The Lifestyle (16 page)

“So were you the one who first suggested it?” Leah asked.

“Actually, Elliot saw an ad for a dance and I said okay,” Linda related. “At that point we loved each other as much as we ever did—but we didn’t make love. We had no passionate times anymore. I always thought you loved a man and you had passionate sex on an ocean of romance, blah, blah, blah. Well, ten years of marriage, the kids, a job, and no more oceans. But what the lifestyle definitely did for me,” she went on, “it taught me to separate sex from love, to have an experience with a man and then to come back with it to us again. Right, Elliot? That first time, we just got so
passionate
about each other, it was
amazing.”

“It was like I was watching a movie star in a love scene,” Elliot said. “I can’t believe how
beautiful
she gets. So
hot!
I went out and spent two hundred dollars on sexy underwear for her for the next time.”

I knew that this sort of erotic collaboration—the first of Joyce’s rules for a couple’s ethical involvement in the lifestyle—was incomprehensible to the straight world. Hardly anyone I’d ever talked to could accept that two everyday heterosexuals could
both
want to stay in this forbidden world beyond a single experimental evening. The repeat expression of wifely bisexuality—and male voyeurism of same—was a little easier for people to understand as a motivating factor for a couple to remain swingers. “Generalized” male lust and grudging female concurrence, or the abusive hauling of women to clubs, were the easiest to comprehend. Unethical as it was,
normal
people had adulterous affairs.

“It’s really increased my appreciation of Carla,” Ed said in agreement with Elliot as we turned the palmy corner and came parallel with the dancercise pool where lines of couples wearing blue ID wristbands were doing split jumps and calisthenics. Noticing our pink Lifestyles wristbands, a couple of them beckoned with cheerful innuendo for us to join them. The
Eden and a dozen other lifestyle-friendly resorts were on the points plans of many staid North American businesses and all around the world that season the poker-straight middle classes were getting a first-hand peek at a subculture they’d never expected was still alive and well—and which (judging by the lack of complaints) they seemed to find less offensive than the reporters who had noticed swinging was still kicking.

“See, the way I was brought up, I would never even fantasize over another man,” Linda was saying as we crossed onto the main pool deck where Joyce was tearing open the boxes of togas. “It was always buried. I was really naive. I just thought it was wrong, immoral, a betrayal. I was clueless that it was natural if the two were separate sometimes.”

“You mean lust separate from romance?” Carla asked. “Animal attraction?”

“Yeah, like for the general manager,” Linda laughed, gesturing to Pascal who, wearing his tennis whites, waved to us heartily as he entered the administration building.

“There’s something about that guy, ain’t there?” Carla mused. “Pascal. I think he’s very intriguing.”

“Those were Linda’s
exact
words!” Elliot laughed. “See, I’m just learning the girl code for ‘I wanna do that guy.’”

“I can actually think that about a man now and my head doesn’t have to go through the woman thing, ‘Do I really want a full relationship?’” Linda said. “Like my friend’s having an affair she got into over pure lust, and she’s worried, my God, am I gonna lose my husband? But here, everybody understands it’s not that way. It’s so tremendous. And I must say that there’s never a time that I go down to our club with an expectation of something happening. If it happens and it’s spontaneous, that’s fine. But spontaneous is a big deal for me. Because I love Elliot. It’s just for us.”

“What would happen if you found yourself crossing the line between sex and love?” I asked.

“For myself I don’t even have to answer that question,” Linda said. “If I even
thought
it, that would be the end of it.”

Lest I get hate mail from neophyte couples attending a backwoods bacchanal hoping to find thirty intellectuals sitting around in togas debating the simple and profound truths of Cyrenaic thought, it must be stated that the wealthier and better educated the crowd the more prevalent will be those swingers dealing from the top of the Tarot deck. Conventions are big draws for these articulate sorts, as are expensive Lifestyles tours, although on your average Saturday night at, say, Select Friends in Alaska or the Dixie Group in South Carolina, you will more often than not have to bring up a high-minded topic on your own. All I can affirm is that whenever I’ve been around to ask the right questions about God or morals or ethics, most swingers have not been averse to addressing issues you would never expect them to take seriously.

And so, as the uniformly college-educated couples gathered round Joyce and took their yard of muslin, I completed a conversational poll of the Lifestyles tour I’d been working on and determined that, as in the general population, not only did most of them take God or a Supreme Being seriously, but they believed in Him. There were a few, like Chuck, who were determinists or agnostics, but the fact that more than a handful actually
prayed
to Jesus Christ or meditated on Buddha-consciousness and admitted it was consistent with most groups of couples I’d met at conventions and clubs. Everyone I’d ever talked to in the straight world always found this one of the strangest bits of information about swingers, as if, smart or stupid, they must be in deep denial about opposing the moral laws enjoined by God that it was their duty to obey. Combining God with an orgy seemed as impossible as combining ethics with hedonism.

“This, if it’s done right between couples, is not aspiritual,” a Catholic nurse by the name of Evie told me, trying to figure out how to wrap her toga creatively. “It just expands the accepted definition, I guess.”

Beside her, Carla said, “You call this
material?”
She held it up to the light, lowered it, held it up again. “I’m lookin’ through a fishing net!”

“If you’re not into it you can’t interpret it as pleasant or a turn-on,” Evie said. “It’s hard to understand from the outside. Most people think it’s a terrible thing, and so they say that women are doing it against their will.”

“That’s exactly what they think about it,” said Evie’s husband Lance. “All the guys taking their wives out—it’s all abuse.”

“It really confronts all your issues in life,” Evie explained. “You have to throw off so much to be in this environment. I’m looking for my pure energy, I guess. If I get through all these hang-ups and all these walls, then I can truly love people. That’s what I’m looking for. You get that ecstatic energy with other people, and that’s something!”

“That’s the pagan philosophy,” said Harvey, the anthropology buff. “You get so far into your sexuality so that all the personality stuff falls away, and what you’re left with is the bare humanity.”

“A poor soul is he who does not love or lust under summer’s sun!” Chuck called—offering a paraphrase, I later learned, from his favorite piece of music,
Carmina Burana
, whose libretto sometimes just informed his thoughts or sometimes was quoted verbatim.

“Maybe ecstasy’s what all people in this movement recognize they’re struggling for, and that this is the way to get there,” Lance said.

“Well, that’s a pagan belief,” repeated Harvey. “Ecstasy means to get outside yourself. It’s a Greek word. That’s the
main pagan belief. I’ve been all over the world and that was the belief before the missionaries arrived.”

“Whether it be through sexuality or spirituality or some form of our emotional being,” Lance said, “what I’m after is to tear away the shell and get at the inner being. I really believe that.”

“To admit who you are, to tear away all those layers, then you can really kind of laugh and love yourself when you’ve been hating yourself,” Evie said. “You’re not presupposing so much, and you’re not so fickle of other people’s personalities, you can just have your core being and flow with it without judgment. We went to Lance’s birth mother’s funeral about six months ago. I hadn’t been in a church in a long time, and it was kind of sad for me, because I was remembering how it was
all
judgment,
no
forgiveness. And I was just thinking how bad religions are if you’re different—you have to go outside the church to reach out. I seek it, or God, or whatever on the outside. I don’t have to be in a church to be spiritual. I can be here and be spiritual. Churches are all about orthodoxies and I just can’t stay hidden in that box, hiding myself from God.”

“Here’s something else for your book,” the ever-helpful Harvey said to me. “I spend a lot of time on the Internet and there’s Christian groups in the lifestyle promoting the pagan roots. Liberated Christians.”

“Actually, I’ve looked them up,” I said.

They were a Phoenix-based organization whose evangelical preachers presented one of the more popular seminars at the annual Lifestyles convention—its theme: “Swinging: Not a Biblical Conflict.” God-loving playcouples weren’t “guilt-ridden and shameful slugs of the sexual underground,” the Christian Libbers preached on the Internet, and we shouldn’t be shocked “that the innocent-looking wife next door likes to drag two or three men onto a bed at a time and be smothered with their attentions without guilt.” On their Web site, visited
by thousands of spiritually inclined swingers a month, Dave Hutchison, an exile from the Billy Graham Crusade, and Bill Paris, a certified theologian, attacked the belief that lust was sinful, based as it was on a “Bible that has been misquoted and mistranslated to falsely suppress sexuality.” In their view, adulterous lust in the Old Testament was declared an evil not because of immoral sexuality, but because of unethical “covetousness, the desire to deprive another of his property… the essence of adultery.” Since lifestyle couples were supposedly not covetous of their extramarital partners, they were not sinful but ethical. “The loving women-centered sensuality and satisfaction of natural desire for sexual variety has absolutely nothing to do with ‘lust’ as most assume it to mean. Lust is the selfish desire to take something from another.”

It was a question, again, of ethics, not morals—of motives and ends. Instead of staying morally loyal while unethically cheating, swingers stayed ethically loyal while immorally exchanging spouses, having group sex, or watching others do both. The world might view secret adulterers as angels compared to orgiasts, since adultery was sometimes redeemed by love and thus closer to God than a four-in-a-bed scenario, but swingers viewed themselves as actually having taken a step
up
from this moral code. They claimed that the ethical lust they cultivated with others was a plaything of their loving marriage and that they were not doing anyone harm by enjoying affectionate encounters with like-minded couples. They
did
have love on their minds, they said—for each other—and so they did not feel separate from God and His goodness.

Yet you would be hard-pressed to find a paragon of ethical and spiritual goodness in any culture’s pantheon of saints who would reflect this reasoning. When Mahatma Gandhi titled his autobiography
The Story of My Experiments With Truth
, the big truth was not pacifism or independence for his homeland, but
brahmacharya
, “literally conduct that leads one to God. Its
technical meaning is self-restraint, particularly mastery over the sexual organ.” By mastering sexual desire, one became master of oneself. “Purify one’s mind,” was the first lesson of Buddha. “Flee fornication,” was Saint Paul’s advice. “Hell has three gates: lust, anger, and greed,” the
Bhagavadgita
warned us, lust being immoral, anger and greed unethical, and all three interlocked at the low level of a hedonistic existence. “No man,” Christ said atop the Mount, “can serve two masters.” And so on across all religious barriers and national borders, even unto that moral pit America, where triple-X-rated movies are still “wicked” and “dirty” and all the more profitably promoted as such by purveyors of porn.

This fundamental theological and cultural tenet—that hedonism is separate from “good” behavior and from God; that chastity is completely unified with both; and that matrimonial sex is somewhere between—is so ancient that we need to look beyond its cynical exploitation by kings, priests, scribes, and pornographers and ask: where, in truth, did it come from? Why did sexual pleasure, persistent across millions of years of evolution and the perfection of nature’s and presumably God’s reproductive laws, come to be considered the basest of human pursuits, involving one in a web of selfishness and evil? And why has the struggle against hedonistic enjoyment always been waged with appeals to our “higher,” spiritual nature, with threats of irredeemable harm for those who ignored the appeals?

When the righteous American general in the film
Dr. Strangelove
raged against women because they corrupted men and stole their “vital juices,” he gave a clue to at least one of several possible answers, which, in this case, could derive from what John Money has called “an ancient bit of proverbial sexosophy.” The notion that one’s goodness or evil fluctuates up and down on a divine scale according to one’s orgasmic self-restraint or
hedonistic expulsions may in part have originated in the mistaken belief of our male ancestors that they were losing something precious when they lost semen.