12 hours ago
Britain is kinkier in bed than you think
Many moons ago, when I was editor of Erotic Review, my S&M columnist – a former BBC children's TV presenter – told me her idea of nirvana was to don fetish gear and get soundly thrashed. I said, 'Forget the pain, I'm all about the pleasure.' She chided me: 'You're so vanilla!' I remain an unrepentant sybarite, so I approached curator Anastasiia Fedorova's book Second Skin: Inside the Worlds of Fetish, Kink and Deviant Desire, about the British fetish scene, with the curiosity of a dungeon tourist.
There's plenty of perverse pastimes to wrap your head around here: leather, latex, fetish clubs, not to mention the key roles of dominatrix and gimp (mute sub in identity-obscuring mask). Fedorova traces her own inclination for the fetish scene to her Russian upbringing during the 1990s, when fake designer garments started to flood the black market. The badly-embroidered Medusa head on her mother's knock-off Versace trousers became symbolic of the lust for a Western life: 'In its own way my childhood provided me with an intense crash course on capitalism and its power to elevate quotidian consumer objects into fetishes.'
Even so, Fedorova didn't start to explore the fetish realm until the start of lockdown in London (where she's now based). Starved of human touch, she became fascinated by kinksters, unable to go out, posting social-media photos of themselves wearing latex garments at home: 'People of all genders, from all corners of the world, showed off limbs transformed by glossy rubber skins on their sofas and beds.' She relished the element of performance in all this; the taboo element appealed to her too, as a queer-identifying woman – a verboten identity in Putin's Russia.
As Fedorova points out, such metamorphoses don't come cheap. Her first catsuit sets her back £257 (the Matrix model, from London-based Libidex), and she road-tests it at an anonymous hotel. She excels at sensual writing: 'We went slowly: two latex-clad cyborgian beings moving around one another in a careful choreography… I thought of all the blood and electricity running through his body under the latex.'
Second Skin interweaves vivid personal experience and interviews with fascinating historical research. Few will be surprised to learn that the UK's fetish culture finds its roots in Charles Macintosh's 1823 patent for his latex and cloth raincoat, leading to an early fetish known as 'macking' – hence the expression 'dirty mac'. It was only much later that a London-based Mackintosh Society, founded in 1967 by Leon Chead, became 'one of the world's first fetish organisations'.
I'm taking this snippet on trust: Google, for instance, seems to have no record of Chead. But I'd imagine that much of the material Fedorova examined at the UK Leather and Fetish Archive, in London's Bishopsgate, isn't readily available online, and with good reason. The kink scene has long provoked close interest from the police. Fedorova reminds us of Operation Spanner, which saw 16 gay men prosecuted in the 1980s for private, consensual sadomasochistic acts, on the grounds that the acts involved 'actual bodily harm'.
I was also glad to be reminded of John Sutcliffe, who trained as an aircraft engineer and served in the RAF while harbouring a fetish for rubber and leather. In 1957 he set up Atomage in Hampstead, a company manufacturing rubber and leather motorcycle gear 'for lady pillion riders'. He was responsible for Marianne Faithfull 's leather catsuit in the 1968 film The Girl on a Motorcycle. He went on to set up Atomage magazine in 1972, publishing photos of his customers posing in middle-class homes and 'manicured' gardens, dressed head-to-toe in bondage gear. This very British incarnation of private perversity came to an end in 1982 when Sutcliffe published Jim Dickson's erotic novel The Story of Gerda. He was prosecuted for obscenity; his back stock of magazines and printing plates were destroyed. He died not long afterwards.
For all these historical diversions, the balance of Fedorova's book tilts in favour of today's fetish realm, with particular reference to LGBTQ+ practitioners and other marginalised communities. 'Rubber,' she writes, 'allows one to channel a creature devoid of gender or social attributes.' Maybe: but latex also allows some fetishists to emphasise breasts, bottoms and genitals to cartoonish proportions. There's rather too much exposition of far-from-groundbreaking contemporary art for this reader's taste, and some lines can read like captions in a Hoxton gallery patronised only by Gen Y and Z: 'Pleasure is key to traversing that space between language and sensation, between identity and change.' I also enjoyed: 'One must resist idealising a homogenous vision of the leather community.' Must one?
But then people in their 20s and 30s are surely the intended audience. Fedorova's cultural references tend to be recent: the TV series Industry, fashionistas such as Isamaya Ffrench, Instagram influencers such as dominatrix Eva Oh. Everyone's pronouns seem to be 'them/they', and the author occasionally ties herself in moral knots, as when she discusses Tom O Finland's more 'problematic' illustrations from the 1950s and '60s – so famous his homoerotic images appeared on a set of Finnish stamps in 2014 – which frequently fetishise police and military uniform.
I may not be the reader Fedorova envisioned, being 57 and possessed of the desire to laugh at life's absurdity – sex included. Often, for us in Britain, life is a comedy, but for Russians, all too understandably, it's a tragedy: and Fedorova convincingly makes the link between her own heritage, a lifelong struggle with anxiety and gradual immersion in the fetish world. The following passage, where the author disrobes from her catsuit, is almost unbearably moving: '[Latex] helps you to transcend the restlessness and sadness which comes with having flesh, blood and skin. Sometimes, after the pressure is released and the catsuit is at your feet in a sweaty pile, it feels like grief.' That, I could imagine.
