Dr. Olivia Kenicott sat in a metal and leather aviator chair, looking like she was ready to crush a thousand hearts. The slit in her dress showed just enough to get the imagination started, and her tapered blouse showed more than enough to get the imagination finished. Years ago, she had been one of my father’s star psychiatry residents. I’d met her at one of the annual dinners he hosted at our house for his medical staff. She had been equally alluring back then, even in her weathered scrubs and bruised clogs. I had followed her career online and through her occasional television appearances. She had become a noted sex therapist and worked for several years at the sex clinic at Loyola before opening her private practice downtown.
“Should I consider this visit official or unofficial?” she said as I got comfortable in a padded wing chair. The window blinds were fully open, allowing the sun to add warmth to her otherwise austere office.
“Totally unofficial,” I said.
“Great. Then I won’t start the clock.” She smiled, and I wondered how many of her patients came to truly get help or just be in her radiant presence.
“Introduce me to the world of BDSM,” I said.
“As a participant or an observer?”
“Neither. Let’s start with becoming an understander.”
“It’s a pretty big topic,” she said. “Definitely one I can’t cover in just thirty minutes.”
“Only thirty minutes?”
“You said this was unofficial.”
“I’m working on a case where a man was found alone in his bed late at night, strapped to the bedposts, with a studded dog collar around his neck. He also sported red panties.”
“Cause of death?”
“Right now, it looks like his heart gave out. But all the labs aren’t back yet, so the final isn’t in.”
“You expect foul play?”
“I think he was too old to do what he was doing, and his heart couldn’t keep up. But you never really know until you know.”
“You’d be surprised,” Olivia said. “People mistakenly believe this type of sexual play is only for the young and adventurous. It’s been trending a lot with older men. They’re the growing demographic.”
“How does all of this work?”
“Depends on who it is and what they’re into. There’s no set way or pattern. It can be a very customized experience. Many first believed this type of sexual role-playing represented some type of underlying psychopathology. But as researchers dug more into it, they realized that the participants were normal, psychologically healthy adults who simply wanted to venture beyond the normal confines of traditional sexual interplay. There’s definitely no one-size-fits-all. People experiment until they find what they like.”
“So what exactly are people doing during this interplay?”
“It’s a pretty big list to choose from,” Olivia said. “But role-playing is very popular, as people act out fantasies in a private environment where they feel safe being vulnerable. In most scenarios, one person assumes a dominant role while the other person becomes the submissive. The dominant partner is called the ‘dom,’ and they control the action. Accordingly, the submissive is called the ‘sub,’ and they willingly give up control to the dom. Most of the time, people have a preferred role they like to play, but then you have some people who like to switch between roles. They’re called ‘switches.’”
“And what about the leather accessories?” I asked.
“Sometimes it’s leather; sometimes it can be ropes or chains. Depends on an individual’s fetish. In general, some type of physical restraints is involved as well as some degree of humiliation and power dynamics. Sometimes the session might involve pain, but that’s not a requisite. It really depends on what the sub likes.”
I thought about the welts and old scars the medical examiner found on Kantor’s bottom.
“Help me understand the panties thing,” I said. “That really strikes me. I can’t make sense of it.”
“Because you, like most men, have been conditioned to only see things within the narrow boundaries around masculinity and heterosexuality that society has set.”
“As a heterosexual man, it’s never crossed my mind to wear my girlfriend’s panties.”
“Would you wear them if she asked you to?”
“I can’t imagine her asking me to do that. Why would she want me to wear her panties?”
“Let me give you a number to remember,” Olivia said. “Around ninety percent of men who enjoy women’s clothing are heterosexual. They are not gay, and they don’t have any desire to be gay.”
“So why are they wearing panties?”
“Lots of reasons.”
“Such as?”
“I had one patient come in a couple of years ago. He was a former Marine, happily married to a woman he was deeply in love with. One night, he had to attend an event dressed in uniform. He had gained a few pounds and was having difficulty getting into his trousers with his boxers. He couldn’t get them to zip up. He could get them on without underwear, but he was nervous that if his pants split for some reason, he’d be exposed. So he went into his wife’s drawer and pulled out a pair of her silk panties, put them on, then pulled up his trousers. It worked. He never told his wife he had done it, nor did he want to admit to himself that he actually enjoyed wearing them. Not only did they feel good but they also enhanced his arousal. So he would often go into his wife’s drawer or clean laundry and swipe a pair, wear them around the house when she wasn’t home, then return them without her knowing. One weekend, his wife’s girlfriend came over to spend a couple of nights. He found himself sneaking into her suitcase and snatching a pair of her panties and wearing them while his wife and her girlfriend went out shopping. That night he had barely gotten them back into the suitcase before they returned, and he spent the entire weekend panicking that the girlfriend would notice someone had disturbed her undergarments. He came to see me and wanted to know if he was weird or if he was homosexual and just didn’t know it.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That he was neither. Millions of men are walking around right now wearing women’s panties, and the vast majority of them are straight and very normal. Some men do it as a fetish. Others actually do it because their girlfriends or wives find it a turn-on when they wear them during sex. Some men simply like to wear them because they’re softer and more comfortable. None of these reasons are pathological nor should they be a source of embarrassment, but because larger society regards this as abnormal behavior, it’s something that’s not openly discussed.”
My mind flashed back to the Oscar De La Hoya scandal. De La Hoya, also known as the Golden Boy, was arguably one of the greatest boxers of all time, the first to win titles in six different weight classes. The world was stunned when photos of him wearing a fishnet bodysuit, women’s panties, and heels had been leaked by a mistress looking for a multimillion-dollar payday.
“I can’t help but think of the boxer De La Hoya,” I said. “After years of denial, he finally admitted that it really was him wearing women’s lingerie in those photos.”
“If I remember that case correctly,” Olivia said, “he claimed drugs and alcohol are what drove him to cross-dressing. But make no mistake that while intoxication can lead people to do things they otherwise would not have done, the underlying desire to do many of these things is already there. The substance abuse only unlocks the door, but what’s inside is already there.”
“This case I’m investigating involves a very successful, very powerful man,” I said. “If I’m understanding what you’ve said so far, I’m still left wondering why a man so formidable and in control in his real life would take on the role of a submissive in his sexual life.”
“You answered your own question,” Olivia said. “It’s very common for alpha men, who are accustomed to being in control, to take on the sub role in this kind of interplay. Recent data shows that as many as thirty-four percent of men prefer to be subs. They want to be dominated. They get a high from giving up control.”
“Do a lot of people die from these activities?”
“Despite what they like to portray on TV, most participants are not doing extreme things that would lead to death. The play can get a little rough, but most of these people are experienced, and they know just how far they can take it. Occasionally, there’s an accident, but those are the rare cases.”
“What about rich men? Are they any different?”
“A lot of wealthy men practice BDSM,” she said. “It’s almost like a trend with them. They don’t talk about it publicly, but many of them are doing it quietly in very closed circles.”
“Is it always a one-on-one situation?”
“Not always. Sometimes you have couples that like to do it together, and they switch partners.”
“I’m trying to be open-minded, but it’s hard for me to understand how a guy can sit there and watch another man fuck his wife or girlfriend.”
“It can get even more interesting than that. Sometimes the men will ditch the women and partner with each other.”
Carolina Espinoza sat across from me, glowing like she always did, even in the dim lighting of Virtue, a restaurant known for its reinvented Southern fare in the heart of Hyde Park. Foodies from all over the city made the trek south to this neighborhood that sat against the lake and was made famous by the University of Chicago’s sprawling campus. We hadn’t been seated for more than ten minutes, and I was already making fast work of the homemade butter biscuits with pimento cheese and ham.
“Did you learn anything about BDSM you might wanna try later tonight?” Carolina asked. She had allowed herself half of a biscuit and then pushed the other half to me, claiming she would save her carbs for the banana bread pudding.
“I don’t know if it would work for us,” I said. “One person is supposed to be the dominant, and the other is supposed to be the submissive.”
“That could be a problem,” she said. “I guess two dominants wouldn’t work. In the spirit of equality, we could take turns.”
“That would be called switching. Some people do it that way too.”
“Look at you with all your fancy new lingo. You sound so proficient.”
“What I am proficient at is tying knots.”
“Relevance?”
“I learned how to tie more than twenty knots when I went to summer camp as a kid.”
“I didn’t know there were so many,” Carolina said. “Most people don’t even think about knots. Don’t they just tie things together?”
“My point exactly. Most people will use a simple knot like the overhand knot used when tying your shoes, or a figure eight when you’re attaching something to a tree or post. But the knot used on Kantor was very specific, extremely secure, and not common for the average person. It’s called a becket bend. It’s used a lot in the military and fire departments.”
“Is it hard to tie?”
“Not once you get the hang of it, but it’s a knot that takes practice. Most people don’t have enough patience or interest to tie a knot like that.”
The server appeared with Carolina’s gem lettuce salad with radish, slices of hard-boiled eggs, crispy black-eyed peas, and buttermilk dressing. She had asked them to take out the bacon. I prepared to dig into the blackened catfish with Carolina Gold rice and barbecue carrots.
“Were all the knots tied the same way?” Carolina asked between bites of salad.
“That’s a good question,” I said. “Honestly, I didn’t think to look. I saw the knots on his feet and assumed the same for his hands.”
“Well, that’s why you have me,” she said.
“To remind me of the things I’ve missed or to test my knot skills?”
“Both.”
She took a sip of her favorite wine, a Tignanello red.
“So, what do you think happened?” she said.
“I think he was having kinky sex with some young girl, and it got too much for him to handle, and his heart exploded.”
“Don’t most men say that’s the way they want to go?”
“Depends on if it happens before or after the deed is finished.”
“Did he finish?”
“Not from what I could see, but they’re still testing samples. His panties appeared to be clean.”
“What’s up with the panties?”
“Sexologist Dr. Olivia Kenicott says the panties are very common in men who are heterosexual and are normal in every other way. For some it’s a fetish that produces greater arousal; for others it’s comfort. Millions of men are walking around right now, lifting weights in gyms, running the armed forces obstacle course in basic training, sitting ringside at boxing matches, and no one knows they’re wearing panties.”
“Except their partners, if that’s what they’re both into. You think this had something to do with why Elliott Kantor died?”
“Honestly, I don’t know what to think right now. A young Asian woman who serves drinks up at Rivers but also works for a high-end escort service was seen entering and leaving his apartment building around the time the call came in that Kantor was dead.”
“How high is high-end?” Carolina said after taking a sip of wine.
“Three thousand dollars an hour,” I said.
“Why does a girl with that size sticker on her cha-cha need to serve drinks to a bunch of bleary-eyed gamblers?”
“That’s exactly the question I plan on asking her.”