The trappings of bondage

Aside from the occasional fish-out-of-water convulsion, it was difficult to move.

I was tied down, bent over a leather whipping bench, hands folded semi-clenched in restraint mitts and bound to the contraption’s front, ankles shackled to its back. Arse in the air and naked, aside from a leather codpiece.

“You’ve been a naughty journalist,” scolded Domina Equinox, the cane swishing through the air teasingly, the sound building up delicious, frightful anticipation.

When there was contact, the cane bit, seared and sent endorphins rushing through my body. Apart from childhood, the odd run-in with police and various shattered love affairs, I was utterly at the mercy of another human being for the first time.

An undoubtedly sentient being, but one who had at her disposal various domination paraphernalia, including canes, floggers, whips, strap-on dildos and a candle that had, earlier in the evening, been administered to my scrotum while I was sitting in a special genital torture chair.

The gimp mask meant I could see little and the gag ball in my mouth rendered the use of words almost useless. Apart from my safe word, “aubergine”, chosen because variants such as “brinjal” and “eggplant” would ensure enough confusion to guard against prudishness, I had no power whatsoever. Certainly no other form of control.

Domina Equinox tells me later that although she has patrons “from all walks of life”, she does get “a lot of high-powered people”.

“Businessmen, chief executives of companies, the sort of people who have a thousand employees and multimillion-rand budgets, who feel that they are loathed by their employees and want to lose control for a while, because they spend their lives controlling almost every aspect of it.”

The scene appears vibrant — local sites such as www.collarme.co.za have more than 19 000 members and a BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism) soiree held during last year’s Fifa World Cup apparently attracted more than 5 000 punters. People who enjoy the scene give a variety of reasons for participating, from re-enacting pivotal sexual power moments in childhood, such as being caught and disciplined by a nurse for masturbating while in hospital, to wanting to release the tensions associated with their constructed mainstream identities.

“A lot of what we do can be linked to people like [Sigmund] Freud and there is definitely a psychoanalytical element for many of the patients we see,” says Domina Equinox. She adds that there is both pre-consultation screening and post-treatment care to ensure that the psychological balance of her patrons is maintained.

Her live-in slave boy, Jono, who has been at her beck and call for more than a decade, taking care of everything from washing the dishes and doing the shopping to being her whip meat, interjects: “You are really manipulating people’s minds. Obviously, with their consent, but you are playing out these often psychologically and physically violent fantasies and blurring the lines of reality. So monitoring the patron’s mental state is very important, because we really are breaking them down,” says the former nurse.

We are sitting in the dungeon of Domina Equinox’s “citadel” in Johannesburg’s northern suburbs. It is equipped for every fantasy imaginable: a prison cell, a medical room, classroom and a feminisation parlour for cross-dressing men, with wigs, dresses and heels. Or it can be a dungeon, replete with a confession voyeurs’ booth, a coffin with a glory hole, a homemade wooden “extender” (a behemoth structure on which people can be trussed up in various positions and degraded) and an assortment of pain-inducing weapons — from handmade cat-o-nine tails to the plastic tennis-ball slings one uses when taking the dog for a walk.

The house also has all the accoutrements of a normal existence: dogs wandering around, a fridge plastered with magnets containing inspirational messages and even a dwarf-size white picket fence bordering the walkway to the dungeon.

Domina Equinox is regal, yet softly spoken. A nationally recognised show-jumper, she says her 12 years as a dominatrix (24 hours a day, seven days a week, “it is a lifestyle”) is about aesthetic and intellectual pleasure, but also her own psychological healing.

She was abused as a pre-teen by a family member with sadistic tendencies and was taken out of school almost daily to shoplift with her “kleptomaniac mother”.

“I didn’t live in a nurturing, loving environment,” she says. “There was a lot of trauma in my childhood and I was never allowed to be a child. I was punished by my mother if I didn’t steal enough, every showjumping event I entered I had to win, otherwise we had no money to go home and no food. And, of course, there was the physical abuse.”

A traumatic childhood bereft of love led to her developing both anorexia and bulimia as a teenager, illnesses that lasted into adulthood.

“I’m fully recovered now through BDSM. It has allowed me to find an equilibrium in my life and heal me,” she says.

Through BDSM, Domina Equinox says, she has not only resolved various childhood traumas, but also re-established her feminism, discovered more about human power dynamics and learned intimacy and sensuality. “This is what gives me empathy,” she says, “whether I am inflicting excruciating torture or merely introducing a beginner to the new experiences of fetish. Although I perform sadism, I am conscious of exactly what I administer — I am aware of the vulnerability of the masochist under my control.”

But she “doesn’t get off sexually from sessions”, Domina Equinox says. “I can have an orgasm in private. Sometimes I masturbate and think about a particular session.”

She is also firm about the fact that what she does is not prostitution, because there is no sex allowed.

As we chat, Jono marvels at how many of the methods of degradation and torture that he suffers, willingly now, are traced back to single-sex school and university initiations.

He may have a point: it is difficult not to consider the rituals at Spud-like private schools in South Africa and the captains of industries and politicians they consistently produce through old-boys’ networks.

Domina Equinox says she has not had a visit from a contemporary politician and does not see black African males because “of our complex history”.

“Just the thought of a black man being whipped by a white woman doesn’t feel right for me.”

Theorists like Freud have drawn on the writings of Donatien Alphonse François, the 18th-century Marquis de Sade, a French revolutionary politician and libertine, in their psycho-sexual examination of childhood. Regression into childhood is perhaps manifested most overtly in the BDSM scene through acts of infantilism.

Philosophers such as Simone de Beauvoir have also drawn links between the Marquis de Sade’s writing and the radical notions of freedom inherent in the existentialist movement of the 1960s.

Is there something liberating in being tied up and whipped? There is certainly catharsis and relaxation in a flogging, which felt very much like a post-deadline massage. There was also insight to be gained into the euphoric maelstrom of rushing endorphins that must propel the self-flagellation sects in Shi’ite Islam and Christianity towards “spirituality”.

Imprisoned in Domina Equinox’s jail, electric shock rod crackling menacingly in the background, acting out the naughty journalist victimised by the Protection of State Information Bill was scary, though.