Sir: Your correspondents about my piece on the Torture Garden
should really get their facts right if they want to be taken seriously. Quite apart from the botched attempts to discredit the reporting (in a very mixed club, it's amazing that T. Barber seemed to know exactly which Japanese girls I was referring to. Was I being fol- lowed?), there are several more blatant errors. Barber states categorically that everyone at the Torture Garden has to give proof and sign a declaration that they are over 18. I didn't. Stu Anderson refers to `four or five' exhibitionists. Obviously the hundreds of people wearing nothing but slave-collars, bondage harnesses, corsets or rubber knickers — not to mention those not wearing anything at all — don't count as exhibitionists. Anderson should get a new dictionary.
Your correspondents neatly managed to side-step the bloody (literally) whippings and the public sex acts. Trying, as they did, to pretend the Torture Garden is nothing more than a fashion show-cum-coffee morning does no one any favours. 'Why is sexuality so shunned and damned?' asks Barber. Because of this kind of lily-livered double-think, that's why. It's interesting that both resorted to attacking my sexuality rather than addressing the facts in the piece. Seeing the reality reported in print was obviously an experience in which, for once, pain was entirely unmixed with plea- sure.
Tabitha Troughton,
41A Kensington Park Gardens, London W11
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