When I wasn’t at the Winnies, I was experiencing this week’s column…
We sat in uncomfortable chairs, under banks of fluorescent lights, facing a large group that scrutinized our every move. We were addressing a class, but the seven of us were lined up against the wall like some kind of pervy firing squad. The man next to me continued to speak, and his words brought me back into focus. “I had this bottom once, who wanted me to wear my smelliest shoes. I’d put on these leather high-tops and jog over to his place.” Outside, it was a crisp December afternoon. I tried to imagine the man next to me jogging through the Castro in leather Converse. I thought, Do leather daddies jog? “When I’d get to his apartment,” the man continued, “they’d be really sweaty and I’d tie the shoelaces together and hang them around his neck. He’d jack off just like that, inhaling deeply.” I thought I heard a little gasp in the back of the room.
Of course, that gasp could have been more excitement than repulsion. The man speaking was a retifist, and I was on San Francisco Sex Information‘s sexual fetishes panel, one of the last classes in their intense training series. The panel brings in a mix of outside educators, fetish practitioners, and SFSI’s internal training staff to provide students a well-rounded education session. In the session they hear a variety of fetishes described, hear from people who actually do these things and get questions answered about how, what, where, when and why. I’ve been speaking on this panel for several years. In December 2006, I even wrote a book about the whole rubber enchilada, and every year at SFSI the lineup is different (as are the fetishes presented, ranging from the mild to the extreme).
The trainees are often sexologists, clinic workers and counselors, psych students and MFTs in training. SFSI staff is similarly comprised. The goal of the training is to give trainees the tools to be able to respond accurately and without judgment to SFSI’s cold-calls and e-mails on any given sexual topic. On the panel, especially as the fetishes ranged into the unbelievable (and even physically impossible), educators reiterated the motto “We don’t prescribe or proscribe, we describe.” And reminded trainees (dubbed affectionately by myself and another educator “newly-minted superfreaks”) that it’s perfectly fine to have an “ew” reaction, but to think twice before they judge whether or not an individual’s sexual interest is “wrong.”
After the man on my right described his extensive knowledge of man-on-man stinky foot sniffing, the woman on my left — a local professional dominatrix — eloquently launched into a mind-boggling range of information about “adult baby” (colloquially called “AB,” or “DL” for “diaper lover”) scenarios gleaned from her work with clients. She brought props. I was feeling pretty OK about my “ew” reaction.
(…) Link.
Image of Victorine via melle.luka, taken in the Paris (Metro) subway.
