First some Newspaper articles. Thanks to a friend in Philadelphis for putting these into circulation.
Okay first the facts. For folks who don’t want to jump links, there are precious few. Richard Benjamin is a 67 year old retired college professor from Montreal. For years he’s been sneaking down to New York City on a pretext and playing fetish games without his wife knowing about it. He was at a small BDSM joint that’s fairly well known, has been open for a while and featured in a documentary called The Nutcracker Suite. His particular fetish was to be put in predicament bondage and left alone. This isn’t a public play space like Power Exchange in S.F. or Crucible here in D.C. but a house where clients go to play with Pro-dommes for pay.
A 30 year old domme named Taki Noriko had him in predicament bondage. The details are a little unclear because two accounts mention a “pain machine” and a contraption called “the wheel,” but none of the published accounts actually describe anything that sounds like a machine or a wheel. The details seem to be that he was put in a hood, wearing nipple clamps hands bound behind his back and a leather collar around his neck. The collar was connected to a rope that was attached to a hook in the ceiling. He was wearing women’s high heeled shoes. He was under just a little tension, but not so much as to put him in any danger. The Domme was checking on him every twenty minutes, and he was fine after the first check, but after the second he had slipped out of one of the shoes and choked to unconsciousness. He was taken to St. Vincent’s hospital, didn’t die and eventually revived. His wife had no idea about his BDSM life and was shocked. He gave an exclusive to the N.Y. Post in which he said he was “desperately trying to break his addiction. “
“I don’t want to go to the clubs anymore,” Benjamin said.
“I’m trying to learn to control myself and my emotions. I’ve seen doctors to help me,” he said, adding that he’s been unable to control his desires “from very early on in my life.”
Without editorializing, I am going to comment that there was a lot of talk about pain and so forth, but I’m not actually seeing that. This looks more like predicament bondage than anything that had much to do with pain, at least until it failed.
So initially I have three thoughts…
I think most of us are going to say “WTF was she thinking” but let’s go a bit deeper. A lot of us are also going to say “that’s not our community.” Really the older businessman or academic dressing up in women’s clothing and being tortured by a sexy young domme for money is such a stereotype, I think many of us have trouble associating it with what we do. Certainly I have more easy seeing Noriko as somebody I’d know or hang out with than Benjamin. And the mea culpa and “I’m going to change” sort of removes all sympathy. I think there’s grounds for saying “this isn’t my world.” I know prodommes who work at clubs, but I’m never going to go to a club where I have to pay money to get a domme, or a sub, other than maybe as a lark.
But let’s go a little deeper. This is BDSM related, and it certainly is fetish, and it certainly reflects on what it is we do. If you’re going to embrace prodommes or other sexworkers as people you know and associate with, then you need to be willing to accept that their clients are in that environment too, even when they’re sort of stereotypes.
So that takes us to the big issue. “What the fuck was she thinking?” I think that’s a provocative question, but I don’t have enough information to answer. On the face of it, she left a sub/client in a situation that was designed to be a serious predicament, suspended just barely able to stand with a collar on, and bound. Obviously that’s just going to seem wildly irresponsible to most of us. The idea of even being out of line of sight, nevermind only checking ever twenty minutes, seems chilling to me.
But there are a lot of things I don’t know. I didn’t see the negotiations. I don’t know if this guy said “hey do something to me” and his domme was just irresponsible, or if he said “look, I have looked high and low to find a place they will do this risky thing” and somebody finally said yes. Being left alone was the guy’s kink. You could say it’s irresponsible to meet a kink that could kill someone. But first, you have to consider “is it better if they do it with me with some supervision rather than at home where it’s more dangerous but not my responsibility.” While the answer is certainly legally yes, I don’t know ethically and morally. I’ve done some edgeplay that was very dangerous, admittedly and with full knowledge of the level of danger involved. And yes, it involved my endangering someone else, not myself. I could have said “no.” I could not go into those areas.
So if you look at it from that perspective, I think it’s provocative. I just don’t know. I don’t know what the room looked like, how much it seemed like if there was trouble there would be noise, how precarious the setup really seemed, and how freakish the accident was. I just don’t.
That said, I think that if you are taking risks that aren’t core to the fetish, you are a fool. In this case, sneak a peak. I’m in favor of Doms cheating to make things safer. It’s the illusion of danger we want, not the reality. But there is a point where the reality is the thing that is making it exciting, and it’s hard to go around that. I will also add that most of the time the thing that submissives expect from us is safety. They are counting on us to be older, wiser, safer, and to make things fucking exciting while not really putting them at risk. I have to wonder in this case.
But that’s not the thing that really provokes me…
Somewhere in the back of my brain something is screaming “where was the fucking Dungeon Monitor?” And of course there wasn’t one, because he place wasn’t a public club. And that brings a whole realm of things slewing into perspective.
The reason that Benjamin doesn’t seem like a “fellow player” to me (and I have good friends who I respect who are male subs) is that he seems to come from another world. And he does.
He comes from a world and an age where kink was something to be ashamed of . A deep burning shame to eat at you because it must be wrong and abnormal, to gnaw at you like a cancer through probably more than fifty years of life. I think that’s the thing that’s really sort of sad and dismal.
Look I respect choice. A lot of players I know don’t talk about it to colleagues, parents, many of their friends. That’s fine. I mean ultimately it’s your personal life, and it’s not even appropriate to put that on the table in a lot of situations, nevermind necessary. But when they move in the world of kink, they have access to resources and people to make them safe, and put them into an environment that us supportive and unashamed.
Fetish is blossoming as a culture. Everybody knows about it, and in educated urban culture as many people think it’s cool and trendy as not, though I have a feeling that Benjamin’s tired old fetish might come across a little passé to them.
It’s sad to me that this sixty seven year old guy lived most of his life feeling his sexual outlets were a terrible secret that could destroy is life. Married, raised kids, and had a career feeling he was hiding something. Not that he should have advertised it at work, or even to his friends. But that he was ashamed for most of his life and not in a good way. That’s sad to me.
I don’t know. From reputation this club had decent rep, so he found good people and got unlucky. But it still seems chilling to me to never be okay with yourself in that regard.
I feel bad for everybody concerned, rather sad it happened. It doesn’t give fetish a good name in any sense of the word. I feel bad for the girl, at worst she was irresponsible and shouldn’t have been running scenes. I feel bad for Benjamin who got fucked up desperately trying to fulfill a kink fantasy he was ashamed up. I feel bad for his wife and kids who didn’t know because people of that age were expected to pair and marry without regard to sexual excitement or fulfillment. I dunno, just seems like a rotten thing all around to me and glad it wasn’t worse.
Just seems to suck to go through life denying and being ashamed of something other people do all the time and have fun at.
I got nothing funny to follow that with. Afterjoke will return later this week, in a new easy open can…
It seems really irresponsible to me. I just don’t see how you could do that. I don’t even mean morals or anything, it just seems really stupid. I’e done BCP, and some rpetty serious bondage and I would never want my Dom not to be watching. I just wouldn’t do it. Maybe sure if I were a pro. But you would have to be paying me a lot to take that kind of stupid risk. Enough to retire.
Well i gotta go with i wasn’t there. It does sound very stupid and unreasonable but i kind of think maybe it made more sense if you were there. Think of all the play you’ve ever done, and if some part of it went wrong how badly it would reflect on everything you didn’t do. Sounds bad tho. i don’t envy the poor guy having to tell his wife after that, he’d been keeping up the illusion. Sure we can say he shoulda been open and honest but how many of us tell all to all. Mother, Father, sibs, former classmates. i’m public about it with friends but there are people at home from High School who don’t know and probably never will.