the mars bar party of everyman dreams

Like most UK males of my demographic, with the shared propensity towards the bi-urgent manias of socially acceptable – which is to say heterosexual and temperamentally mild – fetishes and commercially endorsed oral (confectionary) consumption, the Mars Bar Party (MBP) was – shit, perhaps is! – one of the enduring myths of youth, whose promise of the coupling of hot sexual encounters with the perfectly proportioned, globally appreciated triad of chocolate, caramel and nougat exemplified in the eponymous bar (some whirl of deliriously welcoming, nubile and erotically primed females, a party’s worth for Christ sake, it’s in the fucking name, as if the very thought of a vagina stuffed unceremoniously with one of the market’s denser chocolate bars rapidly melting against the temperature of the genitals and the mushroom tang of the burgeoning secretions was enough to leave scores of willing females weak-kneed with anticipation, ever ready to forego their complex sexual ethics and expectations, desires even, the fragile essence of their deep-rooted body issues and privacy in favour of an orgiastic, thrusting, consumable grocery item gripped at the external end by trembling adolescent fingers awash in the uncertainty of feminine physiological incomprehension, cunts bared en masse as the hysteria of lust [not for any one man but for {a} PRODUCT] overtook them, celebrated in guffaws the school over, for what more could woman want but that, inexperienced, loveless, chocolate entry from whichever lucky lad could stretch, financially, to a multipack) was simply too much for the young male to process sensibly.

The legend is said to have grown from Jagger, and indeed it is all too easy to imagine a smack-radiant and sultry young M. Faithfull enshrouded in furs and vacant eyed and flanked by the half-melted stub ends of bar upon bar of Great British confectionary, Caramac, Blue Riband, Penguin, of course Mars, the rich flesh of her venison parts speckled with a coating of melted Caramac oozing like questionable discharge, and body-warm chocolate in a neat dripped line from cunt to anus, and thick pubic hair entangled with wisps of soft stringy caramel, all the evidence needed to construct a lasting sexual legend, documented and wanked to by police decades on, the perverse depravity of the rock n’ roll suburbs, the glamour of a life within the force, “an orgy of cunnilingus” interrupted only by the irrepressible moral code of the monarch-by-proxy, whose encyclopaedic knowledge of appropriate sexual pleasures was more than sufficient as a means of condemning anything that fell outside the realm of normalcy. A nation spewed, gagged on the horror of its own future! The things they [drugs] drove you to! Jagger’s greedy lips smothered with the lapped cunt-fresh choc of a genitally retrieved Mars Bar, onanistically ogled by not only Keith but six other nameless male guests all masturbating no-handed into the tightness of their trousers, aching for a Faithfull party all of their own where the hapless female, drugged to senselessness and delirious with the erotic potential of sugar, would be gasping chocolate bars from every orifice like working pistons; ensconced like comedy eyebrows beneath the curve of her Platonically meticulous breasts; twitching teasingly in her puckered anus; stuck like a stogie in the sloppy gob of her just fucked whatnot, Mick’s wiry twat frame draped like low-rent mink on the suite around her. Faithfull may deny it to this day – “the Mars Bar was a very effective piece of demonizing. Way out there [...] Mick retrieving a Mars Bar from my vagina, indeed! It was far too jaded for any of us even to have conceived of. It’s a dirty old man’s fantasy [...] a cop’s idea of what people do on acid” – but she did it, of course she did, how could anyone resist?, and what on earth does it matter if she didn’t?

It’s a legend that has lasted, even grown (crowd-pleasing mass-market child comic Russell Howard did a short and desperately uninsightful skit on it without addressing any of the deeper socio-historical background of the legend), because it is plausible enough and desirable enough to be believable, and because it contains the three essential elements that Brunvand considers prerequisites for enabling narrative folklore to become a lasting cultural symbol: “a strong basic story appeal, a foundation in actual belief, and a meaningful message or ‘moral’”. These messages, he continues, are either explicit or function “metaphorically or symbolically”, providing “deeper criticisms of human behaviour or social conditions”. Irrespective of the introduction of food items into intimate relations, the fundamental immorality of casual sexual encounters was for the Britain of the 1960s symptomatic of the dangers of rock n’ roll excess and drug fuelled solipsism that through media driven moral panics had become synonymous with the under 25s, and was considered entirely at odds with the notion of a well-functioning social order, promoting instead individuality and personal gratification.

In this debauched youthfulness, even innocent confectionary was corrupted by the joint evils of music and teenage rebellion, and the message was clear and literal: lock up your daughters lest sugared entry occur. The Mars Bar Party entered into contemporary folklore as an attempt to dehumanise the influence of a new vocal youth, spurned on as they were by the nationally reaching fear of the social discontent and revolutionary communistic ideologies that were then permeating the malleable values (“turn on, tune in, drop out”, “think for yourself and question authority” – Leary, you son of a [i.e. definitely the, definitely] yank Satan or similar &c.) of our children. As a narrative it combines a universal emblem of childhood (specifically Mars Bar – although the branding of the bar could be easily substituted for an alternative it would lack the aesthetic potency of the assonance central to the phrase in question, as well the global reach of the MB [sold in numerous countries worldwide with minor variations]) with a story of the utmost physical and psychological corruption and decay, the Fall of youth perpetrated by the unchecked libido of adolescence and the diabolical influence of rock music, itself an affront to Christian values, original sin recontextualized for the twentieth century. Crude in its methods it lamented the very dissolution of childhood, swamped as it was in the functioning genitals of the adult, where – as in long long life – everything was secondary to arousal and desire no matter how transient. By the end of the 60s the voices of the young were heard, a ‘moronic drone’ both offensive to society and frightening; the powers instilled in the white hairs and gravity and silent secret abuses and adulteries of the old and aged were under threat from new values. As Faithfull observed with surprising acuity this morality tale distilled this perceived threat into a nonsensical “dirty old man’s fantasy”, really trying to even conceive of the kind of perversions the young might engage in for the sole purpose of attaining one’s ‘kicks’, and formulating over board meetings and stonily sombre conversations as God-damned incomprehensible and corrupting and unscrupulous an activity as they could imagine, the terminal extent of depravity to which their stilted senses could reach blushing and repentant.

And yet it was a cautionary tale that succeeded only in instilling fear into the distant hearts of the precise people for whom such extraordinary sexual practices would never be an imagining, much less a physical likelihood, the same people who devised the legend and nurtured its roots into the heart of our culture themselves. Its falsity has in no way diminished its power, not to shock, though, but to titillate. The same youthful experimentation and carnality they had sought to demonise with so outlandish a story is the thing that has ensured its survival, appealing as it does precisely to this fiendish audience, making hordes of (thankfully) sexless teenage boys ache with hungry desire for a masterful unification of two most cherished components (chocolate and the other). For the propagandists the issue was and would always be that they made it sound amazing, for God’s sake, not dreadful at all. Any consequences weren’t bad, they were fucking great! They sold the rock n’ roll lifestyle more in that one anecdote than in a thousand tired Stones records! It was less cautionary than it was a call to arms for the young to be as depraved as their imaginations allowed; inadvertently, limits had been destroyed, everything was permitted. It wasn’t a moral position and as such it failed to question the morality of the act with any insight; instead it highlighted the appeal of an amoral sexual code unfettered by the repressed Victorian values that still informed the era, a liberation of (all) the senses. Goodbye past and hello future! As a cautionary tale, then, it ultimately failed, but regardless: as an urban legend – AN INSPIRATION – it soared, still does.

Of course when it came to the frankly ugly reality of genito-confectionary union the staying power of a decade of legend was hugely undermined by the grimness of the whole sorry disaster, a desperately unsexy combination of gluttony, sexual congress and ambient grocery. Despite the nougat baseline the structural integrity of the Mars Bar is not solid enough to be up to the job in any kind of satisfactory way, and the disintegration of the bar is almost immediate when subjected to the temperatures of the pertinent body parts. This makes the process an incredibly messy one, which for all but the most committed and transcendent sexual practitioner cannot help but be a point of laundry-oriented or hygienic concern throughout the act, so much so as to stifle the potential for any verifiable arousal to almost nothing. Add to that the fact that once the thrill at seeing an inanimate object inserted into a vagina has passed – usually within some thirty seconds or so – you’re left with nothing but an emotionless void where once there had been the shadow of excitement. In practice, far from the purely academic narrative deconstruction of the multi-layered meanings of a given aspect of our shared heritage, it seems that with the sheer abundance of varied sexual positions on offer (and in truth I should know, I’ve tried all three personally), to sully an act that must otherwise be described as pleasurable with a pretty decent if not first choice chocolate bar is lunacy. Furthermore, and some would say vitally, and interestingly, she wasn’t into it; despite the assured self-belief of the adolescent that all females must be and were, biologically drawn to the erogenous pleasures of the MBP, the very rustle of the opening wrapper like a Dionysian call to some intense and frenzied, ecstatic bacchanal, despite this, (admittedly limited) experience would suggest otherwise. She looked on coldly while I sank it in, watching my own movements and hers with them as if I were a spectator positioned far outside of it all, engulfed by the weight of historical expectation. I fluffed the eating part, and pulled all that I could reach out to finish off (although by the time the weirdly methodical preparation was complete we had lost the will to bother long before the wrapper came off), leaving a cunt full of melted Mars Bar behind that looked like a terrible accident. She asked if I was done, so cutting a question in coitus, then went to the bathroom to wash out the nougat and left dark sticky streaks down the edges of the bathtub like ancient riverbeds long dried up. She was gone for more than half an hour. She never returned.