Sure, everyone looks forward to winter solstice because we know that after weeks of dreary darkness, they days will get longer and brighter. But the first Global Orgasm Day on Friday, December 22, 2007, should give a new meaning to “Here Comes the Sun.”
Organized by Donna Sheehan and Paul Reffell — long-time peace activists who started Baring Witness (baringwitness.org), which seeks world peace though nudity — Global Orgasm Day is an attempt to change the global tide against war by, well, mass orgasming on a specific day. Before you write this off as crackpot, Sheehan and Reffell explain on their Web site (globalorgasm.org) that the Global Consciousness Project at Princeton University has measured sustained effects of human consciousness — which emanated during such strenuous events as September 11 and the Indian Ocean tsunami — on matter and energy. So, it actually makes a lot of sense.
Actually, it’s a great idea. I mean, who is going to complain except Lynne Cheney, Bill Bennett, and, these days, Mitt Romney?But the best thing about Global Orgasm Day — well, maybe the second-best thing — is that it’s a throwback to the wacky yet well-intentioned 1960s, a time when anti–Vietnam war demonstrators, egged on by Abbie Hoffman, once hoped to levitate the Pentagon by meditating and singing “All I am Saying is Give Peace a Chance.” Taking ideas from far-out psychologist Wilhelm Reich’s The Function of the Orgasm and crossing them with Norman O. Brown’s theories in Life Against Death, Sheehan and Reffell have essentially created what seems like the senior-prom theme for UC Berkeley circa 1968.
Let’s face it: the Pentagon is asking $468.9 billion for fiscal year 2008, a 6.3 percent increase over its 2007 budget request of $441.2 billion. In hardcore porn talk, that’s a “money shot,” and we’ve got to do everything we can to bring peace on earth and good will toward women and men. This may be our last chance to influence President Bush — who seems relatively unmoved by the Iraq Study Group Report — before he announces his major Iraq policy statement in January.
The 1960s bumper sticker read: what if they gave a war and nobody came? Maybe now, if everybody comes, they won’t give the war. Works for me.
