The Pollination and Propagation of Kinky Salons
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Letter to the London Times
Written in response to this article in the Sunday Times about Kinky Salon
There’s a story that San Francisco sex culture is teeming with uber rich, hedonistic Silicon Valley playboys. The outside world seems to be infatuated with the idea that vast wealth and hedonistic sexuality go hand in hand. It’s a compelling image to portray—with money and power they no longer need morals. They can do whatever they want. They don’t care. It’s like the fall of the Roman Empire. It’s the perfect image of debauchery and decadence. The truth is, as with most things in life, a lot less salacious, and a little more complicated than this satisfyingly titillating template.
San Francisco has always been an incubator for progressive sex culture. It was the first town in America to allow topless dancing and pornography. By the time the sexual revolution blew its wad into the heart of San Francisco, it was already established as a haven for liberal sexuality. The streets in Downtown San Francisco are named Minna and Grace, after the sex workers of the Barbary Coast. San Francisco is a city with history and culture; it’s not just the playground of “young, rich and driven” Silicon Valley white-collar elite. Young people travel to San Francisco from all over the world because they’ve heard that this is a place where you can be yourself. In San Francisco moral structures are questioned, not ignored.
Kinky Salon is a San Francisco event, not a Silicon Valley event. Sure, there are some tech workers in our community, but we also have librarians, social workers, nurses, waiters, firemen, teachers, artists, store clerks and civil engineers, and they’ve found a place where they can be themselves—where being sexual is just being human. It doesn’t have to be shocking and sleazy. We are leaving the sexual dark ages behind, and places like Kinky Salon are leading the way. At Kinky Salon diversity is celebrated, sexuality is playful, consent is paramount, all bodies are beautiful, and creativity is valued above social status. Volunteers run our community, which prides itself on being inclusive and authentic, and our VIPs are the people who take out the trash.
It’s easy to fall back on stereotypes, but the tired image of young, wealthy, narcissistic socialites with a voracious appetite for self-indulgence has been around since the ‘70s. That isn’t what’s happening at Kinky Salon.
We Create Culture
We create culture. You and I and our parents and our ancestors. We are all a part of it. Nobody is exempt from this great communal task. Culture is like a giant homunculus, given life through the lives we live. Rearing its giant head, it looks at us with vacant eyes. How should I feel? What’s right and wrong? In the past the answers were easier. Where and when you were born was the determining factor, and your morality was decided for you. Victorian England? Sex is bad, listen to your father. Norse? Welcome guests to your hearth, die a hero and live forever in Valhalla.
We didn’t get to decide what we believe until recently.
We have watched the world shrink. The time it took to travel shortened and we all got cozy. People fled wars, or just sought warmers climes. We traded places. Instead of absolutes, the options became broader. This is what we believe, but these are your neighbors and you should respect their beliefs too. And so we asked our neighbors what they believed and we discovered they knew some pretty cool shit. They taught us how to meditate, how to do yoga. They reminded us that prayer is not just an empty ritual. And most importantly, we discovered the parallels between all ideologies. At the end of the day all the myths and the ceremonies sound kind of similar. What a wonderful and unique moment in history when the overarching belief system isn’t to fear the gods of your strange neighbors, but to value them, experience empathy, and seek out the connections rather than differences.
Our brains have gone quantum. Instead of one belief system with a basic message driven and enforced by its limited local culture, we are now managing a multitude of ideologies, from civilizations all over the world, overlaying each other, cross referencing and merging. If, as citizens of global culture, we are expected to respect our neighbor’s beliefs, then it’s natural we become critical of the beliefs we were raised with. Morality isn’t black and white anymore. Instead of being told what’s right and wrong, we get to decide for ourselves. We can create our own moral structures based on our personal experiences in the world.
I don’t mean to break out into religious commentary and get all serious, but it’s difficult to talk about the lineage of our sex culture without talking about religion. When it comes to our sexuality there’s always been some sort of belief system wrapped up in it, whether we’re shamefully trying to hide our lustful inclinations from a wrathful god, or celebrating the cosmic force of creation by ritually re-enacting the birth of the universe. Godless sex is a very modern phenomenon. Or a very ancient one.
With this intricate, personalized, and nuanced relationship to our belief systems, we get to approach our morality critically. We also get to question how we want to approach our own relationships. We are searching for answers to our culture’s broken relationship to sexuality though our individual experiences. If our desires don’t fall within the constraints of traditional relationships, we can explore outside those structures and find out what works for us. Will we be happier? Perhaps. Some people might get exhausted with all the complexity and yearn for simpler times, when a man could get down on one knee and expect his woman to be faithful to him for life. But for some, it’s liberating. The world of relationships is opening up to create options that were never possible before. As human culture develops, and the great homunculus strides onward, perhaps we’re taking one step closer to understanding why society’s relationship to sexuality has been so challenging, and find some lasting solutions.
We create culture. Every single one of us. I pull the great homunculus this way, influencing it with my thoughts, and then you wrench it back. Thoughtforms that become popular in the greater community feel like truth to those who experience them, but it’s all part of this dance. The great beast reels and takes another step. We’re all here, either cheering it on or begging it to stop. Seven billion shepherds with one sheep.
Patreons and Podcasts and YouTube, OH MY!
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The Sex Culture Book Fair
The Sex Culture Book Fair was this weekend and it blew my mind. Jeff Ray from Adobe Books and David from Belle SF Magazine first came to me in October and said, “let’s collaborate.” They let me loose brainstorming ideas, but none of us had any idea how it would all work out. First time events are always a gamble. In our first meeting their eyes widened as I reeled off the names of people I’d like to get involved. That would be awesome they said. But I really had no clue if I could pull it off. I was talking about my mentors, my heroes, the people who built the foundation of the culture in San Francisco we all love. The sex culture revolutionaries who I admired from across the ocean before I even arrived here.
I got Mission Control in on the action to represent the community. They produced the back room with kinky demos and naked girls reading. This was not your grandma’s book fair.
For me the highlight of Saturday’s event was the “Legends” panel. I invited Carol Queen, Ron Turner, V Vale, and Violet Blue to join me at a pokey little bookshop in the Mission for a conversation about sex culture in San Francisco and they all said yes. Holy shit. This is my life.
Carol Queen has been a mentor since I arrived in San Francisco. Her generosity and support have always humbled me. She’s one of the reasons I fell in love with this town. Pervy, edgy writer, and producer of pagan sex parties. My kinda lady. Ron Turner is the founder of Last Gasp, a publishing company who has been publishing the unpublishable since 1970. Sexy, nasty, weird, underground, offensive, subversive books. If you’re a friend of mine you probably have some on your bookshelves, even if you don’t know it. V Vale produces RESearch—the series that brought us Angry Women and Modern Primitives, two of the most influential books on me in my early 20s, purchased at Waterstone’s Bookstore in Camden Town and carried home in the rain to be devoured, my young mind a sponge for these compendiums of bizarre performance art. Violet Blue is the woman who was taking San Francisco by storm when I arrived here. Who was blogging about sex in the early ‘00s? She was.
So here I am sitting with this panel of unbelievably awesome people. They’re here because I asked them to be. I’m having a moment. I gather myself and try to appear professional when all I want to do is jump up and down with a shit eating grin on my face and shout “LOOK WHAT I DID, DAD!!!!” I ask about pivotal moments in their careers. The microphone is passed down and they each tell a story about a person, an encounter, an event.
Ron Turner talks about the Mayor’s party he produced where performance artists carved pentagrams on their backs, pissed on each other and were sodomized by a Jack Daniels bottle, Violet Blue pipes up, “they were my room mates!” Then she talks about the time the Billboard Liberation Front pasted pictures of her face all over town. The Chronicle had decided to launch her sex column with a whimper rather than a bang, but San Francisco wouldn’t let it happen. They talk about their heroes: Betty Dodson, Margot St James, Susie Bright, Patrick Califia.
As they’re talking I realize this is my pivotal moment.
Soak it up, Polly. Your idols have become your friends.
The Tale of a Shaved Pussy
I remember the moment I decided to shave my pubic hair. I was at an afterparty in London with a dozen or so friends. They were fetish models and photographers. I was finally hanging with the scene makers and I wanted desperately to belong. We had been out to a fetish club and stayed up all night high on drugs. As the orange sun of early morning peeked through the curtains, we still wore our fetish gear from the night before. Corsets and high heels, latex and leather. The discomfort of sweat and constriction forgotten. Cigarette butts discarded in half empty cocktails. We talked about how special we were. A few of us stood in the center of the room dancing and laughing, waiting our turn for a line of coke. We flirted and dared each other to outrageousness. Diana, with curls of shiny black hair bouncing around bright red lips reached her hand between my legs and I adjusted my hips so she could explore more easily. We laughed as she casually felt up the outside of my PVC shorts. I remember the look on her face, wide eyed and nonchalantly mocking as she tugged on a tuft of my pubic hair.
“Jesus Christ, Polly, you’ve got a such a hairy pussy.” I suddenly felt awkward. My confidence seeped away and I felt my face redden.
“I don’t like to shave,” I retorted, “stubble is nasty.”
“Check this out you guys, Polly’s pussy is soooo hairy.”
I don’t have a particularly hairy body. I’m fair and my hair is fine. I’ve never shaved my legs. My pussy hair is light with a reddish tinge. It doesn’t grow past the necessary area. I was 22 years old and had never thought of shaving. Diana tugged on the hair again and I pulled away.
“It’s so long! It’s, like, the longest pussy hair I’ve seen in years.” Everyone at the party laughed and I pretended like it didn’t bother me.
After the party I went home and considered my options. I didn’t want to shave my pubic hair off entirely like the other girls in the fetish scene, leaving them bald as an 8 year old. I didn’t like the way that looked or felt. But perhaps I could meet them half way. If I just shaved underneath then my pubic hair would be accepted. I lay back in the bath and picked up my razor, holding it in front of my face contemplatively. I wanted to pretend this was my decision, that I was a grown up, that I had learned something new about how to be sexy, and that I liked the idea of shaving. As I dragged the razor across my labia I convinced myself I was in control. Five minutes later my pussy was pink and hairless, and just a little nicked, with a triangle of strawberry blonde starting just above it. For the next couple of decades my hair stayed the same. I trimmed the sides and a little from the top to stop it from poking out from my underwear, and I shaved myself bald underneath.
I first started questioning my relationship to my pubic hair when I decided to take a break from having sex nearly two decades later. At first I continued my grooming, even though nobody would see it. But then the questions began. Why am I doing this? Who am I doing this for? Is this for me? Or for my sexual partners? Or is something else going on here? I would allow you to grow back for a while, but then hurriedly shave it off again with a pang of shame.
Then one day I thought to myself, “why do we have pubic hair anyway?” I went online and googled that very question and I discovered a most amazing fact. Not only does the layer of pubic hair help to prevent skin to skin infections like herpes and HPV, but shaving and waxing create tiny micro-tears in the skin which make infection way more likely. WTF? Really? Pubic hair protects us from STDs, and yet the sluttier we are the more likely we are to shave it off, making our delicate genitals vulnerable and exposed. This seems downright illogical.
Looking back it’s pretty clear that I allowed my vanity—my desire to belong—to dictate my relationship with my pubic hair. I followed the fashion, and I didn’t question it or look too closely at my motives. I allowed myself to think it was a personal preference. I admit, I do like I do like the feeling of slippery smooth freshly shaved labia, but I haven’t questioned why. Thinking about it now I realize that it’s pretty much all I’ve known. My entire slutty adult sex life I’ve had a shaved pussy, so of course that’s sexy to me.
So I decided to grow back my bush. It’s not super long and unkempt, but neatly trimmed and perfectly coiffed. I’m still getting used to it, but I like the way it feels. There’s a whole new sensation to nearly touching my pussy that I’ve never experienced before. The brush of a hand tickling the pubes on my labia feels good.
I’m happy to be in a place where I can finally overcome the social pressure of shaving, and make a decision based on what I want. It’s my body, my pubes, my health, my pleasure, and my choice.
An Open Letter to Kim Kardashian’s Ass
Dear Ass,
Congratulations on your recent media attention. It’s a telling time in history when a woman’s ass can be more famous than the woman. With your undeniably impressive proportions and your ceaseless media exposure you have achieved a status in our culture previously only available to people. As a sexual object, oiled and buffed to perfection, your voice is now more powerful than any other ass in history. I hope you will use your fame to bring attention to the plight of your fellow female body parts whose voices are so often silenced.
Ankles, for example, are desperate for this kind of sexual objectification. For more than a century they have been all but ignored. Victorian culture did not neglect the ankle as we do now, and understood its elegance and erotic potential. Eyeballs have also suffered, with their only attention being the occasional oculolinctus. Although the women themselves might complain about this constant dehumanization and sexualization of their body parts, you and I both know that the body parts themselves crave the attention.
While some may poo poo your talents, I admire your ability to balance a champagne glass, as the famous ass of freakshow star Sarah “Saartjie” Baartman, AKA the Hottentot Venus, did before you. It’s a noble lineage of ass glass balancing.
What factors have arisen in our culture to allow your ascent into the annals of history? I believe it’s the repression of sexuality that has made way for your meteoric rise. If everyone had access to ass without guilt and shame, then we would have no need to fetishize and deify an ass, even one as magnificent as you. You would be relegated to the simple status of just another body part of just another woman, no more notable than a graceful arm or a strong calf.
Congratulations again on your unprecedented media frenzy. Never in the history of ass has an ass made such a huge impression.
Polly
Rally for Sex Culture
There’s sooooo much happening at the book launch party it’s going to be quite the spectacle. Don’t expect readings or traditional book launch activities. This is a celebration and a rally for sex culture.
BUY YOUR TICKETS NOW!
Join Polly and her co-conspirators at this VICTORY event, celebrating the launch of her memoir Polly: Sex Culture Revolutionary.Conspire with the revolutionaries of sex culture in an evening of renegade performances, rousing speeches, rebellious readings, and riotous revolutionary rhetoric!
RECLAIM your right to be a pervert
SMASH any idea that you aren’t a gorgeous manifestation of creation who deserves to be loved
WALK OUT and join the ironic sidewalk strike against righteousness
SIT IN on the tea party and enjoy a nice cuppa
… and let’s BURN THE BOOK in memory of all the books that have been burned out of fear of change.
UP THE REVOLUTION!
UP THE REVOLUTION!
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Playing revolutionary songs to make your bum wiggle
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Pounding drums and causing a ruckus
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Raising awareness with low-brow sacred shenanigans
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Pushing our boundaries with “performance art”
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An anonymous missive from “Legion”
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Recording live, capturing the evening with interviews and commentary
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The DJ who makes everything Bounce
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Super-Shakti Tea Ceremony
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And that’s not all!
 For those of you looking for a more traditional book launch party I’ll be hosting a book reading with interactive discussions and a conversation with Carol Queen at the Center for Sex and Culture on Sunday Nov 8th. Watch this space for more details.
Have you always wanted to hear the deeper story of the sexual revolution? Carol and Polly are multi-generational sex culture revolutionaries and they want to share their personal stories with you. Come and participate in an interactive evening of storytelling, questioning and presentations. Leave with a complete picture of where sex culture has been, and where it’s going. Come armed with curiosity and prepare to be surprised.
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Expanding Mind on the Progressive Radio Network
Listen to me having a conversation with Erik Davis about sexual objectification, Miley Cyrus, sex culture and Kinky Salon.
http://expandingmind.podbean.com/e/expanding-mind-sex-culture-091414/
Preparing to Expose Myself
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Four years ago I made a plan. Write a book, and expand Kinky Salon into new cities. As I send the book to print, I’m working with the hosts of Kinky Salon London, Copenhagen, Berlin, New Orleans, Portland and New York to create a solid structure for the expansion of the global Kinky Salon movement. It’s been a long haul, but these goals are finally coming into alignment.
energetic, spiritual, and intellectual. To me, this makes it art. And making art is like having sex with the universe.
I’m creating a video to help promote the book and the global Kinky Salons. You can participate from your home with your webcam. We’ll ask you to read something to the camera. Then we have a bunch of silly things we want you to do. Make a heart shape with your hands, show us your underwear. Stuff like that. Then we’ll edit them all together into a super inspiring sex culture manifesto which communicates the ethos of Kinky Salon, and our ridiculous sense of humor.