Alice in whips & chains

In troubled times one can do a worse than to get, as the incomparable Kool Keith years ago put it, “caught up in the booty world.”

I mean, one can only meditate and protest so much. It goes without saying that too much of anything is bad for you, but that is subjective and I can tell you stories of pandemic shutdown healing that would blow you mind.

Anyone interested in getting brilliantly caught up—or at least the idea of it—ought to glean a lot from this week’s WCS podcast conversation with the knowledgeable and engaging Sophia Sky. Executive Director of the Pan Eros Foundation and next month’s Seattle Erotic Art Festival, my old friend wants to insert one wormhole of an artistic experience in place of your present doom scrolling.

The idea of asking on Sophia came after I saw her quoted in a Guardian piece about the negative impact of Diddy’s alleged crimes on the sex-positive community. Her observation— credited to Sophia Iannicelli—that, “People in our community don’t want to be equated with people who are under investigation for things that include sexual misconduct and coercion” needed to be made.

When you gift a West Coast Sojourn subscription, you share a pleaser present.

American sexual expression baggage is so voluminous that a disclaimer like that ought to be mandatory for Sean Combs’ soon-to-be circus trial.

‘We're really focused on making sure that people have a place to go, where they don't have to look over their shoulder before they have a conversation, that they can wear what they wanna wear and not worry about being harassed. And also be celebrated for like, ‘Look at you in your fancy latex! That's awesome—good for you.’

The Seattle Center art fest is more than dear to me. Fifteen festivals ago, I met the person with whom I would cohabitate with for the better part of seven great years. Should you like to learn the origins of my visionary friend and colleague, get a view of our conversation from the first days of West Coast Sojourn.

But if you want talk about the state of sex in 2025, watch and listen to the conversation between me, Ms. Sky, and co-host Lev Anderson. Sophia ’s recording screen goes black at the apex of our critical conversation about choking’s widespread popularity. Aside from that outage, not a whole bunch stays hidden.

Standing out in particular is the talk about our times and the political threat to progressive cultures, especially for our neck of the American woods.

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An anecdote about the Pan Eros Foundation facing harassment from a set of digital freelancers calling themselves Washington DOGE chilled me. Our guest tells me her foundation has taken precautions because—like the most independent minded among us—she saw the overt repression coming.

“Shoving sex in people's face to make them accept that sex is a natural part of life has not worked. So now, we’re going to be respectful and subtle about it. It’s what we have to do right now in order to survive. Some people are like, You got to be out, you got to be proud. And it’s like, Honey, there’s a lot of proud here. Don’t worry about that. But we’re going to be out in a gentle way. We don’t want to be the nail that's sticking up higher and we get hammered to the death.”

My gut tells me we’ll get though this. And if we do not? Well, some of us will have stayed in touch with Earthly ecstasy along the way.