“I’m so wet,” groaned writer Noelle Purdue at an erotic literary reading, as she climbed onto the stage directly out of an enormous hot-tub, dressed in jeans.
“Is anyone turned on right now?,” she said.
Some in the audience (who were arranged in the swimming pool-sized hot tub) at the Sauna Salon event said they were.
Purdue was giving a graphic exposition of the emergent “wet denim” fetish and how it confounds the judicial principle that it’s impossible to define pornography “but you know it when you see it.”
She was followed on stage by downtown’s favorite/least favorite enfant terrible Caroline Calloway, who read her own translation of Ancient Roman poet Sulpicia, which revealed that Augustine it girls sounded a lot like Lena Dunham. (It turns out Calloway is fluent in Latin. “Tell your friends — Caroline Calloway, is smarter than you think!” she told the crowd.)
The event was hosted at the new Bathhouse on Atlantic Avenue in Downtown Brooklyn by Camille Sojit Pejcha, the sex and desire writer behind hit Substack newsletter Pleasure-Seeking.
Also on the bill were Tony Tulathimutte, Eliza McLamb, Magdalene Taylor and Grace Byron. Sojit Pejcha finished out the event with a story about her struggle with the civic and ethical implication of having loud sex.
It’s Pejcha’s second time hosting a reading in a bathhouse. “A lot of literary readings are sterile and stuffy; if we’re going to talk about desire, I think we should do it in an environment that fits the theme,” she told Page Six. “I like the bathhouse concept because it forces people to get out of their comfort zone, talk to strangers, and have an embodied physical experience — plus, almost no one is on their phone.”
“The fact that everyone’s stripping down to their skivvies also feels like a strange equalizer: the readers are being vulnerable, but so are you,” she said.
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