New York-based actress Poppy Liu has spent a lot of time discussing her abortion on college campuses recently. Actually, she lets her voiceover do most of the talking as she stands to the side of dark auditoriums, the film she produced projected on-screen for crowds of students to watch.
Liu has been using โNames of Woman,โ a thirteen-minute short film based on her own abortion story, as a way to start conversations about reproductive rights and justice as she tours it through college campuses across the Northeast. The first major film project produced by Collective Sexโa production company Liu founded in 2015โhas even been screened at a few Planned Parenthood fundraisers.
But at the same time, โNames of Womenโ is not politically charged; in fact, if you were not familiar with Liu and her work, youโd be hard-pressed to assign her a side to the on-going abortion debate. Instead, the film assigns a face to the overly-politicized procedure, thus showing the humanity of the situation. After she found out she was pregnant in September of 2015, Liu was overcome with lonelinessโabortion is such a highly stigmatized topic that she felt, at first, that she didnโt have anyone to share it with.
โEveryone has an opinion about it, but I didnโt know what it was like as a human beingโand not just a political ideaโto be going through this,โ she says. โWhen we talk so much about concepts or ideologies, sometimes whatโs left out of the conversation is that weโre still human bodies going through all of this.โ

โNames of Women,โ released in January 2017, began as a story Liu shared at one of Collective Sexโs live storytelling events. She had no plans to turn it into a film at the time, but after receiving very positive feedback, she began to see how advantageous itโd be to create something with an important message she could easily share with larger audiences.
โAfter I shared it, a lot of people came out of nowhere and shared their stories with me privately,โ Liu remembers. โWhen you share a story so personal, what happens is that you create permission or space for other people to share theirs.โ
After crowdfunding $20,000 for the film in August 2015, she and an all-female production team shot, edited and released โNames of Women.โ Liu toured the film on eight college campuses over the past three months; she plans to continue the next leg of the tour in the fall. Most recently, โNames of Women,โ directed by Liu and Amanda Madden, was added as an official selection at the Brooklyn Womenโs Film Festival.
โWhatโs really cool about film is that itโs really accessible and youโre able to have conversations with many more people and reach other communities that you normally wouldnโt be able to,โ Liu tells ivoh.
Liu has gotten positive feedback while touring โNames of Womenโ through the Northeast. โItโs incredible what happens afterwards,โ she says. โIโve had students personally share their stories with me after this.โ
She explains that, while a majority of the schools were left-leaning, a few were conservative; rather than balking at their ideological differences, she was more than happy to talk with students who didnโt hold the same beliefs.
โItโs really important to talk to groups of people that arenโt just reaffirming what we were already thinking, otherwise youโre talking in a vacuum,โ she explains. โItโs eye opening when you do engage with people who have very different views from you. You realize that theyโre not bad people, and they see that youโre not bad people.โ
Liu, a self-described โold soul,โ has always been wise beyond her years. At 24, she founded Collective Sex to destigmatize stories related to sex, body, intimacy and identity by infusing those stories with vulnerability, personal narrative and authenticity. Intrinsically, she knew storytelling could have healing qualitiesโand as โNames of Womenโ gains traction, she was proven right. But before she was at the helm of a burgeoning production company, she was once a college student with an ambitious senior thesis.
The seeds for Collective Sex were scattered in 2012 when Liu, then a senior at Colgate University, wrote and directed โThis Is Not A Play About Sex,โ a play based on her interviews with 26 students about their relationship with millennial hookup culture. By including students whose backgrounds spanned across gender, sexuality and identity, Liu sparked interest on campus by inviting all voices to the conversation.
She says that โThis Is Not A Play About Sexโ resonated wildly on Colgateโs campus. โIt was meant to start a dialogue with people who wouldnโt normally find themselves in a room together,โ Liu says.
The play, which she produced as her senior thesis, was such a success that Liu held an encore production two months after its premiere, leading the university to license the rights from Liu. A production of โThis Is Not A Play About Sexโ is put on every year during freshman orientation, and Liu regularly attends.
It was through this project that Liu began to understand the power of using storytelling as a way to start conversations. Once Liu graduated and moved to New York City, she used the inspiration from โThis Is Not A Play About Sexโ to found Creative Sex.
โIt was a hella experimental phase where I was like โOkay, thereโs something about vulnerability and storytelling and talking specifically about body, identity and sex, and somehow, this triangle of stuff can connect,โโ she says. โI started hosting people out my living roomโ weโd meet once a week for four hours and weโd do acting training, meditation, movement work, writing, reenactmentsโฆโ
These experimental workshops quickly lead to live, monthly storytelling events. Soon, Liu was filling spaces in Williamsburg, Brooklyn with 40 to 50 people for these performances. โA grassroots community started building from there, and more people started telling stories,โ she says with a smile on her face. โIt was this really organic growth process.โ
โOur two-word mission is decolonizing storytelling. What that means for us is focusing on what stories we tell, how they are told and who is telling them,โ Liu says. โWe believe very firmly in allowing folks to share their own stories and to have a space where people can tell their own stories, in their own words, the way that they want to be heard.โ
Collective Sex became an opportunity for people to share their stories in a non-judgmental environment. Liu feels that the creative process should be healing, joyful and collaborative; because of this, there is no stage at a Creative Sex storytelling event. Instead, storytellers sit among audience membersโโand the stories would just emerge,โ Liu says. โI thought about it as โliving room theater.โโ

Now, Collective Sexโs live events are held seasonally and their structure has changed slightly. The events now revolve loosely around a themeโfor instance, January was reproductive rightsโand personal storytelling is followed by panel discussions. Storytellers share their experiences with the topic, while panelists share ways to get involved with the cause. This new structure combines the healing aspect of storytelling with the social activism that Liu had in mind when founding the company.
Other than preparing for the fall tour of โNames of Women,โ Liu and her creative team at Collective Sex are in the beginning stages of an upcoming web series project titled โMercy Mistress.โ The autobiographical series will follow the personal experiences of a New York City-based Chinese-American professional dominatrix.
โThis story is about destigmatizing the sex work industry, examining the intersections within the kink community and reclaiming the sexual agency of the bodies of women of color,โ Collective Sex said in a statement on its Facebook page. An upcoming Collective Sex storytelling event will be held on Saturday, July 22 at Euripides Gallery to raise money for forthcoming web series. Tickets are $35 at the door; all proceeds go towards the fundraiser.