To drap der sex ser ut til å ha spilt en rolle, fascinerer europeiske avislesere. Sean Thomas har skrevet en bok om seksuelle rollespill, etter selv å ha opplevd det, og forstått at det er utbredt.

Thomas traff i en alder av 20 år en 17 år gammel overklassepike med sans for å utforske sinnets kroker og med stor grad av seksuell energi. De «lekte» – villere og villere – og det endte med at hun anmeldte ham for voldtekt. Han satt to måneder i varetekt og hadde en erfaring han gjerne skulle vært foruten, selv om han ble enstemmig frikjent.

After my acquittal I tried to come to terms with all this by writing a book about erotic games and dangerous sex. By way of research I attended lots of trials of «sex crimes».

Many of these cases were simple rapes. Horrible but basic. But more than a few came from an enigmatic and sinister area of sexual experiments gone awry: swinging sex that ended in jealous violence; games of submission and domination where a little too much blood was drawn; sessions of bondage where the amusing became disturbing – and someone called the police.

The lesson I learnt from this research is that as a society we may well treat sex too lightly. Put it another way: we see sex as an amusing sport, a titillating pastime, a kind of fancy-dress party of the libido – the more the merrier, the weirder the better.

Don’t believe me? Look at the headlines in the most sober of newspapers. Footballers «roasting» drunken girls. Gays «cottaging» in your local park. Couples «dogging» in the nearest woods. All of it treated with a kind of glib flippancy. As a culture we seem to have veered from a position where all sex was questionable and unusual sex was scandalous to the opposite extreme: where everything is permissible and prohibition is jejune.

These days, anyone who says that orgies or buggery or bondage is wrong risks looking a prude. Nowadays, all forms of sex, short of paedophilia, are regarded as part of the fun – and no one wants to be the party pooper.

Why is this? Why are we so drenched in sexuality and so desperately accepting of «strange» and «unusual» sex? The obvious answer is the sexual liberation of the 1960s, that famous pendulum swing against the puritanism of the Victorian era (which lasted, as Philip Larkin pointed out, right up until 1963, and the Beatles’ first LP).

Som Thomas påpeker: «permissive culture» har tatt et nytt steg med internett. Den gjør alt mulig. Nettet er som en stor hjerne der du kan finne de mest sprø tanker og lyster, og det er lov fordi det finnes:

There is another factor, though. I think the process of sexual permissiveness, the adoption of sex as a supposedly harmless game, has been vastly intensified by the internet in recent years.

The internet introduces us to the sexual thoughts of others, and the sexual variety and fervency of the human subconscious, in a wholly new way. When it comes to sex, the net is voluptuously protean. If you want to find images of naked Russian girls in mudbaths, there they are on the net. If you want films of couples having four-way sex, you can find them live on the internet. Whatever you want, whatever you think it possible to conceive of is on the net. And because it is there it somehow seems, well, more licit, more understandable, more mainstream.

This versatile nature of the net is especially dangerous, because it can reveal to anyone the multifarious kinks in their own brain.

When sex games go wrong

To drap der sex ser ut til å ha spilt en rolle, fascinerer europeiske avislesere. Sean Thomas har skrevet en bok om seksuelle rollespill, etter selv å ha opplevd det, og forstått at det er utbredt.

Thomas traff i en alder av 20 år en 17 år gammel overklassepike med sans for å utforske sinnets kroker og med stor grad av seksuell energi. De «lekte» – villere og villere – og det endte med at hun anmeldte ham for voldtekt. Han satt to måneder i varetekt og hadde en erfaring han gjerne skulle vært foruten, selv om han ble enstemmig frikjent.

After my acquittal I tried to come to terms with all this by writing a book about erotic games and dangerous sex. By way of research I attended lots of trials of «sex crimes».

Many of these cases were simple rapes. Horrible but basic. But more than a few came from an enigmatic and sinister area of sexual experiments gone awry: swinging sex that ended in jealous violence; games of submission and domination where a little too much blood was drawn; sessions of bondage where the amusing became disturbing – and someone called the police.

The lesson I learnt from this research is that as a society we may well treat sex too lightly. Put it another way: we see sex as an amusing sport, a titillating pastime, a kind of fancy-dress party of the libido – the more the merrier, the weirder the better.

Don’t believe me? Look at the headlines in the most sober of newspapers. Footballers «roasting» drunken girls. Gays «cottaging» in your local park. Couples «dogging» in the nearest woods. All of it treated with a kind of glib flippancy. As a culture we seem to have veered from a position where all sex was questionable and unusual sex was scandalous to the opposite extreme: where everything is permissible and prohibition is jejune.

These days, anyone who says that orgies or buggery or bondage is wrong risks looking a prude. Nowadays, all forms of sex, short of paedophilia, are regarded as part of the fun – and no one wants to be the party pooper.

Why is this? Why are we so drenched in sexuality and so desperately accepting of «strange» and «unusual» sex? The obvious answer is the sexual liberation of the 1960s, that famous pendulum swing against the puritanism of the Victorian era (which lasted, as Philip Larkin pointed out, right up until 1963, and the Beatles’ first LP).

Som Thomas påpeker: «permissive culture» har tatt et nytt steg med internett. Den gjør alt mulig. Nettet er som en stor hjerne der du kan finne de mest sprø tanker og lyster, og det er lov fordi det finnes:

There is another factor, though. I think the process of sexual permissiveness, the adoption of sex as a supposedly harmless game, has been vastly intensified by the internet in recent years.

The internet introduces us to the sexual thoughts of others, and the sexual variety and fervency of the human subconscious, in a wholly new way. When it comes to sex, the net is voluptuously protean. If you want to find images of naked Russian girls in mudbaths, there they are on the net. If you want films of couples having four-way sex, you can find them live on the internet. Whatever you want, whatever you think it possible to conceive of is on the net. And because it is there it somehow seems, well, more licit, more understandable, more mainstream.

This versatile nature of the net is especially dangerous, because it can reveal to anyone the multifarious kinks in their own brain.

When sex games go wrong