Gawker doesn't think there was anything wrong with "naming and shaming" the kinky Canadian--a retired college prof--whose bondage scene at New York's Nutcracker Suite went horribly, horribly wrong. Gawker:
The sex writers, Emily Farris at Nerve and Dan Savage at every alternative weekly ever printed [the item I wrote about it is here], plus Jeff Bercovici at Portfolio, want the professor's identity protected. They wonder about the news value in printing his name. They wonder why he's being "shamed. " What problem does the New York Post have with kinky sex?
None, from the looks of things.... There's nothing wrong with going for some kinky sex in a dungeon. There are surely many, many people who do so without the knowledge of their spouse. But someone who specifically asks and pays for a dangerous situation, because that's what he gets off on, has no reasonable expectation of privacy if an accident should happen and he should lapse into a coma. The cops will be called. The wife will find out. A reporter will show up at the hospital.
The bondage coma story, which is a staggeringly awesome story by the way, should be covered like any other story precisely because the sex fetish is not shameful, and because the likes of Nerve and Dan Savage surely don't want companies like News Corp. making judgement calls on what is shameful.
Running with the identity of the of the kinky prof was salacious and mean-spirited... just like The Post, I realize. (And just like my column often is.) And perhaps the kinky prof should have realized that, should something go wrong with his edgy sex scene in a commercial dungeon, his name could wind up in the papers, and his family could find out. What bothered me about the Post's treatment of this story, however, was not the wallowing in all the kinky, salacious details (just like my column), but the Post's declaration of war on kinky people--as if there aren't kinky people that read the Post, write for the Post, run the post, and own the Post.
Here's that infamous quote again: "The Post will happily name every adult caught in a dog collar." Okay, fine. But what are the odds, you suppose, that among the thousands of people that work at the Post, there's at least one--maybe a few dozen, maybe a hundred or two--who have worn dog collars outside of an amateur production of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown? Staggeringly high, I should think. (And if anyone has any pictures, I'd love to see 'em.) And if being named & shamed is good enough for a college prof that nearly asphyxiate in commercial dungeons, it's good enough for News Corps execs that profit from their public humiliation.
And you can argue that a sex fetish isn't or shouldn't be shameful (like I do in my column), but you can't argue that the Post's stories on this college prof attempted to make sex fetishes look shameful, and that the Post shamed this poor, desperate, still-disoriented-from-three-days-in-a-coma kinkster into disavowing his kinks. The asswipes at the Post shouldn't be able to write pieces shaming people for their kinks, and threaten to do the same to anyone else caught being kinky in public, and then see people who believe there's shameful about kinks come to their defense.
And finally...
Black leather, inter-generational sex, possible rice queen--should Mr. Murdoch, sitting in his glass house, really be throwing stones at other kinky men past retirement age?
