It was a central tenet of the hippie worldview. Free Love – also known as mass fucking – was the logical pastime for a new society that rejected corporate nationalism, the Vietnam War, and most of all, the middle-class “values” that their parents forced upon them.

And my, oh my, did the hippies reject those things with all that Free Love. There are patches in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park where the grass still won’t grow back, so scorched is the earth from all that ‘60s lust ‘n’ thrust, aimed at sticking it to Nixon and the legions of Cleaver families in Orange County.

Except the thing is, if the hippies hadn’t embraced sexual liberation as part of their movement activism, and instead had reacted against Vietnam and the rest with, say, a celibacy worthy of the Carmelites and high-dollar auto-castration propaganda, those hippies would have fucked each other’s brains out anyway.

That’s because when something exciting is going on that lasts longer than an acid trip – a social movement like the hippies, a political one like Che’s, or even a Division III college football team’s 11-0 season – and you are in the middle of it, you fuck everyone around you.

The birth of the Getty museum in the mid-1970s, in Malibu, California is the classic example. Oil baron J. Paul Getty dies, and leaves his Malibu ranch and nearly a billion dollars to the fledgling museum’s trust. Overnight it’s the richest museum in America, and the only directive is to assemble the finest, finest collection of antiquities and paintings in America.

The curators and librarians, all fluent in Latin, Aramaic, and Sappho, immediately abandon the pieties and social reserve that their East Coast colleagues had spent a century cultivating – none of that servants-of-the-rich stuff. Outrageous reports start circulating of sky-high bidding – and taunting! – at Sotheby’s auctions. The art dealers fly in, treat the staff like gods, and suddenly the Getty is buying looted masterpieces of Greek civilization for sums that dwarf their competitors’ annual budgets. The conservators are busy sniffing coke off the tits of the latest Aphrodite statue, and everyone has a beach house.

But when the going gets fabulous, there’s no easy way to express how intensely satisfying the whole thing is. We can’t articulate the experience of these movements with money, and certainly not with words. The desire, really, is to hump the situation doggy-style, but since we can’t, we end up penetrating every available body that’s in the middle of this wonderful thing with us.

Things got fabulous at the Getty pretty quick, and the fucking was soon to follow. It wasn’t cowardly off-site fucking either. It couldn’t be. The excitement was tied to the museum.

God, and what a backdrop that place was for doing it. Better known as “The Villa,” it was reconstructed along the pattern of a Roman noble’s retreat discovered in Herculaneum. No detail was spared; the totem novem gradii – bronze cupids pissing into fountains, myrtle hedges, frescoes of landscapes and courtly scenes, laurel trees, atria. And don’t forget Malibu’s Med climes: 70-degree air, steady sunlight and clear nights.

From what I heard from the lucky staffers at that time, the sex was exquisite and ubiquitous, and, unlike most American workplaces, the fucking knew no hierarchy. The fat black security guard, Minnie, of course did it with the cleaners, but she also banged the entire archive staff, not in the closets, but in the galleries. The curator of French furniture gave hot meat injections to every wife of the museum’s board members, while their husbands watched and jacked themselves, using Plantagenet tapestries for cum rags. Best of all, fat and old had their way with the young and supple – these little eras get so intense that all the sexual mores that typically create winners and losers simply cease to exist.

The fucking went on into the mid-‘80s until the U.N. started to make the 2,000-year-old practice of looting ancient sites in Italy, Turkey, and Greece, subject to Interpol. The dealers started going to jail, Getty curators got busted for buying fakes…essentially everyone found out how much fun the Getty was having, and stomped on its fuck parade. That was a tight-knit community of 200, so it only took a couple months to extinguish.

The hippies, however, numbered in the millions, and it took almost a decade and thousands of Petri dishes for those unsexed and disgruntled biologists at Harvard to breed herpes and Chlamydia strains strong enough to kill off Free Love as we know it.

But don’t let that be a downer; don’t hang your head because you missed the ‘60s or the Getty Days. Because my big point – and you guys who don’t get to put it in her as often as you’d like, listen up – is that these “movements” are happening right now.

Just read the paper, and find out where some exciting thing is going on in America. The obvious candidates of the moment are Katrina-ravaged New Orleans – yes, fucking is just as rampant around tragedy – and Redwood City, California, which has turned into the Hollywood of video games. Close runner-up is that $200 million-dollar bridge they are building to connect 97 Eskimos to the Alaskan mainland.

Drive your car down to one of these places, and put yourself in the middle of it. You’ll be fuckin’ in no time.