A Woman in a Man’s World Makes it a Woman’s World

The dark expansive room is bathed in deep red light. Disco rhythms thunder across a sprawling dance floor where a semi-nude crowd wantonly gyrates. A living diorama features a half-naked blonde suspended by her wrists and ankles a dozen feet above the crowd. Two more semi-clad women hover nearby, dressing her. And all three perform as “servants” to a striking female figure decked out like Maleficent, holding a chalice as she admires her “submissives.” Meanwhile, dancers in gold bikinis, Elvis wigs, fairytale costumes, and platform shoes, flesh out the thick erotic atmosphere.

Lording over this bacchanalia is its creator, Polish-born Alina Ratuska. Dressed in a black catsuit with a plunging V-neck, she’s seated cross-legged, almost motionless, on a VIP couch. This is her party. Or, more precisely, her fantasyland. And she surveys it like a Broadway director watching her premier. It’s a scene of dramatic decadence and exotic showmanship that Alina has spent decades refining and presenting as live events and videos, and is now launching into the metaverse.

Alina Ratuska is the founder and creative impresario of The Kinky Rabbit Club—a roaming sex party staged at private mansions for an exclusive clientele. Established in Los Angeles just one year before the Covid pandemic hit, it’s a unique club where the sexual power dynamic is flipped into a female-friendly vision of decadence. The emphasis is on the theatrical, melodramatic, and aggressively baroque fantasy scenarios, all served up for an elite membership.

Alina herself is what makes her business stand out. She’s the spoke in the wheel, deciding on the scenarios to stage (involving anything from Disney characters to historical figures), designing the costumes and sets, and even programming the choreography. The vision, the boundaries, the rules, who gets to enter, who gets to work here—it’s all up to Alina.

She claims The Kinky Rabbit is her X-rated Disneyland, and the comparison is less far-fetched than you might think. Fantasy is at the center of what she does, most of it aimed at the celebration of female pleasure and empowerment. She’s a savvy businesswoman, applying imagination to edgy adult scenarios for her privileged members while creating a playful safe space for a broader clientele. Walking the tightrope between the sensual and the indecent, she pushes the boundaries of sexual performance art far beyond what you’d see at your standard-issue gentleman’s club.

The couples in Alina’s world are not the usual May-December matchups found at other adult clubs. Her crowd is generally younger, and everything from her admissions policies to the crowd curating, to her flamboyant stage shows, is pursued with a sense of gender equality rarely found in male-oriented nightspots. Here, women can be sexy on their own terms, which frees them to be more outrageous in their pursuit of erotic expression. All of them are slim and beautiful (classic standards of beauty are in force here) and they aspire towards the glorious “goddess” motif. Yet despite the costumed debauchery, the atmosphere is one of diversity and respect, and it gives The Kinky Rabbit an appeal to a wider public because, for once, it’s not just the men who come to play.

Membership applications are done online and completely subject to Alina’s preferences. She reads what potential clients write about themselves, then asks things like, “What’s your kink?” (Presumably they have one.) She explores what they’re into, and she requires a photo. “You can feel people or see them through pictures. I see a good vibe…it’s a specific vibe of why they want to be part of it…and if they dress nice. If you dress nice, you get extra points.” In selecting potential guests she’s as scrupulous as a Hollywood casting director, and essentially plays that role in tailoring the crowds that attend her events. Alina builds and populates an exotic world of her own creation.

She’s changed things on the management side as well. Alina’s small cadre of loyal performers (she calls them her “family”) deeply trusts her. They’re willing to expand their sexual comfort zones, which are already pretty wide, and pursue their most ambitious fantasies with a daring they wouldn’t try at other clubs. “There’s a lot more body worship for female pleasure,” says Kenzie Anne, one of Alina’s performers. “It’s a lot more sensual, and slow, when you are displaying something so beautiful for a group of people to see; you are really emphasizing on showing how to please a woman…we moved really slowly to make sure we felt everything. That was at Alina’s direction.” Having been a dancer herself, Alina knows how to get them to experiment. The themes they explore in her scenarios range from Alice in Wonderland to the Marquis de Sade to Eyes Wide Shut.

Alina’s performers include the modern menu of sexual orientations: straight, gay, lesbian, bi, gender fluid, non-binary, transgender, you name it. And they’re not simply accepted; they’re celebrated. All of which clashes with the more conservative ambiance (think Playboy meets Studio 54) that generally haunts other clubs. The traditional men’s clubs tend to be hetero; built around straight male sensibilities. At The Kinky Rabbit, every night is Ladies’ Night.

Polish born and German bred, Alina spent years as an exotic dancer and club manager in Europe. She grew up in the middle-sized town of Marl, not far from Dusseldorf. Her father was an electrician, her mother a project manager. At 16 she started working at a pharmacy, but she was bored, unfulfilled, and underpaid. Then she found a love for dancing and inventing sexy costumes. “I was always into the kinkier version of nightlife, and in Germany there are a lot of clubs and crazy things going on,” she says.

She dated a male dancer who encouraged her to try go-go dancing. She started doing it for fun, and to make extra money, and quickly discovered she was very good at it. Having learned to sew from her mother, and having made costumes for herself since childhood, Alina started fashioning unique outfits for her performances. She loved assembling a distinctive wardrobe, and she took her show on the road across Germany and Spain for a couple of years. Then she started booking other girls she’d meet in the clubs, all while still in her teens. Eventually, after a visit to the United States in 2005, she found herself bored with Europe and enticed by the greater sense of license in America, and specifically in Hollywood.

On vacation with a few girlfriends Los Angeles, she decided to stay, with the goal of “seeing and being seen.” They set up shop at The Palazzo, a trendy West Hollywood hotel, and got down to the business of infiltrating the exclusive party scene. “I was young and hot. It was pretty easy,” she says. “This was the time all the celebs were out partying all day and night. I come from a boring town and then go to…Paris Hilton’s house, and Britney Spears is there dancing on a pole! It was crazy.”

Then, while sightseeing one day on Rodeo Drive, she was approached by a man who invited her to the Playboy Mansion. Rusty with her English, and still a bit naive, she grabbed the opportunity. She ended up dining with a handful of bunnies and with Hef himself, who chatted her up about his love of old movies as he gave her a tour of the mansion. Alina loved the licentious setting, but she quietly imagined that she could top it by being her own show designer and director.

She formed her first company, Rockachic (still her personal Instagram handle), which provided clubs with sexy entertainers she’d recruit among dancers, bartenders and even customers she knew at other clubs. She’d also design their lavish costumes. But she was frustrated by the limitations in lighting, sound and creativity existing at most clubs. She wanted something more ambitious. More showmanship. So, in 2013, she started throwing weekly parties at an old Hollywood hotel, The Argyle, which she redubbed The Kinky Room. Here, Alina was free to stage sexy little vignettes with live actors. But she kept them R-rated. “I put hot girls dancing in tiny outfits…it was provocative but not crossing the rules of the club.”

It was about this time that the owner of The Argyle suggested Alina check out a spicy new startup called SNCTM (pronounced “sanctum”), another club-hopping sex party that was better financed than her own. SNCTM was run by Damon Lawner, a former rocker and model, who bears an uncanny resemblance to David Duchovny in Californiacation – including perfectly scruffed hair and a mischievous charm. When she introduced herself, Alina made an immediate impression. Lawner claims, “When Alina and I met she was the wildest most sexual person I’d ever come in contact with.” SNCTM was taking matters a step beyond Alina’s lascivious performance art at The Kinky Room. “What Damon did that I didn’t do was he went a step further with his performers...sexually. So, I was like, okay…how is he allowed to do that? Who is this person?”

Alina approached Damon directly about a partnership. Damon’s more traditional men’s club specialized in the black-tie cocktail party vibe, with seductive side entertainment. Alina brashly told him, “I love what you do and love the idea of it…but I think I can make it much better.” She proposed a kind of interactive theatre with gorgeous maids performing outlandish scenarios to define the environment. The experience would be like walking through an erotic Renaissance Faire.

Damon gave her a shot, and it paid off. For the next five years she served as SNCTM’s creative director, during which time it grew into Tinseltown’s most exclusive sex party. Once again, Alina hired performers and atmosphere models, conjured up costumes, and oversaw every detail of their lavish events. Upon entering the clandestine mansion in the Holmby Hills where SNCTM parties were often held, you were typically greeted by svelte sirens in playful French Maid costumes with notecards glued to their bare chests that read, “touch me.” You checked your phone at the door, then you’d be offered a flute of champagne. The dress code was tuxedos for men and lingerie (mostly couture) for the women. Masquerade masks were required. The performers were leggy, busty, flawless. Each party had a theme, and all of them included BDSM, leather and lace. Guests could have sex with each other but not with performers. The overall setting was that of a lurid dungeon.

Each party was limited to 99 attendees, most of them curious females in their early 20s or 30s, who could enter for free if they passed muster with Alina and Damon. Most of the men were part of a tiered membership, with the top dogs—known as the Dominus Membership—forking out a whopping $75K a year. SNCTM quickly went high-profile, attracting Hollywood A-listers. Celebrity guests included Sting, Bill Maher, Gwyneth Paltrow and her director husband Brad Falchuk, and Bella Thorne. It was a place without judgement or fear of being caught on camera. The lurid sex shows aroused the crowd, and occasionally gave them ideas.

Still, to Alina, it was a “traditional” sex club. It conjured up a darker, more male energy than what she preferred. While performers were told to interact, it was not gay-friendly. Also, behind the scenes, and unknown to Alina, Damon was squandering his profits and was distracted by personal relationship problems. SNCTM fell into deep debt and began losing clients. So, in 2018, Alina and SNCTM’s General Manager decided to split off, together, in a kind of soul-baring, Jerry McGuire moment. Within a year they launched The Kinky Rabbit Club, and did so with Damon’s blessing. “…She loved to see me amazed with her, and she loved to know she was right on the edge,” Damon admits. “…She’s so trusted by the women she works with. They will literally do anything she asks because she has a truth about her…and her performers want to be challenged to push boundaries and she asks that of them and also gives them permission to explore what they want.”

Alina was now free to create the club of her dreams. She broke from the staunchly hetero narrative of SNCTM, lowered the entry fees, carefully vetted her crowd, and conjured up more gender-bending themes for her performances. She got edgier and more avant-garde: a Space Sex party featuring alien positions, or a disco ball spinning on top of a naked body at “Studio 69.” Today, she commands a realm that allows women to be playful, to be worshipped as goddesses, and where men are free to be bi-sexual, or non-binary, or whatever they wish. And she continues to push boundaries. “Everything is energy,” she insists. “It’s about how you treat your people, especially the girls, and if you give them freedom…They tell me what they want to do, and push me further. I’d never put them in a situation where they don’t feel comfortable or the energy is dark. It’s all about fun and happiness.”

To stay ahead of the curve, Alina says The Kinky Rabbit is now diversifying from the live sex party to a branded digital platform promoting a new generation of erotic content in the metaverse, including virtual reality experiences and sultry NFTs (non-fungible tokens) to invest in. “We’re building a kinky world in the metaverse with exclusive access [for] members, and special NFT holders, that we’ll release soon,” she promises.

Her online ambitions also fit into her changing personal life. Nowadays, Alina’s top priority is being a mom to a beautiful 17-month-old daughter. She says she’d have no objection to her child going into the business herself someday, if that’s what she wanted. In the meantime, she keeps life at home pretty normal. Her husband, who works in the jewelry business, says he’s a staunch booster of his wife’s work. He goes to every party he can and stays at late as possible, sometimes not getting home until first light. And somehow that seems right. He’s there for the dawn of the next phase in Alina’s remarkable career.