America Unzipped (33 page)

“Aww! Brilliant!”

But he's not done. While she is still lying down, Paradox uses soft wax to form a bowl on the small of her back. He pours in some alcohol and lights it. Jenny has become, one audience member says approvingly, “a human candelabra!”

“That is so sexy…”

As a brief encore, Paradox gives everyone a quick lesson on fire cupping, the practice of using Chinese glass cups to create a warm suction on the skin. He places a cup where he wants it on Jenny's back, lights a match, lifts the cup slightly off her back, holds the flame under it, removes the flame, and then tips the cup back fully onto her skin. As the air inside the cup cools, it sucks the skin up into the resulting vacuum.

“Gwyneth Paltrow does this,” Paradox informs us. The effect is like giving somebody an enormous hickey. “You will get a very nice bruise there.”

“The smaller cups are great on nipples,” Paradox says. “This is a very fun thing to do, especially if you have somebody who is lactating.”

“You are a very sadistic daddy,” Jenny says, smiling. Paradox glows at the compliment.

“Aren't you worried about the bruising?” I ask Jenny.

“Oh no,” she says. “I like to be marked.”

After the seminar has concluded, Allena introduces me to Debra and Craig, a middle-aged couple who don't resemble the others in the room. I don't see them attending any Renaissance fairs. Debra is petite, thin, elegant looking. Her nails are perfectly manicured, her lips glossy. She is wearing a glittery camisole top and black pants. Craig is tall, thin, blond, handsome, and well dressed. When Debra tells me they are both fifty-six, I frankly don't believe her. I'm not sure I would believe forty-six.

“They're in town just for the night,” Allena tells me, “and I thought we'd all go out to dinner, with Paradox and Jenny and my boyfriend Jim.”

I pile into Allena's car with her and Jim, a fellow who produces online bondage porn, and we drive a short distance to a seafood restaurant on the water. We sit at wooden tables and order beers.

Craig and Debra are unmarried swingers from Illinois briefly visiting Seattle on an extended trip that has included a visit to Paris and swing clubs there. The Wet Spot isn't really their typical scene, but both of them have set off on a sexual odyssey of their own and are trying new things.

Debra is a school psychologist in a small Illinois city. After she and her first husband divorced, she “saw the divorce as an opportunity to reinvent myself” and she did it partly through swinging. When she married again, she and her second husband began visiting a club called Executive North in Mount Prospect, Illinois. That was where she met Craig, a prominent businessman in the Chicago area, and his wife. The four of them became friends, but, she insists, that friendship had nothing to do with why either of them divorced their spouses. She and Craig aren't exactly exclusive now anyway—they don't even live very near to each other.

Swinging for Debra is a way to receive positive affirmation and feel good about herself and others. She's not a BDSM aficionado—“I am not into pain. I have a strict ‘no pain' policy!” For her, swinging “is all about intimacy.”

She says this like trading partners in a sex club and intimacy should seem naturally linked concepts in my mind, but I confess that I don't get it. Intimacy would seem to imply at least a little exclusivity for at least a little longer than two hours.

“When you are naked and sharing intimate parts of yourself, those experiences are very intimate to me. We all have a great need for intimacy. Our society,” she continues, “works against intimacy.” We are atomized and harried, technologically plugged, and humanly unplugged. “So this is about trust and respect. There is no other place where you are so vulnerable and others are vulnerable as well.” This is why she prefers the nude environments of swing clubs like the ones in Paris.

Craig has undergone a profound change in his life, just as Debra has in hers. There came a moment, he tells me, about a decade ago, “when I realized that the culture would kill me if I did not become what I am now.” I don't know what that means. What is he now?

In a world in which people are not touched nearly enough, he says, one in which the prevailing attitude is about restriction and regulation and sin, we have become starved for intimate contact with other human beings, one of those things that make us human in the first place. All his business dealings, his success, his religious background as a Lutheran, never once helped him become the loving, sensitive man he is today. Now he wants to share that intimate touching. He has become an advocate for polyamory, having multiple, simultaneous loving relationships. He also serves as a sex surrogate for middle-aged women. “Sex is something we give to other people,” he says. Craig wants to be a very giving person.

Knowing she and Craig are from Illinois, and now reminded by her mention of Paris, I have to ask her about Jack Ryan, the former Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Illinois. If Barack Obama becomes the next president of the United States, he can thank those sex clubs in Paris. Ryan was running against Obama, and had a good chance of winning, too, but his candidacy crumbled after court papers filed in his divorce from actress Jeri Ryan indicated that he and Jeri—she apparently reluctantly—visited the clubs. Personally, I don't think visiting a sex club in Paris should disqualify anyone from public office. On the other hand, I feel this episode revealed a moral flaw in Ryan, not of sexual depravity but of greed. (Did I mention he was married to Jeri Ryan?) Neither Craig nor Debra believes they ever ran into Ryan, but they say I'd be surprised by the number of well-to-do prominent people who go to the clubs. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised. Maybe once. Not anymore.

Swinger clubs like the ones Debra and Craig have been telling me about have been around for a long time. The most famous in the United States, probably the world, was Plato's Retreat, a New York City club that opened in 1977 during the last spasm of sexual profligacy in disco-era Manhattan. It closed in the wake of AIDs.

Swinger clubs are making a comeback now. Las Vegas, San Francisco, Dallas—most major cities have several swing clubs and many smaller cities have at least one. There are swinger travel agencies arranging swinger vacations to destinations like Cancún and Jamaica, swinger hotels, swinger message boards on the Internet, swinger personals.

The parties at Fetish Con, held in public nightclubs, did not offer any penetrative or oral sex or display of genitals. In fact, at many fetish events, sex is frowned upon regardless of venue, sex being secondary to the scene and a possible violation of a code of etiquette within the fetish community that discourages sex in “play spaces.” The swinger clubs are different. Sex is the point. At Miami Velvet, in South Florida, couples can even perform for an audience in the club's “Luvnasium.”

With their emphasis on sex, swinger clubs are considered somewhat old-fashioned by many in the fetish and BDSM world. Some refer to swingers as “lifestylers,” a name that evokes overweight, middle-aged people wearing gold chains and thong bikinis and cruising swimming pools in Las Vegas. But a new breed of swinger—younger and prettier—has arrived. Trained on raunchy MySpace party photos, Bang Bus, and hooking up, many are singles who just want hot, fast NSA (no strings attached) sex.

The Wet Spot is something different. It was founded in 1999 by six people who wanted to promote sexuality awareness and freedom. At the time, Allena was a well-known community activist and café owner who sometimes held BDSM “play parties” in the café's basement. The founders hired Allena to take charge. She has been the director ever since. While one can certainly “hook up” at the Wet Spot, there is a self-conscious exploration of sexuality as a way of life that the founders and Allena have tried to foster. That was what attracted Debra and Craig and why they wanted to stop by on their travels.

As soon as we return to the Wet Spot, Craig drops his pants. He goes wandering around in his gray man briefs and his socks, checking out some of the students from the earlier class who are practicing their fire play. When I look again, he is lying down on a table getting a massage from another man. Nearby, a woman is lying naked on a similar table with a flame erupting from the middle of her back. Her male partner is working like an intense Frankenstein concocting new variations, assembling his ingredients on a side stand, plotting his next creation.

 

A
llena and I have arranged for a day of perv shopping in Seattle. First, though, just like two girls fortifying themselves for a day in the city, we meet one of her best friends for lunch at a downtown bistro. Allena wants to prove to me that completely normal, everyday people are having sex that we used to think was deviant and strange, something I proved to myself a long time ago, but Allena herself still finds it amazing after all these years promoting a sex-positive culture that it really is true. She enjoys hearing the stories of seemingly vanilla people over and over again.

So we sit with Pamela Kruger, a forty-three-year-old president of her own industrial supply company. Pamela doesn't care if I use her full real name or tell you exactly how she became a self-described pervert, a term she uses sarcastically as a way of tweaking what she believes is a national hypocrisy.

Pamela is a handsome woman in that strong, pioneer sort of way. She has a prominent chin, short blond hair, and a robust build. My first thought upon meeting her is that she reminds me a little of the actor Brian Dennehy, only prettier, and when I tell her so, she laughs loudly because as a child she had a major crush on Brian Dennehy. She used to masturbate to a poster of him that she hung in her room.

Most mothers want their children to become smart, educated, and responsible young people, and Pamela's was no different. Every week, when Pamela was twelve, her mom took her to the local public library in the suburb where they lived. It was always Pamela's assignment to check out a new book to read or to discover a new interest she wanted to explore. But Pamela's mother was also a member of the Doubleday Book Club. Every few weeks, the club mailed flyers to members highlighting new selections. Some of the titles included small asterisks. That meant the book was “sexually explicit.” Unbeknownst to her mother, Pamela used this as a reading list.

“I would go to the library and seek out those books. One day, I found Anaïs Nin's
Delta of Venus.
That was my most influential book. A whole world opened up to me.” Every week, her mother would take her to the library, and every week Pamela would head for the engineering section where she had hidden
Delta of Venus
so nobody would ever check it out. “I read more and more—Mom probably thought I wanted to be an engineer—until I eventually stole it.”

Pamela's fantasies, sparked by Anaïs Nin, led to masturbation. “Discovering masturbation was huge! It was a big change in my life.” Even after she married, she couldn't wait for her husband to go to work, “so I could lay around all day and masturbate like a fiend. I had that thing about Brian Dennehy, you know.”

Once you break one taboo, others fall more easily. Having started at age twelve, breaking what she figured had to be a pretty big taboo reading that book, and then stealing it, taught Pamela how much heat could be generated by sin. So she kept pushing, until, today, there isn't much she refuses to try. I tell her about a dominatrix I met at Fetish Con, down in the lobby bar of the hotel, who had just come from an appointment with a client.

“What was he into?” I asked the domme.

“Scat. He likes scat.”

I looked at her blankly, not because I didn't know what scat was, but because she took me by surprise. I was expecting spanking or something.

“You know, I shit on him.”

“Well, yeah, I won't do scat,” Pamela tells me. “I do like golden showers, though.” Once she was lying on her back patio and a man was peeing on her and she's pretty sure the neighbors could see, because they've been looking at her funny ever since. She has become a regular at BDSM parties thrown by a neighbor in the small town north of Seattle where she lives. He's a sixty-one-year-old guy with some of the best BDSM equipment in the Pacific Northwest, including a roomful of medical gear. Once, an overenthusiastic Pamela tried to use the heart defibrillator. “‘It's just for show!' he yelled at me. Stopped me at the last second,” she recalls, laughing.

The first time she went to the Wet Spot, she says, she was terrified to come out of the bathroom. She wore a very short skirt without panties, “so I was basically bottomless.” But after a few minutes she realized everyone else there was in some way exposing themselves, too.

“Do you ever feel abused or used, you know, as a woman?” I ask.

“Oh, I hope so!” she says, laughing at me. I have got to learn to stop asking these phony sensitive feminist questions. Starting with the firefighter back in Arizona, not one of the women I have encountered in my travels equated their own sexual indulgences as having anything to do with what is normally thought of as first-wave feminism. They all felt perfectly free to give and receive as much sex, in whatever variety they chose, as they wanted, which was supposed to be the point of feminism, as far as they were concerned. Why hoard one's sexuality as some sort of prize? they reasoned. I want what I want, and if I want to be peed on by a man and have a three-way with a man and a woman, who cares how anybody else wants to interpret that?

“I had a threesome with a guy and another woman recently,” she says, and the girl came in, like, twenty-nine seconds, squirting all over him, and I'm, like, ‘You bitch! Now I feel so inadequate.' Then she says, ‘Well, I was faking it'!”

When I turn to my quest and ask if Pamela has any generalizations she'd like to share about why she thinks America has become a more wide-open country sexually, which seems to defy the common wisdom that we're becoming more buttoned up, she tells me she agrees that sexual experimentation like hers is becoming much more common. “And that's a shame.” Pamela is the first person to say such a thing to me and I think she is the first person who has been completely honest about this. Everyone else has told me how happy they are that experimental sex and porn and toys are gaining acceptance, but I have always doubted them. Pamela derives pleasure from rule breaking, so “it is so sad that fetish wear is so mainstream now.”