IF YOU were going to choose a day to be National Erotica Day, would it be a Monday? Me neither, but there you go, and at the beginning of the week I did my best to enter into the spirit of things by spending the day at my computer stark naked (folk who work in offices call this hot-desking).

I thought it would help me to get into the swing of things but, after seven hours spent sitting on a straw-covered dining chair that left my bum looking like a giant waffle, the experience proved more sensitive than sensual.

If you missed the big day, don’t beat yourself up — let someone else do it. A world of pain and pleasure awaits you at Olympia, West London, which hosts Erotica from today until Sunday.

This is not unlike the Ideal Home Show (only with a bit more discipline and a lot more Daily Mail readers), except that one is as likely to end up with a sore bottom as aching feet.

I’ve always had a progressive attitude to experimental sex (although there are limits to what can be achieved with rubber tubing and a Bunsen burner), but on diving deeper into the murky waters of Erotica I was startled to discover the depths to which some will descend to get their jollies.

Gird your loins, chaps, and follow me into the queasy world of Femdom — not a contraceptive device but an entire sub-culture of sexuality wherein wives (aka dominants, or dommes) have their husbands (submissives, or subs) very literally, and very painfully, by the balls.

What’s really weird about this isn’t that the women want to dominate their menfolk in this way, or even that the so-called men in question like it, but the fact that it is so widespread (and here I will spare you details of the role of plastic forceps in all of this), supporting the Austrian psychiatrist Alfred Adler’s adage that the only normal people are the ones you don’t know very well.

Don’t believe me? Take Kent, for instance. Virtually everyone is at it. Unless you are already tied up that night, pop along, say, to the Spyglass and Kettle pub in Rainham for the next meeting of the Medway Munch (I’ll let them tell you why it’s called a munch), on November 29.

They’ll be the ones with a bondage bear and an A to Z on the table. And therein lies the problem: it is far too dull and bureaucratic to be erotic. Google “Femdom UK” and you will find thousands of sad little sites, windows on a world where fat, pasty, balding “slaves” crawl around on all fours, wearing harnesses and licking the shiny, knee-high boots of equally fat and pasty “mistresses” — deluded, whip-cracking dommes who exude about as much sexual charisma as Bet Lynch with a hangover and who think smoking a fag is the ultimate symbol of class.

Welcome to Abigail’s Party with leather face masks and vibrating nipple clamps — packaged

perversion for off-the-peg people who engage in dull online debates about rules and equipment, comparing the merits of rattan versus bamboo canes in much the same way as they might compare company cars, and compiling pages-long, libido-draining, slave-mistress contracts (cc: Human Resources).

This advice, for instance, could have been penned by a McDonald’s hot-beverages liability lawyer: “Ask your mistress not to zap you if you are dealing with hot liquids . . . a very nasty accident could happen if you were holding a freshly made cup of coffee.”

Dull, dull, dull. And besides: I thought pain was the point? So widespread does such “erotic” behaviour appear to be that the question becomes not what kind of man does, but what kind of man does not willingly submit himself to this demeaning nonsense? Am I the only man in the country not trussed up in an erection-punishing spiked inflatable zipper jock or Rhino chastity cage under my suit trousers? Am I alone in not wearing a collar around my privates that allows my mistress, should she so please, to discipline me secretly at a dinner party or supermarket with an electric shock from a distance of up to 200 metres? Nuts, I say, to all that. And to all you chaps bending over to please your partners, I say, where’s your self-respect? What you need is a damned good thrashing. Ah . . .

jonathan.gornall@thetimes.co.uk

STOP PRESS: all tickets for tomorrow’s Erotica Ball are sold out. Probably just as well. What is it? A dance or a raffle?