Thanks to the magic of television, I was made to feel like a geezer in a single afternoon. We subscribe to Hulu. Generally, we watch reruns of “Mom” and shows of that ilk. On Saturday mornings, we like to tune in to Ion, a cable/satellite channel. It plays reruns of “Law and Order SVU” all day and night Saturday. Mrs. Lion and I like the series and generally watch an episode or two before getting going for the day.
Today, we discovered they replaced SVU with horrible, made-for-TV holiday movies. Apparently, we can look forward to this until Christmas. I decided to see what we could find on Hulu. To our delight, all episodes of SVU are there. We watched a couple of commercial-free episodes before getting up.
At lunchtime, we watched another. Mrs. Lion noticed that “Hill Street Blues,” another cop show from the ’80s was available. We watched the pilot. It was from 1982. The cops didn’t carry walkie talkies. There were no cell phones. The cops on the street had to find payphones — payphones? — to call in. The captain had a beeper.
Holy shit! This was all during my lifetime. I don’t think there was even an Internet then. I remember dialing in to Compuserve in the ’80s. Wow! They did have color TV in 1982. The truth is, Mrs. Lion and I go back further in time. We record “Match Game” on the Game Show Network. It airs episodes from 1974. Fortunately, there are no real hooks to the outside world other than dated questions about Richard Nixon and Howard Cossell.
So much has changed in a few decades. When I was active in the New York BDSM community, I became friends with the founder of the oldest BDSM organization in the country. He was in his 70’s when I knew him in the ’90s. He was submissive and wanted to be tied up and spanked. He decided to put an ad in an underground paper. He advertised for like-minded people to meet. A few answered his ad and they met in his apartment. For the record, they were all submissive men.
When I got involved in the ’90s, organized BDSM was well established. There were meetings, workshops, and parties. Women attended! There were very few female tops (Internet translation: Dommes). Like the explosive progress of technology, the maturing Internet brought many more women into the scene. The role of female top became more popular.
When I met Mrs. Lion, she had never considered or even heard of BDSM. I introduced the topic to her. That was back in 2002. So, I guess the idea of sexual power exchange hadn’t progressed all that far. Now it has. Thanks to Fifty Shades of Grey and other popular films and books, adult spanking and other BDSM stuff has gained popularity.
The Internet makes it simple for people who are curious about kink to Google their way into all sorts of stuff. Male chastity, which was virtually unknown in the ’90s, is now popular enough that neighborhood sex shops carry male chastity devices. If you visit dhgate.com and search for “Male chastity” you will find hundreds of products for sale. Even amazon.com sells male chastity devices (they are more expensive than the same ones on dhgate).
It’s nice to be joining the mainstream. Maybe one day no one will raise an eyebrow when they learn My wife spanks me.
Face it, buddy. We ARE geezers
There’s a small market down the street from us on the corner of Hill Street and Magnolia. I REALLY want to go in there and suggest they change the name to Hill Street Booze.