Yale PD Investigating Annual Naked Party

“Nakie is good. Nakie is free. Nakie is nakie!”

Remember back in the day, when Wesleyan’s now defunct Art House would throw the celebrated, twice-annual Naked Party, which MGMT claimed to have performed at? Remember when the administration casts its disapproving glance and shut down Art House, and when Wesleyan’s famed Naked Party switched venues, to Earth House, and advertised all over the ACB, and P-Safe still bared its teeth and contacted Earth House to cancel? Remember that time the New York Times published a 2007 expose of college naked parties at Yale and Wesleyan and beyond, which cites Wes naked parties as “so well known that student tour guides sometimes mention them”? A then-Junior discussed her experience throwing a naked party in her dorm (“people look each other in the eyes more than you’ve ever seen,” apparently). David Pesci, university spokesperson, expressed the administration’s concern that such parties “create a condition too ripe for sexual harassment.”

No. You probably don’t remember, because most of this took place before you got to Wes, and because Wesleyan’s illustrious history of naked parties has been all but stamped out by Big Evil Administrative Overlords, and because Eclectic didn’t even hold its traditional Sex Party shitshow last semester. If you can’t get naked at Wesleyan, where can you!?

Apparently not at Yale—the other prestigious Connecticut university with a colorful history of naked partying. According to the Yale Daily News, the Yale Police Department is currently investigating events surrounding a February 19 naked party thrown by The Pundits, a “senior prank society” on campus. Several attendees ended up at the hospital; at least one mentioned a possible sexual assault at the party, which about 50 students attended. The added detail that this was part of the society’s “tap” process (read: like pledging), and reportedly entailed forced heavy drinking by the Pundits, probably doesn’t help matters:

Fifteen attendees of the party, who only spoke with the News on the condition of anonymity, provided conflicting accounts of the evening.

Multiple students alleged attendees complied with the Pundits’ requests because of the pressures of the pre-tap process.

“The biggest problem, and what was dis-inhibiting people, was that they were force-feeding people alcohol and they couldn’t say no because of the power dynamic,” one student said.

[…]

The YPD investigator asked unprompted whether sexual misconduct occurred at the party, according to the student that was sent to the hospital. The student recalled for the investigator witnessing a member of the Pundits forcing attendees to kiss each other and that a Pundit forced a male friend’s face onto another’s penis.

It’s worth pointing out, I think, that similar allegations of sexual assault and alcohol abuse have never, to my knowledge, surfaced in the context of a Wesleyan naked party. Could this be because throwing a naked party in the context of a tap week event, replete with hazing and forced drinking and generally degrading tomfoolery, is an utterly godawful idea?

Maybe.

In other college-sex-controversy news, Northwestern is in a hubbub over a “little more explicit than expected” sex toy demonstration during a Human Sexuality class, during which a “naked non-student woman” was “repeatedly sexually stimulated to the point of orgasm” by a “motorized phallus” known as a “fucksaw.” Whoah. I’m not sure who’s ballsier—the professor who led the NSFW demonstration (“Sticks and stones may break your bones, but watching naked people on stage doing pleasurable things will never hurt you”), or the university spokesperson who defended it (less punchy: “The university supports the efforts of its faculty to further the advancement of knowledge”). You can read the professor’s statement here. You can read all about Wesleyan’s Great Alpha Delt-Fucksaw Incident of 1993—

Wait, forget it. Administration likes to keep that one hush-hush.

News:

• Yale Daily Herald: Yale Police Department investigates Pundit party
• The Daily Northwestern: Class sex toy demonstrated causes controversy
• The Daily Northwestern: Prof. John Michael Bailey issues statement on after-class event controversy

History:

• New York Times: Black Tie Optional
• The Argus: Naked Parties: Fact or Fiction?
• Wespeak: Administration Hates Sex
• ACB: naked party