The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- BDSM, ABBA, and Me -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 16)

Nevertheless, I've had some doubts about coming here, not least because I wasn't sure what to wear.

I don't really have the body for bondage, and when I consulted my kinky oracle—Lena the Latin South African—her less-than-helpful suggestion was a monosyllabic chant: Gimp! Gimp! Gimp!

Fortunately, the club's dress code has saved me from looking like a big-'n'-tall medicine ball.

Dark clothes are de rigueur, but a good suit will do, so I'm wearing the best one I own—an old Pierre Cardin, as it happens.

The former wine cellar has been converted into a cozy setting for Sadeian fantasies, complete with candelabra, plush furnishings and bondage films projected onto the half-barrel ceiling.

Sadly, the club's habitués don't look anything like the models pouting in patent leather on the ceiling—I'm not even sure they belong to the same species.

BDSM'S OBESITY BOON

The average age in here must be around forty-five and the body-mass index knocking on a hundred.

Not for the first time, it occurs to me that the obesity 'epidemic' has been a boon for BDSM.

Before coming here, while searching for gear for myself, I came across a woman's website listing 'goddess' sizes, including petticoats for a 54-inch waist (I clicked away when she mentioned dressing like a goddess-sized—or was it Godzilla-sized?—Japanese schoolgirl).

Sure enough, a table of corseted vamps in the corner are gobbling their way to deification, alongside a stringy blonde whose voice is so deep I can't tell if she's a pre-op tranny or a post-meno Frenchwoman.

One obvious travesti is a travesty indeed: he's got a weathered, man-of-the-land face, but he's wearing lipstick, a blonde wig and a maid's outfit with chains and BDSM trinkets tied around his waist.

He wanders past a mostly naked man who's kneeling and facing the wall with his hands tied behind his back and a ball-gag in his mouth. And overhead, the sound system is blasting out ABBA.

Which—if you think about it—may just make his humiliation complete.

I mean, if the guy on the floor is into the submissive thing, willingly trussed up in all his flabby luminosity, then he's probably fantasized about the soundtrack being dark and sinister; not the bright aural bellbottoms of ABBA.

You can imagine him eagerly submitting to being bound—oh yes, mistress!—and gagged—moh myef, miftreflbf!

And then, when he's powerless to stop her, the cow turns on 'Dancing Queen.'