How Many Guests Constitute an Orgy?

Choire Sicha
The Awl
Published in
4 min readOct 27, 2015

Wild??? I’d say “MILD”. And to whichever guest benefitted from calling this misinformation into the Post, I only wish you good health, happiness, and a long life to enjoy taking advantage of the kindness of strangers and talking shit about others. #reallyqueen?

A photo posted by Marc Jacobs (@themarcjacobs) on Oct 26, 2015 at 9:23pm PDT

New York City’s last great local gossip item, the “Page Six Team”-bylined story “Marc Jacobs hosts a wild, 10-person orgy,” really delivers the goods right in the headline. Ten men! An orgy, it seems safe to say, is definitely an orgy if it contains double digits. But those are not the facts: The digits in this orgy were at minimum eleven, as the text clearly indicates that “the single designer hosted an orgy over the weekend with up to 10 people, whom he invited via Grindr.” Bless! That’s so much work on a little iPhone keyboard.

Where does an orgy stop and start? Two is a mating and three is a threeway. Because four is a fourgy, you would think that five is logically an orgy, but no, five is two couples who keep forgetting about the creepy guy cranking it in the corner. Six is an accident, you didn’t get enough for a gangbang but you got too many for something more innocent and lovely. Six is gross. Seven is probably a really mild semi-orgy, an afternoon tea time of group sex. Seven is your grandmother’s orgy, polite and manageable, with people ducking out for treats when winded. Eight is certainly enough to hide from someone with bad pheromones or gross genitalia. Nine, though: nine is when we create the bare underpinnings of an orgy. The gross orgy about to break out in Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress has ten at the table. Couture’s Romains de la décadenc has a whole passel, more than a dozen; a Tom of Finland orgy never has fewer than eleven. In the Dutch engravings for de Sade’s Juliette from 1789, each panel seems to get more and more participants, and sprinkled throughout are highly unlikely and McMartin preschool-style sky-high pileups, but it ends, as far as we can tell, with an even dozen. If you have twelve people of any gender, you always have an orgy. And if you can’t quite remember how many there were, you’re definitely on your way.

Coupled with an very lengthy premature obituary for the career of Marc Jacobs published over the weekend, the Post seems to be trying to tell the world that Jacobs is off the wagon and back on the sauce. (“Jacobs is reportedly sober,” goes the orgy item; he’s plagued by a “mystery” goes the obit.) Like a trial lawyer, whenever the Post refers to a mystery, they always have an answer at hand.

Jacobs doesn’t address that text, and also doesn’t do himself any favors by aggressively clapping back to both items on Instagram. But would you have the willpower to resist? I certainly wouldn’t. Defensiveness never plays, but it does get you a million comments, most of which involve some variation of “yaassss” and “slayyyy” and various nail-painting + praise-hands emoji stringlets. Do those folks buy handbags? I’d say they do not. Still, lots of people think if you live like a diva you somehow won’t also die alone and afraid and regretful in a cold bathroom with a needle in your arm.

An open letter to MAUREEN CALLAHAN Girl, I think I understand your pain. You’re a sick woman. It must be such a sad, unfulfilling and lonely existence to get paid for “writing” (I use the term loosely) an article put together from out of context information “written” by other journalists over a period of time, for different periodicals, in different countries. I can’t even imagine your suffering having made a life and name working for what has to be the worlds worst, trashiest, and most irresponsible of “newspapers” (LOL)! I can imagine the powerful and fulfilling feeling you must feel with each piece you “write” that helps yourself and your readers feel better about their lives by putting down others who are so fortunate as to have been blessed with a genuine passion for creation. Those creative individuals who like everyone else has feelings, a sexual appetite, “issues”, character defects, and professional ups and downs. If you were a real writer and not the parasite feeding off of the successes and failures of others I wouldn’t bother writing my thoughts here. I do feel sorry for you. Please know you are in my prayers. I hope you will someday find something, somewhere that gives you pleasure…and not at another’s expense. Should that moment happen for you, please don’t thank me. I only wish the best for everyone. Even you. Sincerely and disrespectfully, Marc (Jacobs). #lethimwhoiswithoutsincastthefirststone #youwannacomeforme?

A photo posted by Marc Jacobs (@themarcjacobs) on Oct 26, 2015 at 8:59pm PDT

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