Rules and group sex have gone hand in hand for decades. The more risqué the sexual party, the tighter the guidelines, particularly in the BDSM world where partygoers consent to physical pain. “The space, people’s bodies are sacred,” Kinky Salon co-founder Polly Whittaker, aka Polly Superstar, recalls from her many years in the BDSM and fetish scene. “You do not talk while someone is having a scene, you don’t laugh, you don’t stare … They’ve created this incredibly strict structure because what they’re doing there is working through some really heavy shit and they need safety for that.” [...]
“We believe that it is a fundamentally radical political act to deprivatize sex,” write authors Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy in their famous book, The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Adventures. “Group sex offers the opportunity to challenge ourselves,” they write, “to move our sexuality out into the open, banners flying, with lots of support in getting past the fears and bashfulness and lots of friendly people to applaud your ecstasies.” [...]
“As it turns out, the first ‘key parties’ weren’t about sexual pleasure so much as a response to the existential issues triggered by facing the highest death rates of any branch of the U.S. military during the war,” Ryan told me in an interview. “These guys had a one in three chance of dying during one of their missions in the Pacific. They got together and had sex parties, not as a way of getting more sex … but as a way of deepening the bonds that held their deeply interdependent community together. The tacit understanding was that the men who survived would look after the widows of those who didn’t.” [...]
And this is where the rules come in. These parties, when executed with care and sensitivity, can break social norms and offer what seems to be a healing space around collective issues of sexuality. That doesn’t mean it’s always easy or fun. “People have different experiences. And I think it’s really complicated, particularly our histories around sexual trauma,” Whittaker explains. “Especially women, when the statistics show how crazy the levels of abuse are. So I think creating a space where sexuality isn’t a shameful thing, where it’s not something that is being imposed on you is a very liberating thing for women.”
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