In this series, I’ve shared my experience co-founding Strings, an Amsterdam-based sex-positive collective, and organising our first event last year. Here are my final reflections, and some hopes for the future. If you've made it this far, thank you for reading!
We’ve had a lot of time to reflect since our first event. To be honest, we felt somewhat burnt out for a while afterwards. But we also learned a lot, and emerged with a much clearer understanding of what it actually takes to build something like this. And since then, we've had many long conversations about how to move forward in a way that feels organic and sustainable. The clearest lesson for us was that we couldn't do it alone, so we've since expanded to a core team of four (and hope to keep growing if we find the right people). We also leaned on our friends and community a lot to get everything done - learning to ask for help was a big part of this journey, and building community means that we can also lean on it when we need to.
Strings began with a simple impulse: to organise the kind of sex-positive parties that we ourselves longed to attend. That desire hasn't changed. What has changed is our relationship to time, energy, and ambition. It's easy to become consumed by the excitement of imagining what could exist… it’s much harder to accept the pace at which meaningful things can actually be built. We want to be realistic about our time and energy, so for now our focus will be on workshops and other events (sans play spaces). These will allow us to continue nurturing our community while gradually working towards the larger vision we have for our parties - something we hope will become possible as our team, experience, and resources grow.
On that note, here’s a little wishlist for my dream sexy party:
Some of these are more achievable than others, but a girl can dream!
On that note, as I wrap up this series, I also want to acknowledge the reality of working in sex-positive spaces. Through my own experiences and conversations with peers, I've realised that for the vast majority of organisers, this is a labour of love. There is very little financial reward, and an enormous amount of emotional, logistical, and invisible work. We do it because we care deeply about creating spaces where people can explore, connect, and feel genuinely welcome.
I would love to see a world where sex-positive nightlife receives the same recognition, institutional support, and arts funding that more conventional cultural events do. At the same time, I often find myself wrestling with the tension between growth and intimacy. Part of what makes these spaces feel so special is that they are small, community-driven, and hidden from the mainstream. Scaling up can bring greater accessibility and financial stability, but it can also risk losing some of the care, trust, and vulnerability that make these environments possible in the first place - even though we’re a long way away from having to answer this question ourselves, we can’t ignore it either. Perhaps that tension is inevitable. Every community eventually has to ask itself whether it wants to become bigger or become deeper. Sometimes those goals overlap, but often they don't.
I don't think Strings needs to become the biggest party in the city. I would rather it become a place that people trust - where they can arrive curious, joyful, awkward, playful, uncertain… and feel completely at ease in themselves regardless. Maybe that's always been the goal, and the parties are simply the medium.