Mr. Pinup

This weekend saw not one but two stories on woman-centered sex clubs, one focused on the meditative achievement of the female orgasm and the other on wearing cat ears and boning on leather beds.

One Taste, profiled by Patricia Leigh Brown and Carol Pogash in the New York Times, is a San Francisco residential center where 38 men and women learn to create “the orgasm that exists between them.” They do this through what they call “morning practice,” a 7 a.m. ritual in which couples gather in a room, the women strip to the waist, and the men “stroke” them until they orgasm. The couples don’t have to be dating — they call each other “research partners.” Participants call the practice “orgasmic meditation,” and say it’s more about “the ‘hydration’ of the self” than about sex. The bulk of the article, though, actually discusses whether or not founder Nicole Daedone has a Svengali-like hold on her students.

Killing Kittens, covered by Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe in the Times of London, sounds a little racier. This London sex club is also female-focused — a man can’t get in without a woman. But the women in attendance have to be “conventionally good-looking” and one in three applicants is turned away. Once they’re admitted, they can attend the club’s high-class parties, frequently held at members’ homes, where they can drink champagne, have sex with their partners or with new men or women, or just watch activities like an amateur porn director “buffing his bits” against porn stars in the shower. Drugs and cameras are strictly forbidden, but Hunt-Grubbe and a friend found both on their respective visits. And although condoms are provided, the screening process checks for hotness but not for STDs. Founder Emma Sayle says Killing Kittens is “about women – not alpha females who storm up to men – but feminine and sensual ones who can go and dance around in their underwear and drink with no pressure and no expectations, just free to feel sexy and have fun.”

via Sex And The Cities: A Tale Of Two Sex Clubs.

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