Summer music festivals are basically the closest thing humans have to mating season. Penguins stand on the beach and fertilise eggs, humans go to a field in Surrey, take a shitload of drugs and then stand in a sea of bare thighs, topless girls and boys, and wait for nature to take its course.
The only problem with this is getting laid at a music festival is horrifying. At very best, the ugly one from Rizzle Kicks might take you back to his tour bus to have his way with you before dropping you off at South Mimms services in the middle of the night. At very worst you’ll end up with grass rash, a STI and some mimsy 19-year-old from Milton Keynes texting you every hour when you get home. Music festivals are literally the worst place to have sex. Here’s why:
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Tents are literally the worst place to have sex
No matter how erotic you think your moves are, their effects are going to be severely diminished within the confines of a £15 pop-up fabric house, in which bare skin sends icey dew running everywhere. Things are even worse if you try and stay inside the sleeping bag. You’ll be sweating like you’ve just dropped four bombs at Pacha in mid-Summer heat, the restrictions placed on movement will prevent any pleasure whatsoever and, eventually, you will look less like two humans displaying their affection and more like a pair of eels negotiating their way out of a swing-bin liner.
And all that is assuming you even make it back to your tent at all. But you should at least try. If you ever find yourself dry humping in the mud or fingering your way through a Rudimental set, remember this: we can all see you and we are probably taking photos.
It’s fucking disgusting
Festival sex is is 10% friction and 90% smell. The scents rising from your local waste treatment plant are similar to the ones you’ll find emerging from the pants of someone whose genitals have been gently braising in damp and pill-sweat for three days. Add to that a sweaty tent and apocalyptic toilet facilities and at the very least you’re looking at a case of thrush that will make you regret packing 5 pairs of denim batty riders in lieu of any other clothes. If you find someone you simply must go to town on, try to have a wet wipe shower first and don’t be the kind of melt who doesn’t use a condom. Putting aside the obvious and numerous health and safety risks, there is nothing more depressing than having a total stranger jizz in the sleeping bag you have to lie in for the rest of the weekend.
You’ll be far too hammered for it to be good
Considering the female orgasm is, in part, psychological, a music festival is essentially a location in which all the anti-cum conditions of the world unite to have a laugh at women’s expense. Unless your idea of relaxing stimulation is a sonic combination of the nearest juice bar blasting Dub Side Of The Moon and someone in a K-hole a few tents over screaming something about bananas and doorknobs, you’ll probably fall short of getting off, but each to their own I guess.
Also, festival sex occurs in total darkness, which is preferable considering most people’s standards in these circumstances tend to seriously plummet to include trustafarians, street performers and fashion bloggers. However, it also means that if you want even the hope of an orgasm you both have to know what you’re looking for and be able to find it without actually looking, and the chances of that happening will be almost non-existent by the time you’re wasted enough to think that tent sex was a good idea in the first place. There are only two forms of guiding light you can rely on in a tent after hours: battery powered lanterns, which will project every unfortunate move as a silhouette on the tent walls like a sorry arthouse porno, and candles, which will definitely kill you. The only way of avoiding the issue is if you manage to bag The Geologist from Animal Collective and convince him to keep his headtorch on during. Wait, why am I turned on by that?
Foreplay is impossible
Foreplay – the most important part of sex – is rendered physically impossible because mouths and hands are completely off limits unless they’ve gone through numerous rigorous hygiene checks and ain’t nobody got time for that. When your fingernails contain tiny diaries written in crisps and excrement and ket, wet-wipes just won’t cut it. Unless you end up with the kind of maniac who brings lube to a music festival (in which case you should run away immediately) then it’s likely you’re about to experience the dryness of a Brut Champagne.
Having said that, if you do manage to find someone who can make you cum in a tent in spite of all the aforementioned obstacles then well done, you have found your eternal spirit animal. Never let them go.
There’s loads of better stuff to do
One of the greatest things about music festivals is that all the laws that usually govern everyday life no longer apply. Up is down, hats make you look better and sex is one of the least fun activities on offer. Most festivals cost more than your rent, so if you have the option of dancing around a giant metal spider on fire with a stripper on one arm and Bradley Cooper on the other then you should probably do that instead of the thing you can do in supremely better conditions on your lunch break. I know that everything you are high on (including life) might lead you to believe that romancing the person in the Indian headdress back to your tent is the best idea ever, but trust me, it isn’t.
You might be excited because you saw some circus performers bending bits of their bodies you didn’t even know existed, but all the stuff that propelled you go for it in the first place will abandon you the second you can taste three days worth of someone else’s cheesy chips on your tongue. Euphoria will turn on you. You will find yourself wet in all the wrong ways, bumping against a body you can smell more than you can see and hoping you’ve accidentally done it with your best friend purely so you don’t have to spend the next two hours wandering around looking for them.
They’re the worst place on earth for anything to go wrong
Without getting all Catholic School Sex Education Video up in here, if you end up doing the no pants dance at a festival and have some kind of accident, you will find yourself up shit creek without a person whose only reaction isn’t to Snapchat it. It is, quite possibly, the worst place outside of a warzone to have a sex problem. “Oh, nothing bad will happen to me”, you say, but let me leave you with a story relayed word-for-word by a friend of mine who thought much the same before he played Sonisphere 2010 (proof that there is no escaping any of this even if you’re in a band):
“I went back to this girls tent who I had just met and started doing the sex. After a while, I realised things were getting a bit wet and sticky. Just thought it was the typical sex juice… It was blood. I broke my frenulum (banjo string). We found out by her turning on the light on her phone to reveal a puddle of blood at the end of the tent: “fuck! This is my friends brand new tent, she’s going to kill me!” So I went outside for a piss, naked, and a large group of metal heads walked by and shone a torch on me. I looked like a nude, full-body Andrew WK album cover. Needless to say they were impressed. I collected my bloody clothes and headed back to the party. Everything else was blank until I woke up buried in beanbags in the artist bar (which is closed with security overnight), encrusted in blood. I couldn’t have sex for more or less a month because of the damage.”
Follow Emma on Twitter: @SickBae
Photos by Sam Odumosu, William Coutts, Paley Fairman, and Egli Trezzle
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