In his childhood, Ryan Mantione wished to become a priest. Back then, Mantione blessed potato chips as though those were Sunday mass wafers. However, as a teen, he was interested in heavy metal after his exposure to the uncatholic and hedonistic way of life around it, and after realizing an inevitable fact. He had to drop his ambition due to his insatiable sexual appetite, deviant desires, plus longing for a true romantic relationship with many people.
Priests cannot marry or have sexual intercourse with someone, said Mantione. After all, that has been a universally accepted principle for a long time. Therefore, if he was brought up as Protestant, or should the Pope permitted priests to be married, then he would have been a hitched preacher with many children.
Rather, he turned into another preaching figure type for polyamory, fetishism, performative art that provokes, and essentially, sexual liberty. He termed his work ‘A Wry Perspective’, which covered advocacy, activism, education, writing, music, speeches, and consultation about everything mentioned above. In 2018, he was making dialogue in the form of a social change force. He was concentrating on transformation, fun and redemption back then.
In the daytime, he was an internet-based brand strategy specialist in the entertainment sector. Like several others before him, Mantione moved to Los Angeles to become a rock music performer under the guise of only a college education. He needed an internship to pursue a degree in the USC Thornton Music Industry program, so he worked at Universal Music and Video Distribution for some time. He entered the online marketing game when the so-called Napster crisis was at its peak, and he has been in this field since then.
At night, he said he was technically an occasional prostitute when working as a fetish play area host for private and government events. He would not have a penetrative form of sex with clients who paid him for it. It was not illegal to be paid to flog people, Mantione said. He acted as per the basic rules and regulations.
Mantione organized the first-ever Los Angeles Consent Summit in 2016, which included educators, venue owners, podcasters, event promoters, attorneys, photographers, and therapists. The event happened at the Los Angeles-based Hilton LAX hotel.
Mantione’s objectives for an alternative lifestyle related to sex might have been serious, but he did not know in what way to have some fun. Therefore, Mantione’s socially-driven Los Angeles events could be quite wild. His promotion of and participation in underground events typically combined straight talk about experimentation and liberty with humor, music, and frolicking. In 2009, Mantione improved his party game with his birthday bash, similar to a circus, which included dancing, DJs, sex toy product demos, and fetish displays.
His birthday party’s important element was its stringent no-photography rule. He did not allow selfies, which applied even in 2018 with some variation. The change was that a photographer would do the job and hand the birthday pictures to him. After that, he was accountable for what would be released, plus he would try to respect individuals’ consent and discretion as much as possible.
He expected around 400 guests for the 2018 private sextravaganza event, which coincided with International Sex Workers’ Day. He was one of the driving forces behind the Whore Day-special events held in LA that year, which included a protest march promoted under #LetUsSurvive. The gathering at Boardner’s brought attention to the unsafe working conditions and exploitation of prostitutes. It commemorated the incident where many prostitutes occupied Lyon’s Saint-Nizier Church as they demanded decent working environments, plus the end of their daily subjugation of freedom and stigma. It has been observed as a public holiday event for the last four decades.
With the enactment of SB 1693, sex worker advocates such as Bella Bathory and Mantione feared more risk and shame than before for consensual prostitution. The so-called SESTA/FOSTA bill was designed to hold internet platforms responsible for the content that users post on those, to curb sex trafficking. Anyhow, it has impacted grown-ups looking to connect voluntarily. The section of Craigslist’s Personals, involving its well-known column under the ‘Missed Connections’ series, no longer exists because of that bill.
Websites would not like to take any chances, whereas several adult entertainment service websites closed or started to stop access into those from the US after the bill’s enactment. The fear was that law would push the sex-related community further into the so-called ‘dark web’ world, thus causing their work to be much more dangerous than before.
That required maximum urgency and awareness, said Mantione when he was preparing to make a documentary featuring interviews with prostitutes that would start at the above-mentioned protest march. Mantione was also planning to work on other things after the stormy twofer in the Whores weekend. In 2018, Mantione realized that there were complex layers in sexual deviancy and desire for many people. After that realization, he wished to offer support and education in fresh ways. He was prepping to start a big, mental health-related platform, which would feature licensed therapists, authors, and others ready to be very revealing regarding their experiences.
Similar to whatever else he did, the willingness of Mantione to disclose his history, quirks, kinks, and beliefs encouraged other people to follow in his footsteps. That brought out the stories of other people with the same wry perspective as him to a place where it was acceptable and expressible.