantasy they have no idea what true mutual consent means, much less what's legal).
It's sweet that people can go to a club dressed up in fetish wear and act out fantasy roles. It's healthy to be sexually experimental. I'm all for it. But the dumbing down of SM/fetish fantasies into a playland for the vanilla is a sandtrap for the seriously kinky adult. Between the Internet and the off-line trendiness, more and more people are getting lost in fantasies which relieve them of thinking too hard about things - like consequences.
One very small example: cuckoldry has become one of the most popular fetish fantasies on the Net. On the screen - and in many people's minds - it seems irresistibly hot. The drama of betrayal! The humiliation of feeling inadequate! The spectacle of your wife/gf having sex with a sexier man than you'll ever be! Oh yeah. But the very same men who go crazy for this fantasy would be emotionally devastated if these scenarios became their daily lives. It is, in sum, a fantasy which, if it were to become a central lifestyle, would generally lead a man to feel like a worthless piece of shit. Which is, of course, a profoundly erotic feeling for some submissives for short periods of time, i.e., the time leading up to orgasm. But what about the rest of the time?
Fact: Fantasies don't prepare you for real-life choices, struggles, or compromises. Fact: fantasy doesn't factor in risks or consequences. Fact: fantasy play doesnt lead to a mature understanding of sexual diversity or greater self-acceptance. More often than not, fantasists' keep their sexuality locked up in a nice safe Internet closet or behind the doors of a pro's dungeon.
I have been to trendy club events where people make a fuss over hopelessly shallow but good-looking diva types and shun unglamorous, earnestly sober players hoping for a real connection. I've been to way too many SM events where people who couldn't housebreak a poodle pass themselves off as Lord or Lady Extra-High and Super-Powerful, while equally fantasy-ridden numbnuts trail after them as if witnessing an oracle.
Here's another fact. You can you dress up like a sadomasochist but that doesn't mean you know what it is to be one.
If you become obsessed with fantasies, you don't learn more about integrating kink into your real life than you would from masturbating to a dirty magazine. If you mistake the fantasies that others spin as reality (for example, buying the pap a lot of prodommes pass off as reality on their sites), you are worse off than if you didn't know anything about kink in the first place because you are buying into a fake model of SM. Sex is not something we do or wear: it is who we are. Divorcing your sexual kicks from your real life is both psychologically dishonest and ultimately self-destructive.
The more fantasies stray from what is possible in reality and the less they factor in other human needs (from security to love to companionship and mutual respect), the less likely one is to form a functional relationship, and the more those who are serious about this stuff will feel isolated.
So while I am glad to know more people have more opportunities to experiment, the emphasis on SM and fetishism as a fantasy role-play instead of a sexual orientation makes me queasy. It makes me wonder if the over-feeding of SM fantasies to a passive and gullible audience is succeeding only in building bigger closets for us all.
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