My First (and Probably Last) Orgy
Thomas Mahon
“To engage in exotic behavior once, is to gain experiential insight. To engage again is to risk becoming a pervert.” — Attributed to Voltaire
Some years ago, I found myself alone in a desert community. I didn’t know anyone and it was so hot I couldn’t even go for a walk.
As I was pondering my situation, I remembered a website, Meetup.com, that I had used for new business development before I retired. Maybe I could find some local social activities in this new town as well. So I checked and came across something very unexpected. An orgy!
The ad didn’t use the word orgy, but it said An Evening of Total Immersion in the Healing Arts of Tantra. I knew just enough about Tantra for that to pique my curiosity.
I signed up— before the pandemic — and as I began to think about the upcoming event, I realized the description didn’t sound that exotic. More like a college frat party. With one difference; no alcohol or drugs.
I arrived in front of a very large, middle-class home on a hillside in Southern California on a warm autumn night. Within a few minutes there was a gathering of 50–60 regular folks, many new to events like this, and many giggling in anticipation.
Some were in their early 20s, but most looked to be between 40 and 60. The group made me think of a cross section of people you would find shopping at Costco on a Saturday night. As if someone had taken the Public Address system there and invited anyone interested to come over to his house and take off their clothes. This group looked just like those respondees.
Precisely at 9 pm, the door unlocked, the host came out to give us all a very mellow ‘hello,’ and invited us in.
The host explained, “Shoes here. Potions, notions and lotions over there. Latex gloves, condoms, blindfolds, masks and satin robes in the other room. Instruments in the basement. And just drop your clothes anywhere the spirit moves you.”
Instruments!
Then we were directed to go into the large, well-lit family room, with cushions, mats, sleeping bags and pillows spread around, covering the floor.
If I had any pre-conceived notions about an orgy, from films like Fellini Satyricon, or Bob Guccione’s Caligula, or Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, a recalibration was in order. This was orgy mid-America style.
Then came the introductory presentation: a half-hour lecture drawn up by lawyers describing what is appropriate and inappropriate behavior at an orgy. (I’d assumed the nature of an orgy was to let yourself go with consenting, kindred spirits. Nope. This is the age of #metoo. And it’s about time.)
The core message, repeated often in the introduction was: Ask first. Yes means yes. No means no. And maybe means no.
That should go without saying. It should always have gone without saying.
By now, the attendees are starting to chafe at the delay. Some had already checked each other out from across the room, and were ready to move on from theory to practice.
Time was running on, but there was more to come in lecture form. The orgy ends at midnight, we’re told.
Again, my misperception. How do you put an end time to an event like this? Shouldn’t it just go on till dawn and peter out naturally? Nope. At the stroke of midnight, Cinderella must grab her shoes and hop in the pumpkin.
But there was still more instruction to come. The lawyer passed the mic over to the doctor who told us that there is a large orgy sub-culture growing in Southern California now with many amateurs joining in, unaware of the risks of “the orgy lifestyle.”
So, before physical contact of any kind, even with the latex gloves and condoms, there must be clear communications between all the parties involved, whether in groups of two, five, ten or even twenty, about each other’s “tests” When did you have your last one? What was it for? What were the results? Have you had any encounters since the last one?
It took a minute for this to sink in. He was, of course, talking about tests for HIV/AIDS, gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia, hepatitis and other STDs. That put a real damper on the evening for me.
But no one seemed concerned about health risks. They were too anxious to get on with the evening, with time drifting away. Maybe some feared they could only maintain a suave appearance for so long.
So in a roomful of many strangers about to engage in wholesale carnal knowledge, we’ll just take each other at their word that we are all clean and healthy.
The online invitation said it was okay just to be a spectator. I’d decided to leave that decision until I sensed the gestalt or the weltanschauung of the crowd. But considering the roll call of STDs, I decided to be a spectator. Or voyeur, if that sounds more sophisticated.
It is now 10:00 PM, and we are down to two hours of orgy time left.
And we’re off…. Okay, I’ll try to give it a shot. I’ll try to participate, though I remember Yoda’s warning: “Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try.”
I set off to wander among the fifty or so people there looking for… what, exactly. I’d never been good starting a conversation with a woman in a singles bar, where everyone knows why they’re there. What is a good opening line at an orgy?
“Hey, do you work out…? Come here often…? What’s yer sign…? Wanna tantra?” I was at least 15 years older than anyone else there. And I have two missing teeth, and a cowlick that sticks up when I get anxious.
I had to do some serious internal visioning to get in the right mood. And I suddenly remembered the two cool orgy guys from my youth, Bond, James Bond, and Hef, Hugh Hefner.
I pictured myself in a velvet smoking jacket brandishing a cigarette holder, asking for my imaginary drink to be shaken not stirred.
But apparently the image of the sophisticated man of the world has moved on since 1965. I soon became an object of speculation among the attendees, some wondering if I was the host’s doddery father who had been ordered to stay in his room upstairs. It took about four put downs for that to sink in.
The old guy is not one of us, they said to each other. There is no fool like an old fool, said I to myself sotto voce.
There is however a big difference between getting shot down as a teen-ager, and as a septuagenarian. Your older self can take some comfort knowing you’ve made it thru life, you survived and maybe even flourished. You’re still standing after all these years. That alone is an accomplishment. What else do you have to prove?
All those years with your nose to the grindstone, working for the man, getting away without getting caught… You’re fuckin Rocky at the top of the steps, man; you’re not gonna fly now. You have flown and still you fly! You did it, and yer still standing. No shame in that.
Colleagues in the corporate world have a saying, “How goes the battle?” And it’s true. It is a battle, where mediocrity triumphs over excellence 99.99 percent of the time, damn all the empty corporate mission statements. But our brotherhood and sisterhood of seniors, we know the secret the young ones still have to learn. We’re all playing parts. After a heart attack in the Intensive Care Unit, I discovered there was a former CEO on one side of me, and on the other side a day laborer. They would have had no occasion to meet before, let alone say hello. Now they talked about their common regimen. We survived and have the scars to prove it, but we survived. WE ARE ALL ONE PEOPLE!
And another thing: Kids, don’t think old folks have banked the furnace. What may be ‘dirty thoughts’ to a teen, are like a rare, century-old brandy to a senior: to be sniffed slowly and savored.
The reasons for not selling the elderly short include: 1) a lot of experience echoes in their creaks, groans and groins; 2) there is no fear of pregnancy; 3) and the certain knowledge that death is a reality, and time must not be wasted.
For a teen, a rejection can seem like the end of the world: I’ll never get a date; never marry; never have a family; I’ll die alone…
But then I think on this a little further. If a sophisticated group like this is not allowed to show any bias based on gender, race, or religion, why should ageism be allowed?
But it is, so live with it and I’ll go back to being a voyeur. And a philosopher.
And that brought sometime else to mind. When I started college in 1962, the good life for a young man was “wine, women and song.” When I left college in 1967, the good life for a young man or woman was “sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll.” That was a major tectonic shift.
Midway in the two decades between the appearance of the pill (1960) and onset of AIDS (1980), books showed up even in clean, suburban bookstores openly describing and displaying what till then had been unmentionable: Our Bodies Ourselves (1970), the richly illustrated Joy of Sex (1972), Masters and Johnson’s Human Sexual Response (1966).
In that twenty-year period, between 1960 and 1980, all the rules and regs got re-written. It wasn’t just men who could engage in casual, guilt-free sex anymore. Women could now, too. I’m not sure that the happiness quotient for either went up as a result, but now women could also do their own thing. The musical HAIR summed it up, “You can rock ‘n roll in bed. But you can also break your heart in bed.”
In a culture where men were used to controlling women for over 8,000 years, this was and still is an unsettling idea that many men can’t come to terms with it.
In fact, a serious backlash seem to be growing. Our highest court is now controlled by five Justices who wish to re-criminalize abortion and possibly even outlaw birth control. And in traditional societies, some women still pay with their lives for a modicum of liberation.
What if the gatekeeper to Paradise is one of the Hindu gods? Not the stern St Peter who wasn’t that keen on women to begin with.
What if the Gatekeeper to Paradise understands sexuality to be the true and deep form of holy communion? A gatekeeper who wants us to know that heaven blesses the man and woman who, with loving intentions, pleasure each other for mutual satisfaction by inserting his lingham into her yoni with alternating soft caresses and a vigorous pulsing motion.
Perhaps it is in combining the lingham and yoni skillfully that yin and yang become one complete one, the fulness of love and life and light, and so create a child who may in time be a parent to a thousand generations to come, and make all things new again.
Now, with time’s winged chariot hurrying near, now halfway through my 70s, now with only two hours left to live all my fantasies… now, I find this coyness is a crime. So much left undone; so many of life’s pleasures still to experience. And I am wandering like a naïf while everyone else is…. you know.
Maybe there are no sins of the flesh, as I’d been taught all my life. Maybe there are only blessings of the flesh. With that, at least in my mind, I turn 2,000 years of Western moral theology on its head.
Maybe there should be Orgies for Seniors? And list them on Meetup.com? Yes, that’s the ticket! Maybe it wasn’t my age working against me with the much younger, middle aged ladies. Maybe it was just my missing tooth? My stumble resulting from spine surgery? My breath?
Maybe it would be better to be with folks with shared experiences, who survived the puritanical past and realize now there is so little time left. It seems strange now to talk to female contemporaries about mutual life experiences, when sixty years ago a boy would die of embarrassment if his prom dance partner, whom he has known since first grade, said she appreciated his boner.
No, I will not go gently into that good night. I’m at an orgy, so what am I doing musing on the history of the human condition. Get with the program, Thomas. Are you in or are you out?
Yea, but what about the syph, the clap?
Okay, I’m in. All in. So I stepped into a room in time to see a stunning young woman as glamorous as any Hollywood star sit down on a pile of pillows, disrobe, lay back, and tell the drooling men standing around, “Tonight I don’t want to pleasure anyone. I want to be pleasured.”
Like the Apostles at the Last Supper, these dozen guys rushed to the banquet table, sat down surrounding her, and began giving her a 24-hand massage. “Only one request,” she said. “No penetration.”
Oh, God. I lived in San Francisco during the Summer of Love, and in London when it was ‘swinging.’ But this was something else. Maybe it’s like the shock a little child experiences going into the parents’ bedroom when they are having sex. “Mommy, what’s daddy doing to you!?” You are not meant to be here.
The room was dimly lit and only as I headed for a door on the other side of the room, did I see the same scene playing out there, too. Except in this case the young woman was telling her squad that she is Special Forces home from a tour in Afghanistan. She kept chanting, So yummy, so yummy.
I stepped into a well-lit room with people passing through in both directions. And standing just out of the path of the traffic flow were three women, probably in their 50s, talking with each other. Each of them bare as the days they were born.
I stopped and stared at them; they were oblivious to me and to everyone walking around them. They were having a discussion.
It was the first time I was ever in the company of more than one nude woman. And just coming here from the other room, I was somewhat in a daze. The 20-year-old women literally had men salivating over them. These women didn’t get a glance from anyone, man or woman, except me. And my look was not lascivious, but more curious.
Again, this is my chance to go over and say hello, and make new friends. Instead, my brain took over and I’m lost in thought, reflecting that 30 or 40 years ago, these women were maybe in the first room with men falling over themselves. And in 30 or 40 years those young girls will be in here.
These women bore the evidence they had successfully navigated the child-bearing years, with the stretch marks and a C-section scar.
Nothing amazed me more in married life than how, in the midst of making love, a mom can hear the baby in the next room signal discomfort. Mom sits bolt upright, is out of bed and off to the next room in an instant. And dad is saying, “Wait, no. Ohhh, I’m sure baby is fine.”
Is this the traditional destiny of womenkind, in these two adjoining rooms tonight? Alluring long enough to get pregnant a few times, then pushed back to limbo until called in again to be a grandmother?
Sometimes glancing thru Facebook I’ll see someone, man or woman, I don’t know but who looks interesting. And amid the photos of an older woman, there may be a photo or two from her youth, when she was drop dead gorgeous, perhaps even as far back in the 1930s or 1950s. And now she is frail and grey. Did that beauty simply go away? Did get buried under wrinkles? Or is it still there and the male eyes are too dull and dull-witted to see that?
Photos of the prim, innocent Jane Goodall at age 26 going to Africa in 1960, show a very different woman than Jane now in her mid-80s, grey and wrinkled. You would have to look hard to still see the ingenue she was. Except for how all her experiences over sixty year, alone in the jungle or celebrated at a royal reception, and everything in between, shine in her eyes. The lights of a life well lived on her own terms.
I’m neither a feminist nor an anti-feminist. But I’ve spent most of my adult life in the company of engineers, and so I have acquired their contempt for waste. And what a waste, that for so many millennia half the human race has been told not to make any contributions: not to medicine, law, philosophy, art, engineering, literature…. Just keep making babies. Babies for the king’s army, and the landowner’s fields, and the manager’s factories. And have lots of them, because a third of the children will die before they turn a profit for king, bishop, lord or business owner.
So I’m watching these three women converse, who are oblivious to me and to the others walking past. I’m not looking for sex. I am looking at Sex.
Breasts; we are such hypocrites about breasts: a child’s source of nutrition; a lover’s erogenous zone; a proximate cause of death for so many women.
Americans have never managed to balance the prudery of our Puritan past, and the mercantile instincts of New York and Boston. Indeed it is a sin and a crime for a woman to show her breasts in public. But, if someone is willing to pay for a glance, Well, I am sure Mr. Hefner, Mr. Guccione or Mr. Flynt will be happy to oblige, so he can pay dividends to shareholders.
An actress can study her craft for years and finally win recognition for her moving portrayal in award-winning film. But first, she has to conquer the red carpet, and stand like a side of beef, showing off her sweet ass and mammoth jugs.
But if, in all this strange combination of prudery and profit, we should see a tiny speck of an areola, STOP THE SHOW! We got us a goddam wardrobe malfunction. Time out is required. There will be endless replays on every kind of storage and retrieval system. Leaders of the world’s religions will collapse with the vapors; governments will resign.
Naughty is nice; nude is a money maker; but naked is on your permanent record. There are neighborhoods where you will never be allowed to buy a home if the public has seen your areola. And if a nipple shows, you will wear a scarlet ‘A’ for years to come.
Midsection: A woman’s midsection contains the most amazing “machinery” in the biosphere. A lifetime of periodic pain, sometimes abandonment and shame, yet for all that able to produce a living child so complex that the baby’s vision will expand in just one year from fixing on mom’s nipples to seeing the edge of the universe in the night sky. And as if to foreshadow that, the eggs in a young girl’s ovaries are arranged in the same spiral form as suns in a galaxy. Worlds within whirls within worlds.
Vulva: And the eyes keep going lower to the visual focal point, midway between crown and ankle. The vulva, the exterior of the vagina. Men probably spend 90+ percent of their/our waking hours thinking up ways to gain entry.
Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby has figured that out and wants her daughter to be “a beautiful little fool,” to attract lovers or a husband so that her gain is greater than her loss of freedom or agency. Even if, especially if, she leaves a field of broken hearts behind. Like her, many women learned long ago how to level the field, whether for money or marriage or something of equal value. But that is called feminine guile which is not the same as equality.
But now something different is birthing. It will probably be several generations for it to take shape. It may yet be a balance of genders where neither one has to surrender what is uniquely its.
Or it may mean rethinking sexuality itself if baby-making comes to be handled by smart machines, perhaps printed at home on 3-D printers. Compatible robots / lovers with Artificial Intelligence (AI) may come, but only to transition to virtual reality and intracranial stimulation of the cortex to stimulate stronger orgasms without emotional involvement.
Again, why am I thinking these thoughts when time is running out tonight? Still, I study these three vulvae not as a husband, or lover, or clinician. But as one trying to make unseen connections, between lingam and yoni, sex and love, guys and dolls, earth and sky, analog and digital, matter and spirit, present and future. But what of the past?
My mind slams back over three million years to a place in present-day Ethiopia. There’s Lucy, a young hominid girl in a body half the size of ours, and ovaries smaller than a peanut. She probably doesn’t even bother to cover her vulva. Who knows what intercourse was like then: random, violent, a peace offering, affectionate? It’s unlikely that folks then had figured out that sexual intercourse is what makes babies; there are so many moon cycles between one and the other.
And Lucy, leaping around in the jungles that would in time become the Sahara Desert, will die as a fully developed adult at age twelve.
And in her ovaries were the genetic coding for the entire human family which numbers now about eight billion people, plus the billions more who lived in between.
Ok, stop pondering, Thomas, get an orgy frame of mind. I had to come back to earth and clear my head, so I went into the back yard where there was an empty spa. I slipped into the warm water and before I could reach to turn on the jets, three couples came outside and got in with me.
It wasn’t long before each of the couples was engaged in the old Mister and Missus routine, if you catch the ins and outs of my metaphor, creating whitecaps in the spa. I left. I was not missed.
Ok, I’m going home I decided. I live two hours away on unfamiliar freeways, and it will be after midnight. I hadn’t had anything to drink, but still it would be a long drive. And I was getting very hungry. The promised appetizers consisted of one large package of Doritos, long gone.
So I went back into the family room to get my sweater and head out. All the lights were off, and as I expected all the pillows and cushions were still on the floor. But as I stepped in, one of the pillows said ouch in a man’s voice. Next step got a “Hey!” from a woman. When my eyes got used to the darkness I could see six or eight couples lying amid the pillows, beasts with two backs.
It was a perfect ending to a perfect night, as I listened to some couples talking to each other and one, I think, talking to his spouse several couples over.
It seems to me that if you and your spouse are experimental enough to go to an event like this, you should also be up for trying new positions. All the couples were in the missionary position. It was the final disappointment of the evening.
I gave up trying to walk across the room to get my sweater, with all the bodies there, and figured I’ll leave a note for the hostess to mail it to me. Or maybe hold it until I come back again.
If I come back again. And if I do, I will leave several copies of the Kama Sutra around so these amateurs can get a leg up on learning variations on a theme.
Story © 2020, Thomas Mahon
Illustrations owned by registered copyright owners
