OTAKU MAnKO: Sex and Electricity
Close on the heels of my rant on sexual urban legends comes a tragic case from Pennsylvania that sounds like bullshit — but it’s not.
In a story headlined “Kinky Sex, Shocking Death: Pennsylvania man charged with electrocuting wife during nip zip,” scandalcentric website The Smoking Gun reported on — well, it’s pretty self-explanatory. Toby Taylor and his wife Kirsten were, in Toby’s words, “into weird sexual behaviors,” which sounds to me like the sort of thing that a perv says when he or she is forced to explain certain recreational activities to somebody who is just not going to understand. In this case, it’s pretty clear why the cops wouldn’t understand, since Kirsten had just died because of them.
The behaviors, whether or not you consider them weird, were unquestionably dangerous. They involved running current from a power strip to clamps on Kirsten’s nipples; Kirsten and/or Toby would then turn the current on and off using the power strip.
While The Smoking Gun milks the story for its more prurient aspects, I confess to being just plain horrified by the light-hearted attitude people seem to be taking to the Taylors’ story; just one example is the post on urban legend site Snopes.com’s message boards — “bet she came and then went!” “missy_pooh” rimshots, ha ha ha ha ha. Thankfully, somebody named “Spamamander” (isn’t the Web great?) sets Missy partially straight with the comment that electrical play can be done safely, and in this case was not.
Still, the response of most people on hearing of cases like the Taylors’ has been to laugh their asses off and proclaim loudly that they would never do anything so weird. Those people are sexual freaks, you see, and they fucked up. Let’s make fun of them.
At least ten years ago I read about a Darwin Award supposedly given to a man who stuck one electrical cord up his ass and the other up his wife’s; they died trysting frenetically with current arcing between their bodies and were discovered burned to a crisp. That event almost certainly did not happen; in fact, it sounds physically impossible to me, but that’s hardly the point. The point is that it held people who enjoy sexual variation up for humiliation and provided endless hilarity at their expense — always good fun in the Darwin Awards, regardless of the story’s veracity. Unfortunately, Toby and Kirsten’s tragedy is real.
The problem with what Toby and Kirsten Taylor did wasn’t that it was weird — it’s that it was ill-informed. Playing with electricity is not to be done lightly, but it can be done safely. What makes Kirsten’s death a tragedy is that it didn’t have to happen. I hate seeing stuff like this in the news because I fear it hurts the cause of healthy sex. It advances the idea of “alternative” sexual practices as dangerous and stupid.
But it also mixes up two widespread areas of ignorance in most peoples’ lives: sex and science. Shame around alternative sexual practices like electrostimulation limits people accessing information about how to do it safely. It also interferes with the experimenters’ ability to rationally evaluate what the risk levels are of certain behaviors and choose ones that are both hot and safe. Meanwhile, lack of science education means that while most people might get that electricity is dangerous, they don’t understand why or how it is dangerous, with the result that their own ill-informed sexual experimentation provides all the information they have. They don’t understand that running current, particularly wall current, from one nipple to the other means that it’s crossing the heart, potentially causing a cardiac arrest even in an otherwise healthy person. A cardiac arrest is what killed Kirsten.
Coincidentally, the Pennsylvania case hit the news a few days after I interviewed Princess Donna, webmistress of San Francisco BDSM porn company Kink.com’s Wired Pussy, which is a mostly female-on-female BDSM electrostimulation and electrotorture site. In that interview, Donna told me that her first experience with electrostimulation was with her mother’s TENS unit when she was a kid. Her reported response, then, was “AAAAAAHHH!!!” — which is pretty much how I felt when I slapped on a TENS unit recently for the first time in years. Then, the thing was on my thigh — frankly, I’m damn glad it wasn’t on my nads, and if I ever put it there, boy howdy!! It takes some getting used to.
A TENS unit (the term is short for “Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation) is a device used to stimulate the muscles for the purposes of physical therapy. These units are relatively inexpensive, run off a 9-volt or similar battery, and are sometimes adapted for sexual pleasure or pleasurable discomfort.
My first encounter with a TENS unit, about ten years ago, was my first encounter with electrostimulation unless you count accidentally sticking my finger in a light socket when I was a kid — which was stimulating, but not in a good way. My TENS unit experience occurred when the unit was in the hands of someone I was really turned on to. I wasn’t exactly a bottom at the time, but it certainly helped that I was turned on. When I tried TENS recently just “to see what it’s like,” it was just plain weird. Never overestimate the ability of arousal to make things seem hot when those same things seemed weird five minutes or a year ago (or ten years later). That is (forgive me), if you’re wired that way.
TENS units are usually medically prescribed and considered pretty safe. They also taking some jerryrigging to adapt for internal or nipple stimulation — which is not recommended unless you realy know what you’re doing. At Wired Pussy, nipple stimulation only goes from one side of one nipple to the other side of the same nipple — never crossing the heart. The Kink.com folks also build many of their own electrical toys — but, and I cannot emphasize this enough, they know what they are doing. Unless you are an electrical expert and have a pretty good understanding of physiology, please don’t do the same.
On the other hand, Blowfish features an awesome inventory of electrical toys that are designed for safe sexual use right out of the box. There’s also some exceedingly important safety information, which you should check out whether or not you’re going to buy your electrical toys from Blowfish. The key things to know are that you should not play with electricity without knowing what you are doing — and that some very basic safety information can tell you very much what you’re doing, and how to do it without hurting yourself or your partner(s).
In addition to being safe, electrostim can also be rock-on amazing-friggin’ fun. I once watched a good friend climb into an electrostim chair manufactured by a different company and slide herself onto a probe that within minutes had her climaxing copiously. It was hot.
Safe electrical stimulation can be either pleasurable or uncomfortable, and in either case it can be either mild or intense. But just the fact of electrostimulation carries both a stigma and a — forgive me again — charge.
Something Princess Donna said sticks with me: “I think electricity is a very psychological thing for most people; most people are familiar with what it’s like to get slapped or to bump into things, so they’re familiar with corporal pain, or at least the idea of it. But when you introduce electricity, it’s automatically something that you’re not supposed to feel. You learn from an early age don’t stick your hands in the socket; you lick a battery you get scared. So I think it’s definitely edge play for a lot of people.”
The fact that electrical BDSM play, or electrical sex play, is so taboo and edgy means that it carries an extra level of excitement for some people. This means that it lends itself to exactly the kind of freaky fears and prurient obsession that can make pervy sex hot — and that can help spread both misinformation and shame.
Did the Taylors know they were taking a risk by running wall current from nipple to nipple — and was it that risk that made it hot? Probably not, but I don’t know for sure. Maybe they just didn’t know how serious a risk it was. But enjoyable electrical play, like any kind of “alternative” sex, oughta be about taking calculated risks, preferably minimized by knowing what the heck you’re doing.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, 5 February 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on Thursday, 7 February 2008 at 9:09 am Max Heck wrote:
I’d start by stating that the Taylors were idiots, and perhaps well deserving of their “Darwin Award.”
Perhaps that’s cruel, but…
Electricity is like pharmacopia, and not something you want to take lightly. You wouldn’t take a pill a stranger gave you if you didn’t understand what exactly it did.
Then again, some people might. And I’d call them idiots as well.
People understand things like fire… It’s visible, it’s obvious, you can at least see what it’s doing at any given point. Electricity is a lot more subtle. But it does have one simple rule.
Don’t ever cross your heart, unless you hope to die.
Seriously… You know how the Ghostbusters spoke of crossing the streams being a bad thing? This is the same way, only more so. Imagine a line between any electrodes you place. Don’t interfere with your lover’s heartbeat. Never, ever place two electrodes in such a way that the line runs through their chest.
And that, my friends, is 99% of what you need to know.
The other 1% would be to use certified TENS equipment and not do nitwit stuff like using wall current for stimulation.
Personally, I’m rather intrigued by the elecrostim stuff, and hope to play with some soon. It’d be a nice change from the more dangerous stuff I used to play with. :)