All dressed up — in latex and dog collars
Media often provide a first introduction to the fetish world. Some fetishists cite comic books, sci-fi movies and fantasy art like that of Frank Frazetta, famous for his hugely muscled barbarian men and voluptuous, mostly naked women.
“I was 8 years old and up late and saw a movie on HBO,” Melissa says. “A man, fully clothed, spanked a partially nude woman in a hallway and it spoke to me. I thought, there is something about this I like. I have to know more about it.”
The Internet has been a powerful force in the mainstreaming of fetish. For example, the day Rita got a connection, she typed “spanking” into a search engine and realized for the first time “that I was not the only person in the world.”
“Dude, it started off with, like a 300-baud modem,” James, a 27-year-old electrical engineering student from Knoxville, Tenn., tells me. “Even as a little kid, before I even knew anything about sex, I used to really like tying people up. Then my dad went back to school to study computer science and we had like, an old 286 computer. It took five minutes to download one picture! But I could look up whatever I wanted.”
Once a taboo is overcome, a new world opens. “You cannot turn back,” James says.
“That’s true. You can’t go back to vanilla sex once you taste this,” agrees Anastasia Pierce, a professional fetish model, actress and movie producer based in Los Angeles. “It’s a very adrenaline thing. You try stuff constantly and go, 'Oh, this feels good! I never tried that!'”
But as much as fetishists love what they do, many express mixed feelings that fetish has gone mainstream. Fashion layouts in Vogue and big budget movies like "The Matrix" use fetish clothing, and thousands of “goth” kids show up at clubs dressed in fetish attire.
“Yes, they’re being rebels,” Pierce says sarcastically of the young arrivistes.
On the other hand, many fetishists I talk to here have been among the most thoughtful people about their sex lives I have ever encountered. They have to be.
“What a lot of people in the vanilla world do not understand is that this entails an extreme amount of trust,” a “lifestyle master” who works as a real estate agent tells me. Part of his job is to dish out just the right amount of pain to his girlfriend. “It is a trust that goes beyond what a lot of people in everyday vanilla relationships have. Left and right they are lying to each other, doing things behind each other's back. A lot of that does not happen here.”
Abuse, degradation and love
Some say the very nature of participating in fetishes like bondage, sadomasochism and humiliation requires a level of communication between partners that many other couples never experience.
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“A lot of times you come home after a long day and you’re tired and you really do not feel like spending 30 minutes tying somebody up,” says James, the engineering student. “Then it’s like, can we just have sex?”
“What we do is a very big part of our lives,” Bob explains from behind his leather hood. “But it is not strictly this. We have a normal life. We have [regular] sex. This is part of our sexual relationship but it is not who we are. We are very much in love.”
His wife, Melissa, describes one way they express that love: “I put him in his place. I verbally abuse him. I degrade him. I spit on him, urinate on him, absolutely anything I can think of to take that smug little look off his face.”
And then she looks at Bob and they both laugh the warm laugh of affection.
Brian Alexander, a California-based freelance writer and MSNBC.com's Sexploration columnist, is traveling around the country to find out how Americans get sexual satisfaction. Alexander, also a Glamour contributing editor, is chronicling his work in the MSNBC.com special report "America Unzipped" and in an upcoming book for Harmony, an imprint of Crown Publishing. In the next installment in this series, he ventures into the world of online exhibitionism.
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