'A euphoric experience': What I learned at the first-ever Manchester Fetish Weekend
On the top-floor of a grubby pub, Luca is getting ready to fly.
He’s wearing nothing but a pair of matte leather briefs, his legs outstretched on a wheely medical table. Three masked peroxide-blonde ‘doctors’ are threading hooks and rope through neatly paired holes in his thighs and shoulders, fixing the ends to the scaffold framing the table with bondage knots that pull skin from muscle. The lights are dimmed, Islands in the Stream is playing through the bar speakers, and an audience of ten are sipping on glasses of wine.
Twenty minutes and a pile of disinfectant wipes later, the table is wheeled from beneath him. Luca drops, stops, and dangles three-feet from the ground, suspended by flesh and cable. He makes a face, then relaxes. Now he's ‘flying’.
Welcome to the first-ever Manchester Fetish Weekend.
Historically, events like this were a hush-hush, if-you-know-you-know affair for a dedicated few. But this weekend almost 1,000 people from around the UK - including a dominatrix influencer with 120k-plus followers - flocked into clubs, pubs and bars across the city to celebrate their unique type of sex.
So what’s the appeal?
Pub wisdom says that anyone who likes having their balls crushed with a stiletto has deep-seated trauma. Daddy issues, perhaps, or victims of child abuse or problems with authority. The fetish community says it’s a half truth. For most, fetish isn’t a symptom of trauma, it’s their medicine. A handful say it can be more psychologically purging than therapy. It just happens to be really, really fun.
Saurora is a tantric sexologist, conscious kink practitioner, sex therapist and sex worker.
“But they’re only really labels aren’t they?” she says. “My real passions lie with helping people release shame."
Saurora knows all about shame. Raised by a mother who taught her, from a young age, that sex was dirty and wrong, she hid her love of BDSM and kink - something she’d known she was into by the age of 14 - until well into her late-20s.
“[My mother] found my sex toys when I was younger and went f*****g mental,” she said. “We never talked openly about sex or bodies or pleasure. That whole world was just shrouded in shame. She had a horrendous relationship with herself - swore off sex the moment I was born, became an alcoholic, neglected herself mind, body and soul.
"Everything changed when she passed away."
Saurora spent a year getting her head around her grief over her mother’s sudden passing. Kink helped her to make sense of it. While roleplaying with someone she was dating, she asked her partner to ‘be my mother’, and to do nothing but hold her in their arms, stroke her hair, and tell her how proud they were of her.
“I don’t even know if I can put it into words,” she says. “It gave me so much closure, and allowed me to come to terms with her not being here anymore.”
After that night, Saurora made the decision to retrain as a sex therapist - “to help people like my Mum” - and among her regular clients, works with paraplegic kinksters, helping them to orgasm with other parts of their bodies when they’ve lost all feeling from the waist down.
“A big part of my work with disabled clients is reinforcing the idea that they deserve connection,” she says. “That they deserve fantasy, deserve to feel a woman's body on theirs. It’s becoming more apparent that disabled people really need and deserve connection, intimacy, sex work, kink, to live out and celebrate their fantasies. But they’re just ignored.”
It’s easy for polite society to dismiss Luca - the ‘flyer’ - as a lone strange man doing strange things to pacify strange urges. But Luca is an artist studying for a PhD, and his work is just as much about politics as it is about pleasure; a crossover of ideals at the core of the community’s past, present and future. So what is Luca hoping to express?
“The body is an instrument used by society to create regulation and social order,” he says. “But when you’re on stage, you are the one who is in control of it. You decide how much pain you can endure, what you do, how long for. I want to use BDSM to criticise power and the control of the body through the regulation of sexuality. To raise questions about government regulation of gay BDSM in the UK.”
BDSM is still technically illegal in the UK. The country that gave the world nine heavyweight boxing champions doesn’t recognise the possibility of consenting to bodily harm. But Luca’s art is especially ironic in Manchester, the home of 1987’s Operation Spanner, a homophobic police sting that ended in 16 men being convicted of assault and actual bodily harm for their role in a decade-long consensual sadomasochistic relationship.
Some of the men received sentences of 12 months, others four-and-a-half years, and the same law that sent the men to prison was upheld by the Conservative Party in 2024, two years after rumours started circulating of a Tory candidate organising gay BDSM sex parties.
Yes, fetish is about sex, but celebrating sex in a country as socially conservative as the UK makes political activism a necessity. One photo on the social media page of Manchester’s most popular kink event shows a person holding up a picket sign that says ‘Dear MPs, what we do with our own bodies is none of your f*****g business’. Another shows a man dressed as a policeman with ‘DEFUND ME’ written in permanent marker between the camo-print chest straps of their harness.
The fetish community says that activism is so important because they know what’s at stake. Outside of just sex, it gives its members the support and freedom to explore life-changing things. Some entered a club, a subreddit, a playroom, and left having found religion. It's helped others during physical rehab. But wherever it’s led them has allowed them to be the fullest, happiest version of themselves. And that’s worth protecting.
“I only came out as trans after I got into kink,” says Maddy, a younger member of the Manchester community. “Kink changed my perspective on my body. It made me realise that it’s mine and I don’t have to conform to what other people think it is. And I can explore it in so many ways. I can get hurt if I want to. I can hurt someone if I want to. I have autonomy.”
Maddy’s not alone.
Rubi Belle is a dominatrix who works in fetish communities all over the world. “I didn’t know what I liked, what I didn’t, or even who I was until I started experimenting in the community,” she says. “That discovery reached across all areas of my life. It made me much more vocal in my personal relationships, and allowed me to advocate for myself much more outside of the confines of kink or sex.”
As a ‘scene’ - a destination, a coming together of all the different sub-subcultures, sexual orientations and gender identities - Manchester’s fetish community is only about two years old. ‘Crossbreed’, a queer rave that ran for just two nights in July and September of 2022, was the first time people from disparate groups swapped numbers, started group chats and got organised. Two years isn’t nothing, but it’s rookie numbers compared to cities in Europe whose name alone inspires images of leather, latex, hardcore techno and sweaty club corners.
But who needs that? Manchester isn’t Berlin and it isn’t Amsterdam; instead, it’s what the community calls “new guard”. It’s conscious, thoughtful, caring, even wholesome at times. It cheerfully encourages experimentation but wouldn’t dream of pushing you - you do you, yunno? There’s no better example than the Manchester Fetish Weekend. There’s bullwhipping and live fisting demos, but there’s also bingo hosted by Crystal from RuPaul’s Drag Race. There’s the bondage workshop ‘Hitchin’ Bitches’, but there’s also a dance class from Homoparody - a dance troupe that ‘finds power in togetherness’. There’s dungeons, stocks, and Saint Andrew’s Crosses, but there’s also panels on trust and consent. There’s even life drawing.
“There’s a ‘northern niceness’ and an openness to the Manchester fetish scene,” Rubi says. “It’s much more welcoming and genuine. London, especially, has started to feel more like a popularity contest and a fashion show. Connectedness and sexuality have taken a back seat.”
Saurora agrees.
“For me it’s how close-knit the community is, and how welcoming everyone is,” she says. “The Manchester scene is more welcoming of older people, but it’s also more welcoming of much, much younger people. It’s what makes it unique.”
But as close-knit as the community is, there are still risks.
Sites like Pornhub - visited more often than LinkedIn last year - mean that fetish and kink is becoming more mainstream and accessible, and Katy is seeing more and more of ‘the wrong crowd’ turning up at events across the city - ‘alpha male’ men who think consent can be left at the door.
Katy was raped at an event in Manchester. She can’t say too much about it while the police investigate, but it involved a “conventional, mindless young man”, new to kink events, with no understanding of the history or rules of the community.
“Almost every single woman who I told about my sexual assault, I found had been sexually assaulted themselves,” Katy says. “Almost every single time.”
“It’s like when you hear reports of a murderer targeting a rural village because everyone leaves their doors open. There’s always that risk that someone might exploit the scene, because most people are so trusting and so safe. There are things in place that are robust enough for the subculture now, but it won’t be robust enough for the future.”
For people like Katy, fetish and kink events often have more to do with celebrating sexuality than raw sex. You could spend the night staying clear of the playroom and they’d still be inclusive, safe spaces to dance, find new friends, and learn something new about yourself. They’ve stayed safe, until recently, because everyone in the community was on the same page, especially on issues of consent and education.
Katy isn’t optimistic that that will be the case for much longer. “I chatted with two guys on dating apps,” she says. “Both were conventional heterosexual men, and both mentioned they were going to the same queer kink event. It shocked me because I realised it’s only a matter of time before this snowballs to the point where we haven’t got any control over the scene anymore.
“The whole point of kink events is that you’re meant to be safe from whatever you’re at risk from in the mainstream world. If you’re trans it’s from people being hostile or aggressive to your body. If you’re a bisexual woman it’s from fetishization.
“Consent and bodily autonomy is sacred. To come into a kink space, especially to come into a queer space as a straight person and abuse people’s trust is defiling that sacred space.”
“Almost every single woman who I told about my sexual assault, I found had been sexually assaulted themselves. Almost every single time.”
“The whole point of kink events is that you’re meant to be safe from whatever you’re at risk from in the mainstream world."
Common Kink Club Rules
- Understand the Dress Code
- Gain + Maintain Consent
- Do Not Touch Without Explicit Consent
- Do Not Interrupt Play
- Do Not Solo-Wank
- Do Not Pressure
- Do Not Abuse Us
- No Photos, No Videos
- Do Not Be Ignorant
- No Chemsex
But Pornhub can’t solely be blamed for introducing fetish and kink to people who think buying a bodysuit on ASOS counts as educating yourself. While a lot of older kinksters found their way into the community through 50 Shades of Grey, Gen-Z are discovering the extreme extremes of the kink spectrum in their early teens, with no guidance beyond the comment section.
“I think it’s so seductive to see something on TikTok and think ‘You know what? Why not pull out a knife during sex?’” says Maddy. “I personally got into kink too young. I saw it on the internet and didn’t educate myself properly. I didn’t realise until I was a bit older the importance of safety in the community.
“I’m seeing 16-year olds commenting on choking videos on TikTok. They should not be getting into breath play so young, it’s really not safe. If it was getting into the mainstream with the education behind it, then it wouldn’t be as big of a problem. But people aren’t learning about it in a safe way.”
One TikTok creator made her living getting paid to abuse men online, consensually, and for their pleasure. But her cash-flashing created a flood of uneducated copycats who cyberbullied submissive men without their asking and then demanded payment. To put it mildly, it had a damaging effect on both the men and the fetish community.
“Pre-internet you’d only learn about fetish from the community itself,” says Rubi. “The communities were pretty small, there was a unique code of conduct, and if you didn’t abide by those rules then you risked ostracization.
“Fetish used to be a closed practice, but now there’s an element of tourism, of people not aware of the space or rules. They don’t have the same concepts of what it means to be a part of the community, and they don’t have an understanding of what consent means. That’s the biggest problem.”
But Rubi also stresses the positive potential of the internet. “It can go the other way,” she says. “The internet gives great opportunities for discussion and education that wasn’t previously available. More people come at it from an educated space.
“On the whole kink spaces are beautiful spaces. I typically feel much much safer in a fetish or kink event than I do at a ‘vanilla’ bar. Nine times out of ten I will always feel more welcome, and I will always feel safer, because most of the people engaging in that space have an understanding of consent.”
Another speaker at the trust and consent panel puts it more succinctly. “Being mainstream is not seen as particularly attractive, and it can invite idiots,” she says. “But there’s idiots everywhere, even in subcultures.
“The more that we speak for ourselves and give colour to conversations, the more hope we have that society that can support us.”
That same panel is hosted by Lou Safire, an award winning burlesque dancer who’s travelled up from London just to be here.
“We’re all here for the same reason,” he says.
What’s the reason?
“To get our rocks off, who knows?” he laughs. “To get society to understand that fetish is okay.”
If you are a survivor of sexual assault and have been affected by this article, please visit The Survivors Trust
Built with Shorthand