A professional dominatrix was acquitted of manslaughter yesterday in a Massachusetts court. It sounds like the case was poorly handled by the authorities, from the investigating cops right up to the prosecutor. The police supposedly forced a confession out of the dominatrix, but neglected to record it—they didn’t even take written notes—and no body or DNA evidence was ever recovered, despite the charge that the woman and her boyfriend dismembered the decedent, who weighed 245 pounds, and disposed of his body behind a nearby restaurant. You’d think someone would have noticed 245 pounds of chopped-up dead guy behind a restaurant. Even more bizarre was the little passion play performed by the prosecutor during closing arguments.
“… prosecutor Robert Nelson put on a black leather mask with a zippered mouth opening and re-enacted the bondage session. With both hands, he reached back and clutched the top of a blackboard as if strapped to the rack. Then he hung his head as if dead.
Asher’s lawyer objected, and the judge agreed.
‘That’s enough Mr. Nelson,’ Judge Charles Grabau said. ‘Thank you for your demonstration.’”
Yah. The state claims the dead guy had a heart attack while restrained on a rack, and the dominatrix failed to act to save his life out of fear that her “home business” would be discovered by authorities. The guy should probably be called “presumed dead,” because a body has yet to be discovered, and he is factually just missing, for now.
It raises a bunch of interesting issues (and headlines! as one Australian paper put it: “Dominatrix Beats Rap”) not the least of which being the legal twilight surrounding certain consensual intimate acts. The dominatrix in question has been described (among other things) as a sex worker, a phrase that raises legal issues itself in a country where most intersections of sex and commerce are illegal. This sort of BDSM sex is even odder, legally speaking—most BDSM acts could be considered battery, let alone sexual assault, and that’s not even taking into account the aspect of sexual gratification for pay. It’s absolutely illegal to pay someone for a hand job … is it more or less legal to pay someone to kick your ass and then give you a hand job? What if they just kicked your ass?
Even more “train wreck” interesting to me is the horrific landscapes that “edge play” sexual practices border. Extreme and “transgressive” bondage, like breath control, are just plain creepy and could not be less erotic in my view, but even worse are the occasional reports that surface of someone being “consensually” mutilated—or worse—like the nightmarish murder/cannibalism case currently being retried in German courts (details are so horrific and distasteful (no pun) that I won’t link to coverage or provide any other details in this post) and an earlier (1996) case here in the US. The German case is being retried in an effort by the court to get a longer (murder) penalty imposed over the original manslaughter conviction. The killer? co-conspirator? in the 1996 US case did go to prison, and died two weeks before he would have been paroled (in 2002).
Bad tattoos make me cringe—enjoy that “Skunk E. Buddz playing guitar and smoking a big joint” mark on your body forever and ever, pal. Some of the more radical piercings and modifications I’ve seen fill me with a sense of unease and confusion—why the fuck would someone cut off their fingers above the first knuckle?—but at the same time I find the works and lives of artists like Genesis P. Orridge interesting and compelling. Genesis, who is transgendered and heavily modified by surgery intended to make him “pandrogynous,” is dedicated to some extreme ideas about art and humanity. In a recent Signal to Noise interview, he says “… the job of the artist is to present extreme ideas in order to drag the rest of society kicking and screaming towards something that might enhance and improve the quality of life and the experience of being alive.” I agree in part with the sentiment (I also think artists should entertain and soothe at least half the time, and being dragged kicking and screaming is neither fun nor relaxing), but I agree more with the sentiment that humans are perhaps at their most divine and transcendent as agents of change. The problem with divinity is that it’s bipolar.
Though it may seem like a curve ball to add to the narrative, the legality of assisted suicide (a phrase which is an exceptionally ugly composition of language) is related to the issues underlying this dominatrix case (if one assumes the dominatrix was in fact responsible for a heightened lethality risk for her client), and even the “consensual murder” cases I reference obliquely above. Should we have the legal option of ending our own lives as gracefully as possible if those lives have descended into base torment and agony? I’d think so, though I’m torn by the issue—maybe my Catholic upbringing rearing its head here, but I believe that suffering may have value and bring enlightenment we can impart to those we leave behind. But we should have the legal option, whether we take it or not (I find it obscene that matters of law apply to a decision as definitively personal as suicide). But is suffering “imparted” by sickness or disease the same as suffering as the result of torture or mutilation? As the coin spins in the air, god and devil overlap.
Should anyone have the option of allowing someone else to place them in a position of increased risk, for reasons of sexual (or other) gratification? Are bondage and “edge play” somehow roughly analogous to extreme sport? I have the same visceral reaction to breath control and extreme body modification that I do to detailed accounts of climbing Everest and deep free diving, all varieties of “sport” which are occasionally lethal. But again, should anyone be legally restrained from placing themselves in a position likely to result in their injury or death? Sky diving, car racing, bull fights … are these that removed, in the austere and sterile world of jurisprudence, from bondage and torture that’s willingly participated in? Where do we draw the line? If we’re allowed to climb a mountain and die on it, are we allowed to let someone murder (and/or eat) us? The coin spins and falls.
Hopefully somewhere shy of death and cannibalism, though the advocatus diaboli in me embraces Genesis’s call to pushing the boundaries of human experience. I just can’t help but think there are some things we can more safely regard as abstractions, and some coins are safer in the pocket than spent or flipped.
