Why Are People Into That?!

“As someone who has done sex work activism full time for years, I’ve found that in order to not burn out in this fight, I have to be having gross pervy sex, just living the ho life. Otherwise WTF are we fighting for?” // Recorded live at the Pleasure Chest in West Hollywood Los Angeles May 2018, this panel features Siouxsie Q and Carly D. Three drama queen sex educators in WeHo discuss the politics of sexual freedom and then exercise it to the extreme! // Discover how to be a high status princess, how to follow the narrative arc of gaping, why the office of POTUS is the ultimate in power bottoming, what Siouxsie and Tina would do if they were stuck in an elevator and both had to pee, how turning housework into a sex game makes invisible labor visible, how to be a valeDICKtorian, and why people are into pigs, tunnel plugs, double penetration, ass to mouth, giant novelty cocks, and more! Also a very special guest appearance by Damien Bathory explaining the appeal of scat. // Writer, advocate, and performer Siouxsie Q has been an outspoken leader in the sex worker rights movement since 2012 when she launched her popular podcast, The WhoreCast, garnering national attention. Her first book, Truth Justice, and the American Whore was released in May of 2016, and her writing and perspectives have been featured in Wired, Alternet, CNN, Rolling Stone, National Public Radio and many more. Her sex column, The Whore Next Door, ran in the SF Weekly from 2014 until last year when she relocated to Los Angeles, to lead adult film performers in a historic win against the noxious California Proposition 60. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Adult Performer Advocacy Committee and continues write, perform, and fight for sex workers rights at the local, state, and national levels. // Carly D. Weckstein is a sex educator and theatre director who works as the Junior Buyer at The Pleasure Chest stores. Raised by two Bay-Area gynecologists, she has a passion for empowering people through knowledge of their own bodies. In our culture of so many damaging and contradicting messages around sexuality, she believes that deep healing and joy can be found through re-claiming sex on your own terms. Carly loves teaching about communication, consent, orgasm, kink/BDSM and roleplay. When she's not talking to people about sex, she's busy running a feminist theatre ensemble in Los Angeles.

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“The second you make someone laugh, it’s so much easier to get money out of 'em!” / Live from McNally Jackson NYC in January 2018!We discussed colorism at strip clubs, #MeToo issues, Spread Magazine, how being a stripper prepares you to write single panel comics, and a certain portrait of Aya's mom wearing a leopard print fur bikini holding a snake! / From I Was A Teenage Dominatrix to The Happy Hooker, classic sex work books have been limited to pretty one-dimensional points of view. In the 21st century, sex work books are as prismatic as the workers themselves. Join sex work journalist and podcaster Tina Horn for a panel on the exciting and nuanced ways sex work is being written about right now. Learn how strippers around the world represent themselves, on topics ranging from snacks to the male ego, in Jacq the Stripper's crowdfunded self published Striptastic. Learn why Aya de Leon chose escort characters as the protagonists of her Justice Hustlers crime series. Learn how Akynos uses both her blogging and performance art as activism. We'll be discussing everything from stigma to genre to branding to high heels in an effort to create a real and honest portrait of the modern literary sex worker. 

/ Jacq the Stripper is a Canadian writer, comedian, stripper and illustrator. She lives in New York City with her wife and plants.Beaver Show, Striptastic, social media... / Aya de Leon is an author, teacher, and activist in the Oakland Bay Area. Kensington Books publishes her sex worker heist series, Justice Hustlers: Uptown Thief in 2016 (winner of Independent Publisher and International Latino Book Awards), The Boss in 2017, and The Accidental Mistress in 2018. She has received acclaim in the Washington Post, Village Voice, Tits and Sass, The SF Chronicle, and The Establishment. Her work has also appeared in Ebony, Guernica, Writers Digest, Huffington Post, The Toast, The Honest Courtesan, Essence, VICE, Bitch Magazine and on Def Poetry. She is also at work on a black girl spy YA novel called Going Dark, and an adult spy novel about FBI infiltration of an African American political organization. She teaches creative writing in the African American Studies Department at UC Berkeley, and blogs and tweets about race, gender, and culture at @AyadeLeon and ayadeleon.com.

kynos is a New York raised stripper and performance artist. For the past decade she has been featured in showcases from New York to Europe. She is a proud sex worker and human rights activist. She has spoken at events such as the 2016 International AIDS conference in South Africa and the AWID conference in Brazil of the same year. Her film Whore Logic has been featured in film festivals such as The Sex Worker Film and Arts festival. She currently has a new bi-weekly variety showcase with her dance troupe Koffee every other Thursdays at Essence bar in Brooklyn. To support her artistic endeavors please support her current gofundme campaign and sign up for her patreon where she will feature writings and a podcast on topics pertaining to her life, sex worker rights and conversations around sex and sexuality. She is currently a grad student at Goddard College in Vermont. 

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“If the thing you love to do is only seen in 'shame' porn, you may think that’s the only slot you fit into as a desirable person. That’s not cool, and that’s what I’m trying to fix.” / From ASMR to GIFS, comics to fan fiction, public screenings to photo sets of dudes who can suck their own dicks, this YAPIT Live from April 2018 at the Pleasure Chest in NYC explores all personal and political facets of modern pornography. / Special guests Math Magazine EiC Mackenzie Peck and Pleasure Chest sex educator Leon also swerve into an explanation of what FOSTA/SESTA means for sexual freedom, how paying for porn can actually improve your sex life, and the ethics of literally eating people. / MacKenzie Peck was born on Valentine's Day, raised in Connecticut, and graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art, magna cum laude. Three years ago, she set on a path to becoming a pornographer. Now, with the hotly anticipated seventh issue of Math Magazine coming out soon, she is working to revolutionize social norms and evolve industry methodologies. /

Leon is a worker at the pleasure chest and budding sex educator who has been active in the kink community for around eight years.

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“When I’m editing my porn I love admiring the way my nails look wrapped around a dick.” / CONTENT WARNING: This episode includes frank, informed discussions of consensual non-consent fantasies, as well as two Jewish women unpacking what it means for trolls to invoke the Holocaust. / Artist, indie porn producer, and sex work organizer Arabelle Raphael is femme for a living. So what does it mean to be a queer lover of opulent extravagant finger adornments? Arabelle and I chatted about our mutual love of creepiness, the way she’s transformed troll hate mail into art, the Tex Avery cartoons that are forever linked to her femme identity, and exactly how to fuck someone when you have long nails (hint: very carefully!). / Arabelle Raphael is an artist, indie porn producer and sex worker living in the Bay Area. Arabelle has been nominated for numerous AVN awards and won her first in 2018. She is active in sex worker's rights and community organizing. She working on publishing her first book Evaluations. 

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“I didn’t how to kiss gently. It was always about grabbing the person, putting my hand around their throat, biting. Leaving as many bruises on a body as possible. I confused a lot of people!”

How is being an actress like being a dominatrix? Tina spoke with the creators of the groundbreaking new webseries "Mercy Mistress" about BDSM as healing, sex work as a consent ritual, and the perks of crop tops in winter.

Mercy Mistress is an episodic dramatic series that follows Mistress Yin, a queer first generation Chinese-American professional and lifestyle dominatrix living in New York City. Each episode focuses on a different client and explores the roots of their particular kink while the larger story is one that unveils the layers of Mistress Yin's own sexuality and how she broke from a cycle of abuse, self-destruction, and childhood violence through her healing journey with BDSM.

Yin Q is a BDSM educator/writer, media producer, sex work activist, and mother of two fierce girls. She has a BA from Barnard College and MFA from The New School. 

Poppy Liu is a first generation Yellow American New York City based actor, poet and community organizer who was born in Xi'An, China and raised between Minnesota and Shanghai.

Poppy is the founding director of the production company Collective Sex which has the mission of decolonizing queer femme stories about body, sex, love and healing. 

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“The ultimate fantasy is love.” Live from Camp Ravish, a sexy outdoor event in rural Texas, comes this atmospheric YAPIT Live! My special guest was world renowned rope bondage expert JD from 2 Knotty Boys. We discussed bondage, exhibitionism and voyeurism, spanking, age play, and more!

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“Chivalry is the kind of ritualized flirting that goes on and on and on." In this episode, iconic writer S. Bear Bergman makes a case for chivalry; a modern, bespoke, very queer kind. He compares it to high protocol BDSM, cruising, and good ole fashioned courtesy. Very much the kind of convo you’ll only find on YAPIT.

S. Bear Bergman is a writer, storyteller, educator, activist and the founder and publisher of children’s book publisher Flamingo Rampant, which makes feminist, culturally-diverse children’s picture books about LGBT2Q+ kids and families. He writes creative non-fiction for grown ups, fiction for children, resolutely factual features for various news outlets, the advice column Asking Bear and was the co-editor along with Kate Bornstein of Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation. These days he spends most of his time making transgender cultural competency interventions any way he can and trying to avoid stepping on Lego. Learn more about his projects at sbearbergman.com.

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“Back in the 90s, I touched so many pussies and so many penises while doing erotic awakening massage that eventually I noticed there was no fucking difference: People were responding as erotic beings!”

Part 2 of YaPi Tantra begins with Barbara Carrellas guiding us through the first steps to full body blissgasms. She also explains how the 10th anniversary edition of Urban Tantra came to include trans and gender nonconforming erotic awakening massage, and tells a bit of the origins of her tantra practice in a downtown Manhattan strip club. 

Barbara Carrellas is celebrating the brand new second edition of her bestselling book, Urban Tantra: Sacred Sex for the Twenty First Century—the world’s first LGBTQ- and BDSM-inclusive Tantric sex book. She has also written Ecstasy is Necessary: A Practical Guide To Sex, Relationships and Oh So Much More, and Luxurious Loving. Barbara is the founder of Urban Tantra®  — a philosophy, an international community, and an inclusive conscious sexuality practice. She was named Best Tantric Sex Seminar Leader in New York City by Time Out/NY Magazine for her Urban Tantra® workshops, and was awarded a 2016 Sexual Freedom Award for Lifetime Achievement.

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“The AIDS crisis was taking away our sexual freedom as well as our lives. I wanted to have sex in a way that was safe from HIV, but ecstatic as gay men in the all night disco palaces of your dreams.”

Barbara Carrellas is a queer kinky sex educator whose work has been very influential on Tina’s personal and professional life. To celebrate the tenth anniversary edition of Barbara’s seminal book Urban Tantra, the two of them sat down to discuss breath and energy orgasms, their relative tolerate for “woo,” and the complications of cultural appropriation. This is Part One, with Part Two coming later this month!

Barbara Carrellas is celebrating the brand new second edition of her bestselling book, Urban Tantra: Sacred Sex for the Twenty First Century—the world’s first LGBTQ- and BDSM-inclusive Tantric sex book. She has also written Ecstasy is Necessary: A Practical Guide To Sex, Relationships and Oh So Much More, and Luxurious Loving. Barbara is the founder of Urban Tantra®  — a philosophy, an international community, and an inclusive conscious sexuality practice. She was named Best Tantric Sex Seminar Leader in New York City by Time Out/NY Magazine for her Urban Tantra® workshops, and was awarded a 2016 Sexual Freedom Award for Lifetime Achievement.

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“The part of sex that most people love is the letting go, the freedom of connection with themselves or another person, the expansion, literally the OMG of it. Most people feel that want more of that and they want it to go on longer. Tantra offers practical ways to get you there."

Recorded in front of a particularly enthusiastic audience at the Pleasure Chest in NYC, December 2017, this is the Tantra Edition of YAPIT Live! Featuring Barbara Carrellas, author of the kinky queer sex guide Urban Tantra, along with Sloan, a Pleasure Chest educator and curator, this episode covers massage, breath, orgies, and much more! 

$5+ Patrons get the episode early, as well as NOT ONE BUT TWO EXCLUSIVE EXTRAS including sex advice about asking for what you want when what you want is love, and a whole lot of fascinating audience questions.

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