(Above: an example of this site's feeble attempts to emulate News Corp with a gratuitous shot of Madonna while trying to make a point about fetishism. Surely by now we've established our credentials for a career as a News Corp columnist?)
What on earth are we to make of this remark by Paul Sheehan?
As for the physiological explanation of the link between asphyxiation and sexual pleasure, and the psychological explanation of the urge to exploit that link, I don't know, because my curiosity has been overtaken by my recoil mechanism.
In BDSM roleplay, erotic asphyxiation is known by a variety of terms such as "edgeplay" or "breathplay" and an erotic asphyxiator is sometimes called a gasper, and can use various paraphernalia including gas masks, plastic bags and bondage straps. Usually a partner is present to avert catastrophe.
The real list of such fatalities is long, and much longer than the official record. Most are men.
Nor is Carradine the first prominent casualty. Ever since the singer Michael Hutchence was found hanged in a hotel room in Double Bay in 1997, there has been doubt about the official cause of death, which was ruled a suicide.
One of the characters in Breath ends up like Carradine, hanging lifeless in a closet, like a suit. Winton wrote the novel long before Carradine's death, because for years police have been finding the result of erotic asphyxiation gone wrong, bodies hanging in hotel rooms, closets, bathrooms. Many have been ruled suicides after a family member or friend sanitised the scene by removing sexual apparatus.
I don't get vampires, avoid them at all cost, but Australia is having a love affair with them. The bestseller list is dominated by a 35-year-old American Mormon, Stephenie Meyer, whose vampire-driven Twilight romance novels hold positions one, two, three and four on the Herald's best-seller list. They've dominated the list for a year, spending a combined 192 weeks there. Australia alone would make Myer a prosperous woman but her four Twilight books have sold more than 40 million copies worldwide.
I don't get sexual asphyxiation, either, and have avoided the subject for years but it, too, is sitting there, surreptitiously, on the bestseller list, just below the Twilight dominance. It can be found in Tim Winton's latest novel, Breath, a best-seller which won the Miles Franklin Award last month, the fourth time Winton has won Australia's most prestigious literary award.
As for the physiological explanation of the link between asphyxiation and sexual pleasure, and the psychological explanation of the urge to exploit that link, I don't know, because my curiosity has been overtaken by my recoil mechanism.
That's after a column supposedly devoted to the ins and outs of autoerotic asphyxiation (Breathless sex simmers at the edge of compulsion). Well oxygen depletion is a simple enough mechanism and as usual Wikipedia has an informative article on it and the matter in question here.
Breath play isn't a form of kink to be recommended, because of the obvious dangers involved, but what's sublime about Sheehan's fatuous ignorance is the way he manages to blame the internet for the technique seemingly becoming commonplace, and apparently the new best way for lonely males to end their lonely days in lonely hotel rooms (but come to think of it that's on a par with his decision pleading recoil, to end his column right at the point when he could have ended his and his readers' fatuous ignorance).
Yep, it's Tim Winton's fault for deploying the technique in his novel Miles Franklin winning Breath, and that reflects the baleful influence of the intertubes:
The mainstreaming of erotic asphyxiation in this novel is another element in the process of mainstreaming the values that have exploded out of the largely hidden margins of society thanks to the advent of the internet. The porn industry, more than any other, has been able to export some of its sensibilities into schools and homes, to the point of social conformity among the young.
Tim Winton and the intertubes, conspiring to bring down western civilization as we know it. And shipping it into the minds of the socially conforming young.
Which establishes Sheehan's ignorance - because it's been a fairly well known form of extreme sex play since composer Frantisek Kotzwara died in 1791 from erotic asphyxiation, which according to Wikipedia, is probably the first recorded case. No doubt it's due to the baleful effect of the intertubes in the eighteenth century.
Perhaps the most famous twentieth century death involved Sada Abe, who killed her lover in 1936 and then cut off his testicles and carried them around in a handbag for a number of days. It became a cause celebre in Japan, featuring in any number of novels as well as films, but achieved international recognition with Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses, produced in 1976.
That film was widely banned, though given the associated scandal you'd have to have been a monk in a monastery to suggest the notorious show was part of the largely hidden margins of sexual life.
I do remember watching it in a flea pit in Adelaide, and being amused by the number of men in raincoats who hastily exited the cinema as the tale of the mad, obsessed lovers ground to an inevitable and profoundly unerotic conclusion. Those were the days when I'd willingly surround myself with panting men in a darkened room in the interests of auteurism.
Whew, thank the lord those days are gone. I mean there's sex and passion, and then there's death, which rather limits the options for experimental sex play. And then there's the swishing sound of frustrated men stomping out of a cinema stinking of sweaty unfulfilled sex, a smell worse than buttered popcorn.
But I guess it was the infamous role of the internet in the nineteen seventies that should shoulder much of the blame, rather than Oshima.
Still, at least it's a change from blaming comics, which always liked to show aliens threatening evil towards scantily clad, bound or chained women, or The Joy of Sex, which in the seventies devoted a whole page to the pleasures of bondage.
All the same, it seems that Sheehan is titillated by the subject, and he manages not only to conflate it with the prevelance of pornography on the intertubes, but with the safe practice of BDSM:
The more you learn about the subject, the worse it gets. I've been looking sideways at this for years, not wanting to know, but like other highly dubious practices, erotic asphyxiation, or asphyxiophilia, has a following within the subculture known as BDSM (bondage, discipline, sado-masochism).
In BDSM roleplay, erotic asphyxiation is known by a variety of terms such as "edgeplay" or "breathplay" and an erotic asphyxiator is sometimes called a gasper, and can use various paraphernalia including gas masks, plastic bags and bondage straps. Usually a partner is present to avert catastrophe.
Well what are these other highly dubious practices which infest the world of BDSM? Sheehan doesn't go there, which is fine, because then we won't go into the highly dubious practices of safe heterosexual sex, such as glassing as foreplay and rape as a demonstration of male passion.
But then Sheehan is fond of completely unfounded comments:
A long list of fatalities? Much longer than the official record? So what's he got? A couple of celebrity deaths including the recent death of David Carradine, and by implication the death of Michael Hutchence:
And now it seems there's the intertube influenced Winton and his book, which brings the subject out of the closet, so to speak, so now it can be revealed that many many men have died lonely deaths in strange parts of the house or in hotels:
One of the characters in Breath ends up like Carradine, hanging lifeless in a closet, like a suit. Winton wrote the novel long before Carradine's death, because for years police have been finding the result of erotic asphyxiation gone wrong, bodies hanging in hotel rooms, closets, bathrooms. Many have been ruled suicides after a family member or friend sanitised the scene by removing sexual apparatus.
By golly, for a column that manages to list no more than three celebrity deaths, that's a pretty evocative image of a world gone mad, with men driven to insanity by what's available on the intertubes. Could this be the worst killer of all time, way ahead of passive smoking in cars, which can now only be used to understand less significant matters, like the way Tony Abbott experienced intellectual development difficulties in his youth.
Sheehan really isn't interested in making any sense on the subject. He starts his column by explaining that he doesn't get vampires:
I don't get sexual asphyxiation, either, and have avoided the subject for years but it, too, is sitting there, surreptitiously, on the bestseller list, just below the Twilight dominance. It can be found in Tim Winton's latest novel, Breath, a best-seller which won the Miles Franklin Award last month, the fourth time Winton has won Australia's most prestigious literary award.
Well from reading this column, I dare say that Sheehan also doesn't get the cult of the goth, bright red lips, pale cheeks, Wuthering Heights (and its implications for women), corsets, fetish clothing, Betty Page, Betty Boop, Buffy, bondage, the beneficial power of garlic, silk stockings, six inch heels, conical steel bras, the importance of carrying a wooden stake, a cross and a set of silver bullets, the sense of style wearing only black provides, the joys of cross dressing and taking a walk on the wild side.
But can he stop blaming the internet for them and suggesting that somehow the full to overflowing tubes have produced a new pornographic social conformity among the young?
Can we just agree that the sudden outbreak of rampant sexuality in fundamentalist Christians and Republican governors has been around for a long time, well before the intertubes got going.
As the priests used to say to the young boys in my school, stop it or you'll go blind, or even worse, get hair on the palms of your hands.
Yep, there's very little that's new under the sun, and the sun has been rising (and setting, in a strictly metaphorical way) for a long time. Legends about sex and sex play and kink have been going around for an equally long time - why it feels like only yesterday I was reading Apuleius's The Golden Ass (which involves an ass doing things) and Seutonius on what the emperor Tiberius liked to lick, but as with Sheehan's speculations, idle regurgitating of nonsense about how the intertubes made them do it, don't make it right ...
Which reminds of the story of the woman who kidnapped a male Mormon missionary and chaining him to a Devon cottage bed with mink handcuffs, and forcing him to have sex. It seems she might be the same woman as a year or so ago paid a substantial sum to a South Korean laboratory to have her pitbull terrier cloned.
Never mind whether it's true or not, the Daily Mail rehashes the original story of McKinney and the Mormon here.
And it's good clean salacious tabloid fun, as opposed to the sanctimonious pieties of Sheehan. And it's available on the intertubes. Even if it's a story that happened in 1978. You can surely see the sinister relevance.
Stand by for more cases of women kidnapping young Mormon missionaries and having their evil way with them. Using mink handcuffs. Oh intertubes you have so much to answer for, and you give so little.
Moral to the tale? There are more things in heaven and earth, especially when it comes to sex, than are dreamed of in Sheehan's limited philosophies ...
(Below: Joyce McKinney, the woman in the 'Mormon missionary with mink handcuffs' affair, proving the baleful influence of the intertubes on bondage in 1978, as well as elevating this site once again to the responsible level of News Corp reporting, in a fair and balanced way, while refusing to sensationalize. We maintain such high standards we'd ski naked down Mount Everest with a carnation up our nose rather than lower the quality of insight provided herein).
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