Aspiration and Reality - A Feminist Sex Shop under Capitalism
The basis for our work in the collective is, of course, that we agree on the most important, essential points. One of them is that we all have a critical attitude towards capitalism, which expresses itself, for example, in the fact that we want to create something together in solidarity, all while paying attention to individual needs, and in an anti-hierarchical way. This attitude should also be reflected in our future sex shop: We renounce leaders and bosses and run the shop together as a collective at an equal level - we will not strive for profit for the sake of profit, our earnings should continue to finance our feminist educational work.
In the day-to-day competition between companies, profit-oriented (sex) shops have to direct all their efforts towards profit (maximising). The means (the shop) to that end (profit) is measured solely on its effectiveness. Thus, the focus of conventional (sex) shops is on consultations, which must increase sales, and on products that are produced as inexpensively as possible and are marketed as supposedly sustainable. The target group is usually selected only according to their purchasing capacity and hardly ever covers the actual gender and sexual diversity of society. It is the compulsion of profit orientation that restricts conventional sex shops so extremely in their range of products and options for action, such as counselling, and leaves little room for an emancipatory approach to sexuality and desire.
As much as we as a collective and as individuals wish things were different, even with Consent Calling we are not free from the already explained capitalist constraints. We also have to buy our toys etc. from producers, who produce for profit, which is reflected in the often non-sustainable products as described above. Nevertheless, our aim is to separate the wheat from the chaff as far as possible and to offer you, our customers, products of the highest possible quality. Certainly, our price policy has to be oriented to a given extent by external constraints, such as rent, shopping, and eventually somewhen also wages, etc. But you can trust that we, as young people and partially still students, know the feeling of being short on money all too well and will accordingly make our prices as affordable as possible. For us it is clear that we don't want to participate in pinkwashing or greenwashing in order to sell as much as possible. Patriarchy and capitalism have to be analysed and fought against in an interconnected way... For this very reason, it is our responsibility to point out the contradictions that will arise for us as a collective, which is critical of capitalism, through the shop and to develop a way of handling them.
But now for the good news:
As a feminist collective, you can be sure of this, our future assortment in our future shop, and of course our future consultation, will clearly be oriented towards a much broader target group than conventional sex shops. Our aspiration is to be a feminist sex shop for everyone, especially for people who do not find themselves in the heterosexual and binary gender system. Also, as mentioned above, we do not intend to pay ourselves the usual manager salaries, but to reinvest our earnings in the feminist revolution ;).