How I became boring | The Spectator

I had S&M relationships from my teens through my roaring forties. Why did I get involved in such strange antics? I just don't know.

Was it because I wanted to be different? Because I didn't want a quiet, comfortable, devoted relationship like my parents had? Because I thought of romantic and sexual love as impermanence, and that seemed hard to reconcile with vanilla sex? Or was I simply the type that many male masochists are – I was “powerful” in my field, excellent at my job, and curious about what it felt like to be powerless? (The latter, given what I now know about how many girls and women around the world experience powerlessness, makes me feel ashamed like few things do.) Did I actually enjoy being gagged, handcuffed, beaten, and whipped? Well, looking back, I did enjoy it., I think – ooo, imagine, I have The last night!

But looking back now, I'm both baffled and amused. I'm glad I got over it for three main reasons. The most trivial is vanity; there's no doubt (unless you're a perverse gerontophile) that a 32-year-old generally looks much better naked than a 59-year-old, although the conspicuous exceptions of Sam Smith and Liz Hurley spring to mind. As with all performative sex, you'd better look good if you don't want to look weird.

Another reason is that what was outrageous and cool in my youth became mainstream and nonsense; Venus in Fur to furry handcuffs in high street shop windows on Valentine's Day. For someone as unruly as me, this was always going to be a problem. Then there's another kind of nonsense, the kind that fancies itself edgy; the dead hand and deaf ear of 'queerness' spoiling the fun, as it always does with us early converts. It's a long way from the forbidden, exquisite torment of the Velvet Underground to a horde of fat men dressed as 'leather puppies' being fondled by smug police officers on an overcast day at Pride. Watching YouTube footage of people being publicly whipped at a Pride parade is about as sexy as having a dog pee on your picnic – which, come to think of it, I would have found pretty sexy at 17. But not anymore!

But it's not just the meanness that made me give up the pain of leisure; it's the meanness. Although it might have been easy to figure out my idea of ​​horizontal fun if I'd read the dirty book I wrote in my twenties, ambition – in which the heroine suffers all sorts of exotic humiliations, including the tattoo “SOLD” on her forehead – as far as I know, no female murderer has ever tried toambition Defence' in the way many have tried to defend the 'Fifty shades Defense': 'She was literally “I wanted it that way, your honor!” Since the publication of EL James' first novel, sexual violence has become so much of a norm that choking even made it into a Harry Styles song. In the US, a survey found that a third of female college students between the ages of 18 and 24 said they were choked the last time they had sex. One can't help but think that the mental health epidemic, most evident among liberal young women, might have something to do with this dismal state of sexual relations.

Cranks who find nothing more sexually pleasurable than harming women seem to be everywhere these days, watching it, planning it, or doing it, from poor Holly Willoughby's recent troubles to a woman I know who began an online romance with a male terf, only to have him shamefully confess on a visit to his homeland that he was impotent unless he could watch rape porn. This is hardly the cheeky kind of extreme “slap and tickle” that it was when I was a girl, just after the Boer War. And that's not even taking into account that – largely due to the online militants of trans activism – we live in the most brutally misogynistic era of modern times, a time when a snazzy online retailer like Etsy sells T-shirts with the slogan “FREE BEATS FOR TERFS.”

Who could blame me for not seeking sexual humiliation anymore when it's everywhere? There's no point being an old masochist when you're already suffering the rigors of a well-lived life of fun and games. At 65, all I say is “Ouch!” if I stand up too quickly – and after so long at the bottom of the scale, that's fine with me.