Focus Group: Virginity
The Sexy Pigeons facilitated our very first workshop on Sunday 21st April 2024 at the Albany Theatre in Deptford. We had 15 gorgeous women and non-binary participants attend our three-and-a-half-hour workshop focussed on all things VIRGINITY!
This workshop was very much a focus group to experiment with ideas. To try things out, be bold, and see what sticks.
In all honesty we were both pretty terrified an hour before we were due to begin. Ever since the idea to run a workshop came about more than 2 years ago, it had come in and out of our subconscious many times. With Saph going away to Glasgow to complete her Masters degree and Otts completing a foundation at LAMDA – as well as general life getting in the way – the workshop went on the backfoot for a while which was sad. We always had hope however that us two as creatives would eventually find a point to reignite the fire and begin the proper planning. Finally towards the end of last year we actually sat down and thought – right we’re serious about this and we wanna talk about sex baby!!!!
The planning stages for the workshop taught us a lot about how to market ourselves as creatives. From coming up with our name Sexy Pigeons (inspired by a silly little sticker we each have of a pigeon with a strap-on) to creating an exciting and eye-catching poster to advertise the workshop – designed by the amazing Gabby Kirk. We were so nervous after so much work…what if no one wanted to come or no one showed up?? But we were entirely proven wrong by the number of willing participants and the love shown towards our idea.
And now for a bit about the workshop itself – we wanted to tackle the construct and concept of Virginity with a very open and playful lens. Topics around sex can be very sensitive and vulnerable – we therefore wanted to use creativity and artistic license to introduce this topic into the space in a silly manner and put participants at ease. We used the first 30-45 minutes for people to get to know each other through a series of icebreakers and games. People had to run around the space as all kinds of sperms, we got to know a little about the kind of sex toy/sexy thing people felt like that day, as well as allowing pairs and groups to find commonalities amongst one another. We found these games to be just as beneficial to ease into our role as facilitators and also to check in with each other.
The workshop moved onto a more focussed discussion about virginity as we shared thoughts, arguments and beliefs on the concept. Saph then introduced an exercise whereby different groups had to pick two parts of the mind maps we’d just created from which they would build still images. As a collective we then had to guess what had been picked. This was such a lovely exercise to witness, and participants communicated and laughed with one another to explore concepts of virginity but had fun whilst doing so.
The next section of our workshop honed in on the thread that will bind our workshops together. This is source material from the Reanimating Data Project. The reanimating data project uses interviews from the Women, Risk and AIDS project, Manchester 1989-1990 to explore changes and continuities in young women’s relationships, sexual health, empowerment and much more over a period of more than 40 years. Our workshops also aim to reanimate data through reading interviews with young women and building a thread between past present and future life to track changes, notice patterns and connect with a part of history. We want to connect to these young people from the 80s and explore how things have changed, how things may have stayed the same, and how we can work to create a future world which could protect and empower these young women and ourselves.
We used interviews as well as other source material such as film video clips, news articles and magazine covers to explore different topics around virginity include age-related pressures, and gender double standards. These group discussions all culminated in a world building exercise. We wanted our groups to build a world for one woman in their interviews that was more sex positive and could combat some of the issues they discussed. We asked for a name, an aesthetic (eg colours, textures, environment) and a sex positive invention. This generated some really interesting conversations around young people’s agency and non-romantic/sexual relationship seeking.
To end and wind down we finished with some zine making. This was a glorious way to digest the workshop and for people to express themselves on paper in any way that felt good to them. There was huge variety in zines created and we cannot wait to build on our Cum on Down! zine archive.
We are so grateful to everyone that came along to support our new venture, and cannot wait to welcome future participants to our workshop series.
