Confessions of an S&M Virgin

by Linda Jaivin

  CONFESSIONS OF AN S&M VIRGIN

  Linda Jaivin is a writer of some discipline but minimal bondage.

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  FICTION

  Eat Me

  Rock n Roll Babes from Outer Space

  NON-FICTION

  New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese Rebel Voices

  (co-editor with Geremie Barmé)

  CONFESSIONS OF AN S&M VIRGIN

  LINDA JAIVIN

  TEXT PUBLISHING

  MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House, 22 William Street Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Linda Jaivin 1997

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published 1997

  Printed and bound by Griffin Press

  Designed by Chong

  Typeset in 12/17 Bembo by J&M Typesetting

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Jaivin, Linda.

  Confessions of an S&M virgin.

  ISBN 9781875847464.

  1. Cultural relations – 20th century. 2. Social change – History – 20th century. 3. Manners and customs – Humor. I.Title.

  306

  Ebook ISBN: 9781921799945

  Many of the pieces in this book, some of them in different form, first appeared in 24 Hours, Australian, Australian Society, Campaign, Far Eastern Economic Review, Good Weekend, Hecate, Independent Monthly, New Woman, Rolling Stone and Sydney Papers. ‘My Friend the Axe Murderer’ first appeared in Columbus' Blindness and Other Essays (UQP, 1994).‘Inside Tiananmen’ is an excerpt from Linda Jaivin's biography of Hou Dejian, forthcoming from Text Publishing.

  FOR TIM

  CONTENTS

  Naked Brunch

  CONFESSIONS OF AN S&M VIRGIN

  My Favourite Year

  Confessions of an S&M Virgin

  My Friend the Axe Murderer

  Rock n Roll Is Really Bad

  Bendy Wendy

  Why Sex Makes Me Laugh

  Cocky

  I'M A LOSER, BABY

  1989

  Inside Tiananmen

  U Got the Look

  Wow Now Red Mao

  I'm a Loser, Baby, So Why Don't You Censor Me?

  ALIEN SEX FIENDS

  Lust

  Why I Love Younger Men

  Come Again?

  Love Sex, Love Love

  Cute

  Vrrrooom Vrrrooom

  Der

  Hot Champ

  Cathay Camembert

  Riffraffy

  Gay Abandoned

  Alien Sex Fiends

  Naked Brunch

  You'll have to pardon my nakedness. It's Nude Saturday here in Belongil Beach, Byron Bay, and everyone around has thrown off their clothes for a good cause, which is the right to throw off their clothes for no cause at all. Who am I to go against the tide? Just across the street, on the beach, the protest is progressing in the form of nude surfing, nude speeches, nude comedy and nude dancing to the music of a nude reggae band.

  I've come to Byron Bay to work on a novel. I often come to Byron to work, which is slightly perverse considering most other people come here to play. But I do like to blend in. So when I finally get around to putting on some clothes again, they will be items from my Secret Hippy Wardrobe, my little Byron Bay Collection. In Sydney, where I live, I am all lurex, short skirts, patent leather and orange fake fur. In Byron, I'm Indian fabrics, long skirts, sandals and natural fibres.

  In Sydney, I have friends who live in sharehouses and play in bands. In Byron, I have friends who live in teepees and drum. In Byron, I don't giggle when the girl who gives me a massage rings little bells around my head and passes crystals over my feet.

  It usually takes about a day to make the transition, during which time I go bare-legged under the lurex mini, miss my collection of CDs and try to remember how to tie my sarong so it won't fall around my ankles at the next full-moon party. I still can't quite bring myself to care about people's star signs or order deep-fried tofu chips, but I'm making an effort. I haven't worn shoes in three days.

  Here in Byron people talk about being in touch with your inner child. Remember Zelig, the Woody Allen film about the human chameleon? Me, I'm in touch with my inner Zelig.

  When I was little, growing up in New London, Connecticut, and my mother introduced me to a friend of hers with a facial tic, I immediately developed one of my own, much to their mutual mortification. I picked up a Gaelic accent when speaking to Bridie, the Irish woman who came to clean my grandmother's house, and I gestured wildly while talking to Italians and fellow Jews. In my Charles Dickens phase I insisted on calling my best friend ‘old bean’.

  Then I grew up. I went to university, studied Chinese history and language and decided to become Chinese. In the early eighties, following two years of further language study in Taiwan, I started spending quality time in mainland China. Here's a snapshot of me in my early days in China: hair dyed black, dressed in a People's Liberation Army uniform, hooning through the back streets of Beijing on my Phoenix-brand bicycle.

  It was in China that I met the Australian China scholar Geremie Barmé. In 1986 we were married there in a bureaucratic socialist ceremony: a po-faced cadre read out the entire Marriage Law of China while we tried not to giggle. I came to Australia with Geremie shortly thereafter. I knew little about the country aside from the fact that it suffered terrible droughts and had produced Mad Max, Patrick White and Lindy Chamberlain.

  One evening, shortly after arriving in Australia, I sat down to watch the television news with Geremie and his brother Scot. A politician appeared on the box, and Geremie and Scot hooted and laughed as he spoke. I experienced rising panic for, try as I might, I couldn't make out a single word he was saying. I would never be able to speak or even understand Australian! I'd never fit in! Afterwards, Geremie and Scot assured me that in fact no one had ever understood a word spoken by this man, whose name, incidentally, was Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

  Despite this early, scarifying encounter with the Australian language, I grew to love it. Naturally, it didn't take long before I resolved to become Australian. This turned out to be much easier than becoming Chinese, though the formalities did throw up a wee conundrum. Today, new citizens may choose to pledge their loyalty directly to Australia; at the time I was naturalised, you had to choose God or the Queen or both. This was difficult for me, an agnostic republican, but in the end I chose the Queen because, I reasoned, at least you can prove she exists.

  Gaining formal citizenship was one thing. But in terms of my Australian conversion, I consider the day I learned to eat Vegemite on toast without gagging, a milestone second only to the day (the following one, as it turned out) I discovered I couldn't get through the morning without it.

  After separating from Geremie in 1992,1 moved from Canberra to Sydney. I fell in love with the city. Its spectacular blue skies and harbour views, its secret little parks, beautiful terraces, sociable cafes, music scene and character-laden neighbourhoods all have me in their thrall. I have become a passionate Sydneysider. I cannot imagine living anywhere else. I want to map the city in my writing. My first novel Eat Me is a love song to Darlinghurst, my second, Rock n Roll Babes from Outer Space, a paean to Newtown. The novel I'm writing now journeys into Paddington and Chippend
ale.

  In Eat Me there's a minor character, Richard the writing teacher, who transforms himself into whatever kind of person he is writing about: a pale, black-haired punk one season, a tanned surfie the next. At last sight he's growing a moustache and learning to boot-scoot in preparation for taking off for San Francisco to research a novel set in the gay scene there. Richard is not just in touch with his inner Zelig, they're e-mailing each other five times a day. The aliens in Rock n Roll Babes enjoy getting around in Earth-girl form—shapeshifting being a radical but effective way of adapting to life on a new planet.

  While I was working on Eat Me I spent even more time than usual hanging out at cafes and thinking about sex. When I was writing Babes I spent half the time convinced that I was Baby Baby, my extraterrestrial extraordinaire, alien sex fiend and wannabe rock star, and the other half that I was Jake, the hapless dred-headed Earth boy who is the object of her out-of-this-world affections. I began to perform with a band and sprouted dreds.

  I tend to get into character for my non-fiction writing as well. What motivated me to write the story that lends its name to this collection was a spate of reports in the popular press on the newly opened Hellfire Club, Australia's first above-ground nightclub dedicated to the practice of consensual sado-masochism. The writers of these articles went to the club, sometimes with psychologists in tow, perved at the perverts, asked a few questions and called it a story. Many went to great lengths to make it clear to the reader that they were not one of them. I thought, fuck it, if you really want to understand what it's all about why not become one of them—for a night, anyway.

  One wild thing led to another and, before you could say ‘Please, Master’, I found myself lying across the lap of the Hellfire's manager, my hands manacled, tape recorder running, getting a spanking and an interview all at the same time.

  I was sufficiently fascinated by the experience to return to Hellfire a number of times after I'd finished the article; Kathy Bail, my editor at Rolling Stone for whom I wrote the story, even gave me a little suede lash as a present. In the end, I decided that, while I'd made interesting new friends with whom I'd enjoyed disciplined times and bonding moments, S&M wasn't really my scene. Latex makes me sweat, I fall over in stilettos and I've never been able to tie a good knot.

  The myth of the journalist as impartial observer dies hard. But the pretence of objectivity in journalism can only ever be just that: a pretence. It's a confidence trick. Trust me, I'm a journalist.

  Taking a break from writing this essay, I wander down to Belongil Beach for a swim. The nudists are gone, but there is a man with a dog. While the dog practises for the Olympic Frisbee Event, Canine Division (backflips, airborne pirouettes, ocean retrieval skills), I talk to the man. He's worked as a journalist too, it turns out. He tells me he can't stand the sort of journalism in which the writer inserts him or herself into the story. The focus of any article, he observes, ought properly to be on the subject. I know exactly what he's talking about.

  I return to the beachhouse, put my head in my hands and think about all this. The man with the dog has a point, and it's a good one. Imagine how irritating it would be if every time we opened a newspaper to find out what was happening in the Middle East or Canberra we had to learn first about the reporter's car blowing up that morning.

  On the other hand, I know that the kind of non-fiction writers whom I find most exciting and inspirational are those who fully invest their work with personality, who live their stories and make their stories live. Whose knowledge of their subjects is matched by their passionate interest in them. Writers like Hunter S. Thompson, P.J. O'Rourke, Helen Garner, Robert Hughes, John Birmingham, Tom Wolfe, Anka Radakovich, Nic Cohn and Oriana Fallaci. I love the image of Fallaci ripping off her chador in the middle of an interview with the Ayatollah Khomeini while making some provocative comment about ‘medieval rags’; of Hunter S. Thompson roaring into a small American town with a convoy of Hells Angels; of Anka Radakovich—who does for sex what Hunter S. does for drugs and Nic Cohn for rock n roll—slope-testing a ski instructor or discoursing on the relative merits of different aphrodisiacs (one of which apparently inspired an irresistible compulsion to vacuum the house).

  Looking back over all the non-fiction writing I've done, I find that much of my straight, or ‘impersonal’ reporting—and most of my work has been of this kind—has already passed its use-by date. You won't find any of it in this book. I hope the man with the dog is on the beach again today. I'd really like to talk about all this some more with him.

  In the early eighties I worked as a correspondent for a Hong Kong-based news weekly. I once interviewed a dissident artist in a darkened room at the back of a Beijing gallery. His friends guarded the door. Undercover police in risible plainclothes observed the crowd and the art with impenetrable expressions. The artist spoke against the revolution in the brave clichés of revolutionary romanticism, for that was the language of courage in all the films and books he had ever read. He was playing the public hero, and if he had private fears he was saving them for when the tape recorder was turned off. But what interested me most was how the courage and the fear must have been jostling in his mind, and what emotions were animating the blank-faced policemen.

  How do you get to these inner truths? One way is to perpetrate a break and enter on your subjects' thought processes, not an easy task in the weird, convoluted reality of China. To compound the difficulty there has never been a huge call for New Journalism among publications like the Asian Wall Street Journal and the Far Eastern Economic Review. They like to stick to the facts.

  As a China specialist, one of the problems I always found in sticking to the facts was that there were so few of them that could be relied on in the first place. When I began reporting on China, hard facts were as difficult to come by as a good cup of coffee in Beijing. Nothing was ever quite what it seemed. Statistics were convenient political fictions. When the People's Daily announced that ‘the situation is excellent’, it always meant ‘the situation couldn't be worse’.

  At the time, just getting on a flight from Hong Kong to Beijing qualified as Adventure Travel. The national Chinese airline, CAAC, provided folding chairs in the aisles of the planes for overbooked passengers and regularly stacked excess luggage in front of the emergency exits. There were never any demonstrations of safety equipment. I used to wonder whether there was any. CAAC's Liberation Army-trained pilots tended to land their planes like bombers, pointing the nose down and then pulling up short and fast at the last minute. This was especially tough on the folding-chair crowd. There were a number of flights where I recall passengers screaming.

  In those days the Chinese government judged all foreign journalists to be spies and their Chinese friends to be potential collaborators and traitors. This didn't exactly encourage a caring, sharing sort of attitude towards the gathering and exchange of information. It was hard to say whether the levels of paranoia were highest among Communist officials, the Chinese public or among the journos themselves, who never tired of exchanging tales of telephone buggings and surveillance traps.

  In my experience, and I've had a few, the cake—no, the whole bakery—goes to a playwright I once interviewed in Shanghai. He insisted on conducting the entire interview on paper so that it couldn't be overheard by bugging devices—good practice for my written Chinese, but not exactly the most efficient way of holding a conversation. When we finished, he wrote down the instructions quan ji xialai—‘memorise it all’. He then ripped out the pages and pages of Chinese script that we'd scribbled in my notebook over the course of the last hour or so, tore them into tiny shreds and flushed them all down the toilet.

  Gobsmacked, I watched as my work went, quite literally, down the drain. At this point, he threw himself upon me and tried to stick his tongue down my throat. When I made it clear that my interest in his work did not extend to the state of his tonsils, he heaved a great sigh, shook his head dramatically (the man was in theatre, after all) and left. The delicate s
ubject of this fraught interview, incidentally, was a play that he'd written and which was about to be performed publicly.

  Though I was always most interested in cultural topics, my work mainly involved reporting on the ephemera of Chinese politics and economics—leadership reshuffles, market reforms, state visits and ideological campaigns. In play, I gravitated towards the sort of people I tend to hang out with anywhere: the weirdos, the artists, the musicians, the creative malcontents. My friends included China's first punk rocker, gays, and poets who liked to declaim verse from atop imperial ruins. Many of them had spent time in prisons or labour camps. They were writing an alternative narrative of Life Under Socialism and I imagined myself into their story for a while.

  As a non-Chinese reporting on China, however, you are forever an outsider looking in, a position with which neither side can ever feel completely comfortable. The virulent and xenophobic nationalism that recurrently sweeps China, moreover, means that no matter what you write about the place or how you write it, you may encounter enormous hostility. Some Chinese intellectuals insist foreigners have no right to any view on their country's affairs at all. So, despite the fact that I dedicated my entire university career to learning about China's language and history, lived there for nine years of my life during which time I mixed mainly with Chinese people, despite the fact that I marched for democracy in Hong Kong, was spied upon by Taiwan's Garrison Command, harassed by the mainland's secret police and traumatised by Tiananmen, I am still not perceived by many Chinese as having a right to an opinion on any of it.

  Helen Garner, in the introduction to her marvellous collection of essays, True Stories, writes about her relief in turning from fiction to journalism, at being able to shed what she calls the ‘irksome obligation to make things up’. My journey has been in the opposite direction. Shifting from non-fiction to fiction, from China to Australia, I felt an extraordinary relief at being able to shed the irksome obligation to stick to the facts. I revel in the freedom that fiction bestows.