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HEDON

‘In a way, Love is always there.

We are humans.We share times, we share currents, we share the emotions that we are living in that moment.’

Talking About Alternative Sexualities.

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Van i lla, Gay, St r aigh t , Bi , Pan s ex al, C ur i ous, Kin k y, Fe t i s h is t , Monogamou s, Polyamorou s, Q ue er.

About me / Intro

A b o u t m e / Int ro

Coming to grips with my sexuality has been a continual journey throughout my life. The normative social influencers painting a picture of happiness, beauty and success if you fit in to the generally accepted formula - get a well paid job, fall in love with a girl, get married, have children and be happy. Now I must agree that this is a very beautiful picture, but it’s one with which I can relate less and less as the years go by.

Something I have struggled with since the beginning of this journey is the certain boxes which must be ticked or crossed in order to be able to identify who you are, what you stand for and how others perceive you.

Of course everything we do will conjure some kind of pre-judgement - it seems to be human nature to define and place things, in order to make sense of our surroundings and to be able to apply past experiences to future situations, it makes sense and saves time, but I think it also blinds us to exceptions of the rule (or the fact there are no rules).

Since I was a teenager I didn’t really feel a difference between boys and girls. I was raised mainly by women so missed out on the whole ‘man does this, woman does that’ conditioning that most kids have growing up. For me women could do everything men could do, and more. For a long time I did feel inadequate to the more ‘masculine’ boys I grew up around. I was shit at sports, knew nothing about cars and found it easier to be around girls.

I never really had external problems because of it, people would ask why, and would sometimes make comments, but I wouldn’t say I was really bullied for it. The main problems came from me.

I was looking around and realising that I wasn’t the same, that something must be wrong with 4

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me. In certain stages in my life I tried to discover, or reclaim this masculinity I was missing, just to find out that this wasn’t really me.

After some years I kind of got use to it, I mean still to this day I do think about it, I can’t really help it, but I don’t really worry about it.

Then through high-school we had those parties where we would play spin-the-bottle or whatever. I have always been very close to all my friends, I take friendships very seriously and this showed in the way we acted around each other. I remember once playing spin the bottle and kissing a guy, the thing I remember wasn’t being disgusted, or excited. I was indifferent. Completely indifferent.

I realised pretty quickly that I didn’t really differentiate on a social, or sexual level.

A b o u t m e / i Int ro

Now this didn’t really phase me so much, since we were all friends it was kind of normal. It wasn’t until I had an experience with a guy that I hardly knew that I realised that I must, now, tick the ‘gay’ or ‘bisexual’ box. This was pretty hard for me. And I guess there are a load of reasons for this. Mainly the fact that it is seen as something abnormal and disgusting, I was scared of what people might think, what my family and friends might think. Also because I wasn’t 100% sure myself I didn’t want to be put into this box, because I was sure that it would be easy to be put in there, but not so easy to be taken out.

It took me a while and a couple more experiences before I told my closest friends about it, and I think moving to the Netherlands made it easier to be open to experiences, I still wasn’t so open to talk explicitly about who I found attractive, or the things I had done with guys, and it was only really recently, since moving to Berlin, that I became completely open about everything. It’s a process, and I’m still discovering who I am and what I’m looking for, but it feels like I’m on a good path, I can accept myself and explore my desires and this conflict I would usually face is disappearing.

HEDON is my way of continuing to express and explore pleasure and sexuality, it has helped me to connect with like-minded people, as well as discovering new ideas and making new friends.

This extended into the photo-series where I could include the people around me and the subject in another medium, raising different questions and creating another moment of reflection for myself.

Enjoy!

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C o nt ent s

Contents.

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01.

Madieanne Amsterdam, BDSM, and being a Mistress.

02.

Erik BDSM, the fetish scene and pain as pleasure.

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03.

Taylor Moving to Berlin, a journey of self-discovery.

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04.

Christian Performing in the fetish scene, clubs and movies.

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05.

Alex The importance of balance and not wasting time.

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06.

Michele Society, sex, technology and power.

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C o nt ent s

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Directory Places and websites mentioned.

Glossary An expension on some terms used.

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‘There are hardly any real Mistresses in Holland anymore. Most girls who work there play dom because you make more money if you’re submissive than if you’re a dom.’

Madieanne

If you see in the sex industry, all the windows are disappearing. A lot of places are non-existent anymore. If you want to do a party it’s very hard to get the paperwork done. If you go to the big parties they’re in Zaandam. They’re not in Amsterdam, it’s against city regulation. Every city has it’s own regulations.

Oh really? So it’s not allowed to do any fetish party?

Almost not, because you can do it once or twice a year, but not much more...

Wow, ok. I imagined in Amsterdam it would be quite liberal and quite…

No. There’s no sex club in Amsterdam. Theres no official Mistress in Amsterdam. They all closed it.

Not only for women but also for the men as well.

There’s no official gay clubs.

And how long has it been like that?

10 years.

Wow I really assumed, because…

Because the Dutch are very good at telling the world they are liberal and open-mined. They’re not.

Yeah you can go in the city centre and there are all types of bars. And you can smoke, because you can do that and there are some windows everyone thinks it’s a very open place. For the foreigners everyone think’s it’s a really good place. But not for the people who live here.

And you also said that the people who own the clubs are having more international people than Dutch Mistresses for example.

Why is that?

Yes, because you can work 3 months with not much paperwork and then you disappear and another comes and another comes and they just go through Europe. They’re mostly East European. They have some places, they rent an apartment and, well a normal apartment and somebody comes and stays for a few days, has a client then disappears. Then the other one comes, has a client and disappears.

That’s the way it goes.

Ok so it’s also easier to avoid the paperwork and because of that its going a bit underground?

It is underground already, because all the places we used to meet, they closed a lot.

That’s a shame, and because of this do you find that it’s then harder to reach people, or you have less demand?

That’s different. Everyone is going online, they talk to each other and they do it private. But the BDSM policies in Holland they’re disappearing. There are hardly no clubs, the ones that are (still open) are the ones that have been there a very long time cause they have the paperwork. And for the newcomers it’s almost impossible to start something. And if they do, they’ll start it in sex clubs. Cause in sex clubs its possible to be a mistress, but not outside.

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H E D ON .

And you said sometimes you’re performing in clubs?

Not clubs, parties.

Ah ok, and they’re privately organised parties then, or?

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No no no, like Wasteland and B.I.T.C.H and Dominatrix. But Dominatrix they do only modelling at the moment, no BDSM anymore. It’s about regulation, You can’t do special things on stage… You need a permit. But if you have a fashion show you’re allowed. If you have sex shows it’s not allowed. It’s all about how you play it. You have the dance scene and they involve some shows but its mainly hooks or blood scenes or something like that, fashion shows. but not BDSM scenes, you hardly see them anymore.

So it’s more, a short performance r ather then a scene?

You’re allowed to have a performance and the maximum time is 12 minutes. Because otherwise the public gets bored and they are on pills, on everything, and they want to move.

Ah ok so it’s about pleasing the crowd and maintaining the level of entertainment, not about following the regulations?

Yeah, we are just eye candy, that’s all we are.

Ok so it’s not very personal then. And so it’s much different for you when you’re performing in a party, and what you’re doing here for example.

Ohh you cannot, no it’s completely different. What I’m doing here is completely different than what I do on stage. Here is playing, and on stage it’s eye candy. It has to look beautiful because of the loud music and the little space you have, you have to be careful of what you do and how you do it, and it 10

has to look good. It’s more a fashion kind of thing, an art thing. Or putting fantasies or ideas into peoples head of playing. But it’s not really playing on stage.

And here is more about the individual?

It’s all a mind game here. And being in bondage and things. what’s here is totally different than in parties.

Ok. And you said before there are sometimes people staying overnight. So how does that vary between your clients? Like the timeframe and what they want from you and what they ask from you?

Well, they have nothing to want because I’m the one deciding. If I have fun and they aren’t against it then we can do it. If people stay overnight then mostly it’s that they come a little bit earlier and we do a session, Then I put them away in the cage. Or on the bed ‘cause I have a lot of harnesses to hold them down. Or I can just tell them ‘I’ll keep you here until I want to let you go’ Ok, so they really give up control when they walk through the door.

Yes And so before do you come up with the regulations, or is it completely in your control?

Like because I was reading about safewords for example...

I don’t do safe words.

Ok so it’s really up to you.

Ok I can tell a safe word but I know before they know. I can tell from the body language. I’ve been a Mistress for more than 35 years so I can tell.

Because the body shows, and otherwise you can feel it on the skin, or a look in the eyes, or how the

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colour changes, things like that. or they do all kind of moves and you can tell yeah, they’re having a cramp or they can’t stand much longer, or it’s starting to hurt.

And are these all things you have learnt from personal experience? Or you’ve done workshops or things to learn about it?

So people just kind of superficially look, then dive into it?

Yes, without knowing anything, and you can’t tell them anything cause they know better. Everybody says ‘yeah, I’m a slave, you have to do this to me.’

And mostly it’s only sexy. 90% who tells to the world they are a slave are looking for sex things.

And how can you be a slave if you don’t have an owner? They feel like a slave so they ‘are’ a slave.

And you can tell them you’re not because you don’t have an owner and they say, ‘what are you talking about? I’m a slave!’ And so the slave, the word slave doesn’t mean anything anymore because they all know better.

Yeah, because before you had regulations and, there was freedom, of course there was freedom.

But people now they know everything better then…

He knows better than he does, and he knows better than… That’s why there’s no respect. People don’t listen to each other and thats why they fight so much.

So before, when you were beginning and you had for example the O magazine, Was that like giving a manifesto, or guidelines for how the scene works? Or was it all interpreted in different ways?

Well I started behind the window in the red light district, cause those days there were no clubs, there was no internet. So the places where we did it, it was there. So I was a Mistress behind the window with a whole group in a certain area. All Mistresses you know. And we would all stand there in high heels and PVC or leather or whatever. And we had our fun there. And if someone wanted to have sex we would ask the girls, ‘hey, you want to be a slave girl? because he wants this and this and this.’ We had loads of fun and did crazy things behind the windows and stuff. But then you did not have the paperwork or the strict regulations that you have now. Because for everything in Holland there’s paperwork. Anything! And in Holland they changed the law in 2007. And since 2007 I am a sex worker. And because I’m a sex worker the youth…

Well 2007 that’s 8 years ago, and that means that the youth think ‘Mistresses are sex workers, they’re prostitutes’. So the youth don’t have any respect for Mistresses anymore. they just pay and you do what you want. Before they were looking up to ladies and not anymore. And if you’re commercial then you are shit, and you’re not real because people pay you for your emotions.

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Mad i eanne

Well I had a partner who knew a lot. I started slow and mainly taught myself everything. And I started to try with people and work it out. And now I myself give workshops. But no-one is interested in workshops. They don’t know anything about safety.

Because you go to parties and there are fucking machines but no condoms, things like that. People play with something, there’s some blood on it and then they hand it over to another one and they just go for it. So safety has changed a lot. They just don’t care. Erm because if you have the elderly people, they think. Around 40 years upwards they think. Under there they don’t even know what sadomasochism means, with the safe words and what it means. Because the internet came

So it’s completely changed then from what it was before?

H E D ON .

And what’s the difference? What’s on the other side? If they think you’re not real then what is real?

Oh, if you go to a private home and a lady has some kids and they have a little room and they do it for 15/20 euro and you get sex. They’re real.

Very twisted because it’s all about money. For Holland, Dutch people it’s all about money, because it’s a country of managers. It’s very calvinistic.

Do you think that over the years the quality of the profession has changed?

Yeah, it’s worse!

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Because now it’s more superficial?

It’s all pills and everything. A lot of the people that do the shows are on drugs. Some of them are really good, but that’s why I stepped into the Burlesque scene, it has more style, people are more friendly to each other.

And is there a big scene in Amsterdam?

No, there’s little things. You can ask Erik later, he is a film maker and he makes the clips and everything.

Oh that’s what you’ve been working on this week?

Yeah. Let’s go sit and have a coffee or something.

Because there is the sun and here’s dark.

- Between the SM studio and coffee we talked a bit more about the differences and standards within the BDSM scene, I asked how what Madieanne does compares to other contemporary Mistresses, she went on to say...

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There are girls that are submissive but can play dominant. Because that’s what the clubs want.

Ok so they just switch between…

Yeah there are hardly any real Mistresses in Holland anymore. Most girls who work there play dom because you make more money if you’re submissive than if you’re a dom. Because if you open your legs and people can do something there, you get more money than if you’re a Mistress and have a whole studio of stuff. Because sex pays more. So they start to play submissive, then after a while they take over being a dom. Men like that, they pay for that. They first have a dom in the beginning and they get spanked and stuff, then they can take over and use the girl, that’s what mostly happens.

Is there like a source where the definitions of fetish language are found?

Wikipedia is used mostly… Because in the beginning we had different names but a lot of people who study and did some therapy think they know better, because of that they had their own sources…

Because before you didn’t have the word BDSM, it was non existent, because in Holland we had Dutch words. But suddenly the Americans got in it and everything got American you know. Everything is in English, and before it was all in Dutch, with other words and other meaning.

So do you find that the profession changes along with the language?

Yes, with the internet everything changed. It got international. And of course because of the way Dutch people think about foreigners (in terms of popularity) they took over. Because if you’re international you must be better.

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And do you know where the roots are of BDSM? Where the inspiration is coming from? Is it very different in each country?

You must meet a lot of interesting people, are you ever surprised by a request?

No.

It’s quite interesting where the switch-over happens. Because you say you have quite a lot of male clients which seems to be against the social norm. Do you see a connection between what we are taught and the fantasies that people have? Or it’s not so much an act against society but more people following their feelings and desires?

Well the people that come here they have money, otherwise they can’t pay. And people with whom I play are smart and intelligent. They have a full time job, a family or whatever. And they are mostly in control, and they want to rewind. To get rest in their heads. The backpack has to be emptied. They come here and I take over and I decide. And if they leave the place they are relaxed again and the world is open and free. That’s what I do. And I can do that it many many ways.

Yeah, I guess it comes with the open-mindedness.

Yeah people have crazy ideas and they ask me, ‘can you do it?’ And I say no. If I think it is over my limits then I say that it’s not my fantasy. ‘Yeah but I like you to do this.’ Ah then go somewhere else.

‘Yeah but I think that you should, you have to like it.’ Fuck off. Haha.

Not today…

Never, never! and that’s what I see with people from the past who were having studios, and because they (the government) have always been on our back wanting extra money and extra money, because they believe we have loads of money which is not true, the girls or ladies that have the studio are doing things for the money and not because they like it. Then you start disrespecting men in general, because you go over boarders all the time. And then you think, ‘ok, I don’t want to be alone so, well I’m straight but let me try a girl.’ Well if you make that choice then you go over your own boarders again.

So then you don’t like girls either.. Then you end up alone as a woman who plays with everybody but you don’t like yourself, you don’t have any respect anymore so usually you end up alone and old.

I think it’s quite difficult because…

You have to be strong in your head.

Yeah because you come into these conflicts I guess more than a lot of other people would.

Because other people go about their ‘normal’ day without…

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Mad i eanne

The inspiration of BDSM started when the first person landed on earth. It’s inside humanity. I wrote a book about it, I have a book that’s called Tught. which is about how to behave, and how to be with girls and how girls had to behave. And I had a book before with pictures and things, even from the 1300s. And even before Christ was born. Because the church did use it as well. All torture and things was mostly sexual. Muslims do sexual things, and the Christians do too. You cannot talk about it but thats what happens. You don’t have the Nuns for no reason. In india you have the temples and the Hare Krishna, the women have to do it with all the men there. It’s always like that. the men are the people in control and the women are there to be used .

H E D ON .

Well for me it’s not a conflict. For me a boarder is a boarder. And a lot of people say, ‘yeah well I want to cross that boarder,’ and if you cross that boarder then it’s not there anymore. Then you’re borderless. And boarders have a reason, you know. So if you cross it, it’s not good for you. It’s not good for yourself. You can look for boarders, where they are, but crossing it? Nope. That’s no good. Because you can never go back.

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Yeah, that’s quite relevant for me at the moment… Are your clients quite similar to each other? Or you have quite a variety?

No totally different. That’s why my studio is so well equipped, because everybody has… There’s not one person the same in the whole world. And that makes people unique. So if somebody comes here I treat him like a unique person. Because it’s all about your feelings and I want to get there, that gives me the drive. Thats why I enjoy my job so much, because theres nobody the same. And to try to find out, to get somebody crazy and to get into their souls and feeling. That is a drive, I love that.

I love people. I have respect for people. I couldn’t play with someone that I don’t like. No way. Go somewhere else. Why should I put my energy in you when I don’t like you? ‘Yeah I pay...’ Pay the street I don’t need your money. I can use it of course, that’s different, but not in that way, no way! I’m not going across that boarder. I’m just not doing it. That week I will eat less, or maybe sell some stuff to get some food or something, but I’m not going there. That’s my pride. I’m a proud woman. I know what I want and I find that what you see online and what a lot of people around, they have all this medication and stuff and they tell you that you need that medication or that treatment. Well, it has nothing to do with you not being ok. But the treatment is making you sick. All the medications, the medication industry is there to make you use it. And because you take this one you need more, and people just get sicker and crazier. I don’t use anything. I don’t even go to the doctor anymore. And a lot of things I don’t use, like cosmetics and things. If you use cosmetics there are 14

a lot of things to remove it. And they are expensive, and they’re so harsh on the skin, that you need all kinds of creams to add to make up for all the things they took out. If you have some normal soap and you wash your skin, and you have some olive oil that’s enough you know. That’s the basic. That’s why my skin stays good. I’m 61 but you can’t tell.

Wow yeah, so for you it’s very important to take care of yourself.

Yeah. well now I’m like this (dressed in relaxed clothes) because it’s relaxed and I thought ok it’s an interview, I didn’t know about pictures and stuff but pictures can always be done later you know.

Yeah but I like it like this, it’s more personal, its nice. It would be nice to come back for photos some time.

Yeah, I told you I’m a people person, you know.

Always have people all over the place. like now we have two people over.

Yeah it’s a nice atmosphere here.

Err, oh yeah, do you ever take the submissive role?

Me submissive? No way! It’s just not there. I’m not a switch, why should I be submissive? Many people ask that and I don’t understand the question. I’m dominant. So why do they want me submissive? To say,, ‘see you can’t be a strong woman.’

No, I think it’s more, well for me at least I guess it’s because I don’t know where I am.

So that’s why. All the youngsters are switches, they’re still looking, they want to eat from both sides. No, make a choice you know. Find out who you are and don’t go there and then there. They hop you know, like on the television and on the internet. They hop hop hop hop, they never make a decision. And then you don’t have a balance.

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Yeah I feel like it’s in our upbringing to be everywhere and not to stay in one place.

And do you find that also the things you’re creating, are they a reaction to your clients?

Or more a reaction to your own ideas?

Yeah, that’s the way they are brought up in school you know, then it’s harder to find a balance in your life. And they love that, that’s how the government rules you know. Because if the people hop hop hop then the government can have their straight line.

You cannot follow it and they can just do whatever, you know. And you can just, again, again, again…

They just keep you busy.

Well I’m creative, and if I’ve done something once then I won’t do it again. I show it off what I’ve done, and then people mostly take it over, you know. Because I’ve done it already, it’s behind me so let’s do something new.

Because they make money from control. The government likes to control everybody. It’s all money you know. You need to know the story otherwise you can’t see. You have to look at the roots. Without the roots a tree can’t grow. And it’s the same in the studio. If someone comes here and they’re insecure and after a while I don’t see them growing then I have to say it, it doesn’t work. I want strong people, proud of themselves. Even in their feeling, Even when they crawl on the floor they do it because they feel strong. They can do it, they can do it. ‘Yeah it’s difficult but I can do it because I have to.’

Yeah, it’s interesting, you’ve given me a lot of information and you’re helping to shape the BDSM world for me which is interesting.

That’s the way I see it so I always try to come with new ideas and new games. I did find out with my ex partner about the vacuum bed, that’s our design.

I like to come up with new ideas you know, and Erik as well. And my ex liked to as well. We like to grow and to explore. I don’t like to be narrow. No, I like to explore, try this, try that.

Always. Yes. If somebody comes then he expects the studio to be clean, warm. Because it has to be fine to the body. Because otherwise he cannot play properly. I always take a shower and take care that my makeup and my clothes are ok. So I always need one and a half hours before a session starts.

And do you already know before a session starts what you’ll be doing?

No never. Because there’s a lot of newcomers here and I don’t wanna think about it. Sometimes somebody has a question, ‘would this be possible?’

Then I take a shower and when I’m showering my fantasy goes, ‘ah, that idea!’ Then something starts to grumble and come up and then in the studio I look at him and think ‘yes’ or I think ‘no.’ Because if you open the door, and because of me doing it for such long time, I sense the feeling and how he is in his body and how he looks at me. And if I think, ‘Huh, I had this but now I look at him and think he’s tired, or maybe too emotional, or whatever,’ then we have a sit and a little drink, or not, or just a talk with him and how he feels. I always, if I have somebody new I always ask if they’re on medication, or if they ever broke something, or if they have their own teeth, if they wear contact lenses, you know. Or did they drink any alcohol or smoke some grass, are they on pills or whatever? If they are, we don’t play.

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Mad i eanne

Yeah definitely. It’s something that I come into now, well over the past few years I guess, and it’s something that I’m also exploring a bit, like why it (society/life) should be like this, why can it not be another way?

Yeah, some more exploring, that’s nice. Do you have to make any preparations before starting a session?

H E D ON .

So you make sure all the conditions are met for a safe session?

Mm, yeah it must be a lot of work, to prepare and to think about what to do…

Er, it’s not about safety. It’s about sharing. If you’re on drugs you’re bee-dee-dee (puts left hand in the air) and I’m here (puts right hand underneath left).

How can I reach you?

Yeah tell them, or give them messages or whatever.

I don’t have time for that. And I don’t wanna do it.

Because I like playing for the moment you come in, I have a look at you. And I’m going to have a fun time and have my go. And after then we hug, and you go your way and I do my thing. I don’t want to have it the whole day.

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So it’s really a lot about the connection?

Yeah, if there’s no connection, I can’t get into your head cause you killed all kind of feelings, or you just go here and there… No way. No. If I look you in the eyes I want you to feel me looking. And I want to feel the sensations and the things you’re starting to think. Otherwise no way. I have my ways... I’m strange. I don’t want real slaves, because a lot of ladies want their own slaves, to tell them this and that and that. I don’t want that cause I have a normal relation with Erik and we do crazy things together and have a lot of fun. But if I have a slave it’s like having a dog. You have responsibility. And that takes time, all day. Even if the dog or the slave is not here.

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Yeah, but is it very common that people have this 24/7 thing?

A lot of people say so but they have a kind of new relationship with some extra, and they call it BDSM because in Holland everything must have a name. because of all the regulations and all the boxes.

That is that, and that is that and this goes there.

I have a cabinet with drawers, and I can throw everything in one draw. Oh I have this, and oh I have that. And then you can combine. It’s all about your own thinking, you know.

02.

‘An endorphin rush can do similar things to what a shot of Heroin will do to you, but your own body is producing it.’

Erik

Is there a difference between your dominant position and that of Madieanne?

No, not really. It’s very similar. In fact it’s all about partners. So if you play with somebody you try to look what they’re about, what the references are, see if you have any common ground, and if so then there is a possibility to play. If not then not. Very simple. You communicate so that you agree, and that you don’t inflict permanent damage. All the rest is discussable, optional. That’s how I see the connection between consenting adults. There’s a few more limitations here because we are old-fashioned and monogamous and all that. So if you want to come by for a quick fuck, wrong address.

Besides it’s tiring.

Haha, you don’t have the energy for hooking up then?

No. I can’t be bothered, I’ve got one to do, that’s enough for me.

Haha. Do you find that it’s quite similar between other Doms, like in this area?

Err, everybody is different, so, everybody usually has an opinion, that is something the Dutch are very good at, having opinions. If what you want to do is fine with your partner and it makes you both happy go for it. And if you want to try out new things and you know what you’re doing, do it. If you don’t, when in doubt, don’t. Think. Don’t get so horny that you start doing dangerous stuff.

Yeah, like Madieanne was saying, you have to be true to yourself and know your boundaries.

Yeah. Don’t be an idiot, don’t damage people, because people are precious. It’s like when you go to the store and a girl gets a little barbie doll and she is like, ‘ahh’ and the legs fall off. Well then your toy is broken, what are you going to do?

Yeah, that’s the end of it. Oh yeah I saw you are doing photography and video work, how does that overlap with the work you are doing here in the studio?

Oh they combine. We like to make dolls and dress Transvestites and things like that, it makes people very happy. And if I’m around and they feel up for it, I make some pictures of them so they have a lasting memory which can be, you know, a good thing because it gives you an extra dimension in the connection with yourself. Everybody is different, but then again, I do just about everything photography wise. I just don’t do babies, because if you want a really nice photography shot you have to get down low, or put them up high and I’m not up for that.

Ha ha, that’s not your way?

No, but for the rest, from artistic direction to big parties. I’ve just done a, finished editing the second movie of last weekend at Burlesque. So I was, well that was a lot of fun as well. A bit too dark so I have some noisy footage, and that means so much extra rendering time to make it a little bit more acceptable. But it’s all fun.

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H E D ON .

02.

And you’re doing it for the venue? Or it’s more for yourself ?

Yeah, it must make them comfortable infront of the camera.

Yeah yeah for the venue or for the performers. Err, afterwards a lot of the performers they love to have some clips and preferably something that is nicely edited so they can use that. It’s a commercial thing so that they can use it to apply to new venues. They can show their tricks and sets. If you have like 20 different acts that you can do, you can make a combo and show your personas and your outfits and then ‘Ohh wow that is great… That is good, let’s do that one!’ So it’s a selling point. And it’s fun, it’s fun, having hundreds of really nice models on speed dial is not really a bad thing.

Yes, it’s like the 1 2 3 click you kno. When they hire me for something like that the people are suppose to enjoy it, they should want to come back. When I do it they will bring 2, maybe 3 outfits and they will go change in between because they want to show how pretty they are. No matter what they look like, you know. They can be as wide as they are tall, I don’t care, they always feel pretty in front of my camera. And they usually look pretty good as well.

I don’t photoshop. I just make sure that they look happy on the picture and that’s almost completely it done. I mean if it’s dark then I bring lights so that’s no problem.

No no I can imagine. Not a bad job at all.

And Toxic’s in April right?

Nah I’ve done worse. Then again if you’ve got some nuts and bolts that need to be photographed and you want that to be turned into a web shop, I’ll do the entire package for you, no worries. It’s just I prefer people over nuts and bolts.

Yeah, they usually have them when the clock changes.

Madieanne said you’re also doing a photobooth soon at Toxic?

Yeah yeah yeah, for the last 2 years I’ve done that, and last time Natalie, she forgot to book me. No body asked so I just took another job, then she went totally bonkers on me, so I introduced her to a colleague. He’s a good photographer, he makes really nice images, but he’s a serious guys. So the party was on Saturday, and Sunday noon I got a phone call from a hoard of the girls and they were like, ‘Ahh you asshole, you weren’t at the party!’ They like me because I developed a new style for that party, they call me the cam clown ‘cause I’m always doing silly things. I’ll shoot like this (puts camera above head) and I’ll have conversations and won’t even look, and they’re like, ‘yeah right, that’s gunna be a bunch of crap.’ But it turns out that they are really nice pictures. Anything not serious.

20

Ah ok, nice. So there are two per year?

Yeah, two. They do different parties because it’s an ensemble. They have a New Years eve party and other things, but Toxic in itself is twice. But they use the same venue for different parties. It’s all somewhat the same but they change the theme and the way they dress up the venue so it gives a different feel, and theres something for everybody.

They’re really nice people. There are several levels so you have different types of music, and you’ve got a play area, a quiet part. There’s like an old-fashioned pub in the middle of it where you can just hang out at the bar and have a drink. I like to hang out there if I get chance. I actually hooked up a couple, they went to the party for first-time, both completely new too, and they ended up in front of the camera, and it clicked, it kind of connected, and so now they blame me for being together.

Issu e 0 1.

Haha, you’re like Cupid. Ok let me see what questions I have. Well I think I went through most of them with Madieanne.

Yeah, we see eye to eye on a lot of stuff.

Yeah you seem like you’re on very much the same wavelength.

making money, and that’s, err, you feel it. So all he wants to have in are VIPs that don’t know where to leave their money. And all of the normal fetishists are left out. Because there’s a lot of people that have urges but not the cash. So if you neglect those, or even treat them poorly, it will reflect. So, with a bit of luck I’ve been able to take away about 100 guests from him.

Yeah, especially when it concerns safety and how to handle people and that kind of thing. It’s like driving a car you know, you hold onto the steering wheel to point the car to where you want to go. You can do that in a load of different ways but at the end it’s kind of the same. Many roads that lead to Rome.

Oh yeah? You’ve been redirecting them?

- After spending some time talking about my graduation project and Berlin -

And make something better.

It depends on purpose. The fares usually, there is a big separation between the crowd there… they will show you stuff and they will try to sell you stuff, the way to connect is usually financial. If you want to do business with them, cool. If you just want to look, they’ll make sure to present their product and hope that you will buy their films or what not. If you go more into the party things, it’s a totally different level, they’re having a fair, but a lot of them are actually players that do a lot on the side. We just want to make some money to be able to keep on playing. Plus you get all the weirdos having fun, and that’s cool.

Yeah that’s cool, I would like to check out some of the parties.

The Fetish Ball is very recommendable. It’s in Berlin, the German Fetish Ball. They’ve got a thing going on in Essen as well but, nah… The fun went. It’s no longer about the people, it’s about the organisation

Yep.

E ri k

Yeah I wanna check Berlin out because they have like, the Porn Film Festival, and quite a few sex or fetish events in Berlin, but I have to look into it.

Well I’ve been organising another party on the same date, accidentally, and there’s a lot of people coming to what we’re doing, instead of going to him. So he’s pissed off. But it’s his own fault. Insult me and I will stay away.

Nice, yeah I should definitely check something out.

Yeah the German Fetish Ball, Boundcon and stuff like that. That’s fun fun fun. In England there’s a lot of nice things to be had.

Yeah? Cause I was never really err, well I moved out of England when I was 18, and I was very err, not sexual, hah, so being here and in Berlin, it’s kind of opened my eyes a lot, so I’m not really aware of what’s happening there.

They have a couple of really nice parties every now and then, and there is a, some clubbing going on.

It’s not an open scene, you need to belong a little bit, but language wise you would fit right in. There’s a lot of nice things going on over there. A lot of it is London-based, which means it’s not cheap.

Yeah that’s what kind of scares me about London.

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H E D ON .

Well if you’re doing the German Fetish Ball for the whole weekend, that will easily set you back at least a K (€1000), K and a half.

Yeah? Woah. But it’s also from buying stuff there, or it’s just…

Yeah just buying the tickets all weekend, and all the parties. And if you don’t have an angle to get in there, and you’re not a guest then you have to buy your way in. And there are certain events and venues where as a single male you will not get in.

02.

Yeah I heard that. Actually I’m looking for a partner for my research, because I was reading that Toxic is also…

Yeah they tried to, to level it out, the wankers scene is not promoted in there. So there is, the leeching and trolling and all that is totally not tolerated.

Anything that misbehaves will be ejected. And it’s cool, you open up more than at another venue and you want to feel safe, not harassed. And at the really big things like Bitch where there is for four, four and-a-half thousand people, even an old fart like me can’t move through the crowd without being pinched in the arse and it’s like, ‘get a life people.’

You need to respect the boundaries.

Yeah, so the more crowded and the more pushy it gets, it’s, well it’s also too loud anyway. I like it when there’s a quite corner where you can sit and talk to people, make friends, or see other friends again that you haven’t seen since the last one. Maybe it’s the age but err, why would I want to go to a party where all you do is stand together sweating and not being able to have a conversation. What’s the fun in that? That’s why there is so much pills in the scene of course. People go clubbing and they will take ecstasy because then everything is fun.

22

Yeah ok, is there a lot of drug use in general at these kind of parties?

Err, everywhere where there is a big crowd, and things like that, Ecstasy its, it’s fashionable still. It’ll kill you if you’re not careful, but nobody seems to care, or they say, ‘yeah but everybody does it.’

Yeah that’s true.

Yeah, and it’s not about fetish or what not, in all the scenes it’s a problem, and it’s been reflected in all times, that people seem to need something to have a good time. I mean I love having a beer because I really like the taste, but I don’t like being drunk, that’s something totally different. I like coffee, I like beer and I love a good Scotch, if I have someone to share it with and we can discuss flavours and, yeah I like that, but getting drunk off it, nah. A wee drink and a good cigar, just enjoying each other and the little bits next to it.

Oh yeah, one thing I didn’t ask actually is where you see the connection between pleasure, pain and sex.

Err, do you mean on an emotional or on a chemical basis?

Mmm, I don’t know. Because it’s something new for me I don’t really know...

Well you’ve got the pure physical part where by inflicting pain or stress you create endorphins in the brain, or adrenaline and they are, in fact, drugs as well, because an endorphin rush can do similar things to what a shot of Heroin will do to you.

So, but your own body is producing it. Err, it can create a sense, a sensation of well-being, accomplishment, it can be very pleasing. It can also be purely in the head, that it’s emotions like, ‘I want to do something special for somebody, and she likes to hurt people so I will suffer this pain to make her happy.’ And that, everybody is different, there are many many different angles to it. And when we

Issu e 0 1.

Yeah it’s nice, like this connection between two people is really a strong thing which keeps coming back.

Yeah, even if the connection is temporary. We’ve got reputations of being able to read people well and be safe in what we do, and have of course a lot of toys if you want to try out some fantasies, if you want to try on some clothes we’ve got loads of crap. So it happens that people will try to come by to experience something, or a couple will come by and say, ‘we want to do this and this and that, but how do we do it?’ Or, err, ‘we’ve been married for 10 years now, the kids are a little bit bigger, we want to try and do something out of the house because they’re starting to look, and we just want to… it’s all becoming a bit of a drag you know.’ So we will give you the space and help you kick-start your life.

Have fun and rekindle that imagination you know, get out of the rut. Sometimes it’s people where one of the 2 has an affinity for this, and the other doesn’t, but there is so much love that it is allowed,

it’s no problem. Or she will go like, ‘ahh he’s a pain in the ass again, I’m gunna send him by.’ She gets a docile, happy man again. Or they’ll both come by and different things will happen. There’s a couple and she’s a little bit into photography as well, so we might take off and shoot some birds, or just hang out in the garden with a glass of wine, shooting the bees and the flowers when the season’s right. And the other one gets his re-education for the next 6 months, or something like that.

Yeah, ok that’s nice.

Yeah, it’s hard if you are into this stuff and your partner is not, then there is something you can’t share. But if the relationship is sound and you know that it’s not cheating, it’s just adding that little bit, or taking away frustration on a certain level. And some people can do that perfectly. That’s why some of these parties are really fun because you have combined things. You might have a really nice hotel with these parties going on just next-door. But the partner that’s not into the heavy latex stuff or whatever, they can just hang out in the sauna, and everybody meets at the bar and you get this mix of the fetishists and non fetishists, the players and the non-players and it coincides perfectly. Everybody is happy because you grant your other half that happiness as well, and it works the same way, the other side you go to the museum together, for example.

It’s all about balance, if you have a nice balance in your life then everything works out that way, that makes for a very happy, healthy relationship.

It’s really nice to hear. I’m having a nice morning, it’s really relaxed here.

Yeah, this is a web with friendly spiders.

Yeah, I’m sure!

Yeah, people come here from all over the world, and the main purpose of this place is, you have a place where you can be yourself and you will not be judged. You might be judged on the way you 23 23

E ri k

interact with people we try to figure out what makes them tick, how it makes them tick and if they have, in our opinion, not the correct approach and it could damage them, then we try to explain that to them. And for the rest, if not, then cool. People go skydiving and they go, ‘woahh, that was a rush!’

You can have the same thing when you’re strapped to bed and there’s 6 people tickling you until you scream yourself semi-senseless. Just keep your head at it and don’t do anything that damages people permanently. It’s all about having fun. That’s what humans are designed for, you know, to have fun.

You’re always in search of happiness, and everybody has their own approach, some find it in religion, some find it in servitude, some find it in pain, some find it in bossing people around. But you’re always looking for a form of reward. That’s what you’re all about. You want to improve, you want to feel good so you want some kind of reward. And if you can reach it with a partner that completes you, that’s nice. That kind of symbiosis can be very very very much fun.

H E D ON .

put on your makeup like, ‘hey, if you do it like this it will make your eyes pop out more,’ but you want tomorrow to be a girl, or you want to be a dog or whatever, that’s fine by us. If it doesn’t bother yourself, or anyone else, and if we, if it fits in our morality and possibility and our fantasies, then why not? We will support you.

That’s nice, it’s like you give a freedom, which is really nice.

02.

Yeah, it’s important because there’s so many people that will judge you before they actually have a clue what’s going on. ‘Oh no that’s wrong and this and that,’ and you have all these religious fanatics, and I’m not just talking about any one religion, but you have all these rules and things. I’m not against religion, I’m just against all them idiots that think they know what you need to do and…

24

Enforce their views on you and expect you to live in this way.

Yeah, I’m not very much into the dictatorship unless I’m the dictator, haha! But no, that’s too much work. I think I would just have this big law: ‘have fun, don’t damage, and show some respect.’ If you’re happy, you radiate happiness and the people around you will relax and be happier. If you’re stressed and pissed off, everybody around you will do similar things. The ‘I’, the ego, that’s the most important thing in the world. And some people will say, ‘my children are more important.’ No, ‘cause if you’re not ok, how can you look after your children? It’s simple things. So if we can promote happiness, that is a good thing.

03.

‘What does sex mean to me?

Running around naked!’

Taylor

What do you think about the general representation of sexuality in our society?

Totally fucked? Well not totally fucked, no. I think the biggest thing that bothers me about modern society and sexualisation, like quite often is to do with the way that women are perceived and stuff like that. I’m actually thinking of doing some exhibit/ installation on that topic because I want to speak to lots of people about that. There’s loads of false pressure and theres loads of awful advertisement and stuff like that as well, and it’s all very like, contradictive. They say that you need to be like this you need to look this way or whatever. And then when a woman, or other people as well, are free to do what they want then they get a lot of shit for it, yeah. It’s been amazing actually coming to Berlin because it completely changes it.

Do you think you’re much different now than when you first came to Berlin? How long have you been here now?

7 months. Definitely more like free, and don’t worry about what people think and stuff like that. I don’t necessarily sleep around more or stuff like that, but if something like that happens its not a problem like it used to be back home. Or, maybe thats my mind as well.

Yeah, you can talk more openly about it here as well for sure.

Yeah, yeah totally, umm, I think it’s some-thing thats like progressing, I dunno I don’t wanna just have my input from Berlin because obviously I see

it as progression, but that’s probably because of where I am and where I’m going. Umm but generally theres a lot of like, casting aside ,and I always find it strange as well when you’ve got like separate things for being straight and being gay. I can totally understand why they would do parties like that or whatever but then I dunno it kind of segregates it.

Yeah it really puts people in categories.

Like I went to a gay bar the other night and it was a lesbian night and therefore its all women pretty much, and thats fine, I just don’t really see the necessity of it so much, I’m not sure. And then obviously they will complain about certain stuff, yeah I dunno.

But do you think like in Pornceptual and Berghain, everyone mixes together it really shows you how it can, well I don’t know how it is with you but when I go back to my town for example, this shit doesn’t exist. Like it’s so segregated.

Fuck no, I could never explain that stuff if I went back home, no one would get it and I think that partly you have to experience it. I was talking about this concept of Berghain with someone the other day, about how it’s… I mean it’s beautiful because it brings people together, you definitely need more of that where people are equal and people don’t even fucking think about it, it just is What it is, everyones there they’re all on the same level, they’ve come from all different kinds of backgrounds, and they’ve come to the same place to…

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H E D ON .

And also Berlin in general, I think a lot of people are attracted to the city because of its openness, you can try everything.

03.

Yeah absolutely, that’s half the reason I came, just free to do what you want. But you go other places.

I mean sometimes I go on holiday, I dunno in like Spain and you hear about how backwards it is, and it surprises me so much because you get used to it being so normal, and you go to somewhere so backwards but so close to home, and they’re just totally like...

Completely different and that’s the thing I think also for me, I wasn’t really from a creative background and then going to a design school everyone is so much more open and accepting, and you think okay the world is changing in a positive way. Then you look around and people are getting murdered because they’re Trans or Gay or whatever, it’s like how the fuck is this still happening in our day?

I find it so crazy that people are so against, I mean just let people do what they want. Let people be I don’t see what the problem is.

Like the world is so big, why do you have to put your view on everyone around you?

Absolutely and in a way you also can’t blame the people who feel this way because of where they’ve been bought up and the things that they’ve seen whether its social media or general stuff in society because we are fed so much shit.

And it’s so easy to think thats the truth, because it’s everywhere, since you were born you’re bought up in this kind of way.

And also that kind of, there’s so much.. they talk about how everything’s okay, they talk about how we’re equal, they talk about how women have more rights, all of that kind of stuff and you know they 28

might put something, put a poster somewhere that’s for women and their bodies, umm yeah theres a lot of like stuff particularly in social media where they claim that everything’s better than it is. But I just think its like a silver lining and…

It just makes people think it’s okay.

And it’s not at all. and where would you place yourself and your interests in this kind of scheme? Like within society itself, like how do you find you fit in or don’t fit in with the roles which are there?

I think umm, it’s changed since being in Berlin.

For a long time I, partly to do with relationships as well, I sort of fell into a category that was thinking a lot more about what I knew was right and what I should be doing for myself, but wasn’t necessarily doing it. Whereas now its a lot different, I dunno where to fit it? just free of it all. I probably don’t maybe take enough action to change things, but then thats kind of why I wanna do this exhibition I suppose, just to like prove a point or something.

Do you mean kind of like a category, or something like this?

Yeah I mean because for me, for example, I don’t really see the necessity of these categories, like of course I understand everyone has to be put in a category because it makes society easier.

Yeah that’s how it works.

Yeah exactly but if you do feel its necessary to put yourself in, or to know what you are.

I think that’s the thing though, I don’t see myself in a category. I don’t see myself as anything. I’ve got my opinions and stuff like that, and its interesting to talk to all sort of people who have got different opinions and they’re all entitled to their opinions

Issu e 0 1.

and stuff like that, umm, but fitting into it all, just do what you want and experiment and leave people to do their own thing. As there’s so much of it going on here, like, being free of who they are are sexually and just in general creatively, it’s amazing, and if anything it’s just firing me on to do more stuff. That’s also why I came here, because I didn’t do anything for so long, and now its like theres so much influence and people want to do work with you and help each other out.

Yeah yeah yeah, its funny you mentioned that actually about dancing, because I’ve been meaning to get back into dance for about four or five years, now I’m wanting to do it. I was doing a bit of pole dancing before I came here and i was like, right, I wanna be a stripper. and you know I tell people back home and they’re like, ‘what the fuck, really? that’s like near prostitution.’ And I’m like, ‘no not at all!’ And it depends how you look at it and it depends where you work and stuff like that, and then you mention it to people here and its just so normal, it’s totally okay.

I think also because a lot of people they cannot separate the idea with .. the idea of doing something slightly sexual with the action of fucking every person. It’s like these things come together when they shouldn’t have to.

Exactly! They presume you’re a bad person because you want to express yourself sexually, or you just want to celebrate the fact that you’re who you are.

Like quite often when I want to think of photoshoot ideas or stuff like this, I always end up thinking of it

It has to be in a certain way and like the man has to be, have a priority in a way.

Yeah so that’s a massive thing, and thats another thing I’ve got from Berlin is being able to just like have your boobs out for a whole weekend, because you’re partying and its not a fucking problem Yeah yeah.

It’s nothing it doesn’t mean anything people don’t see it as anything.

And also you don’t feel so much like… well I think here people don’t… they’re not going to be perving on you or try to grope you.

Yeah completely, yeah you’ve got your boobs out and if anyone looks it’s more because they’re not used to it, not because they’re looking out of interest sexually.

Or that they’re assuming something about you as a person just because of how you present yourself.

Yeah exactly, which is something that used to happen a hell of a lot more. It’s great, you know the fact that I want to walk around naked, doesn’t mean that I want to be fucked by someone that’s just over the road, and just goes yeah okay yeah, I choose her. That’s absolutely not it.

Yeah exactly and people really need to know these boundaries and respect them as a person and not just make these kind of huge assumptions.

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Tayl o r

So much more opportunities, yeah, I think that’s also my major attraction to the city also, not just sexually but also for example I really wanna try more stuff with performance and dance, and here it’s a huge thing, and there’s opportunities everywhere like workshops and inspiring people and like every aspect of yourself you can really explore it.

being based on a naked body, particularly being the female body, I guess because we’re much more suppressed as to not showing the body and if you do...

H E D ON .

If they feel comfortable that way, thats it, and theres nothing to it sometimes. So yeah, Berlin is great for that shit man.

It’s fucking awesome.

It’s so good.

03.

Like even in my school I was always the one to like get naked or at least just wearing my pants at a party and dancing around, and people were like, ‘what the fuck why?’

It’s like, why does it have to be a why? I feel comfortable to do it, I’m wearing too much clothes I wanna take them off that’s it.

Yeah exactly I worked in a retro store like when I was 18 in Brighton I loved it absolutely loved it that’s when I was dancing and I would just wear tiny little shorts and a bikini top and fuck loads of gold chains and a head scarf and it was like, it was my style it was my thing that I did, but people would kind of joke about it and people would come in and be like, ‘argh tell her to put some clothes on,’ and it was kind of like you know, not being super harsh or anything, but I felt super comfortable and like, also when you’re that age why the hell not.

I dunno like…

Exactly, exactly…

But yeah people can just be like, ‘nah nah nah, what you doing just put some clothes on.’ It’s like nah, and like also working in pubs, I worked in a pub once and my boss was just like, ‘ah you know, wear what you want, if you get shit from people then we tell them to fuck off,’ which I thought was great, like you don’t often get that, and obviously wearing short shorts they’re gonna be like paying, attention.

That’s super nice to get this support from authority figures like your boss.

30

Yeah absolutely, and he was a guy as well which was cool, because yeah you don’t often get that, and I’ve never forgotten that, the fact that he was like, ‘you wear what you want, you want as much flesh on show because thats how you feel comfortable thats fine. I know you’re not doing it because you wanna be sexualised,’ basically, so yeah that was cool, really cool.

Sweet, these people… these kind of people, you don’t meet them so often but in this context, in Berlin you do of course. But its so nice to also see that in other places people are so progressive no matter what their surroundings are.

Yeah absolutely, Berlin needs to spread the love to the rest of the world.

I think that’s a mission. Umm, do you visit porn websites or use hook up apps? And what do you think about them?

Yes to both. Umm, with the hook up apps I kind of only started using it when I came to Berlin because I didn’t know anyone and that was my way of just meeting people, and I think quite a lot of people do that, and then I’ve used it to meet up with people for sex as well but I’ve barely ever actually gone ahead with meeting people, because I find it really, personally I think it’s a little bit too much pressure and too kind of vague.

Yeah It’s quite forced…

Yeah and you’ve got this profile where you’ve gotta put up these pictures that represent you or represent how you want to be perceived, and then you’ve got to write something about yourself, or you don’t, and then you’re talking online and none of that’s real and I have a massive problem with it, and I kind of go in and out of phases of using tinder for example. I just get sick of it, so sick of it, ‘cos it’s not real, and actually if people are using this stuff all the time you’re gonna forget how to fucking

Issu e 0 1.

communicate to people and actually meet them, and you miss out on like this chemistry as well with people. I had a conversation with a friend about it, he was like, ‘I really want a relationship I’m ready for it,’ and we were saying about how tinder and all that stuff’s fake, and I left him that night and he carried on dancing and he just ended up dancing with this guy and they’ve been together since. It’s amazing and they’re really cute together it’s really great. It was so cool talking about it and then it happened like for real, not just…

And just to know that it can happen, because so many people would think like it’s not really possible anymore and you need this kind of assistance or this help to set it up…

Yeah definitely. I think the context is different like I mean for me the first hook ups I really had with another guy was from meeting them online, because I didn’t have the confidence or know where to go to find anyone, so I think it really depends on your context. It is a shame and also that’s something which me coming to Berlin, I still kind of, I’m not so good at hooking up with people, because I don’t really know how to approach them or what to do, and I think because most of my experiences have come from these apps, its also something I really want to step away from, just be in the now and to really feel the connection.

Yeah I totally agree. I actually started using like social media stuff when I was like 14/15 like

But I think it’s with most things, like with people, you have a characteristic which is maybe not favourable for you, it could be social but it could also be anything so you kind of find an alternative which also draws you further away from being able to practise these skills. I think it’s always the case.

Yeah yeah, thats very true. Yeah umm, and then porn websites. Porn websites is a funny thing, like theres obviously that kind of, you know there’s a lot of people who use porn websites and then they think that thats what happens in the real world and it doesn’t. And it’s all fake and like, I use them but quite often I can’t because I can see how fake it is and it’s just a bit like…

You can’t get anything from it.

Yeah and again I suppose that’s something that can stop you from just going and meeting with other people and again, with society, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, but we’re kind of told that you shouldn’t go sleeping with people or something like this, like sex is oppressed. But then at the same time they moan that people use porn websites. The whole system the whole world of the porn industry is really dark. I watched like a documentary it was talking about these girls who, so many girls start doing it so young and they only last like six months and at first they get really into it, and then 31

Tayl o r

But we’re only making that a problem for ourselves by using it. Like with just general social media, the more you use it the less you’re gonna actually do stuff in the real world. But at the same time I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing to use, I guess it depends how you go about it and stuff, but I just personally, you know some people don’t go out that often, some people don’t have time to go out that often and try and meet people, so it’s different.

myspace and stuff, and I think that the reason I started using it so much was because I was getting bullied at school. And then I sort of hung out with another group of people, and then I got a little bit bullied from them so I ended up using social media and that was great and I look back at that, it was cool. I used to go up to London and meet loads of people and have a great time when I was really young. But then I think about it now and I wonder if that makes me more socially awkward in certain situations because I’ve grown up being able to like type and think about it and shit like that rather than being with people as much, I dunno.

H E D ON .

they realise how hardcore it is, especially being a girl because you just then become this toy and the guys can do whatever the fuck they want and can walk away from it a lot less emotional than the girls do. I can’t remember the name, (Hot girls wanted) it was just on channel 4 or something like this. It’s only like an hour or something. It was just quite interesting to see I love watching stuff like that, find out about what’s behind, because you never fucking know, you get painted one picture and told another and it’s...

I think it’s good to face it, sometimes you have to be a bit uncomfortable and know the risks, it also makes you wiser.

It’s really confusing like I think the world is so confusing. I feel like I don’t know anything, every time my eyes open a bit wider and I think, ‘wow, shit.’

It was funny ‘cos like when I got to my sixth month mark, it was like, that was when I felt so much more settled. And so much more with myself like it took a long time, and there was lots of partying and I know that the drugs didn’t help and the come downs didn’t help and the fact that it was winter, and I get like super low in winter, And you kind of come out of it and you’re like, ‘I know exactly how I wanna go about things now because I did certain things that I’ve kind of learnt from.’ And yeah I felt shitty for a couple of days from certain things but now I’m… yeah I’m not gonna do it again.

03.

Yeah absolutely! Which is fucking beautiful as well.

Yeah but you also see how it’s quite scary, I dunno I think when I first moved to Berlin, I got first super excited about all the openness and all the opportunities and stuff like this and then I had one experience which made me think like, it wasn’t so bad I mean it was just like something with a guy with drugs who like locked me and my friend in a toilet with him and was trying to give us free drugs, which could seem very nice but his energy seemed quite twisted to me and I was really uncomfortable and it really made me anxious for a few weeks. Also going out and thinking like, some people do have these ulterior motives and you can never really know about it, but then you’ll live your life in fear, so after a while its like ‘fuck it’ you have to enjoy, you have to be careful but you cannot live behind a glass window.

Yeah absolutely, and there’s always gonna be someone bad in the situation that seems so, somebody who’s not quite on your vibe. But yeah like you said you can’t just hide away from all those things.

32

Yeah exactly and then you know from the get go, if you get the wrong vibe from somebody or whatever, you’re not gonna get into a similar situation. So yeah, you gotta make mistakes or find these weird situations to learn, I also had a lot of that in Berlin.

Yeah I think it happens fairly often.

Yeah I think the winter as well, that’s why I really want to move here in the summer, because I think to move somewhere and to start something new its so much easier.

I just don’t know why I did it, when I did. I did it because I wanted to get out of England as soon as possible, but like I’ve always just been so fucking down I knew that it… winter is not… I’ve always said to myself that I would move to a country that’s sunny all the time.

Yeah me too I was always saying it and I’m always attracted to countries which are not in the end. Um What does sex mean to you?

What does sex mean to me? Running around naked! Haha umm, no Sex means to me, that’s another thing I suppose I’ve thought about more lately, similar to the whole tinder thing, like if you’re using

Issu e 0 1.

tinder just for sex. I find it really difficult to have meaningless sex and I’m really interested in exploring sex and trying out different sex, but I emotionally just need…

Something...

Yeah. It’s not like I need to be totally involved with this person. And I don’t need to have a lot of attachments or anything like that but if I just have like a random fuck or something then I’ll feel super like damaged afterwards, and like right now I don’t want a relationship, but to be able to sleep with people and stuff like that it needs to be more than just a one night stand or fuck. Thats just completely empty, because yeah I would feel empty the next day and it might not have been that bad, but then I’m just a bit like eurgh.

This is the other thing actually, like feeling you know, like you just said ‘I’m still alone.’ I think to really like get the best out of sex is a lot to do with your self growth and self love. And that’s a massive thing that I’m on at the moment. This whole sort of journey that I’m on, it’s all about me and it’s about working out. Because I’ve never been very good at looking after myself, and I know that even if I was to come into a relationship right now, it wouldn’t be enough because of where I am. And I think that there are so many faults that people make, because people are not aware of that and..

I think a lot of people jump into a relationship because they think it’s gonna give them this... This feeling... And it’s not always the answer, and I think what also happens with me sometimes, I’m like a really loving person and I show a lot of affection towards people because people are super important to me, but also so often it’s like read in the

It’s kind of like, you know whenever I’ve had friends who’ve come out of relationships and gone straight into another one, I cannot understand it as to how they don’t give themselves time to recover from the last one and then I mean, you, I personally think you cannot find people that are good enough for you, in that sense.

One after another.

Yeah exactly, I just don’t think it works like that, and that’s probably got a lot to do with the fact that they’re not loving themselves enough to be aware of what they need and stuff like that. So yeah I guess like sex is a big thing in that as well. But also sex is about fucking exploring your body and exploring other peoples bodies and enjoying your time together, naked. Again with the way that society changes things, maybe its a lot harder for us to do that sometimes, because…

I guess there’s so many expectations which come out of such an action. I think that’s also why I feel bad afterwards, I think its also a lot to do with my upbringing, which tells me that there should be more, and also like now, I’m really trying hard to, even if I’m watching porn or whatever, to really enjoy the sensations of my body and not just think about the action or the orgasm or whatever but just, it feels nice you know?

Enjoy it! You should be able to enjoy yourself definitely, like why not?

33

Tayl o r

That happens often actually, maybe it’s nice at the time, but as soon as it’s finished, or the next day I’m thinking ‘I’m still alone’ you know. I want some kind of continuity.

wrong way. And I feel like the other person kind of expects then a lot from it. Sometimes I really feel like people put so much pressure on wanting to be in a relationship or wanting someone that they will put this emotion into the next person that they have a strong connection with.

H E D ON .

Yeah exactly because I felt always so guilty about it, like I shouldn’t touch myself too much or I shouldn’t do this too much. In the end I think maybe there can be an unhealthy degree to which you’re fucking or having sex but I think that’s also for everyone different.

But yeah there’s so many conflicting ideas and so many umm, I dunno like so many different people telling you how it should be and in the end its very difficult to find out what you think for yourself.

Yeah yeah, completely. I think that’s a, that’s quite a big thing as well. If like.. if you’re, as a girl having sex with guys and then I’ve been with guys before who turned around and said like, ‘ooh I make girls orgasm so quickly usually.’ Or something like this.

03.

Seriously?

Yeah they don’t fucking know what they’re doing when they say that, but they’re putting so much pressure on you and immediately you’re not enjoying yourself, you feel shit because you can’t relax and you can’t just orgasm like that like what they expect, which probably isn’t fucking true anyway.

And then it just goes on.

But that’s also something which I struggled with a lot, because for me it takes me quite a lot of time to cum, and for me it’s not the most important thing.

But that’s the other thing isn’t it, it’s not just about that. Some of the best sex I’ve had has been for like two hours or whatever, going on for fucking ages and you’re just totally enjoying everything about each other. And then you have sex with someone who just like after 5 minutes is like, ‘why haven’t you cum yet?’ And it’s just like…

Now it’s not gonna happen. Fuck you.

Yeah an why would I so quickly? I mean there needs to be more.

34

Exactly, but it is hard, I’ve been in this position and I’m thinking to myself why haven’t I cum yet? This guy is awesome or whatever, and I feel like I should be really enjoying it and I cannot enjoy it. You put so much pressure then you’re too much in your head and then of course it just makes it worse.

Yeah, but it is down to so many different things isn’t it? Yeah you can be so fucking attracted to that person or whatever, but it just doesn’t fucking work because whatever other reason, yeah the pressure is mad. But its interesting as well having been here in Berlin, opening up even more to sex and stuff like that. You see it in clubs or people that have an image, just with bondage wearing or something like this, fetish parties, you see people who are experimenting in so many different ways, and also like actually when I first got here it was like, should I be in an open relationship if I want to be in a relationship? Because everyone is in an open relationship.

Yeah you start thinking about everything, like what’s normal.

But I don’t think I could ever personally do that, but like it’s cool to like see it and learn it and I guess thats another problem with so many other places, you don’t see any of it so you’re not open to any of it and then you’re not able to work out what you want and be cool with that. I really wanna check out more sex parties for sure, just to get the vibe because you don’t actually have tp get involved you can just sort of see whats going on and stuff.

Yeah exactly. Um what would you recommend everyone to do once?

First thing that comes to mind, it’s sort of like what we were talking about , kind of on the wave of learning about yourself and stuff, so I don’t know how to say like what’s to do as like one particular thing.

Issu e 0 1.

But maybe what was like the first step you took in this journey? Or something which opened your eyes which …

Well I suppose doing something that you know is going to benefit you even though it might be really scary. So like originally when I knew I needed to start changing things, I came out of a relationship, I was very very much in love with, and then, knew that that was gonna be really really hardcore, opened up to the fact that that was gonna be really hard and then went on from there and then other things led to another. Because I don’t think, I think you have to do that stuff to get fulfilment out of everything else. I just don’t know how you can…

Yeah, tryna think of something else… something that everyone should try, yeah I guess just like something thats really gonna scare you, and there’s so many things that you can do actually, it doesn’t have to be deep within. it could be like something really simple like, shaving my hair of for charity in the middle of the street, that’s fucking scary but you do it and then you’re like gonna get something from it and its really cool, and you feel great afterwards.

Tryna think of other examples now…

But it’s already a good one.

Yeah, just the stuff that scares you is often the best stuff obviously there’s some stuff that you know is gonna be dangerous so you don’t do it, but like, otherwise you don’t push your boundaries right? and then you’re just stuck.

I feel the same. Who or what inspires you ?

Who or what inspires me? hmmmm.. mother nature. For sure letting fate come down to itself.

Actually just a lot of the people that inspire me,

Tayl o r

I guess for everyone its different right? It just depends on what situation you’re in now and what you want from life and you make a decision based on that.

are like my closest friends quite a lot of the time, a lot of my closest friends that I’ve met here are the people that inspire me the most. The way that they live their lives and the way that they go about things, and the way that they see things. That’s fucking beautiful actually, learning about the way other people see things, and view things in a different way. I think more than like any famous idol or anyone, it’s always the people that are around me, my friends for sure, not even family like just my friends, that I meet, the people that are doing creative things. I think especially since being in Berlin actually I’m trying to surround myself with the right people you know, that are gunna influence you to do things in an environment where you can see yourself doing the same thing, rather than it being someone that’s all up here (raising right hand) and you’re like wow that’s really cool thats really inspiring but…

You’re never gonna reach it.

Yeah they’re already there and actually sitting with somebody and you can see that they’re like…

You’re like yeah I can do the same, I can get there because they have, you know?

Yeah that’s super nice.

Definitely my friends there’s like one girl in particular who I can think of immediately, who yeah, I met super early on in Berlin and we work together now, on different sections but like yeah, she’s really inspirational in the way that she thinks and the way that she just gets up and goes and does things.

Really positive stuff like that.

That’s super nice when you find those people that’s super special.

Yeah definitely, don’t think she knows that either I always try and tell her, and she’s like aww that’s nice and I’m like you don’t know!

Like seriously listen, I really mean it!

35 35

03.

H E D ON .

Yeah.. pressure haha. I actually spent my christmas with her and her Dad because I couldn’t afford to go home so I was with her and her dad and we cooked a massive meal and we had some friends come over, but they weren’t so involved and christmas was a really like low point for me and…

Well thats more of a lifestyle, haha.

Also being away...

Yeah yeah yeah. So like although I haven’t done it for ages I was always dancing, Just like contemporary stuff, I did a bit of pole dancing, did a bit of aerial hoop

Yeah and I didn’t really think about how much I would get home sick but I really was, and just being with her and her Dad, and the things that they talked about and the questions that they asked, philosophical stuff and very much, they’d obviously done a lot of reading into buddhism and meditation and all this kind of stuff which I really enjoy reading into and they were just asking all the right questions. And sometimes it was really difficult and I was like, ‘aah don’t fucking ask me about that I don’t want to think about that.’ But the next day I was so relieved and so much weight lifted off me, and I was reading this buddhism book as well and they were talking about this stuff, and he would be asking me questions that I’d just read and I’d just be like what? And I knew that that was a new chapter as well which was amazing. Yeah really really cool. Loved that.

It’s amazing sometimes you know it just fits together and you think, ‘is it even possible?’

Yeah, yeah and then I sometimes I question, am I putting this together because I want to?

Sometimes it just works like that.

And maybe you are putting things together, but you’re putting things together in a positive way.

That works and that’s right, that was really yeah, fucking intense but cool, yeah.

Do you have any hobbies?

Do I have any hobbies? Apart from partying every weekend? Haha.

36

Dancing is definitely a hobby though because it’s so expressive and it comes from something personal.

You were dancing before you said?

Aerial hoop?

When you’ve got the hoop kind of like from the ceilingand then you climb around on it and stuff.

Yeah I really want to get back into that actually because pole dancing I can’t do because my hands are too sweaty. I’d literally just be like ‘shummm shummmm’ (actions sliding down with her hands).

It doesn’t work for me. I really want to check out some Butoh!

That’s interesting, and there’s quite a few workshops in Berlin about this.

Reading as well and just being very like, reading and writing a lot. I think I’m a lot more philosophical than I realised. It’s just writing, maybe sometimes too much. An exhibition, fucking thats a definite hobby that I’ve got. I’m always trying to go to an exhibition or gallery if I’m gonna hang out with somebody. You know not everyone wants to do that but I love doing that .

Like contemporary Art or?

Anything, sometimes I go to stuff that I’ve got no idea what it is and I just turn up and its a talk in german and I have to walk away, because I don’t read it and I’m just like, ‘yep cool sounds good.

The title sounds cool.’ Or yeah, or something that someone’s invited me to, like I went to one that was umm.. last week, I went to like a live art piece.

I have no idea what she was gonna draw I didn’t

Issu e 0 1.

check out her work I just thought it sounded really cool to just go and see someone doing their thing and it was in this really cool building and there was loads of incense sticks and loads of lights almost like this (we’re sitting in Silver Future, a gay bar with lots of over the top lighting and decoration) but more chaotic, loads of stuff going on just like a really cool studio. And then she was just painting and she was having time to herself and doing some stuff and thinking about what she was going to do, yeah it was really cool.

Have you ever been to the Sammlung Boros gallery in Mitte?

No…

Ohh I think I’ve heard about this.

Yeah only 12 people can go at a time. Yeah super beautiful, they have a really nice collection. I never did the tour, but I would recommend it, because they like talk you through every piece and give you background information about it. But also in the gallery week, I think there’s a gallery week in May like the first weekend of May, it’s open for everyone so you can just go in a check it out. It’s super nice. Just in the building as well it’s super intense, I was walking around fully thinking about the people sitting here for weeks, no nothing, no light and now in the new context of an art gallery which is also provoking new questions about contemporary society. It’s very interesting I love that, it’s so amazing the amount of buildings that have got so much history here. I mean it happens where ever you go but I guess because we’re

Yeah for like training the kids?

Yeah, yeah and then after that it was a communist building and now it’s Soho House and I’m like what? Now it’s a hotel. But yeah it’s also a statement about the times, but yeah, cycling around.

Yeah exhibitions and galleries sort of things, trying to do as much as possible, it’s great because you can go and do it on your own or with people and…

It’s always so different like when you do it alone or together…I once went to the cinema for example, its so nice to go alone and just like feel the experience.

I do really enjoy doing things a lot on my own as well and its really nice to experience things. But I think when you don’t have any other influence around you, you totally lose yourself, which is great but yeah it’s super nice being able to experience stuff with other people also.

Yeah then you can talk about it and you have this shared experience.

Yeah totally.

How do you think you learnt the most about sex? Like from school or from porn or from people, friends/family?

From doing it.

From doing it?

Yeah. Not from anyone telling me anything because, you can hear one story and you can think, ‘aww that’s really cool I really want to try that out,’ 37

Tayl o r

It’s like, near to Rosenthaller Platz, and it’s like an old bunker it’s like five or six stories high and these two guys own it, they built a house on top. You have to book normally a tour and it’s like a two month waiting list.

in Germany, there’s so much. I mean even where I work, Soho House, the building was originally, when it was first built it was the biggest Jewish umm, just like supermarket, mall, it was like a massive shopping mall. And then after that it was like, a building for the Nazi youth or something like this.

H E D ON .

and then you get into that situation and you’re like, ‘I can’t do this, this is not for me.’ Then you pressure yourself into doing it because you want to experience and explore but you’re not. Um maybe because someone is a bit more wild and outgoing than I am but then when it comes to it I’m like, ‘nah I can’t do this.’ But yeah Definitely not from school, didn’t learn anything from school. If anything from school there’s that whole joke of, ‘you have sex and you die.’ That’s it.

03.

Haha exactly, Mean Girls education.

Yeah just that yeah I guess you learn form horror stories from people what not to do sometimes. definitely from doing it. I mean also if I’d not done some of the shitty one night stands that I’ve done, the ones that have left you feeling really empty, then I wouldn’t be where I am. Wouldn’t know what I want, that I do know now. I’ve learnt that by experiencing it more and also experiencing things with different people, who bring in different things you know. I mean I had sex with somebody not that long ago and he was a lot more aggressive than I’d ever experience before and at first it was a bit like, ‘okay I don’t really know, I’m gonna go along with it though,’ and then I got really into it and that was really cool. Yeah and then you have sex with someone else and its completely different. Yeah thats good as well being able to mix it up.

Yeah exactly because at different times I think we have so many different emotions and different things which kind of satisfy us.

Yeah that’s really true actually. If you’re in a certain point in your life you’re gonna want different things from, yeah you’re gonna want certain things out of a sexual relationship as well. I’ve never actually thought of it that way but its really obvious. Well maybe not really obvious but definitely,...

Yeah, I think people always struggle to realise that they are not the same everyday, and they think that they should be, or they 38

have to be, as soon as you realise that your not then you can see in every context. Also its about during the moment, being true to yourself and not being held down by stereotypes which maybe you had a few years ago. For me I feel like I’m getting more and more camp and I used to be anti-homonormative blah blah blah. And now I just feel comfortable in it. But sometimes I feel like I shouldn’t change too much. But at the same time I think this is just how I want to be at the moment, and maybe when I’m older I’ll want to change again, and it’s just about enjoying it.

It’s funny because it’s like, a little bit like, slightly of topic, but with feminism and stuff like that, when I was younger I was always very very much like, ‘I’m not gonna be feminine, I’m not gonna have long hair, I’m not gonna try and be this pretty girl.

Because I don’t have to be like that, I can be sexy without all that shit.’ Now I’ve got short hair and I really want fucking long hair because I wanna be really feminine and I want to be a sexy woman and I, shaved my head.and its funny how..

How it switches, totally.

Yeah definitely and it’s completely about where you are in your life. Same with sex in the sense that like when I first got to Berlin I was horny. as. fuck.

Because I got to this new place…

You can’t help it of course, you’re seeing shit everywhere.

So many people so many things going on. I’m just like, ‘I want everything I want a piece of everyone, la la la.’ And then you go through different stages because you’re moving and you’re getting used to it and you’re trying to settle and sometimes you’re like, ‘I don’t wanna have sex I don’t even want to look at anyone,’ and then like now I’m getting my fire back a bit and its completely changing.

Issu e 0 1.

Yeah definitely it comes and goes.

But then I know I don’t want to be in the same situation that I was in the first week of Berlin.

It’s weird because you kind of go back but it’s never back because you learn from something. So it’s always forward but maybe like in a circular movement, don’t know how to say it.

Yeah I think a lot of people are like that, but also you can look at it that you were attracted to Berlin because you had it, like this kind of expression.

Yeah totally.

That makes more sense.

But there’s definitely some people who you can see just from old pictures or whatever, you can see have changed a lot, which is fine like theres nothing wrong with that at all.

It can also be a lot of things, it can be like peer pressure or like you feel like you need to fit in, but it can also be like, now you

Yeah, what they wanna do and maybe they change that in 6 months time or whatever.

Yeah exactly but I think that’s fine.

But the other thing I was thinking about when she asked me was, because my style often changes like, every six months or a year; I’ve gone through so many different looks and I remember someone else saying, ‘oh is that because you can’t make up who you are? You can’t figure out who you are?’ and I was like, ‘ohhh interesting but no.’

That’s always a bit of an attack in a way, this comment. It’s a bit like you’re confused or you’re young.

Yeah yeah yeah, which it wasn’t at all. But then my other perception is that it’s just about what you were saying, wherever you are in your life, I’m totally influenced and I guess it’s just a form of expression. Therefore wherever I am in my life, whether it’s based on the place that I’m living in, the people that I’m surrounded by or the place that I’m in mentally, it totally changes it.

And it should I think, that’s also something which I really like from RuPaul, the whole point is that your identity is kind of a show, it’s a performance you know? Even if you’re wearing like completely ‘normal’ stuff, you’re still putting on a show. And so it’s nice to realise, ok I’m expressing myself in some kind of way and it’s not about following, but it’s about embracing.

I couldn’t do it. I find that really strange when people, for years just exactly the same, because it 39

Tayl o r

I think I know what you mean though for real, also like when I got here, when I first got here and I was kind of a bit more like crazy or overexcited, energetic and stuff like that. But I wouldn’t want to be like that now, just because I’ve got my fire back I wouldn’t want to be like that now, because I’m more settled also and I would want something different. But yeah it completely changes depending on where you’re going. I was also talking about clothing because the other day my friend was like, ‘Oh do you think Berlin has influenced the way that you dress?’ And I was like, ‘yeah it definitely has,’ but I have always been really expressive and I’ve always, I’ve had crazier hair than this for example, whereas I think people probably look at me and go, ‘oh that’s happened because she’s in Berlin.’

finally feel like you would be accepted to express yourself. So I think that’s why I always hate it when people are saying ‘He’s such a hipster!’ Or, ‘he’s following a trend,’ because I think maybe they just found finally the place they should be? Isn’t that possible?

H E D ON .

is such like, ever since I was a teenager or yeah I dunno, it’s always been such like a prominent thing and it’s always something which people are like, ‘Oh that’s Taylor, she’s doing this or she’s doing that,’ and it’s freedom of expression of who you are. And I can also understand that people wouldn’t want to do it because they wouldn’t necessarily want attention or something like that you know. I’m walking around with a fucking bright yellow fringe and people are gonna be like ‘oh.’ Sometimes I’m like, ‘what? I’ve got something on my face?’ So I can kind of understand as well why people are like, ‘nah, fuck that.’

03.

I guess you just weigh it up what do you get more pleasure from? Being true to yourself or sometimes having a feeling where you’re not fully accepted.

40

Yeah, yeah, which we shouldn’t do so much, it gets too much.

Exactly and thats also something I find really interesting. This fact that it’s not possible for you to act something other than yourself.

It’s just not possible.

I’ve learnt that a lot since moving here as well, I kind of was sort of on that way already and then when I came to Berlin because of my anxiety as well it totally flipped upside down and everything was everywhere and I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing and I was trying out at all these different things, and it just came back down to me and I was like nah this is me and thats cool, and ever since that everything’s been so much easier. I’ve met even more people.

0 4.

‘When it comes to sexuality, I feel very much at home in the fetish scene.’

Christian

In Berlin there’s a lot of Kinky clubs like KitKat, Insomnia. There’s BDSM clubs like Darkside, There’s gay clubs like Fiken 3000, Schwuz. There’s a lot of fetish clubs but they’re quite awful.

Really? How come?

Mostly the people, it wasn’t a real good energy there. Umm… so I go to Kitkat very often, also out of convenience. Its close by, there’s never a very long queue. I always meet people, because lots of my friends go there every week. I have friends who work there so I get in for free.

Yeah I like the place. I also really like CockTail d’Amor at Griessmuehle. I really like the outside area, especially when its weather like this.

Have you ever been to Berghain?

Yeah I really like its as well, It’s awesome.

How do you compare actually the scene in Amsterdam to Berlin?

There’s not so much happening in Amsterdam. All the swingers clubs are quite bad, uhh fetish parties, its only recently they’ve started doing those again.

Like uhh.. most of the parties are not in Amsterdam itself, they are in Zaandam or… but umm it’s only recently that these people started to organised unleashed, which is actually quite a nice party. Europerve is also quite nice. About once or twice a year.

Is that the one which is kind of like a festival or something?

No its a bit more like umm.. it’s pretty big, but not as big as Wasteland. So it is a smaller festival and umm… there used to be kinky salon but I’m not sure if they’re doing that again.

Okay, it sounds familiar but I’m not sure.

Unleashed is one of the nicer parties.

In Amsterdam the scene’s not so very good. Fetish clubs are awful Are there many?

There used to be three, one is closed because it was actually more prostitution than anything else.

So there’s two left. One is Same Place, the other is is Club Paradise.

And how did you get into it actually?

Well first I used to live in Rotterdam close to a swingers club, and I went there out of curiosity and it was really bad and then I wasn’t very interested anymore. And then when I just moved to Amsterdam a friend of mine bought me to my first fetish party, which was Wasteland, and I really liked Wasteland because there’s this energy and there’s a lot of attractive women dressed very sexily. And there’s this atmosphere of real debauchery and decadence, and freedom. So I really like this energy 43

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yeah… so I went to a few parties like Wasteland, like Boudoir Bizarre and Europerve. And then I… I my nickname was naked cellist. And a friend of mine she organises kinky party in Haarlem and she asked me if I wanted to perform as a naked cellist. and I said well I want to do this at least once, and I did. So I did this with a friend of mine Coco who does bondage. We combined our acts and it was.. it worked very well. She asked me to do another performance with these people in Berlin. Called aesthetic meat front, they do hook suspension. So since then I’ve been performing with them about fourteen times. And in Holland in Berlin in France in England.

friend was already involved so he could tell you a bit like how its gonna go and what to expect, but how was it like the feeling?

Nice so like touring around?

Yeah so everybody is coming together?

Yeah umm with Coco I’ve also performed in Italy uhh, in France, and I’ve done some performances with other people. So I’ve done a lot of performances at these kinky parties including Wasteland and in the Netherlands but also Wasteland Berlin.

I’ve done a few performances at Kitkat club. I’ve performed a few times at Insomnia.

Everyone is coming together, it doesn’t always mix. But they are there in the same place, which is not very common. Because normally they have their own parties. So I quite liked it, but it differs per Wasteland edition. At some parties there was such an atmosphere where it was mostly couples hanging out with themselves. And at some parties I was performing there myself so it’s also a different energy, and a lot of people that I know. I mean in the beginning I didn’t know that many people, now if I go to Wasteland I know that there is at least 30 or 40 people that I know.

Okay nice, woah really busy. And how does it differ from location to location?

Well the locations determine one thing, but its also the event, like Saturday Kitkat is always the same thing. Wasteland is a bit different but not so different. Insomnia really has the theme nights, so they have the normal fetish theme nights which is okay but it’s mostly couples. They also have the young love party, which tries to reach a younger audience.

They also have a BDSM party, they have a tango evening, they also have gang-bang events. And it’s a bit more banal, sometimes I have nice times in Insomnia but in general its not as accessible as Kitkat for example, but I have some friends who work there.

Okay yeah, so its a bit different, okay thats good to know. And how was it the first time you went to a fetish party? I guess your 44

For me it was amazing. I haven’t done wild things at Wasteland so much. But just going there and watching and seeing all these people, english people, do things. It was quite amazing. I found it quite amusing because if you’re in the fetish clothing, you have people having sex on… just on the dance floor.

There’s in the darkrooms different kinds of people, you see people from the fetish scene, you see people from the swingers scene from the BDSM scene from the gay scene.

Okay so it’s quite a close community then?

Yes especially with the people who go to parties and perform there. So if you, someone like Eric can introduce you to this scene.

Yeah Ishould definitely take the opportunity. What do you think about the general representation of sexuality in our modern society?

Hmm that’s a good question. To be honest I can’t really tell because I haven’t had a television in 12 years for example, this is for example. I agree with a lot of people that a lot of things that are

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unconventional, are represented as often, often underrepresented or in a very exploitative way. It’s getting slightly better for example like homosexual relationships are getting a bit more normal, sometimes even to the point of not being different from ‘normal’ relationships, and now and then we see some things bubbling up, from the kinky scene.

Things like polyamory, open relationships, bisexuality, transgenders and some of the kinks. Especially with the kinky stuff like fetishes and BDSM things are very much still shown in a very exploitative way, it is slowly changing. And we see some of the software sites are getting more mainstream, you see that things like swinging is getting a bit more mainstream, but its getting very slow and in mainstream media it still will be mostly a freak show.

But it is changing just changing slowly. You can say that something like 50 Shades of Grey, even though it was very awful at least made some people curious about this stuff. So… I was wondering where you would place yourself and your interests if you would put yourself into a category?

Umm when it comes to sexuality I feel very much at home in the fetish scene. Somewhat in the swingers scene although the things that I’m looking for are a bit more sophisticated than you see in a normal swinger scene. In that sense I haven’t found it completely, although I’ve found something, like my people, probably it might happen that we organise these things ourselves. I like things like orgies and I like things like role play. And I like… in general I like this uncomplicated way of doing things. Like in the swingers scene there’s protocol of the hands, like if you see someone you like in an orgy, you touch this person. If this person pushes away, that’s a no, if she allows it then you can go forward. Just

More easy going.

Yeah it’s fine if you want a relationship with someone, I still enjoy this too, but sometimes you just want to have this uncomplicated…

Like this connection with someone.

Yeah. So I guess this is what I really like, but what I really would like is what I call sophisticated debauchery, so on one hand sophisticated people and then on the other hand complete debauchery.

The problem with the swingers scene is that there are people there, you might want to have sex with them but you do not want to have a conversation with them.

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I agree it’s slowly being more accepted but there’s still a pretty strict limit as to how much people are accepting and not accepting and it varies a lot.

things in place of meeting someone and chatting them uo and getting connected and then seeing if there’s attraction et cetera.

Uhuh okay.

It’s not a high level scene, of course there are always exceptions. The more sophisticated scenes for example the BDSM scene, there you will find much more intelligent people. But then this emphasis on BDSM is not necessarily my thing. So the ideal for me, It’s a bit like Shortbus.

Aah I’ve seen it yeah , yeah I liked the movie, it’s quite strange but nice.

This idea of really high end entertainment but also I think one of the best parties. Was the first opium party, which was very nice entertainment, I was performing there, people were wearing white ties, and in the mean time on the floor people were also have sex, this combination is something I really like.

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Yeah, is there parties like shortbus here?

Opium tries to be a bit like that, it doesn’t always succeed in that. Especially in the recent edition it hasn’t. It’s still a nice party, I still recommend it.

But its something which is like once a month, it’s not like open continuously?

Yeah I mean BDSM parties are a bit more sophisticated. Like the Sklavenmarkt. But for the rest not so much no.

And when is Sklavenmarkt?

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Sklavenmarkt is mostly in Darkside, it’s also once a month. Opium is in different locations, last time it was in Kitkat but it also has been at Club Culture Houze and many other places.

So it really just depends on the time? And Darkside, because I was checking out, because a friend of mine posted that there’s like an oil wrestling match tonight I think, but what is it exactly happening there?

It’s like a party space and an events space. Its mostly BDSM, sometimes there’s other parties but it’s mostly BDSM. I haven’t been for the normal events. I’ve been mostly there for the Sklavenmarkt when I was helping out a friend.

Do you use porn websites or hook up apps and what do you think about them?

I don’t really use porn websites. I use OK Cupid! and I use Tinder but not so actively. I’ve met one girl via Ok Cupid! she was extremely nice, I fell in love with and then she broke my heart. But it was a very nice encounter.

Yeah yeah, so it was something really strong it wasn’t just a meet up.

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Yeah and I met one girl via Tinder and she was also very nice, really, we had nice sex but also became friends, good experience.

Do you think generally like Tinder and these kind of apps they’re really useful?

Yeah certainly. I have a lot of friends using Ok Cupid! especially for certain things. A lot of kinky people there a lot of people in polyamorous relationships more than in normal dating sites. So for them it’s quite useful. I haven’t done much with it, I get a lot of reactions but mostly with people who I don’t find that attractive.

Do you use like Fetlife also?

I have but i’m not so active on it. It’s very nice, there’s very much an emphasis on BDSM, not so active on it.

But I guess also when you’re going a lot of times to parties and you’re performing in events, you’re getting a lot of face to face contact, which makes it maybe a bit less necessary to be always online. Okay what does sex mean to you?

Well, sex can mean many different things. If I have sex in an orgy it’s a different kind of sex than I have with someone I’m very much in love with. So sex can be for me very, very different levels of intimacy.

Someone that I’m very much in love with it is very intimate, or it can be very intimate. it’s not an orgy then its not just something very physical, which can also be nice to have this detachment from anything else, so it’s purely physical no emotions at all, so it is also about attraction.

So how far would you say it’s about the connection with the others? Like in an orgy is it as important to be connected to the others as it is in a …

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No.. no… I mean it can it does happen, but its not so common, so. Do you know Schwelle7? Except that they just closed down. It’s a club for alternative sexuality, so they have things like the Bondage Jam every Tuesday evening where people do bondage.

Is it also like workshops? or its only..

No it’s more like people coming together and tying each other up. They also organise workshops, they also have the Full Moon party which is a play party, this is more BDSM, more than swingers but this is a very sophisticated crowd.

Is there generally a lot of workshops to introduce people how to do it?

And is it a space where you can stay or is it only open?

Yeah it is possible to stay there, but like i said the place is closing down.

And is there many alternatives which are quite similar to this?

Darkside is it like… it seems like there’s so much happening in there, can you compare it to Kitkat club?

It’s much smaller but they have more facilities like love swings and things that you can tie up people.

What would you recommend everyone to try at least once?

I would say everything but it really depends on your needs and your wants, I think one good thing was to go to a really big party where the different scenes come together so you can see, oh this is how it looks when people do BDSM, this is how the swingers look, this is how the gays look, this is how the fetish scene looks. It’s not completely representative but it can at least give you a bit of an idea if it arouses you, if you find it interesting and then explore it in more depth. That’s one thing I’d recommend.

I think thats a good one actually, because there’s a lot of very specific placed like you said, And then its also…

Have you explored yourself ?

Well since I was here I was quite often at Pornceptual, and once at Gegen…

But you haven’t been to things in England?

No Schwelle7 is quite unique, because it is more sophisticated.

I heard about also a place, which a friend described as an apartment building. With lots of different rooms with different kinds of fetishes and different equipment inside.

And you could just kind of go and you could either use it or you watch people using it.

No, no I moved out of England when I was 19 and then I wasn’t really exploring so much.

I’ve been to a few parties in London, I used to have a girlfriend that lived there, I went to Antichrist which was a gothic fetish party, which was very nice. I went to Subversion which was BDSM, and I went to flying dutchman. It’s a club where they organise different things. So bondage evenings but also BDSM. Yeah there’s a really big scene in London.

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I have a lot of friends here who do introductory workshops for rope bondage. I have also a friend who did a workshop on femdom, the femdom workshop was in Schwelle7 for example. Schwelle7 was a very good place, it’s a very beautiful space, very quiet very serene. There’s beds and mattresses and couches. All kinds of toys that you can use.

A few places are like that, Darkside has a little bit of that, Avalon has a bit of that.

H E D ON .

Yeah I can imagine. And how do you find out about events and stuff, what’s happening?

Well in England it was by my then-girlfriend.

But generally in the scene I’ve seen on Fetlife they’re showing some events and stuff...

Mostly I find out via friends, via Facebook but I also , there’s also this scene website called Belin18, but thats mostly for swingers. But I’d say mostly via Facebook.

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Yeah is a really good platform for sharing. How would you say your sexuality has evolved over the years? and can you identify what caused theses changes?

Well, in the beginning when I was very young, before I had my first relationship, I had this very much this separation of my ideal… my ideal love relationship which would be almost plutonic and very banal pornographic sex. They were two very different things.

And what age was this?

Puberty. Then I got my first relationship and then I got a bit more experience and then I also realised that girls were also very much into sex. Then I got very interested in the idea of non-monogamous relationships. I very much like the idea of separation of emotion and sexuality and then with my exploration the fetish scene and the BDSM scene helped me define things. Like I was curious, I’ve at least had sex with a guy once because I wanted to see where in the spectrum I am. I realised no I am actually straight but I’m happy that I tried this out. Same with BDSM, okay I’m not submissive but it was a good experience and I’m glad I learned about this. I like orgies for example. So it helped me decide more what I like. It also goes in phases sometimes it’s more important to explore things than at other times. And at times… what I also realised, I like sex quite a lot but it’s not as much as a lot of 48

other people. A lot of people their kinks are their lifestyle. They go to every fetish party, every week.

For me its not like that, I have other interests, other hobbies. I also had a few girlfriends with a higher libido than me, that was sometimes quite awful.

So it depends like different stages in your life, you go through different phases of trying different things.

Yeah very much i guess for example I spent a lot of time in my life trying to get laid. In fact I’m going to write a book about it. Without much success, just going out to normal clubs and seeing if I could meet a girl. Then I discovered the scene and sometimes it was easier but not always satisfying.

And then a few years ago I overcame my shyness and overcame this chronic heartbreak I was having.

So then it became much easier to get in touch with girls especially in Berlin. Then came the phase where I was trying out and then it became very easy. And now recently I’ve been meeting a lot of interesting girls, in Kitkat for example with whom I not only have a physical attraction but there’s also a connection on an intellectual level.

Yeah yeah I think that’s very important also to have a deep connection with someone.

Yeah yeah its not superficial, something which is very nice to find it in several people, while at the same time there is also intimacy.

I think a lot of people they have this idea of how love should be or sex should be, and they find it really hard to question, ‘is this how I really feel? Or is this how I’m told to feel?’ And I think that’s also something which I have experienced growing up. And now also before coming to Berlin I was subject to more different kind of situations and experience and I thought, ‘okay, I should forget about what I should think or how I should feel, I should just experience it and see how I feel about it.’

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Yeah, now I let myself be very much influenced by what happens to me. I’m not always in control but it’s fine. in some ways its actually a good thing, because I let chance influence me and I consider myself actually very lucky in the people I’ve met.

A very important realisation is that my happiness does’t depend on one person. shouldn’t depend on anyone else and that gave me a lot of freedom

‘maybe I should have been clearer? Been more outspoken?’ But then she talked to other models who worked with him and they said similar things.

Similar incidents. So it’s structure and through this, unfortunately in this scene there are a lot of people, mostly older men, who do fetish photography, who do bondage to get… to have sex with young girls. If it’s consenting that’s perfectly fine.

I was reading recently about Hedonism from Ancient Greece and how pleasure is the only form of truth, like something which you experience for yourself. I think that’s a really beautiful way to live your life; experience the things which you experience and enjoy the things which you enjoy. I think that’s something which more people should embrace.

But you can also really easily go over the boundaries, for sure.

You need to know your boundaries also.

There’s something that Madieanne ? also said her boundaries are very important, you have them for a reason its important to see how far they can go. Or when you cross them then you’re really damaging yourself because you’re going against something.

And also people, now I see also, in the gay scene there have been quite a few incidents of people dying on overdosing GHB. Yeah I heard that’s really lethal actually.

If you take it responsibly it can be one of the safer drugs. Like with everything it’s matter of dosage. But also there have been some incidents with consent. Recently I heard about this fetish photographer who was a bit racy, there were some incidents where he forced himself upon his model.

A friend of mine had this incident and she thought,

I think that’s the thing which is most scary for me when approaching experimental BDSM is to have the confidence to give up your power and to trust the person.

Then it’s quite good because there are clear boundaries, clear procedures. There’s a safe word and then it stops. and it is a bit difficult, On the other hand in America you see this trend of people consenting so idly. You cannot consent when you’re drunk. You cannot consent if you’ve used any drugs. You cannot consent unless you really write it down on paper. And that I don’t like either, because then you lose also a lot of the magic.

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You can learn a lot from Hedonism, its very much at the core of your being. But it’s very easy to get lost in it and get killed. Especially if you force things, for example taking a lot of drugs, trying to get to a certain state again and again.

But you can actually blow the boundaries and sometimes it can be extremely scary. If you’re tied up as a girl naked in a rope with a ball gag there’s not so much you can say or do so, it’s very much about trust, this consent is sometimes trust and this is something I find quite disturbing. This scene is also such that they will try to protect everybody, they will bar people, there is some social protection like at Kitkat there was this girl who was completely high on drugs and there was an older guy who was a bit of a predator and wanted to touch her.

Immediately some of my friends said, no you’re not going to do that, she’s high. So in that sense its a safe place.

H E D ON .

Yeah, it’s quite complicated because it’s hard to say when is too much or when is not enough, but I think that’s the important thing you can’t write it down, its not like a formula you know? Its about the feeling and about the moment.

Of course everyone has to develop their sensitivity to a point. I had to develop my sensitivity too. I always was someone who avoided risk if I wasn’t sure if she was interested I would just leave, which could also be frustrating.

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Yeah definitely, I always have to know it I don’t want to take the risk and find out. It’s crazy because I know nothing can happen, the worst thing is they say ‘no’ and that’s it.

I mean it’s sometimes very hard to go past that… Umm, Who or what inspires you?

Mostly, simply said, music and beauty and people. I guess the thing that inspires me most is to see people make beautiful things, like musicians or artists, yeah that is what inspires me the most.

And it’s like inspiring you in your work and also in your personal life, like on every level?

I mean maybe not so much in my day job, although one thing I do like about my day job is the people I work with. Many colleagues are really nice people intelligent funny, they’re all quite on the same page when it comes to, they’re all disgusted by racism for example.

How would you say you learnt the most about sex?

I guess just by doing it and watching and trying out things, experimenting I think experimenting is very important, I was very lucky that I had a lot of girlfriends, a lot of lovers. Showed me new things, new ways.

That’s very important to have someone who can share this with you.

Don’t be afraid to make mistakes.

Is it sometimes difficult to perform when you’re performing at a party, because there’s such an emotionally charged atmosphere?

No because I’ve done it so often now. That I always… I’ve done it really often and what I mostly do is improvisation. I wouldn’t call it routine but I do have a confidence that I always manage it.

There are always some frustrations with sound quality, but you know if they cant hear me then it’s a visual thing, that’s fine. It’s not like I’m performing in the Philharmonic playing classical music that would be quite different.

I was watching the film Eyes Wide Shut Do you draw any similarities between you and the pianist in the movie?

Umm it’s funny that you say that, because the pianist is blindfolded so is not aware, but i’m quite aware of what happens around me and I enjoy being aware of it. I enjoy playing and meanwhile people having sex and later, maybe participating. So it is a different…

Because you’re actually involved in the scene whereas he was really an outsider, he was brought in.

I mean I remember seeing Eyes Wide Shut a few years ago, I was in Berlin but I wasn’t living in Berlin. I saw this movie and I thought now I’m in the mood for an orgy and so I went to Insomnia and it was okay.

That’s really nice in Berlin that you can act on your desires this easily.

I mean not everything is good, sometimes you have to be a bit picky.

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Is there any other films or representations of the kink or BDSM scene which you think is giving it justice.

Like I said Shortbus is a movie that I like very much. But I would like to reach this sophisticated debauchery. When it comes to mainstream movies, something like The Secretary.

Have you seen Realm of the Senses?

Yeah. Nagisa Ôshima. It’s a very great movie very beautiful, very intense.

Extremely intense and it’s very nice how you a viewer get sucked into this whole intimacy.

I haven’t seen this movie.

It’s a movie made by the same director as Kids, its has unsimulated sex at the end and it’s very sweet.

It’s of course a bit exploitative but it’s sweet.

And it’s about the scene?

No it’s about young kid, their struggle with things like sexuality. I mean the guy who made these movies, he is a bit dubious, there is some suspicion and I’m pretty sure that it is exploitative. That he gets off on it, but it doesn’t make it less interesting, and I like that because normally there is a separation between what is porn, very explicit sex devoid of narrative, and movies which can be erotic but where they shy away from showing actual sex. And Ôshima does that. And there’s movies like Kent Park, and theres a list on wikipedia of mainstream movies with unsimulated sex. Sometimes I would like to make a movie like that.

Yeah I’m quite interested film making. I’ve been an extra at a movie, I’ve made some art movies. I also auditioned for a porn movie, for a friend of mine, a friend of Jenny actually, you should also meet her she’s in Amsterdam. She’s actually a Harvard graduate who makes porn movies.

So you auditioned for a role in a movie of hers? Did you see the movie which Jenny made? I think it was playing in Switzerland, last week or two weeks ago, they filmed it in the back of the car I think...

No I don’t think so, I’ve seen a few of her movies but not that one.

I haven’t seen any of her movies but she was explaining it to me, hopefully she’ll send me the link so I can check it out. I was skyping with Jenny the other day actually, she’s busy making dildos so her whole room is just full of models, it’s super funny, it’s super nice. I saw you’re also friends with Suzy?

Yeah she’s a really nice person, I don’t know her that well but she’s a really cool person.

Yeh really sweet and really open. Also she invited me to a couple of her events, she was doing one in Spektrum, like organising or helping to organise. So it seems like she’s doing some really interesting things.

It’s an interesting crossover between many different scenes here in Berlin. Between kinky, fetish, BDSM scene but also the art scene. A lot of people who are artists are also in the fetish scene. Especially exhibits at The Ballery and also, for example, the hackers scene and the polyamorous scene. Theres quite a few people from the hackers scene who are into BDSM or polyamory.

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Based on a true story. Yeah I really like that movie I like the aesthetic, I am really interested by this crossover where you have a movie which is not pornographic in itself but where there is unsimulated sex. Movies like Kent Park for example.

But you also like you’re interested in directing the movie, or more about the characters?

H E D ON .

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Yeah what do you think actually about the aesthetics of the kink scene?

It can be very beautiful but it can also be the same again and again. For example if you look at fetish photography, its mostly pretty girls in latex with saturated colours. It’s always the same. I admire the skill and it always looks nice but it’s always the same, I don’t find it very interesting and I don’t find it very arousing. But if you look at something like Shibari the Japanese bondage, and it’s something I find very beautiful, it’s something which also can be very emotional. I was at this Shibari performance at Shwelle7. The man Akira Naka the performance was so beautiful that it really moved me to tears. It was moving it was really emotional.. It wasn’t really that it was happening so much, in principle it was a man tying up a girl, but with some subtle dynamics of she doesn’t want it and she does. For me in my interpretation it was about law, and it was very powerful and very moving. The performances I do, the people I perform with, the sort of ritual, they’re also very intense and also in their way very aesthetic. That’s why I wanted to perform with them. The first time I saw the performers a long time before I actually met them at the Fetish Revolution in Essen, and I was blown away by the performance and there was this girl who was being suspended who later became my girlfriend.

Yeah I checked out the website and I really love the whole idea of crossing the boundaries of the skin and this connection between people and space and music. It seems very beautiful but also very intense.

Like of course at first looking in.

For some people its very intense, at least at a few performances people faint. It’s something they are proud of.

Yeah it’s something very intense you’re touching people in a certain kind of way.

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What I also like is some events where art and kink meet or different scenes meet. Last Sunday was the Decadence party, which was a gothic fetish party so you see people from two quite different scenes coming together. Like Antichrist also Pornceptual is also a bit like that, not necessarily a sex party so you see a lot of people from the gay scene, normal party scene, a bit from the kink scene. But there is a darkroom, a place where you can have sex. same with Berghain. And I sometimes perform in these kinds of places.

Do you also… because I guess in most of these places you cannot really record what you are doing I guess..? So how do you also find new jobs or opportunities?

Mostly people ask me. I have a friend for example, who does tantra massage and she’s deaf mute, and she also gives workshops on tantra massage for deaf mute people. It might be interesting, they’re a couple - he organises parties and is also into BDSM and is an actor and he also organises orgy parties.

Okay that’s super cool I would also like to go to a workshop or something.

The workshops are very good for that, I have some friends in Amsterdam, you also should meet Hans and Karen they’re really nice people, they’re very much into age play. She calls him always Daddy and always wears a school uniform. They give a lot of kink workshops but they do it with a lot of humour it’s really funny. Really nice people. I should also introduce you to Marijke, Jenny also knows her. I don’t know if she still does it but I think she still does, what she does is organise discussion evenings on all kinds of different subjects. So things like making porn movies, swingers, but also talking about prostitution, talking about pedophilia, talking about sometimes really difficult subjects.

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And it’s like an open discussion? Or it’s only inviting people who are involved?

Yeah also, so I really know a lot of people who… so if I introduce you to this friend of mine I’ll send you her email. Like I said she’s American, born again christian and now a born again swinger. ahh yeah very interesting, she’s still in America?

She’s living in Berlin, very nice, very smart PHD, creative, musical.

Yeah I think this transition is extremely interesting. That would be great.

There’s a lot of people here in Berlin who discover these things.

Yeah it’s really a pity that Shwelle7 isn’t there anymore because this would be the perfect location to talk to people. A lot of nice friends, a lot of friends who go there, not just because they’re so kinky but because they like the people and they like the atmosphere.

Because it is so open also?

It is very open. I know lots of people from there, sometimes theres also a negative, there’s this guy I always see at all parties. He’s at Kitkat, he’s at Schwelle7, He’s a bit of a guy who’s just in it to have sex and there’s a lot of girls that I know who are complaining because he forces himself a bit.

He’s a bit pushy thats really something I don’t like I guess it’s also very attractive to people who do just wanna hook up, because they can see that it’s…

Yeah yeah, not to push the boundaries too far. That’s pretty important.

What’s also going on, is theres a brilliant porn film festival, where i also met a lot of nice people. The interesting thing about that, for a lot of people their sexuality, their kink is also their lifestyle, their sexual orientation, which isn’t necessarily the case for me, but also they’re working in it, so for them they’re also active in it to promote it. The Berlin Porn Festival is also an example of that and I think it’s great that it happens but it can also not necessarily be interesting to see. Like a friend of mine she went to the Berlin Porn Film Festival and she was complaining about it because they want to make alternative porn which is all inclusive. So man and women but all non-binary genders, transgender, older people younger people handicapped people, obese people, and it’s really nice that they make it all inclusive, but it doesn’t make it necessarily attractive.

Okay yeah.

Sometime you have a lot of movies where you see people that are unattractive and of course it’s fine because for other people it might be attractive, for other people they may want to see people like that.

Yeah, yeah but I guess that’s the thing, I mean I can only compare it to when you have a radio station which is playing every genre of music, half the time you’re going to be bored you cannot enjoy it, you cannot connect to it.

That’s the thing porn is, attraction is very personal, a friend of mine she also said she was looking at lesbian porn, a lot of lesbian porn is extremely boring and extremely politically correct, for example if they do oral sex they use dental dams which is extremely un-erotic, and all inclusive sometimes 53

C h ri s t i an

It’s really interesting how you can break through the former restrains which you had and find something new.

And thats fine if it’s with consenting people, and there’s attraction, that’s something I also like, but he’s someone who really can be pushy.

H E D ON .

has very unattractive people. Also with this, they think it’s female friendly porn, but this assumes that females all want the same thing, and that’s different from mainstream, so I like the term that my friends use which is sex-positive porn.

0 4.

About enjoying the sex, rather than about who and what for. I think generally porn… I have a friend who’s straight but she prefers to watch lesbian porn because she doesn’t like the way women are perceived in straight porn generally. The predictability and how obvious everything is. I think its interesting if it’s not particularly your sexual orientation but still you find something…

I mean I like to have some kind of context, I wanted to make a new genre of porn where there is a lot of effort in the context in the role play. My friend Karen is actually very good at acting so I wanted to do it with her but she’s not sure if she wants to make public porn.

But I also really like this, there’s a story and a context I think this is super important and I cannot really connect if it’s too direct.

Yeah I mean I found it quite interesting to see the Berlin Porn Festival, I saw Jennifer’s movies, what I like about it is that you really see that the people are enjoying themselves and that’s quite special, although I do think now there’s a lot of porn where people are enjoying themselves. There’s also sometimes, sometimes it’s a bit clumsy. What I realised when I was watching her movie, which is, I dunno, one and a half hours long. You don’t watch porn normally in real time, so to watch a whole porn movie from beginning to end it gets a bit long. So it still was interesting to see her work to see how she works, what’s good and what’s bad. It’s still porn it’s still not necessarily Stanley Kubrick or something.

I’m still interested to go to the level of Stanley Kubrick with porn. I’m not sure if I could but…

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1–No but it’s the idea, keep me updated that sounds super cool!

What I also really like about the scene, and this is also important, is the community, they’re friends, it’s like family, they’re really good friends that I trust. For a lot of friends it’s about intimacy, for a lot of friends it’s about finding like minded people, finding a safe place. There’s a lot of people who’ve had traumatic experiences with sexuality, in these scenes they can meet like-minded people and explore their sexuality in a safe way, for example. I mean sometimes you have to be a bit careful when you talk to people, sometimes when I tell people that I do suspension people get a bit nauseated by the idea.

Yeah of course it depends who’s really ready for this kind of information.

Some… I had once for example, I was telling a friend that I was into role playing, incest role playing and later on she told me that she had actually been abused by her brother. So you have to be careful about it. and I think a lot of fantasies they also do play on something which is…

It’s taboo..

Yeah exactly and when someone also has experiences themselves I can imagine it’s quite a difficult topic.

I mean you also will find some damaged people.

You find damaged people everywhere I guess in someways damaged people find it a safe community.

0 5.

‘In a way, love is always there. We are humans.

We share times, we share currents, we share the emotions that we are living in that moment.’

Alex

Can you tell a bit about your sexuality?

Let’s say I came out of the closet with 21 years old.

I had my first relationship and it was with a guy, not with a girl. And already I had likes for guys.

So you already knew before?

Not at all, it was a process like for many people, to understand what I liked and how, and in which direction. So when I had my relation, sexual relation for the first time, mmm it was very natural in a way, very easy. The guy who I had the relation, he didn’t think that it was my first time so it was, yeah I mean we talked after about that…

And why didn’t you tell him before?

I didn’t see it important in a way. Like why I have to say or something. We were also a bit drunk, fucked like fucking animals, super beautiful, I wont forget it. So then in that sense talking about kind of relationships, I only had one relationship with a partner and it was just a week, I never had a boyfriend, like I have been building up something with someone, like a closed relationship. Maybe it’s because my profession it keeps me away, its hard to make normal relationships. I’ve been in many different kinds of relations with persons.

And do you think that like your sexual orientation influences this? Or it’s morein the lifestyle which you lead?

I think both. One is the job because I cannot place myself in a place for longterm, so we will see what

happens, once is also, well maybe it is because I don’t want, and in the other feeling is, I love to fuck like crazy so its like I can’t… I’m thinking that 24 hours a day, I don’t stop… I’m doing my workshops or I’m talking with you, I’m on the train I’m taking a shower, it’s there the whole time. Even to masturbate myself I can’t concentrate to write a text or to finish the emails or this kind of stuff.

And was it always like that?

No the hornyness is there, I can’t control it. Well I control it in a way, I put myself a lot of challenges or things to do. In a way also that energy should be controlled, its not just fun to be so horny or to keep fucking around with guys. I think as humans we have something to do here, so to waste time we have many things, and one of those can be also sex. If you are in Berlin and surround by 1000 different guys.It’s also about quality, at this time also I prefer to choose quality meetings of sex; instead of meeting handsome guys with huge dick, nice ass, beautiful eyes. They have a great body but they don’t know how to use it, you have to teach it and that’s another thing. So it’s different, and sometime it’s very beautiful, you meet someone that just guides you and I think it’s amazing.

You mentioned that we should do more than just waste our time, is influenced by your upbringing or connected to your spirituality? Because you’re from Columbia, I mean of course the culture is much different from where I was bought up, so do you think that has an influence?

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H E D ON .

I think yeah, maybe in a way because I come from a family, we are proffessionals, and in Columbia you have pressure to get studies, to get a job or whatever. Like normally time to get the first career there is 22 - 23 years old. You are done then you start masters or you start specialisation in something. So in that sense probably wasting time is something I had the notion of before. I thought before, I cannot stop just one semester because I don’t wanna waste my time, or lose my time to do something, there is pressure. On the other hand it of course influence my thoughts, my behaviours. But more than that now for me, it’s my time and I appreciate it, we are in an actual world where everything is running very fast. The reality of capitalism is that we don’t have time. You have to work, go out in the morning and I’m a person who also doesn’t sleep much. Although sometimes you have to give time to live the situation, and so that the situation grows in a good way, if we are talking about meeting guys.

And when do you think it’s a waste then? If it’s just for one night or just one time and then you never seen each other?

No but I didn’t mention the period of the meeting.

I think wasted would be when you are with people that are maybe taking care about themselves, then you get people that you just meet and they want to get fucked and getting a blow job or in the other direction because people are just like put your dick in my ass and that’s it. And that’s a waste because I still believe sex is a communication and dialogue and it’s much more fun when the things come together, you have much pleasure when the time can be hours and hours, instead of, ‘oh yeah put your dick in my ass, then you came, ah it’s done.’ Or you’re having drugs or whatever and getting horny, but then it’s like this circle and you’re never getting in a real…

So you think its important to have some kind of connection with the person and build something up?

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That you learn with the time also. When you keep meeting a person that you have good sex with that you enjoy, you keep growing things with that person not just in terms of sex, but also I really believe in making love, that sounds funny but for example, now with this one guy we are loving. It’s different.

But in a way, love is always there. We are humans.

We share times, we share currents, we share the emotions that we are living in that moment.

What do you think about the general representation of sexuality in society?

I think its changed in each culture, because in some places there are more taboos, because of religion or customs in this culture, traditional stuff. Like in South America they are Catholics, I grew up in a Catholic community and there are taboos. But the Evangelic, they are worse than the Catholics. But inside we all want it, we all have our fetish in the end. so yeah, then…. then you are in a place like Berlin now for example, what is very open, and still you can meet people here who are like, ‘what you are in a cruising room, what is it? What did you do there? How is a gay sauna? So you are naked there, always? how is it going on?’ You know its this kind of things, here it also happens. Maybe its the medium and we are also very open Do you think travelling and seeing these different cultures, these different taboos, has allowed you to explore your own?

Yeah. you don’t get cities with so much things like here all over the world. Mad concept parties for gay, prostitution, pan, and so many different ways to waste time.

Yeah you really have the freedom to do whatever you want, and also to explore everything for yourself. Umm so What do you identify yourself with? As a sexual being.

Issu e 0 1.

I’m open to whatever is coming. I like fetish, not all of them. I like dirty things. I don’t place myself in one thing, I think I’m open, I place myself in the condition that the persons or the person with whom I am having sex. If we are both, or all comfortable then I am open to proposals, to try myself also to place myself in other things that we haven’t tired.

And also open to say no, that I don’t like I don’t want to try that. I already know, but most of the time I say yes, I want to try. The no comes later.

But I think thats really important.

Yeah definitely the mood and the situation can change it of course, like one day you may say, ‘it’s not really what I like,’ and the next day it could be completely amazing for you. I think a lot of times we put a label on ourselves and we say, ‘I would never do this,’ or, ‘I will only do this,’ but you can never say that because we are changing everyday and every situation is different.

I think probably you’re gonna be open and ready for those things, and just get a different idea, but also to know it was okay, it was a good decision because its not something I really wanted to do. So, I think I don’t like to place myself in something that specific. One day I’m wearing a top, the next day I’m wearing sandals and sweaters, today I have this haircut. You haven’t seen me like this. I was using gel in my hair since maybe 17 or 20 years, and its just, I think it’s just our way of exploring things in life. Also I said, ‘okay now its my body, I wanna play this.’ Because I work with my body I wanna play my body in this place, in this situation. It

I think that’s the same for everyone you know? Also in relationships, like if you’re gonna date a man or a woman you could cheat on them with someone else because they’re ‘better’ or leave them for someone else. There’s always this kind of thing that humans always want something better.

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And in a way, I also feel like once there is an intimacy and an encounter, that happened just there, and whatever happened there stays there. You can’t once meeting with a person and decide this person is like that. I mean one day you can be playing with shit and another day you could be playing with oil.

Maybe it was your high point of ecstasy. We’ll play with water tonight, haha.

doesn’t have to be just sex, and I explore something or I have an experience and I put it here, and I play sometimes with my body like a puppet, manipulating it in different situations. As you said, sometimes I see this puppet in a situation that is so difficult that I come out so shy. I’m super shy also, I’m very open at the same time but shy. And when you are naked you are vulnerable. I mean talking also about sex, sometimes you can be big, or sometime’s you’re small because it’s cold out, but later you can’t be very proud of yourself because of all that is happening in the atmosphere. And we as the gays are fucking bastards, the fucking worst community in the world. Its very hard, here it happens also a lot, we cannot really approach people easily. And in that time that you wait for the better one you waste your time.

Yeah but the gay community is more demanding.

We don’t say that loud but thats how it is, like the people in bars in the end they all are trying to flirt with each. Its five, six in the morning, and you think, ‘I go home because nothing works in the night,’ in terms of meeting guys or something, you know that nothing works because we always are looking for the best one and maybe they look at me but I’m looking at another one, and that guy is not interested in me and then I miss one. Then I have to go home and masturbate myself with a porno.

Or arrive home looking online then falling asleep without getting also nothing. It’s like that.

But that’s also interesting, because generally in society there’s like this heteronormative way that people should act. But I was also reading this criticism about the homonormative society which I think is quite big in 59

H E D ON .

0 5.

Berlin where it’s like, well I mean there’s variations, but where every gay person has to always act the same way. What do you think about these kind of…

I know what you mean, it’s, actually what I’m thinking now is that hetero people are very demanding in those terms. I’m very open, also open to opening their feelings and, how to explain it? I mean let’s put just an example, we have grindr, they have tinder, and I have a lot of hetero friends, all they use is fucking tinder. We can be here and saying, ‘Hi guys, what are you doing?’ And if I want to meet a guy then I will move to meet a guy, but they’re not gunna move to talk about life and fuck like we do. This time its like we are more open, we are just usually more loud as gay people, like open in the fact of, it’s easy and acceptable to talk about, and they know, ‘ah they’re gay, we can accept that they fuck each day.’ But they are exactly the same, they are super horny too. It’s normal, we are animals.

That’s true. What do you think about porn websites and apps like Grindr?

I think they are dangerous in many ways, I don’t mean that you’re gonna be dead but more dangerous in terms of time, like you waste your time.

What I said before. On the other hand there are a space for all, many people are also very shy and they really find a way to meet someone and to release their body necessities through this space because it’s easy for them to hook up, to talk or to initiate something, to face something personally. I don’t see that as a problem. Yah I won’t say that it’s good or it’s bad. I mean to say dangerous, is just a word in the sense, it can be very hot. Dangerous in a good way. You can meet 10 guys in a day.

What does sex mean to you? I should also ask about love, lets talk about both.

It is something that inspires me, I need it in a way, not just about my dick. If we talk about my partners, sex friends that I have, I love them. The 60

people that I meet and it’s whatever kind of meeting, is what I just mentioned before I really mean good meeting for sex, instead of meeting someone who doesn’t feel good then you have no fun.

Because I think with them I have both. But you can never have all together indeed, you never can have it all with a sex partner, I don’t think so. It’s very hard to find.

And do you have the same feeling also when you have group sex, if it’s more than one person do you still have this strong connection with them? Or then it’s more…

It’s different, then it’s more sex and pleasure and I think with time you realise and you also liberate yourself from the impression or whatever way of thought you had, to let you enjoy the sex as it is, you know? But it also depends on how the person behaves to you, how the reactions are, If they show more love or not. You also control those things.

You can have an intention with someone and touch them like this, or talk to them like this. And it’s the same with sex, you can just go around a body and kiss or I don’t know make blow jobs or whatever, you feel the difference if you get a blow job and someone loves you, you see he’s taking care of your fucking dick. Or you see like okay I’ll just go rough, rough, and take it you know, and it’s different. And they can be together, and it’s amazing when they are together and you feel both, you can be two fucking beasts there eating each other up penetrating or whatever it is, but I definitely think they should be together in a way. We are for the love, as human beings we need it. We don’t need it, we use it. It’s natural to be in love for the things we are doing. I mean I go to have sex because I love it, f I don’t love it I don’t do it. Same like that, I love to cook, if I don’t like it I just don’t do it. I love it.

And do you think this is also connected…

Well it’s not work, that’s what I mean.. Sure it is connected in a way.

Issu e 0 1.

I mean the point that it’s something that you have to experience before you can judge it.

Yes totally. It has all of that, in my case it gives me new ways of creating things just between bodies or thoughts, also release my thoughts to be present in other things in life. But I see I’m also very sexual.

Well what I can recommend is let yourself to experience something, don’t be so hard with yourself with criticising or to signal or point your own actions. It’s difficult but it is part of learning as a person, in this world that we are. I think that’s the biggest recommendation I can give. When we start to signal ourselves it’s very difficult to understand why we like something or what we don’t like or why we can’t say yes or no. Things happen, you will just have to take care, and I’m talking about sickness in physical terms and sexual transmissions, just take care about ourselves, more conscience of our being, our energies too. Take care about how is your energy, sometimes we have to close some canals of energy, we meet too many people around, sometimes I go home very tired and say, ‘fuck I met this guy he was sucking my energy, he doesn’t know but, there’s no other reason. We were fucking each other so why has it come like that?’ We need to take care of each other, I can recommend we need to take care of ourselves. But also we just let it go, we cannot have control of everything in life, it means also our own life

You work with performance and dance, it’s very much about the body and about other people’s bodies and so how does this influence your sex life? Or how does your sex life influence your dancing?

I think the ways it influence me is, in opening my feelings, learning how to accept my body as it is.

The fragility we are when we are naked. Or the fragility that we have when we share time with someone, in a bed, in a room, in a toilet, wherever is the place. And this fragility I think I can make an approach or bringing to the stage for example, to sense what I feel when I do this or that. Or even I worked for a piece, I worked as a dancer and the subject was dark rooms and saunas, it was very interesting because I used all my experience.

That’s interesting. And was the theme explicitly told to the audience? Or this was like more used as inspiration, the dark rooms and your experiences?

It was inspired out of that. We recreated what we could see from experience and so we talked a lot about that, and also from we think, so we were also always chatting, ‘I don’t think these lights work with what we are doing now,’ or, ‘I don’t think this set is fixing as well with this moment of the situation, in the perspective or whatever.’

It sounds cool! Umm, what would you recommend everyone to try at least once?

Ahh I don’t know, for everybody?. That’s not a good question, I’ll have to think about many things.

Yeah I think control is a really big thing.

Free control maybe is good for some persons, until which point I don’t know but I would recommend that. Take care about our feelings, how far we can go with someone and if we are prepared or not. I dunno, maybe I’m saying too much. About the sex things, I won’t recommend anything I think each one has to find the things which are good for each, like yeah… there is so many things.

Yeah it’s completely personal and it really depends on the moment and on the people and everything, like there’s so many factors. I mean I always would recommend for people to try group sex or like a threesome because I think it’s super nice, but I wouldn’t say to do it right now, more like if you feel 61

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Like a form of creativity.. like dance, like expression?

H E D ON .

it then don’t run away from it. I think the reason I enjoyed it so much is because it came and it was with people I would never imagine but it really worked. Because of that moment in time you know. How would you say your sexuality has changed over the years? And can you point out the reasons why it changed?

0 5.

It’s since maybe, what I just mentioned before I think is connected. About the experience is one point, but then also about I stopped many things to, I used to see by myself for example what I do and what I don’t do, or signal myself doing this or that and it wasn’t good. But it’s also with the time, with self confidence also I guess And do you think it depends on what you see? Like if you see certain people living in this way or if you…

Sometimes I just don’t give a shit about what anyone is doing because otherwise in this sense, you can be well, sensitive or living a fragile life where you don’t know which path to take. And I guess like, well once I arrived in a group sex, it was maybe seven guys in the room, I was supposed to meet just with one, he didn’t say anything and I was like ok.

I went out of the room because they were like, ok well it didn’t match, and at the same time, well they had been wasted for some days. I was proposing just to have fun for a few hours. Not for hours and hours and hours. That could be good, but that day I couldn’t, and they didn’t give a shit about me, and I didn’t either, there are so many other guys like this. you go out open up and you get hundreds of thousands of offers and the market of it is so huge, just don’t give a shit, but not because you have to become a bitch, a fucking bastard bitch, it’s because you have to value more your own person and each feeling. I think more in that sense than, ‘ok I didn’t fight with them, yeah I think that’s more like, and of course it’s not that easy always! Come on, you meet seven guys they are all naked, butts, faces and it’s like yeah I love, butts and ass and all that stuff 62

but no. Maybe not.

Yeah I think it’s important sometimes to take yourself away a bit from the moment and really realise...

See the full picture. They were wasting my time, they can have a good dick or whatever they are not able to get it up again. When you arrive in these things, they have taken viagra or something to keep them going then they can’t continue, but they are already too wasted for me, I need to find someone...

Someone tha’s more on the same level…

Or somehow, and that means for me open mind, open to be able to behave with all situations. Not just like, ‘ah we cannot deal with it.’ It’s just another meeting you know. And of course all of this I have said, you have to take care about yourself because it can create frustrations or bring your personal beliefs down, your self confidence also.

Because life has other beautiful things, So I do what I do to keep, also myself working in other things, with people because its part of my work, outside its a light day. Sometimes I just think I don’t want to stay in behind my curtains in the dark when outside it’s sunny, I can be missing something very special outside. I love when I am in with kids, my friends now they have kids and I will go first to meet the kids than to go to meet a guy to have sex, that’s something I’m not hesitating, because I have so much fun with kids, playing with them, my friends they probably needed me more, sometimes its harder than others. But life is more. And sex is… thats another thing I believe, sex is in many things, I went to see a performance yesterday I was fucking horny, my dick was hard, and I was like, ‘fuck! What do I do now?’ By watching a performance, they were not naked or anything but just some scenes where I was like, ‘hmm this is kind of porn. For me many things are sexual you know.

Issu e 0 1.

Yeah sex is really a big thing, it’s present in a lot of things that we do, so you cannot really hide from it or something. Umm, who or what inspires you?

I don’t know. Right now I think life… I love life experience. The things I see, I’m very a night person so I like to go out and the night inspires me just to see the outside, I mean just tonight I went to here and then I just see, maybe half an hour to see the people, think about things, maybe also some writers. I would say in South America we have something that is called ‘Realismo Mágico’ it’s like ‘magic realistic’ so we play, I say that we assist the Surrealismos in this period so many artists of this time inspired me for example Dali. And then umm, impressionists inspires me a lot, and then today there is a collaboration invented in Brussels. He makes movies, writes, dances, performance.

Its physical but its also showing the voice of the dancers. He’s very physical.

So it’s more about the skill ?

The skills but also in terms of how he shows the body. In terms of the subject he is investigating at the moment and this expression of, sometimes crude but sometimes also from inside. Like you see his breaking heart and I like it.

So this presence of emotion in expression is a big part.

I think my friends also inspire me, and thats why we keep together. And then I love there is a writer called José Saramago. He is south American, he plays also, what if we all suddenly have an epidemic that we get blind? Then he creates a story and its very interesting, sometimes.

Yeah, it’s very interesting and then, the other countries borders start to blocade it, but they couldn’t keep the people in the country because death was not working there. I like how he is playing with the imaginary and I think that as an artist we have to live it to release it, to let it go. Nobody is grown, we just try out things. As a human being you know?

That is actually our reality to be here. I think cultures also inspired me a lot like traditional stuff, A lot of what your talking about, like surrealism and a bit like taking a step away form the reality. Do you think this is also why the connection between two people in sex or Love is also an important moment for you where you escape reality. Would you compare it at all?

Maybe it could be, but in a way its also my ‘being real’ moment, I don’t try to escape too much to don’t be there, present. I like to be there as much present as I can.

How did you learn the most about sex ? Like from school or from videos or other people or something else?

Oh I practise I think. Definitely not by videos or porn, I think really by practise and the practise came in those that you said. Sometimes you say 63

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What is it you like about it?

And the stories always look at a different context like a different person?

Yeah he takes each context, in anther book the Death was stopping to kill people, he recreated a country where nobody was dying , because she was in love for a guy, in physical terms she created a body she came to visit ‘cause she were in love, then she stopped to kill people. It was old people having bad time because they were suffering a lot, so what families had to do was go to the borders and throw people in the next country where they could die .

Ah ok ‘cos there’s a different Death working in each country?

H E D ON .

nothing, you let it happen and you let the person guide and sometimes you also play that you know, sometimes it works and sometimes no. I do have the confidence also, I’m not that shy, ‘what is it you have these toys how you use it? It looks interesting lets use it.’ So I let it happen or I say I’ll have this one and see if I can continue or not. And then you learn by shutting up, or by talking about it and then do the practise. It’s basically like all things, you have the theory and you practise. But sometimes you go straight to the fuck.

0 5.

And just see how it works out.

Sometimes you are more scared, nervous than other times. Sometimes you are with a person that knows other things but you trust him so much that you are not scared. You are very happy to know he is taking care of you. I think sex is part of the life, it’s symbolic for me in everything, for me it’s totally my life. It’s also sensual. It’s not just sex, it’s part of a current and love, I think that as long as those things are together and we are conscious, we can also play around see how it comes. Also in terms of also naming a relationship. Because many times it depends, how sex life is going between those two persons, and that... I think we can get in that point when we also understand ourselves. What we like, how far we can accept things or not. We are all very sexual always, we are kids we are sucking pencils or whatever, it’s there from the beginning.

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‘Coming off of the Hippie generation, raising your kids with free love, identification of yourself, alternative lifestyle, welcoming. Yeah I think it was much easier then, really.’

Michele

What do you think about the representation of sexuality in society? In contemporary society specifically.

At the moment? Umm, I think, It’s a bit modelled..

I’ve lived in Amsterdam for twenty years. When I first moved here there was a definite feeling that you could be yourself, you could wear what you wanted and sexuality was an integral part of society. So there were a lot of nude beaches. There was no problem with going to the nude beach. Even though that’s not a place where you have sex, it has a sexual connotation, but that was fine, you could go to the beach, take your top off. Everybody knew that there was something sexual about being naked on the beach or taking your top off but it was fine, there was an easy flow between the two. As time has gone on I think that Europe in general has become more and more conservative in a weird way. At the same time they use sex to sell everything. There’s always a joke that sex sells right? Umm, so it was really funny that you would say, ‘oh yeah, yeah sex sells, look at that hot girl selling that car.’ Now it’s, it really is true, if you watch music videos there is this overt almost mis.. well.. misogynistic representation of women as objects and they are not just objects like a table, they are literally sexualised toys for men to play with, and women have over the years bought into that. So you see these young girls sexualising themselves without even realising that its about sexuality, so they’re not even claiming their own pleasure or sexuality or understanding anything about themselves. It’s completely about this other person, the other, who they don’t even know who the other is anymore.

Exactly, yeah it’s interesting, well it’s pretty fucked up actually.

It’s, it’s gotten in my personal opinion really far away from when I grew up, and when I grew up it was the 1970s believe it or not. I was born in 63 so I am way older than you are. In America in the 1970s it was an incredibly exploratory sexual time but when you said no, no meant no and just because you wore something sexual didn’t mean that you wanted to be fucked. It was fashion, it was umm, it was like there was more respect for everybody it seems. I can’t say that’s absolutely true, but now it really seems…

No definitely.

That that there is a huge lack of respect.

And now people are trying to claim it back as well, its seems like now its like gone like this and now they wanna go back to how it was and make it more acceptable and that we shouldn’t have to have these problems, but it’s really weird how it could kind of goes backwards, you know. For me it always seems like it should progress and the opinions about people’s sexuality, race, whatever should take a step forward but it seems like we took a step back and now we’re trying to catch back up to how we were before or something.

Uhh yes, unfortunately what I have always heard when I was studying, for instance I studied, first I studied sociology then I studied art history. In so67

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ciology we also did social history right, and what we learned were the different theories that people have about how society evolves and one of them is that it’s cyclical. So you… you start down at the bottom and then you get to the middle points of a circle and that’s where you have extremes, then you go up to the top and then you have sort of a balance but it’s extreme one way or the other, and then you circle back down around again so that you’re repeating things that were bad, and then you go back down to the bottom again and you start over.

So this is how society actually…

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So in fact, in this theory is it that it is still in fact going forward?

Yeah, it’s cyclical but it has a loop. It moves in a forward direction only because of money and technology. This is my personal opinion; if technology and wealth didn’t fluctuate, lets say that everything was free and we had no exchange of something for anything else, then value… then the word value, anything that’s valuable would change and therefore we would actually be able to come to a state that could be more harmonious.

Okay yeah… yeah… because money and value is really abstract at the moment, it’s not really related to anything, so then it would become something that is actually more related to our experience here.

On the planet right exactly, It’s just a theory I have, and with technology now everything that we have recorded will never go away, whereas it wasn’t until the 1970’s really that we started to record things and show them to everyone in a particular kind of way. There.. you could go to the movies, but you had to go to the movie to see it, you couldn’t then watch it on your television that didn’t happen until late 1970 - early 80’s. So with every… every generation, every century we gain a particular kind of technology which evolves society further in one particular way, but sexuality is a part of humanity so it pulls it along with it. It doesn’t, nothing exists in a 68

vacuum. When it’s cultural there are things which are irrelevant now that, like there’s jobs which don’t exist anymore because technology has made them obsolete. But when technology is so intermittently part of our everyday existence then that means it also is about power and sexuality because thats what humanity is about.

Yeah completely I think it’s very, that’s also what’s so complicated about the topic because to me it feels like something which is extremely natural. Like sexuality and being naked and facing yourself and facing others, but in everyday situations it seems so alien, like it shouldn’t exist or it cannot exist because there are so many other things which are contradicting it like laws.

Power, money and technology, I’m telling you and it’s about the exchange of things and it’s how we value things. It is also inconvenient in society to sexualise in all circumstances. It’s there but it’s inconvenient. At work it is inconvenient to have people walking around naked, even if it was the perfect climate, because bodies are sexualised and because people get distracted. That’s why we wear clothes.

But it used to be that and still is in some professions that not only do you put clothes on but you put a particular type of clothing on. Which reduces your sexuality to some extent and hypes up your power, so they’re still on the same scale.

Yep yep, it’s like a continuum, yeah or also in the other way where you have like a secretary or a nurse when the outfit is also kind of contributing to your sexuality, but from a certain aspect. Like less for the enjoyment of the wearer but for the people watching and that’s also about power.

Yes it is, thats why they always say that sexuality is political, anything sexual is political certainly in America. That is yeah, Jesus Christ in San Fransisco you could have many a conversation with people in the gay scenes specifically yeh well the LGBT gay

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scene that tell you that sex is power, power is sex and therefore it’s political and if you really think about it is. If you look what’s going on they’re trying to appeal abortion laws where at the same time you know gay marriage is also, its…

But also like the stuff in Carolina at the moment like the…

I know with the toilets!

It’s insane a friend of mine was also kicked out of a girls toilet because she looked too (boyish) a couple of days ago and it’s amazing how it’s really happening everywhere at this moment, I guess its always been.

I really just don’t understand the whole idea, like what is the problem it makes no sense.

I don’t either I mean honestly all of a sudden I’ve seen what’s going on in America and I’m thinking holy fuck this reminds me of when blacks had to use another toilet.

Exactly I think about it also in the same way, that’s why I’m always very pissed off when black people are homophobic because you’re just doing the same shit that happened to us back then and you’re just doing it again and you think its ok.

I think its slightly different but I agree with the theory, someone who has been oppressed should not also become an oppressor. But unfortunately it appears that that is how...

Yes… its a cycle. It’s terrible actually, it’s not very nice about human nature.

But no its everywhere that’s the thing humans are not really nice in general. A lot of the times I loose a lot of faith in humanity which is a bit of a shame, I dunno, when I see the way things are going it doesn’t really seem so… great.

I’ll be honest with you like I said I think we’re at that part of the circle which is where you’ve got extremes; people who are just fucking horrible human beings, at least by my standards, and other people who are just amazing and people are listening and they are en masse changing the world. But so are these horrible other people because there’s lots of them too.

And they’re the ones who seem to get the attention in the media and stuff.

They both get attention but negativity has always gotten more attention, people like a horror story more than a love story. It really is easier to be negative than it is to be positive, honestly I know that from my own personal life, it takes a lot of effort to be positive. It’s a natural habit, really it’s just so much easier to bitch than it is to revel. It’s a personal choice but it serves the planet better and everyone around you if you can try to be more positive, anybody who tries to be more positive.

Yeah thats very true. Um, How has your sexuality changed and can you identify what caused these changes? You already mentioned moving to Amsterdam.

Ok I didn’t actually, I didn’t really, I mean I explored my sexuality when I was younger because I knew that I was bisexual from a very young 69

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It’s so strange to me because, ok I’d never gone to a unisex bathroom until I came to the Netherlands, but I don’t even think twice about walking into the men’s toilets if I have to pee and the girls is busy.

They’re just toilets! We all shit, we all piss, we all blow our nose, we all wash our hands.

Yeah thats also true when you’ve experienced it, then you uhh… it’s like the bullied - bully.

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age, umm, and then my best friend that I met when I was 13 turned out to be a lesbian. She didn’t know that and I didn’t know that when we were in high school, because in those days you didn’t really know what you wanted to do, about what being gay or straight was in the 1970s you just didn’t discuss it really.

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Okay that’s interesting because it’s like the biggest conversation now like when I was in school, it was like, ‘you’re gay, you’re this… you’re this.’

Yeah right. No that just wasn’t talked about really.

Where I went to school at least, I went to an upper middle class suburban school, that was not me. We were poor Bohemians, but I got into this world and learned a lot that I didn’t know. In my last year of high school my best friend had a boyfriend and we were extremely adventurous sexually, so if she wasn’t with her boyfriend we were hanging out with other friends and we would have threesomes all the time but the two of us wouldn’t really touch each other, we would just play with the guy. But now looking back I can see that we wanted to. So for instance I remember one time tickling her and just kept on tickling her where at some point I should have stopped. And I remember thinking, ‘I wish she’d kiss me,’ but I was too shy, but I’m not a shy person. I was too afraid, I guess in a way so was she.

But like afraid of rejection or of what it would mean?

What it would mean yeah. I’ve always been a control freak. Always. So my control freak side kicked in and went, ‘I don’t know what this will do to our friendship.’ Ironically after we graduated from high school she got a job, fell in love with her boss, had a very messy relationship with this woman who was married and had a kid, and it did not go well. She was broken hearted, almost killed herself, well… tried to kill herself and then came to stay with me in Florida where we had the ‘big conversation’ and slept together for the very first time.

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And it was the first time for you, first time ever with a girl?

With her, but I had slept with other girls, I went and explored that part on my own and so did she. She took it really far fell in love got her heart broken and tried to kill herself, I just dabbled, but we’d never really talked about it. So she came to stay with me, slept in my dorm room, because I was sleeping in a dorm at that point, slept in my single bed. So we got really cosy and started sleeping together, she left and I’m like, ‘wow, that was really great,’ to like lose my female virginity with my best friend, and then all of a sudden I was in a relationship with her, I didn’t know that but she thought I was.

After that day?

After she left, like the day she left and she started sending me gifts and treating me like I was her girlfriend. I’m like, ‘okay I have to wrap my head around this.’ Anyway to make a long story short it was really weird but she moved to Florida, we got an apartment together and she was my girlfriend for a year and then I decided I was going to travel around Europe by myself, I helped her find a new girlfriend. She couldn’t be on her own, found her a new girlfriend, and I’m not kidding I really did find her a new girlfriend.

Like, literally?

Yeah yeah. I went to a bar with her, a gay bar and I was like, ‘okay, what about her? What about her?

That one!’ and I said ‘okay’ and I walked up to the girl and said, ‘could you meet my friend?’ First of all I thought it was really awkward at first, so anyways I got her into a relationship, I went off to Europe, I came back I hated this new girlfriend I didn’t know I was gonna hate her, horrible person.

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But like also horrible to your frined? Or just generally quite negative?

Yeah also awful she’s just a horrible person. Anyway I got involved with a man after that point, but always knew I loved women of course, so I spent the rest of my life switching being being in a relationship with women and being in a relationship with men. Just fucking around with women, just fucking around with men, then I moved to here and started getting into the fetish scene and had a great opportunity to play with both men and women in an environment that I liked, with sexy clothing on, so that rocked. Then it evolved more and more, where I got, you know, I was able to get into the orgies with my friends and you know all kinds of lovely different types of combinations, and it’s been fun ever since.

Yeah, yeah I would say that’s true yes. Yeah, I went through a few years, now in retrospect I think that my interest in men and specifically men was related to the fact that I was still fertile, at least my brain thought I was still fertile and now I see the other side of that, like I’m in menopause, I’ve been in menopause for five years now. So yeah I didn’t have any kids, I think people who don’t have children stay younger longer. I like to party, have fun, I’m a fun person, so that helped a lot, and I meditate.

I also want to start, my roommate is doing it a lot so I want to try and get into it.

It’s great I’ll show you, we’ll talk about it later. So what happened is I believe that my interest focussed mostly on men, was because my biological clock was ticking. Yeah, very interesting. I didn’t realise that until recently.

I actually believe that now, now that I’m on the other side of it.

But it does seem to make sense actually, And ironically the last boyfriend I had, where I think in my mind was my last ditch effort to be able to have kids, he was the best looking man I’ve ever dated and also most intellectual.

Okay like the best genes?

Uhuh, seriously! And he didn’t care if I slept with other women, he was the perfect boyfriend in a lot of ways, and within one month of me dating him my period stopped.

Seriously?

Yep. I went into menopause.

That’s crazy!

Yep it was really weird it was if my body said, ‘he might tick of all those boxes but you are not gonna have a kid with this guy.’

Ok, wow it’s interesting to think about our biology and how that affects how we interact with people, because there’s so many things like the pheromones and like hormones which influence us.

Oh my god I’m telling you now I see things so much more clearly. The urge to have children transcends everything, no matter how selfish, no matter how sexual no matter how, umm, open. Honestly it takes over everything. People who I’ve met that are in the fetish scene, who never even in a million 71

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And do you find this is more, like for me I go through phases of like, being attracted more to one gender or another?

I did read that actually, I read this in an article I think it was like a few years ago about women at the age of 45 becoming more interested in other women, but I didn’t really link it to menopause, I just thought…

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years would I think would have a kid, they have children all of a sudden they’re like, ‘yep I have a kid now. I have to stop.’

And it affects their involvement in the scene?

Yeah of course it does! You can’t have a kid and be able to go to every fetish party.

Yeah, I imagine it’s pretty contradictory.

You have to get a babysitter, maybe you’re nursing, you know? You’re just too fucking tired because the kids don’t sleep the way you’d want them to.

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Completely changes your life I guess.

For instance I was friends with a porn star, now she did alternative porn so indie porn, arty porn, but a porn star none the less. You fuck on camera for money. She has a daughter. Something inside of her said, ‘I need to have a kid’. She’s a lesbian, mostly a lesbian. She prefers women but during this particular set time of her years she somewhere in her mind said she must have a kid. Even though she didn’t realise that was what was going on. She got pregnant had a kid, thought she was gonna stay with the guy, within a couple years he’s gone. She then realises, ‘oh! This was just about having a kid,’ And got into a lesbian relationship. So her lesbian lover of 6 years helped her raise her daughter.

Then her daughter got to a certain age and all of a sudden oh, my friends backing out of being in porn. Left porn completely, just when it would start really affecting her daughter at school. ‘What does your mother do for a living? what do you think of your mother?’ You know, that sort of thing.

And do you think that this has changed since the 70’s? Like it would have been more acceptable and easy to deal with?

Absolutely. Coming off of the Hippie generation, raising your kids with free love, identification of yourself, alternative lifestyle, welcoming. Yeah I 72

think it was much easier then, really. The people, oh, then there’s the police state right? Getting out of World War Two, in which everyone was policed.

The 70’s was sort of like a coming down period, but more like a rich and livened ‘do what you want’ period. And the 80’s became about money, became more prosperous. In the 80’s though we stared to come up with this more like Big Brother looking after you police state, because technology started to allow government to police you in a new kind of way.

They could see everything that your doing.

Right, so that’s what’s happened now. Now we’re policing people again. So people who used to host orgies at their house can’t have children in the house, they can’t be asleep. God forbid they might see somebody naked. They’ll have their children taken away from them, whereas this was never even, nobody even thought about it in the 1970’s.

Even in the early 80’s you didn’t think about it, the kids were sleeping You just do your thing.

You check in on them, you tell them, ‘stay in your room if you wake up, call mommy,’ and that’s what kids would do, and if they saw a bunch of people writhing around on the floor, it happens. We’re sexual human beings.

That’s so much better.

Seriously we live in a police culture now and a lot of people don’t even realise.

It’s true like I always… I also had it when I was younger, watching porn, even now I’m like putting it on private and stuff because I’m like, I don’t want people to know what I’m doing, but it shouldn’t really matter, but I always have this kind of feeling like someone is watching and someone is gonna judge or its gonna kind of affect me in some kind

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of way if they know what I do in my private time. It’s ridiculous but yeah, its very real.

Yeah its disturbing and I’ve really noticed it recently. I could go on about this forever, since I studied sociology I love cultural things and how culture is created. I was raised by two Bohemian intellectuals.

What do you think about the terminology and categories used to describe sexuality?

Can you give me an example of what you mean?

Well homosexuality, the term homosexuality didn’t even exist until the 1900’s - late 1800’s they would say buggery, they would use the physical act of what you would do, they did not have a term...

For the person who did it.

That was applied to that person.

I was reading a bit about this like the trial of this guy, he was an artist and, but I can’t remember the name...

Yes they used it in a, oh well we don’t know if eventually he was tried as a homosexual but you could be persecuted, prosecuted for the act of doing it, which of course, not in Greek times, starting in like the 1700’s I think even in the 1600’s Leonardo da Vinci was charged with buggery. And, alright so, terms as a sociologist you know, former sociologist, whatever, I’ve always thought that being able to identify as something helps the structure of life. So this is why we say when we meet someone, ‘what do you do for a living?’ Because then we can assess

But thats in the good case of course.

Right. Im trying to put a positive spin on it but also theres negativity as well.

No but for sure it is useful and I at the same time, I don’t really like to put myself in a category because I still don’t really know myself what I am. And I don’t wanna say like ‘I’m Gay’ or ‘I’m Bi’ or whatever, So if someone asks me I just say to them, ‘well in the past three years I’ve only slept with guys, so you can decide what I am, it’s up to you.’ But I think at the same time if people realise that just because you’re Gay doesn’t mean you’re gonna act in the same way as every other Gay person, or just because you’re Bi doesn’t mean you’re gonna act in the same way, it tells you what you do with part of your life, but it doesn’t tell you anything more.

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For example Bisexual, Lesbian, Transgender.

Like these kind of umbrella terms which are used to describe your sexual behaviours.

Because for example I was reading about Ancient Greece and it was like these terms never existed because it was more like a natural flow.

who they are. It’s a way to structure our environment around us, give it context. It would be lovely if we didn’t need to do that and people were just people, umm, but that’s really difficult for people as you can see with what’s happening with this whole toilet issue. We uhh, we say to people, ‘if you’re men you use that toilet, if you’re a woman you use that toilet.’ But we’re being confronted with what are, what is the definition of male and female. Is it who you id (identify) as? Is it what your sexual orientation is? But also it becomes more and more complicated you know. I think they’re useful.

They’re a necessary evil, maybe thats a better way of putting it. It helps people to understand for instance, when I tell people I’m bisexual then they’re like, ‘oh that’s the vibe I got from you, now I understand it more.’ If I tell a woman that I’m sitting there talking to, ‘yeah I’m bisexual,’ and you can see her kind of go, either ‘oooh’ or you can see her like kind of go (looks up as if thinking). I see them do this, I can see them like ‘click click click click.’ It helps.

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Yeh, you know what I say? ‘I have a fluid sexuality,’ and that really works. And I think if they’re a smart person they know what you mean.

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For sure! Ok, what would you recommend for everyone to try at least once?

Oh wow, umm well I certainly think that everyone should at least kiss, if not get naked with, the same sex. At least once, and I think that we’re all fluidly human creatures, and I have seen that in person, with people who I know identity as being either straight or gay, and I have watched them give a blowjob to a man or I have watched them play with a girl, just so you know. Just so you can know in your head that we’re all sexual human beings, umm that’s one thing. I think that if you open your mind to what it is to be human, I think understanding how power works within sexual dynamics is very important and I think that everyone should also have an experience that they are consciously aware over the powers playing between two people.

Yeah, and you mean like in terms of a role?

Or you mean in terms of like the energy? In which way do you mean?

So some people take it to a BDSM level so they’ll either do bondage discipline or they’ll be submissive or they’ll be dominant. This exists in all sexual dynamics but most people don’t acknowledge it.

Acknowledging it for at least one moment, that I’m giving over my power to this person or I’m taking the power from them. Or I’m, you know, taking the power and using it, once you at least acknowledge it to yourself honestly then it empowers you to make better choices for yourself. If you are the kind of woman for instance that, ‘I only like men that are really dominant,’ but you never say that out loud, ‘I like men who are bossy and tell me what to do, I like men who are in powerful jobs.’ Well why? Is it because you admire their power and you want to take some of that power? Or is it because you actually trust them to put you into a submissive role and that excites you? So it’s that part. You 74

don’t necessarily have to live a 50 Shades of Grey lifestyle, but at least acknowledge that that’s what’s happening. You know you see these women in these relationships, with men, and they’re a trophy wife right? And they say, ‘I’m not gonna have sex with you until you buy that purse for me, that’s you know, €1000.’ That’s power, you’re playing with power. Acknowledge it.

Ok, because you think like through the acknowledging your actions and those of others you are becoming more true to yourself ?

Exactly. And I believe that the only path to truly participating as a human being is being truthful.

First to yourself and then to others, and then that allows all of us to be better people. So..

And how does this… because I think that being truthful to yourself and to the other person is very important during sex because it allows you to reach e a level together and you can satisfy each other and yourselves in that way. And how would you say that this changes in like a BDSM scene in which you are kind of playing a role, or you are playing in a scene, because then, I mean… I’ve never done it myself so I’m not sure if you’re kind of expanding your own characteristics or if you’re playing a role which is slightly different to your normal one?

Yeh that’s tough. People who explore BDSM know that there’s something inside of them that they want to outwardly, truthfully explore. Either inflict pain or receive pain or choose a dominant role, tell the people what to do that are consensual, ‘yes I will let you tell me what to do.’

And that’s also important, the consent.

Consent is everything, I’ve met unfortunately quite a few people who have been in those kind of situations where they kind of knew that that’s what they

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were seeking, but the person who was in power, just was feeding on the power and therefore abused that, in a variety of ways.

I think thats also what’s quite scary in general, from an outside perspective, of the scene, is the fact that when you’re giving up your power you really have to trust that person, otherwise..

Yeah, I guess also like what you say, you also put yourself in situations because, also I think when you are young you are really testing your boundaries or you’re testing like what it is, and you just throw yourself in the situation. It can, yeah, be quite dangerous.

Thankfully, with the advent of the internet, with everything available online, I mean my first recommendation for anybody who wants to try anything outside of what is considered to be safe, no matter how you are bought up, is to look it up. You can

And is there something which I mean because, Jenny told me about FetLife, which has also got some forums about people’s experiences and what they do and the places they go to, and is there any other websites where everything is kind of condensed in one place or you’re more finding everything all over?

Well theres alt.com, like alternative, that’s similar to FetLife. It’s the other alternative website for people who are kinky. And there are forums and there’s lots on there but of course once again there’s also predators on those sites, people looking for young people who don’t know what they’re doing, they want to take advantage.

But that’s the same anywhere I guess, so even if you’re not in the kinky...

You have to be careful. There used to be societies, you know? For people who were interested in this, interested in that, forums is what they would be called now, and they still exist. I don’t know where they are, because I have learned everything that I know about BDSM from going to parties, meeting people, having men come up to me, ‘can I lick your boots?’ Going and talking to my friend and saying to him, ‘this is what happened to me at the party last night. You know? Could you tell me more about why would men do that to me?’ The very first time it happened, and so he knew, because he was in the scene since he was in his early twenties. So he knew all about it. I got really lucky I made a friend who just knew everything, so he helped me. And then yeah, you learn more and then I started working at the BDSM studio, and I had a woman who trained me, and I trained with her for two weeks, I was in every session that I could get into with her and I learned first hand how you take, how you do what 75

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It’s paramount. You must trust that person, and they have to be deserving of your trust, obviously.

And the thing is when you’re young, you don’t necessarily, because I think we, when were young, in our late teens and early twenties, life was kind of although it’s happening to us, as opposed to us making our lives happen, so you’re much more able to, or your not willing, but you place yourself in circumstances, that after you turn 30 you would never put yourself in again. Or you would choose differently. And people know that, people know that there are young people who will do porn and regret it horribly later. But you know when they’re young they just think, ‘what the fuck! I like sex who gives a shit. I like the idea of being beat up,’ but you know, in a controlled circumstance, and so this other older person goes, ‘hahahaha, they’re gonna let me do whatever the fuck I want to do to them.’ So they rape them and they hurt them and they don’t care about that other person, they don’t care about consent. And it’s much more common to happen to younger people than it is to older people.

look up people’s experiences, you can look up blogs.

You can look up books. You can look up, you know, articles and look at what other people have to say about it and thats great.

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you do, so yeah, all the other sexual stuff. I met this great couple at a fetish party who are my best friends to this day and they’re really fun and kinky and they have parties at their house which turn into orgies. And its brilliant, and so I was able to take all that sexuality and have friends who you know…

Also enjoy it, thats super cool.

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But I was in my 30’s so it was easier for me, I knew more about myself, I knew what I wanted, and I also knew what kind of people I was interested in and attracted to, and that made it easier.

Yeah I think that is quite important because also I’ve gotten myself in situations in Berlin and then the next day I’m really like, ‘why did I do that?’ and I say I wouldn’t do that again. Well I say that but then I have done it again anyway regardless, haha.

But maybe with other people?

Yeah with someone else. But still having a similar feeling like maybe it wasn’t the best idea. But also I don’t know how much that is because it’s against my values or it’s against the values people have put onto me and that’s very confusing.

It’s a really hard thing. Honestly even to this day at the age that I am, I’m still occasionally confronted with things that were imprinted upon me when I was a teenager growing up in my parents house.

I guess because it’s so deeply into your person, like it is your character in a way.

It is, I mean I’ll never forget that after I moved here and within about a year and a half I started going to fetish parties and then I would go back to America to visit my mother, my father died when I was 23. I would go back and at some point, I think the second year after I went back I’m like, ‘I’m so excited, I’m making rubber clothes, I’m wearing 76

rubber, I’m going to these parties, I feel like I’ve really found my place, you know?’ Because everybody’s a bit older, they’re all sexually open, and my mother just looked at me, now my mother was not a prude but personally she was a prude. She was very open minded, she said, ‘ew I can’t understand at all why you would do such a thing.’ And I said, ‘well I know you wouldn’t get dressed up in rubber and go to a party like that, but you know me, you know I would enjoy something like that.’ And she said, ‘ah, it’s disgusting I just don’t understand it.’ And she refused to even just acknowledge, the mother that I grew up with would buy beer for me, as long as I drank it at home. That would drive me every Saturday, Friday and Saturday night, to the Rocky Horror Picture Show. As a 13 year old I would get dressed up in a very sexual outfit, and watch an extremely sexual movie. I’ve seen it over 100 times. And she tells me as an adult in my 30’s that she thought it was disgusting that I would dress in rubber.

That’s really funny, but is it because of her relationship with you, being her daughter? or is it really just…

No, She absolutely could not see outside of herself on that one.

And she could never get over it?

I never told her about it anymore, I certainly never told her that I became a Dominatrix.

I can’t imagine what she would say.

Oh my god. And now I don’t have to worry about it, she’s dead so, and she lived a long life. She was happy when she died and that’s all that matters in my personal opinion. She finally found friends and peace with herself, and acceptance. So that was really, well it does stick with you. The kinky one I think was my dad, I think my dad was really quite kinky and it is a shame that he died when I was not even close to figuring out how kinky I really

Issu e 0 1.

was, am. And now it’s just a part of who I am and I spend a lot of time, not a lot of time, I help other people understand their, themselves more, thats what I do.

That’s nice.

Yeah it is. It’s fun and nice and rewarding.

Ok so the next question is quite tied into what you just said, is your sex life and your public life connected? Like can you express yourself sexually in front of your friends and family?

Yeah, everybody knows everything about me.

That is a very good question, actually I can think of one friend that I have now that I met before I moved here, actually I have two, but I’m very honest with both of them, and one of them I’ve brought to a fetish party because she wanted to go, and met a guy there who she went home with that night. He tied her up, she was in heaven she loved it. And a few years later she got involved with a guy who she met at a BDSM party, it was like exclusively BDSM and then she got into it. They used to play together, they got married they had a kid and now she’s divorced because he’s an asshole. But okay whatever. And now she’s in a relationship with a guy who’s 20 years younger than she is and she bosses him around. It’s really quite funny, they just came to stay with me.

And is it a good dynamic?

Yeah they’re great together. I could never be with a guy like that but, it’s fine, it’s good. She’s happy, very happy, and so’s he. And I have another friend who lives in LA who I met here, but moved back to

Ok, so they were open to it just not really trying it out. And do you ever feel like this is a thing that you have to address and you have to tell people?

Or is it just kind of something which comes naturally.

I have to say that I do work it into the conversation, if it’s somebody that I feel needs to know that about me. Because most of the time, because most of the time people end up talking to me because there’s something within them that they see that I can help them understand, that’s what I’ve noticed in the past couple of years. Before that I was just kind of arrogant and would just tell people anything. Almost to shock them just for fun.

I think that’s also important because so many people are sort of stuck to themselves and their own opinions. And I think sometimes you need someone who’s gonna say, ‘look there’s a bigger world out there you know, it doesn’t end where you end.’ Uh ok, what do you think about the future of sexuality? Where do you think it’s going?

Sexuality will never go away. I love science fiction, and there are many science fiction movies and books that posit the end of sexuality. Babies in test tubes, and that sex becomes so dangerous, to exchange so much drug, not drugs fluids and bacterias that we’ll stop having sex. But I don’t believe that. Until you change humanity we will always have sexuality. How open we are about our own sexuality will ebb and flow over your life time. You will probably see exactly how I have, see it change so much, where it is now it’s like, really restricted.

With the muslim faith becoming so prevalent, not that it hasn’t always existed. It’s like it used to be, 77

Mi ch el e

That’s nice, and is it because they met you while you’ve been exploring it. Or also the good friends which you had before you can easily talk to them about it as well?

America, she knows everything about my lifestyle, never interested in it. She was very happily married until her husband died about a year and a half ago.

They did not ever ever do anything kinky, but they found my stories amusing and they, they love me.

H E D ON .

‘we’re here, we’re Queer get used to it.’ Now it’s like, ‘we’re here, we’re Muslim, get used to it.’ You know? And I truly believe that the reason why it has become so prevalent, covering yourself, is because we’ve got to that tipping point where it just became a little too much for some people. With the Catholic church, lots of people theat are catholic left the church. So I just think that its also the last gasp for organised religion, and it’s the most extreme and has the most extremists.

0 6.

I guess like how you said earlier about the cycles and we have one extreme which is like the liberation and the other extreme which is like the covering up and the cutting down.

Yeah I mean it seems like it just keeps going that way. Up and down, up and down. What I find really interesting is that western culture has in some ways embraced fluid sexual identity, so transgender has become a hot topic. That’s actually something I was thinking to talk about because it’s really everywhere at the moment. It’s always been there but the techniques of being able to change from your birth sex to your real sex, your mental sex, have finally evolved where its possible and thats why I believe that it has gotten to this point. Now this is what I find really interesting, I know there are a lot of women who are becoming men but what we tend to see in the media are men becoming women, that’s more publicised. And as a result of that I had a hope that women and men will become more understanding towards one another. Because when men become women, and women men. And when men in power become women they will see how fucking hard it is. And how evil society is to women.

What do you think about arguments among the Drag and Trans community? There was this interview with RuPaul where he was saying Drag queens were more taking the piss out of gender and not taking it seriously, and Trans people were taking it very seriously. Do you a connection with this?

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Well it’s a good question you know. I’ve thought about it, Ru Paul has ridden like a crazy experience in life and he knows it from his perspective, which is he chooses to remain gender neutral so that he can hype up the theatrical part of it. It seems to me that in all aspects it’s about theatre. Different, not the same thing. So anybody in the Transgender community, you wanna become a woman? That’s who you identify as? Fine, but thats different. Being a Drag queen is playing with theatre. Who he is as a person, he’s lived as a woman, he recently kind of dresses like a man, sort of. But he’s gender neutral.

Which I think is even more powerful. He’s happy, you wanna change into a man? Shut up, if that’s what makes you happy then do it, and let somebody else do it if it makes them happy. Again it’s about those categories, putting somebody in a box makes your life more stable.

Putting something in a box to understand it makes sense, but if you cannot move from that box or leave that box then it stops making sense because we’re different everyday.

Absolutely, when I was 40, like my friend who paid a visit to me just recently with her 20 year younger boyfriend, I also ended up in a relationship with a guy who was 20 years younger than me, and he was, before me and him got together, was living in Amsterdam and he started exploring his sexuality, and he started going to the red light district and sleeping with Transgender people, only men who dressed as women, and he actually told me that he felt kind of in love. So we talked a lot about that and why would he feel that way. So he was really young he was only 21 so it was just difficult, although he was open to talk about stuff he still didn’t really… The point is were still friends on Facebook and every once in a while I hear from him, and about a year ago, maybe a year and a half ago he sent me a message on Facebook, a personal message, ‘I’m on FetLife, check out my photographs, here’s my name,’ and he’s dressed as a woman, and he looks good! But then four weeks before him telling me that, one of my ex-boyfriends

Issu e 0 1.

called me at 10 o’clock at night kind of drunk and told me all about his alter ego Wanda and how he’s now dressing as Wanda.

It’s like starting a new life.

Yes It’s funny because as Wanda, he’s really happy and chilled out. Wanda’s this fetish slut.

Did you meet her?

Mi ch el e

Oh yeh babe, Wanda has hosted one party already and is hosting a May Day party so we’re all going.

The owner of this bar (Getto) is going with his husband. Anyway I believe the more men become women the more they’ll understand. And actually the same goes for women who become men. So to me the potential for at least western society, kind of sets the bar for these things. The possibility is good, for us to be more understanding of each other.

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Directory

Venues/Parties 08.

Wasteland www.wasteland.nl 26 November 2016 North Sea Venue Amsterdam / Zaandam

D i rec t o ry

08.

B.I.T.C.H www.crazylandparty.nl 11 June 2016 North Sea Venue, Zaandam 08.

Dominatrix www.dominatrix.nl 10 December 2016 Boudoir Lounge, Uitgeest

25.

Berghain www.berghain.de Wriezener Bahnhof, Berlin

41.

Club Paradise www.club-paradise.nl Schaafstraat 26, Amsterdam

36.

Silver Future www.silverfuture.net Weserstraße 206, Berlin

41.

Unleashed www.unleashedparty.nl 21 May 2016 The Box, Amsterdam

41.

Kitkat Club www.kitkatclub.org Köpenicker Str. 76, Berlin

43.

Opium www.opium-berlin.com Various, Berlin

41.

Insomnia www.insomnia-berlin.de Alt Tempelhof 17 - 19, Berlin

43.

Sklavenmarkt Various, Berlin

18.

Toxic http://www.toxic-fetishparty.nl 29 October 2016 Heuvelring, Tillburg

41.

Darkside www.darkside-berlin.com Nostitzstraße 30, Berlin

43.

Club Culture Houze www.club-culture-houze.de Görlitzerstraße 71, Berlin

19.

Porn Film Festival www.pornfilmfestivalberlin.de 21 - 25 October 2016 Cinema Moviemento, Berlin

41.

Schwuz www.schwuz.de Rollbergstraße 26, Berlin

19.

Fetish Ball www.german-fetish-ball.com 4 - 8 May 2016 Various, Berlin

41.

Cocktail d’amore www.cocktaildamore.tumblr http://griessmuehle.de Sonnenallee 221, Berlin

19.

Boundcon www.boundcon.com 20 - 22 May 2016 Zenith – Die Kulturhalle Munich

41.

Same Place www.sameplace.nl Nassaukade 120, Amsterdam

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45.

Schwelle 7 www.schwelle7.de Uferstraße 6, Berlin 45.

Bondage Jam Tuesdays at Schwelle7 45.

Full Moon Party Each full moon at Schwelle7 Berlin 45.

Avalon www.studio-avalon.com Zitadellenweg 20, Berlin

Directory

45.

Antichrist www.clubantichrist.com Electrowerkz, 7 Torrens Street London

11.

Tught A book by Madieanne detailing the roles of men and women, doms and subs within BDSM.

45.

Subversion www.clubsubversion.com 122 Whitehorse Lane London

30.

Hot Girls Wanted A 2015 American documentary on young-adult pornography The film follows the lives of several 18- and 19-year old pornographic actresses.

45.

The Flying Dutchman www.flyingdutchmanlondon.com 156 Wells Way London

Websites 44.

Fetlife www.fetlife.com 46.

Berlin18 www.berlin18.com 74.

Alt.com www.alt.com Movies / Shows / Books / Performers 09.

O magazine An international fetish magazine produced in the late 80s - 90s, published by Peter W.Czernich.

43.

Shortbus a 2006 American erotic comedy-drama film written and directed by John Cameron Mitchell. The plot rfollows a sexually diverse group of characters trying desperately to connect in New York City, Inspired by various underground NYC gatherings in the 2000s.

49.

Realm of the Senses A 1976 French-Japanese art film directed by Nagisa Oshima.

It is a fictionalised and sexually explicit treatment of an incident from 1930s Japan.

49.

The Secretary A 2002 erotic romance film directed by Steven Shainberg The film is based on a short story from Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill, and explores the relationship between a sexually dominant man and his submissive secretary.

49.

Kent Park A 2002 drama-erotic film written by Harmony Korine, who based it on Larry Clark’s journals and stories. The film revolves around the abusive and/or dysfunctional home lives of several teenagers, set in the city of Visalia, California.

49.

Kids Kids is centered on a day in the life of a group of sexually active teenagers in New York City and their hedonistic behavior towards sex and substance abuse during the height of the AIDS epidemic.

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D i rec t o ry

46.

Pornceptual www.pornceptual.com Various, Berlin

43.

50 Shades of Grey A 2015 American erotic romantic drama film directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson. It stars Dakota Johnson as Anastasia Steele and Jamie Dornan as Christian Grey. Steele is a college graduate who begins a sadomasochistic relationship with young business magnate Grey.

49.

Eyes Wide Shut A 1999 erotic drama film based on Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Traumnovelle, following the sexually charged adventures of Dr. Bill Harford who embarks on a night-long adventure, during which he infiltrates a massive masked orgy of an unnamed secret society.

Glossary

Terms 07.

Mistress / Master The dominant person in a Master/Slave relationship.

07.

BDSM Bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism.

G l o s s ary

08.

Hooks A method of body piercing with sharp hooks.

08.

Blood scenes Fetish relating blood to sexual arousal.

08.

Bondage Tying, binding, or restraining a partner (usually physically) for erotic, aesthetic, and/or somatosensory stimulation.

08.

Safe words A safeword is a (series of) code word/actions that are sometimes used in BDSM activities to mean that a bottom or submissive is reaching a limit, or to signal that they are in distress and the Top/Dom must stop the scene.

09.

Owner See Mistress / Master.

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09.

Slave Most often this term is used to refer to the submissive person in a consenting Master/slave relationship.

18.

Play area A space used especially to enact BDSM scenes.

45.

Femdom Female Domination: A woman (or action in which a woman) dominates sexual interaction with her mate.

47.

GHB A naturally occurring neurotransmitter and a psychoactive drug with comparable effects to ecstacy.

50.

Shibari In Japanese, “Shibari” simply means “to tie”. The contemporary meaning of Shibari describes an ancient Japanese artistic form of rope bondage.

50.

Darkroom A darkened room, sometimes located in a nightclub, gay bathhouse or sex club, where sexual activity can take place. When located in bars, dark rooms are also known as backrooms or blackrooms

52.

Non-binary A catch-all category for gender identities that are not exclusively masculine or feminine‍—‌identities which are thus outside of the gender binary and cisnormativity 53.

Suspension A form of sexual bondage where a bound person is hung from one or more overhead suspension points. Suspension bondage is considered to carry a higher risk than other forms of sexual bondage.

57.

Cruising room A meeting place, usually a bar, which caters for people looking to meet someone for sex.

57.

Gay sauna Commercial spaces for men to have sex with other men 72.

Fluid sexuality One or more changes in sexuality or sexual identity. There is significant debate over whether sexuality is stable throughout life or is fluid and malleable.

Glossary

77.

Gender neutral The idea that policies, language, and other social institutions should avoid distinguishing roles according to people’s sex or gender, in order to avoid discrimination arising from the impression that there are social roles for which one gender is more suited than another.

G l o s s ary

78.

Transitioning The process of changing one’s gender presentation permanently to accord with one’s internal sense of one’s gender.

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A b o u t t h e c o nt ri b u t o rs / O u t ro

About the contributors / Outro

Interview 01.

SM Studio, Amsterdam, The Netherlands This interview was a lot of ‘firsts’ - the first interview for the first issue of HEDON, the first time I met a pro-Dominatrix, and the first time I visited an SM studio. It was a great experience and reassurance that even though I’m exploring an intimate and largely private subject, there are people who are more than happy to share their opinions and welcome you into their world. www.madieanne.com Interview 02.

SM Studio, Amsterdam, The Netherlands After interviewing Madieanne I interviewed Erik, her partner. He is also a pro-Dom which was already interesting for me as they didn’t confine to the Sub-Dom formula. Erik was just as friendly and welcoming as Madieanne and I’m happy I got to meet and feature them in the beginning of my journey. www.peculiardesires.com Interview 03.

Cafe Luzia, Berlin, Germany I had met Taylor once before this interview at a Pornceptual party, she had a nice energy, looked cool and danced really well so I introduced myself to her, since then I’d been in contact on Facebook and really wanted to interview her since she is the same age as me, also English and had moved to Berlin at the same time. It was interesting to see that we had a lot of similarities in our way of thinking and the kind of experiences we had in the city, the interview which usually would have taken an hour lasted six. With a couple gin and tonics, some indian food and a cup of coffee in-between. It was good fun and also a conversation where I talked a lot (maybe too much) about myself. @taytay_rayray

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A b o u t t h e c o nt ri b u t o rs / O u t ro

Interview 04.

Tante Emma, Berlin, Germany I was introduced to Christian through Jenny, it was really nice speaking with him since he is quite active in the Berlin and Dutch fetish scene through his friends and performances as a naked celist, so could introduce me to a lot of new places in the city and referred to a lot of films which I could share with you. www.christiantan.com Interview 05.

Kotbusser Tor, Berlin, Germany I lived with Alex during my internship in Berlin, during that time we talked often about sex (among other things) so I thought he would be a great person to talk to. Since Alex also works in dance and performance, he is active in regarding the body, space and interactions between people in a very poetic way. www.alexander-carrillo.com Interview 06.

Getto bar, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Another contact made through Jenny, Michele has been exploring her sexuality since moving to Amsterdam 20 years ago. It was great to talk about society, sexuality and how things have changed, and continue to change over time. We had a few cocktails and dinner together which made the conversation flow pretty well, Michele is working on a book of her sexual experiences and will be organising workshops around BDSM practices so I’m excited to see what’s coming up.

HEDON magazine.

No part of this publication may be reproduced without written permission from the copyright holder.

HEDON is not responsible or liable for the accuracy of the information contained herein nor for any consequences arising from its interpretation.

Published in 2016, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

85

HEDON magazine.

No part of this publication may be reproduced without written permission from the copyright holder.

HEDON is not responsible or liable for the accuracy of the information contained herein nor for any consequences arising from its interpretation.

Published in 2016, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

‘We recognize pleasure as the first good innate in us, and from pleasure we begin every act of choice and avoidance, and to pleasure we return again, using the feeling as the standard by which we judge every good.’ - Epicurus

H E D ON I n t e r v ie w s 0 1