Put On Your Kinky Boots Jian Ghomeshi

Watch where you put those hands Jian!

 

I’m not surprised often, but that morning I was pretty shocked.

And it wasn’t just that my left sock was black, the right navy blue.

Years ago I worked in a mid-sized medical lab at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Comox, on Vancouver Island. I went to my job one day, and returned home a little less naive at the end of my shift.

Entering the lab, I had to pass through the front waiting-room area. Chairs stood in rows where patients sat before being called into one of the smaller back rooms to have their blood taken or electrocardiogram leads laid out in a curving river across their chest.

A long narrow hallway led into the back of the lab past an open washup and sterilization area on the right, followed by the tiny pathologist’s office in the far right corner.

Each morning, I veered left at the pathologist’s office into my Microbiology department. It opened out with its warm incubators and cold fridges and counters layered high with multi-coloured petri dishes sprouting bacteria of all makes and models.

There was a familiar – almost sweet – but not totally unpleasant bacterial scent in the air. You probably know you’ve worked in a lab for a (too) long time when the putrid scents begin to develop an appeal…

.

But really, it was the pathology office that held a magnetic lure.

.

On many, if not most mornings, protruding from the IN-BOX screwed to the wall just outside the door there would be a long paper sheet or two loosely jutting up from the upper opening.

It was an invitation begging to be looked at.

These long sheets were dropped off by the local coroner from the previous night’s usually routine, or sometimes macabre adventures that resulted in a chilled body stretched out in the morgue downstairs.

The page was a request to the pathologist to carry out an autopsy on someone who had expired and where some explanation was needed. Tidy block writing described all of the important details of the poor wretch’s demise. The factual commentary outlined the circumstances of the death and the reason an autopsy was needed.

Most were straightforward and vanilla: suspected heart attacks, strokes, tumbles down stairs, drownings.

But one day … this day … a story unfolded in the coroner’s script that still stands out in my mind all of these years later. It was a sad little tale of sexual kink that ended tragically for one poor fellow.

So why am I thinking about this now? I blame it on you Jian…

Well … Jian Ghomeshi, Canada’s premier radio show host, it’s thanks to you and your 50 Shades of Grey proclivities and adventures. The stories are popping up all over like a Whack-a-Mole board about your BDSM lifestyle and sexual recreations with choking and other maybe-not-so-fun stuff.

I’m no prude. What happens behind closed doors is all fun and good with me.

Most of the time.

I’m trying really hard not to judge you Jian so early on without more background detail. And it’s hard because I’ve always admired you and your considerable abilities to carry out wonderful interviews with both the famous and the common folk.

You are the epitome of cool, you have a great radio voice, a charming smile, and your questions are insightful and respectful, even if Billy Bob Thornton thought you were an asshole when really he was just looking at himself in the mirror.

Hearing the stories about Jian from increasingly numerous young women of beatings and forced chokings in a sexual context carried me back to the moments years earlier as I stood outside that pathologist office in Comox reading the coroner’s notes graphically detailing a young man’s death.

I had never heard the term before:

Autoerotic Asphyxiation

Wikipedia describes it as:

When you rob your brain of oxygen (asphyxia), you experience a high — euphoria, dizziness, and lowered inhibition — before you lose consciousness. To make their sexual experience more thrilling, autoerotic asphyxiators masturbate while strangling themselves with cords, ropes, scarves, and ties, or they suffocate by sealing their heads in plastic bags.

The vast majority don’t mean to kill themselves. They usually devise some kind of rescue mechanism to stop the asphyxiation once they’ve climaxed. But the fail-safe often fails. For example, they may tie a slip-knot or hang themselves from something that’s shorter than they are, so they can simply stand up to stop the strangulation. But they may get so weak and disoriented from lack of oxygen that they can’t pull out the knot or stand up, and they pass out and die.

The Wikipedia description almost perfectly outlines the coroner’s notes of the young man in the morgue fridge downstairs.

He was found hanging, a knotted rope circling his neck, porn magazines scattered open on the floor around him, a carrot protruding from his rectum. While standing on a small stepstool in order to get some tension around his neck, somehow the stool had slid away and out of his reach. He was found a couple of hours later – too late – by his wife when she returned from work.

North American statistics suggest this is a occurrence that repeats itself over 1,000 times each year.

My little naive mind was shaken and disturbed. It was an uncomfortable and sad feeling that stayed with me and lingered. It even still resides like a dormant virus in a tiny corner of my mind.

And so this week when I listened to the (alleged) stories arising about Jian, I felt that same sense of unsettled discomfort. It’s a lifestyle choice that is far beyond even my own internal kinky fantasy life.

50 Shades of Grey, like a good horror movie, transports many of us into a world of supposed make-believe that has some shock appeal perhaps solely because it is pretend. Fantasy and imagination can be a wonderful enriching part of our existences.

I’m just not sure I’m ready or want to disassemble my naivety and enter a place where “normal” people like Jian Ghomeshi (supposedly) roughly take their personal narcissistic enjoyment.

I’m still in recovery from one day in the Comox laboratory all those years back.

Are those your Kinky Boots Jian??