Why BDSM is innately conservative

My friend Evie complains that I never want to go out and have fun anymore.

“You’ve become a boring old stick-in-the-mud.”

And I’m left wondering: is she right?

My Woke Woman invited me to go with her to her Free-Love-Eco-Marxist commune and I said no. “Come on,” she pleaded, “it will be fun!”

And now Evie wants me to go with her to the Torture Garden, which is Europe’s biggest fetish and body-art event. “Come on, it will be fun,” she says. “There will be dancing and wild scary women!”

It’s not the wild scary women that worry me — it’s the fat bald bearded guys in pink latex tutus with nipple clamps that wag their tongues at you that scare me.

Friends always want me to have fun. They get drunk and end up singing along to pop songs into empty wine bottles. Recently, I was handed a bottle and commanded to sing along to “Don’t Leave Me This Way” by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes. “Come on, it’s fun” they insisted. Really?

To tempt me to come out Evie shows me an outfit I could wear. It looks like a black rubber kilt, with a leather chained harness and a leather gimp mask. Call me old-fashioned but I’m more of a Brooks Brothers than Mad Max kind of guy. The fetish look is not a good look for men of my age; we just end up looking silly and sleazy at the same time.

No thanks, I tell her. I don’t want to stand around like some old perv!

But it’s a room full of pervs, she says. It’s a chance to let your inner perv come out and take a bow.

I can’t figure out why my young friends always want me to go to things like the Torture Garden, Killing Kittens and the Femdom Ball. (Is it a case of let’s freak out the old square?) The Femdom is an annual event that describes itself as a place where “the Femdom glitterati come together to revel in the power and beauty of dominant women.” Where I come from, that’s called marriage.

When I was first invited to the Femdom Ball, I thought, why not? You can’t always say no to Life and new experiences. I decided what the hell, I’ll give it a go — and then discovered I’d have to go as my female friend’s “slave” and wear a leather mask and a collar and a leash. I would not be allowed to speak or sit on the furniture and would have to keep my eyes to the ground and only speak when spoken to for the whole evening! That’s fun?

Evie insists that I have to go with her to the Torture Garden and says in a conspiratorial whisper, “You know you want to.”

And for a moment, I thought, maybe she’s right. Maybe inside this shell of sobriety and moral seriousness, there’s a crazed 250-pound transsexual leather fetishist with a penis gag in his mouth wanting to come out and shout: Hello world! This is Me! Love it or shove it!

Hmm, I don’t think so. And maybe that’s a pity. I know I need to loosen up and let the dark side come out to play and have a little fun. We have this idea that our dark side is the interesting bit of us. But not me. My darkness isn’t really that dark; it’s just bland and a bit boring.

It’s not like I haven’t experienced that kinky S&M world. Back in the 1990s I went to Skin Two, a then-fashionable S&M club. The first thing you notice about these sorts of places — these so-called sex dungeons — is that they’re never sexy. Fetishism isn’t about eroticism — it’s more about theater, ritual, power and performance. I remember walking into Skin Two and thinking how very sad and suburban it all was.

I was sitting with a friend having drinks and nearby I could hear the sound of someone getting the lash behind a screen. I wondered what kind of sad-sack comes to a place like this to have some obese dominatrix whip him? I decided to take a look and saw that the sad-sack down on all fours being chastised by an obese dominatrix was my younger brother Miles.

He greeted me cheerfully, “Yo bro! Good to see you. Come and join me!”

No thanks, I said, and slunk back to my chair.

To those of a conservative persuasion these S&M people might look like a freak show, perverted children of the Sixties with their self-indulgent, anything goes self-expressionism. But for all their weird ways and wacky looks this crowd is the natural ally of conservatives. There’s something positively Victorian in their belief that their subterranean society must have rules, rituals, dress codes, hierarchy and strict adherence to forms of etiquette. Theirs is a direct challenge to the Sixties idea of just letting it all hang out.

Evie came back at around seven in the morning with tales of dancing all night and meeting fabulous people and seeing old friends. “Oh, you should have come — it was so much fun. But it would have been more fun had you been there.”

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s January 2024 World edition.