Chemistry NYC: A Sex Party for the Solo Female Traveler
By Rebecca Rush
Picture this: first, you’re a woman. That’s pretty important to this scenario. Once you do that, picture this: you’re naked in a dojo in Bushwick on a Saturday night with 150 others. You came alone, you’ll cum together, and then you will leave blissfully alone.
You aren’t completely naked, you’re still wearing the gold leaf headpiece and half moon plate necklace you bought for your costume, because you don’t get this naked in 2017 Brooklyn without a theme, and this one is When in Rome.
Via – This party
“It’s perfect“, you think as you climb atop a Sybian, (a vibrator with an engine reputed to be strong enough to power a small jet).
The empire is falling. We may as well dance.
The author When In Rome
As you ride, the small tribe of people, (you will affectionately later refer to as your “fuck tribe”) – ask you what you want, where it’s okay to touch you, and you say yes, yes, yes, and yes, to everything. A couple you’re not interested in approach, the woman reaches her arm out to grab your jiggling breast and a quick look between you and your party, and suddenly they have built a wall in front of you preventing the unwanted touch from entering your force field.
At the parties comedian Billy Procida, host of the Manwhore Podcast, goes to, consent bracelets are handed out
Consent to touch – Photo by Billy Procida
NO GRABS.
Female intuition y’all. And that’s how consent was won. You will, occasionally, over the next few hours have to circle back to that mattress to exclaim, “Are those people still fucking on my underwear?” But you won’t mind. You’ll get a laugh out of it each time.
We typically hire big, burly men to keep us safe in a nightclub atmosphere and bouncers are certainly in place, but by the time an issue gets to one, this pussy would be dried up like the desert. Furthermore, as women, we are taught to minimize threats to our safety – nobody wants to be the girl with the problem, the buzz kill, the bad mood. We’re taught to be the girl that brushes it off, that suppresses her emotions, that pushes everything deep, deep, inside until she dies. Fuck that noise.
At Chemistry NYC, the protections in place are female – and go beyond preventing unwanted touch – into promoting an environment where a girl showing up alone, knowing nobody, having never been to a sex party before, could find herself happily astride a vibrator jet, cracking jokes within a few hours.
Feeling safe and having fun at a sex party. Picture via – this website
In an interview for Yourtango.com in 2015, one of the event’s organizers, who goes by the name of SheilaMonster, stated that “Unattended men cannot go into the play spaces by themselves.” Now it’s 2017 and those rules have ramped up considerably, and for this solo female traveler, it’s for the better.
Chemistry brands itself today as a “female-energy-centric environment,” where men are not allowed to attend without a date. As a woman bringing a man, you are responsible for him and his behavior from the moment you walk in the door until the moment you leave – he doesn’t have to go home with you, but he can’t stay here.
That entire evening, the women had my back (and sometimes my front).
I spoke to a lot of people about their perceptions of sex.
Corinne Fisher, co-host of the Guys We Fucked Podcast: “I honestly felt safer naked surrounded by these people fucking than I’ve ever felt at any heterosexual nightclub I have ever been to. No one touched me in a way I didn’t like or didn’t say that was ok. A lot of voyeurism, certainly, but that’s part of the fun.”
Chemistry even is set up to romance you the way a woman would want – slowly – first, costumes and snacks and mingling, then, burlesque and magic, then dancing, then…well, whatever you want.
Pure innocent fun – Via Time Out
Other parties have other policies – such as the PAL system, created by Polly Superstar, founder of Kinky Salon.
Full rules here: PAL System PAL, which stands for Pervy Activity Liaison, is a nongendered approach to what happens at Chemistry – a buddy system built on the sex party world hallmarks – accountability & enthusiastic consent.
However, as Kate H. points out in this Essay on Consent in Huffpo: “Consenting to sex “is not some catch-all for having suddenly consented to every imaginable type of sexual activity and losing control over your limits.”
Even if you previously granted consent, if you lose the ability to revoke that consent, from that moment on, there is no consent. And if someone takes that control over your consent from you, or ignores that you have lost your control over your consent, that is rape. You must be in control of, and able to revoke, your consent at all times for that consent to remain valid.
Pro tip: If you want to be really, really sure someone is enthusiastically consenting, ask them to say yes a few times before you do that kinky thing to them. Make them beg for you to do that kinky thing to them. Consent for the win!”
This was very much the atmosphere I experienced. Explicit consent means feeling safe, it means feeling secure, it means feeling really, really, sexy.
Chemistry was even safe enough for the most special of snowflakes; a young girl in a floor-length dress, kind of what you would expect in South Williamsburg on a Sunday afternoon and not Bushwick at 2 am had been circling the Sybian and the group of us hogging it for quite a while. There were six of us and the women had already ridden the thing to orgasm three times each.
Shy girls can have fun too – Photo Via here
“Can I usssseee thatttttt?” She finally asked. Sure, yes, of course! We said at which point she tried to drag the thing off to a corner, so we backed off even further. A man approached her and asked if he could watch.
“I’d reallllly prefer that you didddddnnnnn’tttttt,” she replied while arranging her long skirt around the vibrator.
And he didn’t. He walked away without a word. There were, after all, hundreds more naked bodies about who would most likely welcome his eyes.
Not all sex parties are solo female traveler friendly, however, not all are born of Burning Man and sipping cafe con coconut milk in Costa Rica. It’s important to research in advance to know you’re going to a type of party that works for you.
One NY party organizer, Tiffany Williams of Tiffany’s Temptations, told me she would never turn down an unattended solo male. “That’s money,” she said. Tiffany further explained that women coming to her parties are often looking for a man, and are not interested in just playing with couples or women. While I struggled to wrap my head around the idea of going to a sex party to meet a man, I pulled back. Different strokes for different folks, and all.
You know when you’re in the bathroom at a party and you make a friend and then you leave the bathroom and that friendship stays golden, that is your best friend, that bitch is fucking perfect and probably could have solved your life because you’ve never had to experience them as a human being with flaws? Their only task was to say your hair looked good and give you a tampon and they NAILED IT? That’s what sex party friends are like. I hugged goodbye to the girl who had just had her face in between my legs while her boyfriend and I made out and someone else pulled my hair and headed out into the night.
So screw that savings plan for that retreat to go ruin yoga with other white women in Costa Rica. Staycation in the city, and get your groove back in Bushwick. Unless, of course, you don’t want to.
Stay classy and consensual NYC.
