America Unzipped

by Brian Alexander

  As Dave shoots, and ties new knots, and shoots again, and poses Sheridan in new ways, he becomes increasingly eager and even more solicitous of her. “Everything okay?” “Does that hurt?” “How are you?” Models are understandably cautious about going to an amateur photographer’s hotel room or home. They rely mainly on word of mouth from other girls, and the mere rumor that a photographer has acted inappropriately will get him blackballed. Dave would behave like a gentleman anyway, but he makes a show of it because it doesn’t hurt to be thought of as sweet and unthreatening.

  “Are you warm?”

  “I’m hot, actually,” she says, and I’m grateful to her because I’m sweating and all I’m doing is sitting in a chair and talking. But Dave hasn’t noticed at all.

  He turns up the air-conditioning and says, “What do you say to a topless shoot? Is that all right?”

  “If Brian’s all right with it, I’m all right with it,” she answers. Me? Why do I count? This is the first time in my life a woman has asked if I would mind if she took off her top.

  “Do you expect me to be offended?” I ask, laughing, which makes Sheridan laugh, and Dave takes the opportunity to snap off a half-dozen photos. He likes happy faces on tied-up women.

  “I was being polite. I don’t want to take my top off in front of anybody who is going to be offended.” I assure Sheridan that I can take it.

  Dave is unprepared for the quick assent. “I guess I better figure out what I am going to do.” Dave is getting a little overeager, rushed, jittery.

  But Sheridan is helpfully making suggestions. “How about taping my ankles? You can use the chair here. You can tie my arms to the chair and feet together,” she says, demonstrating. She puts her hands on the bottom of her T-shirt and starts removing it.

  “Do you want me to turn my back?” Dave asks, carrying his punctiliousness too far even for Sheridan.

  She sighs. “Oh, come on.” Sheridan pulls off her shirt.

  Dave almost stops trying to direct her. He snaps away as if at any moment Sheridan will evaporate. He begins sweating again, leaping to stand on the bed one moment, straddling the space between a chair and the room’s desk the next. Sheridan runs on automatic, mostly, delivering smoldering looks, smiling, laughing, pretending to strain against the ropes.

  Dave takes a few shots of her butt. Her shorts have gone wedgie and Dave zeros in to capture the rope, her cheeks, a hint of labia.

  In her book, Ann says, “It’s hard enough to resist temptation without feeling like you are the only person on earth being asked to engage in the Herculean task of not committing a mortal sin.” Dave does not think this is a sin, though, or if he does, the sin only makes it more fun. He may love Ann Coulter, but when it comes to sex he doesn’t obey her any more than the Southern Baptists back in Missouri were cowed by the diktats of preachers.

  When it’s all over, Dave releases Sheridan from the final tie, and while she changes clothes in his bathroom, he cleans up the used ball gag, the ropes, the cloth strip he used on her mouth. Sheridan returns. Dave thanks her profusely and hands her a hundred dollars in cash. He’ll probably send her some of the images, too, so she can forward them on to the boys in Iraq. She has developed a fan following among the guys in her boyfriend’s outfit.

  Dave tries to say good-bye by giving Sheridan a hug, but he makes such an uncertain, tentative move, she is not sure what he’s doing and so she reaches out her hand to shake his, which he assumes means no hug for him, and it all winds up being a little awkward.

  Dave Gibson has been naughty. Tonight, in Ann’s book, he’ll read, “Character is developed out of a lifetime of choices. Almost every decision you make, however small, will be a step closer to God or a step closer to the devil.” But though his mind might belong to Ann Coulter, his heart belongs to Miss Behaving.

  I am sitting in the back of a shuttle bus as it drives through Tampa on its way to nearby Ybor City and a nightclub called the Castle. Carl, a lawyer for a social services agency in a Florida county, and his new girlfriend, a young nurse (maybe Michael was right—I seem to be meeting a lot of nurses), are sandwiched next to me. Paige Turner assured me that I would pass if I wore black to the Vamps and Vixens Ball, so I’m wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt, not very fetishy, but I’ve got Carl beat. He looks…actually, he looks like a lawyer, a preppy lawyer. His girlfriend is wearing a black flared, pleated dress made out of PVC cut low across her chest and heavy black eyeliner and black boots. Everyone else on this fetish troop carrier is geared up in some version of PVC and leather and rubber. We are all packed so tightly that when somebody rubs against another passenger, you can hear the PVC squeak.

  We ride for a few minutes in silence—Carl and the nurse and me. Finally, I say to Carl, “You don’t look like you belong.”

  He grins. Tension ebbs from his face. “This is my first fetish event. This is my girlfriend,” he says, introducing us, “and we haven’t been dating very long. She wanted me to see what it’s like.”

  “And?”

  “It’s interesting.”

  Carl’s girlfriend seems a little disappointed by the word. She brought him to Tampa so he could understand something that has become part of her life in hopes of a conversion. Carl doesn’t oppose anything he has seen so far; he kind of admires the fetishists’ freedom to go a little nuts, but he makes it clear that for him to embrace his inner fetishist will require a profound mental adjustment.

  When the bus pulls up to the Castle, there is a line around the block waiting to get in the front door. Most everybody seems to be under thirty and they are decked out in gothy, fetishy costumes, scores of them, a tribe standing there with varying levels of patience.

  As Fetish Con attendees, we have been granted special access to the Castle, so we climb a set of wooden stairs and enter through a back door. Industrial metal music blasts over a sound system. Trent Reznor screams, “I wanna fuck you like an animal!” Colored spotlights bounce around the cavernous dance floor, which is so jammed with people dancing isn’t even possible. Giant flat TV screens above the bar are playing scenes of old black-and-white movies by Irving Klaw. Bettie Page is up there in her underwear. Over in a corner a body painter named Pashur has set up a mini-studio and is quickly painting topless girls and their faces. One girl, her torso elaborately painted by Pashur, is dancing on a platform behind him, doing a trancelike sway. A man sits beneath her, his hands cuffed behind his back, a collar and leash around his neck, an American flag captioned “9/11 Let’s Roll” tattooed on his shoulder.

  “There is a bumper crop of creative newcomers,” the party’s promoter, Jsin, had told me earlier. “The younger kids, the next generation, are open people. They take all this for granted. It is nothing for them to walk around in bondage harnesses.” Here was Jsin’s proof, a hundred or so kids—mainly kids—ready to party.

  Marilyn Manson marries (and subsequently divorces) Dita von Teese, a fetish superstar as Jenna Jameson was a porn star who, like Jameson, went mainstream and is now considered a chic symbol of the new popularity of fetish. She has been on the covers of the New York Times style magazine and Paper. She has been nominated by the readers of Elle as a “style icon.”

  The Matrix movie series was a fetish-style apotheosis. Everything was fetishized: the violence, the technology, the hardware, but especially the fashions. The imagery is everywhere now, marketed like Red Bull and hip-hop and cell phones.

  In the old days, like ten years ago, a kid wanting to find a fetish party had to get to a record store that carried flyers about underground events. “Now there are party images on MySpace,” Jsin said, and announcements of future happenings all over the Internet. (Even the Internet itself has become an object of fetish. Cyber-fetish attempts to transform you into a living digital avatar with accessories like neon-colored wig attachments resembling dreadlocks, and shiny metallic PVC and latex.)

  I have been told over and over how the Internet has unleashed fetish, providing a place where enthusiasts can fin
d each other. Barb, a sixty-two-year-old woman from Shreveport, Louisiana, explained that as a child, she used to enjoy spankings. If she couldn’t sleep at night, “I’d think about spanking. That would give me a warm feeling and I’d go off to sleep.” She was married for thirty-one years, but “I couldn’t get my husband to hit me for anything.” There had long been spanking fetish magazines, but she never saw them. Then she finally got a computer and hooked it to the Internet. She typed “spanking” into a search engine. “I knew then I was not the only one.” She left her husband and became “romantically involved” with “Master Mac,” who owns the Kink Shop in Shreveport. A Southern Baptist, she justified her fetish to me by saying, “I do think this is biblical. The man is the head of the household, right? Well, this is just taking it a step further.”

  Joy Berger, a self-described “little Jewish grandmother,” couldn’t be happier about the fetish boom. She owns Le Chateau Exotique, a fetish-wear store in New Hope, Pennsylvania, one of the largest in the country. Fifteen years ago she stopped teaching high-school biology and started selling fetish fashions and equipment. Business has never been better. She wouldn’t say just how much she sells every year, but she did say that she never imagined fetish would become so mainstream. “I now sit at the mayor’s table,” she told me, referring to chamber of commerce meetings.

  But pop culture appropriation of fetish, its omnipresence on the Web, and the resulting trendiness have generated some grumbling in the fetish world about arrivistes who just like to play dress-up. “Oh yes,” a professional BDSM porn star named Anastasia Pierce told me, “they’re being rebels! They will sit around and smoke clove cigarettes.” These people miss the point of fetish, argues Mia Voraz, and Voraz’s mentor, a longtime fetish expert named Sir David Bane. The latex, metal, and leather clothing, the encasing rubber suits, may be sexy, but they are also supposed to be transcending.

  “It is a transformative experience,” a professional fetish model named Kumi Monster told me. Kumi, who has thousands of dollars’ worth of latex dresses, takes on a new persona when she wears them. “It’s different than putting on a suit and tie. Your attitude changes, your posture changes, whether or not you have heels on, for example. Heavy corsets force you upright. You are not slouching.” When she is wearing her fetish clothes, she said, “I feel in power wherever I go.”

  While fetish is all about sexuality, often it is not about sex. Instead, fetish makes sexuality a theatrical experience in which the entertainment payload is dropped before the denouement. Orgasm may be necessary, and momentarily pleasing, but it is also a defeat, even a death, because it brings you out of the fetish moment and back into the ordinary.

  BDSM is often more mental than physical. Voraz, for example, won’t have sex with her duct-taped client; instead, she’ll play with his big head. The idea is to give power up to the dominant, or top. Submissives, or bottoms, often talk about “entering sub space,” a kind of endorphin-fueled mental flight free of any worries or cares because they have yielded all responsibility to the dom. This is why, in a very real sense, the sub is often the one in charge. They are being serviced by the dom.

  Some people object to the conflation of fetish and BDSM, but popularity has made “fetish” an increasingly meaningless word. This helps explain why nobody really knows how many fetishists there are in the United States. If you use the looser definition, it could be about two hundred million, or just about every adult. For obvious reasons, I have always had a little thing for Catholic schoolgirl uniforms, which is painfully hackneyed in the age of shibari, I know, but there you go. Is that a fetish or just a quirk? Do women who dig men in tool belts or cop uniforms have a fetish, or just an interest in tough guys? Understand that fetish also comes in degrees, from full time to only on your husband’s birthday, and you can see the problem.

  Using a much stricter definition, given to me by the principal partner of Diversicor Media Group, publisher of fetish magazines like Skin Two, Bootlovers, and Domination Directory International, about 7 percent of Americans are hard-core fetishists. He is extrapolating from his circulation, but that would be about fourteen million adults. I have no idea if his number is an accurate reflection or not—there has never been a reliable survey. I’ve seen estimates that say 15 percent of Americans have a foot fetish, but I don’t know if that’s accurate either, and I’m not sure it matters. I think it is enough to say that many people, far more than most of us recognize, are at least a little kinky and the numbers are growing.

  Many of the Fetish Con attendees tell me they weren’t always able to express themselves this way. Just as Madison dreamed of Catwoman as a girl, they saw a superhero or a fantasy character like Conan the Barbarian in a comic book, or they watched a movie where somebody was spanked or slapped and then kissed passionately. A half-dozen tell me that, like Dave, they loved old westerns on TV, especially the parts where somebody got tied up. Chloe said that as a boy, he would watch a cowboy on a horse and wish he were the horse.

  A man named Bob tells me that when he watched cowboy-and-Indian movies, he wanted to be the Indians. At the moment he is wearing a black leather hood over his head, a collar around his neck, and he is being led with a leash, by his wife, Melissa, who looks like a plump Robin the Boy Wonder thanks to the black mask on her face. Like Bob, she also points to an early interest in BDSM. She was eight when she watched a movie on HBO and saw a clothed man spank a partially naked woman in a hallway. “It spoke to me,” she says.

  I am tempted to tell you a lot more about their childhoods and to say that Melissa drags Bob around by a leash because both of them lived through baroque family melodramas. There were sledgehammers through car windshields, and drug addiction and alcoholism and a kidnapping by Mafia-connected goombahs in New York, and life in a trailer in a redneck town in central Florida, and some sexual abuse from a relative, and a private eye beating up a dad, and something about a chain saw. But the fact is, Bob and Melissa aren’t sure what, if anything, the childhood traumas have to do with leather and leashes.

  Secret yearnings are the most powerful of all. You nurture them unshared with anyone else and in the closed hothouse atmosphere they grow until you can’t suppress them anymore. Both Bob and Melissa went on with life despite their childhoods and their inner passions. When Melissa could no longer suppress her yearning for BDSM, she initiated an apprenticeship under a bondage master so she could properly learn the system for using rope. During a brief first marriage, she dominated her husband, and other people—mainly other women, but sometimes men—but he never seemed to understand that when she said she wanted a submissive man, she did not mean she wanted a doormat. A subtle point, perhaps, but vital. Bob had much less experience when he placed a profile on Bondage.com, part of the AdultFriendFinder network where Melissa found him.

  “On our first date we went to a restaurant, then drove to a lake,” Bob recalls. “It was soon after July fourth and there were kids there shooting off bottle rockets, so forever after I have been able to say that fireworks went off on our first date.” They kissed on that date. Melissa squeezed his nipples a little.

  They go on telling me the story of their courtship and I keep waiting for the bacchanalia of kink. Instead I hear about their second date and how Melissa screwed up her courage to ask Bob to spend the night at the town house she shared with her sister because she already knew she was nuts for him—“Hey, I’m a stud!” Bob says, laughing, at this point—and when she did, she announced her fear by saying, “I am trying to work up the courage to ask you to stay the night but nothing will happen and we will not do anything and I would like you to stay with me” all in one breath.

  “Does your sister wear contacts?” he asked.

  “Excuse me?” she replied.

  “I cannot wear my contacts all night long,” he explained. He was hoping there was contact lens fluid in the house. There wasn’t, so they drove to Wal-Mart. Bob bought a NASCAR toothbrush, too.

  “Then we watched Finding Nemo, my favorite
movie, and the next morning he left.” To Bob and Melissa their story sounds romantic and epic the way yours probably does to you, but as far as everybody else is concerned, you sorta have to be there, you know? So I’ll skip the rest of the courtship and fast-forward.

  They dated, they were engaged, they got married. Now Bob and Melissa are in their midthirties. Melissa works in a technical capacity for a military contractor and was a regional campaign volunteer for George W. Bush. Bob, funny enough, is a corporate controller. Bob drives an SUV. They bought a house they can’t really afford, but they love it and work constantly to pay the mortgage. One recent Christmas, Melissa bought Bob a new Wii video game machine. Bob bought Melissa a Prince Albert.

  Ahh, now we get to the kink.

  Bob’s Prince Albert is a piercing in the head of his penis that will attach to a chain Melissa can use to lead him. The Prince Albert was a big deal, because Bob is not into pain. Even scarier for Bob, they ran into the guy who was about to do the piercing, at Kmart.

  “We went to buy some Lysol,” Bob recalls, “and we saw him and he said, ‘Hey! How you doin’?’ and Brian, I am not kidding you, the guy had facial tics! Like Tourette’s or something. He kept popping his neck, doing these half turns, and circles with his neck! It was a surreal moment.” Bob went through with the piercing anyway, a testament to love.

  They’ve also done a little home improvement to their new place. They have added a bondage table, and a custom-made hoist for rope suspensions, and, in an extravagance they feel guilty about because it’s so financially irresponsible, they bought a custom wood and steel cage. Bob spent Christmas night curled up in it. They are redoing the garage and will incorporate the cage and the hoist “so they are plausibly deniable” as handyman equipment.

  Melissa uses all this on Bob, but not all the time. They have regular old vanilla sex, too. But if Bob acts especially cocky, she’ll “verbally degrade him. I spit on him, urinate on him, absolutely anything I can think of to take that smug little look off his face.”