I have a fantasy. In it, I’m sitting in front of a bank of computer screens. Each one has a different live video feed of a lone person in bondage. My eyes flick quickly from one to the next. My gaze sharpens on one of the screens, and I zoom in for a closer look, then snatch up a phone. “Number 28’s in trouble! Dispatch assistance immediately!”
That’s what I’d like to do for people who practice self-bondage as part of masturbation: be the eye in the sky, keeping watch and sending help if something goes wrong. Like most fantasies, it’s not workable in reality. But I wish I could have done it for David Carradine.
The final word hasn’t been written on Carradine’s death, but my opinion is that he didn’t commit suicide, and no one was with him when he died. I’ve had hundreds of people tell me about their self-bondage/masturbation sessions, many of which were elaborately engineered and included breath restriction. The infamous “death photo” and the description of how Carradine was found are very similar to a lot of those stories.
Carradine would not be rare in practicing self-bondage and auto-erotic asphyxiation. Remember Gary Aldridge, the Alabama Baptist minister who was found dead in 2007? He was wearing rubber clothing, he had a dildo up his ass, and he was hog-tied with a cord around his neck. Shocked parishioners whispered of murder, but the official verdict was that he tied himself up and restricted his own breathing—and it went terribly wrong.
Hundreds of people die every year doing this, and that’s not even counting those whose families insist it was suicide. (Apparently they prefer to think of their loved one experiencing deep despair than a solitary orgasm.) People act astonished that Carradine, a 72-year-old movie star, would masturbate. Get real: Everyone masturbates. And most of us have a favored form of stimulation that we return to over and over. If this was how Carradine got off, then to him it would seem as normal as a porn site and some hand lotion.
However, normal doesn’t equal safe. Self-bondage can be risky in itself, but anytime someone’s oxygen is restricted, death becomes a possibility. The risk might be slight or it might be great, but you can’t eliminate it entirely. SM 101 author Jay Wiseman has researched breath play widely. He states: “I know of no way whatsoever that suffocation or strangulation can be done that does not intrinsically put the recipient at risk of cardiac arrest… I know of no reliable way to determine when such a cardiac arrest becomes imminent. If the recipient does arrest, the probability of resuscitating them, even with optimal CPR, is small.” Even if I’d been in the room with Carradine, I might not have been able to save him.
Woody Allen once said, “Don’t knock masturbation. It’s sex with someone you love.” I’m supportive of people self-loving in ways that get them off. But there’s a French phrase for orgasm: le petite mort—the little death. If you do self-bondage and asphyxiation when you masturbate, you run a real chance of turning your “little death” into the big one.
Thanks for stating in a public forum something I’ve thought for years. I was in Australia when Michael Hutchens died, and I remember some media outlet saying that, although it was almost certainly autoerotic asphyxiation, it was being called suicide “to spare the family.” And I thought, what kind of family feels better think that they’d somehow ignored a loved one’s suicidal depression, as opposed to having a loved one with unwise masturbation habits.
P.S. I’ve spent some time with Jay’s “big binder of breathplay stats.” Scary stuff!
Pedantic correction: la petite mort.
Is being alone a big part of the turn on? If not, what’s the problem with hiring someone to at least keep an eye on things?
I would imagine most people are too embarrassed to hire someone to keep an eye on things. Not to mention that masturbation is supposed to be a quick fix, and probably done somewhat impulsively, whereas hiring someone quickly becomes an exercise in planning, making sure your house is clean, etc. and so forth.
The most beautifully written Control Tower I’ve read yet. Keep it up Mistress Matisse.
I learned only recently that I once had an uncle who died in the same manner; instead of telling me when I was old enough to understand, the family did everything it could to erase his memory. The pain of discovering an unknown family member, condemned forever to obscurity because of his sexual particulars, is surprisingly deep and sharp. I will never know this man – that I know of his existence at all is only through my own discoveries.
Poor David Carradine, I’m going to miss him as an actor.
I am not new to kink and have enjoyed many different fetish scenes as a top, but have never understood the what draws people to breathplay. I experiancied it first hand one time with no forewarning or consent and I remember clearly the feeling of losing consiousness and it was not anything I would choose to experiance again. I do realize that everyone has choices to make concerning their chosen masturbatory practices and they are exactly that their own choices. While I feel for his family, Mr Carradine lived his life expectancy and through his acting brought enjoyment to many as well as helping to bring martial arts into the mainstream here in the US and that is more that can be said for the many who die in obscurity every day.
The Australian author Tim Winton deals in part with auto-erotic asphyxiation in his fiction novel Breath (recently awarded 2009 Miles Franklin winner). One of the characters has a penchant for putting plastic bags over her head to restrict oxygen flow when cumming. It’s all written in a very sentitive and compelling way. I recommend the book highly.
The dangers of auto-erotic asphyxiation aside, Mr. Wiseman does not appear to be knowledgeable regarding strangulation. Brazilian jiu jitsu, mixed martial arts, and submission grappling are increasingly widely practiced sports in which practitioners frequently employ chokes and strangles, both during cooperative technique drilling and in live wrestling. Judo, an olympic sport that is one of the most widely practice sports in the world, also contains frequent choking and strangulation.
This gives us a pool of hundreds of thousands of athletes around the world, at a very conservative, bare minimum, who are choking each other several times a week. Guess what? People aren’t dropping dead from choking each other while practicing these sports. No news reports, no case studies, no personal accounts, no anecdotes, not even rumors heard from a guy who heard it from a guy etc. So it seems like grapplers have a pretty good idea of how to choke each other safely. Maybe Wiseman (and you, Ms. Matisse) should go talk to them.
All the best,
@7 on the other hand, our culture is WAY more likely to make a big deal about dying during masturbation than dying during anything else, especially sports that are already seen as potentially physically risky. A martial arts mishap is just as tragic, but wouldn’t be considered *scandalous*, and scandals make the headlines.