You Can’t Wear Khaki’s to a Sex Club
When I go out with friends, which is rare there’s always a place that you “end up” and it’s usually a 24 hour diner with bad coffee and good pancakes.
No one “ends up” at a sex club.
A sex club is a destination. Like Wally World or the Grand Canyon.
It takes planning.
And wardrobe that all but a few of us have.
A friend of mine who will absolutely remain both nameless and without alias is on a sort of a journey that among other things includes taking on a boarder in her stunning 2-bedroom condo, growing her
hair long and dating a man who’s sexual proclivities seems to have awakened a sleeping giant.
Over risotto and my 5th vodka gimlet (I was on-foot in the village) she put our 5-year friendship in a context that bonded us and had me laughing harder than I had in a while. She and the man she’s been seeing had spent the day at a sex-po (just like the Computer Electronics Show in Vegas only with leather, whips and silicone penises) and said that she’d been invited to an after party and did I want to go.
In retrospect I’ll take note that my judgment at 3 vodka gimlets is good. At 5, not so much. 15 minutes later we were near the Nats Stadium in DC shelling out $20 bucks each to a place that I’ve been assured won’t say “sex club” on my credit card statement. Bank of America knows WAY too much about me.
Obvious neophytes in “the lifestyle” we were assigned a tour-guide, Susan, to show us around. In her real life, Susan is probably a 20-year GS5 government worker who hates her commute and comes alive once or twice a month when she makes the drive in from Prince William county with a pad lock around her neck . Tonight she is friendly and helpful giving us etiquette tips as we snake our way through 20 or so play-scenes of naked men and women in various S&M postiontions.
Instantly sober, I slipped into a clinical mode where I began to record every detail , knowing that I would be writing about it this morning. The bowl full of cheese-its. The he/she trio taking turns on a black cross, the woman having her thigh surgically stapled, the man being flogged with enough force to draw angry welts on his many tattoos. All of this under the cruel brightness of fluorescent lighting.
A station has some kind of device made with home-depot lumber usually with straps and chains and people hanging on them, blindfolded with other people smacking them with something leather and a bunch more people standing around watching.
Because that’s part of the point isn’t it?
They don’t serve alcohol at this place and I didn’t see drugs. I saw at least 10 women in their 60’s wearing capri pants from Chico’s getting their freak-on in various ways. Everyone else was naked or in something black, shiny and flammable.
Susan introduced us to Mitzi (“I’m a giver”, she told us right away) who reinforced some of the rules which on S&M nights include no genital-to-genital contact. “But if you come on swinger’s night, anything goes”. She directed us to a website and encouraged us to come to a dungeon 101 class next month. All of this while a woman with sagging breasts and an apron of belly fat is being led around the room by nipple clips.
Since this is not my journey and I am truly along for the ride, I try not to be offended that my friend is getting approached by multiple men in the hour I’m there. I cite my body language, arms folded over my chest and my facial expression which is one of amusement, not titillation. I see the humor here, especially here and anyone looking at me can see it in my face.
Men outnumber women two to one and the majority of the scenes being played out are ones in which the men are “bottoms”. In my brief on-line sojourn into S&M the “giver” is actually the submissive and what you would normally think of as the one “receiving” is actually the one in control.
When my friend’s boyfriend showed up, I grabbed her key and got out of there fast making sure to say good-bye to Juliette (no way that’s her real name), a 50-ish mother of 3 from Richmond in a velvet corset and ass-less chaps.
It’s one thing to know, conceptually, that places like this exist. Places that take you to a darker side of human sexuality. It’s quite another to be confronted with the starkness of the human condition. What I saw last night wasn’t as much sexual as it was about people desperate to connect, to feel alive, to feel anything in a world that’s numbed them to all but the most extreme sensations. I would say that the vast majority of the men and women there were overweight- and not in the too many cookies sense of the word but profoundly overweight. My theory is that places like this deliver sexual intimacy to people who don’t feel like they can meet people in real life who will love them and accept them the way they are. In that regard, I can, unfortunately, relate.
But not to the extent that I’m willing to go there.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
i THOUGHT that was you running out of there. i still have your undies you gave me the night of the S&M party. i tried to call the number you wrote on them but it’s just to this wine bar in calistoga. they say you don’t work there.
I think if I had been there with you, we might have had an un-stoppable case of the, “church pew giggles”. It would have been inappropriate and we might have gotten removed from the fine establishment where they allowed capri to begin with…I thought all clothes were banned!? Maybe that is just bingo night at the Nudist Colony.
Funny in a weird, bizarre sort of way. But sad too, I doubt people who need to get off that way are real pleased that this is how things turned out for them. Obviously this fills a void for them somehow (no pun intended. Well, ok, it was intended).