Thanksgiving Sex? Sex Lives of the Pilgrims: Girls Gone Wild & Goodwives Chasing Native Men

by Coleen Singer at Sssh.com

When pondering what to write for Erotic Scribes this week of Thanksgiving in the U.S., the thought occurred to me of how one might combine the biggest family values holiday in America with Sex.  Not an easy task!  Let’s face it – Thanksgiving just isn’t a sexy holiday like Valentines Day or even Christmas (which Victoria’s Secret transformed into a hot holiday with their velvety line of Mrs. Santa stripper costumes, sure to delight all partners!).  

Thanksgiving is about either traveling home to see the family (and sleeping in your childhood bedroom right next to the parent’s room, pretty much dampening any idea of screaming orgasms), or, if staying at home, probably spending 2 days of prep work in the kitchen, cooking for 7 hours for the guests, and then 2 hours of dish washing with any and all other female friends and family that came over (whilst in most cases the men-folk drink beer, watch football and eat leftovers in the living room).  How sexy ISN’T that?

Read on…

So, figuring some clever pornographer at some point had made a series of adult movies with Pilgrims and Indians doing the nasty after the feast, I searched high and low with little luck in finding anything.  It seems that the current rage of CosPlay doesn’t spill over to Pocahontas and John Smith having “swing from the old oak tree sex” in Plimouth Village.  Disney does seem to have at least romanticized the Pilgrims a bit in their movie, “Pocohontas” which in a nice G-Rated way, at least hinted that Pocahontas and John were probably having a roll in the hay.  But, beyond that, not a whole lot of sex in the media tying into modern Turkey Day.

After exhausting all boolean google searches and even not finding much even on the tubes, I figured that YouTube might have at least one video commentary on Sex and Thanksgiving and, you betcha! There is one!  What makes if funnier is that it is by British Video Blogger, Aly Bongo who, beyond touching on the topic of turkey day sex (or lack thereof), expresses her total confusion as to what American Thanksgiving even IS!  Let’s take a look….

There were a few other Youtube videos, mostly selfies of women sexualizing the job of “prepping the turkey with oily hands”, but nothing much more, or anything involving human sexual behavior on the day that starts the Holiday Madness in America. So much for Rule 34 in this instance.

Sometimes I find it best to go back to the beginning of something and work forward in time to get some clues to a question, so the obvious place to start was with the Pilgrims and other Puritan Colonists in New England in the 17th century that sort-of-accidentally invented Thanksgiving in the first place (well, before slaughtering their Indian neighbors shortly thereafter).

Although any trace of sexual diaries by the Pilgrims have long been burned on the pyre, we do get a bit of spicy sex in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, “The Scarlett Letter“.  Although intended as social commentary on sexual repression in the Massachusetts Bay Colony of the 1660s, this one does have all of the elements to “sex up” for a movie!  Demi Moore screwing the village pastor and having a blinding orgasm is always a good plot starter!  Hollywood did take a crack at this with this film version of it, but might have gone overboard a little. Demi Moore stars as Hester Prynne, a new arrival to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1666. Prynne, who interacts freely with slaves and Quakers and wears revealing garb, is something of a free thinker and off-putting to the uptight locals.  But, it’s probably more fantasy than reality that Hester looked or acted even a little like Demi Moore:

Yep. The real women of Plimouth Plantation and the Massachusetts Bay Colony looked and dressed a whole lot more like the woman above on the right, complete with 17-century Dutch-inspired versions of the modern day Muslim Burka.

Ergo, nix on Hollywood giving me any steamy Pilgrim Sex inspiration that has any bearing on reality.

Ergo, back to the source material!

In  his delightful article, “Sex Lives of the Pilgrims“, historian Carl Anthony pretty much chronicles that the Pilgrim and Puritan women of the 17th century had a randy, if not even kinky, side to them. Or, at the very least, were just horny after potato weeding duties.

One finds that the bedraggled band of fifty or so English and Dutch immigrants who got off the Mayflower with fear and malnutrition had little time or inclination for trouble. They were so desperately praying for help to survive  that the stability provided by their faith in God only emboldened their promise to live as purely as possible. As a previous General Society of Mayflower Descendants historian Eugene Aubrey Stratton makes clear through the original research and analysisof his book, Plymouth Colony: Its History and Its People, 1620-1691 (1986), however, ’twas not long before longing appeared.

Not surprisingly, the most frequent Puritan “longing” problem involved girls gone wild – who then got pregnant.

Some fun facts from Stratton include:

• The first sign of pregnancy usually meant marriage, but if a new couple had a child a little too soon after the wedding, they were punished as retroactive sinners. That was the deal with one of the earliest records, in April 1633 when John and Joan Hewes were put in the public stockade after their pre-marital sex was figured out.
• Mayflower status offered no leniency. Even celebrity Pilgrim kid Peregrine White (the only child born on the ship), and his wife Sarah were fined after it was figured out they “fornicated” before marriage.
• After being found guilty of pre-marital “carnall copulation” Rebecca Alden (daughter of the famous Mayflower Pilgrim John Alden) and her husband Thomas Delano (ancestor of Franklin D. Roosevelt) were so humiliated they named the boy “Benoni,” Hebrew for “child of sorrow.”
• The married Mary Mendlove had “dalliance diverse tymes” with Tinsin the Indian, but it turned out that this respectable lady had been the one who seduced him through “allurement and inticement.” She got a routine whipping but also had to wear “a badge upon her sleeve” identifying her as an adulteress. And if she was seen without it, she was “to be burned in the face with a hott iron.” Meanwhile, Tinsin only got whipped.

Stratton adds: Hands-down one of the wildest accounts involved a sex party with one babe, four dudes – and lots of complications. The scene was Hatch house where young miss Lydia Hatch seemed to be the instigator, with her brother Jonathan there for fun too. Joining them were Edward Mitchell, Edward Preston and John Keene.

The only woman with a party of four men – including her brother, Lydia Hatch’s secret party hit a hitch. One guy snitched.

First, Lydia wanted Ed Mitchell to “abuse her body,” but he was up for “lude and sodomiticall practices” with Ed Preston. Meanwhile, Ed Preston was “pressing” John Keene for some action. So Lydia first ended up in bed with her brother Jon while Ed Mitchell got it on with Ed Preston who gave up on John Keene “because he resisted the temptacon.” Finally, Lydia got to do her deed with Ed Mitchell. For participating in what wase the only Puritan orgy (at least the only one found out) the partiers ended up getting a run-of-the-mill whipping – all except for John Keene, who had ratted them all out, but was found “faulty” for watching it all.

Certainly, there was one case that did seem to push things over the edge a bit. That was the September 1642 case of Thomas Graunger. He was a 16 year old servant boy in the home of Love Brewster where much of his work had him outside, tending to the crops and the animals. In more ways than one – and with more than one, so it turns out. The gig was up when one colonist spotted him in the act of penetration – on a mare. And not all his victims were female.

Author Carl Anthony concludes…..

Governor Bradford had led the Pilgrims away from England and its ungodly influences on the Mayflower with every hope of them creating a new Puritan world. So it was understandable that he became a bit wigged out about all this stuff going on. He knew the penalties were harsh – the steep shilling fees, humiliation in the public stockade and complete social ostracizing, the torturous whippings, the threat of hanging. “Yet all this could not suppress the breaking out of sundrie notorious sins….espetially drunkenness and unclainnes; not only incontinence betweene persons unmarried, for which many both men and women have been punished sharply enough, but some maried persons also. But that which is worse, even sodomie and bugerie, (things fearful to name), have broak forth in this land, oftener then once.”

Yup Governor, you got that right.

Back to the present, I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that indeed, the Pilgrims and Puritans were probably having wild sex (and getting beaten or fined for doing so), but it’s just not really possible to “sex up” Thanksgiving very much. Sort of like Ash Wednesday, Groundhog Day, or Flag Day. Let’s leave it at this then: American Thanksgiving (and, yes, Canada has one too, but it’s not such a big deal there) is just a nice family-andfriend holiday that is focused around food, gathering together (with their teen kids hiding in the basement, tweeting their dismay), and finding those sometime itty bitty things in our lives over the past year that we are thankful for .

And, if you MUST sex it up a little, here’s how:

See you at the Macy’s Door-buster sale at 9pm after I finish the dishes! Oh wait. They are open all Thanksgiving day this year. Jerks…