I was invited online to attend a party in my Topanga neighborhood and was ready to bleep out the invitation when I noticed that it was labeled as a "sex party." I took another look.
We have many different clubs in the canyon that indicate interests in books, gardens, bird-watching and knitting, but none that I know of that cheerfully hustles sex parties as an inducement to join. The invitation doesn't say come and get laid, but it does refer to getting "hooked up" with someone, which in digital syntax, is another way of saying you are almost guaranteed an evening of erotic bliss.
The invitation was sent from a sex club in Skokie, Il, where they may have just discovered scatology, and featured a lineup of naked women in peculiar positions to illustrate, one presumes, how agile a female can be during a hooking up session.
I began to realize that this was being offered during a time when a lot of kids in the Canyon are going back to school. We take education seriously up here, but elsewhere the back-to-school month is known as the rutting season for teachers---or trolling among the guppies---when horny grade school female instructors fall in love with 14-year-old boys and hook up with them until they're caught.
I have lived in Topanga for 40 years and am aware of its history as a sexual playground for movie stars and film producers who once brought car loads of ingénues to the mountains to party and get hooked up, but what they were doing predated the current euphemism. They didn't give it a name, they just got drunk and did it. That's probably why they chose us as a site for the next sex party.
I think the current popularity of erotic behavior has to do with emulating leaders like Bill Clinton, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Anthony Weiner, none of whom could keep their flies zippered for any length of time. Their hooks, so to speak, were always out.
The day I received the sex party invitation I happened to see a movie based on the life of Linda Lovelace, a small-town girl who starred as the queen of fellatio in the porno film "Deep Throat," altering forever one's limited perception of oral sex. Students of ancient history used the Greek term "playing the flute" to describe Linda's pleasures but they were in the minority. Bob Hope commented when he heard the "Deep Throat" title that he thought it was a movie about a giraffe.
I saw "Lovelace" at a Laemmle theater in Encino. The audience consisted of about 50 old ladies who, I don't think, were there to revive memories of cunnilingus. They ate popcorn and laughed like hell at the whole thing. I guess time makes everything seem a little bit funnier. Even porn becomes comedic in the 'burbs.