Murder is always good copy. Particularly when it involves attractive young
women. So it’s no surprise that the media seem fixated on two recent, tragic
cases: the
death of the British student, Meredith Kercher in Perugia, and the
killing of the Frenchman, Olivier Mugnier, 24, allegedly by a British
woman, Jessica Davies. But maybe there is more than youth and looks that
link these cases. Maybe there is a sexual echo, too.
According to a French prosecutor, the death of Mugnier was the result of an
erotic game when Ms Davies tried to “intensify an extreme sexual experience”
by putting a knife to his throat. After allegedly slicing an artery she is
thought to have stabbed him “in a frenzy of anger and frustration”.
A French police source said: “The similarities between the allegations in both
cases are very clear.”
But what actually occurred in Perugia? It may be that Ms Kercher was involved
in a sex game that went too far – and when she refused, she was killed.
Whatever happened, this innocent girl’s death is a hideous crime. And a
further example, maybe, of what can happen when sex games go wrong.
I know whereof I speak in this matter. Some years ago I was tried on a rape
charge brought by my then girlfriend. Although she and I did have sex, it
was consensual. I was rightly acquitted.
Nonetheless, looking back, I feel some responsibility for what went wrong
between the two of us because the sex we had that evening, and for many
evenings before, was brutal and rough as that is the kind of sex we both
liked.
When I first met Alicia (not her real name) I was 21 and she was 17. Like me,
she was a student. But she was a type I had never met before: rich,
metropolitan, intelligent, sensitive, from a European background. She was
also up for it: drugs, drink, parties. I fell for her hard, this wild little
rich girl.
Alicia was also voraciously sexual, in a way wholly new to me.
Compared with her I was very naive. I had only had one girlfriend, one lover,
by the time I was 20. She had slept with 20 guys by the time she was 17. And
she liked to experiment in a sado-masochistic way. But, as it turned out, I
was ready for experimentation, too.
The mixture of our similar psyches was inflammable. I’m not sure who
introduced the kinkiness into our relationship, but we both enjoyed it.
After three months we were doing it all: bondage, exhibitionism, pretend
rapes, the works.
In time, the wildness of our sex life started to corrode our emotional
relationship. And so the inevitable happened. Alicia and I found ourselves
strangers in all ways and places but in bed. We split up.
But we kept returning to our strange affair and our carnal games. We were
hooked on dangerous sex with its drug-like rush. Scientists have shown that
in obsessively sexual relationships the endorphin high of the emotions is
especially intense, akin in its effect to heroin.
Like all addicts, we ended up in trouble. One night I strolled around to see
Alicia and we did our thing. I clamped my hand over her mouth and she
reached orgasm. I shouted at her. She bit me. This was fairly normal for us.
Abnormal for many. Then, for some reason, I felt a sudden revulsion at what
I was doing, at my addiction. She started crying. I told her I’d met someone
else, picked up my jacket and walked out, arrogant, cruel and whistling.
Three hours later I was arrested on a rape charge. I spent two months on
remand in jail, then I was bailed to my family home. A year later I went for
my trial at the Old Bailey. At the end the jury retired for two hours and
the verdict was unanimous: not guilty.
Does that sound like closure? It wasn’t. The obvious question would not go
away: how did my beloved girlfriend, the woman who I adored more than anyone
else in the world, come to accuse me of that awful crime? Something
evidently went very wrong that night. Two intelligent people, neither of
them wholly bad or mad, ended up in the most destructive situation. So
destructive that I spent two months in prison. Moreover, I don’t think
Alicia would have done what she did to me without some good reason. I think
she truly believed, or honestly convinced herself, that she was raped.
How? I’ve come to think that we were partly to blame as a couple because of
the druggy foolishness of our lifestyle, the reckless abandonment of
morality, the kinky games we played. When Alicia and I got into our dubious
antics we were asking for trouble because we deliberately blurred the
boundaries.
After my acquittal I tried to come to terms with all this by writing a book
about erotic games and dangerous sex. By way of research I attended lots of
trials of “sex crimes”.
Many of these cases were simple rapes. Horrible but basic. But more than a few
came from an enigmatic and sinister area of sexual experiments gone awry:
swinging sex that ended in jealous violence; games of submission and
domination where a little too much blood was drawn; sessions of bondage
where the amusing became disturbing – and someone called the police.
The lesson I learnt from this research is that as a society we may well treat
sex too lightly. Put it another way: we see sex as an amusing sport, a
titillating pastime, a kind of fancy-dress party of the libido – the more
the merrier, the weirder the better.
Don’t believe me? Look at the headlines in the most sober of newspapers.
Footballers “roasting” drunken girls. Gays “cottaging” in your local park.
Couples “dogging” in the nearest woods. All of it treated with a kind of
glib flippancy. As a culture we seem to have veered from a position where
all sex was questionable and unusual sex was scandalous to the opposite
extreme: where everything is permissible and prohibition is jejune.
These days, anyone who says that orgies or buggery or bondage is wrong risks
looking a prude. Nowadays, all forms of sex, short of paedophilia, are
regarded as part of the fun – and no one wants to be the party pooper.
Why is this? Why are we so drenched in sexuality and so desperately accepting
of “strange” and “unusual” sex? The obvious answer is the sexual liberation
of the 1960s, that famous pendulum swing against the puritanism of the
Victorian era (which lasted, as Philip Larkin pointed out, right up until
1963, and the Beatles’ first LP).
There is another factor, though. I think the process of sexual permissiveness,
the adoption of sex as a supposedly harmless game, has been vastly
intensified by the internet in recent years.
The internet introduces us to the sexual thoughts of others, and the sexual
variety and fervency of the human subconscious, in a wholly new way. When it
comes to sex, the net is voluptuously protean. If you want to find images of
naked Russian girls in mudbaths, there they are on the net. If you want
films of couples having four-way sex, you can find them live on the
internet. Whatever you want, whatever you think it possible to conceive of
is on the net. And because it is there it somehow seems, well, more licit,
more understandable, more mainstream.
This versatile nature of the net is especially dangerous, because it can
reveal to anyone the multifarious kinks in their own brain.
It is good that people feel less inhibited about sex. But sex isn’t just about
orgasms. It ain’t just about fun. For all their faults, our forefathers knew
something about sex that we seem to have forgotten.
Sex is not a computer game. It is not a party trick. It is not tennis with
bells on. The sexual urge comes from the most primitive and aggressive parts
of the human brain. It is certainly not something you should mix carelessly
with disinhibitors such as drink and drugs (as seems to have happened in
both the French and Italian cases).
Put it another way. Sex can drive us to states of bliss, but it also has a
cruel and savage aspect. And when we take it too far then sex can destroy
lives.
— Sean Thomas’s memoir, Millions of Women are Waiting to Meet
You, is published by Bloomsbury at £7.99
