Many millennials probably remember a particular urban legend which plagued our parents and educators in the 2000s—namely, the idea that teens were hanging out after hours and having “rainbow sex parties.” Although I was not the kind of kid who would ever be invited to such a thing even if they existed, I had major doubts that they were real at all. And I say this as a teenager who attended a private school which has been described by my subscribers as “horny Gossip Girl.” Don’t get me wrong, plenty of people were having sex, but there were no rainbow-oriented trinkets involved.
Let’s back up for those of you who don’t remember this urban legend. Rainbow Sex Parties often involved teens paying each other for sexual favors with a large variety of different-colored wristbands. How were teenagers acquiring this many different colored wristbands in a time before Amazon? Nobody knows. I was supposed to believe that teenagers who were impulsive enough to trade bracelets for sex at a drunken house party were also good enough event organizers and project managers that they would be running around to different stores days ahead of time to find seven separate colors of wristbands, clearly communicating which sexual favors correlated with each color, and then orchestrating the exchange of wristbands at the party?
Some versions of Rainbow Sex Parties involved an act that everyone would realize was impossible if you had ever given or received a blowjob even once. In 2002, conservative pediatrician Meg Meeker wrote a book called, Epidemic: How Teen Sex Is Killing Our Kids. In it, she includes a story from an anonymous 14-year-old who claimed that she attended a variant of a Rainbow Sex Party, wherein girls were given different shades of lipstick and asked to each perform oral sex on a boy so the lipstick shades would, presumably, accumulate in a rainbow along the length of his shaft. And then Saddam Hussein nuked the entire party, which was summarily swarmed by killer bees and washed down with acid rain.
Look, perhaps I’m not enough of a blowjob expert, but my understanding of the mechanics is that, how do I say this, nobody would be able to see a clear band of lipstick on a penis once you’re done, let alone multiple bands in different colors left by multiple people. Perhaps I’m taking it too literally and it wasn’t really a true blowjob but rather a one-time “stamping” of sorts, but I’ll be honest: I don’t think this happened, let alone on any grand scale, although it’s possible a teenage boy made it up as an *Inbetweeners-*type story.
But people were convinced this was a widespread epidemic, probably because the media just loves a scandalous story that terrifies parents and feeds into the zeitgeist. The Oprah Winfrey Show even did an episode about this underground “teen phenomenon” in 2005.
It’s easy to laugh about what was certainly a Y2K-era urban legend now, but a new one has emerged, except this time it’s about adults dating in 2026—and it makes sense, given that the current cultural anxiety is about the loneliness epidemic and birth rate, and less about out-of-control randy teens. Basically, according to today’s legend, we are supposed to believe that women are, en masse, demanding that men send them Ubers or black cars to pick them up for the first date and are cancelling dates if this doesn’t happen.
