Documentary

Speaking about submission, there was this broadcast on the private Austrian TV channel ATV the other day. Not having won the rights to broadcast the World Cup soccer games, they are currently guaranteeing a "soccer-free programme", so during a somewhat boring soccer match I decided to see what they had to offer instead and reached for the remote.

As it turned out, I zapped right into a 60-minute pseudo-documentary on dominatrixes in Vienna. It was totally cheesy, and especially the voice-over sounded like one of those know-it-all types who is really pretty clueless, but thinks he is teaching the rest of the world important things about a hitherto undiscovered subculture. Still, I sat on my sofa and watched in awe as strange stories unfolded before me. At some point a noteworthy pattern seemed to emerge:

1. There was this one particular dominatrix at home with her boyfriend, an "unemployed actor", preparing coffee or something, and talking about how her work doesn't interfere with their personal lives or their relationship at all, and then the voice-over said, "Ms X has a twenty year-old daughter who moved out two years ago and knows nothing about her mother's line of work." And I thought: Uh-huh. Well, she may know now.
   
2. Then they filmed a brief segment in the SMart café, showing plenty of faces, and again the know-it-all voice-over says, "Some people come here with their girlfriends or spouses, but in most cases their families do not know anything about their sadomasochistic desires at all." Let's hope then that no-one from their families or friends was watching this.
3. Later, we were introduced to Robert, one of Ms X's customers, who apparently lost his normal sense of pain after an accident and now needs extreme stimulation to get aroused. Because I am queasy I switched back to the significantly more soothing soccer game while Ms X was doing all sorts of things to him. When I switched back, you could see Robert leaving her house and the voice-over said, "Robert is now going back to his girlfriend, who knows nothing about his desires." Good. So let's hope that neither she nor anyone she knows saw this, or else Robert may be in for an unpleasant surprise. On the other hand, if she never noticed that Robert needs extreme pain for sexual stimulation, there might have been something inherently wrong with their relationship anyway.

The pattern is of course that there seem to be all these people whose spouses/friends/family know nothing about their sexual preferences and practices, but they choose to talk about them openly on television.

I'm getting more and more convinced that shows like this are either completely staged and scripted, and everything is just a performance by a couple of actors, or, if these are real people, that they must be extremely naive in believing that a 20-to-30-minute personal apperance on TV goes completely unnoticed by anybody.

For example, when I appeared in this rather obscure 3-minute segment about the London Underground, at least six people I know saw it just by mere chance. You can expect a significantly higher number of people to tune in to a cheesy sex report. Even during the Soccer World Cup. Never forget that it's a small world.

Like, as I was cycling home from work the next day, I saw Ms X's unemployed actor boyfriend walk along Landesgerichtsstrasse. It was definitely him, no doubt at all. He was even wearing the same pullover over his shoulder, an odd thing to do in this heat.

It's a small world.