The Lifestyle (28 page)

As the couple make love and he approaches orgasm, his body begins to “load” sperm into his urethra—600 million sperm, not 200 million, regardless of whether he has masturbated during her absence. His loading muscles are more forceful than usual, shunting to the front nearly the full length of the two sperm tubes, and he spurts in a surprisingly pleasurable orgasm that, according to Tom Shackleford’s hypothesis (and you can confirm it with the testimony of any swinging husband), feels stronger and longer-lasting than the ones he experiences in routine sex.

Since his wife’s body is full of her lover’s sperm, the two “armies” set at each other, exactly as she had unconsciously planned and he had unconsciously prepared for. Now her orgasm comes into play, evidence that she is fully equipped by evolution to participate in the competition.

By varying the timing of her orgasm, she can favor one set of sperm over the other for uptake into the cervix. If she orgasms before her husband’s insemination, her cervix will descend and absorb acidic mucus, which will hinder the passage of the alkaline sperm. She will be as unconscious of planning this timing as her husband will be of planning the number of sperm he delivers. As Josef Skala explained to me, if she has unconsciously chosen to favor her extramarital lover’s sperm with the timing of her orgasm, a greater proportion of her husband’s sperm will leak out of her body after sex as “flowback.”

Let me point out here, as Baker does, that this competition
can entail the inseminates of more than two men in a woman. “Once a woman’s body contains sperm from two
or more
different men, those sperm compete for the prize of fertilizing the egg…. It is indeed a war—a war between two (
or more)
armies.” [Italics mine.]

To illustrate for his readers the natural drive of men and women to establish sperm competition in a group-sex encounter, Baker set up a fictional scenario involving two couples that he called “fair exchange.” He assessed the behavior of the two couples as being congruent with one of the ways people were programmed to behave—that is, as “a recognizable part of the rich mosaic of human sexuality—a part, moreover, that promotes sperm warfare.”

In Baker’s scenario, one of the wives initiated the “swapping.” “Eventually, as they lay together, it was the serious stroking and kissing of their bodies by the other couple that took them across the threshold from embarrassment to intense sexual arousal. The intercourse they had, while still being caressed by the other couple, was the most exciting either had ever experienced…. Watching his partner have sex with another man excited the childless man once more. He could barely wait for his friend to withdraw before taking over.” He had orgasmed minutes before and would now orgasm again. He would have been experiencing sperm competition syndrome.

In this fictional vignette the couple “never repeated the exercise.” In fact, many couples in the lifestyle indulge in the exercise no more than once a year when they feel drawn to experience the “intense sexual arousal” it causes them. Or, if they are fastlane swingers, they may seek it once a week. They may frequent clubs like New Horizons or they may have a small circle of discreet friends who never go to clubs and who hardly “swing” at all. But if we look at all lifestylers in this biological way—from the inside out—we can at least begin to
comprehend why they do what they do and the reasons they say it gives them pleasure. It is easy enough to declare the lifestyle abnormal, but millions are in it, and we should weigh the good arguments that the behavior could have a natural basis. It involves the programmed urge of both males and females to promote or fight sperm wars in females, the casual female bisexuality and group sex so prevalent in our close relatives the bonobos, and the voyeuristic pleasures of males who—as assured of their partner’s emotional fidelity as their partner is of theirs—know how to enjoy the hot reaction of their bodies to spousal “infidelity.” Indeed, the new revised latest edition of the standard model is actually catching up to swingers. Now females are thought to be “semimonogamous,” “mildly promiscuous,” and capable of “multiple mating.” No one, however, has yet dared to put a number to the adjectives “semi,” “mildly,” and “multiple,” and, thus far, at any rate, Baker and Bellis have not reported on the three big fastlane swing clubs—Connections, Number One, and Adam and Eve—in their university town of Manchester, nor on the dozen other big clubs in Britain. Perhaps if they paid a visit they might discover that thousands of mainstream marrieds have an unreserved idea of what number we should read into that word multiple.

An hour after Skala, Leslie, and I had first come upon our tablemates in the video room, they were all more or less played out and singing vibrantly in the showers. An hour after that the Annex was empty. All the fastlane couples in the club who had been fondling and titillating—they’d all changed back into their fantasy outfits or Bermuda shorts and sneakers and gone back to the banquet hall. By one-thirty in the morning most of them were sitting around tables chastely gossiping and
laughing and drinking soft drinks and eating whole-wheat sandwiches prepared by Connie and her dad. In a few days they would all return to society as law-abiding middle-class taxpayers.

“What’s your opinion, Skala?” I asked.

Skala took a bite of his ham and cheese sandwich and chewed and didn’t say anything. Then he sipped some of his drink. Then he said, enigmatic as Vishnu: “Their pleasure is derived from being aroused.”

I waited.

Then he said: “Their arousal is most important to them. That’s the essence of their sexual pleasure, and maybe their lifestyle. The older women are most sexually arousable and pleasure oriented, and the men look at the women and if the women are aroused that gives them their pleasure. I have not seen many male orgasms here tonight. They seem to know their orgasm kills their arousal. Not for the female but for the male. The actual coming is not that important to the males—they seem to like to stay in that state adoring the women. The Grecian urn. Or your Hindu sculptures.

“It’s just my first night,” he said. “I’ll give you another opinion tomorrow.”

B
efore I arrived at New Horizons I knew that roughly three-quarters of lifestylers were not disposed to anonymous, pile-on sex. According to the studies I’d read that Edgar Butler had cited in
Traditional Marriage and Emerging Alternatives
, roughly one-third tended to “emphasize the social aspects of swinging,” another third tended to “desire and emphasize close emotional relationships with their sexual partners,” and perhaps one-tenth were at least “fairly selective” in choice of partners. Overall, most swingers preferred the kind of encounters I’d seen take place at the Eden Resort, where couples got to know one another (even if in a short space of time) before becoming intimate. What I learned from my first couple of days at the Northwest Celebration, however, was that even the couples in the hard-core quarter of the lifestyle liked to spend hours in sexy display in elegant environments like the banquet hall—where they elaborately seduced each other before segregating into friendly cliques and entering the Annex. Group gropes between couples who paid at the door and jumped in a pile with no socializing beforehand—as had occurred in the seventies among hard-core swingers in big clubs like Plato’s Retreat in Manhattan—seemed to be largely a thing of the past in the lifestyle, at least according to what the hard-core swingers at New Horizons were telling me. It was a claim I would verify in that most fastlane corner of the continent, Southern California.

To be sure, open eroticism is still the main fare at clubs, and you can see most levels of spouse sharing practiced side by
side every weekend at each of the hundreds of clubs in North America where “on-premises” swinging is permitted. Some swingers watch, some dance close, some make love, and almost certainly they are congregating by the score in a house dedicated to their activities right in your hometown, maybe even on your block. The fact that you don’t know about it (unless the police decide people shouldn’t be doing it) brings me to the point of this chapter.

Swinging within the lifestyle subculture almost always occurs peacefully, according to the same middle-class rules most people live by, without violating the bourgeois sensibilities of the people involved, and without any documented harm to society. Further: although swingers seem to turn the world upside down, they are acting in accordance with the attitudes and values that make up North American culture.

Now that sounds like an outrageous observation—but I take no credit for it.

Back in 1971 an anthropology professor at Northern Illinois University completed a three-year study of heartland swingers and stated it categorically: “It is our position that swinging is absolutely not deviant behavior in terms of American cultural patterns.”

Dr. Gilbert Bartell titled his book
Group Sex
—an activity that to him did not require a redefinition of cultural patterns in the Nixon era. To Bartell, the behavior of the couples he investigated (more than a hundred of them, most of whom had voted for Nixon) was “not tantamount to ‘sickness.’” While the press accounts of mainstream swingers declared them “bizarre,” Bartell deduced the opposite: “The sequence of learning, action and relearning swinging is supported, not by alien influences, but is legitimized and reinforced by feedback from respectable, even staid, institutions within the American system.” At its sociological essence, Bartell believed, swinging was the appropriation by the middle class of what
the media constantly advertised as the chief privilege of celebrity: the license to indulge in royal revelry, which was refused to commoners. The people the media sold the dream to
were
the bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie, therefore,
were
the swingers. “We impose different standards on different members of society,” Bartell wrote. “Movie celebrities can perform in one fashion, but a good housewife must perform in another. How does one adjust to this conflict between one’s movie model and one’s own activities? Our female interviewees told us that one way to resolve this conflict is to swing.”

Bartell averred that he personally considered casual swinging sex “repugnant,” but as an anthropologist he observed that even while engaged in their rites, swing couples preserved “essentially normative middle-class values,” among them the ideal of a spicy, emotionally monogamous marriage. At a stage when most long-married people were giving up the thought of ever being hot for each other again, or were committing adultery to experience that heat with others, the lifestyle provided couples with “an increased sexual interest in the mate or partner.” The majority of Bartell’s respondents reported that “swinging created for them a better relationship, both socially and sexually.”

It did not surprise Bartell that for this accomplishment swingers were decried in the press as “‘a pathetic, sometimes ridiculous product of our society’s frantic search for pleasure, youth and good looks—coupled with the need to preserve the niceties of house, family and job.’” That commentary from the
Chicago Daily News
fit in with his theory of the interplay of social and cultural forces that caused and censured swinging at one and the same time. The
Chicago Daily News
often featured in its entertainment and gossip sections paens to the hot lives of stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Dean Martin.

Not much has changed since Bartell’s day. If you had perused the mainstream media around the time of the New
Horizons convention you would have found celebrities still being praised and promoted for behaving like swingers in the same outlets that were labeling middle-class swingers pathetic and ridiculous for behaving like celebrities.

Our patterns of seduction and scolding would be merely funny if it were not obvious that the judgments of offended journalists are among the reasons swingers find themselves harassed and arrested for doing exactly what the rich and famous are applauded for doing. I’d like to offer some examples that show how unfair this process is and why swingers should be spared the humiliation inflicted on them by the media. Swingers follow social rules, which they take seriously; when they adhere to the rules, they usually do not do themselves (or anyone else) any harm.