The Helen 100

by Helen Razer

  In short, I have often been thrown out of important things—or left as soon as I sensed the threat of ejection. This is no real brag of rebellion. It is simply an honest account of my regular failure to do as I should.

  I do see the contradiction that arises when one both seeks and refuses discipline. The whole Problem with Authority thing needs to be overcome when one is, in fact, begging for authority. I did, quite earnestly, wish for some manageable pain and restraint: in this case of the sort that would perhaps provoke another’s pleasure. But I didn’t really want to be involved in anything referred to as ‘The Lifestyle’.

  Of course, more important than my personal issues with The Man were the matters of safety and consent. It’s all well and good to want to be sexually or emotionally dominated—and I had wanted this unambiguous treatment for some time. Better the boot in the face, and all of that. But it’s just dumb to accede to this domination without a set of guidelines, such as those The Lifestyle so amply provided. Rules all over the shop.

  Nonetheless, it’s also a bit difficult for a wad like me to say, ‘I consent to not consenting’, even though, obviously, this is the thing that every bottom must do. Otherwise the domination then ceases to be domination and becomes sexual assault—of which I am no fan.

  These were the sorts of concerns I upheld before the munch, which was due to take place at a good, low-price south Indian restaurant in which I’d previously dined. If there was anything that would tempt me to eat again, it was the savoury pancake of southern India. So even if I didn’t get admitted, or didn’t want to be admitted to The Lifestyle, I would be sure to ingest some urgently needed carbohydrate. (I had eaten almost nothing since the ex left and I think that I was getting the ketosis breath that we can sometimes smell from the gobs of fad dieters.)

  But no one was eating any carbs when I arrived, fifteen minutes late. The man who I recognised to be Georges, a man a tad diminished in height and athleticism since filling out his internet fetish profile, looked at me and said, ‘Tsk.’

  He was quite hot, quite small, and just starting to bald. For some reason, such natural tonsure in shortish men around fifty often makes me think, ‘Ooh.’ I’m not sure why. Perhaps because I think, ‘Well, there’s another shiny thing he can try to put inside my vagina.’

  I said to Georges that I was sorry I was late and politely allowed the conversation to resume. Apparently, they had been talking about the matter of the service tip. Apparently, they did this too often.

  ‘We do this too often,’ said a youngish man with sandy lashes, who went on to explain ‘again’ that he had developed a simple formula for the reliable calculation of a gratuity. Something about time spent dining plus or minus consensus about the quality of service divided by something or other.

  ‘Oh, we can just go with it,’ said a striking brunette person of indeterminate gender, who I later learned identified as a person of indeterminate gender. They were, according to their name tag, called ‘Sam/Switch Hit’, and I realised I had forgotten my own label and was called nothing at all.

  Georges had previously explained that all the munchers must use name tags. Some like Sam/Switch used both their fetish name and their given name, while others, like the sandy boy, went only by ‘Server’, a reference both to his work in the IT industry, he would later explain, and to his peccadilloes.

  ‘I’m sorry about my name tag,’ I said.

  Odette, a plump, pretty young lady with hot-magenta hair and gold skin, said, ‘Georges’s new girl is a silly little billy,’ and grabbed my phone. She tapped ‘MidLifeISIS’ in the message app, magnified it with a nip of her Wüsthof nails and thrust it back my way. ‘We were expecting you. Hold it up, noob,’ she said with a stagey smile. Again, I said that I was sorry. Which I was.

  I imagine that any aspiring kinkster, whether dominant or submissive, feels awkward in the first moments of a munch. I mean, you’re sitting in an overly lit room made chiefly of Laminex with a group of people who all may reasonably suppose that your only passage to climax involves a diaper and a sprinkling of powder. And this is not, by any means, to disparage any hue of consensual human passion. It’s all, as they say, good—even if you did buy it from a baby store. I have myself paused to find things just as strange as talcum arousing en route to fulfilment. Judge not lest ye be photographed wearing knitted booties on your dong, etc.

  Nonetheless, the lights! Such stark illumination of all our dark urges made me uncomfortable. This was embarrassing in the short term, but probably a good sign for my sexual future. If the bright lights of this Indian restaurant had failed to make me uncomfortable, then it would mean my dark urges had perished.

  Which is to say, for some of us, there can be no pleasure without dark guilt. I may have been asked to leave Mother Church, but she had never deserted me.

  So, I was awfully, if necessarily, embarrassed.

  I think this was okay, as blushing becomes a potential submissive. I was embarrassed, but also fairly sure that my embarrassment fit the role for which I had applied. I thought that it must be horrid to be a Top who suffers social anxiety, and that probably a lot of them do.

  At any rate, MidLifeISIS was now red as the pile of chicken tikka—which the menu aficionado will note is not normally in the south Indian culinary repertoire. But it was there at the restaurant, in any case, as alien to its present environment as me.

  Georges, who really was a decent-looking chap of the compact and well-proportioned sort that brings to mind the three-quarter copy function on an office Xerox machine, asked, ‘Is that the name you want today?’

  ‘That or Helen would do,’ I said.

  ‘Hello, Helen,’ said a straight couple, neither of whom had heeded the vanilla dress code. This didn’t mean that much in a city like this one, full of street theatre, but, still, I found their choice of the blacksmith’s aprons unsettling. He was called ‘Anvil’ and she was called ‘Hammer’, and neither of these tools had, in my view, done much to honour discretion. Not that discretion was something that I gave much thought to at the time, but the rules of the munch had been written fairly clearly and that this pair had seen fit to come in bearing a placard that basically said ‘We’re Going to Fuck You In a Blast Furnace’ was a clear violation.

  Still, I guess I hadn’t worn a name tag. I held up my phone screen in an effort to stick to the rules.

  There was another chap present. He was about forty, he wore a lot of denim all at once and his name tag said ‘Stumpy’. I initially supposed that this name signified his fondness for erotic humiliation. There are those chaps, I had read, who enjoy having their penis size derided. Again, good luck to these men from whom I can claim no distance. I was myself aroused by the thought of editing someone’s screenplay while earning no money and wearing no pants. And also, apparently, by being broken up with, by residual Catholic shame and by a range of other items and practices that even I am not so foolish as to disclose.

  Stumpy, as it turned out, was not one of those who craved a verbal beating. He was, in fact, an aspiring Master and Stumpy was not really his fetish name but an everyday sobriquet acquired when he had lost half his leg in a boating incident; an absence I hadn’t immediately noticed. And, no, of course I didn’t ask. What sort of nuff goes about asking a one-legged man, ‘Where did you leave your limb?’ He had told me about it when he asked if I wouldn’t mind popping up and ordering him a dosa.

  ‘Rather not do it myself if I can help it,’ he said and he patted his stump. ‘Boat. That’s why I’m Stumpy. No left leg, love. I left him in the sea.’

  ‘I hear you have a third leg, anyhow,’ said Odette. Everyone cackled. Although Georges and Sam seemed to do so only out of duty. Stumpy just went deadpan, like the Buddha.

  There was, as far as I knew, no written agenda for the meeting. Still, it seemed to proceed along a course familiar to its participants, who were all regulars except for me. They spoke of past Lifestyle events. They spoke of upcoming Lifestyle events. They complained a little
about the quality of music at some Lifestyle events and Sam said, ‘I am sick to the back fangs of that hideous, nineties industrial drone. I mean, who wants to hear mechanical bashing and feel like they’re trapped inside a foundry? No offence, Hammer.’

  ‘None taken. I couldn’t agree more about Skinny Puppy. I would say it’s the sound a fax machine makes before it dies.’

  Some of them were a little lewd and free with double entendre, but not much of it was racier than a Carry On film. Not even from Anvil or Hammer. This wasn’t X-rated. A few of them talked about a recent Shibari workshop and Georges offered the opinion that the alleged rope artist was not to be trusted with the quality of his knots, which had not, he had it on good authority, even been studied in Japan.

  I tried to focus on the idea of being tied up by handsome little Georges, even in knots of dubious nationality. I tried to catch his eye. But I wasn’t really meshing with this sex lunch for a couple of reasons.

  First, Anvil had dropped some coconut sambal on his collar, and I found this distracting. It looked like jizz. Second, I felt like I had been in a similar situation before and I couldn’t quite place it.

  When Hammer hissed—affectionately, it should be said—at Anvil, ‘You’re a dirty little man-baby who can’t be trusted with his dinner,’ I remembered. This felt a bit like a pyramid sale for kitchen appliances.

  A few years before, I had been required by work to take notes at one of those Tupperware-like events. You know, the sort of thing where ladies’ homes are used as a party-plan store. The gathering is intended as both a social event and a point of sale, but it fails to be completely one or the other. It may succeed at the time as a sale in terms of hard cash, but no one ever really feels that they weren’t obliged to buy, and this sensation of pressure always diminishes the social experience, which in turn diminishes the esteem in which the purchased product is held, and future sales do not follow. As such, the blender I had been commissioned to falsely praise in print is no longer sold.

  (This is clearly not the case for Tupperware, which is a fucking awesome product. Tupperware continues to have great use-value and no volume of terrible parties will ever change this. To be clear, I have no financial interest in the Tupperware corporation and I have myself insufficient funds to afford even more than two pieces of Tupperware. Nonetheless, I admire Tupperware, which is as durable and as timeless in design as are the knotted ropes of the very best Japanese perverts.)

  This party plan comparison struck me not because I felt that The Lifestylers were evangelising or even soft-selling their noble crafts. Not like that lady with her hand-held blender. ‘Look. You can make breadcrumbs,’ she had said, as though anyone ate carbs anymore outside southern India. The munch wasn’t that disconnected from the social. But I did get a sense there of the social connection that is slowly frayed by business, or perhaps of the force of the trade economy, which leaves its impression even on our private economies of love and friendship.

  But there had to be a sort of businesslike element here, too. I soon became aware, and remain respectful, of the responsible approach the Kink community takes to its activity. It’s sensible to meet your fellows in a vanilla environment and heavens knows what might happen if kinksters only met while wearing gimp suits and holding bedpans. Kink relationships, especially those that involve the receipt of pain, need to have their guidelines set well away from the rack. You don’t just jump in arse-first and hope to get exactly the kind of beating you can stand.

  Still, I couldn’t help but be a little disappointed by the Tupperware approach. The Lifestyle seemed to be a place where the love we might find for each other was discussed, demonstrated and burped in advance. Call me a romantic, but I craved spontaneity in a thrashing.

  The meeting drew to a close. I stayed close to compact, muscular Georges. He had given excellent internet chat and would, it seemed to me, also give an excellent dose of what-for should he deem me and my arse worth the time. But in those few minutes after the meeting that I begged to spend with him, I saw that I was not up to fetish snuff.

  I mean, perhaps he found me tolerably attractive. I was, after all, wearing a dress entirely free of cat waste. I also have the sort of skin that any connoisseur of violence would know bruises easily, and I imagine this would be a plus. But even if he had deemed me physically desirable, I was perhaps not his type of girl. Not in my reckless, unbusinesslike state.

  We walked towards the railway station and then he beckoned me to the old steps that led down to the Yarra. As we descended, he placed his hand, lightly but assertively enough for me to know I was still in with an eighth of a chance, on the small of my back, and growled, in not an unappealing way, ‘What the fuck do you want?’

  ‘Um. To be dominated?’ I said.

  He rolled his eyes, and his body, which a moment before had been straining towards me and the river, fell halfway back into repose. He said, ‘FFS. Be more specific,’ and then grabbed and pulled my ponytail quite hard and spun me around so that my back was now against the old wall that runs by the riverbank.

  (This, I ought to report, was an act of address to which I had already consented with Georges by internet message. The BDSM people were terribly organised about their brutality.)

  Be more specific. Well, I was more specific. As I felt him pull on my hair and resume his interest, by which I mean cock, I was able to say some really specific shit.

  It’s not so much that I will not offer an account of this filth, I am just unable to recall it. It was a great stream of Kerouac Kink written on a single sheet of longing—the sort of tosh that seems ridiculous and begs to be forgotten everywhere but in its very particular moment. All I can really remember is that it involved a lot of ‘arse’, ‘fuck’ and ‘hurt me, Georges’, and possibly an offer from me to clean his kitchen in my scanties.

  For a good thirty seconds, this seemed to go down pretty well. He pulled my hair with one hand and grabbed my wrist with another and I felt quite fixed against the old retaining wall. As he Vader-breathed into my ear, he positioned himself against me with mocking expertise—which is to say, he was the sort of chap sufficiently fascinated by sex and its preamble that he seemed to have learned just where and how a fully dressed boner should prod a lady so that she would begin to feel quite faint. I can tend to be a fairly coarse person, but I was momentarily well mannered as I said, ‘Please, Georges. Please.’

  And then, I do remember, that I said that I wanted him to blow in my arse after he had finished whacking it with one of his devices. And he said, ‘Yeah, I’ll put on a condom and blow in your arse,’ and I said, ‘No condoms. I want you to come inside me,’ and, well, that was it. Au revoir, Monsieur Bataille and friends. Twelve down. Eighty-eight dates to go.

  ‘Bareback? Are you mad?’ he said.

  Well yes, I was, as we have amply established. Still, I thought I was being super hot and that my genuine invitation to transgress the recommended health practice for casual hook-ups was extra super hot. But the transgression specialist knows that any compromise to safety is also a compromise to future transgression and, again, I was terribly impressed by Kink’s commitment to Best Practice. But, you know, disappointed that a fairly bright and hot chap wasn’t going to sodomise me with what seemed to be an organ of notable girth.

  I apologised and tried not to cry. Georges said that he too was sorry and asked me if something stressful had recently unfolded in my life. And then, of course, I did cry and the poor chap ended up having to sit me down, listen to the account of my break-up and buy me a Starbucks. And, I really don’t think a Smoked Butterscotch Latte was what he’d cycled into the city that day to find.

  Nonetheless, this was a decent man who now gave me some decent advice, in lieu of unsafe sex.

  He said that BDSM was not the place where you sought a cure to your past woes. It was, or it should be, more a place where you played them out at an advanced level, having already done some elementary work. He told me how his father had been a cruel man. He told
me that codifying his own dominance in a very conscious way with women made him a much better feminist. If he played out the masculine brutality in his memory, he found he was able to release the real forms of it from his everyday behaviour. But, he said, it was important that he knew that this was what he was doing well before he actually started doing it.

  ‘I swear, without BDSM, I could have become a Men’s Rights dick,’ he told me, and I certainly saw the logic here. Get rid of the power by continually laying it bare.

  BDSM practice is not an aberration. BDSM is, in my view, a good attempt at honesty. Responsibly done, it is conscious engagement with one’s past and shouldn’t be a chaotic, condom-free game of pin-the-tail-on-the-repressed-donkey. You open your eyes to the repression first, then you sit in a well-lit Indian restaurant after having first stared the ass in the face. Apparently, I hadn’t identified my herd of problems.

  Georges gave me the good advice to sort out my shit before I returned to this community, one I now esteemed as an exemplary self-regulator. Goodness, if the construction industry could only apply itself even half as well as the kinksters do in upholding safety guidelines there’d never be another on-site injury again.

  I tried to kiss him once more in the Starbucks. I was crying and, as he pointed out, I had a snout full of caramel froth, which probably looked like santorum. He told me I wasn’t ready to be kissed, much less beaten.

  ‘Sort out your shit, Helen.’

  I thanked Georges for the company, the advice and the Grande, and even managed not to get all huffy and explain that I was trying to sort out my shit, thanks, and that I had a Helen One Hundred spreadsheet to prove it. Instead, I bowed my head to Master and made my way to the train that would return me to my miserable half-home.