Girl on the Net

On Friday I went to Venus Berlin. On Sunday I bought two large McDonalds milkshakes, left them in the kitchen until they’d thoroughly melted, then clambered into the bath and poured them all over my tits. These two things are not unconnected.

Venus Berlin is a sex event. I want to say ‘sexpo’, but I think that portmanteau might be taken already, by Sexpo in Australia. If you’ve got a penchant for sex, there are a number of amazing events you can attend – from Eroticon (for established and aspiring sex writers – see my write-ups here), Sexhibition (for anyone and everyone – but with a particular focus on kink and burlesque), Woodhull (sexual freedom campaigners, educators and allies – see my write-ups here), and many many more. If I had to sum up Venus Berlin in one sentence I would tell you it’s ‘an exhibition for men with massive cameras who like taking pictures of tits.’

Venus Berlin: tits and cameras

That might sound a bit dismissive, but I promise it’s not meant to be. When I finally design my sexual utopia, men with massive cameras who like taking pictures of tits will be just as welcome as alternative pornographers, sex educators, and people who would rather not shout about their sex lives but are happy to live amongst people who do. I don’t want to sneer at the men with massive cameras, on the contrary I was fascinated – and aroused – by them.

Because I’m feminist, and supportive of alternative porn, I often get into discussions with people about the nature of what I’m going to call here ‘mainstream male sexuality.’ That’s not a particularly helpful phrase, to be honest, because not all men have the same tastes, or indulge their tastes in the same way. But I hope you understand what I mean by it, despite the clumsy words: it’s the kind of sexuality that enjoys page 3, or gets excited about a trip to a strip club. The kind of sexuality that is – broadly – the one catered to by the majority of straight, mainstream porn. In the early noughties it sat down to watch Babestation. Now it goes to PornHub and looks at slim, young women with lovely tits. If any of this sounds like you, then you would absolutely love Venus Berlin.

There are many many many beautiful, semi-naked women at Venus. That’s point number one and to be honest if you’re thinking about going next year, realistically this fact should be the main thing you consider when making your decision. There are many semi-naked women at Venus. There are many semi-naked women doing things that I have never seen at any of the UK sex events I’ve been to: wanking casually on sofas, inviting members of the audience to rub baby oil on them, getting incredible spray-painted body-art, etc. If you’re more kink-inclined, I also got to see a couple of pretty great bondage and suspension demos.

Venus Berlin: sex toys, sex dolls and dick shots

Alongside the nakedness, of course, there are stands where you can go and buy awesome sex toys. Doxy was there, which was lucky because on my rounds of the other stands I saw a few companies selling wands that looked rubbish. Feeble, wibbly things, that don’t hold a candle to Doxy in terms of power or beauty. I’m biased though, as you’ll know from my Doxy review, and also from the fact that they paid for my flight to Berlin so if it weren’t for them I wouldn’t be writing this post at all. Follow Doxy on twitter and if you don’t have a wand yet, or you own a rubbish wand and would like to replace it with a good one, get one of theirs.

Alongside vibrating wands, there was also a guy selling antique violet wands. These were phenomenally beautiful. I first encountered a violet wand in the hands of a dominant friend of mine: he blindfolded me, strung me to the ceiling by my wrists, hitched my skirt up round my waist, and then zapped me with it at irregular intervals so I never knew when the delicious hot sting was coming. It was awesome. So when I spotted a whole load of super-old violet wands I got really excited. The man on the stall let me play with them, or rather he poked and zapped me with one while I giggled coquettishly and urged him to turn it up.

There were also some incredibly realistic sex dolls, for which the word in German is the rather satisfying “sexpuppen.” I’ve always wanted to shake hands with a real doll, so was delighted that I got the chance to do it: bucket list achievement unlocked. On top of skin that feels like you’re touching yourself after being numbed with anaesthetic, some of the sex dolls also came equipped with central heating. This is why I don’t get to be a sex doll designer, because it would literally never have occurred to me that someone might want to warm their doll up before they fuck it. Perhaps this is why I’m so bad at foreplay.

Kiiroo. I’m fucking obsessed with sex tech, and when I say ‘sex tech’ it usually means sex robots or what have you, but I think toys like Kiiroo as well as OhMiBod and others are amazing too – not only do they mean it’s technically possible for someone with a dick to have a hands-free wank, they are also often used in creative and unusual ways by cam performers. At Venus Kiiroo were demo-ing the way their toy can be programmed to sync up with virtual reality porn. It was cool to have a play. I’m not 100% convinced that the movement inside the toy is good enough yet to provide a super-pleasurable experience, but what do I know? I don’t have a cock. I can tell you that I would very much enjoy watching a bunch of men hooked up to VR porn headsets with Kiiroos on their dicks testing it out. Maybe Kiiroo can make this happen for me.

Booze. There were at least two stalls where they were giving out tasters of alcoholic drinks, so naturally I became good friends with the people on these stalls throughout the course of the day. One of them even made tiny hollow plastic dicks filled with booze shots, because if something’s worth drinking it’s worth drinking out of a miniature plastic dick.

More importantly than the things, though, were the people. I got to meet the team from Kinky Kittens, who are a really lovely crowd, and who sat with me for ages in a Starbucks talking porn, ethics and teaching me Polish swearwords. They’re doing some pioneering things in a country which is not otherwise known for being super sex-positive: we shared horror stories about bad sex education and media representations of porn, and it sounds like they’re doing amazing work to break through sex and porn stigma, including hosting Sunday porn breakfasts – an idea I might shamelessly nick if any of my pals want to bring me McMuffins and watch the latest filth. Check out KinkyKittens’ website and follow them on Twitter.

I also met Bert Wibo who produces Massad magazine – the oldest Dutch BDSM magazine – as well as some amazing BDSM porn. He’s given me copies of two Domina Files films, so I now have the rather excellent pleasure of owning porn on physical media, and hopefully soon I will have a spare evening to sit down and have a marathon wank while watching them. Alongside giving me free porn, Bert also kindly got me in to a big Venus Berlin party, so for those of you who’ve read this far purely because I mentioned milkshake tits at the beginning, this is where your stamina is rewarded.

What about the fucking milkshake you promised, GOTN?

OK so. I have explained already how Venus was pretty tit-heavy. I have also – briefly – explained why mainstream male sexuality kind of does it for me. Perhaps because I read too many issues of FHM when I was an impressionable teenager, or had formative experiences in a sex cinema at the hands of a bunch of intensely horny blokes, but I enjoy this kind of thing. If I were shut in a room with a naked woman who was rubbing baby oil on herself like she was auditioning for Brazzers, I’d offer her a towel and a cup of coffee, but be erotically unmoved. However, if there were a crowd of gawking men in that same room, I’d find the whole thing deeply hot.

I basically have a kink for the ‘male gaze’ and we can talk later about how and whether that’s massively problematic.

Anyway. At this big Venus party on Saturday night, there was an incredible performance as everyone filed in. The club itself was beautiful – somewhere in the city centre at the top of a building, with huge glass windows so you can look out on a panorama of the city. But eclipsing the beauty of the club itself was the beauty of two performers who were positioned at the entrance as we walked on. One, a supremely hot guy in his pants holding an urn of what looked like thick spunk, and two, a supremely hot lady in a fishnet catsuit with her tits out, over whom he was pouring the liquid.

It was fucking mesmerising.

I love having my tits played with, touched, loved, and generally adored. And I love watching other people do the same. When I wank, many of my fantasies involve a fairly heavy tit-based element: the satisfaction of a tight top being pulled up to expose someone’s nipples, someone pressing the end of their cock against a full, rounded breast and squirting spunk onto it, maybe someone sucking hard and then pulling away so there’s a satisfying smacking sound of lips, spit and flesh. I like this very much.

And yet it hadn’t ever occurred to me to cover myself in something slippery and messy and just massage that stuff into and over my tits. I’ve no idea why. Sure, there have been massages and oils and all that stuff, but never something thick and creamy and altogether more splosh-y. Yet watching it at Venus Berlin, having found out from someone that it was actually melted ice cream, and then observing the crowd of eager men desperate to bury their faces in it was… unngh. It was hard to keep a conversation going with that happening close by, which is as sure a sign as any that the performance was A Good Thing.

It was so good that I could not get it out of my head. So fascinating and hot and yet weirdly … vanilla. Pun very much intended. It was sex of the kind I grew up catching glimpses of at the midnight freeviews on the dirty TV channels. Softcore, sploshy, playful tittilation that seemed almost Carry-On it was so traditional.

It was so perfectly tuned to cater to the male-gaze sexuality that was at the heart of Venus Berlin. And it occupied so many of my waking thoughts the day after, when I was exploring some of the less sexy elements of Berlin. In museums, on the bus, walking along beautiful streets being careful not to get run over by trams: the idea of pouring melted ice cream all over myself just would not leave my head.

So when I got home on Sunday, after giving my partner a big hug and a pile of airport chocolate, I told him we needed to head out to McDonalds.

If you want to see some pictures of Venus Berlin, check out the hashtag here. And if you want to support Doxy, who were kind enough to pay for my flight and show me a bloody good time once I got there, visit their website and go buy one of their amazing toys.