I was in S&M relationships from my teenage years to somewhere in my naughty forties. Why did I go in for such strange antics? Damned if I know.
Is it because I wanted to be different? Because I didn’t want a calm, cosy, devoted relationship, like my parents had? Because when I thought of romantic and sexual love, I thought of volatility, and that seemed hard to reconcile with vanilla sex? Or did I just conform to the type that also marks out many male masochists – I was ‘powerful’ in my realm, excellent at my job, and was curious to find out what being powerless felt like? (This last one, in the face of what I know now about how many girls and women experience powerlessness throughout the world, makes me feel shame in a way that very few things do.) Did I actually enjoy being gagged, handcuffed, beaten and whipped? Well, I enjoyed it in retrospect, I suppose – ooo, imagine, I did that last night!
But looking back now, I feel baffled and amused. I’m pleased I grew out of it for three main reasons. The most trivial is vanity; there’s no doubt (unless one is a kinky gerontophile) that someone of, say, 32 will generally look a lot better naked than someone of 59, though the striking exceptions of, say, Sam Smith and Liz Hurley come to mind. As with all performative sex, you’d better be good-looking if you’re not to appear comical.
Another reason is that what was outrageous and cool when I was young became mainstream and naff; from Venus in Furs to furry handcuffs in the high street shop windows on Valentine’s Day. For one as contrarian as me, this was always going to be an issue. Then there’s another kind of naff, the kind that finds itself edgy; the dead hand and deaf ear of ‘queerness’ spoiling the fun, as it always does for we early-converters. It’s a long way from the forbidden, exquisite agony of the Velvet Underground to a gaggle of porky men dressed as ‘leather pups’ being petted by smirking policemen on an overcast day at Pride. Seeing YouTube footage of people being whipped in public at a Pride parade is about as sexy as having a dog urinate on one’s picnic – which, come to think of it, I would have found quite sexy when I was 17. But not now!
Who could blame me for no longer seeking out recreational sex-based humiliation, when it’s all around?
But it’s not just the naffness that made me give up recreational pain; it’s the nastiness. Though it might have been easy to work out my idea of horizontal fun by reading the dirty book I wrote in my twenties, Ambition – in which the heroine undergoes all kinds of exotic indignities, including having SOLD tattooed on her forehead – so far as I know no woman-killer ever tried the ‘Ambition Defence’ in the way many have tried the ‘Fifty Shades Defence’: ‘She was literally asking for it, Your Honour!’ Since the publication of the first EL James novel, sexual violence has become so much the norm that choking has even made it into a Harry Styles ditty. In the USA, one survey found that a third of female undergraduates between the ages of 18 and 24 said they had been choked the last time they had sex. You can’t help thinking that the mental health epidemic, which is most notable among liberal young women might have something to do with this grim state of sexual affairs.
Weirdos who find nothing more sexually pleasurable than harming women seem to be everywhere these days, watching it, planning it or doing it, from poor Holly Willoughby’s recent troubles to a woman of my acquaintance who struck up an on-line romance with a male Terf, only when she visited him in his country to face the shame-faced confession that he was impotent unless he could watch rape-pornography. It’s hardly the saucy bit of extreme ‘slap and tickle’ it was when I was a girl, shortly after the Boer war. And this doesn’t even take into consideration that – largely due to the online militants of trans-activism – we are living through the most violently misogynistic era of modern time, times when an online retailer as chi-chi as Etsy will offer T-shirts bearing the slogans FREE PUNCHES FOR TERFS.
Who could blame me for no longer seeking out recreational sex-based humiliation, when it’s all around? There’s no sense in being an ancient masochist, when you’re already suffering the wear-and-tear of a life well led, full of fun and games a-plenty. At 65, the only time I say ‘Ouch!’ these days is when I stand up too quickly – and after such a long time at the sharp end, that suits me just fine.
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