The Cosmic Joke

The universe is gay and it's trolling me 🌈

I’m copywriting for a gay sex shop, and honestly I love it. I mostly sit in the back office writing product descriptions for the website, but every now and we topple into the shop together in a flurry of activity: a customer needs urgent advice on harnesses, or somebody’s ordered a within-the-hour delivery for several bottles of lube and adult toys you could describe as “advanced.” And I’m just happy somebody out there is having a great time.

It's whiplash to suddenly be back in a very gay environment because generally, my life is much less queer than it was five years ago. Partly that’s my age, and suddenly having my mid-thirties reckoning with the possibility or impossibility of motherhood. I’ve been drawn into the 4-dimensional chess game of figuring out how money, partnership, personal and career goals, fertility deadlines and the background horror of climate crisis all figure into that decision, which directs me more towards culture and media aimed at straight cis women than the party gays. And it’s partly just life moving on. I used to organise, socialise and run events a lot more in queer spaces by default, and things have expanded beyond that.

It's a real vibe collision to be wrestling with the most unsexy, reproductively stressful sides of feminism while also selling men sparkly butt plugs and little pink thongs. But I think it is a cosmic invitation to try and make the two work together. My instinct as a pole artist is that I desperately want to talk more about financial injustice for women. The pole fizzles with this history because it comes from sex work, and sex work starkly exposes where capitalism fails women – especially, how unregulated capitalism is terrible for mothers. Pole dancing’s origins in strip clubs means we owe the art from to single women with children who created it as a means of financial survival. The beginnings are obviously broader and more diverse than that, and now the sheer scale and diversity of the pole dance industry is wonderfully enormous, but whenever I touch the pole I feel this legacy tingling in it’s DNA. Possibly from loyalty to my own stripper beginnings. Or the inability to not be a grumpy feminist about basically everything.  

Meanwhile, I love being in a job where sex is loudly and proudly entwined with pure pleasure, and which firmly puts frivolous, sexy queer fun in the centre. I think there is some link which will help me expose the financial injustice for women I want to talk about with more joy and creativity, instead of it feeling bogged down and depressing. The shop has also made me much more confident about working sustainably as a weird artist: I can see hard, numerical evidence from the sales report on my screens that there is a market out there for absolutely anything. And more existentially, whenever I feel gloomy or overwhelmed, I’m reminded there’s always somebody out there who ordered a ball-stretcher in the wrong size who’s having a worse day than you.

Some things I’m doing:

I’m doing a few work-in-progress shows of my stand-up hour Meatshapes with Feelings at the Museum of Comedy (London) in August, and Aberystwyth Comedy Festival in October. it’s about when I worked in the day for a men’s mental health charity, and in the evenings at a strip club (a more lucrative men’s mental health charity.) Come along if you’d like to watch it squirm into life.

Writing Coaching and Patreon Writer’s Room.

The thing I’ve enjoyed doing most this year is working one-on-one with writers on their projects: from books and scripts to solo shows and stand-up sets. I love collaborating with writers on their material itself, or supporting people with a great idea who are struggling to fit their writing goals around other jobs and commitments.

The beauty of coaching is that it’s completely tailored to what a person and their project needs, and everybody’s different. Have a look here to see if writing coaching could work for you and get in touch to have a chat!

I also host a weekly Writers Room on my Patreon where we have a tea and a chat before getting on with some work, and then check in to talk about how it’s all going. These are so lovely and it’s amazing to hear about what other people are creating out there in the wild! Hop in if this would be useful, and supporting my Patreon at any tier helps me keep the pole comedy party rolling.

Thanks everyone who’s sent me a nice message about this newsletter or recommended it to friends!

Siân