“It’s about pleasure of the mind, not the flesh,” explains dominatrix Miss Barbie Bitch as she shows me the bondage cage.
The box is a steel rectangle, only slightly larger than a dog carrier, complete with a studded collar hanging from the top. “I’ll leave a sub in there overnight or so,” she shrugs. We move on to the bondage coffin, as she urges me to get inside. “When you don’t have someone in it, you can use the coffin to hold your laundry or towels,” she says, a regular Martha Stewart with a cat o’ nine tails.
Barbie Bitch, who has spent nearly two decades as a dominatrix, fit right in at this weekend’s Everything To Do With Sex Show. Lodged into a convention room at Exhibition Place, a 19-plus audience revelled in smut. While some came to watch pole-dancers or have a porn star instruct them on the best way to lick a nipple, others were there to simply pick up an extra pair of flogging gloves, or sample a cake in the shape of a large phallus. Larry David would be proud.
In a nation that recently re-elected a pro-abstinence Conservative government, open discourse about sex seemed liberating. Yet the most shocking aspect of the convention wasn’t the genital shavers or portable dungeon equipment, but rather the attendees. I had been expecting youngsters in body paint, but the average age seemed to be about 45. In fact most could have starred in those Stephen Harper campaign ads.
Compared to our European neighbours, North Americans have always been pretty uptight about sex. Seeing grey-haired husbands pose with porn stars and post-menopausal women in nipple tassels made me feel hopeful, yet it was sad to see so few young people in attendance. Does it really take us 30 years of sexual activity before we can say the word “masturbate?” I know I’m still working on it.
It’s scary that we’ve created a society where “orgasm” is a more offensive word than “murder,” and we’d prefer to watch two men on television kill each other than kiss. I was happy that the attendees felt relaxed enough to publicly lick chocolate dildos, but the event still had a secret, back-alley aura. Take the investment-banker type who whispered to his girlfriend, “I just don’t want to run into anybody I know, that’s all.”
God bless the old timers whose age has made them comfortable with kink. “If you know you’re a dom, you know that it means being one in every aspect of your life,” Miss Barbie tells me. She’s strapping her sub, a mid-sixties man in a pink brassier wearing a nametag that reads “Miss Bitch’s Pain Pig,” into a bondage chair. When I ask her what the downside is to being a professional dominatrix, she smiles wickedly. “There’s no such thing.”
Further down the hall I find “The Dungeon,” a section where cameras are banned. Inside, a woman is being tied to a spider web-like contraption, while a man in leather masks paddles someone bent over a bench. I approach a man carrying what looks like a toolbox. In his hand is a bulb of static electricity, which looks like a miniature of the ball you touch at the Science Centre to make your hair stand up. I hold out my hand, and the demonstrator gives me a series of electrical shocks down my palm, described as the feeling of being tattooed. When I inquire if it’s intended for use all over the body, he nods. He informs me that there might be some burning or scabbing after a long play session. “But nobody has ever died from it—that we know of.”
Further along, I sit in a thousand-dollar sex chair, and bounce on a “sex-ercise ball” as a couple next to me browse for the right scented lubricant. I want to get as much education as possible, so I head to the seminar section where a tiny Japanese woman in her late forties discusses anal beads. Sexpert Midori quickly puts the audience at ease, promising to answer any questions. When someone inquires about semen, she informs us that you can change the taste of your juices by consuming certain liquids, like pineapple juice. Her advice on anal sex is pretty spot-on: “Everybody has an asshole,” she delivers to the man in the first row. “It doesn’t mean you have to be one.”
Midori’s focus, like most of the presenters, is education. After an afternoon of browsing through the stands, “normal” sex seems relative. If sweatpant-clad suburbanites seem so comfortable purchasing videos of the “Naughty Newfie,” why is my generation embarrassed even discussing coitus? If age begets wisdom, I think I should listen to my elders. “Everyone should work towards being a ‘try-sexual,’” Midori tells me. “It’s better to have adventured and spilled some lube along the way.” Wise words, I think to myself, as I smile at the Grandpa clad in the golden man-thong, walking towards the exit.
