My Misadventures in a NYC Sex Club

It began as almost a dare. It ended with my tongue in my friend's mouth. [View in Browser]( [Esquire Sunday Reads]( [My Ladies’ Night Inside a High-End Members-Only Sex Club]( My Ladies’ Night Inside a High-End Members-Only Sex Club As a rule, if you get invited to the sex party, you go to the f*cking sex party. That was our consensus when we received the invitation to attend a masquerade at Snctm, a members-only club that promises sexual freedom, erotic theater, and maybe even group sex with some of the wealthiest hedonists on the planet. Founded by Damon Lawner in Beverly Hills in 2013, Snctm now hosts events in the financial capitals of the world: New York City, Los Angeles, Moscow, Miami. Watch the preview clip on the site, as my friends and I did, and it becomes apparent that this is more than performance art: guests are invited to share in the perversion. As a squad of women, most of us bisexual, all of us with cultivated kinks of our own, we were skeptical of the club’s potential for freakiness. The rules clearly catered to the gender binary: Single men must be members. Couples and single women can attend a one-off as non-members, though only after submitting an application that must include “clear, recent” photos and descriptions of their fantasies. Coupled men must also pay for event tickets. Women accepted to the “lady’s [sic] guest list” attend for free. Like most of Snctm’s soirees, as the company likes to call its parties, this one would be black-tie for men; women could choose between evening wear or just lingerie. With all the opportunities for inclusive, exploratory sex in New York City, how liberating could a cis-gender-leaning, ticketed event really be? 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But while it's not a new idea, our friends at LoT have perfected the form. [Read the Full Story]( [The 39 Best Movies of 2023 (So Far)]( The 39 Best Movies of 2023 (So Far) After a ginormous July for moviegoing, August was a much quieter month. There were no earth-shaking explosions or Barbie Land-shaking existential ruptures. On the other hand, though, there were several very good indies–which ran the gamut from sexy to heartbreaking, and introduced a host of compellingly complicated characters. The summer success has, naturally, inspired a lot of extrapolating and theorizing from fans and movie pundits: Does Barbenheimer prove moviegoers crave original stories from empowered artists? Should multiple blockbusters be released on the same day more often? How on earth do you replicate the viral marketing that made these two films must-see events? Francis Ford Coppola thinks we’re on the “verge of a golden age.” Studio executives, though, seem hellbent on squashing any momentum in service of keeping their wallets fat, putting talent in its place, and reserving the right to replace labor with AI one day. Earlier this summer, SAG-AFTRA joined the WGA on strike, and neither strike appears close to a resolution. Still, festival season is entering full swing nonetheless. So, get ready! The fall blitz is coming. [Read the Full Story]( [Inside Richard Osman's Mystery Empire]( Inside Richard Osman's Mystery Empire There is something fitting about speaking with Richard Osman from my childhood bedroom. It's early August and I'm in Ottawa, Canada's capital, to visit my mother, who turned eighty-one just a few weeks before. She's lived in this house for almost forty years—the balance of my life. And she, like me and like millions of readers on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, cannot get enough of Osman's Thursday Murder Club series of mystery novels, which feature a quartet of retirement village dwellers who band together to solve murders. This is also the same room in which I made my enduring love of crime fiction into something resembling a career. During the conversation, in advance of the publication of Osman's newest mystery, The Last Devil To Die, I keep glancing over at the bookshelf, a time capsule of mass-market paperback titles by the formative crime writers of my late 1990s and early 2000s youth: people like Lawrence Block, Laura Lippman, Dennis Lehane, Mary Higgins Clark, and Walter Mosley. Their books were chiefly entertainments, yes, but they also opened windows onto contemporary society in ways that made me think more seriously. [Read the Full Story]( [How to Make a Bloody Mary]( How to Make a Bloody Mary A Bloody Mary is a love-it or hate-it kind of cocktail, which makes sense. You generally drink it at brunch, setting yourself up for a totally wired (or very sleepy) afternoon. It is a meal itself, whereas a Mimosa is just kinda...juice with bubbles. Its base is tomato juice, which grown adults have been known to run from in horror. It is pungent as hellfire and sulfuric brimstone, if you make it with plenty of horseradish, Worcestershire, hot sauce, citrus, and other flavorful odds and ends—which is to say, if you make it the right way. And making a Bloody Mary the right way is why we're here today. Now, follow along: This recipe above makes one serving of Bloody Mary (two ounces of vodka, about six ounces of mix). Do you want to make only one Bloody Mary? Probably not, but maybe you're a solo bruncher. However, you can go for the batch by doing some simple arithmetic; in the videos below, for example, we doubled the recipe. Then, garnish wherever your salt- and citrus-craving soul takes you: lemon wedges, pepperoncinis, cherry peppers with feta, shrimp, pickled green beans, garlic dill pickle spears, caperberries, and of course, the classic celery stalk. Experiment with gusto. [Read the Full Story]( [The Marvelous Mouth of Cassius Clay]( The Marvelous Mouth of Cassius Clay The year before he became Muhammad Ali forever, legendary writer Tom Wolfe spent a week and a half with the boxing great. Revisit the iconic profile from the October 1963 issue of Esquire. “Ain’t anybody in boxing can draw like me. When I walk down the street, the crowds, they have to call the police.” When Cassius brags about crowds, that’s the part he really means. He is a little like politicians that way. I once heard Abraham Ribicoff say that the thing politicians live for after awhile is not the publicity, pictures in the newspapers, television and so forth, or power in the sense of having control over important matters, but personal deference—the way people hop to it when you come around or move when you say move. I think Cassius has the same feeling. [Read the Full Story]( Follow Us [Unsubscribe]( | [Privacy Notice/Notice at Collection]( esquire.com ©2023 Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Hearst Magazines, 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019