Why we created OPLEYA

The information existed, scattered across organisers' websites, calendars of venues you needed to know about already, social media and a handful of specialist listings. Some focused on BDSM, others on swinging, techno nights or festivals. To discover a party or workshop, you often had to know where to look before you started. We missed so much.

Those categories felt too narrow. What we found in sex-positive culture was broader, and more fluid. A party can be a place of discovery. A workshop can change the way we relate to one another. The familiar lines between learning, playing, meeting people and celebrating start to blur.

There are nights for dancing and meeting people; workshops about consent, touch, movement and shibari; conversations about desire and relationships; performances and festivals. Sometimes we simply want a good night out. At other times we want to understand something about ourselves, explore a practice or try a different way of connecting. All those reasons are equally valid.

What matters most to us is the attention this world pays to individual freedom, consent and other people's boundaries. Of course there are contradictions and real differences between communities. That, too, is part of what makes it alive.

We believe sex-positive culture is part of a revolution that goes far beyond changing social mores. A Copernican revolution, in the literal sense of a shift in perspective.

With Copernicus, Earth ceased to be the motionless centre around which the rest of the world was arranged. It took its place among the stars. That shift changed what it was possible to imagine.

We recognise something similar in sex-positive culture. Our relationship with our bodies, desire, pleasure, love and other people no longer has to be measured against a single norm. We can explore other ways of knowing ourselves and living alongside others. There is no need to replace one prescribed model with another. Everyone should have room to find their own way.

Sexuality has long been used to establish hierarchies, control bodies, instil shame and keep people apart. It can also become a place of emancipation, self-knowledge and sometimes even a way to understand the world. That possibility asks a great deal of us. Freedom without consent is just another form of power over others. It calls for listening, judgement and responsibility.

We do not idealise this world. It has its ambiguities and dead ends. But we see in it an extraordinary invitation to question assumptions we had come to mistake for nature.

We began by imagining the tool we wished we had. First, to spare ourselves those endless searches. Then we thought other people might need it too.

We built a graph that connects events, places, collectives and organisers. Publicly accessible programmes are identified and matched using automated tools, wherever their access conditions allow it. We try to confirm dates, cities and official links. This work is far from finished. There will always be events we have not found or cannot verify.

Our intention is simple: to make these events easier to discover without turning the private lives of the people attending them into a product. We list public information about events and organisers. We do not build files about participants' intimate practices, profile visitors or sell data. We do not sell tickets. OPLEYA is not a commercial venture.

We would like people to discover this world without already knowing all its codes. We would like a workshop to be findable without knowing its organiser's name, and a party to reach beyond the circle of those already in the know.

And, quite simply, we would like to spend less time finding out what is happening and more time living it.