Lex Ruthless, a former Protestant clergyman, has always wanted to make a difference. “In the church, everyone wants to belong. But I found people were hiding a lot of the things they felt ashamed about,” he says. “I was really frustrated, because I want to help people.” Lex left the church and not long after went to his first fetish event in Vancouver, Canada in 2017.
No longer giving sermons, he soon became a “dungeon monitor” (tasked with ensuring there’s consent in kink-play spaces) and founded Switch Kitchen, which holds educational seminars and produces woke BDSM movies. In spite of what you might assume, the transition from the Bible to ball-gags “wasn’t a hard swap,” he recalls. “No-one has anything to hide here. I’ve experienced real community.”
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Lex is just one of many atypical characters I’ll meet on this giant luxury yacht, hired out for a ‘fetish cruise’ to celebrate the annual Vancouver Fetish Weekend. Missionary-loving squares can walk the plank: only serious perverts are welcome aboard, and 350 of them make the cut. A crew of artists, porn stars, entrepreneurs, and strippers have gathered to embark on a three-hour pleasure voyage onto the high seas, far away from the bemused onlookers at the harbour gawking at the latex-clad, gimp mask-wearing kinksters. Some arrive with their play partners, others appear to be on the hunt for fresh meat. “Don’t diss anyone’s kink!” a poster advertising the house rules says. “It might not be your kink, but that’s OK.” Another directive reads: “Don’t get messy! No blood or body fluids.”
The organiser Isaac Terpstra claims to have been the first to bring this niche excursion to North America, providing attendees a uniquely buoyant sense of liberation that comes from being on a boat with the wind in their sails while being spanked silly into an adrenaline-fuelled altered state. “It’s a weird little paradise to find common ground, bond, and play,” he told me recently.
As the boatload of randy fiends sets sail from the harbour at a rate of several knots, leaving the prying eyes stranded on shore, all manner of lascivious activities start to commence—involving ropes, horsewhips, hockey sticks, giant insect swatters, suspension frames, workout benches, boxing gloves, and other paraphernalia.
Cruises of the vanilla variety are known for their endless offerings of “structured fun,” and for pampering guests with humongous buffets and extravagant stage shows. This X-rated version isn’t entirely dissimilar.
An extreme but consensual scene ensues in which one woman, clearly trained in combat sports, beats up a younger lady on an exercise mat. “She’s scared, but a good scared,” says the play monitor, who is managing the ‘crash pad’ area on the second floor. A tidal wave of seemingly ceaseless spanking begins, with willing recipients splayed out across a number of benches. A young woman tied up with ropes hangs in midair while her dominator decides what to do with her next. An erotic dancer gyrates on a pole. A DJ plays sleazy techno reworks. It’s fetish pandemonium. Meanwhile, mildly disinterested security guards, speaking to each other in their mother tongue, patrol on the lookout for any serious transgressions.
Part of the appeal of bondage, domination, sadism, and masochism—that’s BDSM for any ingénues—is a quest for healing from traumatic experiences. This is explained to me by Lex, who is also known (to whom, it’s never made clear) as the “soft dom with a sadistic streak.” Last night, during another event, a man told Lex of being consensually spanked for the first time after suffering from an assault earlier in his life. “He came up to us, and he said: ‘This really healed me.’”
Like Lex, most people here go by pseudonyms. Some simply deploy their usernames from the BDSM community site FetLife. Marilyn, an attorney and former professional dominatrix, discovered BDSM in San Francisco in the 1990s when she met a drag queen at a nightclub and experienced a thrilling sense of adventure from wearing a skimpy rubber skirt. She met her companion—a nameless male gimp, who is not permitted to speak—in Montreal a couple of years back. “He brought his big bubble head,” she says. “He’s my big beautiful balloon today.” Deep intimacy turns her on, she explains. “People really knowing me, and me really knowing them. We all want to be known.”
The last four years of Marilyn’s life have principally been spent in Miami caring for her mother, whose health is in serious decline. “It’s been a very rich, fulfilling period, in a completely different realm than where most of my life journey has been.” On the cruise, she is back in her natural element and “gets to be a star” against a stunning backdrop—Vancouver’s sprawling, futuristic skyline gliding by on one side of the ship, and a range of snow-capped mountains on the other.
“Sometimes I break down crying while I’m being spanked. That’s why I fell in love with it.”
“I love men, I recognise how sensitive they are,” Marilyn says, while holding her gimp by his leash. She tells me that her partner of 12 years is back in her hotel room, while another man has also been enlisted to sleep on the floor and remain at her beck and call. Does she have sex with any of her subs? “No, it’s only for one person, it’s sacred. They’re not my slave. It’s got to be a relationship of parity.”
Her partner, a well-known sportsman turned pundit, I’m told, “loves” how Marilyn bosses around other men, while maintaining her strong boundaries. “Orgasms involving genitalia are fleeting things,” she says. “Here, we’re creating erotic, provocative, sensual, stimulating situations that will live in your mind for many years to come.”
Out on the windy sundeck, I watch as a man named Max gingerly emerges from an intense flogging session administered by Lex, blood trickling from his hip, lacerations carved across his back. It is an image that will remain etched in my psyche. Max met his wife through the BDSM scene. “We were both into latex,” he says. They divorced a year ago, though, and today he is seemingly in a throuple with another man and a woman. “The connection between sub and dom allows growth,” he explains. “It’s like therapy. It touches on early trauma. Sometimes I break down crying while I’m being spanked. That’s why I fell in love with it.”
Safety is a priority here. “Anyone who is known for violating consent in this subculture is immediately outcast,” says Fetish Dynasty, another male gimp, who is wearing a dog tag that says he is the property of someone called ‘Venus Deathtrap.’ He has been “in the scene” for 25 years and his love affair with latex began when he was a competitive swimmer.
“The feeling of ownership is very cool,” he says. “It takes away a lot of the confusion and doubt. The interpersonal dynamics of BDSM are very clearly structured. There’s no not-knowing what my role is here.” Venus Deathtrap, whose permission I had to seek in order to speak to Fetish Dynasty, allows us to talk alone for a couple of minutes before reattaching Mr Dynasty to his leash.
Despite all the pervy attentiveness and care on display today, the consent line does occasionally get crossed in the fetish world, mostly by accident. “If you hit a capillary during needle play, you’re going to bleed more and get significantly more bruising than the person was expecting,” says corporate executive and edge play educator, Speedy Rope Guy, or SRG, “but these are risks that we communicate first.”
SRG was introduced to Toronto’s BDSM scene by a former high school teacher when he was 20 years old. “He said, ‘So, I’m into Japanese rope bondage.’ I went, ‘So am I.’” The teacher took SRG to his first event and the rest is history. Now, he is a needle play expert, a painful practice which can leave genitalia blood-splattered. “Needles are actually something I was terrified of,” he says. SRG would be “the screaming child” whenever he needed injections, but the intense activity has allowed him to demystify that fear. “With kink, I can push intimacy to levels that a lot of people don’t get to truly experience.”
Most people have never got to experience the non-stop horniness of a fetish cruise, either.
The sun begins to set. We dance to the new David Guetta tune about women looking for men who work in finance, and Terpstra organises a group photo of all the attendees dressed as sailors. “Everyone say, ‘Semen!’” he shouts, reassuring worried folks that yes, bottomless nudity is permitted at the strip club afterparty back in Vancouver. I will sit and watch there later, as a woman dressed as a nun plunges a crucifix-shaped dildo into the vagina of a fellow sister as the wild crowd screams for more. To my regret, I never get to ask Lex whether this kind of heresy could ever lead him to repent.
Words by Mattha Busby, Photos by Paige Taylor White
