There’s a cash bar situated in the hallway between the two “play rooms” at DomCon on Friday night. The two hotel employees manning it are smiling and polite. They are not subjected to any visuals, technically, but the EDM music throbbing from each room doesn’t cover the thwack of hands, paddles, and other implements on skin (all of this falls under the kink label of “impact play”), or the vocalizations that these hits produce.
At DomCon, my press pass allows for me to sit in-between. I am not like the cash bar employees, who are totally detached from the proceedings. I was in the know enough to request a pass to DomCon, after all. But if I wanted to, I could insist that I’m not actually into anything sexually subversive, that I’m just here in the spirit of journalistic inquiry. But I don’t insist on that. I realize I’ve become very protective of the scene I’m covering. Many of the attendees of DomCon have been in the community for decades. At seminars, people vocalize in agreement, their mmhms and yeses evoking churchlike fellowship. People greet each other with shouts, hugs, kisses, laughter. These people have forged a community based in fetish, kink, paraphilia, and general sexual subversion (all interests that are fortunately no longer categorized as a mental disorder in the DSM). The attendees are diverse—in age, in ethnicity, in sexuality, and in gender—and because of the broad umbrella that encapsulates BDSM (the acronym itself is actually three acronyms overlapping each other), many of these people mingle with each other despite vastly different interests and approaches to kink and fetish.
As I mentioned in my last dispatch, classes are a big part of DomCon. Some are technical: I watch a man crack a massive whip, so loud that it makes the room flinch even a couple dozen times in, only for it to wrap gently around the tip of a woman’s finger. Some of the seminars are more cerebral: thoughts on service submission from the perspective of an “s-type” (the “s” stands for submissive or slave, the person running the seminar calls it “the other side of the boot”), or sessions on dominant and submissive play that is purely mental and verbal. Some of the people I talk to relish in the technicality of kink: the rules, the regulations, the terminologies. I imagine there’s an almost cyclical gratification for some of the people teaching at DomCon; it must be kinkily pleasing for some to talk about their fetish practices to an attentive audience, or to show off the capacities of themselves or their submissives in public. Others, though, tell me that they were sexually exploring kink and fetish before they even knew there were terms for what they were doing; an intuitive desire that lead to them seeking out a broader community for support, information, or perhaps access to more people and tools that can help them scratch their specific kink itch. There are many people who like the fantasy and play of it all, and while they communicate healthily and safely with their play partners, they don’t get too tangled up in over-planning or preemptive detailing.
There’s maybe some community-based lessons to be learned at large here. I talk to people who highlight discretion, communication, casual but clear values of consent, and an acceptance of a diversity of opinions and interests. A few of the courses at DomCon involve protecting yourself legally or socially outside of the scene. All of the this gives the sense that other attendees are going to be watching your back in the same way you’re hopefully going to be watching theirs.
—
“Sorry, honey, did I ring your bell?” One of the mistresses gently strokes the face of her submissive after cracking him across the face. I’m in a class on how to do rough play safely — choking, hitting, kicking, punching, biting. There’s a wrestling mat on the floor. One of the instructors uses her jiu jitsu knowledge to teach “bloodchokes” using both arms and legs. Another definition for the uninitiated: bloodchokes involve placing pressure on the pulse points of the neck. Blood chokes are good, and anything tracheal (“air chokes”), as in squeezing inward on the actual parts of us that breathe, is (very) bad.
This rough play class is the most tangible deconstruction of a misconception I didn’t even know I held about BDSM. I had unconsciously assumed that the social taboo of so many of these acts, especially the physical ones, would do the heavy lifting in the interaction. (i.e a featherweight tap might have the same erotic impact as an atomic elbow.) While I’m sure this is the case for some kink practitioners, many of the DomCon conventioneers partake in a level of physical intensity that is full-forced and founded on lots of time, practice, and information. I’d imagined that the whippings, slappings, and paddlings that define the sadism and masochism of the community would be half-hearted; the idea that you were submitting to someone else’s control over your pain would be enough. This is not the case. At performances, I see welts bloom on submissive backsides, followed immediately by their dominant delivering a heavy knee to the tender bruise. At the rough play class, the two dominants leave red spots and tooth marks on their submissive partners, drag them across the floor by their hair, and boot them square in their tailbones.
I have to make it clear that everybody involved is happy with this. The very point of the rough play class is to teach people how to get their rougher sexual urges out safely. I admire these people and their quest for subversive, transgressive desire in a safe and informed environment. Their willingness to walk a crowd of strangers through these acts is a testament to a community which believes in safety, care, and access. I chat with two doms who have been in the scene for decades, and they tell me their mission is never to damage anyone. “A little pain, sure. But never damage.”
—
During a seminar on electrical play, the instructor asks if anyone hasn’t felt the sensation of a “violet wand” — a low-current, high-voltage electrical device that violetwands.com says is meant to “energize your nerves and stimulate your skin”. It looks like a long, glass stick with a Tesla-esque coil on the end of it. I raise my hand, expecting to be one of many. But I am alone in my inexperience. The instructor asks me to come up and sit on the table while he explains the device.
While I wait for him to finish speaking, I wonder how much the wand is actually going to hurt, curious and only mildly nervous. The instructor insists on doing everything to himself first before trying it on anyone else; he announces he is going to zap himself in the face with the same tool he’s going to use on me. He flinches and fails to commit multiple times, playing it up to nervous laughter from the audience, and then presses it against his face. He winces like it really hurts.
I’m freaked out by that point. I find myself thinking about the time my high school boyfriend took me to a dilapidated arcade along the piers of San Francisco. There was an Addams Family-themed game where you and a partner held onto these little metal rods that would “shock” you (they would actually just vibrate really hard). I was so frightened then by the idea of getting zapped I chickened out. A definite yuck for me instead of yum, and so I’m not sure why I’ve agreed to come up front to experiment with anything electrical.
“Are you going to turn it down?” I ask. The instructor brushes me off. He asks me to grasp his forearm, and he’ll grasp mine. My palms are cold with clammy sweat. I don’t chicken out this time for a mix of complex reasons: I want to seem like a good hang, I have watched enough demos this week to consider these people experts, and I’m maybe a bit of a masochist. He presses the wand to me. I tense up. Nothing happens. There is no current running through the toy; at this moment it’s just a glass stick with some light inside of it.
This, he explains, is a lesson on the power of fear and anticipation — a more meaningful tool than anything with a truly evil zap.
“You were really scared,” he laughs. I laugh too, feeling my body flood with relief. As I go back to my seat, I also feel a pang of regret; I sort of wanted to see how it would feel to withstand something really tough.
A lecturer opens one class with, “If you’re here, it’s because you’re wanting to feel… Something.” I understand why they don’t say, “good”. Many of the emotions produced here are what we’d understand in the vanilla world as negative: shame, humiliation, pain, fear. But in kink and fetish, these things are molded into something else. Maybe it’s healing (though across the board, the kinksters at DomCon always remind us right away that therapy and self-care is your real answer to that, not being whipped by a hot lady; although they do say that a hot lady with whips is indeed a potential additive), Maybe it’s catharsis, maybe pride in spiritual and physical endurance, maybe a break from thinking.
Being a human is complex. Power and control are utilized oppressively in nearly every sphere of our lives. We rarely have the choice to opt in or out of subjugation. To play with power, control, and even pain in a manner that is exploratory, in a situation that can be started and stopped at your word, has an obvious psychological pull. If not for you, than for the many people attending DomCon.
—
I feel too much like a (non-sexy) voyeur at the play party on Friday. Some people kindly offered to walk me through a few basic bondage ties for my piece, and equally kindly emphasized that there was no pressure either way, but I realized that I’m not really interested in doing anything without my partner’s presence. She is a staunch supporter of my writing endeavors, and so gave me the go ahead eagerly, but the feeling internally was too dissonant and strong. I leave the hotel only a little while after the party has started.
As I’m walking out, three hotel employees march into one of the play rooms to switch out the water jug. Their faces, like the faces of the men working the cash bar, are kindly impassive. I don’t need them to feel good or bad about what’s happening. It’s okay for them to feel nothing at all. But I’m moved that they do not transmit any obvious sense of disgust. I’m similarly glad a prominent hotel chain is willing to host some perverts seeking pleasure and community.
“I didn’t really have friends before this,” one middle-aged submissive says to me outside of the play party. We’ve talked a few times now. Oftentimes he has to leave fairly quickly to assist one of the goddesses from his local dungeons. The last time around, he had some time to actually talk. Before we chat, he asks if I’d like for him to hold my drink — I read it as an attempt at an offering of an act of service, a small signal of submissive performance. “But now… The other day I went out to a club, one that wasn’t even for the community, and some people I knew from this came up to me to say hi.”
The night DomCon ends, I drive to the airport to pick my girlfriend up from a wedding. A man ahead of me at LAX runs out of his car with much eagerness to open the door for his wife. It’s a nice feeling, to offer service. Loving other people leaves us all a little at service and a little served, both empowered and vulnerable. I think that’s how it should be. Doing it on all fours or in leather feels like a small adjustment to what already blooms deep and beautiful within intimacy, sex, and love, anyways.
