When Orgies Were Hot
My most sexually-progressive friend in college wanted to throw an orgy. I don’t know if she ever succeeded. All I know is that if her orgy ever happened, she didn’t invite me.
She probably pulled it off. But if she did, she had to work for it. This was the late 1980s, in Ronald Reagan’s United States of America. The AIDS epidemic was killing people left and right. From the point of view of college kids too young to remember the 60s, the sexual revolution was “Game over, man!”
My friend’s notion of an orgy wasn’t a particularly grand ambition. Half a dozen trusted friendlies, max. No kinky stuff, I’m guessing. She was a girl from the suburbs, after all! But 80s kids were body-shy anyway, sexually repressed, and barraged for years with “safe sex” propaganda that essentially promised death or disfigurement if you fucked outside of marriage without a full-body condom and Level-5 viral decontamination procedures. Just getting naked in a room with five or six other naked people would have been a big ask, even before anybody touched anybody else.
That was just a few years after the “free love” sexual revolution died. In hindsight, the death came instantly. Let’s credit Playboy, penicillin, and the birth control pill for the rise of free love in the 1960s. I’ll be an asshole and say it took its first mortal blow during the police riot at the Chicago Democratic convention in 1968, when a whole lot of liberating notions went down in a flurry of billy clubs. But it limped along, like a lot of 1960s ideals, and also pants with weird-shaped legs, throughout most of the 1970s. My exposure to it through books, magazines, movies, and real-live nudist hippies, shaped my pre-adolescent expectations of the world. And then, right about the time I figured out how to flog my own monkey, boom! Headshot. Dead revolution. No more free love. Jerk off alone, spray yourself with Lysol, and bitch about it to your wife, if you ever have one.
My generation got robbed, and we knew it. But we couldn’t do a damn thing about it. Sex was suddenly dangerous, and the attorney general was trying to get rid of porn. It got so bad, some kids at my college dressed up as “sex police” in protest, running around and making a big mock show of trying to arrest people for minor expressions of sexuality. But orgies? Naw. As a sexual ambition, that might as well have been on the moon.
To this day, I don’t know how many orgies went down in the 1960s and 1970s. There certainly were some. But you can’t dip into the adult magazines of the day without seeing a lot more orgy references than seem plausible.
These days, I suspect orgies were always mostly an aspirational thing. Perhaps the idea of orgies as the ultimate expression of “free love” ideals was more attractive than the actual practice. But I don’t know. I certainly didn’t have to look very hard to find all the orgy cartoons decorating this post. Maybe that was just how people spent Saturday night in 1972?
