In Madison, It's Easy to Be Kinky: The Players (Part One of a Three part series)

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Over the course of her long marriage to a classic passive-aggressive who invariably found a way to saddle her with all the tough decisions, Frances, a Middleton physical therapist, thought seldom of what used to be known as S&M. When she did think of it, she shuddered with revulsion. Perverts with whips and chains hurting one another for pleasure? Maybe not!

But then her classic passive-aggressive proved himself capable of making a major decision -- to abandon her. After a period of crippling despair, she did the modern thing and began trying to meet someone in AOL chatrooms. She started up a correspondence with a guy whose tone became increasingly domineering, and found that his decisiveness, after all those years of passive-aggression, thrilled her viscerally as well as intellectually. His sending her a passage from The Story of O, the notorious French novel of sadomasochism, briefly took her aback -- and then only increased her interest in him.

Ashamed, she tried to avoid the chatroom where she knew he lurked, but it was futile. Looking around frantically on line for explanations of what she was feeling, she discovered takeninhand.com, where women seemed -- how was it possible? -- to revel in what they unanimously, unashamedly, described as their natural delight in erotic submission. She read The Healthy Submissive by Yaldah Tovah and felt herself on the road to Damascus. There could be no turning back now.

Her chatroom man, though, was an ocean away. She needed in real time, up close and personal, what he was giving her on line.

She got wind of and arranged to meet Sir Keith, a dominant Madisonian said to delight in helping women like herself realize their fantasies of erotic submission. Terrified, expecting him to be clad all in black leather, to be multiply pierced, to exude malevolence, she made excuses to cancel two meetings with him. When finally she was able to muster the gall to meet him, she discovered that gentleness and solicitousness were what he exuded. She'd met more fearsome associate professors of botany!

At 43, Frances felt as though she'd found herself, and the self she'd found was...kinky. She liked being blindfolded in the bedroom, reveled in the delicate balance of pleasure and fear her powerlessness engendered. In the right setting, it thrilled her to be addressed as slut.

Around the same time, just down the road, the emotionally fragile Hannah, a generation Frances's junior, was falling into the clutches of a young self-described extreme sadist. She'd known from mid-adolescence, when she checked out of her local library Bound to Be Free, an extensive consideration of BDSM (as S&M had become known) by the psychotherapist Charles Moser and his prophetically named BDSM practitioner collaborator Jj Madeson, that she wanted to be owned, but her early boyfriends just didn't get it. They thought she wanted to be humiliated or even abused, though in fact she wanted, in her way, only to be loved. By the time she turned 21, she was an anorexic self-harmer. She couldn't look anyone in the eye. Her feet never touched the ground, but only eggshells. Sometimes it seemed as though she might never stop crying.

Karcus, meanwhile, had known that kink appealed to him from the day he accompanied his foraging-for-comics brother to the State Street bookstore in which he discovered kinky porn. Discovering the secret cache of the stuff he gradually amassed, his mother shamed him into renouncing it, and he tried his best to do The Right Thing. He got a degree in computer networking and became engaged, and spent his workday in a cubicle, performing remedial tasks, secure in the knowledge that it would lead to his becoming a project manager in a few years.

But then, clearly envisioning an older version of himself in the same sort of agony that Kevin Spacey's Lester Burnham suffered in American Beauty, he abruptly broke off his engagement, got himself multiple piercings in his most intimate place, and left American Family in favor of a job at the Blue Lotus Tattoo and Piercing Lounge on Odana Street. He asked local dominants to instruct him in their respective specialties, and did a lot of reading. When Mistress Jade, the most visible figure in Madison kink, wearied of putting on a regular stage show called Kinked, he picked up the slack, coming up with the idea of the more participatory Sabbat de Sade.

Hannah became his slave, subject to a set of rules to which both agreed. He would expect nothing from her sexually, but she would otherwise do his bidding. Aside from that she paint her fingernails red and dye her hair black, his demands weren't very different from those an adoring parent might have thought to make -- be in bed before midnight when you have work the next morning. Go back to school. Learn to respect yourself.

When they played -- that is, put on exhibitions of her submission to him -- he scrupulously honored her safe word, her signal that she was frightened or in a kind of distress she wasn't savoring. He never inflicted more pain than she found exhilarating to endure, and never failed to cuddle her tenderly as she descended from the Endorphin high the pain had induced. Onlookers described their public interactions as no less beautiful than intense.

When, after a year and a half, he told her it was time for her to cease to be his, they formally renounced their earlier promises to one another, and he gently pushed her into the arms of her new boyfriend. Having, in her view, essentially saved her life.

Some sadist.

End Part One. Come back next Wednesday for the second part of this three part series.

Part Two

Part Three