What It’s Like Being in a Sex Club in Canada’s Far North
January 22, 2019This article originally appeared on VICE Canada.
I brought banana bread to my first kink party.
It’s a Thursday night in Yellowknife, Canada, and I’ve trudged across a frozen lake to get to the houseboat hosting the party. Rylund Johnson opens the door when I climb aboard in a red flannel onesie, peering through thick-rimmed glasses perched above a bushy beard. He asks if I know anything about pellet stoves as he’s currently doing battle with the main source of heat on the boat.
Welcome to Northern Bound, Yellowknife’s BDSM group. Johnson has been one of the admins of the group for about a year, but this is the first workshop he’s hosted on his houseboat.
“It’s very Yellowknife to have a BDSM workshop on a boat,” he says.
He’s also aware that it’s a very Yellowknife thing to be able to invite people to your boat on the middle of a dark lake without them imagining you making a dress out of their skin because they probably already know you and all of your friends. “I can message people in that group and be like ‘hey do you want to come over to my boat and talk about submissive roles’ and they feel safe. Imagine getting that message on Tinder, you’d be like uh, no?”
Hovering around 100 members, the group is organized on Facebook using real names and real photographs in a town that often feels far smaller than it’s 20,000 population. It started about four years ago, with workshops to demonstrate shibari, a specific kind of rope bondage, and since has grown to cover all manner of kink, both great and small. Kind of like a bookclub, but with floggers.
“People show up and they have such ridiculous imaginations, that they’re just going to have an orgy and like they’re going to feel uncomfortable,” says Johnson. “And then they get there we’re having tea and a two-hour conversation about sexuality. And then there’s prescribed reading afterward, like here’s some articles and a book.”
The one I go to has two topics: being a strong, independent person who also likes to be submissive, and having a kinky, polyamorous life while raising small humans. People brought their own cushions and blankets for comfort, and at some point, Johnson pulls out a white plastic cutting board, and slices off hunks of brie with a kitchen knife while someone else passes around a new flogger they just bought on a trip to Calgary.
“That’s probably the second biggest purpose of this group, is just a collective to bulk order sex toys,” says Johnson. (In the north, you can’t exactly just pop into your local sex shop. Everything has to be bought online, or purchased when someone’s in more souther regions of Canada. One girl at the meet up had brought her latest acquisitions, bemoaning the fact that a southern shopping spree had outgrown her storage, and her kinky accoutrements were now being stored in four reusable shopping bags).
But he’s still aware that as a straight, male, dom, people’s stereotypes about the lifestyle are working in his favor. “For myself, being a guy, if someone finds out that I’m a dom, most of the time I get a high five. For a girl, the stereotype is that they’re a slut. And I hate that attitude, but unfortunately that’s part of the society I feel we still live in,” he says.
For Johnson and 42, changing those stereotypes is a big part of why it’s important to have such an open kinkster community in Yellowknife. It’s about changing the culture—not just around BDSM, but around sex in general.
“A lot of what this group is doing is not even BDSM, it’s just like sexual communication. This is my favorite thing about kinksters, they’re the best people on earth to have sex with, even vanilla sex,” Johnson says. “Before I have sex with someone, and this is part of the group too, it’s like a two-hour interview process. I need to make sure, absolutely sure, you’re comfortable talking and conversing during sex.”
He sees things like the intense focus on consent and communication trickling down from the kink community into every other kind of sex, and relationships in general.
“If someone shows up and they see how comfortable people are with very intense play, like very intense impact play and flogging and role-playing and collars, and they see people just talking casually about that, they go back and they’re like ‘oh we can’t talk about whether you’re on top and whether you’re enjoying it?’”
At the end of the day, he says he’s seen that culture start to shift as people become more open about the fact that yes, adults have sex and yes, it should be enjoyable. Even in a small town.
“It’s like yeah I have an exciting sex life, I should shame you for not having one! Do you want to talk about it?”
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