Laurie Penny attended the “Erotica” trade show, and was underwhelmed:
Welcome to Erotica: Britain’s Gulag of desire
If you had to build a prison for human pleasure, it would look like this.You shuffle through the clinical, white foyer of the Olympia Grand Hall in Kensington and, after presenting several forms of ID to prove that you’ve paid the requisite £20 for your sexy times, security guards usher you into a huge iron stadium full of concession stands and bored-looking women in their scanties.
This is Erotica, “playtime for grown-ups”: a festival that is billed both as Europe’s “best-attended erotic event” and “a unique shopping experience” — statements that, taken together, possibly explain a great deal about western sexual dysfunction.
[. . .]
The punters are English, bourgeois and middle-aged; the strippers onstage and in the booths are young and eastern European. They smile desperately through shrouds of fake tan. The punters, a mixture of hardcore fetishists in rubber and older couples in fleeces, clutch plastic pints of lukewarm larger as they watch the grim stage show. Strippers gyrate in nothing but thongs and a couple of England flags, a cross between a jiggle joint and an Anglo-fascist rally. In true British style, the audience claps politely while pre-recorded applause thunders over the speakers.
