Petting parties:
To some social observers, petting parties of the 1920s were a natural, post-First World War outgrowth of a repressed society. To others, the out-in-the-open hug-and-kissfests were blinking neon signposts on the Road to Perdition.
“Petting parties varied quite a lot,” says Paula S. Fass, professor emerita of history at the University of California, Berkeley and author of The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s. “But certainly there were parties where young people did quite a lot of erotic exploration — kissing and fondling. These parties always stopped before intercourse. In that sense they had imposed limitations created by the group presence. They were not orgies and they were not promiscuous — one set of partners only.”
Petting parties, Fass explains, “allowed young people to experiment in a self-limiting way by creating peer regulation that both encouraged experimentation and created clear limits.” [Linton Woods, NPR]
New one on me. I guess I don’t get out much.
