Girls Night Out Just Got A Lot Safer — the Women Innovating NYC Nightlife
Nightlife in NYC has long been a male-dominated industry in which women feel unsafe, but some women are determined to change that and are emerging as leaders in the NYC scene.
Azucena Melchor loves going out in NYC. She loves the thrill of getting dressed up and dancing with her friends. She loves experimenting and meeting new people in a judgment-free zone. What she doesn’t love about it is the people who make her feel unsafe, like a male promoter who told her before she was even 21, “Next time wear a push up bra, and maybe I’ll bring you.”
Sonia Victoria Werner, 22, feels similarly, and she expressed that some of the biggest reasons she doesn’t go out anymore is that she doesn’t want to deal with “creepy men,” and feeling “commodified” as a woman. “Women get in for free because they’re the pull for everyone else,” she said. “I think the whole culture surrounding that is a little bit strange, and it also makes men feel like, ‘Oh, I paid to get in, so let me get something good out of this experience,’ and they all define good in very different ways.”
Ito Choho, 22, also described a similar feeling in her going out experiences, and she described it as feeling like a piece of meat or like a “juicy burger.” She noted how, even in known queer nightlife spaces, even in spaces that make patrons agree to a consent policy at the door, creepy men still find a way to ruin the night.
These three women are just a fraction of the women in NYC who feel the same about going out here. While NYC is much safer than other cities around the world, it’s often still very dangerous, especially for women, and this can be seen in the nightlife world. Nightlife is still widely a male-dominated industry, and ideas of what consent means outside of explicitly sexual contexts are new and evolving in the mainstream, and drugs are becoming more accessible. Going out can be a recipe for disaster if one is not careful, and, even if one is careful, they can still find themselves in a threatening situation.
Some women, however, have decided to take matters into their own hands and work to make NYC’s nightlife space a safer and more inclusive one for everyone, especially women and femme-presenting people. Gone are the days of the only options for women looking to go out being male promoters and women-get-in-for-free events. In 2023, women are throwing their own events and becoming promoters, and a woman just ended her run as NYC’s first mayor of nightlife.
One of these women involved in the effort to make nightlife more inclusive is Ariana Nathani, 26, product designer at Johnson and Johnson by day, and creator and CEO of her Drinks First Podcast and events company by night. Nathani began her podcast where she interviews anonymous NYC singles in 2019, and, by 2021, her following grew so much that she started throwing events for her community. As a South Asian woman, Nathani grew used to a male-dominated nightlife scene, where she didn’t see many people who resembled herself, so she prefers to work with women-led venues and management teams, she said, and building those relationships is key. She’s driven by her desire to meet and expand her community, rather than just making money off the events. Nathani explained how being a South Asian woman in nightlife also gives her understanding of creating a safe space and the importance of her position within the space. “Inherently being a woman of color in a space where there aren’t really many at all is allowing people to look at me and say, ‘Oh, that girl — she looks like me! She looks like somebody I could hang out with!’” she said.
Nathani also uses Tik Tok to build a supportive community, and she has amassed over 18.8k followers. At the start of the pandemic, she began making Tik Toks about some of her favorite NYC spots, before realizing that she could use her platform to reach a specific audience, and that that audience was already finding her videos and joining her community. The entrepreneur explained the methodology behind her platform, “What I figured was if people view me as a ‘subject matter expert,’ in New York lifestyle, then maybe they’ll trust my podcast, and maybe they’ll trust my events, and draw that kind of crowd that is interested in that same kind of things that I might be interested in, whether it’s where I like to go out, or the kind of morals I have, or the things that I value, like diversity in the space and inclusivity.”
Social media has allowed more women, like Nathani, to step into NYC’s nightlife scene as leaders. Social media offers a tool, often for free, that allows these women to build a following and promote their events. A search for “#femalepromoter” currently yields over 14.5k posts on Instagram, and the same hashtag has over three million views on Tik Tok. Social media has provided a space for women to find other women, and now women-led events can be found more easily. For example, Sorry Papi, a women-only reggaeton party with all women DJs that tours around the country, has over 65.9k followers on their Instagram, and they only started having events in the last year or so. Melchor mentioned that she, as a patron, often finds events through following her favorite DJs on Instagram. Social media has also inspired apps specifically for finding promoters and events, like Vybe Together and Resident Advisor, where women promoters often post their events.
The city itself is also promoting a safer and more inclusive nightlife scene. In 2017 NYC’s Office of Nightlife was established, and Ariel Palitz, a lifelong New Yorker, former community board member, and former club promoter and club owner, was appointed to be the first director of the office in 2018. Having grown up in the city, raised by “Studio 54 Era” parents, Palitz came to the position with the perspective that the dance floor is a common ground for all, and that her position needed to be all about centering social justice and creating more equity, fairness, and accessibility within NYC’s nightlife scene. “[People] tend to go [out] to have a sense of freedom and let go of the day-to-day challenges of life, and there’s perhaps a greater vulnerability because you are more yourself, and you hope to be able to have your guard down in those spaces,” said the nightlife mayor. “It’s important for the venues to make a conscious effort to create safer spaces that are conscious and aware of [these] vulnerabilities.”
While in office, Palitz and her team derived several initiatives that tangibly help women and other underrepresented communities within NYC’s nightlife scene. One of their more recent endeavors, “NITE School: Nightlife Industry Training and Education,” is a compilation of all the different resources and training programs created by the Office of Nightlife and their partnered organizations. “It’s meant to be an online school where people who are owners, workers, [and] patrons can go to be trained and to learn how to open and operate better and safer spaces, how to get training for their staff to be good bystanders, and also [for] patrons [to learn] how to identify situations in which they may be called to intervene, like if a woman is being harassed, or anyone is being harassed,” explained Palitz. Some of the partnered organizations involved in the program include Outsmart and the Anti-Violence Project. “Consent on a dancefloor is important. Being able to identify when someone is in trouble is important. Intervening is important,” Palitz continued. “We are the bridge to lead you to the people who are experts on how to do that.” Outside of NITE School, the Office of Nightlife has other initiatives to help all New Yorkers feel safer within nightlife, like active-shooter response training, the “NARCAN Behind Every Bar” initiative, the “ELEVATE Nightlife: Health & Wellbeing” program, and the “MEND NYC Mediation & Conflict Resolution Program.”
As far as what the women customers themselves have to say, the solutions are often pretty simple. Melchor mentioned the “NARCAN Behind Every Bar program” as something that makes her feel safer when going out, along with venues having female employees. Werner explained a trend she’d seen on Tik Tok where bartenders have a code word for women and femme-presenting people to use when they feel like they’re in an unsafe situation and need help. Choho also mentioned the importance of vigilant bartenders, but she also brought up the importance of bouncers knowing when to step in.
All three of them, however, said that feeling a sense of community and knowing that the other people in the space are looking out for them makes them feel much safer. “[It’s about] assuming that everyone in the room is [your] friend, [and] extending care and support to anyone who looks like they need it,” said Choho.
