The summer camp experience is a mythical, esteemed rite of passage in American culture [...] a long lost world of [...] fancy-free fucking under the stars.
It’s big business, too. Each year, around 14 million U.S. campers — the majority being older children and teenagers — pack up and spend the summer in one of the country’s many immersive outdoor getaways [...] and older teens — many of whom head to camp as counselors and apprentices — get a chance to have abundant, post-pubescent sex in a variety of sandy and/or mosquito-ridden locations.
“[You will have] sex in the washroom back closet, sex in the dining room, sex in the bus, sex in the senior staff girls room, sex at the Friday night campfire ceremony,” says one Reddit user of the summer camp experience. “You will never have a better summer.”
On Reddit, there are reams of ex-campers going starry-eyed over their adolescent adventures [...] there is talk of lost virginity, braided grass love tokens and late-night lesbian erotica readings.
Clarissa, 26, attended summer camp in 2009 as a 15-year-old apprentice counselor, and the memories remain deeply ingrained in her psyche. “Me and the other apprentices were completely unsupervised at night,” she says. “I had one camp crush. We didn’t have end up having sex, but we would make out and feel each other up at night. I could always hear other people doing the same thing. Once or twice a couple of people would just go off into the woods together for more serious stuff. I felt like I got no sleep at all that summer.”
Sisley's post reminded me of “Miss Charlotte” - a poem in Frederick Seidel's Peaches Goes It Alone (2018). The poem is about “undressed” schoolgirls “lying on top” of one another in a dorm-room of an all-girl's boarding school, which caused aristocrats to take “cold showers”:
Bring back the all-girls boarding schools for pedigreed girls
Where, morning and night, girls dressed and undressed.
Luxurious lawns and trees rode to hounds.
Horses the girls owned waited in padded stalls.
Think of the cold showers these aristocrates took.
Think of the dorm-room mirrors which sometimes saw
A cold girl lying on top of a warm girl
While a pretty girl with a pimply face on her bed on her back watched
The scene in the dorm-room reminded me of a scene in the Homes' controversial National Bestseller The End of Alice where imprisoned Chappy shared a story from his teen pen pal:
She writes of the memory of one particular afternoon [...] The story is of coming into the cabin to collect her tennis racket and finding the two little girls from Louisville, Kentucky [...] lying across the top bunk, head to toe, the brunette’s narrow foot sweeping back and forth across the strawberry blonde’s nipple, the blonde’s jumpsuit unzipped and parted to the waist. When the lovebirds sighted the girl and smiled at her, there was a flash of light like an explosion, as the sun, reflecting off the brunette’s metal tooth-braces [...]
I was reminded of a story in Nabokov's Lolita where Lolita shared with Humbert a tale about one of her summer camp tent-mates:
Her astounding tale started with an introductory mention of her tent-mate of the previous summer, at another camp, a “very select” one as she put it. The tent-mate [...] instructed her in various manipulations. [...] I wanted to know if either mother learned of those sapphic diversions? “Gosh no,” exhaled limp Lo [...]
And I was reminded of seventeen-year-old Danielle who confessed in “Reality Check From Young Voices”, which is a chapter in Cappiello’s Slut: The Play:
“I go to this typical Jewish summer camp, where promiscuous behavior is practically encouraged and cultivated [...] with no parental supervision, there are lots of sexual firsts for everyone [...] There is one girl in particular, Georgia, who is really petite and very pretty [...] Josh and another boy coerced - basically forced - Georgia to give them blow jobs, while others filmed it on their phones.”
In addition, I was reminded of Lena Dunham's memoir Not That Kind of Girl where she shared that when she was a thirteen-year-old summer camper she: “[...] couldn't stop eyeing everyone else, staring at their round asses as they dressed, the dusky hairs emerging from the bathing suits. “You are so bicurious!” Lena's camp counselor said after she caught Lena “[...] watching her tits swing as she changed.” And Lena: “[...] lusted after a college student and flirted with her “Australian 'bunk uncle'”.
The following summer, at the age of fourteen, Dunham found her “truest love”. “[Johnny] was blond, from South Carolina, and just shy of twenty-two.” In her bunk, Lena fantasized about discarding her “[...] clothes, approaching Johnny, and letting him put his hands all over [...]” her body. [Note: When a nymphet fantasizes about a man, it's commonly considered cute, but when a man fantasizes about a nymphet, it's commonly considered creepy.]
Lastly, I was reminded of E.R. Frank's Friction. In the novella, after thirteen-year-old Alex accidentally sees Simon's penis, "[...] his rain-slicked wet thing above a jiggling sack of skin, and a nest of brown hair. Everything." on a camping trip, Alex couldn't get her science teacher's, "[...] thick-looking and sluggy [...]" thing out of her head.
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