How Womxn of Color-run Collectives Are Disrupting Sextech
My latest piece was recently published in Future of Sex Magazine! It's the first in a series I'm working on that explores the role of Collectives in the advancement of technology.
Hey friends!
Thanks for being here :) I hope that, wherever you are in the world, you’re safe, happy & healthy.
The topic of my latest piece is one I’ve been exploring in my writing for a few years now. In college, I wrote two term papers on The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, the authors of the popular self-help guidebook “Our Bodies, Ourselves.” I also wrote my senior thesis on the evolution of the feminist movement and quickly realized how collectives, including the Combahee River Collective and various Sex Worker Collectives, were largely responsible for pushing the movement to become “intersectional” and “sex-positive”—two principles that are widely championed today and have enabled the movement to sustain and grow.
However, this series takes these ideas one step further, drawing the links between collective organizing and revolutionary technological innovation.
Photo courtesy of https://combaheerivercollective.weebly.com
How It Works
When a society and its institutions—medical, educational, legal, etc.—marginalize and mistreat members who come from certain groups, these folks have no choice but to come together to design new ways to adequately support one another. They build new communication channels, ways of disseminating important information, systems for fundraising and providing mutual aid, and their own solutions to problems they’re facing.
Through a practice dubbed “consciousness-raising,” feminist collectives have led the charge on the development of all kinds of notable and pervasive sextech technologies from the pill, to abortions, and rape crisis responses. Collectives run by womxn of color especially have worked to ensure that these technologies are truly improving bodily autonomy for all by making them safer, user-controlled, affordable and ending the use of birth control as a means of population control.
Today, collectives run by womxn of color continue to have a profound impact on innovation in the sextech industry. For this series, I interviewed a few of the womxn who started these influential Collectives with the hopes of learning why they started them, understanding how they operate and expand them, and further illuminating the kinds of technological innovation that derives from them.
My first article focuses on The Sisters of Sexuality Collective started by Taylor Sparks of Organic Loven. Check it out below, and let me know what you think!
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Taylor Sparks inspires sex goddesses and the Sisters of Sexuality Collective.