From bondage to swinging, private sex club caters to those ‘who like it kinky’
By ANN MARIE MCQUEEN — Sun Media
The Ottawa Sun
Miss Jenn has a motto for all the straight-up sex-loving vanillas out there: It’s only kinky the first time.
It’s not her only motto. This fem-domme — kind of like a dominatrix, though not professional — has loads.
The bottom line, for Miss Jenn and her counterparts in Ottawa’s thriving alternative sex subculture, is that the concept of kinky is entirely relative.
I meet Miss Jenn — who until recently was a dental office receptionist who was fired after running the dungeon at Ottawa’s first-ever Sexapalooza show last month — at Breathless, the city’s alternative community centre and private club.
No secret location: It’s at 318 Lisgar St., just above Venus Envy.
It’s all legal now, with the 2005 Supreme Court of Canada ruling that clubs allowing group sex on premises don’t harm society and shouldn’t be considered criminal.
Miss Jenn is dressed in shiny black to oversee the night’s festivities: A BDSM (an abbreviation for bondage, discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism) pure play party.
ATTRACTS ALL TYPES
An assortment of the club’s 300 members pay a $30 annual fee, along with a per-party charge, to come here on varying nights. Some whip each other to welts, others have multi-member orgies on mattresses laid out on the floor. One man just shows up in a diaper, drinks a couple of beers, and leaves. There are vampires and goths. Something called blood play. A growing number of participants from the gay and lesbian community.
And, of course, the swingers.
As for who goes, you’d be surprised.
“I have lawyers, I have teachers, I have men and women from the (Parliament) Hill. I have men and women who work in the private sector, a lot of people who work for (the City of) Ottawa, bus drivers, EMTs, just everything,” says Miss Jenn. “But then I have a lot of people who work in retail jobs, regular schmos who like it kinky.”
Miss Jenn, a 40-year-old divorced mom of two, definitely took the long way to Breathless.
She was one of four children who grew up on a farm in southwestern Ontario. Though she was the sole kid at her school to wear fishnets and a dog collar, she only stumbled on a kindred world of bondage and domination six years ago.
Frustrated with her sex life, she’d taken an extramarital lover who pointed her to a local group. An encounter in a chatroom introduced her to the first man she would utterly dominate: That included a tattoo and 24/7 contract of submission and service.
READY TO PLAY
“I thought I was the only freak,” she says. “I didn’t know there were other people that liked to be tied down or tie people down or put them in dog collars or humiliate them.”
Breathless is quiet by day. The front section is a no-sex, no-play social area. There are usually snacks laid out there. A row of windows onto the street are blacked out. The back half features futons and bunk beds. There are plastic sheets underneath the fabric ones. Containers with sterile wipes dot various tables.
Miss Jenn supplies the latex condoms, the lubricant, rubber dams and gloves.
There are wooden crosses and bondage tables, ready for that night’s BDSM party.
Before we meet, a man wanders in off the street asking about becoming a member. He’ll have a few hurdles to jump before that happens. Miss Jenn will have to like the look of him, and he’ll need to attend a couple of no-sex social events for her to get a feel for whether he’s going to fit in.
There are rules, too. Lots of them. There is no room for someone who can’t say no, or accept hearing it graciously.
There’s no gawking and members must sit on towels if bare or thong-assed. No naming names in public and no loud confessions outside the club about what goes on inside it. Near the end of our interview, Miss Jenn offers to flog me with a tassled, whip-like device.
I am tempted for a second, just to say I did, but ultimately pass.
Then I duck out into the daylight, hours before the party inside begins.
