Is Necrophillia Dead in the Water?

The publication of Fifty Shades of Grey in 2011 confirmed for many what they had long surmised—that sex can be interesting and not necessarily repetitive, let alone solely reproductive. Nevertheless, for many of the women (and some men) then sitting in cattle class surreptitiously soaking up the BDSM adventures of Anastasia Steele it was a guilty and vicarious pleasure. They couldn’t see themselves doing it: all that whipping and tying up, whilst interesting, was best left in the world of fantasy—or at most minor spanking when Bill got home from work. Yet in the high rise apartments of Auckland, the parliamentary offices of Wellington and the boredom of Hamilton, BDSM is practiced and perfected far more often than we may think. For many, it has replaced vanilla sex as the norm, the benchmark. It is in such quarters not seen as obscene or perverse, an abomination or a cause of earthquakes. It is just what it is. Providing it is consensual, it is a pleasure, an adventure, an interest. There is no evidence, like the myth that soft drugs lead to hard drugs, that BDSM leads to greater extremities of behaviour like necrophilia or child sex, both of which can be described as, and are, perversions. Indeed it could be said that a dalliance in BDSM sates the appetite for anything more, and it may well be our most potent sexual safety valve. However, it appears that “Bishop” Tamaki disagrees with this assessment. God has told him, he says, that deviant behaviour—particularly but not solely homosexuality—is the cause of the earthquakes our country has suffered. If we are to believe Mr Tamaki, God is perhaps moving with the times: a plague of locusts or a rain of frogs visited upon our house is so old hat. Mr Tamaki is entitled to his opinion, I doubt it is God’s, but I think I know where true obscenity and perversion rests.