Posted by Terry on December 28, 1998 at 16:28
In Reply to: give it up posted by wanna know on December 28, 1998 at 02:37
In the mid-1980s, Murphy's went through a transformation that sometimes depressed, sometimes angered me as I watched it happen. In part, the change seemed to reflect a deliberate effort of the owner to clean up the image of his bar and turn it into a more upscale, lounge-style place that appealed to the lucrative fraternity-sorority crowd rather than to the superannuated hippies and Vietnam vets who had frequented it along with the raucous ruggers. In part, it reflected the changing times. The decade from the mid-60s to the mid-70s had been a comparatively uninhibited period, especially on campuses, during which conventional norms were in question and people were prone to "let it flow" on many levels. The resurgence of conservative, careerist values after the disillusion of the peace movement meant that places like Murphy's had to reform if they were to remain profitable, and it also involved a dramatic shift in public behavior. I have often reflected during the last ten to fifteen years upon how rich a time the protest era was for "sightings" of wet crotch and ass at rock concerts, street dances, and rallies, as well as in bars and at the student union or even in classrooms, and how dry the campus became when students put their bongs away and started working on their resumes. Murphy's went dry, too.
I quit going to Murphy's in the mid-80's, when I no longer felt at ease there. It was still open, in name anyway, when I moved away. Perhaps it's gone now, or perhaps the brighter, cleaner Murphy's is still there. As Lisa surmised, the place did develop a bit of a bouquet, a mingling of smoke and stale beer with an ellusive urinous note that might have wafted from the lavatories. Beer piss doesn't leave much odor, the cigarette smoke was far stronger, and the raunchiness of the place was part of its appeal. If the antiseptic Murphy's is still doing business, I doubt that the owner would like having its squalid past broadcast on the Net. Considering the many thousands of alumni and alumnae of that university, there must be some on line who occasionally visit this site and would identify the bar immediately if I gave the city. I think discretion is advised on that score. The whole point of describing the bar was to set the stage for some nice, wet anecdotes from my seven years as a regular there.
Did I ever have a conversation with another patron about the wet goings-on at Murphy's? No, I often yearned to, but I didn't know how. The ability to talk about "watersports," which still means different things to different people, has developed rapidly in the last few years, thanks in part to semi-public forums like this one. Back when Murphy's was in its prime, I was beginning to realize -- with what excitement, you can imagine -- that I was not alone in enjoying wetting, that there was an indefinite community of sharers out there. But aside from some early studies in "psychosexual infantilism" that I had read, there wasn't the conceptual and verbal wherewithal to discuss my "Rosebud," as it were -- the secret key to much of my behavior. There was certainly no way of affirming it, of discussing it as anything but pathological. So we hung out together, indulging ourselves, making nothing of it, only occasionally smirking or joking about it. "Looks like somebody sat in something," or "Christ, it's so crowded in here, people are just pissing down their legs." Many people must have seen me wet, but how they interpreted it --- as infirmity, compulsion, perversion -- I'll never know. I didn't know how to interpret their behavior, either. All I knew was that I found the sight of others wet tremendously exciting and loved letting go in my pants. It was like, "I don't know what to make of this, but I'm doing it anyway, damn it!"
In our ability to talk frankly about human nature, including the full range of erotic behavior, we have been going two steps forward and one step back for a couple of centuries now, and we're about to begin another. The 1920s were comparatively free, the 30s and 40s were embarrassed by depression and war, my own generation made some progress toward candor, but even radicalism is relative. We touted free love, but we still shunned gays and lesbians. "If it feels good, do it," we told each other, blushing and stammering. In just the last few years, with the advent of the Internet and access to discussion groups like this one, international communities have been revealed that were heretofore unsuspected, and an entirely new order of discourse has become possible. A very few years ago, every man and woman on this board would have been nursing his or her fetish in isolation, wetting furtively in a private room or a dark bar, perhaps finding a mate with whom to share the nasty, sick little secret in fear of neighbors and employers. Now we are transcending our isolation, and we are having conversations that were impossible at Murphy's in the "liberated" 60s and 70s. The cat is out of the bag, and the morality of the 21st century will have to become more nearly adequate to human nature to account for information the likes of us will have disseminated.
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