The very first college panty raid is thought to have taken place at the Univ. of Michigan in 1952. America was in that transition period when post-war ebullience spurred by the first taste of freedom for many women transformed into the conformist mindset symbolized by incoming President Dwight David Eisenhower. As bizarre as it may seem for those who view the decade of the 1950s-see, Tom Servo, I’m not lazy-as one of total repression of all sexuality, one of the biggest fads of the time was the sight of clean-cut males rushing like commandos into the female dormitory and rifling through their undies, bringing back to hoist like some kind of drag queen trophy.
The panty raid fad was a game of war, of course; it was a spectacularly strange sublimation of the urge to war among men who were either too young for World War II or, like Donald Rumsfeld, had other priorities when it came to fighting in Korea. What was a panty raid in the 1950s actually like? It would be wonderful to say this commando raid was organized and masculine, with college boys forcing their way past broad-chested dorm moms as they made their way upstairs and actually did go through drawers in search of undies. In fact, by the time the panty raid became a fad, most of the girls knew what was coming and had their unmentionables ready and waiting to be tossed out windows and through doors. Far from being fearful of this attack, the typical sound was of high-pitched squealing and giggles. Kent State it was not.
Even so, American parents and media could be counted on to blow things way out of proportion. A society that gets in more of an uproar over Janet Jackson’s breast being visible on TV for two second than it has over being lied to about WMDs in Iraq bears more resemblance to the American of the 1950s than it would probably like to admit. The media turned the panty raid into an example of how America had gone off track and was losing its moral compass. For the record, the guys on those panty raids are now the same ones who look back upon the 1950s nostalgically as a time of pure innocence and goodness to which we should return. The impetus for public outrage dealt not so much with the actual act of grown men with panties on their heads, however. What really burned their buttons was the sheer enormity of it all. The numbers involved in panty raids began to rise impressively: first dozens, then hundreds and then thousands at a time. The final straw took place, not surprisingly, at the Univ. of California-Berkeley, where over 3,000 students took part in a panty raid that ended in a full-scale riot, leaving behind property damage and the necessity to call in the police. Psychologists describe the panty raid in general as a contemporary version of the Roman bacchanals. Even so, it still managed to last only into the early 1960s until college campuses exploded into rioting that was far more serious.
