“Teddy mustn’t see what is about to happen.” – Jian Ghomeshi (host, hit CBC radio show “Q” 2007-2014), as he turned the teddy bear to face the wall every time he prepared to violently assault women.
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There is no more lively sensation than that of pain; its impressions are certain and dependable, they never deceive as may those of the pleasure that women perpetually feign and almost never experience – Marquis de Sade
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We all love a bit of role-play in bed. Come on, haven’t you playfully held down your spouse by the wrists as you made love to her?…… Given her tiny bites on the buttocks or the ankles? …….. Tied her up (gently) to the bed posts and tickled her lips? (not the ones in front of her teeth, silly)……. Spanked her butt playfully, with a serving ladle? …… Whispered into her ear, “You have no idea what I’m going to do to you when we get home”, to which she shivered and said,” Ooooh! Are you going to hurt me, Daddy?”
Of course you have. We all find these little games sexually stimulating. Strictly speaking, the above are all mild forms of BDSM – ‘Bondage, Discipline and Sado-Masochism’. In plain language – kinky sex.
Accouterments employed can be chains, steel-studded belts, whips, knives, hot wax, high heels, leather restraints and of course, role-playing in which one of the participants assumes a position of power from where he humiliates the other, who in turn loves to be hurt and degraded both, physically and psychologically.
Consider K2, the second highest peak in the world after the Everest, regarded as the scariest and physically most demanding mountain to climb, way more brutal than even the Everest. Not without reason is the K2, named The Savage by those who have attempted to scale it. I posted a what-if on K2 and here it is…
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“K2……just the bare bones of a name, all rock and ice and storm and abyss. It makes no attempt to sound human” – Mingma David Sherpa, 5-time K2 summiter.
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K2 demands the very last bit of endurance from even the best of the best alpinists and yet, among those who have been able to brave the steep icy slopes and the crashing seracs and crevices and the bone-chilling 60 mph winds, many have reported feeling a release, on finally standing on the peak, a sense that is almost like an orgasm, the ultimate high, achieved only through great physical pain.
This is what BDSM means to those who practice it.
It is all about role-play, where one partner plays the dominant role, known in BDSM jargon as the dom. The dom can be the wimp you come across in your daily life, shuffling along, his head bowed. BDSM turns him into a lion, something that he is not in his everyday life. Folk who are seriously into BDSM often choose roles that are the direct opposite of their regular persona.
The person in the submissive role, the sub, gives up control to the dom. In a similar case of opposites, very often those who love being whipped and beaten with birch behind closed doors, turn out to be alpha males in everyday life. They enjoy the release from the daily burden of command and responsibility. Subs are also the thrill seekers. The anticipation and the excitement built up (what is he going to do to me know? Ooooooh!) just makes them go crazy.
To illustrate my point – the pre-Fuhrer Adolf Hitler, the ultimate symbol of macho to his followers, regularly role-played as the sub when he made his 21-yr old niece, Geli Raubal, steal into his bedroom late in the night, back in the 1920s and perform urolagnia (“golden shower”, in today’s slang). He made her strip naked and urinate on him and then forced her to wipe her wet crotch roughly on his face as he licked furiously and came, his tiny richard twitching spasmodically.
Geli Raubal was into the face rubbing phase when one of Hitler’s trusted aides, Otto Strasser, walked into the room unannounced, with an urgent message that couldn’t wait. Strasser later reported to the OSS that he watched in horror. Stricken with shame, Geli Raubal told her mother her uncle was a horrible monster and later, unable to live with it, she took her own life with Hitler’s revolver, aged only 23.
How do I know Hitler had a tiny twiddle-de-dum? I don’t but I think he did. Take the size of Donald Trump’s thingamabob, for instance. Revealed to the world for posterity by Stormy Daniels, except that Trump’s has a “mushroom” head as per Stormy. Just like Hitler, Trump likes to be a sub, as per the alleged 2016 Moscow Ritz-Carlton pee tape. Many say the pee tape was a fabrication designed to smear Trump. Fuck ‘em. Trump is unsmearable. I don’t have the evidence but I believe the pee tape story completely. Trump is perfectly capable of such filthy behaviour.
Moral : If you are a BDSM sub, you very likely have a teeny-weeny tiddly-widdly.
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I once witnessed a very powerful Indian politician prostrating himself in complete submission before a freakish, obese, afro-haired, utterly phoney Hindu holy man called Sai Baba. The politician reached out and placed SaiBaba’s foot on the top of his head as he knelt in front of the guy and Sai Baba did absolutely nothing to stop him. I could sense that maybe in a way, the politico was a sub, in the midst of a kind of role-play of his own and that was his release from the tiresome exercise of called ‘playing God’ with ordinary Indians. It was not a sexual release but a way to cope with guilt.
“Doesn’t he know that this funny-looking holy man creep is a two-bit phoney?” I wondered to myself at the time. Now I have a better understanding of why he did what he did.
And then there is the switch. The creepy holy man reportedly often randomly picked one of the young white male devotees who lived in the commune (ashram) with him, ushered him into his inner sanctum, then got on his knees and blew them. If true, it was a classic example of someone who switched back and forth between dom and sub.
Now here was a guy who was really having a ball. Switching from dom to sub and back to dom and then to sub again. It is for the same reason why we love to munch on a pickled gherkin between bites on a hamburger. The tingle of the sudden change in taste is exhilarating. Same thing with switching in BDSM, I guess.
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BDSM goes as far back as slavery, the first recorded instance of the practice for sexual pleasure pain being a miniature bedside table sized sculpture (above) found at Giza, dating back to around 2500BC Egypt, possibly during the reign of the legendary Pharaoh, Khufu, builder of the great pyramid of Giza. I have to say the jury is out on whether the above depicted guy was in a consensual BDSM member of the nobility or simply a slave being punished.
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Seeking dominance and submission has been in our DNA all along. BDSM is graphically described in the 4th Century BC Indian philosopher, Vatsayana’s epic Kama Sutra. Even today, one can find carvings showing erotic flagellation and bondage in ancient temples such as the one at Khajuraho in Central India.
Indians have always been horny bastards. Oh yeah.
The BDSM that makes the news channels is however, way rougher and goes by the generic label Rough and Kinky Sex. It is so rough in fact that most of us would find it disgusting and completely unacceptable. Organized medicine calls BDSM a mental and behavioral disorder that needs to be treated. BDSM therefore has an unfavorable social stigma attached to it.
In case you have BDSM leanings, turns out that you needn’t be concerned about being considered weird due to the stigma. In fact you might even feel like celebrating. A 2013 study titled “Psychological Characteristics of BDSM Practitioners“ by researchers Andreas A. J. Wismeijer and Marcel A. L. M. van Assen, published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine, concluded that BDSM practitioners are psychologically healthier and less neurotic than those with a more sedate sex life. It observed that practitioners are generally more secure than the general population and folk who get their rocks off through BDSM, tend to be more extroverted, more gifted with creativity and intelligence and more open to new ideas and experimentation.
The above study however makes two things clear. One, that the apparent psychological pluses in being a BDSM practitioner apply more to the doms rather than the subs and second, BDSM is healthy only when it is consensual. Otherwise, modern psychiatry would label you a sexual sado-psychopath.
That means if your partner says, “Ouch, thanks, I just came”, you are a well-adjusted, happy guy but if she says,” Ugh, keep your hands off me, you sleazeball” then, well, you are a sleazeball.
My colleague, Kenny, 40 and still single, is a devastatingly charming Jamaican creole who trolls the St-Laurent and St-Denis cafes and bars every weekend, looking for ‘conquests’. He succeeds often and even takes a woman home on the very first meeting sometimes. Kenny is into light BDSM, like the fun scenarios I was talking about in para-1 of this piece. From the frequent bruises and bite marks on his neck and arms that he sports like badges, on Monday mornings, it looks as if he has many converts. Last weekend things might have gotten a bit outa hand. Monday, Kenny was heard yelping ‘ouch! ugh!’ while taking a leak in the locker rooms.
History has shown us that kinky behavior and famous personalities are identical twins. The English author, James Boswell, indulged in an isotope of BDSM known as arborophilia. He liked to rub his crotch roughly against tree trunks, often lacerating his penis and testicles before reaching orgasm. The explorer, Sir Richard Burton, liked to be flogged by his mistresses, while Gregori Rasputin wanted his immense member tied tightly around its base with a string that cut right through and left a bleeding welt. Fyodor Dostoevski was so involved in sado-masochism that he was known as the Russian Marquis de Sade.
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The entertainment world is replete with kinky folk too. Angelina Jolie used to love feeling the blade of a knife on her skin before Brad Pitt happened and Lady Gaga has sex in a see-through nun costume with crosses piercing her nipples, while Britney Spears is all whips, paddles and handcuffs. The biggest business in Hollywood is the BDSM paraphernalia business.
Around 10 years back, one more name got added to the stellar cast of celebrity BDSM practitioners, Canada’s crown prince of cool – radio show host, Jian Ghomeshi, whose daily show ‘Q’ on CBC was broadcast over 200 radio stations in North America.
When Ghomeshi was a little boy in England, he had a teddy bear he cherished. Most times, Teddy would sit on a low shelf by his bed, the glass eyes gazing down at him. As he later grew into adulthood, invariably before he lay his women down and began violently assaulting them, he would take the teddy bear and turn its face toward the wall, saying, “Teddy shouldn’t have to see what is about to happen.” And then he would proceed to beat, bite, scratch, punch and pinch them black and blue.
First, about the guy. I am not well acquainted with his show but most Canadians have heard him on ‘Q’. His style is very impressive, no question about it. Jian Ghomeshi was a charming and charismatic host and listening to him interview a female celebrity gave one the sense that she was about to have an orgasm, the way she gushed.
Ghomeshi came across as a perceptive interviewer, his tone easy-going but no-nonsense, honest, professional and intelligent, never snooty or condescending. He could hold his own and put many a cranky celeb jerk in his place with good-humored straight talk that turned them around and made them behave with more restraint as the interview progressed Remember the Billy Bob Thornton interview? Billy Bob Thornton – what a prime fucking jerk). Here it is…..
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Before the BDSM revelations, my impressions of Ghomeshi had always been positive, even though I didn’t go for the kind of topics that his show was famous for – dissemination of arts and entertainment events. He had built a career out of sounding like someone you could trust. He knew his subject and he knew his audience and he knew how to speak to them.
Ghomeshi’s fall off the radio stardom pedestal came in 2014, after revelations that he lead a double life, at work – a suave, debonair, charismatic genius and at home – a violent monster. Over the next few months, the Toronto Star approached Ghomeshi with allegations that he had sexually assaulted at least three young women half his age, grabbing them by the hair, punching, slapping and slamming them against the wall during and prior to having sex with them.
Given his legendary mastery in exercising control over any conversation and that famous honey-garlic voice of his, Ghomeshi might have led the girls to believe that the sex would be just a little bit kinky and fun, before he revealed his true self.
It finally hit the fan when one woman, probably beaten up and then jilted, went to Ghomeshi’s employers, CBC and spilt the beans. This in itself wouldn’t have been sufficient, except that a number of other young women followed suit and revealed the gory details of Ghomeshi’s BDSM picadillos to the Star and other media outlets, including his employers.
Ghomeshi has claimed all along that the rough sex was consensual. The fact that none of the women went to the police after the attacks, with one of them even going back multiple times for more, bolsters his claim. It is a strong reason why he got away with it.
Jian Ghomeshi’s dismissal was part, the sexual thing and part, the resentment that key figures at CBC felt against him for playing the preening goose that laid the golden eggs (which admittedly, he really did) and treading on senior toes like an ‘arrogant tyrant’ as many at CBC saw him to be.
At the end of the day, the question still remains – why? What gave Jian Ghomeshi his Jekyll and Hyde personality? Why did he enjoy inflicting pain?
Could it be that when he was a little child in his little bed in England, he frequently turned Teddy to face the wall so that the little stuffed bear wouldn’t see things it was not supposed to see?
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