I wasn’t looking to do anything stupid when I made plans to visit Berlin, but my friend Vicky and I stumbled on an ad for the KitKatClub on our last night. We were just done with a long dinner of garden sorrel and red wine in Kreuzberg, and because it was a Friday night, curiosity got the better of us. While we weren’t drunk enough to consider participation, we were game to set foot in Berlin’s most notorious nooky joint.
When you enter the KitKatClub, I imagine sex immediately losing its intimate appeal. Once past the rusty wired fence and into the old brick building, you’re quickly thrown into an orgy of sweaty Berliners celebrating their love for techno and bumping uglies. All this in a club located on the very slimy stretch of Köpenicker Straße, which isn’t the safest neighbourhood in Berlin. The lamp posts have lost their shine and strange people lurked in every nook and cranny. We had second thoughts by the time we got to the entrance.
“Maybe we should go back,” I said, as we paced back and forth, crossed the street and returned after a few minutes.
“Screw it. Let’s just go in,” Vicky declared. “It’s for research, remember?”
Right. In the name of research I relented, but by the time we got to the bouncers, they’d already given us the once-over and knew we didn’t fit in.
“It’s gay night,” one said coolly. “Come back tomorrow. Tomorrow’s erotica.”
“Can we go in just for a bit?”
“But it’s gay night,” the other replied, with an intonation that implied, “What part of ‘gay night’ do you not understand?”
So we got the wrong day, and perhaps it was a blessing in disguise. Did I really want to spend my last night in Berlin by a swimming pool of half-naked sweaty men bumping up against one another to pumping trance?
I didn’t think so. I definitely wouldn’t have lasted the night without recoiling at the sight of a sexually charged crowd within the perimeters of a nightclub.
Secretly relieved, we shrugged and headed to Friedrichshain instead. On the way back to our Airbnb, I judged myself for being too vanilla. You know, boring. I never really want to try something offbeat, unless it’s sport-related. When I interviewed a local dominatrix three years ago, I was nauseated by the revelation that people were willing to be shat or urinated on. That was mild, considering the other things she would do to her clients. I knew some part of me wasn’t calibrated to appreciate fetishes and kinks. I don’t even like porn. So a plumber arrives at a job only to meet a chesty housewife on heat, and instead of cleaning the pipes, he gets his pipe cleaned. It’s not Emmy-winning material, but people love it. So why don’t I?
By the time I got back to the apartment, I was intrigued. I googled “BDSM test”, and took the first test that popped up on my search engine. The questions asked included whether I would like to be an everyday sex slave and if I would consider a career in selling porn clips of myself. It also questioned if I often behaved in animalistic ways during sex, like howling or growling, for instance.
To all of that, no. Not happening. If I wanted to behave like an animal, it would probably be in another life (I’ll be a pet dog – they lead such carefree lives). Unfortunately, the results came to a whopping “99 per cent vanilla”. Nooo. Where did the one per cent go? I wasn’t sure, but it definitely didn’t go to wanting my partner to serve and address me as a superior. Or the other way around.
The test validated my boring, vanilla tendencies. But who knows when that is going to change?
Perhaps in a faraway future when I make another trip down to the KitKatClub, when I’m there on the right day and the bouncer is going to tell me, “Come right in.”