Sex-Positive? I Don't Think So.

So, Max and I sat down last night to watch a short video. It was a taped episode of a show on the Playboy Channel, Sexetera, and one part of it featured some riggers down in the Bay Area, the Two Knotty Boys. They've been around for a while, so of course we've heard of them, and Max has met them (or at least one of them, I'm not sure). They teach rope bondage classes and do demos like Max does, so he was interested to see the segment.

Anyway, the Knotty Boys themselves seemed cool. But jesus, the "reporter" the Playboy channel had doing the segment was the single most annoying woman I have ever seen. She acted like a classic ditzy blonde, and she talked in a very affected, fakey manner, over-emphasizing too many words and wiggling her eyebrows "suggestively" with every sentence she uttered.

And her behavior towards the people she was interviewing - the Knotty Boys, the bondage models, and the spectators - was really bothersome to Max and I. She asked inane questions, made dumb remarks and laughed inappropriately. And then, while one of the Knotty Boys was doing a suspension on someone, she picked up the long cord of the mike she was holding and whipped him on the butt with it.

Oh. My. God. I about fell off the couch. That is so incredibly rude, that is so unbelievably offensive, and that is so NOT what BDSM is about. "Gee, I have this cord in my hand and there's someone standing with his back to me. He hasn't agreed to this, and I don't have the slightest reason to believe that he'd like it, but I'm just gonna whack him with it anyway." Jesus, that pissed me off.

So Max and I shook our heads about that, and congratulated the Knotty Boy in question for not immediately turning around and smacking her back, since she'd demonstrated that she didn't see the need to bother with negotiation or consent. Stupid cow.

Then - oh, that regretted moment - we decided to fast-forward to another segment, about an outfit in Florida that throws fetish parties. And to cover that story, they sent not one, but two of the most annoying men I have ever seen on TV. Two youngish frat-house types, incapable of finishing a sentence without larding it with lame double-entendres. They were sniggering and elbowing each other ceaselessly as they walked around the fetish party - which looked to me a lot like a kinky swingers party, as opposed to what I would think of as a dungeon party. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

But their whole mien was "Oooo, lookit the freaks!" Of course, for the special interview, they found a person whose BDSM experience is guaranteed to totally squick Hometown America: a castration fetishist. Now, I'm sure he's a perfectly decent person, but a guy who actually has had his balls cut off in a scene is really not representative of the BDSM community as a whole. In all my years as a pervert, I've never met anyone who really did the castration thing, and honey, if I ain't seen it, it ain't typical.

After they finished flipping out over him - "Dude, you had your balls cut off? No way! Dude, that's like, crazy, man! Did it, like, hurt so good? Hyuh hyuh hyuh!" - then they walked around the party some more, tried to talk to people who were playing, and pointed the camera at all the boobies they could find. And, oh, of course, they also went up to random people and hit them. Naturally.

So, gee, Playboy, thanks for being so insulting and portraying us as freaks and weirdos. If anyone needs a nonconsensual whack on the ass, it's you.