All Aboard The Sex Boat: Atlantis

This story from the 1970 Dutch magazine Mascotte has the whiff of public relations puffery about it, as if it’s trying to make a “wild floating orgy” story out of a “booze cruise hired a few sex workers to get some publicity” set of facts. But then again, fifty years of time-gone-by, and Google’s uncertain machine translation, have surely eroded some of the nuance we would prefer to have. The upshot, from what I can tell, is that in May of 1970 some sort of German/Dutch partnership attempted to boot up a floating sex club that operated day cruises on a pleasure vessel named Atlantis. (There have been many ships named Atlantis but I believe we are talking about this one.) Sadly the venture swiftly failed, due to lack of uptake by the fornicating public:

PORN SHIP “ATLANTIS”

The latest in the Danish sex movement is the appearance of the luxury passenger liner “ATLANTIS”, registered under the German flag, but thoroughly Danish in its furnishings and entertainment. On May 1, the boat was presented to the press and every journalist and photographer was welcome to experience the test run. The boat has room for 400 passengers, who are entertained from seven in the evening until well into the night. The management of the festivities rests with the club “TABU-MARITIME”, which claims that the boat is nothing but an ordinary night club, with the only difference being that one is now on the water and the public cannot leave until the boat is tidily again located in the harbour.

These pictures were all taken during the first trip of the boat. The guests were welcomed by two well-known strippers who did their utmost to warm up the guests, although it had already become quite cold by evening that first day of May. The screaming music from the countless loudspeakers blared around the boat, so that the girls did not feel too much of the cold through fierce dance movements, much to the delight of the visitors who already got a foretaste of what awaited them that night.

When this charming lady has finally completed her comic strip on the quay and she can be admired from all sides in Eve’s costume, the huge steam whistle blows, the music sounds loudly and the naked lady is hoisted up as an “anchor” and the party can only really begin to start. All decks are filled with merry folks and open-hearted girls. The bars and salons are fully booked and different groups regularly perform. Dance groups, ballet, small plays, all based on the one theme of sex. Everything is allowed on board and everything must be approved, by the sailors, as well as by the girls working on board. It should just be a casual social gathering, says the owner of Club Tabu, and he wanted to emphasize that it is certainly not his intention to turn the “Atlantis” into a floating brothel. Every porn club in Copenhagen, according to the club management, offers the same program as us, only us on a boat and them in a permanent room. Being completely free brings our guests into a hee! different mood and that sometimes something is done differently than usual…. oh well, and moreover we have the space. There are enough cabins and it is logical that the guests and the girls sometimes get tired. Four to five hours on your feet is a long time, also for the girls!

Under the guidance of experienced sailors, the showgirls were allowed to hold the wheel during the press demonstration and the captain agreed that he had never enjoyed being on the bridge so much. In any case, the girls were not restrained and each really put her best foot forward to animate the guests. The girls here are Anja and Bettina, well-known strippers from the Danish nightlife scene, both of whom can boast of having been proposed more than a thousand times without ever bending their knees. Anja’s ideal is to survive until she has enough money to start a small farm far from Copenhagen and marry a quiet man who knows nothing about her past. Bettina’s ideal is one boutique in a country estate and as she can see it now she is not thinking about marriage. She calmly waits for the commune which is better worked out and hopes to reach the ideal community later with some good friends, but before that happens she first wants to play around herself, something for which the “ATLANTIS” offers her plenty of opportunities.

There is also joy and cheerfulness everywhere at the bars and who will not believe that such barmaids encourage the guests to have a spontaneous round, because who knows, maybe they will soon become tipsy ladies and would like to go to their room for a drink. To recover?

In between all this there were constant shows to admire. A real porn movie was only a weak reflection of everything that was conjured up for the guests on the “ATLANTIS”. Sex in all shapes and positions. The seasoned gentleman who visits a steady girlfriend every week. The shy outdoorsman who also wants to give it a try but don’t know exactly how to do it. The prostitute, who knows the blows of the whip all too well, tries to tell him all kinds of crazy things and fools around with him, so that by the end he no longer knows where to look. Group sex, one man with four women and vice versa, where it’s just amazing to see the possibilities to experience the ses in ways you never thought of. The “ATLANTIS” can simply be seen as the college of love. Anyone who has experienced a trip at the price of about seventy-five guilders excluding consumptions can consider themselves a graduate in the sex field. For him there is really nothing new under the sun or between the sheets!

Just as “MASCOTTE” went to press, we received the message that the “ATLANTIS” is on the bottle. Hardly a good month at sea, the visit was very disappointing. It was expected that about two hundred enthusiastic sex visitors would book every day, but they barely exceeded fifty per trip. It is not yet known what will happen to the staff, but there is a lot from the business side interested in hiring the ladies as secretaries, with love… that is!

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They Like To Be Watched

It’s not clear that these two lovers are planning to do anything particularly outrageous, but apparently it’s interesting enough for at least six other people to gather around and watch them do it:

Artwork is from the cover of Casebook: The Sex Clubs – A New Phenomenon (FL-111 1972).

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The Sex Club How-To

I come from a long line of men who, in my family, all run to varying degrees of in-person social discomfort, possibly due to some sort of mild spectrum disorder. If that’s what it is, it’s necessarily undiagnosed, because we are emphatically not the sort of men who voluntarily seek medical attention unless there is chest pain or spurting arterial blood. Moreover, we come from the social class where our imagination of mental health care (imagination of it being all that we have) is a Loony Tunes vision of something imposed by predatory men in white coats who come in a van with their straitjackets and a net on a long pole, preparatory to hauling us off to a room with padding on the walls.

However much or little of this social discomfort issue any one of us may endure, one common nuance of it is an extreme aversion to doing anything where we “don’t know the program”; I once saw my father refuse to eat at a fancy wedding brunch buffet because he’d never seen a buffet before that had servers at stations (like an omelette station) and he didn’t “know the program.” He was, basically, paralyzed and willing to forgo thirty-five bucks worth of all-you-can-eat chow because he didn’t know how he was supposed to interact with a catering employee. I had to get him a plate. (No, I’m not free of the disorder; I just avoided all the stations that had terrifying paper hats behind them, which the men in our family would consider “above-average coping skills”.)

Needless to say, we are not the sort of men who would voluntarily participate in an orgy or visit a sex club. Too many strangers and, it can be inferred from first principles, too obviously a set of necessary behavior protocols that we don’t know. It’s just not going to happen. We don’t know the program.

Still: although a visit to a sex club would likely be an impossibly large ask for one of us, we can and do learn new programs, albeit slowly and at no small cost in psychological stress. And one of the ways we do that is by doing lots of advance research and preparation. Hence I’m always fascinated by “how to” articles about activities where I don’t “know the program” and would thus be unlikely to do the thing. Slotting firmly into that category is Navigating a Sex Club for the First Time by Red Hot Suz, who offers about a dozen different tips and suggestions that will ease your first visit to a sex club. Reading the article doesn’t make it more likely that I’ll take my odd little bundle of inherited social phobias to a sex club any time soon, but it should smooth the way for more adventurous types. Consider this sensible suggestion from the Interacting With People section:

Flirting. Most clubs have an Ask Once policy, meaning that you can only approach a person/group of people once to ask to join them. If they say no, you cannot ask again. However, a good amount of people in attendance are open to talking and flirting, and maybe playing if the connection is right. Just because you’re at a sex club does not mean that you don’t have to try. Be as respectful as possible, and be as charming as you would be on a date.

Much more good sense of this sort awaits ye who go to read the whole thing.

Credit: The image at the top of the post is by good-girl artist Bob Powell and is from the story “I Joined A Teen-Age Sex Club” in First Love Illustrated #13 (1951).

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