The Firm's Boxing Ring
May Bank Holiday Monday 2000. Looking back to the September Neverwhere. Poor
silly Frankie.
He 'phoned me on the info line, which I pick up only rarely, a hard Northern
accent, asking the usual questions. Goodness alone knows why he volunteered the
information that he was a boxer.
I detected a double standard around the sex & violence aspects of boxing
while writing for Fetish Times in the mid 90s, and aired them in an article Voyeurs
on Viragoes. It seemed that there was an uncomfortable potency in the
parallels being drawn by Spanner activists between SM and contact sports,
boxing in particular. Beneath the concept, lay the comfortable snobbery that
middle-class SMers were really far too humane to attend a boxing match, however
heavy SM they might get up to, but it was quite wrong for the working class
(what we now call the poor) to do boxing. 'Not good for them', as my mother
would have it.
I met up with Frankie in an Islington sports pub, he was hyper by his own
admission, having just been training. He'd fought the previous night, and won,
he said, and was running again. So what was this club, and what did I want with
him?
I explained I ran a little SM club in
Since Voyeurs I had made a modest study of boxing images in advertising.
Women in boxing gloves had been used to sell deodorant, sports kit, Sanatogen,
Vauxhall cars, and Pretty Polly hosiery. So what was the big attraction in this
overtly violent image of female beauty, if not Sado-Masochism? Swap the gloves
for a whip and you were there. (In point of fact, in mainstream advertising,
the boxing girl was far more a common image than the dominatrix, a more
acceptable face perhaps, but carrying the same kind of messages) The question
was, would this truism that stared me in the face, be anywhere near as obvious
to anyone else?
Having persuaded two women to join in the team as a means to prime the pump, so
to speak, I spent the run-up to the September Neverwhere wondering
exactly what product might emerge. The words 'keep walking' repeated themselves
in my head like a panic-stricken mantra on a catastrophe curve. I was quite
conscious of walking quite blindly into a potential fiasco.
Getting In at the
I was chunking up melon when I heard the noise from the ring. I stuck my head
out of the kitchen to see the concept working beautifully.
Frankie was sparring with Robin, one of the women I'd got to join in, and the
people were watching with enormous interest. As huge as my relief.
The new game caught on rapidly; for the first two of three hours we had a
steady series of bouts, mostly involving paying punters. I had a go myself with
Frankie, and discovered how exhausting boxing is when you're 36 and unfit.
We shut the ring down at
Frankie, though, posed a problem. Because he had 'phoned our ansaline, I had assumed
he was an SMer, but I quickly began to realise that he was nothing of the sort.
Later that evening – or morning rather – he caused a couple of
potentially nasty incidents, and at a subsequent party at my home he arrived
very drunk and aggressive; not attractive qualities in a muscular athlete. With
great delicacy, he was persuaded to leave. I never saw him again.
For the next event, 'Night of the Cane', the ring was run by Alex Jacob, much
more famous for his superb 'Cobra Whips'. He did a marvellous job – and
has continued to so to do. That night we had a terrific contender, a woman from
Since then, we've installed the ring twice at The Fringe in Vauxhall, and it
has been a success both times. Since September we've probably had in excess of
fifty contestants, and no damage done (except for the contact lenses). It's a
very popular spectacle, though sometimes daunting to newbie participants
– which is ironic when you think about it, because six with a springy
cane causes much more pain than I think anyone's ever sustained in our ring.
The aim of fetish boxing (as it's become known) is to make contact, not to
inflict damage. Still, when you get hit you know about it, big and well-padded
though the gloves are. It's an edge-play kind of game, sexy as it gets, but
with a hint of danger; we keep each round closely monitored. Trying to hit each
other has to remain a game.
There is still the feeling of breaking new ground, and the concern that one bad
gig may sink the whole enterprise. The ring is still a sideshow, but a popular
one, the last time we staged it, a young woman stole the show, remaining
unbeaten. Women tend to hit harder than men.
At the same time, advance publicity, either mailed or on the internet, has
brought very little interest. The main Foxy Boxing newsgroup seemed far more
interested in swapping videos and fantasies than in doing it for real –
and now the board has closed down. Our many participants have been walk-ups,
not aficionados.
That in itself affirms my faith in The Scene. The more commercial arms of this
industry, catering for those fearful of exposure – or lazy and cowardly
men if you prefer – have no need to provide anything like real fun; a
bored imitation will do. The topless women's matches in
Oh come on, I don't believe you! Show me
photographic evidence!