The rise and rise of the upmarket orgy

The Upmarket Orgy: Extraordinarily Widespread Popularity of the Sex Party Behind the Dominique Strauss-Khan pimping trial lurks the extraordinarily widespread popularity of the sex party By Julia Llewellyn Smith According to cultural anthropologist Katherine Frank, author of Plays Well in Groups: A Journey Through the World of Group Sex, “There are plenty of large, organised sex social groups, parties and conferences that take place all over the world,” she says. “If that’s what you enjoy, you can easily find something to suit your taste every weekend.” Sarah Palin: Dream Girl of rich and powerful men  “Rich, powerful men have always been hedonistic and narcissistic, they love the thrill, and their egos are too huge to just be satisfied with their wives. They need that extra something. They’re too old and ugly to come to our parties, so they have their mates arrange their own affairs and bring in high-end prostitutes, some of whom are extremely beautiful.” Dominique Strauss-Khan’s Commie buddies in China Before his arrest in 2011 for sexually assaulting a hotel maid in New York, many considered Dominique Strauss-Kahn to be living the dream. The thrice-married head of the International Monetary Fund and father of four was a millionaire and serious contender for the French presidency. Highly connected, he had homes in Paris, Washington and Marrakech and a deal with Air France whereby he was always upgraded to first class. Angelina Jolie: Guest of Honor wannabe of the upmarket orgy? So is Gwyneth Paltrow? He was also, as we learnt last week when he took the stand at his trial for aggravated pimping in Lille, northern France, a regular participant in sex parties in Paris, Brussels and Washington, described in an official French investigators’ report as “carnage on a pile of mattresses”. Is George Bush’s little girl Jena Bush a member of the upmarket Orgy as well? Jenna’s Bush (An oldie but goodie)

But not that regular. “The prosecution gives the impression of unbridled activity,” Strauss-Kahn told the court. But really, he continued with a straight face: “There were only 12 parties in total – that is four per year over three years.” In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, he was too busy “saving the world from catastrophe” for more, plus he had “difficult relations” with his (now-ex) wife, French journalist Anne Sinclair. Sarah Palin: Republican Orgy QueenMonica Lewinsky: Democrat’s Darling  “Only” 12 orgies? To those of us delighted with an annual tally of a colleague’s leaving-do, a niece’s wedding and a neighbour’s 60th, such a total seems impressive. Wags immediately pointed out other quarterly events mirroring Strauss-Kahn’s timetable: submitting VAT returns, publications of company reports, tennis Grand Slams.

Up the Republic and Fuck the Queen!

Yet according to cultural anthropologist Katherine Frank, author of Plays Well in Groups: A Journey Through the World of Group Sex, to orgy aficionados, “only 12” is indeed a drop in the ocean. “There are plenty of large, organised sex social groups, parties and conferences that take place all over the world,” she says. “If that’s what you enjoy, you can easily find something to suit your taste every weekend.” Strauss-Kahn’s parties, which he described as “recreational sessions in a hectic life”, adding “six girls at once did not seem a considerable number”, appear to have been organised by friends in venues round the world, including Les Chandelles, an exclusive Paris swingers’ venue, and wife-swapping clubs at the Carlton Hotel in Lille, the Amigo Hotel and Tantra in Brussels, and his own bachelor flat on Rue d’Iena, close to his main Parisian residence. “I hear about parties like these all the time, they’ve been going on for centuries,” says Emma Sayle, founder of Killing Kittens, which holds 14 upmarket sex parties a month in locations around the globe. Sayle considers the four-a-year tally to be “average” for her 50,000 members, though some attend one a week. “Rich, powerful men have always been hedonistic and narcissistic, they love the thrill, and their egos are too huge to just be satisfied with their wives. They need that extra something. They’re too old and ugly to come to our parties, so they have their mates arrange their own affairs and bring in high-end prostitutes, some of whom are extremely beautiful.” Like much else, orgies originated in Ancient Greece, with the word orgia applied to secret ecstatic worship sessions. When the custom spread to Rome, they became increasingly depraved. Suetonius described Emperor Tiberius Caesar’s bashes, where “teams of wantons of both sexes, selected as experts in deviant intercourse… copulated before him in triple unions to excite his flagging passions.” As Christianity took hold of Europe, such activities were outlawed. In 1644, the Puritans banned maypoles, after reports of mass copulation in the fields after dancing round the phallic symbols. “Of fortie, threescore, or a hundred maides going to the wood over night, there have scaresly the third part of them returned home againe undefiled,” reported the 16th-century Puritan Philip Hobbes, adding: “What smooching and slobbering one of another.” Since then, romps became upper-class affairs. MP Sir Francis Dashwood founded the Hellfire Club in around 1749 at Medmenham Abbey on the Thames, with a network of caves decorated with phallic symbols, where monks and toffs united to perform blasphemous rituals and consort with hired London “dollymops”. In Strauss-Kahn’s native France, licentiousness flourished more openly. The Marquis de Sade and his wife enlisted young male servants and pretty girls for violent sex and cruelty, as depicted in The 120 Days of Sodom. In the Victorian era, British aristocrats headed to Paris with its renowned maisons closes, including Le Chabanais, where King Edward VII was a regular, with his own copper swan-shaped bath that he liked filled with champagne and a stirrup-fitted armchair. It took until the Swinging Sixties for the British to be electrified by a home-grown scandal, in the form of the Profumo affair involving debauchery at country mansions and Belgravia pieds-à-terre. A decade later, movie stars such as Elizabeth Taylor and Clint Eastwood were regular guests at the Playboy mansion in Los Angeles where, as their host Hugh Hefner put it: “It was like going to some infant’s paradise where you could eat all the candy you liked and wouldn’t get fat.” Yet, while such gatherings were depicted as glamorous, the mainstream wife-swapping scene (which the US Kinsey Institute estimates involves between 2 and 4 per cent of couples) was mocked as the province of bored suburbanites dumping car keys in bowls. But in the past decade, inspired by films such as Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, with its scenes of a masked orgy at a country mansion, several entrepreneurs have launched upmarket swinging events to sell rock star-style debauchery to hoi polloi. Chris Reynolds Gordon runs Heaven SX, which bills itself as Britain’s most “elite” purveyor of sex parties – achieved by vetting wannabe guests’ photos. “Our parties are in gorgeous mansions, we only want gorgeous people in their twenties and thirties, though we do have some very attractive people in their forties as well,” he says. “We have every kind of guest – lawyers, actors, accountants, models and nurses,” he continues. “It’s definitely becoming a more and more fashionable thing to do – social apps such as Tinder are allowing people to hook up and it’s made them much less inhibited and more interested in pushing boundaries and exploring, but in a safe environment.” Strauss-Kahn’s case centres around whether he knew that the women involved were prostitutes or not. He insists he had assumed that they were merely “libertines”. “I dare you to distinguish between a prostitute and a naked socialite,” his lawyer told the court, but prostitutes testified that Strauss-Kahn treated them far more brutally than he would have a swinger. According to Sayle, 36, who attended private school Downe House with Kate Middleton, many sex parties – especially those with big age gaps between the men and women – are full of hookers. “Having said that, there are always some women who are attracted by power and lifestyle.” Sayle, whose events include torture and cabaret themes, keeps the predatory likes of Strauss-Kahn away from her parties by inviting only single women (at £50 a ticket) and couples (at up to £400). Rules state that sex can only be initiated by women, with strict security ensuring that no one is coerced. Although parties have previously been limited to the under-40s, she has recently launched Silver Parties for the 45-plus market. “But Strauss-Kahn still couldn’t attend, unless he came with his wife or girlfriend – and he wouldn’t want to do that,” she says. “What’s unforgivable about his story isn’t that he enjoyed orgies, but that he was cheating on his wife.”

China Communist Party Swingers Sex Orgy Scandal

The pictures appear to show the Communist Party secretary of Lujiang county in Anhui Province, Wang Minsheng, his deputy, Jiang Dabin, and the party’s youth leader at Hefei University, Wang Yu. The high-ranking Chinese officials are shown engaging in a hotel “sex party,” according to the reports. The unknown person who posted the pictures claimed that two of the men in the obscene Lujiang photos were Wang Minsheng (王民生), party secretary of Lujiang County of Anhui Province, and Jiang Dabin (蒋大彬), vice mayor of Lujiang County, and one of the women was Diao Jirun (刁吉润), mayor of Lujiang. So far Chinese bloggers have reposted the 6P (six person) group sex photos in Weibo many times. The set of 120 photos show three couples in various acts of sex in a hotel room. But the shot that having everyone talking about this controversy is of five of the members posing for a pre-sex or post-sex group picture, complete with one man cupping another one’s wife with a double-hand breast grope. Particularly intriguing is Wang Yu’s wife, a pretty middle school teacher who participated in the orgies. Wang Yu is the most junior among the male orgy participants, being Deputy Secretary of the Communist Youth League of Hefei University in Anhui. This whole sex party scandal has unfolded while the wife of former Communist official Bo Xilai is being tried for murdering a British expat underscores rising public disgust with corruption in the party. Bo Xilai was one of China’s most powerful and charismatic politicians until he was ousted as Communist Party chief of Chongqing city as the scandal surrounding Heywood’s death last November. What better way is there to get back at your enemies than posting their sexcapades on the web? According to internal party reports, Bo Xilai mounted a widespread wiretapping operation to monitor the activities of his fellow politicians in an effort to boost his own position within the party. Bo tapped the phones at the state guesthouse in Chongqing where senior officials stay on visits to the city. The eavesdropping emerged last August, after it was discovered that President Hu’s conversations with a visiting minister were being recorded. So Bo Xilai and his allies knew the intimate details of his fellow Communist Party officials. The set of photos initially surfaced last week with the mocking title “comrades in charge,” as two of the men were thought to be Wang Minsheing, head of the Communist Party in Lujiang county, in the eastern province of Anhui, and his second-in-command. The Bo Xilai scandal has badly shaken the country’s leadership. And many see this leak of nude pictures of official asBo Xilai ad/or his allies striking back at the country’s leadership. Sex parties and wife swapping are technically illegal in China, and participants can be prosecuted under an obscure “group licentiousness” statute added to the Chinese criminal code in 1997. And while most Chinese web browsers are actively looking for download links for the photos others are condemning the decayed morality of government officials. The scandal grew to the point that the State Council Information Office, China’s head web censor, was forced to issue an official directive that “all websites must stop following and hyping the so-called ‘Lujiang Indecent Photos Incident.'” Currently the phrases “naked photos” and “vulgar photos” are banned from Weibo. But the government don’t want people to take the swift and total crackdown on these photos as an admission of guilt. Chinese Citizens, who think corruption in China is severe problem and prefer to believing Chinese officials live a life of luxury and debauchery, were obviously not convinced by the official account. The Communist party has vigorously denied that these are party members, even though they do share quite a resemblance, judging from pictures. At first they claimed the images were photoshopped. But then they backtracked and said the photos were real but the Party officials had been misidentified. Wang himself spoke up to clear his name, saying he was being “slandered,” possibly as payback over a corruption case he was investigating. The official line that emerged is that the photos were taken back in 2007 and feature random swingers. However the photos are clearly real, as the third male participant, the man named Wang Yu, has confessed. Wang does have a Communist party connection: He’s the Deputy Secretary of the Communist Youth League of Hefei University in Anhui. He was tracked down by the famous Chinese internet hordes known as “human flesh search engines,” who band together to identify internet villains. Now he’s been fired along with his wife, a middle school teacher who was also in the photos. He has not say how he got involved with a wife swapping party. And Wang Yu has declined to identify the other participants in the orgy.