Battle of the Sex

ADULT CONTENT WARNING

Once I was the King of Pain
Now I eat humble pie
"King of Spain", Moxy Früvous (paraphrased)

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Jian Ghomeshi, former lead singer of the quirky Canadian group Moxy Früvous and host of the CBC's popular program Q for the past eight years, has been fired from his job over allegations, not yet made public, that he assaulted women before, during, and after sexual encounters.

Ghomeshi vehemently denies that he engaged in any activity that was not consented to.

He said, she said. Except her words carry a lot more weight than his. They were enough to get him fired, after all.

Ghomeshi retained the services of a crisis management firm that came out with a masterful reframing of the story. This was, it said in a statement, nothing more or less than a coordinated effort by an ex-girlfriend to smear and defame him. She has, he says, approached other women of his acquaintance and enlisted them, together with the services of a "freelance' writer, to destroy his reputation.

Ghomeshi stated that he engaged in sexual practices that some people might find "repulsive", including dominance and submission, bondage and discipline, and "light forms" of sadomasochism. There has, he averred, "always been consent"; he further claimed that CBC's own lawyers agreed with him on that crucial point. He even says in his statement that the ex has approached him wishing to "categorically refute" all the claims against him.

Today it comes to light that the Toronto Star has been investigating these allegations for months; that there are at least four accusers, that they have all chosen to remain anonymous and none have approached the police.

Who to believe?

There are some who see Ghomeshi's retaining a crisis management team as its own admission of guilt. There are others, primarily his fans, who seem to refuse to even consider the thought that he might be guilty of anything.
His guilt or innocence does not concern me at this juncture. What concerns me is the CBC's presumption of his guilt, and what it says about the power dynamics of sex.

Can I get right out front and say I don't understand BDSM at all? I've joked for years that I'm not just vanilla, I'm Madagascar vanilla. To me, pain and loving sex are mutually exclusive states; humiliation and sex even more so. Even role-playing, which Ghomeshi says was part of his repertoire, is a mystery to me: if you pretend to be someone else, and your partner finds that exciting, at what point in the proceedings do you cease to exist in his or her mind? And once that happens--why are you even there?  I find dominance and submission utterly incomprehensible, especially male dominance: it amazes me that the kind of behaviour that would face censure and worse in public is actively courted in private.

However, I'm me, and as I believe I have established over ten and a half years of blogging, I'm not normal. D/s, B/D, S&M: to varying degrees all of these things come standard in most bedrooms (and living room couches and kitchen tables and wherever else yanks your cranks). Provided there is informed consent among all parties, it is nobody's business what adults do in the (assumed) privacy of their sex lives.

But "consent" is such a thorny issue.

Don't get me wrong. I believe that no sexual act should ever be attempted, let alone completed, without consent. There are two problems, however. One is proving that consent existed--short of a written scorecard or (gasp) witnesses, this is impossible. Related is that it seems consent can be withdrawn at any point long after the sex. That may or may not be the case here: the mere thought is enough to cause my scrotum to retract into my body.
It occurs to me that this would hold especially true in the arena of "kinky" sex. I don't even tailgate in that arena's parking lot, but it seems to me that if inflicting pain and humiliation is part of the proceedings, at some point there might be a little too much pain and/or humiliation that results not just in the employment of a safe word but police and legal action in the aftermath. The level of trust you'd have to have in someone to engage in these sorts of behaviours is just off the charts. For what my mind insists on casting as the victim, of course, there's the danger that your "lover" will go too far--with some of the more dangerous forms of sadomasochism this wouldn't even necessarily involve the ignorance of a safe word. Choking. for instance, is an extremely dangerous way to get a sexual high, and it'd be kind of hard to get a safe word out when your airway is cut off--would a "safe gesture" be seen and recognized for what it was? You'd better hope so.

And then for the perpetrator--I really don't mean to cast consensual sex in the terms of a crime, but dehumanizing people just feels like a crime to me--the danger persists long after the orgasm. Essentially, you're tied to this person for the rest of your useful life--at any point she  might come forward and wreck your career. I don't mean to be sexist here; of course a man can be a victim of unwanted sexual advances, and he'll face his own hell if he even tries to report them. But all a woman has to do is breathe the word "rape" and--look what happened to Ghomeshi.

I doubt the CBC would have made this move without long and careful deliberation, which implies to me that there is more to this story than has come out already. It may be that Ghomeshi is guilty of everything he stands accused of. But that's for a court to decide...and not a court of his bosses.