Bondage boom just part of ‘ongoing sexual revolution’

Press, 2 August 1983, Page 19

Bondage boom just part of ‘ongoing sexual revolution’

For $ll9, at Jenny Zinkan’s “The Versatile Boutique” in conservative Orange County, home of Richard Nixon and the world’s first drive-in church, you can buy a “bondage starter kit” — whips, handcuffs, a shackle or two.

There is no instruction book, but for a trifle more, say $2OO an hour, at one of Los Angeles busy “bondage parlours” you can be videotaped in the sado-masochistic fantasy of your choice in a wellequipped dungeon. Assistance comes from a woman who knows her ropes. Bondage houses, and related sales of sado-masochistic equipment and apparel, have become a multi-million dollar business in California. The trade is attracting increasing attention from police who recently raided and shut down an S. and M. brothel in Sacramento, the state capital. Among its clients were lawyers, doctors, and judges. Its proprietors turned out to be a popular high school football coach and his wife, the school’s assistant principal. “Bondage,” says Jenny Zinkan, who also edits a “dating” magazine called “Kinky Contacts” with a mailing list of 15,000, “is coming out of the closet. We are tired of hiding.” Her clients are “respectable professional middle-class people” who resent the stigma attached to their “sexual preference.” The subject emerged a little further from the closet with last month’s Vicki Morgan video tape brouhaha. Morgan spent 12 years as multimillionaire Alfred Bloomingdale’s “dominant” mistress. When he

dropped her in 1982 she filed a $lO million “palimony” suit that filled newspapers with details of Bloomingdale’s Marquis de Sade’s proclivities. He died months later a broken man. Morgan, aged 30, was bludgeoned to death in her sleep on July 7 after a quarrel with a new lover. Sex researchers say that 10 per cent of Americans have sado-ma-sochistic inclinations. “They range from people who simply like to pinch or bite, to those involved in extreme ritualised and violent behaviour,” says Dr Wardell Pomeroy, California psychologist and assistant to the late Dr Alfred Kinsey. Why is it now on the upsurge? “Its partly increased visibility,” says Dr Pomeroy. “More people are opening up and joining clubs, forming organisations.” It is, according to researchers, part of the “ongoing sexual revolution.” Mrs Zinkan, blond mother of three whose car bears a bumper sticker reading “Screw guilt,” sees herself as a sexual pioneer. “People who all their lives have been terribly lonely and isolated because of this need are coming out into the sunlight. For the first time, they can share.” One way of sharing is through “Fetish Times,” a Los Angelesbased magazine with a national circulation of 45,000. There are a dozen similar publications having a combined readership estimated at

about a million. Page after page of advertisements carry every kind of S. and M. gear: “body binding leather garb" at $BOO a suit, metal studded face hoods, racks with suspension beams and hooks to hand them from. Specialists in the field offer to visit you at home. Among some 30 bondage parlours advertising, the “Ball and Chains” in Beverly Hills boasts “$BO,OOO worth of the right stuff,” including a whipping post, a 6ft deep pit, and a “verbal humiliation cage.” Women who work in these houses earn up to $lOOO a week. One owner says he makes a profit of $lOO,OOO. The usual credit card services are freely available. City authorities say they are wary of prosecutions because vice laws aimed at conventional prostitution do not work against the commercial bondage industry. “In court, they always get off with a plea of ‘sexual therapy’ or some such,” says a city attorney. Authorities are alarmed by the spread of S. and M. fashions among teenagers. Major record stores in Los Angeles sell thousands of these items weekly. Studded throat collars and spiked wristbands at $4O apiece are big with the young, but Tower Records says it has stopped selling loose metal studs. ‘We heard gang members were sticking them on baseball bats.” Copyright — London Observer Service.

From

WILLIAM SCOBIE,

in Los Angeles