JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA – I’m not feeling shy or put off. I don’t feel in the least bit like leaving.
The nurse in a cage, the man painting portraits with his penis, and the fetish expert who just offered – somewhat insistently – to tie me up haven’t caused the slightest blush to my cheeks.
In fact, it all feels quite normal.
Not even scaling a giant penis and being handed a rainbow-coloured dildo by an almost naked cowboy as a prize for reaching the top makes me feel like I’m doing anything out of the ordinary.
That’s the beauty of the Sexpo, being held at Gallagher Estate this weekend – it makes shopping for sex toys seem like picking out a set of garden furniture.
Not that the Sexpo is without titillation. Certainly, watching pole-dance contests and listening to real live porn stars discuss their love for fornicating are a little more exciting than choosing which pot plant would look best in front of your house.
But the fact that it’s an expo, not some sleazy side-alley establishment with broken neon signs and blacked-out windows, appears to give ordinary people permission to come and explore.
It’s a safe space where middle-aged couples pick out role-play outfits together – “What’ll it be, honey? Straight-A student or sexy cop?” – where women unabashedly debate the virtues of rabbit versus dolphin vibrators, and men stand transfixed by demonstrations of a penis enlargement device.
Sadomasochists can pick up copies of must-haves such as Flogging, The Ethical Slut, The Complete Slave and Leatherman’s Handbook II, as well as that timeless classic, The Ties that Bind.
For R1 000 you can even get legally married in the Chapel of Love. At the Sexpo, anything goes.
The strange thing is, the sexual liberation is strictly limited to the confines of the exhibition arena.
Step outside the playpen, and society once again expects you to be aghast at the skimpy outfit of the pubescent girl whose parents should know better than to let her go out looking like that!
No matter how normal it feels to watch a penis puppeteer doing things to his thing at the Sexpo, once you’re outside, masturbation sleeves, blow-up dolls and anal beads suddenly become taboo.
As I walked out of Gallagher Estate I suddenly became self-conscious about the rather obvious protuberance caused by the cowboy’s dildo in my plastic Sexpo bag. I stuffed it further down, and tried not to look like I was carry a penis cigarette lighter in my handbag.
What is it about sex that causes us to feel like we have to hide?
Ancient civilisations never had this problem. For the Greeks, high-society events were not deemed complete without at least one decent mass orgy.
As sexologist Professor Elna McIntosh says in her Big O workshop, on daily at the Sexpo: “If a woman were to lose her vagina, she wouldn’t know how to describe it to the police. She’d have to call her husband to identify it in a line-up, and even he would ask for the lights to be put off so that he could feel for the right one.”
As I made my way to my car, avoiding the eyes of people who, I was sure, could tell that I was carrying a copy of Hustler in my bag, I resolved to be less uptight about sex. In fact, I was going to go right home and study my private parts – in secret, of course.
Courtesy The Star: South Africa
Tags: Kinks & Fetishes, Nudity, Penis, Recreation, Sex, Sex Toys