GIVING THE HEAVE-HO TO INHIBITION

An interview with dominatrix Eva Oh.

- Ian Kirke

Having often reflected upon my own sense of Britishness I must confess that I am still wholly confused as to why, on the one hand, we appear to have had such an influence on the rest of the world yet, on the other, have in my humble opinion excruciatingly maintained a set of values that hark back to the Victorian era; let me qualify this observation.

The English language is the global dialect of business with 1.75 billion people able to speak it to a useful level, according to the Harvard Review. That's nearly a quarter of the world's population. In our infamous history, we have occupied umpteen countries, and at its height the British Empire was the biggest territory ever, stretching across a tad under twenty-five percent of the earth's total landmass. So, one could deduce that our Indigenous population would be pretty cosmopolitan and broad-minded towards all manner of cultural curiosities and ways of life, especially those of a sexual nature. But I hate to disappoint those of you originating outside of these peculiar isles by categorically affirming that we aren't! We still haven't figured out a chilled attitude towards sex, even though some would argue that during our colonial days we fucked many nations over, and as I write we are doing the same to ourselves as we negotiate a regressive regime of marginalizing ourselves from our near neighbors.

The Victorian era is blamed for much of this warped mindset, although to be fair to Queen Victoria she often wrote saucy lines in her personal journal about her husband Prince Albert, whose name has become immortalized as a penis piercing. During her reign, gynecologist Dr. William Acton in his 1857 bestseller, "The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs" proclaimed "the majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled by sexual feelings of any kind," probably representing the general flawed attitude of the time to our natural sexual urges and desires.