Confessions of an S&M Virgin

by Linda Jaivin

  U Got the Look

  Close to midnight in Liberal Party headquarters in Sydney on election night in 1993, two student supporters of the Libs and I find ourselves the meat in a major hostility sandwich, grilled on both sides. The mood in the hall is grim and tense as the crowd waits for John ‘the Baptist’ Hewson to appear and deliver his final sermon. At least one Liberal woman is sniffling and there'll be more tear stains on Country Road khaki before the night is through. I am chatting to Chris and Evan, two amiable members of the Sydney University Liberal Club whom I met earlier in the evening, when a Labor supporter from the press materialises at my left elbow to hiss, ‘What are you talking to these fucking cunts for!’ At the same time, on their right, a woman who is clearly some kind of Liberal SS officer snarls threateningly at the two boys that they aren't allowed to speak to me either.

  I say to Thought Police of all persuasions: sit on my tape recorder and twist.

  The weather in Sydney on election day is fetchingly symbolic: blue skies suddenly overtaken by grey cloud, a touch of drizzle and then dazzling sunshine again. No one has managed to predict the outcome of this election, not even God.

  Among the people handing out how-to-vote leaflets at my local polling booth is a small, genial man called Peter Griffiths. Peter is trying to drum up votes for the Natural Law Party. As far as campaign promises go, it would be hard to beat theirs: ‘It is our joy to pledge that, with the government of the Natural Law Party…Australia will prove to be the happiest and most peaceful nation on earth and an inspiration to the whole family of nations.’ Their secret? Advanced Transcendental Meditation. If enough people do it, claimed the handout Peter gave me, ‘a powerful influence of coherence is generated…As a result, negative tendencies such as crime, sickness and accidents are reduced and positive social and economic trends are strengthened.’ Neat.

  The Natural Law Party is fielding 126 candidates nationally. ‘So,’ I ask Peter, ‘do you think you have any greater chance than, say, a snowflake in hell of getting any seats this election?’

  ‘Maybe not,’ he concedes, ‘but awareness is the first thing.’

  Early in the evening, inside Sydney's posh Hotel Intercontinental, expensively suited, taffeta-ed and be-pearled Liberal Party faithful gather in a luxurious, journalist-free-zone. The godless media, meanwhile, hunker down next door at the hospitality school hall to watch the vote count on television, slurp free booze from the bar and wait for what is generally expected to be Hewson's march of triumph and victory speech.

  A few Liberal functionaries mill busily but cheerily about the hall, taking phone calls on their mobile telephones. Occasionally some of the crowd from the party next door stop by to slum it for a few minutes with the press before fleeing back to the comforts of the inner sanctum. Watching them, it dawns on me that most young Liberals actually look exactly like I expect them to.

  If they're not power dressing, Liberal girls wear tight shiny dresses and air-tunnel hairdos or navy blue blazers and pleated skirts. The boys, meanwhile, clearly all shop in some secret Liberal supply store where they get handed either a grey suit or khaki trousers and cotton button-down shirts (white or pale blue) that they wear buttoned up. There's a lot of blond and light brown hair, all of it in place.

  I feel like I'm Ripley and I've just landed my spaceship on a planet where all the alien pods are designed by Country Road. If these creatures managed to take over our world, they'd cocoon us all in beige, at which point life wouldn't be worth living anyway.

  I'm feeling, well alien-ated, but what strikes me as really tragic is that most of the people I meet are too young to die Total Fashion Death. And I mean that in the most metaphysical sense. Hasn't it always been the vogue among youth not just to wear silly clothing, but also to devote themselves to issues like saving the environment while helping the working class overthrow their parents? What are these boys and girls doing dressing like middle-aged business people and trying to save the GST while helping John Hewson overthrow the working class?

  I ask Justin, a television cameraman with a funky haircut who's been on the campaign trail for five weeks, the Big Question: has he ever seen any young Liberals who looked young as well as Liberal? Is there, as it were, a hip pocket in the Liberal suit? Justin confirms that the Libs are, on the whole, a fairly conservative bunch in looks as well as ideology. But he tells me he's spotted a few bandannas and beads at Liberal rallies. ‘There's a touch of hedonism in there and they like clothes,’ he observes, adding that he's even glimpsed a bit of day-glo.

  By 8 p.m., the early, surprising results coming over on the TV have the journos riveted to the screen. Another hour and the Coalition is beginning to look, to borrow an immortal line from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, very five minutes ago.

  A small party of Sydney University Liberal Club students wander in. As they're leaving, I notice one who wears the standard blue blazer, light blue shirt and khaki trousers but also has a ponytail! I make a dash for the door and apprehend the lot. Evan Kaldor, whose head is on the end of the ponytail, is eighteen, light of hair and strong of jaw. I ask him why he's a Lib. ‘I don't like Keating,’ he tells me.

  ‘That's your sole reason for supporting the Liberal Party?’

  ‘And John Dawkins, yeah,’ says Evan.

  When I get to the key issue—if there are any other boy Libs who have ponytails—one of his mates, Dallas J. Mclnerney, cries out, ‘I can't believe you're asking this. The fate of the nation is in our hands tonight.’ His voice rises a few decibels. He's shaking his head and staring at mine. ‘Why don't you ask how many journos have fluorescent red hair?’

  Hey, Dallas, no need to get personal.

  ‘You're asking about ponytails?’ he rants. ‘What media organisation are you from?’ he raves.

  ‘Rolling Stone.’

  ‘I believe it.’ He's practically spitting. ‘I know which side your bread's buttered on.’

  Dallas is twenty, a student in public administration at Sydney University, and at this moment a chunky bundle of outrage and contempt in khaki and blue. I decide I like him. ‘Why are you for the Libs?’ I ask.

  ‘I hate those whingeing shop stewards, to tell you the truth.’ Eeeyew. He retakes the offensive. ‘You're asking about fucking ponytails? Ask about why so many people are unemployed! Ponytails? Unbelievable.’ He storms away, the word ‘ponytails’ bouncing off the stairwell as he goes.

  Christopher Alexandrou, twenty, stays. A bit of a spunk in an angled black beret, Chris is wearing a black cotton short-sleeved shirt, red and black striped braces and jeans over his muscular legs. He wishes his black boots were Doc Martens. He shows me his Ray Bans. He's not a stereotype. And he wants me to notice Evan's tie, which is wildly floral and probably silk. Chris studies economics and law at Sydney Uni and is a fan of Hunter S. Thompson. He got searched four times and accused of being a socialist when he wore what he's wearing tonight to the Liberal Party policy launch. I like Chris even more than Dallas. Unemployment is the issue that pushed Chris into the Liberal camp. Chris and Evan eventually follow Dallas and the others back to the other party, which I imagine must be turning into a bit of a wake.

  Finally, it's official. It is a wake. The mourners file into the hall. Evan, Chris and Dallas are back, together with Justin Owen, the president of the Sydney University Liberal Club, the members of which are careful to distinguish it from the Young Liberals, whom I take it are a lot more hardcore. Dallas is less aggro, more subdued now. Justin thinks Rolling Stone could become a ‘great publication’ if it would just get rid of its bias against the right. Chris puts on his Ray Bans and, while I'm listening to Justin, starts tracing the spider pattern on my tights with his finger. Chris is cheeky.

  Another young Liberal cottons onto the fact that I'm working for Rolling Stone and makes a cross with two fingers, as in, go away, you vampire. I waggle my garlic earrings at him. ‘Do you really believe that stuff?’ gasps one of the women.

  It's now that the heavies order Chris and Evan and t
he others not to speak to me. Evan says, nervously, ‘You'd better move away. We'll get into trouble if you keep talking to us.’

  Chris bristles. ‘What is this, Fascism?’ he wonders. ‘Are we in Nazi Germany or what? I'm a law student at Sydney Uni. I can't believe someone's telling me who I can and can't talk to.’

  I stay. Meanwhile, the Labor supporter at my other side is in full rhetorical flight, heaping scorn on Evan and Chris and finally on me for refusing to stop talking to them. He even accuses me of having switched sides.

  Some of the journos are peeling off for drinks. While I'm very happy that Labor won, I'm not in the mood for gloating. I ask Chris and Evan if they want to party on. They're a tad apprehensive about saying yes. Wouldn't any party I took them to be a Labor supporters' function?

  Probably, I answer. You guys game?

  What if they don't let us in?

  Then, I tell them, I won't go in either. As it turns out, the party I thought would be a rage is rather subdued and we no sooner get there than we decide to split.

  Throwing caution and possibly a future in the Liberal Party to the wind, they take me back to the Intercontinental where their club members were conducting a post-mortem. We get there just in time to see the gathering break up. We're spotted by the woman who'd ordered Chris and Evan not to speak to me at all. She shoots them a seriously hostile look as she drives off. They shrug. We join a small group of their friends to look for a place to have a drink. Chris lives with his parents and it is getting late, so he leaves.

  As the rest of us stroll into the Regent, Evan nudges me. ‘I love this place. It's so capitalist,’ he chuckles. I take out my notebook for the last time in that long evening. ‘Oh, you're not writing that down, are you?’ he groans.

  A few days later, I'm wondering how it went for Evan, Chris and the others back on campus. Judging from what they'd told me, the campuses weren't exactly user-friendly environments for Liberal supporters this election. I hope no one nailed them to any trees or threw sharpened pencils at them or anything like that. But, I'm also thinking, if you people want to do better than that next time, you'll need to find a little room in the wardrobe next to all those blazers and things for some policies that your own generation can relate to.

  And then, synchronicity strikes! I hear that John Brogden, president of the New South Wales division of the Young Liberals, has just spoken out on the Liberal Party's failure to address the needs and wants of Australia's younger voters. I phone him up. John is articulate and forthright. He believes that there's a message in the fact that despite intolerable levels of youth unemployment, the crisis in higher education, many young people enjoying a lower standard of living than their parents and a ‘national debt my generation will inherit’, the Libs still failed to capture any significant portion of the youth vote. He personally found the proposed youth wage ‘a bit rough’ and thinks the party ‘has its head in the sand’ on the issue of Australia becoming a republic. If it doesn't learn to reflect on the ‘interests and wants and needs of young Australians,’ John states, ‘it risks losing an entire generation of voters to the Labor Party.’ He wants to see it embrace a wider range of social concerns and thinks it's time ‘for new blood and young blood, male and female’.

  Chris and Evan both agree with what John was saying. Evan feels the Coalition campaign was a bit insensitive. ‘I can see how the GST would be a real prick’ to working people, he says. And he thinks that the Liberals have to do more to address concerns such as the environment and women's issues.

  Two more things, says Evan in our last phone conversation. He's not actually a member of the Liberal Party. And about his outfit—the blazer, the tie, all that. He doesn't usually dress that way. ‘I just wanted to get into the Intercontinental. I figured I wouldn't get in if I didn't dress like a Liberal.’

  In March 1996, under John Howard's leadership, the Coalition trounced Labor at the polls. This time it clearly wasn't just the beige-and-blue crowd that was voting Liberal.

  I didn't vote Liberal. Nor did I expect to like what they'd do once in power. But I am truly shocked by the damage the Liberals have inflicted on the process of reconciliation between black and white Australia, and the apparent contempt in which they hold Aboriginal land rights. I'm horrified by the government's vindictive policies towards the ABC and sickened by what it has done to our institutions of education, social justice and welfare. I am disgusted by John Howard's piss-weak, belated response to the irresponsible racial agitations of Pauline Hanson.

  My mind keeps turning to China, where the government regularly tramples over the rights of ‘national minorities’, abhors independent media, is shredding the social welfare net, and gives open slather to rabid nationalists promoting the superiority of the Chinese race.

  All I can say is, thank God we don't have to take the road to Tiananmen. If there are enough people who feel the way I do, we can just vote the bastards out next time.

  Wow Now Red Mao

  When I made my first trip to mainland China in 1980, most people wore Mao suits and wished they didn't. Over Maoism in a big way, they were dumping their once-prized collections of Mao badges and Little Red Books. They wanted polyester shirts, real jewellery and translations of John Updike.

  Fast forward ten years. The cult of Chairman Mao, sparked in the Cultural Revolution, extinguished in its aftermath, spontaneously recombusts. Mao, dead and pickled since 1976, goes platinum. Top of the pops. The Red Sun, a collection of Cultural Revolution love songs devoted to the Chairman, hits the four million sales mark nationwide. ‘The sun is the brightest, Chairman Mao the most dear; your brilliant thoughts will forever illuminate my thoughts…and guide us on our way…’ Oh yeah. The punters storm the record shops demanding more, more, more.

  Visitors flock to Mao's old Hunan home at Shaoshan, the Chinese equivalent of Graceland, in numbers not seen since the sixties and seventies at the height of his personality cult. Each day an average of fifty thousand people, nine thousand an hour at peak times, file through the Mao Zedong Memorial Hall on Tiananmen Square to gaze on the Chairman's serene, if waxy, visage—peasant under glass.

  Among the actors most in demand for live and televised appearances are those who impersonate Mao and other revolutionary leaders.

  More than a hundred different books on the Great Helmsman (A Record of Mao Zedong's Interpersonal Relations, Mao Zedong in Foreigners' Eyes, Mao Zedong and his Secretary Tian Jiaying, etc. etc.) are on sale at bookstores and stalls around the country. Taxi drivers from Canton to Beijing hang laminated photographs of the old boy from their rear-view mirrors and his portrait peers out from beauty parlour windows and neighbourhood shops. The ‘four treasures’ of the Cultrev age (Mao badges, books of quotations, postage stamps with the Chairman's picture and songbooks dedicated to him) are once again coveted collectors' items. High school students in Beijing sport Mao badges and keyrings.

  You don't ‘buy’ (mai) Mao-tifacts, incidentally; you ‘invite’ (qing) them into your home.

  This is the official explanation for Mao-mania, according to the People's Daily: it reflects ‘the profound feelings of the people for the revolutionary leaders, the Chinese Communist Party and Socialism’. It is evidence ‘of the desire to support [the party's] Four Basic Principles.’ An elderly ideologue says in another Communist Party rag that it's a righteous reaction to the ‘flood of bourgeois liberalisation on the domestic front’.

  That might be pushing things a bit. An unofficial take on it is that Mao has simply done what many powerful, charismatic men (and a few women) have done before him in China when they died: become a god.

  Remember the incident during the protest movement of 1989 in Beijing when the giant portrait of Mao hanging over Tiananmen was defaced? Immediately afterwards a giant sandstorm blew up. Gale-like winds whipped through the capital, tearing down massive tree branches and creating havoc. People said the storm was a sign from beyond the sarcophagus.

  Other stories abound: a country woman whose hom
e was haunted by evil spirits is advised by a shamaness to plaster her walls with portraits of the Chairman. She installs a life-size statue of Mao in her lounge room and never goes anywhere without wearing his badges on her chest. The haunting stops.

  Two cars crash in a fierce head-on collision. Everyone in the car with the picture of Mao hanging from the rear-view mirror escapes unscathed. Everyone in the other car dies.

  Sometimes, on the flip side of the laminated photos of Mao that taxi drivers hang from their mirrors is a picture of the late premier Zhou Enlai. Zhou, who is generally regarded with more fondness than Mao today, rarely hangs alone despite his popularity. As one driver remarks to me, ‘When it comes to safety, you're not going to put your life in the hands of Number Two, are you?’

  Mao is even perceived, somewhat inexplicably given what he did to China's bourgeoisie, as a god of wealth.

  But the Chairman Talisman theory doesn't explain the popularity of the Mao cult classics like The Red Sun. For that, you have to understand that, for the generation that grew up in the Cultural Revolution, they're the songs of their youth. While their contemporaries in the West were smoking grass and listening to The Doors, Chinese teenagers were pulling up grass (Mao considered grass bourgeois) and listening to this stuff. You wouldn't think people could get too sentimental about the worst period of political repression in recent history, but, for better or worse, it was still the time of their lives.

  Some members of the younger, Tiananmen generation, meanwhile, raise the banner of Mao as a way of taking a dig at the current leadership. As one student explained, even if the government suspects that their purpose is ironic, they can never prove it. For the Communist leadership, the spread of Mao-mania among the working classes in particular carries a disturbing message. As in the 1989 protests, when some marchers raised portraits of the Great Leader, the cult of Mao signals nostalgia for a time of guaranteed employment, nonexistent inflation and invisible corruption.