At a glance this sign made me think I was outside an S&M or fetish shop, which would have not been uncharacteristic for the part of town it was in (Roosevelt Avenue in the 80s, I think). Alas, it’s just a pet store, not a dominatrix supply shop. I think the gaudy gold backing further contributed some to my assumption that this was nothing so innocent as a pet shop.
50% Off Leather Harnesses Collars & Leashes
I was talking about S&M a little on one of the payphone calls from a couple of weeks ago. I don’t remember if I posted the audio or not but I made the call from a payphone near Bond Street. If my memory is correct Bond was at one point the appropriately named street for public meetings of the Eulenspiegel Society, a group which promotes education and understanding of the BDSM/fetish scene. I don’t think they still hold their meetings there but I went to one single meeting in 1991 or maybe 1992 after repeatedly seeing ads for the weekly event on the pack pages of either The Village Voice or maybe New York Press, or both. My interest in such things today has completely evaporated but back then I was interested enough that I purchased Robert J. Stoller’s Pain and Passion and, a few years later, Bill Thompson’s Sadomasochism. Pain and Passion might be the very first book I ever bought in New York.
S&M was also a recurring topic of discussion on the Apology Line, where one of the callers (was it Johnny T.?) described his experiences in that scene. It might have been he who set me straight on what the scene is about. In response to a woman who said she was interested in S&M as a way to get out her aggressions he replied, diplomatically but with some disdain for her ignorance, that contrary to superficial appearances it doesn’t really work like that. By its simplest definition a dominant/slave relationship is about trust, boundaries, and limitations. It is not about unloading anger or manifesting misandry by releasing pent up aggressions. That is better known as rape. I don’t remember gleaning such a succinct insight about from the Stoller book, and I don’t think I ever got too far with Thompson’s work.
That’s funny, I just looked up “pain and passion stoller” on Amazon. It helpfully corrected my search, changing it to “pain and passion stroller”, bringing up a bunch of baby strollers. I guess an Amazon algorithm thinks people might want to get their kids started early on the S&M thing.
I have looked for this book on occasion to see if it is considered, well, anything in the realm of sex studies. At present it is listed on eBay with as asking price of $158, but searching for copies of this book that have actually sold returns nothing.
Damn, looks like Stoller died soon after Pain and Passion was published, in a car wreck right outside his house.
The one meeting of the Eulenspiegel Society I attended was funny to me. A woman stood up front wearing a collar around her neck with a leash tethered to her Master sitting nearby. She said she was a corporate drone by day but that coming to the BDSM scene was her reality, and she could not express how happy she was to be there. I did not believe her.
Similar comments were delivered by leather-clad doms and I think a sub woman was wearing some kind of Strawberry Shortcake outfit. I remember noticing the audience was not exactly uneasy, just a little restless through these prepared speeches. That changed when an obese woman took the stage and knelt over a bench. One of the doms approached and started gently slapping her ass with a whip. For the 30 or 40 seconds during which this took place the audience was absolutely captivated, and silent. This was what we came for, right? The whipping never intensified or reached a level where she would reasonably react with verbal utterances or groans. It was a full-sized whip but he might as well have been hitting her with a proverbial wet noodle. I was not as spellbound by this whipping as everyone else in the audience appeared to be. If I was I would not have noticed how captivated everyone else was. I hate to say it but the gentle whipping and the leather and the childlike costumes all seemed kind of comical to me.
I never attended another of these free weekly Eulenspiegel Society meetings, which I understand are still conducted these days. I came to understand and respect the scene about as well as one could without actually being a part of it, but there is nothing there for me.
I’ve only been with one woman who wanted that sort of thing. She told me to slap her ass, harder and harder, and man I was hitting her mother fucking hard for a long time until I told her I had to stop because it was hurting my precious playing-playing hands. She accepted that reason and kissed my hands a lot, suggesting we go shopping for paddles and rope at a fetish store. She was way into being spanked and probably would have loved a paddle, but we never got there.
Things ended badly with us, as I should have expected when agreeing to have an affair with a married woman. She contacted me a couple of years ago on Facebook. We have several mutual friends, and throughout or correspondence it seemed to me that she thought she was talking to someone else, to one of those mutual friends with whom she also fucked around. She badly wanted out of her marriage back then, or so she said. As far as I can tell she and her husband have stayed together all these years.
