Did Maid Fetish Prompt Alleged DSK Attack?
The Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair has prompted some sensible and some silly discussions about the extent to which sexual mores and arrest practices in France differ from those in the United States. But amidst French condemnations of the "perp walk", revelations of DSK's past sexual aggressions and Bernard Henri Levi's claim that New York chambermaids always work in pairs unless a conspiracy is afoot, one subject has gone strangely unmentioned. It is a subject of which journalists on both sides of the Atlantic seem to be commendably ignorant - despite the way the internet has brought so many hitherto obscure sexual practices into the media mainstream.
It may be that DSK is merely an ordinary, common-or-garden sexual bully and rapist. But the early accounts of what his accuser says took place in his hotel room hint at something more - a very particular fetish that, if the internet is anything to go by, is not uncommon though little known or commented on in the wider world. Its adherents - and they have a subgenre of pornography devoted to their kink -- are obsessed with the idea of being "surprised" while naked by hotel chambermaids.
It is a situational fetish rather than an object fetish, and if you care about the taxonomy of sexual obsession subcultures, it is presumably a refined sub-genre of exhibitionism.
Try googling the words "hotel maid walking in naked" or some variation thereof and you will find a surprisingly large number of sites and lists on which men (they are all men) discuss the erotic appeal of flashing the chambermaid, and what happens when they try to arrange what are for them, such erotic situations.
Indeed there is so much material on the subject that you wonder if each morning there aren't scores or even hundreds of overworked and underpaid hotel workers nationwide rolling their eyes as they stumble on yet another excited chap who pretended not to hear housekeeping's knock.
It is possible that the old fashioned uniforms that some hotel maids wear has something to do with their being an object of pornographic fascination. As everyone knows, here in the USA novelty shops, Halloween costume suppliers and lingerie stores all sell supposedly sexy versions of "French Maid" outfits just as they sell abbreviated costume versions of nurse uniforms.
It is not clear why sexy chambermaid costumes are always identified as "French", though it could have something to do with the traditions of French theatrical farce. These plays often feature comic subplots involving a sexy housemaid being chased by the man of the (grand) house or one of his guests.
Whether French household servants or their modern analog - the hotel chambermaid -- are or were more sexually available in real life than non-French equivalents is impossible to verify. It could be - and this would represent a particularly French twist on the maid fetish - that in France chambermaids are presumed (like all servants) to be more sexually available or active or vulnerable than their social "betters".
The simplest and perhaps most convincing explanation of DSK's behavior may have little to do with specifically French attitudes to class and sex, though it would hark back to the French farces mentioned earlier. It makes such sense that rumors along the same lines are already flying on both sides of the Atlantic. The theory goes that DSK ordered a call girl -- as one might in Paris -- and specifically asked for her to be dressed as a maid. And when the door bell rang, one maid was mistaken for another...
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