Site Presented By
Monday, Nov 23, 2009
Groups like Votergasm.org and FTheVote are appealing to youthful lust to schwing the election.
Oct 21, 2004 | On Oct. 11, four co-founders of a Web-based youth activist group gathered in a small apartment in Manhattan for their weekly meeting. Chairs were pulled into a circle, and iPods and cellphones were dropped onto a wooden trunk-cum-coffee table. The attendants were well-groomed and collegiate looking. Wheat Thins and Oreos were going around. The host of the meeting, a 23-year-old publicity assistant named Julie Binder, sat barefoot on the floor, occasionally tapping out notes on a laptop.
The night's agenda was finding a venue and sponsors for the group's election-night party, and with just over two weeks until Nov. 2, the mood was serious. They considered bars called APT, Piano and Happy Ending. The space would have to be large but cozy, hip but relaxed, and it would need to have a television for watching the election results come in. Also, added Peter Koechley, a 23-year-old Columbia grad, it should be someplace "where it's easy to have sex where no one notices." The others nodded in agreement.
The party in question would be the climax (if you will) of Votergasm.org, a nonpartisan activist group whose Web site encourages "young people everywhere to have sex with voters on Election Night, and to withhold sex from non-voters until the next presidential election." Votergasm also features racy voting-themed photo spreads and a game in which players must guess a voter's party affiliation based solely on the person's head shot. The group's goal, according to the Votergasm home page, is to "send 100,000 first-time 18 to 25 year old voters to polls for the 2004 elections, and to catalyze 250,000 orgasms by the morning of November 3."
A joke, right? Not really, insists the group's 23-year-old publicist, Michelle Collins, a chatty, ponytailed Barnard grad who works as a legal assistant. Collins explained that the group was founded on the belief that young Americans are failing their country in two important respects: They are not voting and not having enough sex. "If there's anything that's really going to speak to America's youth, it's saying that voting is as important as sex, as fun, as American," says Collins. "Take part in both things; you know, be a patriot, be patriotic."
The premise may sound convoluted, but so far the Votergasm plan seems to be working. Since launching on Sept. 4, the site has received more than 516,000 unique visitors (nearly 20,000 unique visitors per day, recently). More than 25,000 people have pledged to vote and have sex on Election Day, and more than 1,000 have clicked on the site's voter registration link. Last month, Votergasm.org was targeted by Rush Limbaugh, who poked fun at the site, and called for his listeners to shut it down by overwhelming the home page with thousands of simultaneous hits. (Hordes of Rush fans succeeded in doing so, but the site was up again in a matter of hours.) "Me and Rush Limbaugh having a back and forth -- I never thought I'd say those words," laughs Collins.
