Fri, 04 Dec 2009 10:32p.m.
By Tova O'Brien
Hot Pink Bits - it's the name of a show being toured by Auckland-based comedienne Penny Ashton.
She's been performing and touring her show for three years now - that's about 160 shows and 160 audiences who've gone home with a far greater understanding of the international sex industry.
It's a small world, but with a population of more than 6.8 billion there's room for a whole raft of sexual fantasies and fetishes – and Ashton knows an awful lot about a lot of them.
"Some people go out and they get dressed up in animal suits and they go into parks and have anonymous sex with other people in animal suits," she says.
Apparently it's more common than you might think – 'furries', as they're called, have even featured on CSI.
"There are a lot of people that just go about breakfast, lunch at home, and they don't like the people that have sex in parks in suits because they think it brings them into disrepute - and they call them ferverts."
From ferverts to the the local pool, you can never be too certain what lies beneath.
"They're wearing full wetsuits with gaps and regulators and stuff, having sex underwater. There's obviously things like oral sex and stuff like that that, they have to be careful with holding their breath."
Then there's what Ashton calls the more conventional side of fantasy. Thankfully, it comes with an instructional DVD.
Still, the animal theme doesn't end there.
"I did discover 'crush fetish', which is when men watch women wearing high heels crushing, like, Tonka toys and mice," says Ashton. "I fact, PETA and the SPCA are involved in that, trying to get that stopped. That surprised me."
And as the woman who's orchestrated group fake orgasms from the US to Gore, she's not easy to surprise.
To find out everything you want to know - and probably don't want to know - about the sex industry, Hot Pink Bits runs until December 12 at Wellington's Bats Theatre.
3 News