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It’s rather sweet to hear how shocked actress Rebel Wilson was to find herself at an orgy. In her new memoir she’s charmingly revealed how she was stunned to be invited to a party only to realise it was “an ORGY!”, as she writes. As if everyone hasn’t been to an orgy these days!
Wilson boasts she was invited by someone “who’s like fifteenth or twentieth in line to the British throne”. This is also unshocking: even one of Kate Middleton’s schoolfriends, Emma Sayle, now hosts a sex club, named Killing Kittens.
I’ve been to two orgies and, as everyone who’s ever witnessed one will attest, they are far less glamorous than in your fantasies. You go along imagining an Eyes Wide Shut romp in some candle-lit catacombs in Paris and end up in a bungalow in Rottingdean. Or at least that’s where my first orgy took place.
I went to my first orgy while at university, way back in 2005, because my friend needed a wing-woman. I remember being mildly appalled that it was called “Greedy Girl’s Night”. (I’ll leave you to ponder on that). I was hoping for The Playboy mansion but instead we pulled up to a bungalow in suburbia. We were told to look out for the house where the blinds were shut. (Apparently, along with Pampas Grass, this is a classic giveaway).
A middle-aged woman answered the door wearing Anne Summers. Inside people less attractive than you’d see at a parent’s evening were grabbing fleshy bits of each other on mattresses on the floor, while old blokes stood around the edge of the room wanking. There was a disco, a cinema, and a swimming pool (I have been suspicious of any house with a pool since).
In the master bedroom I saw a woman being shagged four ways. But the most disgusting thing I saw that night was the buffet. Who thought finger-food was a good idea? I felt nauseous at the thought of where the hands on the sausage’s rolls had been before touching them.
I decided to go swimming, but got stuck in the pool, when some people started having a threesome on the steps, and I had no way to get out. I ended up treading water for an hour before I could escape.
My second orgy was more glamorous: A trendy lipstick lesbian night in west London that I only went to “for work” to report on the rise of women-only sex nights. Let me tell you, there is no one who looks more perverted at an orgy than the person standing in the corner with a notebook.
The clientele were vetted by a committee, who asked to see photographs – so everyone was hot. It was full of sexy, successful women: fashion photographers in red lipstick and women in fedoras drinking champagne on a roof terrace. A total prude, I stood shocked as women stripped down to stockings and Coco de Mer Knickers, messing around with silk bondage gear and sex swings. Still, all I could think about was the Ikea Art on the walls, and the awkward laughter – although maybe that was coming from me.
I think English people are particularly bad at orgies because we’re not stylish enough and – the cliché is true – we’re too prudish and physically uptight.
One friend who went to an orgy tells me she just couldn’t get over her neurosis about hygiene – “I was trying to relax and be cool, but my mind was racing about hygiene and thoughts of people touching my face with sweaty hands that had been on their crotches”.
The night she went to was held at a London hotel where guests were directed to a room decorated with dim lighting, silky things over lamps, tealights and candles. “A bit naff,” she said. In the entrance people sat around “like in an NHS waiting room full of people in lingerie”.
Once inside, things started with intimacy exercises that involved touching each other – but as people poked their fingers into her mouth, she couldn’t stop worrying where they’d been. For the rest of the night, all she could concentrate on was the awkwardness of heels being jabbed into her thighs and lube squired from containers.
She ended up becoming entwined with one man but was constantly distracted by the physicality of the whole scene. “I watched him have a threesome, then he tied me up. In my head I was enjoying it, but I couldn’t stop thinking, as he was kissing me, that he’d just had his face in another woman’s crotch”.
Rebel did a runner from her orgy. I don’t blame her. I also realised orgies aren’t for me. I just find them too obvious. I find not knowing what’s going to happen on a date far more exciting. Besides, I like to know who I’m shagging. As a friend of mine, who went to an orgy only to have his glasses stolen, points out: “The problem with an orgy is you don’t know who you’re getting into bed with”.
