Americana If you go down to the dungeon today,
you're in for a big surprise. Louis Theroux on why S&M is big business in
New York's bondage bars
In her publicity photos, dressed in a black
leather bustier and dog-collar, she gazes at you with a kind of `you miserable
worm' look in her eyes. But in person, Ava Taurel, the eminent Manhattan
dominatrix, appears very different. Rumpled black cotton skirt and jacket, grey
hair, big glasses. More Betty Boothroyd than Betty Page.
There's a
reason for this. It turns out Ava's dominatrix business has fallen on hard times
and she's less and less involved in the work. When she started out in the 1980s,
Ava was a pioneer. The first to advertise in the Yellow Pages and the first to
provide clients with a portfolio of her different mistresses with check-lists of
their sexual interests.
But now, with S&M in the mainstream, and
public dungeons springing up across Manhattan, boasting ever more arcane gear "
one features `A Saint Andrew's Cross, Catherine Wheel and full suspension bars',
another advertises `authentic reproductions of Spanish Inquisition torture
devices' " Ava's more modest equipment and premises look decidedly passe.
`I was like the queen of the town,' Ava says, recalling the time before
Madonna's book Sex helped bring the joys of spanking to a wider public, and
before the film Body Of Evidence made `nipple clamps' a household phrase, `I had
four different places and I paid an enormous rent and enormous advertising fees.
And then it began to decline.' It seems to me that Ava is the Gorbachov of the
S&M glasnost, a reformer overtaken by the pace of the changes she helped
start.
Ava still has an enviable stable of dominatrices, as testified by
the fat album of photos her clients use to pick their ideal playmate. `Rosemary
works for the police department,' Ava is saying of a red-haired woman. `She
specialises in ritualistic domination and foot worship. . . Maria is a housewife
in New Jersey who can take a very strong spanking. . .' But her two kinky love
chambers " one `non-threatening' for beginners, the other more hardcore, with
stocks, flogging board, spanking horse, a selection of 20 different types of
whip, and a kind of crane for dangling people `and of course be whipped while
dangling' " appear a little on the unimaginative side compared to what's on
offer elsewhere.
More typical of the current vogue for bondage in New
York is a club called The Vault. I've been curious about The Vault for almost a
year now, ever since a cousin of mine went and said he saw a little old man in a
cage, dressed in drag with a whip stuck up his arse. `I had to go and throw up,'
my cousin said, though he later qualified this to `almost had to throw up'.
But on a recent Wednesday night, the club is nowhere near capacity and
there are no little old men in sight. It's just a dank basement with porno films
showing on TV sets everywhere. `Where's the dungeon?' I make the mistake of
asking someone.
`You're in it.' Sure enough, the back of the room opens
on to a variety of weird chambers, corridors and small jails.
In one
room I see the most surprising sight yet.Well, it would have been surprising had
I not been forewarned of the phenomenon known colloquially as `weenie wacking'.
A moustached man lies back, straddled by a young woman in a fetish top who
occasionally slaps his face, while not more than 15 feet away, three clothed
middle-aged men look on, masturbating.
Can this really be legal? Yes it
can. Weenie wacking is kosher at The Vault, the only rule being, according to
Mistress (and bartender) Bridgit, `I don't let 'em wack off on my bar'.
The co-owner of The Vault, Janet, is another of these middle-aged
matronly types. In faded jeans and black polo neck, she looks like a friend's
mum. I ask her and Bridgit about some of their more interesting clients and
their demands, and they reel off a list. One man wants to have smoke blown in
his face because it reminds him of his nanny. Another likes to be stepped on.
Then there's Danny the Wonder Pony (no relation, presumably, of the children's
TV character Champion the Wonder Horse), who likes to be saddled and ridden
around with a bit made out of the inner soles of women's shoes. And Roberta, `a
well-known author, who is male actually, who wears baby dolls and a grey wig and
puts large objects in his body'.
The stories notwithstanding, it's the
un-strangeness of the whole scene that strikes me. OK, maybe it doesn't help
that I'm here on a slow night, but it occurs to me that the scary illicit nature
of bondage is a big part of what makes it erotic, and that if S&M is just
the next in a line of yuppie lifestyle fads, like transcendental meditation and
jogging, then it loses a big part of its charm.
Which, I suppose, is
what Ava meant when she explained why she was getting out of the business to
study for a PhD in criminal justice, of all things. `The experience {of being a
dominatrix} in the beginning was pure.
Now it's been damaged by the
media, by stereotyping, by anyone wanting to do it. . . It's not just this
business, it's any business. The moment you start commercialising, you kill
something.' Or at least, if not kill, you give it a good thrashing.