Clutch your pearls! An RCMP officer in BC might be into bondage

one of the offending photos from fetlife.com
one of the offending photos from fetlife.com

RCMP corporal Jim Brown is under a code-of-conduct investigation after photos of the officer were found on the fetish site fetlife.com.

The photos and account associated with Brown have been removed from the site, but they were pretty tame by BDSM standards. The ones that caused the most shock were staged photos of Brown (or “Kilted Knight”) slashing at a tied-up woman with a knife. In none of the photos was Brown wearing his uniform or otherwise representing himself as an officer, so why this is any of the RCMP’s beeswax is unclear.

Nothing that Brown did was illegal. All the photos were of consensual sexual behaviour. That sexual behaviour — bondage and dom play — can’t possibly be shocking to anyone with a web browser.

Still, that didn’t stop BC’s acting RCMP commander, Randy Beck, from making this astonishing statement: “While we must strike a balance between an individual’s rights and freedoms when off-duty and the RCMP code of conduct, I am personally embarrassed and very disappointed that the RCMP would be, in any way, linked to photos of that nature.”

Not to be outdone, BC’s justice minister Shirley Bond said Brown’s private sexual behaviour might undermine public trust in the police.

“I am clearly unhappy about the kind of message this incident sends to the public,” Bond said. “It’s important that British Columbians have confidence in the men and women who serve in our communities every day as police officers.”

She can’t be serious. Even if BDSM were an abhorrent new sexual perversion, which no one should think given how common it is, no reasonable person would lose confidence in the RCMP because of this. What might make John Q. Public lose faith would be, I don’t know, maybe systemic sexual harassment of female officers within the force?

The most depressing part of this story is that some women’s advocates are equating Brown’s consensual sexual activities with some sort of danger to women.

Hilla Kerner, who works at Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter, told to Vancouver Sun that it’s “absurd to think that his personal, private behaviour has nothing to do with his professional role as a police officer.”

“We do not trust this man, and the agency he is part of, to protect women from male violence,” she said.

This is just so plainly absurd that it leaves me speechless. The whole BDSM thing doesn’t really work without explicit consent and strict boundaries. If anything, a fetishist would be more aware of what is and isn’t appropriate conduct, especially someone who posts on a fetish website. And the smiling woman in some of Brown’s photos would likely agree.

Luckily this witch-hunt has not cost Brown his job, but that people have been so quick to throw him under the bus is rather shameful. BDSM may not be a mainstream sexual activity (although defining mainstream is tricky these days) but this whole episode is clearly driven more by prudishness and personal discomfort than any serious questions about Brown’s conduct as an RCMP officer. Grow up, people.

CBCRaimond Spekking/Wikimedia