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This story appears in our Fall 2026 issue featuring cover star Charli XCX, on newsstands September 28th. Want us to come to your place? Subscribe here to get it delivered to your door.
Y ou see your kitchen supervisor’s bare breasts before learning her name. You practice how the words “yes, chef” feel on your tongue in every scenario, from caramelizing bananas to being pulled across the floor by your bolo tie. One kitchen shift, you pause chopping cherry tomatoes and come in for a celebratory group hug with the five chefs who saw you fuck last night. You never thought these things would happen to you, but what did you expect when you signed up to volunteer for a weeklong festival in Sweden called Sexsibility?
When you arrive at the rural Swedish festival center, you are handed a note summarizing your details: Reg diet. Kitchen. Sex. Yes, you think, that about sums it up. Each August, the hippie haven of Ängsbacka hosts Sexsibility, a festival about all things bodily, intimate, tantric, kinky, and playful. And when the 500 participants and volunteers stumble out of the maximum-intensity hands-on workshops (rated three chilies) or the midday gong baths, they will be hungry and you will be part of a dozen-strong team of chefs feeding them. You’ve come here to fuck, to understand your body better, to serve others good meals. At least one of these will happen.
The festival grounds are lovingly quaint: a mix of red-painted Nordic homes, seasonal tented dormitories, and an old sanitarium that now houses the kitchen equipment and BDSM instructors. You cannot detect the ghosts beside the vegan yogurts, though the walk-in fridges stand in what once was the morgue. Whatever hippie juju the Ängsbacka staff and their rumored Circle of Elders sprinkled across these parts, it stuck, even if you giggle or cringe at the language. Plates at the Dishwashing Temple (dish pit) are given a “love shower” (rinse), while the outhouse signage instructs you how to shit correctly, ending with a thank you, beloved!
You had to write a pro/con list before you arrived, given how much the place reminded you of Midsommar last year. The pros won. You returned for another summer. At your first Sexsibility opening ceremony, organizers joked that they were not a cult one time too many for your taste. At your second, they make the same jokes, replacing “cult” with “sect.” But surveying the landscape—as topless women craft beaded necklaces in the grass, zen coaches munch on edible flowers beside the Empathy Tent’s peak, and your crush from the lap dance workshop snuggles with her boyfriend—a better term comes to mind: You are at adult summer camp.
For a sex festival, you hardly see nudity, much less fucking, in the preapproved sex lawns. The sauna is well used (with a no sex sign added this year), but the café and adjacent greenery are the real beating heart of the festival. Just like at summer camp, trusting friendships form incredibly fast, especially when you are volunteering on the same team or when conversation is lubricated by ice cream and shared pizza. Under the café awning, you hear two participants realize they attended the same kink dinner months ago, when one was a guest and the other a tahini-spreader, although both wished they had been the human plates and furniture.
Your first summer, you dedicate yourself to eggs: 300 eggs by 8 a.m., mostly boiled both soft and hard. You watch them disappear from your steam baskets lickety-split. A good, portable protein source, eaten hot or cold, eggs are perfect to snag for a later snack, which means you watch absolute hotties shove eggs into pockets until they are bulging like bolted-on cleavage. The sexiest accordion player you’ll ever meet always stuffs a hard-boiled egg into her sock for later. At 1 a.m., crawling into the fika coffee station after slapping Polish ass, you hear her putter about in confusion: “Where is my egg? It has disappeared from my sock!” It becomes a bit difficult to imagine orgies without picturing how many participants have swallowed egg after egg just before. Once, a DJ approaches your kitchen, browses your all-vegetarian options, simply says, “This is gonna be a farty meal,” and retreats.
The festival can be janky, silly, overwhelming, expensive, and in poor taste, but fuck if it doesn’t affirm how varied and intimate humanity can be.
On your fourth day at Sexsibility, denied access to the masturbation ritual (room too full, ironically), you meet the kink instructor’s assistant and immediately form a crush. You are on the verge of asking them to fuck before they’re pulled into the café attic by the instructor and suspended from the beams in a locked, displayed hot mess. As they spin, upside down and leaking a bit, you can only compare them to the closest metaphor your chef brain has: the serrano ham leg you’ve seen at Costco. You didn’t fuck at all at your first Sexsibility. You do stranger, more intimate things than that. In front of a hundred onlookers in a barn, you worship that assistant in ways you never thought you’d be comfortable with, and afterward, as you recover, your mouth is full of a new, locker-roomy taste. You realize it is the taste of licking their armpits. It’s beautiful to unlock and chew on, although you do wash it out of your mouth with ceremonial cacao. And at the next breakfast, between bites of crisp pear, the thank-you hug that the assistant surprises you with will be the tenderest touch you receive all summer.
The instructor, too, knows how to play with taste, bringing orange segments to a couples exercise. Everyone whispers about the oranges beforehand. These fruits will be tools of conditioning, he says with the giddiness of a Muppet and the darkness of a Nordic pervert. You will use oranges to play with a submissive partner: letting them enjoy the taste and associate pleasure with it, then withholding it and making them earn it. The barn fills with simultaneous citrus tastings as doms let subs suckle on segments, spray the juice on body parts, and let it be licked up à la royale. You try more armpit stuff, get denied, and laugh about it. Afterward, a mother of three admits that the oranges sparked some animalistic part of her that she never knew. Weeks later, your scene partner texts you: “I ate an orange today and thought of you.”
You didn’t know how all these parts could fit together: the mouth, the body, the desire, the crushes, the feasts. The festival can be janky, silly, overwhelming, expensive, and in poor taste, but fuck if it doesn’t affirm how varied and intimate humanity can be. For you, meaning me, cooking for anyone is a joy. And there’s another thrill in doing it for people who bared their entire soul to you the night before in a conversation, in a scene, or while mummified in plastic wrap.
The final party night, between wet mouth noises in the café-attic-cum-dungeon, you pause your fucking to scan the floor of mattresses. Your last barista is jerking it crazy-style, your head chef’s bride is giving head, and your kitchen supervisor is receiving gentle, tantric touch in lotus position. Around her neck is a kinky collar—no, wait, you recognize that from the kitchen. She’s removed a rubber strap you use for securing catering trays and threaded it around herself. You smile—food always has a way of intruding on sex and vice versa. And who are you to judge her for borrowing kitchen equipment? Because you pull out a labeling marker from your pocket and begin to write your name across the ass of a gorgeous Danish sexologist. “Hey,” she chirps. “That’s not how you spell princess.” The next day, after you have served a dozen trays of pesto pasta to participants as they change into vanilla outfits and file out of their campsites, your coworkers search for that marker to label the leftovers. “They are always disappearing,” someone mutters. “That’s my fault, chef,” you say, thinking of how the marker tip glided across her curves, cheek-to-cheek. “It was not in a food-safe environment.”