What if kinky nightlife could teach us more about humanity than politics ever did?
The incredible concept of Pinky Promise is the kind of event that doesn’t sell escape but reflection. It’s a living experiment where sensuality, sex, education, music, and art collide in a one-night-festival.
Founder Jared Philippo calls it “a pinky promise to remain committed to growing, evolving and exploring your sexuality.”
The Birth of a Playground: Pinky Promise
When Jared started Pinky Promise six years ago, it wasn’t meant to become a cultural movement.
“I used to run a circus for 10 years where I was also the ringmaster which allowed for me to embody my inner clown. I love to bring the essence of the circus into Pinky Promise – the laughter, the chaos and the loveable messiness of exploring sexuality”.
What drew him in wasn’t decadence, but curiosity:
“I wanted to create spaces where people could feel, play, and connect. Not just fuck,” he says.
His parties began as creative playgrounds where performance met education. Before lockdown, Pinky Promise was already experimenting with workshops and games that opened people up. Not just physically, but emotionally. When the world shut down, Jared took it online, hosting daily sessions with facilitators from around the globe. Three thousand people joined in two months.
“It made me realise,” that people should have a place that they can party that also offers the environment for self growth.”
The Fool as Philosopher
The key to understanding Pinky Promise is the clown.
Not the circus stereotype, but the figure of the fool. Your inner clown which allows you to be mischievous but also gives you the ability to play the fool when you need to feel fully liberated from any expectations and also to drop any masks in order to embrace vulnerability.
Jared laughs: “I used to run a circus party for a decade, so that’s why I want to bring the essence into it with the laughter, joy and embracing the messiness of exploring sexuality.”
At his parties, you might see a cabaret show in one room with another room hosting a naked life drawing workshop. You might be twerking on the dancefloor and then perhaps witness a parade of bodies blind folded doing a conga line topless.
In Jared’s eyes, Pinky Promise isn’t about performing sexuality; it’s about unperforming it.
Pinky Promise is Education in Disguise
Unlike many sex-positive events, Pinky Promise deliberately blends hedonism with learning. Each event has workshops on communication, movement, kink, and intimacy. Not as moral lectures, but as embodied experiences that help guests reconnect to themselves.
“Its often assumed as Sex positive parties that everyone is expected to be fully seasoned hedonists with decades of experience navigating these spaces. For Pinky Promise, we still welcome those regardless of where they are on their journey which is why we like to see the name as simply being a pinky promise to yourself that you are committed to grow and evolve.”
The format rejects both extremes: the rigid exclusivity of closed kink circles and the superficial chaos of “fuck parties.” Instead, Jared curates a middle ground: spaces where first-timers and veterans mingle, where curiosity is safer than performance.
When Parties Become Philosophy
Behind the glitter, Pinky Promise hides a quiet manifesto. It’s a vision of society that dares to imagine another way of being together.
“You present a version of what society could be,” BERLINABLE notes in the interview. “A place where people can be as they want: free, kind, curious.”
Jared nods. “Exactly. For one night, we build the world we want to live in.”
It’s a temporary utopia, held inside a castle or club. A place where boundaries are discussed instead of assumed, where pleasure becomes communal learning. A micro-society that mirrors what political theorists call prefigurative politics: living the change you want to see.
Intimacy as Cultural Resistance
The cultural value of Pinky Promise becomes clearer when you contrast it with today’s world: a world where intimacy is algorithmic, sexuality is politicized, and connection often feels transactional.
Against this backdrop, a space that centers embodied learning feels radical.
“There’s a dire need for safer, explorative environments,” Jared says. “Especially now. Pinky Promise is about well-being, not just sex.”
And yes, it’s also about beauty. The playrooms are lovingly and delicately designed by creative designers, art directors for films & visual sculptural artists. The spaces are treated as erotic installations where every aspect has an attention to the detail that serves one purpose: to make people feel again.
Berlin as a Rebirth
Jared arrived in Berlin during lockdown. A city that, unlike London, allowed him to be small again.
“I wanted to be the fool again,” he says. “To be shy, to be new.”
That humility became part of the Pinky Promise DNA: the beginner’s mind.
As Shunryu Suzuki wrote in 1970:
“In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities. But in the expert’s mind, there are few.”
This mindset is the secret sauce of Pinky Promise.
The sense that you don’t have to be confident to belong. You just have to show up, curious and open like a beginner to sex.
The Magic of Pinky Promise
Ask Jared what the magic is, and he smiles:
“It’s a space where, no matter where you are on your journey, whether solo, in a couple, or exploring something new, you can show up exactly as you are and be welcomed into a playground of curious, colorful characters.”
It’s not a brand or a lifestyle. It’s a living question:
What if sexuality could be a community practice again, as it was in ancient times?
Jared has enriched the capital of Germany with this Pinky Promise to ourselves: Berlin’s oath is to grow every day, and help others grow, too. Together we build this world we want to live in.
A New Kind of Intimacy
What Pinky Promise teaches us is that intimacy isn’t something we consume. It’s something we co-create.
Between laughter, sweat, and the awkwardness of first touches, something bigger happens: people remember that being human is messy, and that’s the point.
Berlin might be awash with play parties and so what it might need instead are more places for people to genuinely connect and practice new forms of hedonism fused with more intentionality.
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