Okay, so here’s my report on dinner with Igor, purveyor of the RedClouds and VoyeurWeb amateur sex exhibitionist websites. The dinner happened in Toronto last weekend. Igor invited five couples – one from Toronto, one from Buffalo, two from Michigan and one from Windsor. Some of the couples posed mainly for the soft porn VoyeurWeb, but the couples from Michigan were into the more explicit and hardcore action on RedClouds. Those are the wild ones, Igor told me in his impish German accent. We had a semi-private room in an Italian restaurant which, as it turns out, was a good thing.


First off we had drinks and got to know each other. The couples were all older than me. I was probably the youngest person in the room, everyone else was in their Fifties. They were suburban empty-nesters with time to kill. They all had decent jobs and most of them had adult or near adult age kids. None of them were ‘out’ about their hobby to their families and friends and communities.


We sat at a single long table. I sat near the Michigan couples (best friends since they met each other online) and next to the Windsor couple. Igor – who has the air and appearance of an amateur sex Alfred E. Neuman – held court down at the other end of the table. The mood was jovial. We talked about how often the women are recognized going about their daily lives and what that feels like. Apparently, it happens occasionally, just enough to make it an event. It feels good, when it happens, though it can be a bit weird if the guy doing the recognizing gets a bit too excited. We talked about RedClouds parties at which the attendees wear different color wristbands so that the camera toting hordes know who they are allowed to photograph and post online and who doesn’t want to be publically identified.


Wine flowed freely and the jokes got increasingly ribald. At the same time, there was just a bit of awkwardness to the proceedings. The women on VoyeurWeb were quieter, insisting that they only posed because their husbands wanted them to. They wanted me to know that they did other things too – they golfed, worked, volunteered. Their men talked about camera lenses and photography courses. In contrast, The Michigan couples had pretty much engulfed themselves in the lifestyle. They no longer spent much time with their other friends. They traveled to parties and group holidays. It was clear that those who embraced the more social element had a totally different take on it than those who just privately snapped pictures and posted them. The posters were more into the voting and the comments. The socialites were more into the discussion boards and the gatherings.


Still, some commonalities: the women liked the attention and the men liked the adventure and sense of transgression. With the main courses cleared and new bottles of wine opened, body parts began to be flashed. The Windsor husband pretended to drop something under the table. He crawled around under there with his camera. When he emerged, the camera was passed around so we could see his up-skirt, no panties conquest. Everyone oohhed and ahhed about the picture. I looked over at the woman whose genitalia had just been photographed. She was, surprisingly, one of the more reserved VoyeurWeb posers. She was flushed, a little shocked at her behavior maybe. I wondered what was going on in her head. Everyone else kept looking at the picture, an object of fascination, a kind of totem around which to order their collective presence at the night’s festivities.