Berlin is a 'sexual utopia' - but for whom?

Thoughts from the (full-size) swimming pool at KitKat Club...

Right now, I feel like the washing machine in the flat I rented when I was 24 years old. I might be able to count back a certain number of years and realise I’m still within my warranty but…I’m worn out. Overused by people who arrived years after the instruction manual was thrown out. Furiously spinning through an overloaded cycle. Permanently gasping for breath. Leaking backwash. On the precipice of being sold for parts.

I guess this is what it feels like to live in London continuously for six years, in seven different homes (which twice includes a room in a Hackney Wick warehouse which I left and then returned to some nine months later). In London you’re always pushing, stretching, even when you don’t have anything to give - dragging a wet match against sandpaper and hoping to alchemise a spark.

But, according to the BDSM Test™ I have a masochistic streak, so I’ve stuck it out here for most of my twenties - not really exploring anywhere new, but never fully settled either. It’s a loveless marriage to an overpriced city. I have one hand searching flights (which I never book) and sublets so I can abscond to Paris, Montreal, Granada…anywhere, really, but the other hand still clinging onto my bedroom doorframe. Will I ever move on? Quite possibly not, I fear.

My relationship to the city reminds me of the novel Zeno’s Conscience, which fully blew my mind when I was 19 (despite my underdeveloped prefrontal cortex and the clumsy, clunky translation). The main character, Zeno, is always trying to quit smoking, always saying that this smoke is his Last Cigarette, but never quite gaining that closure. He always has another cigarette. He will always be a smoker. Nicotine has its chemical claws in him, and he can’t give it up. The Sisyphean fight against his own will is part of what gives his life meaning.

This is a long segue to say that I’m imagining lives beyond London and, even, what my life would have been like if I hadn’t moved here to begin with. Where would I have lived? What baggage would be weighing me down? What trauma would I have avoided? How would I spend my evenings and weekends? Who would I be?

It’s giving Saturn Return, I know.

I actually caught a deleted scene of one of these alternate timelines I so frequently ponder last weekend. I was in Berlin for the SXTech EU Festival (my freelance scene report with [redacted] publication is pending), sipping beer from a Späti in a bikini top, leather and stiletto boots. I wound up in KitKat, which I’m pretty sure is the only club in the city which never has a queue.

Time for a lore drop: KitKat was actually the first sex club (if we can even call it that…) I ever went to, back when I was 22, just over a year before I moved to London. In many ways, returning to the scene felt like stepping back in time, except I can’t ignore how much I’ve aged. Then, I lived off of three hours sleep, one pretzel and three bottles of Club Mate. Now, my friends ask me for Botox recommendations and I possess a crushing sense of my own mortality.

When I first visited, there was an ‘anything goes’ atmosphere. A mix of visitors in jeans and t-shirts and those in leather. No-one seemed to care about what you looked like. It was mostly about dancing, which is funny, because the music was - as is the case in most mainstream Berlin clubs - basic, repetitive techno beats with a slight industrial texture. Think: what your head feels like the day after you thoughts shots was a good idea.

Some six (okay seven) years later, the music was reliably soulless and so was the vibe. This time around, the crowd was even more homogenous: 95% white, mostly skinny, overwhelmingly cis and made up of heterosexuals and gay guys. Regardless of gender, everyone looked like they’d got together and decided to wear the very same black, leather(ette) starter harness.

In one room, a woman was suspended above a gaggle of harness-wearers for a live Shibari demonstration. Weirdly, another room featured a functioning sauna filled with naked couples, who then jumped into a full-size swimming pool as groups sat around ogling them. In classic European fashion, the occasional orange glare of a cigarette end pierced through the darkness, showing just how ambivalent Berliners are to indoor smoking bans, despite them being introduced to Germany in 2008.

Besides one man repeatedly trying to talk to me, I was left alone and could float, anonymously through the rooms. Comparing it to what I saw all those years ago, I was disappointed. Still tasteless, still tacky, still lacking in diversity, but now with a total lack of spontaneity and humour. An establishment as ridiculous as a sex club with a fully functioning pool, where no-one’s fucking in the play area, and it doesn’t realise it’s a joke?

Naturally, it got me thinking. Often, people refer to Berlin as a ‘sexual utopia’. Or at the very least, they make titillated references to all the ‘craaaaaazy’ sex stuff that goes down there, or the so-called ‘anything goes’ mentality. But who really gets to experience that freedom? And does it still exist beyond the imaginations of the kinds of people who view getting rejected at Berghain as a necessary tourist stop?

Of course, the queer and kink scenes in the city have always had their own problems, a lack of diversity and blatant discrimination being the most glaringly obvious of which. But anyone who lives in Berlin will tell you how it’s changed since the pandemic: gentrification, rising rents, the censorship of solidarity with Palestine, a slow bloodletting of its countercultural spirit.

Without pleasure beyond voyeurism, without community beyond a copy-and-paste aesthetic, is this routine of sexual freedom more performance than liberation? Now that the escapism is over, where can we escape to?

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IMAGE CREDITS:

Taken at SXTech EU Festival.

by @the_code_berlin

Stylist: @mi___lel , @_ippo_lita

Make Up : @jo_sysum_makeup , @aatypixmakeup

Photographer: @gilishan1