Panty raid!

Tom Jones sends his audience running for the aisle to throw underwear. Is this a wholesome orgy or an intergenerational sacred rite?

By Virginia Vitzthum

Oct 19, 1999 | Seeing Tom Jones in concert revealed new dimensions in the semiotics of panty-throwing. I'd witnessed the ritual only once before, at my first Cramps show in 1989. Like Jones, the Cramps are a sexual cartoon; they make black-leather, gender-bending, rockabilly that Betty Boop or Jessica Rabbit might dance to. That night guitarist Poison Ivy played with bent legs spread and an Elvis sneer on her gorgeous lips, while her husband, front man Lux Interior, panted and hiccuped and howled in a leather G-string and four-inch stilettos, fellating the microphone, humping the speakers and rubbing his sweat orgiastically into his chest and crotch. It was a ridiculous, adolescent spectacle, but I was swept up and turned on, as was everyone else around me.

Many panties were flung without premeditation that night -- but few were aimed at the stage. Ivy and Lux weren't themselves the objects of desire, but instead sprayed the crowd with sexual possibility like a bomber plane sending briefs exploding skyward, launching a geyser of airborne briefs. These chicks just wanted out of their underwear, and so they cast their scent wherever it landed. I never doubted that those flung panties were wet, so I assumed that wetness was at least implied in any panty-toss.

But would this be true at a $50 Tom Jones concert at a staid Washington theater?

I didn't expect spontaneity, but I thought some original meaning of a tossed panty would survive. Rituals are meant to both stand in for and re-ignite whatever expression originally inspired them. So even if the Tom Jones fans brought laundered panties in their handbags, once airborne they would signify the same thing as the pioneering pair thrown 35 years ago by some British schoolgirl pushed past her boiling point by the Welsh pelvis. I assumed that every tossed panty still says: You and your show, Mr. Jones, get me very excited, and here are the body fluids to prove it.

But at Jones' concert, the panties appeared while the roadies were still setting up the stage. A woman about 30 rows back started it off, standing up at her seat and twirling white bikini briefs to growing cheers. Others picked it up, and the air above the seats filled with the tiny waving flags and bawdy whoops and cheers. The sound swelled to a war cry: An army of ladies who'd left their husbands at home were preparing to storm the stage and bomb it with their underwear.

I sat between two demographically representative groups. On my left three 60ish women in bifocals and beauty-shop hairdos cooed and giggled over the coming attraction; on my right three women in their 30s played it cooler, making it clear that the panties they'd brought would be tossed ironically. When asked if Jones was married, my 60ish neighbor answered a little prissily, "Well if he is, he has a very liberal wife." My 35-year-old neighbor was the first of many who told me her mother loved Tom Jones and that ogling him on TV had been a family affair.

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