Jonalysis

Every now and then somebody tries to come up with a profound explanation for the love of leather that some of us exhibit. For me, some explanations have an inkling of truth in them; others are just downright ridiculous. For your enjoyment, here is an explanation from the latter category:

The average psychologist will tell you that wearing of leather is a form of protection, possibly even a kind of desensitization. The living, vulnerable flesh is covered by an invulnerable dead hide. Emotionally, the leather wearer cannot be killed because, on the outside, he or she is already dead. In a similar way, on the other side of the relationship, the one who wants to touch and caress someone wearing leather is also looking for a degree of desensitization. The object of desire is covered in a dead skin. They are not quite mortal, not totally alive and therefore somehow less threatening than a full-blooded living partner who might make demands or require a greater degree of response or involvement than the leather lovers feel themselves capable.

The quote is from “The Black Leather Jacket”, a book written by Mick Farren and published in 1984.

I can try to explain my likings in terms of other likings: I like X because I like Y and X provides or resembles or is an instance of Y. But why do I like Y then? Either I have to try to explain my likings ad infinitum or at some stage, I just have to accept that I like something without trying to explain it. I usually prefer shallow explanations or no explanations at all.

Giuseppe dall’Antonia is a porn star. Well, not really. He is a model. I have not even seen him naked. However, Giuseppe is a porn star to me, because certain photographs where he wears leather (or at least something resembling leather) are pure porn to me. The world is different through the eyes of a fetishist.

If you want to learn more about Giuseppe, you can visit his profiles at MySpace (requires registration) and Model Mayhem.

Are you a heterosexual man? Would you like to wear leather pants in public but do not, because some people may think you are a homosexual man? If you answered “yes” to both questions, let me ask you a third question: do you think that homosexuality is somehow wrong?

If you do, I thank you for the malicious pleasure you predicament brings me. You indirectly suffer from the very prejudice you support.

There is a photograph where Brad Pitt is wearing leather from neck to toe. At least that is what some people looking at the photograph may think. However, if you are a leather fetishist as I am and you have surfed the Internet as long as I have, the photograph will probably seem strangely familiar to you. No wonder: the head belongs to Brad Pitt but the body belongs to a man who has modeled for Northbound Leather.

To use a neutral term, the photograph is a digital composite. To use more blunt a term, the photograph is a fake.

Sometimes a fake is easy to spot. For example, there is a photograph where Jake Gyllenhaal sits on a white wooden chair, seemingly wearing a pair of black leather pants. However, the light falls on his upper body from a different direction than on the leather pants. In addition, there are differences in contrast and tone between the leather pants and the rest of the photograph.

The basis for the fake is a photograph of Jake that appeared in the issue number 98 of the “Dazed & Confused” magazine in February 2003. Somebody pasted the leather pants afterwards.

Sometimes a fake is a bit harder to spot. For example, there is a photograph where Jake Gyllenhaal stands with his hands behind his head, seemingly wearing a pair of black leather pants. There is something suspicious about the photograph, but it is hard to put a finger on what exactly it is.

The task becomes easier if one happens to see a photograph of Jake that was taken during a photo shoot for the October 2005 issue of the “Out” magazine. When one compares the basis for the fake and the fake, one realizes that in the fake, Jake’s lower body seems a bit too big compared to his upper body.

I do not mind a composite if it is so obviously a composite that nobody in their right mind would think it is authentic. I do not mind a composite if it looks authentic but it is obvious from the context that it is not. I do not mind a composite if it looks authentic but it has been explicitly labeled as a composite. However, I do mind a composite photograph that tries to pass as an authentic photograph. I would hate to enjoy looking at a photograph only to find out later that it is just a skillfully created fake. I would feel cheated and I would not like that.

Perhaps it is just me. Perhaps other people are better at suspending disbelief in order to enjoy Frankensteins that have been stitched up from miscellaneous body parts.

Incidentally, I am not a stranger to making a composite photograph myself. I made one when I was in upper secondary school. In those days, the only digital thing in photography was the finger pushing the shutter release button. When somebody talked about cutting and pasting, he was talking about scissors and glue.

I had two photographs. One was a photograph of our theology teacher, a lady in her fifties. The other was a photograph of my classmate, straddling his street bike in a leather suit. I cut out the head of the teacher and pasted it on top of the head of my classmate. Then I took a photograph of the result in order to hide the edge of the clipping.

Technically, the resulting composite photograph looked quite believable. Everybody who knew the theology teacher knew that the photograph had to be a fake, of course. However, it was hilarious to see “her” in a leather suit and that exactly was the purpose of the photograph: a little bit of innocent fun.

The photograph circulated among the students. Before long, the teacher in question saw it too. She liked it and asked for a copy.

(By the way, Brad Pitt did wear a ton of leather in the film “The Dark Side of the Sun“.)

Years ago a friend of mine wanted to buy a head harness from the United States by mail order. He did not have a suitable credit card, so he paid the head harness in cash to me and I ordered it with my credit card.

I received a notice by mail that I had received a package from the United States. I went to the customs house to claim the package. I was about to leave with the package under my arm when the customs official called me back.

“The package was sent from outside the European Union, so you may have to pay customs and value-added tax on the contents”, he explained. “In order to find out how much you have to pay, you have to show what the package contains.”

I opened the package and showed the head harness to the official. He looked at it in amazement.

“Just a moment, please”, he said and left for a moment. Then he returned with a colleague. They both wondered at the head harness for a while and whispered something to each other.

“Is this… Does one use this on animals?” one of them asked. “No, it is for humans” I answered, smiling.

Now they looked even more baffled. They took out a big book and began to browse through it. After a couple of minutes, they consulted me.

“We are not sure what tariff applies here. Is it all right with you if we categorize this shipment to miscellaneous metal products? Miscellaneous leather products would be another possibility, but that would cost you more.”

For a long time, I have wondered why I enjoy hurting men but I do not particularly enjoy giving them orders. Recently I realized something that helped me to understand my preferences: I am some sort of a “reaction top”.

I want to render a man helpless, cause him strong sensations, and watch how he reacts. Those reactions are the crux of my enjoyment. The expression on his face, the wriggling of his body, the yelps and grunts he makes.

Power is part of the equation in the sense that I want to be able to cause the strong sensations seemingly without the co-operation of the play partner. That is why I tie him up, strap him down, or make him dangle in chains. It is thrilling to think that I could do anything to him if I wanted to, even though I could never enjoy doing something that he does not consent to. However, I am not interested in power and domination in a larger scale.

Giving a man orders and watching him carry them out is not very exciting for me, because following orders is voluntary. He will call me “Sir” only if he decides to do so. He will lick my boots only if he decides to do so. However, if I hit him with a whip, he inevitably feels the sensations caused by the whip. He cannot decide not to feel them.

I like to cause all kinds of strong sensations. If you let me, I will gladly tie you down and tickle you until you are out of breath because of laughing, for example. Therefore, it would be a bit misleading to say that I am just a sadist. It is more truthful to say that I am also a sadist.

(I stole the term “reaction top” from Eileen. I am probably not using it in exactly the same sense as she does.)

Have you sent some of your photographs to some profile site? What are you trying to achieve with your photographs? How many photographs do you believe you need in order to achieve what you are trying to achieve?

I recently examined a sample of the GearFetish members that have photographs in their profiles. The sample consisted of the 164 members who had uploaded photographs to their profiles during the preceding twenty-four hours. This is what I found:

• 46 per cent of the members had at least 50 photographs in their profile.
• 29 per cent of the members had at least 100 photographs in their profile.
• 14 per cent of the members had at least 200 photographs in their profile.
• 6 per cent of the members had at least 500 photographs in their profile.
• The largest number of photographs in a profile was 5588.

I do not know what hans1943 tries to achieve with his photos in GearFetish, but I doubt that he really needs 5588 photographs to achieve it.

I have made a long journey out of the leather closet and I have not regretted it.

I have owned a pair of leather pants since I was fifteen. For a long time I wore leather pants only when I was home alone. At other times, I kept them hidden, initially in the attic and later in the lockable closet of my desk. A couple of times I had to rush under a blanket to “have an afternoon nap” when some relative of mine returned home unexpectedly.

At some stage, I bought a winter coat that reached my knees. It occurred to me that I could risk wearing my leather pants outdoors if I wore that coat, too. After all, only a portion of the pant legs would be visible. That is what I did then. I chose the times and places so that there was only a minor risk to meet somebody who knew me. Helsinki was big enough a city for this. Before I returned home, I put another pair of pants over the leather pants just in case somebody was home.

I had known for some time that I am gay, but I had not told many people about it. During my leather outings I was afraid that somebody who knew me would see me and put two and two together, or that some stranger would react negatively to me. On the other hand, I was fascinated by the thought that I could perhaps receive positive attention from somebody. However, nothing worth mentioning happened, positive or negative. I felt like I was the only person in the world who paid any attention to the leather pant legs visible below my coat.

I was nineteen or twenty when I took off my winter coat in the company of others for the first time. I do not remember the situation in which that happened. Perhaps I took the coat off when I visited a gay bar or the home of some gay man I knew. In any case, the first people who saw me properly in leather pants were gay. I heard the first compliments about my leather pants.

I was twenty-one when I told my closest relatives that I am gay. I came out of the gay closet, but I stayed in the leather closet.

At the age of twenty-three, I decided to move to the countryside because of work-related reasons. My decision was a good one professionally but a bad one personally. I lived in a small rural district in the middle of nowhere. Everything that was interesting was elsewhere, in the cities. I needed a vehicle. And so I bought a motorcycle.

A car would have been a wiser choice. I could have used a car all year and not just half a year, a car would have kept me dry when it was raining and warm when it was cold, a car would have accommodated a great deal of luggage, a car would have protected me.

But no – I chose the motorcycle. You see, a motorcycle was not only a vehicle to get around with but also an “acceptable” reason to wear leather pants. I was not confident enough to wear leather pants in such a small place without some sort of an excuse. Only two persons there knew I was gay. I did not want to give anybody else a reason to doubt the assumption of heterosexuality.

Initially I was a bit self-conscious in neck-to-toe leather but the feeling soon went away. Sometimes old men would come to talk to me about the motorcycles of their youth but that was all. I became more self-confident. It was wonderful to be able to wear leather and it was equally wonderful to be able to move freely from one place to another. I began to like the feeling of riding a motorcycle, too. During weekends, I rode around southern Finland either just for fun or in order to meet interesting men I had encountered in the Internet.

As time went on, I grew frustrated with living in the countryside. I also could not imagine staying in the job I had for the rest of my life and no other jobs were available around there. Therefore, I decided to move back to Helsinki.

After returning to Helsinki, I rode my motorcycle more seldom. It just was not sensible to use a motorcycle for the trips I had to make daily. My willingness to wear leather pants was as high as ever but the excuse facilitating the use of leather pants had become unusable to a great extent. It was time to take a great leap forward. It was time to ditch the long coat, ditch the motorcycling as an excuse and wear leather pants just because I liked them.

I have worn leather pants in just about every kind of situation for which they are suitable according to my sense of taste and etiquette. I have worn them in everyday situations, in my work place and in front of my relatives. Leather pants are not an obsession to me but I am not ashamed of them either. I have encountered a negative reaction only twice. Neither of these situations was threatening in any way.

I do not wear leather pants every day, not even every week. If I wear leather, I wear either a pair of leather pants or a leather jacket, but usually not both. That is because in my opinion, combining leather with other materials usually looks better than full leather. I can be seen wearing leather from neck to toe only when I ride my motorcycle or take part in a fetish event.

I have come out of the leather closet and I hope that I never have to return there.