Partnered sexuality works differently to casual hook-up sexuality. It's a distinction that can help you tackle relationship problems and save yourself frustration if you think that things should be just as fiery in bed with your spouse after a visit to Ikea as they are with a mysterious guy you drag out of a jazz bar. Similarly, adolescent sexuality works differently to adult sexuality. A distinction that helps you to adapt your sex education knowledge to the new phase of life and save yourself stress if you think that body parts should erect and lubricate just as easily as they do when you're...

We continue with an attempt to find out how workshop sexuality differs from other sexualities. In Part I, we stopped at the observation that workshops are didactically organized, follow a plan and prescribe certain rules and manners. This is why the assertion that workshops break social norms is only partially true. As is so often the case, breaking norms does not simply go hand in hand with freedom from norms, but with a new norm. Normal in the sense of "common" in our society is, for example, that sex is largely non-verbal. And this doesn't mean a lack of dirty talk, but an honest and respectful exchange about what you like and what you don't like. In sex-positive workshops, on the other hand...

At the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin in 2021, there was a conference called "The Workshop - Investigations Into an Artistic-Political Format", the contents of which are wonderfully illuminating for the inherent logic of sex-positive workshops and their influence on a certain understanding of sexuality. Presentations were dedicated to all the beautiful promises of workshop culture: solution-oriented cooperation, solidarity and supportive sharing of resources and knowledge, crazy possibilities of consciousness-expanding experiences through meditation exercises, psychological self-observation techniques, improvisation or organ experiments... According to the conference description, workshops are considered to be "optimally connectable and almost universally applicable...

In the last blog post, reference was made to the cultural studies conference "The Workshop - Investigations Into an Artistic-Political Format" at ici Berlin, where workshops were also examined for their decidedly artistic-performative aspects. Sex-positive workshops are also a kind of performance or social sculpture that follow choreographies. Many theater terms fit in here: a certain togetherness is rehearsed, skills are practiced, rituals are performed. This forms workshop sexuality as an ars erotica. It doesn't have to be...