The Lifestyle (13 page)

What happened next in this morality tale was catastrophic for the sinners of the capital cities of Canaan—and serves as a warning to all the rest of us, equivalent in historical terror to Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden. “The outrage of Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grave!” God told Abraham regarding the swingers and gays. Then He sent down two destroying angels who announced to nephew Lot in Sodom, “We are about to destroy this place, because the outcry against them before the Lord has become so great.” Lot and his wife and daughters fled for their lives and “the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah sulfurous fire from the Lord out of heaven” (which the King James Version of the Bible famously refers to as fire and brimstone, the antisexual sparks of preachers ever since). “He annihilated those cities and the entire Plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities and the vegetation of the ground.” (God did this, we are told, not Abraham’s warriors.) Now much of the land of Canaan belonged to the sexually righteous leader and his people.

As with Abraham’s prostitution of Sarah and his adulterous fling with Hagar that resulted in the birth of Ishmael, the Bible then reinforces the message that there are two kinds of sexual morality: one for the rulers, who get off scot-free for their sexual crimes, and one for the ruled, who wind up slaughtered if they transgress. No sooner were Sodom and Gomorrah annihilated for their sins, taking Lot’s wife with them as a result of her curious backward glance (wives who like to watch, beware) than Lot, over the course of the next two nights, committed incest with both his daughters—supposedly at their coercion. “There is not a man on earth to consort with us in the way of all the world,” they pined. “Come, let us make our father drink wine and let us lie with him.” So we are told. Who benefited?

Four hundred years later, on a mission from God to reclaim Canaan for the Hebrews returning from bondage in Egypt, the warrior Joshua again used the “accursed” sex lives of the Canaanites as justification for razing every other town between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. In this time-honored fashion one sexual pogrom followed another over the next thirty-five hundred years. Sexual immorality was used as righteous justification by the mass murderers of the Inquisition, who pocketed the possessions of their victims; by the judges of “concupiscent” women at the Salem witch trials, who profited in a similar manner; by the American settlers when they slaughtered some groups of openly sexual “savages,” then seized their land; and it was behind the whole range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century sexual-degeneracy theories and “vice” laws that led to the imprisonment of thousands and the empowerment of judges, police, and preachers. It was certainly the motivating logic behind the oft-repeated call for God to do to America what he had done to the violators of nature in Sodom and Gommorah.

The problem for swingers is that enlightened media oracles still take these medieval imprecations seriously. Consider the judgments made in an article in the April 1997
Vanity Fair
, titled “Polanski’s Inferno,” written by Jill Robinson, daughter of the former MGM boss Dore Schary. Reflecting back to a night twenty-eight years before, when Charles Manson’s minions broke into a Bel Air ranch house and taunted, beat, hanged, stabbed, and shot a pregnant Sharon Tate and her three houseguests, Robinson deduced that Manson was a moral avenger. Why? Tate and her absent husband, Roman Polanski, were, like many others in that summer of ’69, swingers. “The murders seemed the consequence of everything all of us had done,” Robinson wrote guiltily, confessing that she too had sped wildly down the fast lane during the years she identified as “the Golden Age of Sex,” the “period between the invention
of the Pill and AIDS.” “We had gone too far, done all the things our parents had warned against—and more. But Polanski, it was believed, had gone farther than anyone. ‘It’s not like it came from out of the blue,’” Robinson quoted Polanski’s former neighbor Bob Rafelson as surmising. “Something he had done had tempted the Fates.”

The mysterious “Fates” were never named, their workings never explained, probably because most readers rooted in the moral myths related above would have understood Robinson’s mystical logic that powerful gods and their avenging angels punish orgiasts by massacring them. Perhaps that was why Robinson reminded us that “Manson… loomed large” over a sexually liberated America that “had got heavy, dark and complicated…. ‘I am what you have made me,’” Robinson quoted a Manson hex. ‘“In my mind’s eye my thoughts light fires in your cities.’”

Now, Polanski himself is not to be defended as a sexually liberated hero. Eight years after the slaughter, he seduced a thirteen-year-old and fled to Europe. But we should examine why Robinson could imply that, long before Polanski’s crime, Sharon Tate and the others died in this insane way because of
their
noncriminal sexual sins. The essayist Lawrence Osborn has labeled the belief in this murderous karma “sexual pessimism … the equation of sexual love outside the prerequisites of reproduction with death,” and the sexologist John Money has coined the term “sexosophy” to describe the negative philosophy of sex reinforcing our dread of the Fates. “Sexosophy is to sexology as alchemy is to chemistry, or astrology is to astronomy,” he wrote in a volume he appropriately titled
The Destroying Angel
. “With the certainty of doctrinal truth revealed” sexosophy uses occult logic or pseudo-science to prove eroticism
causes
“depravity and degeneracy [which] in turn are accused of being the cause of the afflictions of both the individual person and the society.”

In “Polanski’s Inferno,” the very modern Robinson was a metaphysical practitioner of both sexual pessimism and sexosophy, since the nonsuperstitious fact of the Tate-La Bianca killings is that Charles Manson’s motives had nothing whatever to do with the sexual lifestyle of his victims. According to the court testimony of his cohorts, Manson planned his mad butchery so that it would seem the work of black terrorists, which he hoped would ignite a race war that would lead to his emergence as king. He had 35 other millionaires of no particular sexual immorality on his hit list when he was arrested. But Robinson mentioned not a word of this courtroom evidence; instead she told us: “Polanski himself, working in London at the time of the tragedy, became a citizen suspected of lasciviousness, excess, even witchcraft.” What realistic connection those suspicions had to do with the mass murder of innocent people across the ocean we are never told.

Who is benefiting from this non sequitur posing as moral logic?

Vanity Fairs
conclusion was that Manson’s victims paid the price of their pleasure—yet, paradoxically, Robinson’s moral message rubbed shoulders in the same issue with a titillating sexual carrot—a bunch of carrots, actually. “HOLLYWOOD 1997, THE GLAMOR, the stars, the scandals,” read the tabloid-esque coverlines, with a foldout triptych featuring ten languorous starlets whose erogenous zones were minimally covered to maximally stimulate the sexual imagination. “Starring MADONNA, Nicole Kidman… and dozens more.” Abutting a nude Giorgio Armani ad, just a short flip from portraits of the avowedly orgiastic Madonna in crotch-peeking fishnets and Kidman in furry heels and a see-through teddy on a bed, Robinson concluded that everyone had learned their sexual lesson from the bloodbath in the Bel Air sin house, and now things were safe again in a more moral Hollywood. “I noticed how much the city is returning to the family feel that
the studios had tried to maintain before blacklisting, before the 60s,” she wrote. “The conversations are about children and bringing them up the way we lucky Hollywood kids were brought up. Implicit is the sense that at some time things had slipped and are now being put right.”

Implicit, rather, is the sense that things are as they have always been in Hollywood, and in
Vanity Fair
as well, where producers and editors almost always imbed an absolving message of moral condemnation within their profitable sale of forbidden sex. That tactic is the way of the West, where, since Abraham, religious and political leaders have regulated sexual expression by warning against the wrath of invisible Fates, frequently visiting that wrath on offenders as they have enjoyed the forbidden pleasures themselves. “I call it the moral hypocrisy of the commanders,” Friedrich Nietzsche observed in
Beyond Good and Evil
, at the height of the Victorian era’s hypersensitive repression of sex. “They know no way of defending themselves against their bad conscience other than to pose as executors of more ancient and higher commands.”

Every step in the elaborate codification of moral rules in the West illuminates the superstitious vulnerability of humans to threats of divine punishment for their excessive enjoyments, which has allowed the savvy to profit from that vulnerability. Nietzsche discerned a cynical conspiracy between religious and political rulers who, by declaring sexual pleasure a sin, and themselves as protective intermediaries between sinners and avenging angels, established their divine power over the guilt-burdened multitudes. Recently rediscovered by evolutionary psychologists, the iconoclastic Nietzsche was one of the first to have conducted a “revaluation” of the sexual moral history of the West, from the Dionysian orgies of the Greeks, which he believed emancipated individuals from the power of rulers, to the antisexualism of his own day, which he believed enslaved them to rulers. “I know no higher symbolism than this Greek
symbolism of the Dionysian festivals,” he wrote in
Twilight of the Idols
. “Here the most profound instinct of life, that directed towards the future of life, the eternity of life, is experienced religiously—and the way to life, procreation, as the
holy
way. It was Christianity, with its
ressentiment
against life at the bottom of its heart, which first made something unclean of sexuality: it threw
filth
on the origin, the presupposition of our life.”

In a secular era when we no longer burn or jail pagans and when sexual orientation is supposedly a human right, it might seem that the moral revisionism, revivalism, and profitable hypocrisy of
Vanity Fair
are harmless vices in their own right. But a mainstream writer donning a black hood and concluding that the lascivious deserved to be murdered for their sexual enjoyments sounds too much like an ancient call to arms to swingers, who are not comfortable with the idea that some Oswaldesque “loner” might take a Christian hint.

What happened during the sexual revolution of the swinging sixties that made Jill Robinson grateful that it was “now being put right”? Nietzsche might have explained that for the first time since the Greeks the multitudes had assumed the Dionysian privileges that historically had been reserved for the rulers. And since ungoverned sexuality was
never
meant to be the privilege of the likes of Ed and Carla from Oklahoma, it is not surprising to see a mouthpiece for the very wealthy,
Vanity Fair
, declaring that immoral lust leads to mass murder by punishing messengers like Charles Manson—while at the same time exciting the very lust that needs the saving grace of the rulers.

“Boy, if I knew we’d be talking about Nietzsche I would have studied for this vacation,” Leah said to me on the nude beach. I’d just offered her and Chuck my surfside analysis of the
moral structure of Western civilization. “I can just picture this conversation on the Houseboat Getaway,” she laughed to her husband. “They certainly experience the profound instincts of life.”

“Truthfully—Nietzsche died a nut,” Chuck said to me. “He was the only virgin who ever contracted syphilis. Immaculate Infection.”

To my left, the others in the lifestyle clique under the umbrella were now swapping stories about the delight they felt whenever they went to clubs and encountered a mix of “normal, everyday” people—the same delight they’d been experiencing here at the Eden. Swingers are genuinely thrilled by the reassurance they offer to each other. All the swingers at the Eden were sexual outsiders who in their professional lives behaved like insiders. Whenever insiders who are outsiders get together, they marvel at the experience of no longer having to lead dual lives.

“I hate to use the term, but it’s almost like a cosmic experience!” said an ad executive named Linda, expressing her enthusiasm to the others. At thirty-four, Linda was one of the youngest women on the tour. She and her husband, Elliot, were sprawled at right angles to each other by the log pole supporting the circle of thatch that shaded them. “When you have conversations like this you walk away with such a feeling of refreshing openness,” Linda went on, repeating the sentiments of Phyllis the other evening. “You really want to talk to other people about it but you’d be crazy if you did. I mean, I can’t talk to my friends about this. I wouldn’t dare! Then you have to go back into normal society and you have to watch what you say all the time. You can’t talk about what a great time you had at the Eden with your husband.”

“Right, then you have to get back with a certain group of friends and colleagues and stand on yourself with both feet,” offered Ed, who just a few minutes before had left Carla alone
with Bill in the sea and had swum to shore. She was now embracing Bill far out past the pelicans, with her head thrown back in what seemed like sustained laughter. I looked around at the couples. One or two briefly glanced in Carla’s direction and then looked back at Ed. They were all focused on the heart-to-heart. All but Joe and Doris: their eyes were still glued thirty yards offshore at the shoulders above the waterline.