The Dungeon, midnight. I see a sign in front of me: "This business is owned by a reservist"
She hadn't been to The Dungeon club in a decade, but a good friend wanted to go and his wife wasn't up for it, so she went with him — and returned shocked, but not for the reasons you might guess. A monologue of a young woman who thought she would be exposed again to a dark sexual counterculture, but was exposed only to older, chubby men, women who look like National Insurance clerks, Britney Spears songs, and a birthday cake: the Israeli kink, its mundane lines.
Warning: The following article contains explicit sexual descriptions.
"Carmel, come with me to The Dungeon," my good friend Ido wrote to me a few weeks ago. His wife said she didn't have the energy to go with me, and I had never been.
The Dungeon, for those who don't know, is a fetish and BDSM club founded in 2002 and was the first of its kind in the country. It is located on HaArba'a Street in Tel Aviv, next to the Cinematheque plaza, and you can only enter in pairs, male and female, just like Noah's Ark, only with a dress code — black, and as little of it as possible. The motivation behind this arrangement is clear: to avoid at all costs a distinct male majority, what is called a sausage party.
It's not surprising that Ido wanted to go there. TikTok and Instagram have been flooded lately with content about kink, fetishes, and alternative sexuality, and all this just in my feed, a person who fundamentally experiences herself as conservative in this regard. This is perhaps part of what convinced me to join Ido, that and the time that has passed since I was at The Dungeon.
Its first incarnation was at Kedumim Square in Jaffa. I wasn't there, because I was 8 years old at the time. After protests, counter-protests, and protests against the counter-protests, the club moved to a building in the south of the city. But time, real estate laws, and the Jewish Agency — the owners of that building, who managed a stubborn struggle for it to leave its premises — did their work, and ten years ago The Dungeon moved to HaArba'a Street. At that time, I also got to visit it. There were fat women holding whips, thin men with tied testicles, beautiful people, less beautiful people, magnificent breasts, nipples of all kinds caught in clips and pliers, men in drag, and women in stilettos whose purpose was perfectly clear. I was 22 and loaded with questions about who I am and how I am, feeling completely exposed to external gazes, as if everyone could see my fracture on me. When I sat there among all these delusions, I felt boring, and it was so comforting.
For a whole week, I tried to figure out what to wear. I no longer had slutty clothes from my wild 20s; most of my dresses are maternity dresses. In the end, I found a black dress, too tight, too short, too revealing, in which I didn't feel comfortable enough, and I said: "Perfect."
The age range was huge, 18–99, like a KodKod board game. When I visited there for the first time, there was a screen on which they projected Smurf porn, and there was a maze you could walk through just like in an amusement park, only instead of mirrors there were people having sex. The feeling was of an alternative subculture, a wild counter to the mundane Israeli reality.
I mainly remember the smoking corner. I sat there and watched a cute young girl being tied up for her pleasure by a man who probably studied shibari, the Japanese art of tying, while we were all neck-deep in the slime craze. Another man, about 60, approached me and asked if I was more dominant or submissive. The answer was neither, because I was just a tourist. That guy thought and said: "In my opinion, you are actually a queen." It was absurd: to be a queen, you need desire, and desire is the last thing I had at 22. I just wanted to have desire. In any case, immediately after that, he asked if I was willing to ash in his mouth. At that moment, I realized that no matter what my reaction would be, he had already won. I would agree to ash in his mouth — he would get the terrible humiliation he craves, and I would enter the phantasmatic field of his sexuality. I wouldn't agree to ash in his mouth — he would be ignored by me, the queen. It's humiliating in the same way, and perhaps even more. Did I ash in his mouth? I won't tell.
Since then, a decade has passed during which I haven't visited the club, and I didn't have any special interest in it. But after the last period, which is all mourning, grief, sorrow, material fatigue, and threats from Iran, I agreed to yield to the dubious adventure in the hope that perhaps in the basement on HaArba'a Street I would find something I felt I had lost: an alternative to this daily life of ours. A little air to breathe that has been missing here for so long. To feel for a moment in Paris, or Berlin, or anywhere else, just not in Israel — my beloved, only, bleeding, and exhausting homeland. But perhaps the hope that really drove me was to see my good friend with clips on his nipples.
I arranged to meet Ido and his partner, Shira, before he and I went to the club. On the way there, on Abba Hillel Street in Ramat Gan, I saw a child in a Maccabi Ramat Gan uniform who was locked in a bus when the driver got out and locked the doors. He was crying, and when the driver returned, I volunteered to wait with the child until his parents came to pick him up. In a dress that was too short, revealing on the verge of indecent, with heavy, inappropriate makeup, I looked like a sex worker trying to solicit a 10-year-old child for something punishable by prison, and I hoped his parents wouldn't report me to the authorities. For half an hour, I stood next to the minor in a shameful outfit while my breasts, still swollen from breastfeeding, were going out of bounds and, most importantly, out of the dress's bounds. I tried with all my might to encourage him to make small talk so the situation would feel a bit more legitimate ("Which team do you support?" I asked. "No team," he answered) until his parents arrived, thanked me in passing, to the shame of us all, and I could continue the journey to the end of the night.
It was already midnight, and still quite empty. I discovered that the maze, where people have sex in public, opens only at 2 AM. I remember thinking, "God help me, tomorrow I have to get up at seven in the morning for my son. What does he care that his mother decided to imagine herself a subject and go have fun?"
We met Shira for a briefing. She told me: "There are a few rules for tonight. Ido is allowed to spank butts, he is allowed to touch a breast here and there. He is allowed to kiss on the mouth, without tongue. He is forbidden to take out his dick."
"And the balls?" I clarified.
"Allowed," Shira answered and continued: "If someone asks for his phone number, he must ask for hers and say that he is a gentleman and thinks a man should call the woman and not the other way around." In the end, she said: "Have fun, I'm going to watch the American 'Survivor' and sleep."
We set out, and on HaArba'a Street we immediately identified the movement of people dressed in black, minimalist, kinky, seductive. We stood in line, and the woman at the entrance, also in black, warned: "The most important thing is that you are not allowed to take pictures. Phones must stay in your pocket all the time." A disappointing but fair requirement, aimed at allowing revelers to celebrate without fear of privacy infringement — because contrary to what one might think, people with kinky tendencies do not necessarily live promiscuous lives. Some of them work in high-tech offices, as taxi drivers, and as we will learn, even appear on television.
After a short security check, during which they checked that our bags did not contain drugs, we went down the stairs and reached the payment counter. On the glass wall are posted procedures that seem self-evident — we have zero tolerance for sexual harassment, whoever violates the rules will be expelled, another reminder that it is forbidden to take pictures. Next to all these hangs a printed A4 page with the traveler's prayer for IDF soldiers. Right next to it: a sign "This business is owned by a reservist." "Okay," I thought, "apparently in Israel 2026 there is nowhere to escape from Israel 2026." The gray daily life — or actually, it's khaki — has penetrated the kink and fetish basements.
The truth is that very quickly I realized that there are no drugs. And not only are there none, but guards next to the toilet stalls ensure that entry is one by one, so that people cannot do lines together. I understand the logic: this is a place that allows and encourages free sexuality, and such sexuality requires control and full consent, so from a moral point of view, it is necessary to ensure that the participants are of sound mind. But charging about 50 shekels for a glass of arak with ice is no problem for them.
Unlike my previous visit to The Dungeon, today you can no longer smoke on the premises. Only in a kind of smoking ghetto on the side, and even as a person who no longer smokes, these ghettos depress me. After all, it is clear that we do a considerable number of unhealthy things: live in the city, breathe bus exhaust, eat sugar, live under endless pressure in an expensive country under missile threat. So what will kill us is cigarettes? There is something disappointing about an alternative club that interprets health in such a mainstream way.
Slowly, more and more people started coming in, and it seems that most of them know each other. From a light and crowded stroll, one could get the impression that we, even though we crossed the age of 30, were among the youngest people in the club: except for women in fetish clothing, employees of the place whose goal is to make the stay pleasant and who occasionally danced truly magnificently on a pole, there were mainly older, chubby men who looked like taxi drivers and women who looked like National Insurance clerks. It was anything but counterculture: it was the culture itself, just in black. The employees of the place sat on sofas I didn't dare approach, and ate what looked like sushi from Japanika. At least it wasn't pre-packaged meals.
At the bar, I saw a man who seemed famous to me. I said to Ido: "Look, he looks exactly like...", and Ido said: "He doesn't look like, it is him." This is a person who is known in every living room in Israel, and at first it excited me, but then I thought to myself: "There is nowhere to escape. Not just for me, but for him too."
One unusual person who managed to hypnotize me personally was a religious man — kippah, tzitzit — who whipped chubby women in some niche inside the club. He whipped them one by one, with whips with split tails, long and short. He had a whole arsenal. With deep seriousness, I thought: although the last thing I want is for my butt to get whipped, I think this man is attractive. I was attracted by the fact that I believed him that he was truly and sincerely celebrating who he is, I was attracted by the fact that the beautiful and chubby women with bleeding butts trusted him and leaned on him after he finished. I was attracted by the fact that I felt a truly alternative corner within the banality. It was still Israel, but one that can only exist on a Thursday night, in an underground club that celebrates everything bizarre and different, and that manages to offer a place for those who have no other place.
As time went on, we felt more and more like those who invaded a class party we weren't invited to. The music was kitschy 90s pop like Bon Jovi; also played was a song that is a kind of sample of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, and songs by Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, and, I swear — the well-known bar mitzvah song "Cotton-Eye Joe." Under its sounds, a primal fear began to fester in us that soon the game "101 Kisses" would start and we would find ourselves again, the rejected children, kissing the teacher because no one else chose us.
From time to time, a few older, bald men with darbuka drums went up on stage. They looked like a strange incarnation of the band Synergia, ordinary people trying their luck in music and then returning to work on some app that won't change anything for anyone. As if that wasn't enough, at certain stages of the evening the music stopped, a birthday cake was brought out, and everyone sang "Happy Birthday" in a choir to the employees of the place who were born on that day. We tasted the cake. It was delicious.
We went to sit at the bar and waited for it to be 2 AM so we could enter the famous maze. On the dance floor was a quite attractive couple; the woman was performing oral sex on the man, who was looking for someone to make eye contact with. In the end, he found me. I looked at him for a few seconds and finally looked away.
The couple finished undressing on the dance floor and approached us. More accurately, the man in the pair approached. The woman, a true beauty, stood at a distance, tied to him with a choker. It should be noted that this was the first sexual-fetish-BDSM act we were exposed to there.
We started talking to the guy. We expressed to him disappointment with the fact that it is just a regular, Tel Aviv club, that we feel like we went to Shalvata at the port only with a dress code. He said: "Did you come to a brothel? That's in the maze." Okay, so we'll wait. He also said that later there is an after-party and asked for my phone number. I told him I prefer not to, and that I also don't see myself coming to the after-party.
He insisted: "Give it, what will happen? At most, don't answer."
"But I'm not interested," I explained, "I have a partner and we are monogamous and all that."
"We are also monogamous," he said, and his partner, who a moment before had been sucking his dick with the choker, stared into space and looked dissociated.
That guy kept asking for the number, and I kept refusing. The thought that he could write to me whenever he wanted made me feel invaded and penetrated against my will, despite the minor nature of the action. I thought: "What are all these rules worth — all the codes, all the consent, all the toilets you can't enter together — if the simple word 'no' still causes controversy?" This reinforced my suspicion that it is a club with a cover of alternativeness, but in practice it attracts — and maybe that's okay too — only people who want to have sex, without the distinct and clear ethics of BDSM.
At this stage, I wanted to go home, but I swore to Ido that I would wait for the maze because even into it you can only enter in pairs, so that, God forbid, a single man wouldn't enter and violate the gender balance.
When 2 o'clock arrived, we went down to the maze on a long staircase that, the deeper you go, the more stench rises from it. In the maze, there are winding paths, cages, and an inconceivable amount of blowjobs. Most of the sex I got to watch was completely normative, not to say vanilla; occasionally there was someone tied up here or there, and some of the people having sex united into one fucking lump of an orgy. On the other hand, I saw the A-lister getting a good suck on one of the armchairs, and that is an experience I wouldn't get anywhere else. It was worth the 90 shekels entrance fee, the arak for 60 shekels including tip, the smell, and the unbearable realization that in Israel 2026 there is no alternative culture and no escapism. It's all the same shit, only sometimes this shit is dressed in a black corset and stiletto heels, and not in AllSaints shirts.
When we left, a line of taxi drivers was trailing outside. I thought they came to pick up the broken ones who want to go home, but it turned out they were waiting for their turn to enter. It turned out that, unlike us, they are experienced people who know that the time to arrive at The Dungeon is north of 2 AM, and that if they are lucky, they too will get a blowjob from a National Insurance clerk. Which reminds me, do you hear Shira? Ido didn't spank, didn't grope, and didn't kiss.
Many years ago, there was a Facebook group called "Don't do Facebook in Hebrew — all the arsim will come." Despite the clear racism, there is an accurate core in it: when something becomes mass, for everyone, it loses its uniqueness and its subversiveness. Just as at the time the fashion industry adopted the punk style and they started selling jeans with rips and pins in chains at exorbitant prices, just as the hippie movement that brought us meditation is forced to watch the meteoric rise of mindfulness apps under the name "Well-being" — so too the sexual counterculture has become a product, an attraction for a fee. On the way out, don't forget to stop by the souvenir shop, bring some fancy whip for your wife.
Despite the gloomy conclusion, I want to hope that I missed something. That there is a counterculture in Israel and that it exists in dark places I haven't heard of yet. I want to believe that in the decade that has passed since I first visited The Dungeon — a decade in which we have known a pandemic, wars, elections, and more elections — the alternative has not died. It just found a new home that now knows it must hide, before the capitalist machine manages to turn it into a product too.
