Pornography This article is more than 23 years oldMr Blowup and chums
This article is more than 23 years oldTen years ago, you had to scour porn mags to track down whips, rubber outfits and torture gear. Today, it's as easy as buying groceries. Nick Barlay spends an afternoon at London's monthly Fetish FairThe man at the bar clutches a pint of beer. His other hand holds a frayed teddy bear. His pale-blue T-shirt, festooned with cartoon animals, stretches over his beer gut as he chats to a woman twice his age who is wearing a loose black leather dress. Around them is the civilised buzz of Sunday afternoon conversation in a wine bar in a peaceful backstreet of King's Cross in London.
To the uninitiated, the monthly London Fetish Fair has all the charm of a village jumble sale where old friends meet, new ones are made, ideas are exchanged and quiet business is conducted over a drink. So it's easy to miss the man and his teddy bear. It's easy to ignore the bespectacled woman being led on a chain through the crowd. And you would need to be alert to spot photographs pinned to a table that show male genitalia secured in medieval-looking devices.
In fact, you might not even suspect the existence in a side room of more than 40 stalls bedecked with jumble of a most unvillagey kind: whips, canes, floggers, rubber and PVC outfits, spiked collars, hoods, bondage equipment, high-heeled boots, erotic artwork and literature, maid uniforms, military uniforms, corsetry and piercing jewellery. Stall holders include the Peaches Spanking Club; rubber enthusiasts, Mr and Mrs Blowup; the Bondage Fan Club; dungeon builders, Private Room; and there's a bookstall staffed by the former organiser of the All-England Spanking Championships.
According to Heather, a 30-year-old American who is one of the founders of the London Fetish Fair: "The event is not about tying someone to a post and flaying them alive. The focus is on being a community event. Actually, it's more of a lifestyle."
Heather's own lifestyle began when she bought her first pair of rubber opera gloves at the age of 17. "I still didn't know this was fetishism. But my whole family knew because I'd ask for rubber mini skirts for Christmas." Although Heather says that "for a few years it's been very fashionable to buy rubber outfits and go clubbing", she complains that fetishists can still feel isolated because of public attitudes. "People still have very skewed perceptions."
Other Fetish Fair regulars such as Mr and Mrs Blowup, web designers who have been involved in the fetish scene for more than 25 years, agree. Mr Blowup, the name by which he is "known on the scene", says that even a few years ago "you couldn't get the stuff in shops, there were no clubs and very few magazines. Now there are more shops in the UK than almost anywhere else." The Blowups "like wearing the stuff to go to fetish clubs but we don't get caught up in the harder side".
It might be assumed that the "harder side" involves anyone who buys large items of dungeon furniture. But Private Room, bespoke manufacturers of dungeons, playrooms and handmade fetish furniture, has a wide range of clients, from a gay sado-masochism hotel in Amsterdam to an individual request for a revolving St Andrew's Wheel, "portable, easily assembled, 21-day delivery". Terry Pritchard, one of Private Room's partners, says that "people in the fetish scene are very nice. Most could be bank managers or housewives."
The emergence of lifestyle fetishists is hailed by some as the quiet sexual revolution of the 1990s. There are now fetish clubs in city centres, soft-core fetishistic literature in WH Smith, fetish morris dancing in London suburbs, fetishistic TV commercials, booming business for publishers of fetish magazines and manufacturers of fetish clothing. There are prostitutes who now offer domination as a matter of course, thousands of websites, from worldwide mistress directories to Madame Svetlana's Institute of Sexual Pain in Siberia, increasing numbers of women who describe themselves as "lifestyle dominatrixes", and books such as SM101, a technical manual for the serious sado-masochist.
All this in a decade that saw a landmark court case which highlighted Britain's repressive sex laws. Home secretary Jack Straw's recent proposal to legalise consensual sexual activity between adults comes 10 years after the Spanner trial, so called after the police operation of that name. Officers from Greater Manchester stumbled on videos depicting middle-aged men engaged in extreme sado-masochistic acts, such as branding each other with hot wires and forcing a nail through someone's scrotum to the sound of Gregorian chants in a purpose-built torture chamber. Sixteen men were charged with assault, aiding and abetting assault, and keeping a disorderly house. They included a forester, an antique restorer, an ice-cream salesman, a missile design engineer, a tattooist, a former pig breeder, two restaurateurs and a care assistant.
When the case reached the Old Bailey, the defence might simply have been mutual consent - no victim, no crime. Judge Rant, however declared that consent was not an eligible defence. The defendants had to plead guilty, were duly convicted, mostly of causing actual bodily harm, and prison sentences were handed down. But those campaigning for the Spanner defendants had to wait another seven years for the greatest shock of all: in 1997, the European court of human rights upheld the original convictions.
For Spanner campaigners, left and right, gay and heterosexual, from Liberty (the national council for civil liberties) to the Libertarian Alliance and the Sexual Freedom Coalition, the European ruling was one step too far.
The sea change, if not yet the change in law, owes much to the high-profile collapse of the Club Whiplash case after a two-week trial in 1996. Martin Church, manager of the Putney venue hosting the sado-masochistic club, was charged under the same 1751 Disorderly Houses Act that had been dusted off for the Spanner defendants. This time defence witnesses lined up to emphasise the consensual nature of their activities. The jury accepted this and Church was acquitted.
In the same year that Martin Church walked free, Mick Bushell was struggling to keep his business afloat from his bedroom. Four years on, Bushell's Dom Promotions is one of the UK's main publishers of fetish-related magazines, with 14 titles, a website and mail order fetish toys and videos. It also offers heavy-duty bondage equipment, cages and whipping benches. "The SM world has opened its doors," says Bushell. "In the past you would never have known about it. Now it's everywhere."
In a flat in east London, Goddess Venus, a 27-year-old lifestyle dominatrix of part-Italian descent, sits in a high-back chair sipping wine with her boots on her footstool. The footstool is a 24-year-old student called Paul. He has been one of her client-slaves for the past three months. Goddess Venus, public school educated, was aware of her sexual interests from fantasies she had by the time she was 15. "I didn't know what they were then but I was certainly attracting those sorts of guys from the beginning. Now, she has young and old clients, from builders to bankers, and sometimes sees herself as an "underpaid therapist".
Unlike a prostitute, a dominatrix will not simply offer "all services". "For instance," says Goddess Venus, "I would never have full sex with my clients. They don't get close to me at all. Within this world there is huge respect for a mistress.
"Everybody, if they think about it, has some sort of perversion or fetish. The whole thing is really about sexuality exaggerated. It's a myth that people like to be caned. There are a lot of bog ordinary Kevins who just like to see a woman dressed in PVC."
Meanwhile, back at the London Fetish Fair, the man in the pale-blue T-shirt finishes his beer, pops his teddy bear into a plastic bag and heads off into the anonymous crowd around King's Cross. Even if Victorian attitudes persist and 250-year-old laws are still occasionally used to convict, the truth is that, with or without Jack Straw's new proposals, consenting adults will always manage to find each other.
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