Wank Wednesday: Bawdy Storytelling

There’s really no such thing as TMI here!

Photo courtesy of Dixie De La Tour

Hey, Fleshbot fans! Do you love sex stories? I mean, who doesn’t love hearing about the wacky, funny, crazy, titillating, and sometimes actually quite poignant stuff that happens to other people in bed…… or at work…… or in a car… or at the kink club… you get the idea. And not to cast any aspersions toward erotic fiction at all, but I can’t deny that I at least get that extra kick of voyeuristic thrill when it’s an actual true story told by the person it happened to.

Since its inception 17 years ago, Bawdy Storytelling has been serving up bite-sized nuggets (about ten minutes for each storyteller) of the sexual exploits of adult storytellers of all walks of life, all genders, and all orientations. The stories can be about sex, kink, gender, body image, or more than one of these things. All stories must be true, and told, not read from paper, which tends to produce some of the most authentic emotion and recollections from the teller.

Sexual folklorist Dixie De La Tour is the creator of this fabulous concept and it began for her when she was facilitating sex parties and being the “fairy godmother” to new folks attending the events and helping connect them with folks who tickled their fancy and shared their kinks. Soon enough, party attendees began volunteering their sex stories to her about these match-ups and other sexual adventures. Around this same time, Dixie attended a personal storytelling event held for for Burning Man attendees and folks in the burner subculture and wondered how she could do something similar in an adult-only setting. This eventually birthed the first Bawdy live event in San Francisco in 2006.

Hearing someone else’s story can be extremely validating, like, yeah, there’s someone else out there that loves (insert oddly-specific kink here), that’s awesome! And if you sit there and start getting turned on by a story, well, so much the better. Bawdy gets you laid! It really does! There’s even a perfume that says so. Who’s telling the stories? Well, there are a lot of famous humans in the sex and kink world who tell their adventures, but anyone can pitch a story and if Dixie thinks it’s a fit, she engages with tellers with lots of coaching to help improve their technique and the flow of the story. A Bawdy live show includes not only curated storytellers, but often musical acts, and to get the crowd warmed up, there’s the raucous game of Bang-O, which is like speed dating on steroids, kinda, with sex toys as the prizes.

Bawdy flourished with its live events, but it evolved into a podcast as well. People had been telling Dixie that they wanted a podcast for a very long time and she didn’t think the format would translate well from stage to audio, but despite her initial reluctance, it opened up a whole new audience of listeners and tellers. Bawdy and similar events such as Smut Slam are still facing a long road to bounce back from the pandemic. Overall attendance at any kind of live events nowadays is down, unless your name is Taylor Swift.

Bawdy is now on its latest live tour, a courageous odyssey both personal and professional for Dixie. She has taken to the road going cross-country in the winter in her minivan, called Edna after her Mom, who passed away last year. The first stop was here in my hometown of Baltimore this past weekend at the lovely Bluebird Cocktail Room. The tellers were an excellent group consisting of Reid Mihalko, Dirty Lola, Mollena Williams-Haas, Rebecca Rose Vassy, and an all-female musical sketch comedy act called Forevermore. Weird Movie Boyfriend #1 (who is often Live Entertainment Boyfriend as well) and I filled up our Bang-O cards and settled in with a themed drink (the Rimjob was delish!) and some really fire mushroom toast to listen to the tales being told with rapt attention. It was truly an epic night to start this tour and I found it deeply inspirational on a personal level. I have lots of sex stories to tell, for sure, and now I want to do that! I was actually supposed to go on stage to tell a story as a last minute addition, but that ended up not working out due to all of the snow-related fuckery. That may happen somewhere down the line-- you’ll have to keep your eyes peeled!

The easiest way for you to check out Bawdy is of course the podcast. The most current 100 or so episodes can be found on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and many other podcast platforms, and older episodes can be found on Bawdy’s website. Just think, you can be standing at the sink doing dishes and listening to tales of salacious sluttery on your earbuds. What a time to be alive! Their YouTube channel gives you a taste of what the live experience is like, so give that a look as well, but the best way to experience Bawdy is undoubtedly to attend a live show.

The Bawdy live tour’s next stop is in Philadelphia on January 26 at City Winery and it continues at various City Winery locations through February 25 (and possibly beyond, that’s TBA!) . It’s a fabulous date idea, especially going into Valentine’s and Lupercalia month, and yes, self-dates count!

Now, go out there and have some enthusiastically consensual sexual fun and create some great sex stories of your own! Maybe you’ve got a bawdy storyteller in you! I'll leave you with Bawdy's theme song by the inimitable Storm Large. I defy you not to get this stuck in your head!