SPIT: Toronto’s alternative porn collective hosted a bash at local sex club and we went along

You can imagine my delight when I discovered that this burgeoning collective, known for hosting sexy and accessible events for the college and university crowd through their partner project I’d Tap That, was hosting a live porn shoot at a local sex lounge. Finally, someone was offering something different on the live-sex scene: an environment of consent, genuine pleasure… and a young, sexy audience to boot.

The venue was as I’d expected: vinyl couches and beds everywhere, a plethora of towels and people from all walks of life. This was a night of firsts—my first time in a sex club and my first time watching others have sex, never mind while they were being photographed. I made my way upstairs in my skintight jeans and see-through white tee, navigating a sea of towel-clad twenty-somethings. I found a couple about to get busy on what seemed like the back of a Volkswagen hippy mobile. The doors, covered in bumper stickers reading ‘Remember Stonewall’ and ‘I <3 Girl Porn’ opened onto a vinyl (yes, again… sex clubs are into wipe-clean surfaces) couch where a young couple anxiously kissed each other while three photographers had their cameras at the ready. Turns out they were a real couple and knew how to lead each other to climax.

Soon after the peak of the performance, the dungeon was calling and I made my way down to see a live flogging. After some warm-up naked yoga, one of the event’s lovely hostesses volunteered to get chained up and whipped. Smacks, yelps and stinging groans echoed throughout the club as a crowd gathered at the door to see a pro-dom take her sub to the delicate space somewhere between pleasure and pain. After a flood of flashing lights, the photographers were happy and ready to move onto the next shoot. The hostess was freed from her bondage and squealed “Let’s have some sex!” as she giggled at her red bare bottom and headed to the door to find her next partner.

Throughout my viewing experience, I had expected to be transfixed by the motion of a man’s hips, or how different a woman’s vagina looked from mine, distracted from the act at hand and removed by my own thoughts; instead in both instances I felt like I was in the presence of true intimacy. It’s so rare to catch glimpses of what love looks like in true moments of vulnerability, for we can never be spectators of our own love, or the love we make with one another. Witnessing intimacy through a computer screen or in pictures irrevocably removes the layer of vulnerability that one undoubtedly feels in the presence of two people (or more) having an undeniably intimate experience. To watch these young adults fuck, to see a couple in an intimate and honest moment, and to witness a liberated woman thoroughly enjoy being tied up and flogged by an equally liberated woman had a profound effect on the way I viewed of sex.

In that sex club in those moments I saw trust, I saw freedom, I saw consent; it was sexier than I could have ever imagined. SPIT left me wanting to find a bit more freedom in my own sex, an end result I am certain they had in mind all along.

Photo by Sherwin Sullivan Tjia. Follow @PrimaFeminista