The Atlantic
Inside an unmarked warehouse in downtown San Francisco, a woman greets guests with a riding crop. She is not there to beat them, but to initiate them with a set of firm and binding rules. A chart posted on the wall reads:
- State your boundaries.
- Play safely and consensually.
- Have sensible safe sex practices.
- Respect our space and each other.
- Don’t linger unaccompanied in play spaces.
- Don’t cruise aggressively.
- Don’t get too intoxicated.
- Don’t take photographs.
- Don’t use your cellphone.
- Don’t gossip about what goes on here.
Using the riding crop as a pointer, she lays out the basics for guests entering Mission Control’s Kinky Salon, a monthly San Francisco sex party that dates back to 2003. “Kinky Salon is a global movement that promotes sexual liberation by hosting community gatherings where sex is integrated into the social fabric of the events,” reads the Kinky Salon manual, a guidebook to on how to safely construct a sexual play world where no one gets hurt. That means a strict set of boundaries.
The rules are the portal at Kinky Salon. After guests pass this point of initiation, they enter the warehouse—a two-story adult playground. Upstairs are performances, a DJ, and arts activities like portraiture and body painting. There are low-slung couches, people dancing, and a BYOB bar with a bartender who doles out your own liquor. It’s just a really good party. The play space where the actual group sex scene takes place is downstairs, tucked away in a corner.
There are rules about consent, about how to solicit sex, how to negotiate for something different, how to say no. There are rules about protection, about fluid exchange, about staring, about drunkenness. The rules that dictate the boundaries of this seemingly boundariless space are the same rules that people often break in mainstream society: You have to ask before you touch. You can’t get extremely drunk. You have to honor when someone says “no.”
Rules and group sex have gone hand in hand for decades. The more risqué the sexual party, the tighter the guidelines, particularly in the BDSM world where partygoers consent to physical pain. “The space, people’s bodies are sacred,” Kinky Salon co-founder Polly Whittaker, aka Polly Superstar, recalls from her many years in the BDSM and fetish scene. “You do not talk while someone is having a scene, you don’t laugh, you don’t stare … They’ve created this incredibly strict structure because what they’re doing there is working through some really heavy shit and they need safety for that.”
“Kinky Salon is only one step away from the super strict rules of BDSM and there’s a reason for that,” Whittaker goes on, “which is that I think that women, particularly women in our culture, are not trained to state their boundaries.” The usual script that guides the more typical sexual encounter is replaced by a new one. In setting limits, edges, and rules of play, the possibilities for safely exploring new sexual horizons and thresholds become tangible.
Group sex parties run the gamut and are available for all types of people. The New York scene, which just last month opened a Kinky Salon, joining their list of hosted parties in Copenhagen, Austin, Berlin, Portland, New Orleans, and London, has its fair share of parties across the board. There are the parties just for single heterosexual couples, like Bowery Bliss, a weekly swingers party in lower Manhattan, for which “The term couple refers to a Male and Female. Two men are NOT considered a couple.” At others, like Submit in Brooklyn, a party for “women and trans folk” interested in all types of BDSM play, “There’s a shower, a boot black station, slings, a cross, bondage set-ups, beds, peep holes, and more.” One Leg Up requires their guests to leave together if they arrive together, and Chemistry, another Brooklyn scene, asks a series of questions to pre-screen their guests like, “What is your favorite non-sexual hobby?” or “What role does sexuality play in your life?” School of Sex’s Behind Closed Doors party requires an application and has four cardinal rules:
- Ladies make the rules
- No means no
- Men cannot approach women
- Members only
In constructing a separate world around non-monogamous sex, these parties are building small behind-the-scenes exits to dominant cultural expectations. The rules define the new sexual paradigm that guests willingly enter. …