In response to Brown's most recent hour of public shame, I would like to offer a little moral support (using "moral" a bit loosely). Brown didn't invent the collegiate bacchanale - the Sex Power God party continues a distinguished tradition. In the '60s and '70s, students at the University of Chicago staged the biannual Lascivious Costume Ball, which arguably made "Sex Power God" look like a Boy Scout Jamboree. Admission ranged from full-price if you wore street clothes, to half-price for wearing lingerie or "costume," to free if you wore nothing at all. There were a lot more free than full-price admissions. And there was no waiting to change until you got inside. The sight of naked students, students in underwear and leather and more than a few faculty members in erotic habillement lined up on the sidewalk outside the formidable gothic portal of Ida Noyes Hall, waiting for admission, went a long way to lighten UChicago's somber tone.
Inside was a smorgasbord of serio-comic eroticism - a thousand or more attendees slithering through the gothic halls in hooker-wear, underwear, silly-wear and no-wear, transvestite strippers (giving more than a few excited male voyeurs a neurosis-inducing shock when the G-string finally came off), porn movies, amateur strip shows, skinny-dipping in the indoor pool and a few sights that completely defied categorization.
Mike Royko, writing in the Chicago Tribune, thought "(the LCB) just shows that despite the awesome number of Nobel prizes won by the U of C - exceeding the number of bowling trophies in most Chicago bars - the students have a playful streak" and President Hannah Gray described it as "a wonderful and funny thing in its origins."
Brown's Sex Power God doesn't get good-natured press from someone like Mike Royko; Brown gets "The O'Reilly Factor" smugly wagging its sanctimonious finger while scolding the administration for "supporting" student debauchery. This is not the time for Brown to cower down and whimper "we're so embarrassed by all this publicity". This is the time for Brown students and administrators to stand up proudly and say "this is what we like to do for fun sometimes, and if the repressed producers at Fox News want to sneak in and leer at us, then they should at least be less blatantly hypocritical about it".
Sadly, the LCB at Chicago ended in the 80s - for the same reasons that will possibly end SPG at Brown. Not for the bacchanalian theatrics. Again quoting Royko: "It wasn't that the administration objected to young men wearing only Styrofoam cups and other lascivious displays. But at the last ball, a considerable number of students wound up in a hospital emergency room, suffering from being loaded to the gills. Others had to have their eyeballs realigned, as a result of having smoked, sniffed or swallowed the wrong herbs and spices."
Students - take the advice of a puritanical old geezer and back off on the drinking if you want to keep SPG alive. It's worth a lot more than a head-splitting hangover. At the Chicago LCB I met one of my physics professors slinking around, dressed like a flasher in a trench coat with no pants. Now that's something you don't see very often.
Martin Murphy '73 is not too old to remember.
