With a sex club rumoured to be opening in Dublin next month, one might have visions of wild debauchery, sumptuous lingerie and a medley of meticulously groomed genitalia. Last summer, I attended a sex club in San Francisco, which turned out to be immensely different from my expectations.

What kind of people go to a sex club? At first, I entertained all sorts of romantic notions — the rooms would be elegantly lit, with luxurious period furniture, upon which we would find super sexy people doing super sexy things to each other. I dreamily imagined us walking in repressed and unworldly, and walking out enlightened. I was immediately brought back to reality once we got inside, as we were greeted by the jaded volunteer staff members, who sleepwalked us through the rules of the club, handed us the contract agreements to sign, and brusquely requested our $25 admission fee, cash only.

The rules were pretty straightforward: no touching without consent, no aggressive cruising, no sleeping, no cameras or mobile phones, and no alcohol. BDSM was popular, and the club provided various bondage chairs and frames, as well as a cage. Scattered around the “play areas” were volunteers with glazed eyes, looking deeply unimpressed, either with their jobs or with being left out of the fun. To be honest, I doubted whether anyone was having any fun. I considered public, group sex to be one of the last remaining sexual taboos, and had expected to find myself surrounded by people in the throes of passion, like I’d seen in the unabashedly explicit film Shortbus (2006). Instead, there were grungy sofas on which a few blobby couples half-heartedly went at it, or quietly jerked each other off to the strains of nondescript “scene music”. We figured we should get involved, so got in the queue for the spanking horse. Although sex clubs usually encourage voyeurism, we were met with disapproving looks from the staff and patrons, and ended up spending our wait time staring at the incongruous LED dance floor, upon which exactly no one danced.

The promised “munchies” were presented on an almost absurdly banal buffet table, featuring an assortment of celery sticks (something I seldom associate with sex or nudity), along with flasks of coffee and tea. The “ambiance” over at the snack table was farcical when contrasted with the main dungeon and play areas — here, one of my friends bumped into a lecturer from his course, and enjoyed a ludicrously normal conversation with him and his wife, both in their underwear. As most of the attendees were in polyamorous or open relationships, respect and communication are crucial here, but the whole process seemed like a lot more work than I had expected — the communication is so thorough it becomes tedious, and people describe their relationship boundaries in such explicit detail that the spontaneity seems to perish. While this was a bit of a vibe-killer for the club, it was inspiring to see partners being so open and trusting of each other.

I wondered if the problem had been aesthetic, and whether more decadent, sophisticated sex clubs were the solution. I spoke to an English girl named Claire about Torture Garden, “the world’s biggest fetish club”, where she attended a Valentine’s Ball with roughly 2,000 attendees. These parties focus more on spectacle, with a lavish cabaret performance, and although you hand in your phone at the door, there are photographers about the club to take glamour shots of the crowd. At £70 a ticket, the audience is largely composed of wealthy Londoners. Torture Garden enforces a very strict dress code, and it’s common for people to be turned away if their look isn’t sexy enough. Their website asserts, “we don’t want just anybody at our events,” and by leaving it up to the people at the door to determine someone’s sexiness or unsexiness, it’s clear that Torture Garden are more interested in crafting an exclusive, “cutting edge” aesthetic than providing a fun, welcoming atmosphere. In this way, it’s at the other end of the scale: the Citadel, for all its body and sex positivity, ended up being deeply unsexy, while the Torture Garden privileges sexual spectacle to such a degree it’s more like paying for really good seats at the theatre. Neither club matches my ideas of what or how a sex club should be, and it remains to be seen how the Dublin club will negotiate the middle ground between mundanity and spectacle.