America Unzipped (29 page)

Yet Heather isn't scary. She ought to be, but even in the pictures, she can't quite make me believe in her viciousness. In person, she is earnest, sweet, and thoughtful. We talk for half an hour about her life, about how devastated she was when her first husband died, and how at forty-six she believes she can be a unique advocate for health and fitness among older women, presumably through some means other than genital weight lifting. She has set up a mainstream fitness business to try.

Many attendees show no outward kinkiness at all. I meet a man in his fifties (“Call me Sir Arthur”) dressed in casual slacks and shirt with thick glasses with a trim graying beard, in Bond Dave's Scarf and Sari Bondage seminar. At first he chases me away but then apologizes for his abruptness and explains that he and his wife are “very private people when we come to these things.” I tell him that's fine, I wasn't offended at all, and begin to walk away, but he grabs me and keeps explaining himself further and further until I conclude that for some reason it is important to him that I understand. For the next thirty minutes he swings wildly back and forth, talking first about how conservative he is (“I watch Bill O'Reilly all the time”) and so is his small town, and then about BDSM. At one point his wife incongruously interjects that her son is an honors student. Unlike most people I meet here, he seems tormented. “I really hate it when all the gays are out marching,” Sir Arthur says at one point, but then he backtracks immediately to say that he understands the concept of glass houses and stones and that “a lot of my friends would probably call me weird” for being here.

Foxy, on the other hand, “don't give a shit what anybody thinks.” He's happy in his big cowboy hat and showy gray handlebar mustache, driving a couple of sturdy mares, his wife and a neighbor. They have tassels on their heads, hooves on their hands, blinders on their faces, bits in their mouths, and leather thong “saddles” around their middles. Foxy lives in rural central Florida. He's the kind of guy who votes a “straight NRA ticket” because “it just ain't a good day unless you snuffed the life outta somethin'.” Snuffin' the life outta stuff keeps Foxy working. He's a taxidermist.

Foxy and his team would seemingly have nothing in common with Chloe, a male university biology professor with an interest in Buddhism, whose long, luxurious tail keeps getting in his way. But they are all part of the same pony play group.

For Chloe there is no sexual gratification from dressing up in nearly $1,000 worth of tack and showing it off or being trained by his girlfriend, his “handler.” Chloe just likes the escape he feels when she puts him through his paces, when the only thing on his mind is being a horse.

“So we'll do lunge line circles where she'll check my step, make sure it's all right. I do show work, so she will go through all the behaviors I would do in a show.”

“Like dressage?”

“Yeah. Full dressage. The whole bit.”

Chloe, being highly bred, can be temperamental. “If I have a day where I don't want to prance around and listen to what she is saying, I will be unruly.” Some ponies do have sex. For example, a pony might become angry at his or her trainer and attack and “have their way with them,” Chloe says.

His girlfriend had no idea he was into pony play or even what pony play was until they had dated for some time. “It has been very cool, another way we can really be close to each other. It helps with trust and it has to be intimate, because you are really putting yourself in someone else's hands.”

Superhero fetish is a subgenre specialty, one Vesta has explored for years. She now runs an ongoing series on her own pay website called League of Amazing Women. She hires a photographer who uses a simple point-and-shoot digital camera to create an episode in comic serial form. The whole production takes about an hour. The league operates in Tiedsville (Get it? Somebody always winds up bound and often topless) and features a revolving cast of super-powered women and female villains. The League of Amazing Women is deliberately silly and there isn't even an attempt at creating a set. Vesta will shoot an update just about anywhere she happens to be; I watch one being made in an empty conference room at the Hyatt. But Vesta still makes a profit from people who join her site.

Superbecca is even more low-budget. Rebecca Edwards, a fifty-year-old North Carolina housewife, loved reading comic books as a child. With support from her husband, she started her own website featuring herself, a quasi-superwoman, battling evil in the woods behind her house. Becca gets chloroformed, tied to trees, or captured and bound by rope and held hostage on her living-room couch. Superbecca requires an arduous suspension of disbelief and she is never nude, but fans are devoted. Frank, a twenty-eight-year-old artist in the video game industry, joined her site because Becca is “sincere.” It's gratifying for “a guy to feel he is in control, especially of a superwoman,” he says. “That's part of the fantasy.”

 

D
ave Gibson, forty-five, is a short, slight man just beginning to nurture a middle-aged paunch. He wears his dark brown hair in a tight trim. His clothes are neat and basic, his glasses squared with metal frames. Dave lives alone in a house in Pennsylvania, in a town of just over five thousand people, a pretty place of red brick and trees that turn gold in the fall. His sister lives nearby.

Dave is an electrician for a railroad, the one that used to be the Pennsylvania Railroad. The old PRR is long gone. Today it exists only on Monopoly boards. The locomotives are a lot different than they used to be, too, much more sophisticated with circuit boards and high-tech electronics. Dave received his first electronics training in the military. He spent eleven years in the service. For more than two of those years, he lived on a satellite-tracking station, over one hundred miles from the nearest town. Yet despite his years of experience in the military and with the railroad, the electronics on the locomotives are changing again, becoming even more computerized and finicky, so Dave is having to be retrained.

As Dave explains this to me, he excuses himself for a moment. “Have to wet my whistle,” he says, one of many anachronistic phrases he prefers.

He's an old-fashioned guy, Dave is. He carries no debt except for his mortgage. He calls women “ladies,” as in “when a lady is wearing heels.” He is diligently polite. Politically, Dave leans far right. He's an enthusiastic supporter of Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, who has made the restoration of America's moral values a personal crusade. (A few months from now, Santorum will be defeated for reelection, gravely disappointing Dave.) He also reads the conservative writers, especially Ann Coulter. He's a big fan.

“I am very, very Republican,” he says. “I vote what is best for the country.”

Every guy needs a hobby. Dave enjoys photography. He reads the how-to magazines and has invested quite a lot of money into new digital cameras and props like ropes, ball gags, handcuffs, leather restraints, blindfolds, chains, and duct tape.

Dave likes to take photos of pretty girls tied up, gagged, and helpless.

“I'm a pervert!” Dave exclaims. This makes Sheridan laugh, even though her arms are bound tightly behind her back, her ankles roped together. I am in Dave's hotel room with Dave and Sheridan. I feel as if there is another guest in Dave's room, too. There is a copy of Ann Coulter's
How to Talk to a Liberal (if You Must)
sitting on Dave's bedside table. Ann is looking up at us. She is wearing a purplish leather top that would fit right in here at Fetish Con. Dave is wearing shorts and a T-shirt. Sheridan, lying on Dave's bed, is too, but her shorts are significantly shorter than Dave's.

Dave's T-shirt is black. It is one of his favorites, with a cartoon drawing of a sexy dominatrix schoolteacher named Miss Behaving standing in front of a chalkboard and holding what looks like a paddle. “Miss Behaving's Driving School,” it reads. “You've been a very, very dangerous driver.” Ann is standing in front of a chalkboard, too. It's pretty crowded in this room.

There is a trunk by his bed. It and one of the drawers in the room are as meticulously packed as an obsessive fly fisherman's tackle box, containing ropes in various colors and dimensions, safety scissors in case of a bondage emergency, ball gags in different colors and sizes, duct tape, white cloth gags he has ripped into precise lengths, chains, vet wrap (a form of restricting bandage used by veterinarians as on the legs of horses), and more. Dave keeps an eye out on Internet sales to get the best bargains.

Having managed to get Sheridan's elbows to touch behind her back, Dave is pleased. “Not everybody can get their elbows together like that,” he says admiringly.

“I roll on my shoulders to keep them flexible,” Sheridan says.

Knot tying is a vital part of Dave's hobby. He's spent several years working to create better knots, and now, as he leans over Sheridan, he pauses, making sure the knots are big enough and symmetrically aligned. The work is consuming, or at least Dave's focus is consuming; he doesn't notice that he is already perspiring and we're only about fifteen minutes into his two hours of time.

Sheridan has done this enough to know what Dave is looking for, so she turns her head to look over her shoulder with a mixture of seduction and fear. Dave's Sony Cyber-shot starts whirring.

When he was a little boy, Dave used to sit, rapt, in front of the TV during
Batman
and old westerns because women were often tied up, left squirming and in peril. There was something exciting about the idea that he could rescue a damsel in distress. On the other hand, there was also something exciting about imagining himself the villain who put her there in the first place.

Growing up in a small town, there was very little chance of Dave's seeing much bondage porn and there was no Internet. It wasn't until he joined the military that his interest truly flowered. Working in that tracking station wasn't much fun. You practiced for Soviet missiles, you kept an eye on NASA missions, all very important, but being over a hundred miles from anywhere in a military installation gets boring and lonely. So when he had the chance, Dave made the trip into the town and purchased his first bondage magazines. They were very expensive because they were imported from America, but Dave, who is no spendthrift, bought them anyway.

Bondage imagery featuring women in underwear, bound in ropes, had something of a heyday in the 1950s, most famously through the work of Irving Klaw, the man who made Bettie Page an icon. The business shriveled in the wake of government investigations into juvenile delinquency and the availability of fully nude women in the new men's magazines like
Playboy.
It survived mainly on the covers of lurid detective pulps that depicted women tied up, supposedly by crooks and maniacs. A California outfit named Harmony Concepts helped revive the genre in the 1980s. Rather than forcible bondage like that depicted in the pulps, Harmony advocated consent as part of the “Harmony Philosophy”:

What is most discouraging about this business are the prevailing social misconceptions concerning bondage, at least the benevolent, romantic type of bondage that we produce. For the unenlightened, what we represent and advocate really needs to be clarified. In that spirit, the following general explanation is at least a start.

It has never been nor will it ever be our purpose to depict women as mere subordinates to men. These pictures and articles are not about that. The materials we produce are carefully and, we think, obviously designed for men and women to whom bondage is an important mutual diversion, a recreational and benevolent experience, a fantasy with a happy ending, a good-natured game in which everybody wins.

For Dave, the sexual attraction isn't so much nudity as it is seeing a woman in jeopardy. He gets sexual gratification from looking at his pictures and imagining his “damsel in distress.” “A fantasy aspect to all this is being the hero and rescuing the damsel, and sometimes I like to do that. But I also like being the villain, the guy who gets to do this.”

Yesterday he shot with Tomiko, a former third-grade and kindergarten teacher who now does non-nude bondage modeling and is known for playing the businesswoman-in-glasses. Dave especially likes that look. “You could call that a fetish, like the girls on the Weather Channel. They look nice and neat and look so attractive.”

I steal a glance over at Ann in her long blond hair and leather.

Dave will spend about $2,000 on models during the three days he is in Tampa. He began arranging appointments months ago by putting up a profile on the Model Mayhem website. Paige did him a big favor by giving him a shout-out.

“05/25/06 7:00pm Hey Dave! Glad to see you here! The Badman and I are looking forward to seeing you at Fetishcon again this year…great pics on the profile…none of me tho…: (JK…..I believe you'll do well…..girls…..if you want to shoot with a really great guy Dave is your man! He's lot's of fun and really sweet! Hugs and kisses,

Paige.

The trip to Fetish Con has become an annual pilgrimage for Dave, his big vacation of the year. He comes down to the lobby bar, and he'll visit the show floor of the convention to check out new fetish equipment displayed by manufacturers and to see the professional fetish and bondage models who are here promoting their DVDs and websites, but mainly he will watch his pennies and stay in his room shooting every day, adding to the thousands of images he has already accumulated.

Sheridan, hog-tied now, lies down on her belly and Dave snaps away. She looks back at him and compliments his knots.

“That's really pretty what you've done there.”

Dave beams. “I have only one thing on my mind.”

We all laugh, except Ann.

Dave has never done nude photography. “I am still relatively new. I am feeling my way along, what I am comfortable doing. I have done topless, but that is about the limit to what I feel I am ready to do so far. As I do more, maybe I will. It's like, ‘What's the rush? Why be in a hurry?'”