Waterboarding as Fetish: Freakazoids Turned on by Club Gitmo and Abu Ghraib

No shortage of weirdos out there.

It's eerie dark in the exhibition hall at the New Jersey Convention Center in Edison.

Usually, the room is reserved for trade shows. But this summer weekend, it's been transformed into a 40,000-square-foot dungeon for sexual fantasy.

Welcome to The Floating World, three days of suspended reality geared toward those who explore extremes in carnality. The program encompassed bondage, sadomasochism and role playing -- including Gitmo-inspired interrogator/detainee "torture" sessions.

The private event -- no tickets sold at the door, no advertising anywhere but the Web -- drew nearly 1,000 attendees of every sexual orientation, from Jersey and beyond. The registration fee for the gathering, which ran Friday through yesterday, was $125-$190.

The course catalog featured a mix of lectures about relationships and hands-on safety workshops. There were lessons in whipping, caning, roping, gagging, punching, burning, biting, spanking and "power flogging."

"Education is really important," says Dan Andersen, director of the Floating World, a nonprofit event launched last year and named for an Edo-era Japanese subculture. "If you take your education from the movies, you're going to do a lot of bad things."

A sign of the times, the course list also included "Interrogation and Torture Techniques." The class, which outlined how to fetishize Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse, was taught by an instructor with a military background. The core idea of torture play is to integrate topical imagery as a trigger to boost fear and stimulate endorphins.

"When we're using those references, it's to provoke a reaction," says Susan Wright, founder of the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom and an author whose latest novel is titled "A Pound of Flesh."

"Anybody who protests us should ask themselves why they are not protesting the reality of torturing prisoners. We're consenting adults. We might get in a pool with each other and waterboard somebody, but the person can say, 'No, I don't like this.' They have a safeword." (Prearranged "safewords" are established as a stop signal.)

Some arrived at the convention center in plain vanilla street clothes, while others strutted their liberated stuff in body stockings, dog collars and shoes that could double as daggers. Scattered amid the cars in the parking lot were carts for "ponies," people saddled and harnessed like horses.