By Emily Wrigglesworth
Normal clubs have loud music. Normal clubs have alcohol. Normal clubs have guys who get a little too touchy feely with the girls. Oasis Aqualounge has all of that. But it’s a sex club, and most people there are already naked. Those people are usually only women and couples at the club.
Oasis only allows single men into their club one night a week: Wednesday. For most clients, this night is not a problem. In fact, some of the women that go to the club make light of the fact that single men seem to flock to the club on those nights.
“I have a friend who calls it ‘Weiner Wednesdays’,” laughs Skye Fraser as she sips a drink at the bar, wearing a towel around her legs, black fairy wings and nipple rings glinting in the light. The lights from the strobe pulse almost in time with the beat of the club music coming from the DJ table behind her.
She doesn’t find the amount of males at the club disturbing though.
“I’ve never had an issue. It’s a decent place.”
Fraser (who did not want her real first name used) was a regular at the club when she lived in Toronto. Since moving to Ajax, she only comes to Hot Springs Wednesdays. She says that there isn’t a noticeable difference with the club atmosphere between the nights that men aren’t allowed and those when they are.
“They know that no means no,” she explains. “ And (the staff) are right on top of things.”
Even the guys have noticed the overwhelming number of men.
“There’s too many fucking guys!” says Franco Ace (who did not want his real name used).
“I don’t mind them as much,” says Renthu Rishigan with a smirk. “I like to mind the ladies.”
The club is quiet during the day, with a smattering of people throughout the club, chatting around the bar downstairs. There’s usually a guy or two who takes advantage of the couch sitting next to the bar and has a great view of whatever porn movie is playing on the big screen behind the DJ booth and stripper pole. These are the guys who usually walk around without towels or clothes and stroke their manhood whenever they catch someone glance over.
When the sun goes down, the club starts to fill up. This is when the hot tub fills up with seven or eight naked men, and one or two naked women. The crowd gets younger – the daytime crowd tends to be between 45 and 65 years old, while the night crowd dips to around 25-50. The drinks start flowing. The towels start to come off and the girls start to moan. Couples playfully run up and down the stairs, smacking each others bums, bouncing from the hot tub to the bar to the third floor, which is restricted to just women and couples. Single men can only go up there if they are accompanied by at least one lady.
A couple or two play in the dungeon on the second floor, tying each other up, spanking or flogging each other, while six or seven men stand at the door or sit on couches, with their jaws on the floor, wide-eyed and hands moving at a steady rate around their genitals. Up and down. Up and down. Faster now.
This type of attention isn’t for everyone though, and some of the women feel uncomfortable with hordes of gaping men watching them while they try to relax and reach their climax.
“For a single lady, it can be a little intimidating,” laughs Esther DeVille, a long-time patron at the club and the Human Resource Manager. “Not that I can’t deal with the guys, but it’s sometimes wrought with desperation.”
Desperation is the word of the night, as the men generally outnumber the women 7:1. Some of the single women go to the club on Wednesdays to try to pick up the single men and have a nice night of drinking and playing, but the men tend to expect to have sex.
“Obviously there are times that certain guys come in and think that they can just go in there and just have sex,” says Kitty Fung, who goes by the name Ms. Kitty and hosts Hot Springs. “But, of course, everything is with consent.”
The guys that go to Oasis have even started to refine their approach to women in order to get more action. Some have found that being polite and gentlemanly will go a whole lot further than being in-your-face about their intentions.
“When I first came here,” says Ace, “I was aggressive, and it didn’t get me anywhere.”
That’s because Oasis is all about making people feel comfortable and safe. It’s why the club is geared towards women and couples. When the club was founded, then-owner Toni Johnson decided that there were already enough sex clubs and bathhouses that were geared towards men.
Due to the area that the club is situated in (The Church-Wellesley Corridor, commonly referred to as “The Gay Village”), many of the bathhouses that surround Oasis cater to the gay male crowd.
Oasis Aqualounge was opened under the assurance that they would not steal the clientele from the surrounding gay bathhouses.
“We want to be good to women and their partners,” says an employee who does not want his name used because he also works with children. “And it’s a concept which hasn’t existed until now.”
They’re good to the guys too, but even the club can’t work the kind of magic the single men are hoping for.
At the end of the night, there are many men who leave just as sexually unsatisfied as when they came. The difference is that they’re slightly too drunk to notice now. Hopeful shouts of “So you’ll be coming back next week?” echo across the changeroom as many guys try a last ditch effort to take a girl home, or at least get her number.
Emily Wrigglesworth 