All hail, for the early 2000’s have apparently returned with the rebirth of a (possibly, probably fake) thing nobody really wanted: The Rainbow Sex Party. Allegedly popular amongst high school students in the early aughts, these parties had their media heyday when this author was somewhere between 12 and 15-years-old.
Now, you might be asking yourself: What is a Rainbow Sex Party? That sounds fun! But we assure you, it’s really, really not. Either way, we have the 411 on this once frenzy-inducing phenomenon.
So what is a Rainbow Sex party exactly?
According to the rather colorful descriptions on Urban Dictionary, a Rainbow Sex Party is a gathering “where several girls wear a different color of lipstick then each proceeds to give one or more guys a blow job. The multiple of colors left on each guy's penis resembles a rainbow.” A second definition says it a kind of party, “where a large group of young girls compete to see who can mark their unique lipstick color furthest down on the shaft of a boys penis. Rainbow parties mostly likely do not exist, but if they do that would be awesome.” For the record, it would not be awesome.
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Urban Dictionary definitions aside, this weird term officially entered the cultural zeitgeist after Paul Ruditis’ novel, Rainbow Party, made its debut and promptly hurtled the term into the blogosphere. According to Ruditis, whose book was trashed by critics, we live in a culture so unaware of the health hazards (think: STI transmission and sexual assault) of oral sex that teens would gladly have parties wherein impressionable young women give blowjobs to random boys to attain social status.
But, wait. Are they real or not?
It’s not entirely clear. While many have speculated that the Rainbow Party is about as real as the infamous fake STI, Blue Waffle, it doesn’t take away from the fact that weird and creepy stuff like this happens IRL. Remember, for instance, when middle school girls were having sex and giving blow jobs in exchange for black bracelets? I sure do. A few years after the trend was over, my mom punished me for wearing black hair ties on my wrist, because she’d seen the blow job/bracelet thing on Dr. Oz. While her timing was off by a few years, I had done it when I was thirteen. So, yeah, there’s some cause for concern here.
Why? Because Rainbow Parties highlight an important issue that existed when the term appeared and still exists now: We live in a society so afraid of teaching young people about sex that they receive no sex education whatsoever. And when kids learn about sex from porn and popular culture, there’s greater risk that young women will derive their value from their sexual desirability and attention from the opposite sex. They learn nothing about STI transmission or the dangerous aspects of early sexualization (let alone pleasure). Hence, a Rainbow Party just doesn’t seem that far-fetched.
Before we have a colossal societal meltdown and go on a rampage to burn the world to the ground, it’s important to examine how something like this could cause unnecessary hysteria, and why it’s so believable in the first place. Until we change the way we teach (or don’t teach) sexual education in this country, insane rumors and fake stuff like this will continue to appear. It might seem like a scare tactic, but what do you really expect when no one knows any better?
Riddle me that.