From Pink Bunny to Rainbow Buttplug: Sex Toys, LGBTQ+ Identity, and Queer Capitalism

(Links to the presentation featured in bold font below!)

So I’m sitting here in my newly air-conditioned bedroom looking out on the beautiful day, waiting for my Telehealth therapy session and following Teams Board Meeting for Masakhane, dirt between my toes from propping up freshly transplanted tomatoes after they endured last night’s storm. I tried hardening them as I grew them from seed, but I started with the mission that even if one tomato plant survived, I’d consider it a success. I’m sticking to that mentality regarding a lot of things right now.

The semester ended, weirdly of course. But it’s over. 3 professors suggested I apply for the doctorate program, which while flattering, I cannot afford financially or mentally. It’s time to dig into this career. I have the whole rest of my life to flirt with a PhD. Now is the time to focus on the abundance I already have.

So enough of updates. My back is my back. I finished out what ended up being a glob-awful LGBTQ+ Issues course with a highly problematic gay, white, cismale, older professor, and my classmates and I have forged a lovely trauma bond from the experience. Which happens all too often in my academic life, so I’m going to try to spring this collaboration up and out of the shitty pedagogy into some nurturing and sustainable connections.

The people have spoken!

For my MSW final project, I had the opportunity to re-present a redux of a workshop I botched at Widener’s CareersCon in 2016. I made a downloadable PowerPoint with notes, clickable links, and transcriptions, made a captioned YouTube presentation, and included a supplemental show-and-tell video to give a different experience to the content. Take your pick, there are options!

This presentation absolutely FLOPPED. Improvements have been made, I promise.

The board meeting with Masakhane starts in an hour and I just realized how cool it would be for us to host Sex Toy “Show-and-Tell” Zoom meetings: a space for us to show our faves, share what they mean, show how they function, do flame testing, ask questions give modular ideas, riff on the knowledge we have, etc. What do you think? Would you want something like that?