Not What You Think
The distance between what we're told erotic life looks like and what it actually feels like is often enormous. Jess Zakira Wise has spent a decade living in that gap.
There are parts of erotic life that almost no one talks about honestly.
Not because people aren't curious — the curiosity is almost universal. But because the images we inherit from culture, media, and the adult entertainment industry are so exaggerated, so performative, so stripped of ordinary human texture, that they crowd out the actual experience before it can even be imagined. The stigma isn't only moral. It's imaginative. We can't picture what something really looks like because we've only ever been shown a version of it designed to provoke, not to inform.
Group sex is one of those topics. So is desire itself, in many of its forms.
In a recent episode of the New York Times podcast Modern Love, host Anna Martin spoke with Jess Zakira Wise — an organizer who has spent the past decade hosting what she calls play parties, and whose decade of experience has taught her something that cuts well past the subject of group sex: that the distance between the stigmatized version of a thing and its lived reality is often enormous. And that the distance is almost always closed by the same force.
Communication.
Wise describes her first group sex experience — at a house party in high school — as something that emerged organically from friendship, attraction, and mutual curiosity. "It was very wholesome," she told Martin. "I think people, often, when they think about group sex or orgies or sex parties, they think it's so salacious and just this rodeo of a time. And really, most of the time, I find it's really sweet and tender."
She spent years afterward attending organized play parties and finding them disappointing — not because they were too sexual, but because they were too performative. Too much like the exaggerated cultural script. Male-dominated, heteronormative, focused on spectacle rather than connection. "It felt like we were playing at what they saw in movies," she said, "or what they imagined — what somebody else had imagined a sex party could be."
That phrase — what somebody else had imagined — is worth sitting with. So much of erotic life is lived through someone else's imagination. We form our desires, our fears, our shame, and our expectations through images we didn't author and stories we didn't choose. The result is a kind of erotic life that belongs, partly, to someone else.
Wise decided to create something different. She hosted her first party in her apartment in Los Angeles — texting friends and acquaintances with what she described as "a networking party with an optional orgy at the end." Eighteen people showed up. Most sat in their cars beforehand, debating whether to come upstairs.
What happened inside, she said, was tender. People were nervous, then present, then connected. "It should feel like we're in a supportive space," she reflected. "It should feel like we're playing and enjoying life."
What made it different from the parties that had disappointed her? Largely: how it was built.
Wise learned, over hundreds of events, that the conditions surrounding an erotic experience shape it as much as anything that happens within it. Who feels welcomed when they walk in. Whether the space feels safe. Whether there are clear agreements about what's allowed and what isn't. Whether people feel seen before they're asked to be vulnerable.
She also learned something about communication that applies well beyond play parties. Rejection, she observed, is harder to give than to receive — particularly for people socialized to accommodate rather than express. "You've been taught your whole life to not directly say no," she told Martin. "And if you say no, you have to give all of these reasons why."
The inability to say no clearly and the inability to say yes clearly are the same problem. A person who can't honestly refuse can't honestly desire. The erotic life that emerges from that constraint isn't really theirs.
What Wise built — and what she watched people discover inside those spaces — was something simpler and harder: the practice of saying what you actually want, and hearing what someone else actually wants, and letting both of those things be true at the same time.
"Having the audacity to ask for what you want is really powerful," she said. "And it's really scary. Because people can say no."
Stigma does many things to erotic life. It keeps people from imagining possibilities that might suit them. It loads ordinary desires with shame they don't deserve. It fills the space where curiosity might live with caricature and exaggeration — images designed to provoke, not to illuminate.
But perhaps the most lasting damage stigma does is this: it makes communication feel dangerous. If wanting something marks you as deviant, you don't talk about what you want. You manage it privately, perform something safer in public, and live in the gap between the two. Over years, that gap becomes the shape of your erotic life.
The path out is the same regardless of the specific desire. Not bravado, not transgression for its own sake — but honest conversation. With yourself, first. Then, when and if it feels right, with another person.
This is, at its core, what the EROS-Q is for. Not to label or categorize erotic life, but to give people language for a conversation they may never have had — about what they value, what they're curious about, what has felt meaningful, and what they might want more of. The tool is an individual self-assessment, because that conversation has to start somewhere private before it can go anywhere shared.
Wise watched the sun come up after her first party, she told Martin, humming with something she struggled to name. Relief, maybe. Or the particular aliveness of having asked for something real and received it.
"It gives me hope for the future," she said. "I think it shows me what's possible for how we treat each other."
That possibility doesn't require a play party. It requires, mostly, the willingness to say something true — about what you want, what you value, what your erotic life actually looks like versus the version that's been handed to you.
Communication is where the erotic life that belongs to you begins.
Domain 3 of the EROS-Q — Erotic Communication — explores how openly and honestly you talk about your sexual life, and the gap between what you feel and what you say. Request early access →
Source: "Hosting an Orgy Is About More Than Just Sex," Modern Love, The New York Times — an interview with Jess Zakira Wise, conducted by Anna Martin. August 26, 2026.
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