The Lifestyle (15 page)

For a journalist to honestly report on such seminars he or she would have to open up a Pandora’s box of questions cutting to the core of our conventional notions that unbridled eroticism cannot coexist with civilized codes of conduct and noble discourse. He or she would have to weigh the code middle-class swingers claimed they lived by, which went by the brain-twisting name of “ethical hedonism,” and which was defined by Dr. Susan Block, the most popular seminar leader at Lifestyles conventions, as “an erotic etiquette to guide you (and me) toward fully and dramatically expressing our sexual, animal nature, while maintaining the peace as civilized, considerate ladies and gentlemen.” It was, as Chuck had casually mentioned, a “pre-Italian” etiquette deriving from the 2,400-year-old formulations of one Aristippus, a Libyan Greek who founded the hedonist school of Cyrene, where he taught that if wisdom consisted of making the most of the present in sexual pleasure and avoidance of pain, it followed that pleasure’s pursuit must be attended by thought for the future, since pleasure’s consequences should never be painful. That was one of the finer points of Cyrenaic philosophy, and it is why scholars have generally acknowledged Aristippus’s teachings as a bona fide system of ethics that in its ideals promotes pleasurable solutions to the painful problems born of sexual competition and jealousy. “The Greeks realized what hardly anybody else appeared to observe during most of the ensuing two thousand years, that a passing lust for A is not incompatible with a more permanent love for B,” wrote the British historian Burgo Partridge back in 1960. “Moreover, the Greeks realized what
the Victorians did not, that the restraints imposed on married women, whether desirable and justifiable or not, were imposing a strain, and one which it would be well to alleviate from time to time.” Aristippus, perhaps the first of the West’s swing-club owners, therefore worked to alleviate Grecian marital strain by gathering together couples at Cyrene for regular, open bacchanals, which he had observed could be gentle affairs if exercised according to the usual rules that governed all other interactions.

Today, in the neohedonist swinging lifestyle, Aristippus is a pagan hero, and Susan Block—a doctor of philosophy, sex therapist, and host of HBO’s
Radio Sex TV
—is his most outspoken promoter. According to Block’s application of ethical hedonism to marriage, couples may “enjoy the intimate camaraderie with other couples that the swinging or ‘playcouple’ lifestyle fosters” provided they do so from the base of a “very loving and trusting” relationship, use condoms, and do not practice any coercive behavior. Refuting those who called hedonists mindless and Godless, Block reconfigured some age-old irreconcilables by claiming the lifestyle did not necessarily take one away from spirituality or from leading the kind of unselfish, “good” life that benefited oneself and humanity. “We have so much potential to be sexy, peaceful, gracious bonobo ladies and gentlemen,” she wrote in her book,
The Ten Commandments of Pleasure
, published just one month before the Lifestyles tour I was on had taken off for the Baja, and two copies of which were being passed around on the beach. “The mystical experience and the erotic experience are the most intense in human life: both connect desire with awe, anguish, fear, pleasure, pain, and extreme logic-defying
passion
. Religious mystics love God with a passion that can be feverishly romantic, and who do most lovers call out to in the throes of erotic passion? God, baby, God, baby, God…!
There is nothing unsacred about sex.”

The extremely colorful Block had even applied evolutionary logic to Cyrenaic thought, coining the term “primemates” to describe the happy halves of a hedonist marriage and establishing the Bonobo Foundation “to educate individuals in The Bonobo Way, that is, how these chimps use sex to create and maintain peace in their societies.” Bonobo-like marriage partners had “very strong values,” Block maintained. “I’m not talking about ‘family values,’ at least not the narrow, paternalistic, 1950s-style family values that politicians swoon over. I’m talking about personal values. The value of pleasure, and not violence. The value of love, and not war. The value of lust, and not greed. The value of knowledge, and not ignorance.”

I once sat with the skinny, blond, middle-aged Block in her hotel room while she got ready for her TV show, which was taped at a Lifestyles convention the day after she delivered her “Bonobo Way” seminar to several hundred hedonists. “This Everest of smugness from a radio station interviewed me yesterday,” she said, making up her face before the mirror in a shapeless T-shirt that came to her knees and would soon be replaced by the lingerie she wore for the show. “He said, ‘A lot of people are looking back to the morals of the fifties and here you guys are doing this stuff.’ So I said to him, ‘In the fifties there were a lot of people cheating.’ I mean,
morals?
Morals are what people break if they can get away with it. Ethics are what they
don’t
break if they can get away with it. These people are trying to work it out as a team. Whatever their sex drives are, whatever their needs are—at least they’re trying not to cheat on each other.” She turned to me with a liner brush at her eyes. “It’s not a perfect solution at all, but life doesn’t have any perfect solutions. They’re
so
straight, God bless ’em! I think they’re great—ethical hedonists—most of them!”

On the beach where I sat at the Eden Resort, all the couples were quite convinced that they had combined ethical living with hedonism. They
were proud
of their lives, which in some
cases went beyond Hillel’s restraining maxim and followed Christ’s more positive prescription,
“Do
unto others what you would have others do unto you.” Chuck, for instance, could have headed a safe, suburban school if he’d wanted to but had chosen instead to work in an inner-city battleground. Leah, a one-time concert violinist, could have held a genteel job as a music teacher but had gone on to get a postgraduate degree and now worked with students from poor households who had severe problems. Carla headed a troop of Brownies two evenings a week. Ed was an officer in the Rotarians. And Joyce raced home from work at Lifestyles headquarters several evenings a week, ate a dinner prepared by her husband, Richard, and then raced around to various civic centers to organize events for children.

“I have three rules,” Joyce explained to me under the beach umbrella while everyone slipped on bathing suits before heading back to the pool to collect their togas. She waved a hand north and south to include the people she was now guiding through their weekend, then began bending back fingers to enumerate the ethical ideals of swingers. “Number one, you act considerate of your spouse, because he or she comes first in the lifestyle. Without your spouse, there
is
no lifestyle. If your partner doesn’t want it, then it’s not going to happen—end of discussion. Number two, you act decent at all times—you don’t touch
anyone
that doesn’t want to be touched. And the last one is, you act polite—you obey a woman’s wishes when it comes to condoms, and you immediately stop doing
anything
as soon as you’re told to stop.”

Rule for rule, these precepts, which in Susan Block’s words allowed for “the pursuit and cultivation of pleasure within strict limits of consensuality for the peaceful benefit of the individual, the couple, the family, and society,” were repeated every weekend by swing-club overseers throughout the uniform subculture of the lifestyle. Japanese couples belonging
to the Liberated Lifestylist League followed the same rules as those at the New Adventures club in Ecuador, the Couples Club in Australia, the thirty-acre Club Maihof in Germany, and the ten-acre New Faces New Friends club in British Columbia. Jam-packed every weekend were party houses from Scotland to the Philippines—yet an inappropriate grab in any of them, no matter how crowded, got a partygoer thrown off the premises. The club owners might be business-minded entrepreneurs catering to the fantasies of swingers by encouraging couples to dress for the brothel and openly exchange spouses in mirrored rooms, but they knew that no lifestyle club could stay in business for long if it did not promptly evict rowdies who violated the principles of ethical behavior. It was an absolute prerequisite for diminishing the volatility of extra-partner sex. The lifestyle was not, at least in its ideals, a lawless world—just a subculture that could, admittedly, appear very unattractive to an outsider on the occasions when uncouth types were in the majority.

“Swinging never made a bad marriage good but it can make a good marriage better,” averred Joyce’s curly-headed husband, Richard, who had walked over from a neighboring umbrella as part of his constant patrolling to earn his free holiday. “It’s not for everyone, but if you look at who’s in it, everyone’s represented. These aren’t stupid jerks who take drugs to have a good time. They’re socially great people. You know what the biggest shock is to people who go to our club for the first time?”

“Nothing shocking about the folks in there?” I asked.

“Exactly. You should write that.”

I was being agreeable, of course, but in order to be objective about noncriminals who’ve been historically hated on strictly moral grounds, you have to offer them dignity and sympathy—favors not usually granted to revolting heterosexual hedonists.

I noticed Chuck and Leah, Ed and Carla, and Elliot and Linda veering off from the other pool-bound lifestylers and I broke from Rich and Joyce, plowing through the sand and catching up with the six at the brick path before the bar cabana at the top of the beach.

“Principal is as high as I want to go, it’s where I can do the most good,” Chuck was telling Linda as they entered the cabana. Beyond us was the hot tub where a school of lifestyle women were drifting against each other, shiny as porpoises. Two of them waved and then mooned us. “At the level I’m at you have a practical proximity to the kids and to the people that work under you, and you can take the
bullshit
policies that are coming down at you and work them into your effective curriculum goals. We’ve got a tough school in a heavy gang area. But we’ve got a very good learning environment.”

“So are you known as the principal that makes a gangsta school work?” Linda asked him.

“Never been tempted to enter that bubble,” Chuck replied. “I’ve been asked to go on speaking tours but I told them, ‘Look, what I do, the
way
I do it, is not transferable.’ The goal is pretty universal, but I could tell ya that in one sentence: get em to understand that every single thing they do has consequences.
Everything
proceeds from that.”

I looked at the four women in the hot tub rubbing their breasts together for a couple of husbands who were videotaping them, then at Chuck, then at Joe and Doris, who were walking up the brick path on their way to catch a taxi to the mission church in Loreto.

“There’s no conflict here at all, hombre,” Chuck said, following my gaze. “This is harmless entertainment. The consequence is pleasure.”

“It’s just real hedonist enjoyment with the right people,” Leah said, and by turning her back on the hot tub she seemed to be excluding the four women who were now tightly encircling
the two cameramen. “The people that we’re attracted to require a certain level of intimacy prior to having sex.”

“You know what?” the garrulous Linda announced. “I think it’s really important when you talk about this practice that you describe the results for a lot of people, not just the crude stuff.”

“What’s wrong with the crude stuff?” Chuck protested. “Nymphs and satyrs are
supposed
to be crude.”

“This is where I disagree with society’s conception of what I am doing—internally,” Linda said as we took our beers from the cabana and headed down the path to the straight part of the hotel. “Because it’s created such a strong intimacy between Elliot and me. It’s really increased our communication skills. What it does is eroticize a relationship. It’s an aphrodisiac. Your whole body, all your nerve endings are so sensitized by the experience. It’s the afterglow. We make such amazing love afterwards.”

“Seventh heaven sex, kind’a deal?” Carla asked. “Can’t say it’s ever happened to us. Fifth heaven, maybe. Fourth for sure.”

“How many heavens we had this weekend?” Ed asked.

Carla sipped her beer thoughtfully, then looked over at Ed. “I’m goin’ blank all of a sudden. Guess it’s like a dream ya gotta write down soon as it happens.”

“I meditate when I have the time,” Linda interrupted the banter, and I suddenly remembered her reference to swinging being like an ineffable “cosmic experience.” “I’ve had very,
very
blissful feelings—like my brain’s on the top of a flagpole and my body’s at the bottom? I’m filled with such ecstasy. With Elliot, what I’m talking about, it’s
physical
ecstasy. But it’s the same ecstasy.”

“You get that?” Chuck said to me. “It’s important to a Californian. Maybe Canadians wouldn’t understand.”

Linda gave him a shove down the path, under the varnished archway that separated the nude beach from the prude beach.