You might want to watch these videos before reading the rest of this post. You might not. Here goes:

• 1 Man, 1 Jar
• Ow My Ass
• 1 Guy, 1 Screwdriver

Still here? Next you might want to read an interview with Alex, the “star” of these videos. Here is a generous excerpt:

Q. Who are you?

A. I’m just a manager, I’m married, and I’m not gay!

Q. I think the most asked question is, “Why didn’t you go to the hospital?”

A. I was afraid of what they might ask.

Q. So, are you married? Does your wife know.

A. I have been married 2 times. The first marriage lasted 7 years. The current marriage has lasted 11. I have two boys also, they are ages 5 and 17. And my family doesn’t know.

Q. How long have you been sticking things in your anus?

A. I’ve been doing this for 12 years, I am 40 now. I started with a coke bottle. I hope to get larger objects than even the jar in the video soon.

Q. So getting back to the hospital. Didn’t it hurt? Why didn’t you scream?

A. For three days it bleed. It hurt really bad for two weeks. I still have two shards of glass in my anus from it. I didn’t scream because I didn’t want my family to hear me. I was in pain. The new video is of me the day after cleaning it up in the shower.

Q. Is there anything else you would like people to know?

A. I uploaded this to let people know that sticking jars in your ass is dangerous. And because the video was really funny; well mostly because it’s funny. Oh, I don’t have scars on my ass. That was soap I used for lube.

I forgot. I prefer a glass jar because the dimension is constant. Plastic bottle (even full of water) no hard and this diameter may be various. This is important for measuring of record size.

In a way, Alex and his videos should not be so surprising. The tortures that he inflicts on himself can be matched in intensity by many different forms of self-injury, ranging from the “cut myself with razor blades” impulses of teenage girls to the “pound a nail through my penis” performances of Bob Flanagan, the “Super-Masochist.” Whether Alex’s behavior is sexual or asexual self-abuse is anybody’s guess. Though he focuses on his genitalia and anus, he seems less concerned with pleasure than with achieving some twisted Guinness World Record for penetrating himself.

Perhaps the more disturbing thing is the fact that Alex presents himself as a regular Joe. He’s a guy with a job, a wife, some kids. He comes home from work at night and experiments with various insane ways to plug the holes in the lower half of his body. Superficially, it’s a paradox: how can a normal guy do such abnormal things to himself? It calls to mind this fascinating case report of a man who amputated his own nipples and penis — but “stumped” doctors by otherwise offering no psychological irregularities. Evidently Alex is a similar guy.

Which do you think is freakier — the fact that Alex penetrates himself with these objects? The fact that he appears to be a “normal” guy who penetrates himself while his family is in the next room? The fact that he finds the video of a jar exploding in his anus “funny?”

(Thanks to Furpo for the link.)

While people like to imagine that children are sugar, spice, and everything nice, it is also true that children can be venomous and cruel. Perhaps it was something like this that Mr. Barkau and the girl’s mother had in mind when training the young thing to serve as a dominatrix. In a very sick way, it’s a natural fit. Who is more capable than a twelve-year-old girl of making the most cutting comments?

Then again, adolescent girls aren’t accustomed to kicking deviant businessmen in the balls. Nor do they want to graduate from selling lemonade at roadside stands to leading creeps around on dog leashes for spare cash. Nor do they want to trade in their school pictures for pornography shoots. If the young victim in this case had any reservoir of cruelty in her heart, probably its true target was her mother. Think about it. If the mother helped to pimp out her own daughter, what must that girl’s life have been like anyway? Being a hooker will make the news, but what about the thousand bits of abuse and malfeasance the mother may well have inflicted on her before the dominatrix thing ever happened?

To look at it another way, the whole story puts you in a difficult position. One of the weird things about perversion is that, when you first approach it, you have the sensation of setting aside your morality. You want to break all the rules, taste the forbidden pleasures you’ve been dreaming of. But once you’ve done that, and once you begin to contemplate the billion acts of selfish cruelty that perversion causes people to wreak on others, it’s difficult to leave your morality by the wayside. Do you contemplate the spectacle of a child pimped out by her own mother and, almost in spite of yourself, find yourself side by side with the most fundamental of moralists? If so, how do you reconcile that with your interest in perversion in general? How do you reconcile that with your own perverse lusts? Is it possible to be a moral pervert? Or is that a contradiction in terms, like an ethical killer?

(Thanks to Angela for the link.)

A number of newspapers featured photographs of the young couple. The BBC opted to show Ms. Maltby being taken for a walk. The Sun did an insane spread of photos showing Ms. Maltby on all fours, eating supper (with knife and fork like a human), going to the post office, playing “off the leash” in a park. The Daily Mail did a profile of Ms. Maltby, who told a reporter “I am a pet, I generally act animal like and I lead a really easy life. I don’t cook or clean and I don’t go anywhere without Dani. It might seem strange but it makes us both happy. It’s my culture and my choice. It isn’t hurting anyone.”

Meanwhile the bus company is trying to spin the whole thing. Clearly the young couple ran into a cantankerous driver who thought their lifestyle was offensive. Evidently he told them he wasn’t allowing “freaks and dogs like you” on his bus. The bus company, probably anxious to avoid a lawsuit, is making the dubious claim that the driver simply feared for his passengers’ safety. No, he didn’t think the young Goths were terrorists. Rather, “it could be dangerous for the couple and other passengers if a driver had to brake sharply while Miss Maltby was wearing the lead.” Um, right. The bus driver had no way of knowing that her leash wasn’t made of, gosh, razor wire. What if she slipped and decapitated a few grandmothers?

The astonishing thing in the whole story is that the press has bee relatively supportive of the young couple. Typically you don’t expect the mainstream or the tabloid press to show anything but incomprehension toward a BDSM lifestyle, but somehow the mutual devotion of Ms. Maltby and her fiancé seems to have won them over. You think it’s because their choice subtly reaffirms the most traditional gender roles? The man is in charge, the woman is submissive (by choice, of course). Do you think the press would react any differently if it were a woman leading a younger man around on a leash?

Abuse can contain at least a small hint of a positive assertion: it can say “I want you,” though it may also say, “I want you at the expense of your trust, your well-being, etc.” In this case, the abuse took an altogether different form, something like “Participate in my world of hurt.” It didn’t just transform children into accomplices. It transformed them into sadists — or into some weird simulacra of a sadist. And yet the ironic thing is that this transformation, imposed on the children by a self-described masochist, was itself more sadistic than many things a sadist might have done to them. Another news article gives a few more graphic details about the abuse.

Among the offences, the man had performed oral sex on his then 10-year-old son and forced two of the children to insert items and inject liquid into his penis with a needle. Two others were fondled and forced to participate in the man’s masturbation activities, the court was told. He was eventually caught in 2005 when his girlfriend’s seven-year-old son complained that the man had asked him to insert a piece of wire into his penis while in a shopping centre car park.

You can understand why the man’s own brother, in full view of the court, tried to beat the shit out of the guy. “Your day will come boy,” he shouted. “You’re a fucking sicko.” The funny thing (not that abuse is ever funny) is simply that the pedo also happens to be a masochist. If he can enjoy having his children lacerate his penis, he may well have enjoyed being punched by his brother too. Why not? If you’re the vindictive type and think that this guy should rot in hell, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with a hell infernal enough to really punish him.

According to a police sergeant quoted in another article, the guy’s quest for testicular trauma has not been without success. “Some of the women obliged him,” the sergeant said. “I would imagine it would be quite painful, but he didn’t make a peep, just stood up and went on his way. It’s hard to imagine what motivated him. It’s very strange.” Officer, it’s not really so strange. Most guys would rather be poked in the eye than kicked in the nuts, but there is a thriving masochistic subculture that thinks a boot to the balls is the very height of sexual excitement. Probably they like to get kicked by random hotties for the same reason that other guys fantasize about groping them or drinking their pee: it’s better to have some connection with them, even a painful one, than no connection at all.

In fact, doctors say that it is surprisingly difficult to really injure the testicles. The “mobility of the scrotum may be one reason severe injury is rare.” Most guys who get kicked in the nuts feel some pain, but it’s usually not so crippling that it cannot be mixed up with stimulation as well. Of course, you wouldn’t want to be one of the unlucky ones who does experience a severe injury. PervScan once knew a guy who swore up and down that one of his testicles was busted in half by such an episode. But odds are that was some other testicular abnormality, such as a cyst.

If you think it’s strange to go around asking hotties for a kick to the crown jewels, what do you make of guys who get their scrotums split? Do a Google Images search for scrotal splitting. Once you’ve had a good look at some of those pictures, a knee to the nuts doesn’t sound so bad. And when you consider that there are people who choose — consciously and deliberately — to get their nuts cut up like that, it makes it easier to fathom that some guys merely opt to get their kicks being kicked.

Unfortunately, much of the news here on PervScan is of the depressing sort. Story after story features people hurting and being hurt. There are disturbing cultural trends, outrageous acts performed in bestial ignorance, violence, punition, arrests. It’s a consequence of the fact that the site gleans most of its stories from the media, where news is bad news or it’s not news at all. Surely there are people living out their kinks in relatively ethical bliss — but because these people keep pretty much to themselves and don’t end up in jail, they rarely end up on the site.

As a result of this dreary panoply, it comes as a relief to read that fetishists satisfying their spanking fetishes can actually be happier and more fulfilled than “normal” people. Imagine that — happiness! In the discussion of perversions, there is much made of pleasure and little of happiness. It makes you wonder about the relationship between the two. You could define pleasure as a bodily state and happiness as an existential one. But after that the relationship gets complicated: pleasure doesn’t necessarily make a person happy, and happiness doesn’t necessarily make a person capable of pleasure. But lack of pleasure can make a person miserable, and lack of happiness can make pleasure seem meaningless or futile. And so on.

If you ever bother to read a biography of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the man whose name became masochism, you might find it puzzling to see that only the severest whippings — sometimes with nail-studded whips — could induce a feeling of serenity in the man. There are a number of possible biological mechanisms at work, and it’s quite possible the feeling of pain-induced euphoria is little different than the runner’s high experienced by marathoners. But in a more general sense, perhaps this Australian study hits the nail on the head. People are simply happier when they accept themselves, however kinky they may be.

Here is a picture of Ms. Sutton. Many people might think she doesn’t look too bad. Somebody even went so far as to set up a “tribute” site to her at tiffanysutton.com. The guy shows a picture purporting to show the name Tiffany scratched into his arm. It looks very fake, though, and in fact the site seems to be a weird cross between a joke and a scam. If you google the root domain you’ll see that the guy has set up a lot of weird little affiliate sites. Definitely avoid making a donation to him. It’s hard to imagine Ms. Sutton seeing any of the funds.

Though vampirism is a not unpopular activity, as evidenced by the many sites dedicated to various forms of bloodlust, you don’t see it in the news that often. You wonder how severe a wound Ms. Sutton inflicted on her victim. Would the guy have freaked over a scratch? Or did she really gash open his leg, maybe even probe for a vein? In either case, his flight instincts must have been on target. If he’d stood still for the bloodletting, lord knows what she might have used the axe for — maybe his cock or his neck.

At any rate, there is an obvious moral to the story. If you’re hanging out and doing drugs with a transient — even a hot one — who is living in a “shed behind an unoccupied residence,” you would be well advised not to let yourself be tied up. (And no doubt that’s not the sort of advice you hear from mother. “Watch what you eat, wear your seat belt, and don’t let homeless vampire chicks play bondage games with you.”)

(Thanks to Furpo for the link.)

It’s funny how the word Nazi jumps out at you from a story that already features a morbid sexual obsession and a gruesome death. It makes you realize just how loaded the word remains. A guy can hang himself — not a pretty sight — and the image that remains in your mind is his girlfriend wearing a swastika armband or something. Maybe she even shaved one of those little square Hitler mustaches into her pubes. Giving her head would be like kissing the führer.

Of course, it’s not nice to make light of this tragedy. A similar story of death by misadventure once caused a widow to write PervScan bitterly protesting the fact that her husband’s death, which she claimed was misrepresented by the press, was forever memorialized on a site dedicated to perversion. What do you say to such a person? Sincerest condolences for your loss. It can be traumatic to lose a loved one in any way, and perhaps a pervy way is even more painful for you to contemplate.

At the same time, you have to recognize that a person such as Mr. Burley is bound to fascinate. What he did — literally pursuing pleasure right to the edge of death — is something that few people do. It is unfortunate that he slipped over the edge and died (for whatever reason: suicidal impulses, reckless lack of caution, other folks better remember to sharpen the blade). This doesn’t make him a hero, there’s nothing noble about his death. But it does make him a sort of casualty of pleasure. He’s like one of those crazy soldiers who rush into no man’s land without heed for their lives. Mr. Burley stepped outside the bounds of pleasure. And like the crazy soldier, what did he discover there? Death.

(Thanks to Cat for the link.)

Lest you go looking for them, law enforcement has done a great job erasing Ms. Chemero’s sites from the web. They were available at sovereignestate.com and thesovereignestate.com. Even some ads that Ms. Chemero posted on S&M sites have disappeared. You’d think she never existed online if the New York Post hadn’t reproduced one of her pictures.

The newspapers have played up the fact that the estate in question happened to be owned by a Jewish yeshiva. “It’s against our religion. It’s against the Bible. We’ve never even heard of such a thing,” a rabbi told the newspaper. Presumably he was referring not to prostitution, since that and half a dozen other kinks are mentioned in the Bible itself, but to BDSM. Whatever. The Jewish angle seems relevant only from the “get a story to sell papers” viewpoint, since the lady rented the mansion through an agent and apparently had no contact with the rabbinical owners. Or at least she had no contact with them concerning real estate matters.

The newspapers have also tried to stoke the flames by getting reactions from neighbors, boilerplate stuff along the lines of “can you believe it happened in this tony neighborhood?” Well, of course it’s believable. Who do you think has the money to patronize S&M dungeons — guys on the dole? welfare moms? Sure, there is a range of establishments running from the cheap to the rich. But even the cheap dungeons in New York are not exactly available to the budget shopper. Mostly they’re patronized by “generous gentlemen,” so it makes perfect sense to set up shop where the gents live. Hell, probably one of Ms. Chemero’s clients suggested the idea to her. “Hey, Mistress, there’s a place for rent down the road…” Odds are the bulk of her clients lived within a five-mile radius. Probably one of them even paid the rent, or else he’d be beaten and humiliated.

You may recall that the gothed-up face of Mr. Dyleski appeared in newspapers a while ago when he was charged with bludgeoning to death the wife of a high-powered attorney. Prosecutors claim that the murder was “part of a plot to buy lighting equipment for growing marijuana indoors using stolen credit card information.” It’s a pretty complicated scenario and a pretty nasty crime just for buying some light fixtures, but that’s the hypothesis.

Evidently Mr. Dyleski’s defense lawyers were going to try to show what a good guy he was, but then his girlfriend decided to share some pillow talk about sadomasochism, vivisection, torturing children, Jack the Ripper and Lizzie Borden. According to a legal analyst — a dork who, if you watch the video, can’t even pronounce sadomasochism correctly — this testimony effectively throws Mr. Dyleski into prison. And yet, if you look closely at what the girl said, is it really so incriminating?

For starters, Ms. Reddy stated that she and Mr. Dyleski experimented with S&M. She does not detail exactly what these experiments involved. Did they tie each other up? Cut each other with razors? Bite each other? It’s not especially uncommon. Probably half the kids at a Marilyn Manson concert have experimented with some form of S&M. Why should such games indict Mr. Dyleski?

Second, Ms. Reddy mentions Mr. Dyleski’s interest in Jack the Ripper. Well, again, lots of kids are interested in Jack the Ripper. For those who hadn’t noticed, popular film star Johnny Depp made a movie about him not long ago. Is this so incriminating?

Third, Ms. Reddy mentions Mr. Dyleski’s “intellectual curiosity” about vivisection. Admittedly this is not the most common topic of conversation that you’ll find among today’s teens, but it’s not that weird. It might have been nothing more than that — just some weird talk.

Fourth, Ms. Reddy mentions that Mr. Dyleski, when hearing of police activity near the victim’s house, made a joke about Lizzie Borden. This could be slightly incriminating, since there’s a small analogy between the bludgeoning death of Pamela Vitale and Lizzie Borden’s famous “forty whacks.” But again, it’s not exactly character assassination. Lots of kids could have made the same joke.

It all makes you wonder about the common legal process whereby attorneys attempt to establish a general picture of a defendant’s character. Mr. Dyleski may well be a murderous creep, and these comments could hint at the corruption of his soul. He might also be an alienated teen whose blather was the same as that of a million other alienated teens — ones who happen to know better than to kill people for hare-brained pot schemes. At root, it’s difficult to say there is any real correlation between these comments and the crime. After all, look at it the other way — there are total creeps who walk on earth spouting pieties about God and Jesus. Nobody thinks these guys are good just because they happened to praise the lord before committing some murder. So why should the opposite be the case? Why should teen talk — and that’s all it is — make someone look more like a killer?