Johannesburg - A dancing crowd, delirious with excitement, fills the dance floor at Kitchener’s Carvery Bar in Braamfontein.
The DJ is playing house and impresses the party-goers. There are handshakes. There are fist bumps. The twist is that the attention is from the men – and the DJ is a woman.
It’s DJ Les G, who’s playing at the third Pussy Party, hosted every second Wednesday of the month in an effort to flood the DJ industry with more experienced female DJs and create a safe space for women to party.
She had the crowd spellbound.
Rosie Parade, the founder of the event, says they’re working towards levelling the playing field.
“Every time it’s Women’s Month, there’s this proliferation of parties where they want to book women and we find that, on that night, the woman DJs are letting down the team because they haven’t had physical practice in the club with people, and then it became a good reason (to start the Pussy Party).”
Parade, a DJ since 2012, also wanted a platform to work with Phatstoki, an upcoming DJ she knew about from her SoundCloud output mixes for Boobs & Honey.
“We’re listening to her mixes and wondering, when can we book this girl and then part of where Pussy Party came from… okay she’s almost there, her basics are there, her mixing is there but you can tell that she hasn’t had practice in a club, so when can we fit her in?”
Phatstoki wanted in because she said she needed a safe space and clubs were never that to her.
“For the femmes, I think club culture is affiliated with rape culture, even the way the parties are promoted. Bikini parties have only women coming dressed in bikinis.
“When she explained to me that it was just Pussy Party for femmes and that they want women to be about this, I immediately knew what it meant. I definitely wanted to be part of it because I was sick and tired, because I want to be free.
“So, what better way than to come together and have people come together and have almost no choice but to respect our bodies and our party mood and how drunk we are?”
Parade insists the space doesn’t exclude men or established female DJs.
“We’re not trying to exclude men from the party, that’s why we say it’s for femmes, not women. So this is even for the gay boys and the straight boys who want to explore what’s soft and feminine inside them.
“It’s this constant experiment, and we have established female DJs like DJ Doowap, Les G, Mora the DJ, LoveslavePhola, and DJ Sista-Matic who aren’t elevating themselves above other women. Instead, they’re coming with their power to elevate all the women.”
An especially notable aspect of the Pussy Party is that any woman who wants to learn to DJ can come to the venue before the event starts for workshops where Parade and associates teach the craft.
He adds: “So from these two questions: How do we make the dance floor more feminine? And how do we elevate our feminine talent?
“We came to the idea of experimenting with Wednesday night, which is an opportunity we are very grateful for to Kitchener’s.”
The Star