Crypto Kinky Studios is an NFT design studio bringing about a better, more inclusive and uplifting Web3 through sex positivity. Our Pleasure as Utility initiatives surprise and delight, but create space for education and conversation along the way. Scroll to bottom for our Fundraiser!

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We live in a sexually wounded society. From the collective to the individual level, it’s all but impossible to escape experiencing some form of sexual repression, shame, trauma, or feeling of insecurity as we grow up.

The repercussions of this are manifold, ranging from the disenfranchisement and under-empowerment of feminist, queer, and non-normative perspectives to the prevalence of toxic masculinity, violence, repression of human rights, and perhaps even larger scale issues like war.

As an extension of our non-digital realities, the cultural sphere of Web3 reflects a similar set of problems. Web3 can be an incredibly exciting and inspiring space to work in, but crypto-normative culture (the dominant and largely homogenous culture comprised of early adopters) often feels stale, exclusionary, and toxic. It perpetuates entrenched cycles of power and privilege, many of which stem from or are wrapped up in the same sexually wounded power dynamics described above. We’re convinced that Web3 and blockchain technology can change the world for the better, but right now it’s Web3 culture that stands in the way of that happening.

Culture is produced at the margins, but Web3 systemically alienates and risks leaving behind the same marginalized and disenfranchised groups that disproportionately make up the driving force behind the creative economy. There’s a feeling that the space is built by and for groups already enfranchised into Web3 and society at large. Already, there are signs of cultural stagnation and consolidation. The long term barrier to entry to Web3 is not going to be technological. It’s going to be cultural.

These systemic issues jeopardize the long-term viability of Web3 and the vision we share for a decentralized and collectively empowering internet. If we want to reduce the skepticism and backlash toward Web3 and actually achieve widespread adoption, we need to demonstrate that Web3 can serve as a powerful tool for bringing about a compelling, fun, empowered, and inclusive future for everyone. Onboarding more women, queer, and non-normative perspectives is a crucial step in the right direction, but by itself it’s not enough.

Web3 needs to be disrupted with more interesting, diverse, and playful creative output. We need to queer Web3.

Queering Web3

Web3 is itself a fundamentally queer concept and innovation. Let me explain. Queerness does not necessarily refer to a persons sexual orientation. Bell hooks explains it best:

“‘Queer’ not as being about who you’re having sex with (that can be a dimension of it), but ‘queer’ as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.“

Put simply, “Queerness is about the rejection of the here and now and an insistence on the potential to create another world.” (José Esteban Muñoz)

This is exactly what Web3 is all about: rejecting the centralized and monetized Web2 in favor of a vision for the future of the internet as an instrument for collective empowerment. However, Web3 doesn’t exist yet— not really. We’re at a liminal point, an in-between phase of moving away from Web2, but not at all certain what the emergent Web3 is fully going to look like.

You don’t have to identify as queer to align with the vision for a future Web3 that is more diverse, representative, and equity-distributed. The key to accomplishing this? Healing the wounds that lie beneath the surface.

How do we heal a sexually wounded society?

Sex ed is the most obvious and commonly given answer, but the problem isn’t necessarily a lack of educational content and resources. Resources and content exist, but they tend to be fragmented across different platforms, formats, and educators- it can be difficult to know where to start looking and what to look for. This is assuming someone has the intrinsic motivation to seek out sex ed, which is often not the case. Meanwhile, the more centralized approaches such as those provided by governments and non-profits get mired down in politics and struggle to make concrete gains. The general consensus: “awkward, painful and unsatisfactory for all involved.”

So what works then? Approaches that focus on the production of popular, consumable culture- cultural capital that provides a compelling alternative to the guilt, shame and entourage of baggage associated with sex. Let’s take a look at Netflix’s Sex Education show. By packaging accurate, real life sex education as a very consumable coming-of-age comedy series, Netflix created a meta-framework for sex ed that easily circumvents real-world stigma in a fictionalized and super engaging format. It’s working.

When sex ed becomes the byproduct of consuming and engaging with culture, you can accomplish more than you would otherwise. This is why, first and foremost, our focus is on creating cultural capital that people will want to consume and engage with. Yes, we need comprehensive sex ed in schools, but more so than that, we need compelling, real-world frameworks to engage with, communicate, amplify, and incentivize the production and consumption of sex positive culture.

What is sex positivity?

Sex positivity refers to a positive mindset free of shame or judgement towards your own and other people’s sexual identity and behavior as long as everyone involved is a consenting adult. Sex positivity also refers to the social movement that seeks to reframe sex and sexuality as a natural, healthy part of the human experience and emphasizes the importance of individual sovereignty in the exploration of sexual identity, safer sex practices, and explicit consent.

Sex positivity is often categorized as a niche interest, but sexual wellness and pleasure most definitely are NOT. Since sex positivity is usually relegated to the fringe, it often doesn’t reach the audiences that could benefit the most from it. By focusing on frameworks of pleasure, wellness, and play that speak to a universal shared experience, we reframe sex positivity as something that everyone can identify with, something that belongs to them as a tool and framework to seek greater empowerment and self expression through. By designing and producing compelling, sex positive cultural capital (see: utility), we believe we’ll see sexual shame and trauma (and their downstream cultural manifestations) begin to heal on both the collective and individual level.

On Culture

Culture is everything that forms the fabric of society, from the tangible artifacts of art, media, music, consumer goods, etc, to the more intangible conversations, ideas, and trends surrounding these. Sex positive culture expressly aims to destigmatize sexual wellness and pleasure, celebrating this as a reclamation of agency. This is different from the sexualization of culture in marketing, which relies on an outdated, inaccurate, and misogynistic notion that “sex sells” and can be commodified.

When done right, the visual language and appeal of sex positive culture is striking- it’s fun, it’s exciting, and it’s so powerful that we believe people will overwhelmingly identify with and WANT to engage with it. This can help change the world for the better.

Take Carne Bollente as an example. They are a sex-positive streetwear brand based out of Paris and the closest conceptual analogue to our vision. Like the Netflix example, Carne Bollente produces culture (clothing) that people want to consume, and space for conversation and education follow suit.

“Exciting, risqué and playful”, their designs “celebrate individuality and the beauty of the human body in its many forms.” The aesthetic and visual identity they’ve created speaks for itself. Some of our favorites: “Protect horny bugs,” “Baise sur la plage,” “Deep Diving,” and “Field of Love.”

In this interview, the Carne Bollente team explains:

“It’s always been about demystifying the taboo – I guess adding fun to it makes it much lighter as a subject. Representing things in a too graphic way can turn people off, and they probably wouldn’t want to wear it. But if you add humour and positivity to the situation, it changes the whole dynamic.”

At Crypto Kinky Studios, we’re focused on empowering and incentivizing the production, engagement with, and consumption of sex positive culture and we have a specific vision for doing so in a way that only uplifts and empowers. As a Web3 native project, there are a lot of exciting possibilities.

Why Web3?

Web3 has demonstrated itself to be a supercharged infrastructure for the production, amplification, and dissemination of new cultural capital via focused networks of shared-interest communities. It is leveraged to allow relatively small, geographically distributed communities to come together and have an outsized effect on the cultural fabric of society.

Getting Kinky ❤️‍🔥

If the word kinky produces a knee-jerk feeling of shame, embarrassment, or even disgust in you, stay with us (and if it doesn’t, amazing)! Confront that feeling, reckon with it. Where does it come from? Whose interest does it serve? Can you allow yourself to step out of that conditioning?

The word gets a bad rap, but we’re simply referring to a state of feeling empowered to explore your own sexual identity and preferences on your own terms. It’s both a powerful and empowering identifier. In more general terms, kinky just means deviant- unashamed to leave the status quo behind and chart a new path. Crypto Kinky is a stance we’re taking as a counterpoint to the crypto normative, the same tired narratives and communities built by and for groups already enfranchised into Web3 and society at large. Out with the bland, the boring, the bro-y*; in with the weird, the whacky, the whimsical.

Kinkiness is all relative. Nipple tassels? Kinky. A little ear nibble? Also kinky. Building frameworks to bring about a more representative, equity-distributed, and fun Web3? Absolutely, unequivocally kinky!

• *Referring to the crypto bro attitude when it manifests negatively. Being a crypto bro doesn’t mean you can’t also be feminist, queer, sex positive, or a great ally. We need men to be part of the sex positive movement! This is a project for everyone interested in sexual wellness and pleasure that’s willing to respectfully engage and uplift each other.

Enter Crypto Kinky Studios.

Picture a cross between BoysClub, MSCHF, and Carne Bollente. CKS is a community and NFT design studio focused on the production of fun and inclusive sex positive culture across several verticals. In a way, you might also say we’re a subversive sex ed play, but not of a form that’s ever been seen before.

We’re a lifestyle brand, an art collective, a community nexus, an experience ecosystem, a subversive educational platform, and a resource and knowledge repository. We are a community of uplifters, educators, amplifiers, advocates, patrons, storytellers, tastemakers, artists and activists. We’re a conceptual bridge between the Web3 of today and the Web3 of tomorrow.

Our product is not sex ed, it’s culture itself. It starts with our NFT collection, but we’re talking about an entire visual and material culture of which the NFT’s are only the beginning. Web3 opens up a whole new world of possibilities. Here’s how it all comes together.

Breaking it Down

Phase one of our project is a generative PFP collection that grants access to an ecosystem of unique perks and benefits. Our NFT mascot is a kinky kinkajou (pronounced kink-a-chu), an adorable real animal we’ve written about extensively here. The Kinky Kinkajous NFT Collection lives under the Crypto Kinky brand and is the key to all things Crypto Kinky.

A Concept for Everyone

We’re living in a world that is increasingly siloed into feedback loops of inward-facing echo chambers. We thought about this long and hard in the design of our concept. We need nuanced and layered approaches to the production of culture, approaches that span across identities and ideologies and focus on what we all share. No, we don’t expect everyone in Web3 to be interested in sex positivity (let alone read this manifesto) or bother to understand our larger vision. It isn’t necessary!

Instead, we expect the majority of people will be interested in our Pleasure as Utility framework (including our condoms), our playfully suggestive NFT’s, and the virality of the content, products, and art we’ll be putting out.

We want crypto bros and OG degens onboard as much as we want feminist and queer voices to feel like this is a project for them- because it is.

Our NFT concept is gender neutral, sexual orientation agnostic, and representative of a super wide range of sexual fantasies, preferences, and traits. Visual metaphors, innuendo, and witty symbolism in our NFT’s traits playfully allude to sexual fantasies, preferences, and behavior, without objectification or ever being explicit or lewd- they’re totally safe for work or Twitter. Some are pretty vanilla, others quite kinky, but they’re all super fun. For example, a physical cream pie can serve as a visual metaphor for its sexual counterpart, a tail might be ribbed for his or her pleasure 😉, and a pool cleaning net subtly alludes to the classic poolboy fantasy. There are fantasies, preferences, and traits for everyone.

We want people to openly talk about and display their NFT’s and initiate conversations around their traits as well as the utility that we’re building for NFT holders. Utility? Yeah, we’re not like the other JPEGs…

Pleasure as Utility 💕

Utility refers to the usefulness or value that consumers get from a product. In Web3, utility refers to the privileges, rights, and rewards associated with owning an NFT.

If culture is our product, pleasure is our utility! With the following Pleasure as Utility initiatives, our goal is to surprise and delight, but create space for education and conversation along the way:

NFT Printed Condoms! 😎

We’re here to help you have a good time. Upon holding their NFT for a pre-set amount of time, community members will be able to request a safe sex goodie bag with their NFT printed on condoms and shipped to their door as a fun perk, marketing play, and conversation starter. We have larger, more ambitious plans for this perk, but for now that remains a tightly guarded secret.

Sex Toy Giveaways 😳

We’re destigmatizing sexual wellness and pleasure by partnering with premium sex toy brands to regularly give away premium sex toys and other goodies such as lube and accessories!

Ask-the-Experts Panels 🙋‍♀️🙋‍♂️🙋

We will have an anonymous question intake form so that our community members can get their sex and relationship questions answered by a panel of professional sexologists, relationship therapists, and sex educators.

Merch & Lifestyle Goods 🧢👙🧥

Sex positive looks good on you! Suggestive candles, playful clothes, art for your walls… there’s a lot of fun to be had. Check out what our friends at Carne Bollente are up to for a taste of what’s possible down the road. (Hint: you won’t want to wear normal clothes again).

Events 🗓

We’ll be organizing IRL events for our community members ranging from body positive figure drawing classes to live shibari (Japanese ropework) demonstrations and a lot more. All designed to destigmatize, recontextualize and uplift sexual wellness and humanity.

Education Quests 🕵️

Accessibility to sex ed is super important to us. We’ll be putting out a lot of short form educational content via our social channels and running both community exclusive and public facing gamified education quests with prize bounties including merch, toys, NFT’s, courses, and other fun stuff.

Exclusive Sex Ed Platform 👩‍🏫📝

We’re building a token-gated sex ed platform with courses across a range of practices and topics- something for every body and every orientation. For example, courses on breathework in sex, tantric principles, candle play, incorporating toys, etc. All taught by professional sex educators.

Trait Specific Perks 🤐

If your NFT kinkajou has two or more specific traits it might be part of a coveted club such as the Mile High Club or the Forbidden Fruit Club and entitled to unique perks, but not much else is known at this time…

All this and a lot more (poke around our interactive website for some fun easter eggs), all in the name of pleasure!

🌱 The DAO Factor 🌱

Access and participation in our community revolves around our NFT collection. We’re not only thinking about utility frameworks, but also exploring community-centered models of learning, creation, ownership, participation, and governance. We want to build an uplifting ecosystem and community with sex positive educators, artists, and thought leaders at its center. We’re thinking about ways that the community can steer educational content towards its interests and needs, how educators can better amplify their reach, how the community can contribute experiences and knowledge and be rewarded for it, and a lot more.

Yes there will be an Art Fund to buy and commission art from aligned creators, but we want to go a lot further than that. Can we create incentive structures to drive demand for feminist, queer, and sex positive art in the broader market? Can we bring together world class sex educators and thought leaders and provide tools and frameworks to amplify their reach to new heights? Can we empower others to change their lives for the better and become empowering agents themselves? Our DAO would explore what all of this might mean and look like. Early supporters via our crowdfund below will be invited to apply to our DAO and form a core part of our community.

Our Call to Action 📞

We have the conceptual framework and identity in place to take this super far and bring about the change we want to see in the world. We’ve put a lot of time, energy, and money into designing the concept, art, framework, utility and more (manifesto’s don’t write themselves). Our super capable team of devs have everything ready to go on the backend. However, we are a bootstrapped and self-funded passion project- our runway is shortening.

We are crowdsourcing a fundraising round to speed up our growth and marketing strategy in order to launch our main collection and build out our utility roadmap quicker. We’re doing so by issuing a very limited edition of NFT’s with special Pleasure as Utility perks across 8 different tiers.

Support our fundraising round and become a pleasure tester for our utility initiatives!

The NFT’s issued as a part of this crowdfund are unique and highly exclusive. Unlike our main collection, these NFT’s are NOT randomly generated. We’ve hand selected traits to represent each of the 8 funding tiers, with accompanying micro-lore and benefits. Whereas our main collection features our NFT kinkajous on plain backgrounds, the NFT’s in this limited collection feature a distinctive condom background that will clearly signal your status as an early supporter.

Owning an NFT from this collection entitles you to several fun benefits including Pleasure as Utility goods customized with your specific NFT and many more benefits among the higher tiers (click on them to read). We aim to begin rolling out these benefits within a month of the crowdsource closing and will be in close contact with supporters throughout this process.

Many of these perks we’ll be rolling out at a larger scale with our main NFT drop down the road, but this is our beta testing ground for utility- supporters will be able to provide feedback on physical goods, content and educators to help steer the course of subsequent rollouts. Even after we launch our main NFT collection, we will continue working to provide our early adopters here with new benefits.

With the help of this early group of supporters, we’ll establish an official mandate plus content, conversation, and moderation guidelines to ensure we maintain a high standard of ethics.

Help Spread the Love 💞 🥰

We’ll set a sale date for the main collection once we’ve accrued a good sized following on Twitter and Discord.

We’re growing the community and it’s going to be a lot of fun! If you’ve learned something new, resonated with our vision and mission, or are just super excited about sex positivity like we are, tell us what you think. Share this article on Twitter, retweet us, post this on your Instagram story (don’t forget a link), or write about it in your newsletter. Send this article to a friend, a lover, or even your slightly toxic ex 😉! Organic exposure via like-minded individuals is the most valuable way for us to grow right now.

Partner with Us 👯

We’re looking for mission aligned partners to co-create our vision for a more uplifting, fun and inclusive sex positive future. We want to work with:

• premium pleasure-focused lifestyle brands like Lelo, Dame, Bellesa, and Maude.

• inspiring feminist, queer, and sex positive creatives like Camibus.eth, Chella Man, Petites Luxures, and Claire Salvo.

• amazing sex educators such as Dirty Lola, Shan Boodram, Dr. Jen Gunter, Dr. Holly Richmond, and Avril Louise Clark.

• sex positive cultural icons like Erika Lust, Harry Styles, Dua Lipa, and Tim Ferris (perhaps the first time these icons have ever been lumped together 😮).

• institutions, tastemakers, and culture-producers like @MuseumOfSex, UnicornDAO, Amar Singh, House of Yes, PleasrDAO, and BoysClub.eth.

• other divergently creative and empowering NFT projects such as SuperNormal (a beautiful hand-drawn collection by Korean artist Zipcy that celebrates human individuality and sensuality) and Crypto Covens, whose lore and storytelling capacity resemble our own!

Most importantly, we want to work with and empower YOU! Reach out via Twitter DM or email hello (at) cryptokinky.io if you’re excited about what we’re building.

It’s been a true pleasure!

- Poolboy Q and the Crypto Kinky Team

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A final note on subjectivity and risk mitigation in sex positivity

We understand many people have reservations and worries about the potential for anything that touches on sex, including sex positivity, to be misconstrued, misinterpreted, or co-opted for less than wholesome purposes. Sexuality touches upon a very core part of our identities- it’s a very important responsibility for us to ensure we’re only creating, promoting, and amplifying respectful and uplifting culture. To this end, we are committed to leading by example and setting a clear tone with content and conversation guidelines, active moderation, and easy reporting/removal mechanisms for anything that doesn’t empower, #UpliftOnly. We are putting together a diverse and representative board of advisors and mentors to ensure our messaging and direction maintain a high standard of ethics. We will have Safer Spaces policies in place for all real world and virtual events.