How to Hook Up at a Music Festival

It's festival season: Time to forget arguing about culture wars on Twitter and hurl yourself into a field where you can spend the weekend showering your brain with serotonin, tripping over guide ropes and darting from stage to tent and back like a hyperactive bolt of electricity. 

For some people, it’s also the time to get frantically railed on a half-inflated mattress to the distant sound of a guitar solo. Or hoping that someone bothered to queue up for a shower (they didn’t) because you’re about to go down on them. Or collecting hot people’s juices in a small pool, mixed with warm larger and peppered with tiny bits of tobacco, in the corner of your tent. Festival sluts unite! 

They make for great places to hook up because they gather people from all over and lubricate spontaneous connections – if you go to the same club nights in your home city, you can be forgiven for sometimes feeling like everyone you’ve ever shagged or dated is congregating in the same room dancing to techno. But you really need to be going about it the right way; you might be surrounded by hedonism but never confuse that with an “anything goes” environment. 

An “anything goes” environment does not exist anywhere, and for good reason – and especially not at festivals. In 2018, a study by researchers from Durham University found that a third of women surveyed had been sexually harassed at a festival and eight percent had been sexually assaulted. A YouGov poll that same year found that almost 50 percent of female festival goers under the age of 40 had “experienced sexual harassment” at these events. 

Josh Eustace, founder of walkabout performance group Sex Pest Control, recently got back from Wales’s Balter Festival, where they were helping to cool festivalgoers down with sex toys repurposed as water pistols. “We go around festivals and spray people down with various dildos, sex toys and fleshlight-type things,” he explains, stressing: “But only with people’s consent.”

The aim is to cool people down but also open up discussion about consent. “It brings up the topic in a natural way – we’re not shoving messaging down people’s throats, excuse the pun.”

I asked Eustace and some other sex-positive aficionados about the best ways to go about hooking up at festivals and how best to avoid some of the most common pitfalls.

If you go to a festival with the specific intention of fucking someone, guess what? You’re going nowhere near anyone's genitals. That condom in your wallet (side note: please don’t keep condoms in wallets) is coming home on the coach with you. Reeking of desperation and setting your expectations way too high is simply un-sexy. This especially happens with people who’ve been single for a while and see every encounter as a potential opportunity to change that. Don’t be that guy, going around a dancefloor trying to hook up with everyone and succeeding with no one. 

“Have fun, don’t put too much pressure on yourself to hook up,” Eustace advises. “If it happens, it happens. Some people [who] are always looking to hook up at the festival, they put loads of pressure on themselves like that’s exactly what they want to do that weekend. But that’s not what festivals are normally about – it’s about the music and art and performance. Anything else is just a bonus.” 

Matt Skully, a kink curator, kink performer and advocate of casual festival sluttery, concurs. “Have no expectations,” he says. “If you think, ‘Oh, I'm definitely going to get it at this festival’, that's when it never happens.’ Don't spend your time hunting for sex – that's the worst thing you can do.” 

“Try to be as clear about your intentions as possible,” says Gigi Engle, a certified sex educator and co-host of the Bad Break Podcast. “For the most part, people enjoy directness. When you can barely hear what anyone is saying, being open and honest is a big plus.” 

This comes with an important caveat: “Be willing and open to take a no. It can sting and be a blow to your self-esteem, but being able to gracefully take a no from someone is critical.” Any good slut has perfected the art of rejection. So: Get to the point where you register some chemistry between you and the person you fancy and ask if you can kiss them. If it’s a “no thanks”, move on and don’t ask again. 

“I think that festivals are a good place to hook up as long as it’s all above board and everyone is in the right mind about it,” Eustace notes, “because it’s a place where people go to enjoy themselves and have a holiday from their life, it’s generally a good place to hook up.”

Skully agrees that, with no expectations going in, festival sex can be the cherry on top of the cake at the end of a happily chaotic weekend dancing in the sun. “I ended up shagging the vegan burger man,” he fondly recalls. “A lot of kinks and fetishes were ticked off in one because it was in the back of his burger van, but also he was wearing this greasy white vest. He said, ‘I'm sorry, I smell like burger grease.’ I said, ‘No, this is really doing it for me.’” 

Everyone I spoke to brought up the issue of consent at a festival again and again. “Make sure that all people can give consent to begin with,” Eustace says. This was backed up by Engle: “Be aware of drug use, both yours and that of the person you're flirting with. People will often make choices under the influence of drugs that they might not in a different headspace. This is something to keep in mind when hitting on someone, because with alcohol and other drugs comes a big question of consent.” 

“There's always a safety element,” Skully adds. “Be careful and look after yourself, especially if you're taking substances.” It’s advisable to let your mates know where you’re going if you go on a sexy side quest: “Make sure that you, or obviously the other person, isn’t too fucked and you're having an open dialogue with your friends. I always tell my friends if I'm going to go chat with someone or if that's on the cards – just so they know.”

When you’re at a massive festival at night, the crowd surging like a sesh-y tidal wave, a momentary lapse in concentration is enough to mean you’ve lost your friends and you’re not going to find them again.

In some ways, this can be fun because you always end up meeting some new people – some ketty clowns who like fisting, for instance (seriously, what were people taking at Boomtown in 2018?). In other ways, it can be annoying if you’ve been getting off with a hottie and they get swept away in a crowd. Engle has some top festival shagging advice for this: “Ask for numbers of people you're into early on, in case you get separated and want to meet up later.”

The rules of hooking up at a festival are the same as hooking up anywhere – don’t pressure people, don’t be creepy, watch out for overintoxication – just with a distinct possibility that the person who’s just come in your mouth hasn't had a shower for three days. But hey, that’s the risk you take. Just don’t forget the wet wipes.