Swimming for love: a new sport is hitting the shores

While still remaining highly controversial, the novel and intriguing sport of Shark Raping continues to increase its ranks of enthusiastic practitioners.

It may not be your traditional sport, it may not be something parents will take their kids to practice Saturday morning, it may not even have been conceivable a decade ago, but Shark Raping is making up for its lack of history with its sheer defiance of common sense and the instinct of self-preservation.

While it is strongly argued that new extreme sports arise mainly to meet the demand of serious adrenaline junkies for higher fixes, Shark Raping seems to be fundamentally about a change in quality, not quantity.

“The field of extreme sports has long been plagued by a recurrent defect” says Barry Park, S-R aficionado, “in that almost every one of them is but a variant of an existing traditional sport in which a feature has been grossly altered in order to increase the level of risk. Thus you have blind cliff cycling, TNT tennis, brick soccer and the like. The beauty of Shark Raping is that it’s like nothing else before in the history of humanity.”

You could not get four or five rapers (they shun the term ‘rapist’ owing to its negative and criminal connotations) to agree and decide on the sport’s history. “I guess it will never be possible to establish beyond a doubt how and when it began, but I like to think that the one who came up with it was, not unlike myself, the kind of person who would look at something that no one ever attempted before and say: It’s possible and it’s insanely difficult. Why the hell not?” says Barry.

According to Glenn Mäermann, former SEAL scuba diver, Shark Raping is as much a sport as it is an art. “It’s all about determination and skill. Once you set out to do it, you can only ask yourself: how? There’s no time for the why?, it’s all about the how?” The how? question was answered to a significant degree with the invention of the grappling microhook suit, a significant improvement which allows the freeing of the hands, enabling them to assist in the first of the many steps which the full execution of the act requires, where they are often desperately needed.

Shark Raping has certainly not been exempt from polemics. A variety of organizations have spoken out against what they have called “the deranged sportification of a fetish.” Animal protection NGOs affirm that the sport constitutes a traumatic experience for the sharks, a claim that the Shark Raping Organization does not deny in the least. Other sports federations state that what they are doing is a travesty that degrades the very notion of sport. On July, unidentified activists broke and entered SRO headquarters where they proceeded to hang a large canvas displaying a crying shark made by Unicef-sponsored initiative ‘Small Friends of the Sea Animals.’  And as if it were not enough to face external criticism, some internal discussions have almost ripped the community apart.

It could seem unimportant to the average outsider, but the controversy over whether to let women in on the federation carried on for months on end. Jack Enworth, InShark store owner declares: “To anyone that’s seriously involved in this, and I’m not talking about your weekend S-R hobbyist here but the ones that own their gear and practice three to four times weekly, it is self-evident that one of the greatest challenges of the sport is physically enabling the intromission to occur, despite the freezing water and the reasonable fear of amputation. Letting in players that bypass this challenge with prosthetic aid – even if in the name of apparent inclusion – is doing away with the sport’s spirit altogether.” The dilemma was ultimately resolved thanks to the total lack of females interested in practicing the sport.

A challenge faced by every sportsman is how to correctly assess the sex of the shark once it has been spotted. Despite females being the sole possessors of oviducts, all sharks dispose of waste via the cloaca, which means that penetrative copulation is possible with either gender. While diluted estrogen sensing devices are available on the market they are simply too expensive for most of the rapers to own. Most tend to go by their intuition and experience. In the words of Barry: “When you’ve done this long enough, you can just feel it.” And even though for some this represents no great issue, it still troubles others “Raping a male shark seems kind of gay” says Jack. “But hey, who am I to judge?”

For the sport to live up to its name the issue of non-consensuality must be settled. Phillip Hurst, S*H*A*R*K annual Shark Raping Tournament judge is emphatic: “You may have a great player display impeccable technique from an outer point of view: entry-exit time, grip stability, habilitation delay, thrust-per-minute ratio, etc. but unless you can ascertain that the shark did not enjoy it you just can’t be sure if what just went on was legitimate S-R or not.”

Adds Shark Insider Review editor Ernst Gertie: “Sharks emit high-pitched squeals when feeling pain or discomfort, so there’s always that as a criteria, but it’s extremely hard to hear. You could theoretically gather lacrimal samples to assess whether crying of any sort has taken place, but that would be harder than the raping itself.” Since such indicators are not usually available, and even if so, do not suffice to establish the fact, the judge is called in to submit a personal appraisal, which is why most rulings are met with bitter complaints. However some telling signs are accepted by all members of the community and never contested. “A shark that seems aroused and follows you around can provide good training for beginners, but that won’t earn you many points on a tournament.”

And while the federation endeavors to keep the game simple and the regulations to a minimum, there are still three unwritten rules that are passed on to every rookie:

“No kissing, no cuddling and no eye contact.”