A mysterious (some would say notorious) New York sex party club has announced that it is closing the door on its era of exclusive in-person parties, with the founder asking for money to help clear debts and keep the brand going online, following a failed pivot to crypto a few years ago.
The NSFW (New Society for Wellness) emerged in New York in the mid-2000s as a private event series, eventually expanding into a subscription-based community with physical clubhouses hosting sex parties. NSFW sold tiered membership through crypto and NFTs, and hosted online sex parties during Covid pandemic lockdowns.
Daniel Saynt, NSFW’s founder, claimed that a tiny percent of people who applied to join the club were accepted, contributing to an air of exclusive intrigue around the brand. Outlets from Forbes to Fox News covered this “elite” club.
In 2022, Saynt told SEXTECHGUIDE he had plans for clubhouses in multiple cities and an island location. Now he has thrown in the towel, declaring that NSFW has $10,000 of debt.
“The events and future Clubhouse plans are on pause, but the digital spaces will remain,” Saynt said, adding that eight NSFW Clubhouses had come and gone already. He said that he will continue with a magazine and that the NSFW online community would remain active.
Saynt also made a plea for contributions to help settle the brand’s debt, plus ongoing online costs of around $500 per month. These are all surprisingly small figures for an organization with plans for an island location and venues in multiple cities.
NSFW and NFTs: a predictable combination
The closure removes a prominent name from the US sex-positive events space, though the foundations were never exactly solid. The crypto-and-NFT model was always a bet that required both the adult industry’s financial exclusion to persist and crypto’s mainstream adoption to accelerate, two things that didn’t move in the right direction at the right time. SEXTECHGUIDE noted the skepticism around the crypto pivot at the time, and Saynt himself acknowledged in 2022 that many potential members associated it with pump-and-dump schemes.
Major credit card processors refused to work with NSFW, which is a familiar story in the adult industry, and one that has pushed more than a few operators into crypto’s arms as a workaround, as Itch.io found out the hard way. The NFT sales that followed were, in hindsight, about as reliable a foundation as you’d expect.
In 2022 Saynt told SEXTECHGUIDE: “The main concern for people is, ‘Is this just a pump and dump, like all these other pump and dumps I’ve heard about?’. They associate crypto with this kind of Ponzi scheme. There needs to be more regulation, and I can understand people’s fears when it comes to crypto.”
Announcing the end of the NSFW Clubhouse project, Saynt suggested that credit card hassles were the least of his and NSFW’s worries. He claimed that one of the brand’s venues had been stormed by mafia figures, and that he had been wrongly targeted online over false sex trafficking accusations.
Saynt (pictured above) said: “There was even a night when a guest claimed we sacrificed someone in a back room and called the police. I was nearly arrested, cuffs around my wrist, until over 100 people confirmed that no one had been sacrificed to Baal in the Clubhouse.”
Losing access to Stripe, Saynt says, was what finally broke the model. “What did stop me was losing Stripe, losing the financial backbone that made everything possible,” he said. “Two years of memberships lost overnight. Without that recurring support, the model no longer works. And after ten years of fighting uphill battles, I’m tired.”
NSFW presented an image of thousands of moneyed elites begging sexy doormen for entry to a swanky, secret Manhattan sex club HQ. It’s eminently possible that the reality was somewhat different, and that its potential membership size was more modest.
Still, NSFW had a moment, with membership reportedly spiking as it embarked on its online Covid-era spicy meet-ups, and it’s a shame that it couldn’t be properly sustained.
Saynt said: “This isn’t a final goodbye. It’s more of an until I’m ready to return.”
