A growing cohort of Torontonians are indulging their wildest fetishes—and negotiating every slap, spank and lash of the whip.
Toronto Life
By Stacey May Fowles
…Lord Morpheous is at the centre of a thriving kink culture in Toronto, an underground community of people who derive their pleasure from pain, congregating at parties, meetings and classes. FetLife, the hugely popular social networking site for BDSM participants, lists more than 41,000 kinksters living in Toronto. Users identify their sexual tastes and what they’re looking for, post photos of their bruises and rope marks, and narrow down potential partners and friends by fetish, searching for things like caging and confinement, clamps and clips, nun and priest play, or a standard flogging.
BDSM is an overlapping abbreviation of bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism. It covers a continuum of practices outside of mainstream sex, which means something as tame as a blindfold or as intense as a caning falls under the same wide umbrella. A kinky encounter is often referred to as a scene: a single interaction where participants pre-negotiate safe words and acceptable activities. Scenes can involve consensual bondage, confinement and violence—including spanking, slapping, pinching, cutting or choking—but relationships can also be full-time, where a submissive is “owned” by a dominant partner, sometimes wearing a collar to indicate his or her status. Outside the bedroom, subs can provide non-sexual services to their dominants: they may cook, clean, run errands or shine their master’s shoes. Though from the outside doms seem to be calling the shots, the submissive partners hold equal power. They’ve voluntarily surrendered control—and can take it back at any time. Arrangements are as varied as the people who create them, and can be complicated and delicate to maintain, which means constant communication is key to their success.
Last October, the Toronto BDSM community was thrust under a harsh spotlight when several women accused Jian Ghomeshi, the former host of CBC Radio’s Q, of abuse. He defended himself on his Facebook page, claiming he’d participated in “a mild form of Fifty Shades of Grey”: rough sex, dominance and submission. Later reports suggested Ghomeshi hadn’t received consent, and he was charged with several counts of sexual assault. “All of a sudden he choked me, slapped me in the face a few times,” said the actress Lucy DeCoutere of their sexual encounter. “It came out of nowhere. It was unprovoked.”
Ghomeshi-gate has been a PR problem for Toronto kinksters, who worry their consensual practices are now wrongly tied to allegations of violence. Worse still, the case exposed the criminal grey area that kink occupies: in Canada, a person can’t legally consent to bodily harm. That puts some Toronto practitioners in a precarious position—a rope burn, bruise or chokehold could lead to a potential assault charge.
As long as couples have been having sex, they’ve been incorporating consensual pain, control and surrender—erotic BDSM appears in the Kama Sutra, ancient Roman poetry and Etruscan frescoes. Modern kink culture came about in the mid-20th century, colliding with the sexual revolution and queer movement. Kink as we know it grew out of the gay leather scene in 1950s New York, San Francisco and Berlin: after World War II, young men started establishing underground fetish and sex clubs, favouring chaps, harnesses and rough sex. In the early 1970s, the first two official North American BDSM organizations were established: the Eulenspiegel Society formed in New York in 1971, and the Society of Janus in San Francisco in 1974, both focused on education and support for those in the closet. It was in these societies that the movement finally crystallized, and practitioners developed a shared ethos, rules and vernacular. These early proponents characterized their behaviour as “safe, sane and consensual”—a guideline meant to distinguish kink from abuse. By the end of the millennium, BDSM imagery had bridged into pop culture—Madonna played the sub and the domme in her music videos, Isabella Rossellini begged to be hit in Blue Velvet, and CSI detectives encountered the wisdom of the dominatrix Lady Heather.
More recently, the practice of BDSM has grown from a niche subculture into a mainstream obsession. The catalyst, of course, was Fifty Shades of Grey, a kinkified Twilight fan fiction series that sold 100 million copies, spawned a $40-million movie and triggered a worldwide fascination with spanking, leather, cuffs and Ben Wa balls. All across town, entrepreneurs are capitalizing on the growing demand for kink. Over the past three years, the Yonge Street fetish shop Northbound Leather has experienced a 20 per cent increase in sales of harnesses and collars, which range from $10 plastic versions to $2,500 diamond-encrusted chokers.
It used to be a challenge for kinksters to find like-minded practitioners, but now there are dozens of places for them to congregate. “The scene hides very quietly under the surface of everyday life,” says Morpheous. “You just have to know where to look.” At pubs and cafés across the city, kinksters gather for munches—casual meetups to discuss relationships, coming out to family members or new rope tricks. Munches are designed to be as anonymous as possible: organizers prohibit photography and toys, and guests wear street clothes instead of fetish wear. “These people are often just talking about, like, the new Star Wars movie,” Morpheous explains….
Despite its popularity, kink is still the subject of intense scrutiny and stigma: until 2013, it was classified in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual as a mental disorder. BDSM was only depathologized after a lengthy campaign by the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, an American advocacy group that argued the existing definitions failed to distinguish between consensual sadism and abuse. Many kinksters still feel like their sexual preferences put them at risk of persecution: most of the people who appear in this story asked that I use a pseudonym, afraid they might be outed to their families, friends and employers. It’s legal in Canada to fire someone for BDSM activities if the disclosure is deemed damaging to the brand of the company—though many kinksters see their sexual preference as an orientation, it doesn’t fall under the protection of the Human Rights Code. Even Lord Morpheous hides his real name and face from the public. “I’m not ashamed. Anyone who wants to meet me can come out to an event,” he says. “I just prefer to have control. I like my world a size I can manage.” …