He fastens a red blindfold over my eyes. It feels medical, like a vet putting the blinkers on a horse. He pushes my hand into a strap, and pulls it tight. My arm fat can’t breathe. He touches my shoulder lightly. A mother walks past with her children in the bright Melville sunshine.
“We won’t go into that shop,” the mother says firmly.
It’s only because I’m so close to normality – mothers and children and car guards – that I keep from panicking as he demonstrates the leather, and then the rubber whips. The leather pounds my flesh, the rubber cuts like cat’s teeth. The skin of my shoulders either side of my shirt is a mass of red marks.
Afterwards, my afternoon dominator, owner of Kinx BDSM shop and collarme.co.za founder Dave*, shows me a modern chastity belt: silver and shiny in the shape of a banana, with a small padlock at the top.
A man cannot get an erection when he is wearing this device, but he can relieve himself through a small hole in the tip.
“A submissive will take this off only when his dominant partner says he can,” says Dave. This could be as infrequently as once every three weeks. And even then it might just be to clean it and put it back on.
Kinx also sells plastic chastity belts, in case you are travelling and need to go through a metal detector. As a submissive, your dominant partner controls more than just your genitals. If you let them, they control your life.
“(Dominance) is not about sex. It’s about power… it’s more than what happens in the bedroom,” says Dave.
The dominant partner may order for the submissive at a restaurant or choose their clothes. The submissive may have to ask for permission to go to the bathroom.
According to Dave, 80 percent of South Africa’s 10 000-strong BDSM community is submissive. Many submissives need to be responsible, accountable and in control in their day-to-day lives. So in their personal or sexual time they prefer to unwind and not have to make the decisions.
Dave is a dominant. He was 13 when he first started fantasising about bondage. “It’s just who I was, not something I grew into,” he says.
He looks like your average middle-aged man, short with floppy brown hair.
But his pale green eyes flicker mischievously. “There are people who want to live a life run by someone else,” he says. “In the modern world people are told to be assertive and dominant, but a lot of people are not that way. Unfortunately, the real world does not make space for that.”
The term BDSM covers a spectrum of activities including bondage and discipline, dominance and submission and sadomasochism. Getting your nipples pinched or being held down is the lower end of the sadomasochism spectrum. The higher end would be being tied to a pole and whipped with a ball whip – a whip with a wire ball on the end. Mild bondage could involve tying your hubby up with his navy tie, but the higher end extends as far as full bondage (Gimp) suits, where the person is encased like a worm in a leather cocoon.
There are two things that keep BDSM enthusiasts coming back for more. The adrenalin you get from being scared and the endorphins that pump through your body to combat the pain.
“There are no terrible side effects, you get over the bruises and you do it again and again,” says Dave.
Although BDSM is seen by many “vanillas” (those who are not into the lifestyle) as being a perversion similar to drugs, Dave describes it as an innate part of a person’s sexuality.
Relationships between secret BDSMers and vanillas, he says, are doomed to unhappiness because one party’s sexual needs will never be fully satisfied.
“It’s not just something we do, it’s who we are… You are brought up to think that’s wrong… but if you are doing that with your partner, who the hell has the right to tell you you can’t consent?”
Another misconception is that the relationships are brutal.
Dave believes they nurture trust between partners.
“You become emotionally intimate much quicker than in a conventional relationship because of the dynamics you play with… When taking people to our (BDSM) parties for the first time, I’ve been told by so many people: ‘I had no idea it was caring like this.’
“People do get hurt,” says Dave, somewhat offhandedly.
He recalls whipping a man who had just come out of a long relationship and wanted one strike for each year that relationship had lasted. The man was loving it, so he threw his head back – and got whacked with the end of the whip on top of his head. It wasn’t pleasant, but all he had was a nasty lump.
For true believers, the bruises are just part of the fun.
“We wear our bruises like badges of honour… (We say to each other): ‘Look what I got last night, it was great,’” says Dave.
Collarme.co.za holds monthly meetings where there is a speaker who talks on one aspect of play. Visit collarme.co.za or the kinx.co.za for more information. - The Star
* Not his real name