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In Issue One writer Tara Fischer candidly interviews Emma Sayle, creator of Killing Kittens, a private members club that caters for the more sexually adventurous. The club has gained much notoriety with tales of Killing Kittens parties having been splashed across the tabloids in recent times.
The club hosts intimate parties in London and around the UK facilitating orgies where women make the rules; men are only allowed to attend if accompanied by a female, and may only interact with a woman if invited to do so. As the ethos of The Quite Delightful Project is to embrace and celebrate female sexuality we were keen to meet a female sex club pioneer, a woman taking on an industry that is traditionally steeped in misogyny and exploitation, and turning it around so that women make, and break, the rules.
So Emma, how long has Killing Kittens been in existence for now?
Eight years, we started it back in 2006.
And where did the idea of a sex club for women come from?
I had the idea in my head for about a year before announcing the first party.
I was working in PR, and ended up doing promotions for the Erotica show in London. I was working freelance and had lots of weird and wonderful clients at that time. I was happy to take on anything! A lot of these clients were doing some quite off-the-wall parties: fetish nights and high-end swinging parties. Some of it was quite eye-opening!
Like many of us, I had the misconception that what swingers did was pretty disgusting. I thought it was just people throwing car keys into a bowl in one last desperate attempt to cling on to their marriages. To my surprise, though, they were really nice people and it was all very upmarket. Everyone was good-looking, the houses were lovely, and the couples there were actually completely in love! It was a very different reality than I had previously imagined. Everyone was so very normal.
Also, increasingly, I found that most of the adult industry were businesses run by men claiming to be ’female friendly’, but they just weren’t.
In what way?
Well, for example, my assistant Cleo went to a party to do some research and at one point during the evening all the girls were taken upstairs to get undressed together, and the guys took photographs of the girls so that they could keep them as a souvenir! They then brought all the girls downstairs together naked. It was such a tacky thing to do! They were not at all interested in making the women feel comfortable! It was all about the men watching a parade.
How demeaning, and so embarrassing! How did you think you could improve on such a misogynistic set up?
The more I worked in this sector, the more I kept thinking how sex is actually very different for girls. Which is why a lot of men can watch porn – and it’s like, instant hard-on, turned on, done! Yet when a lot of women watch porn we just think, “Urgh!” It’s all bright lights and some ugly guy going for it. Not sexy. Women need the touch, the smell, the feel, to be turned on; sometimes everything except the actual act!
At the same time, Sex & The City was on television, and Ann Summers (a UK lingerie and sex toys retailer) had hit the high street. For the first time ever, you could buy a sex toy from a mainstream high street store, and talk about it in public! So, there was all this female sexual revolution bollocks going on, and I thought, well if a girl wants to kiss another girl, or try it on with another girl, where can she go, other than a random lesbian bar, to explore her sexuality?
It’s one thing to think this thought, but another thing altogether to act on it…
Well, perhaps the catalyst was when I went to a wedding in Ibiza. A couple of my friends were involved with a very hedonistic crowd, the sort of posse who were all at it with each other. At the wedding party it was all going on! People were wandering around naked, or in underwear, and a very, very famous actress was on the kitchen table having sex, in front of everyone. But she looked beautiful and everyone was just happy, it was all totally casual and all just a bit of a laugh.
When you describe it like that it does sound very different and more fun – the opposite to the usual conformist reaction to such a scene.
It wasn’t seedy at all. To be honest, I’d already had enough at work of representing people and clubs in PR that I didn’t have any passion for. I realised that this party was exactly what my clients were failing to create.
So this is the party you talk about in your book Behind the Mask, where the name Killing Kittens came from?
Yes, that’s right. The morning after the wedding we were sat around chatting, and someone asked if everyone had finished killing kittens. I had no idea what they meant! Apparently it comes from an old US college joke that every time someone masturbates, God kills a kitten.
We had one of those long hungover chats about what had happened the previous night, and I just thought, sod it, I’m going to go for it – I’ll organize a party and see what happens. I knew I had the skills to make it work. As we sat there chatting I came up with rules for the club, and envisaged something that looked a little like the parties in Stanley Kubrick’s film, Eyes Wide Shut.
Emmas’ recently published book Behind the Mask, explores in even greater detail the story of how Killing Kittens came into being unfolds.
Visit the Killing Kittens website and follow them on Twitter @killing_kittens
To read the full interview, get hold of your first issue from The Quite Delightful Project HERE.
