Good Vibrations Magazine

We’d been dating for about a month before I kidnapped her.

This was not my first kidnapping. The first occurring years and years earlier; I showed up with a friend at a lover’s house and demanded at water-Uzi point that he and his roommate come drinking with us. We restrained them in the car, but allowed them the use of their hands at the bar. We put them back in the car, blindfolded and drove to a secret location. It was a grand success — one that spurred future forays, some gentle, some, er, ambitious.

Just a month in on dating, my lover, an avowed top, had no idea what was in store for her. Or, only a little idea — we had carefully negotiated parameters a few weeks earlier. That night we were laughing at a bar, celebrating our friend *John’s birthday. Sam, my girlfriend, had just commented on the black hanky Molly was sporting in her back left pocket, flagging that she was a heavy BDSM top.

“Yeah,” I said. I arched my eyebrow back; someone was obviously going to get it tonight. Sam thought I meant Molly’s boyfriend was in trouble. I meant Sam. You see, I wasn’t kidnapping alone: I had a good friend aiding and abetting me.

Molly handed me a gift-wrapped package from under the table. Sam’s eyes lit up as I handed her the present.

“Go to the bathroom and open it, but read the card first,” I whispered in her ear, grinning. I kept grinning as she hustled all the way to the bathroom. I was wondering what she’d do when she opened it, read the card that told her she’d better do everything she was told or else, when she found the pair of tighty whitey briefs that Molly had prepared for her by scrawling LUCKY across the ass. The second “present” had a pair of handcuffs inside. The note told her to go out front of the bar, put them on, and wait. She walked towards the exit, a smile lighting up her face; the word “LUCKY” almost radiated from under the denim ass of her jeans. She didn’t know that Molly’s black hanky was about to blindfold her and would stay over her eyes until we had driven up and down some of San Francisco’s finest hills, until she was released in front of a strip joint for a lap dance.

There is, and probably always has been, something alluring about kidnapping. Even when we can’t call a real-life criminal kidnapping “sexy”, (there is nothing sexy in the commission of a brutal, violent crime), somehow the fantasies of the consensual seduction-by-force are downright titillating.

Let’s put it this way: getting jumped by a stranger on your way home on a dark street is a nice hefty jail sentence, if you’re lucky. Being jumped by (or, conversely, overpowering) your lover when they know it could happen but don’t expect it? Priceless. It’s the sex life equivalent of a horror movie, sort of — you know everything’s really okay (and you know you’re not really evil — or they’re not), but it’s a nice place to visit under well-negotiated, well-planned circumstances.

Apparently, a number of people around me feel this way. For some of us, kidnapping made an early impression — in fact, my ex-wife’s first crush was on Patricia Hearst. And the other day, a friend pointed me to an executive service in Detroit that’s been operating since 2002, where for a few hundred dollars, you can be kidnapped, complete with force-feeding of spaghetti they say is worms, and girls in vinyl fetishwear. And this service is apparently modeled after the work of an artist, Brock Enright, whose art happening featuring kidnappings were so successful, that he went for hire offering the service. And even before Enright, British group Blast Theory launched a nationwide lottery in which ten finalists were put under surveillance and the final two were (you guessed it) kidnapped.

So, if it’s in our art galleries and our news headlines, you know it’s got to have been in our bedrooms (so to speak) for far longer. I used to hear about a kidnapping a year or so, usually a special present for a lucky guy or girl pretty entrenched in the BDSM community. But recently, I’ve heard of at least four, just in my immediate social circle. One recent one involved a Uhaul truck and at least three kidnappers; one farther in memory was a Valentine’s day present and involved no fewer than five kidnappers and an after-hours restaurant.

So, why kidnapping? Why now?

I can’t pretend to be a sociologist, but it seems to me that endurance has become an overt fascination in our current culture. Just the name of the most successful reality show currently running, Survivor, speaks to making it through an ordeal. Add to this the gradual kinking of the mainstream via television and the internet, and a new familiarity with role-play (whether in games or online screen names or even just the childhood memories of cops-and-robbers), and there’s a demographic that’s ready to play at kidnappings. Inescapably, too, the contemporary interest in kidnappings has much to tell us about transgression, gender, power, and their shifting enactments in our day-to-day life. Such has always been the case.

Sometimes, sexual kidnappings themselves are what’s visible — and not always safely so — for anyone. Obviously, they take a lot of preparation and care — there are a lot of good sources on the internet for information; no one should go into this type of situation unprepared and uninformed.

Sondra and her boyfriend, Rex, negotiated their kidnapping scene in advance. They were extremely excited and spent a lot of time on the kinds of activities (beating, sex, threats, pain) that they wanted to include. Well in advance of their date, Sondra received instructions on how to dress (a junior high school girl) and where to show up: the parking lot of a major chain store at twilight. In her purse, she had a consent form in case they were stopped by police anywhere during their scene; it explained the situation and had a Xerox of her driver’s license, and was signed.

In the parking lot, Rex was drinking a soda when she arrived. He handed her one and she sipped gratefully until the sudden smash of glass: He had broken the bottleneck off and held it by her throat, the other hand on her hair, shoved her into the front seat, and climbed on top of her. He was slapping her in the face with one hand as she struggled, other when he exclaimed “SHIT!” Standing behind the car, taking down the license plate number, was a security guard. Rex climbed out of the front seat and handcuffed her to the glovebox.

He drove quickly, swearing.

“What are you going to tell them if they stop us? What are you going to do when the coppers come?” Rex was terse, stressed, but in character, Sondra said. They both looked over their shoulders for a few blocks, expecting company; until he blindfolded her.

“The thing that was scary wasn’t the kidnapping,” Sondra said. “Or, I mean, parts of it were — running through a park in the dark, being tied to a tree in the middle of the night — but I knew Rex was taking care of me and watching out for me. The thing that was scary,” she pauses, “is that afterwards, I was thinking, ‘Hey, a security guard saw some woman pulled into a car with a broken bottle at her throat and nothing happened. I realized how easy it is to just… disappear. That one night, I could be walking to the corner store, and get pulled into a car and… nothing.”

I ask her if there’s a chance the security guard thought they were playing a game that night — that it wasn’t a serious incident. Her face wrinkles in concentration, calculation. She sighs, shaking her head.

“Yeah,” she says, “maybe. That’s sort of what I tell myself, anyway.”

*Names in this essay have been changed to protect the… folks represented herein from being recognized by their parents, children, or others who might have options about what they do with their sex life as a consenting adult.