The Lifestyle (47 page)

“For a marriage is a very happy place, a sheltered environment in which we can endlessly explore ourselves in the presence of another,” McGinley went on. “We are so happy that Michael and Rachel and everyone know how much in love they are. And that they have found each other and that they’re choosing this day, a very special day, to become for all time the accurate and beautiful reflection of each other’s essence. We ask that the visions they have of one another be always informed by the spellbinding radiant power that first brought them together,” he said, a little cornily, as was his occasional bent. “And we pray as they move to the hallowed ground that is marriage, that they may always hold one another in the light of all times in the love of all love.

“May I have the rings, please!” he called.

On my left and on my right, middle-aged women dressed in every conceivable girdle-and-lace outfit, most not too far in skimpiness from the bridesmaids on stage, wiped tears from their eyes. The men—naked cowboys with holsters, bare-assed buccaneers, and a lifeguard with a pith helmet that read “Let me save you!”—held their wives tight, smiling.

“Michael and Rachel,” McGinley announced in the heightening silver glare of klieg lights, “now that you have heard of the magic of the mysteries of marriage, the way it will continue to broaden you, the spring and wisdom it will everlastingly have for you: Do you, Michael, want to marry Rachel, to have her and hold her above all and have her as your life’s partner?”

“I do,” said Michael.

“Do you, Rachel, want to marry Michael and have him and hold him above all and have him as your life’s partner?” McGinley asked.

“I do.”

“Having taken these vows before this assemblage and according to the laws of the State of California,” said the man who had just battled that state to a standstill, “we are extremely pleased to pronounce you husband and wife.”

Robert McGinley turned from the couple’s kiss, threw his arm back, and, looking as if he had attained the highest peak of pleasure and happiness in his own life, declared: “May I have the honor of presenting to you Mr. and Mrs. Michael Barns!”

Mendelssohn’s
Wedding March
came on in deafening organ fanfare and the couple and their train marched back through the crowd, to ecstatic cheers and shouts.

“Good luck!”

“Take care of each other!”

“Mazel tov!”

“I give these kids six months,” the director of one of the media crews said to me as we watched the young couple go by.

“No,” I told him. “Probably longer. In the lifestyle or outside it, most everything’s the same. The only thing that’s different is the style. They think it’s more fun their way.”

E
ight months after that night of victory at the 1997 convention, Robert McGinley’s voice was broadcast across Canada in nine separate CBC radio interviews, each in a city that had at least one swing club, many of them affiliated with NASCA. Two weeks before, on March 1, 1998, Montreal’s Club L’Orage, one of fifteen lifestyle clubs in the city, had been raided by the police and twoscore solid citizens had been arrested and charged as “found-ins in a common bawdy house.”

The raid made front-page headlines in the national and local press, but there was a different spin on the story than was usual when swingers were driven into the street with raincoats over their heads. What had startled the press this time, and had put McGinley on the radio, as well as on the front page of the
Globe and Mail
, was the reaction of the public. Rather than morally condemning orgiasts, everyday people expressed support for the swingers and outrage at the police. “On the city’s most popular open-line talk shows,” the Montreal
Gazette
reported, “the majority of the callers said the state has no business intervening in the orgies of the nation, so long as they involve consenting adults, do not include degrading or dehumanizing behavior and otherwise do not cause harm.”

The public, it seemed, had adopted the principles of ethical hedonism: “Police have found themselves in the unexpected position of having to defend the raid.”

In staid Ottawa, home to both government and the sophisticated Club Desire—a member of both NASCA and the Equal Opportunity Lifestyles Organization—a CBC radio host wondered (as McGinley had predicted the mainstream press would start wondering) what the heck was happening? Swingers?

“The word swinging just conjures up martini glasses and polyester, you know,” the not unfriendly but nonplussed host, Ken Rockburn, commented.

McGinley set him straight. The best words to describe swingers were “in the lifestyle.” And polyester was not the favored attire of most lifestylers. “Socioeconomically we’re talking middle- to upper-middle class,” he explained. “We’re talking relatively high education levels. These are primarily married couples but not exclusively so. And obviously they have discretionary income to enable them to be involved in such activities. So we’re really talking about the movers in Western society.”

Yes—but what about having extramarital sex within the institution of monogamous marriage? That sounded a little different.

Not to McGinley. “They view swinging as a social activity. They view it similar to being involved in dancing, for example. Dancing is an activity of the couple that’s not something that’s going against their marriage at all.”

Then Rockburn hit McGinley with the million-dollar question, the one that was hardly ever asked of him, except rhetorically. “Is there a long-term detrimental impact on a couple’s relationship if they’re involved in this activity over a prolonged period of time?”

McGinley referred Rockburn’s audience to “Dr. Edgar W. Butler, chairperson of the Department of Sociology at the University of California at Riverside, who has done research on this and indeed has published in the area. And there are many
others. We find that swinging relationships tend to be very solid ones.”

Since his battle with the ABC, McGinley had been having his say in just this manner. In the press there were none of the usual snarling adjectival phrases that for more than fifteen years had invariably followed his quotes in print. On the radio, talk-show hosts withheld their angry interruptions that at one time peppered every interview; in McGinley’s previous experience the most civilized interviewers, without the least nod to politeness, would accuse him of being a sex profiteer in the face of plagues and psychological illness. The
Los Angeles Times
, the
Globe and Mail
, network radio, and television stations—always reflecting societal norms—now reflected the curiosity of their clientele. They interviewed “Dr. McGinley” straight up. They seemed to temporarily accept him as a spokesperson for people of a particular orientation.

There was also a new, human texture to this commentary. Newspaper reporters, induced by reader interest to open their eyes to the full range of the people at the events they attended, started going beyond searching out the most obvious examples of abnormality or duncehead IQs. Writers still often led their articles with these spectacular types, but they started including others as well. Most significantly, they were willing to let go unchallenged McGinley’s claim which they perceived the public might now be willing to accept: Lifestylers, whatever you thought of their sex lives, came from the ranks of “the movers in our Western society.”

Overall, it seemed, they detected a new tolerance among the bourgeoisie for swingers and they allowed themselves to relate the story that had been staring them in the face for years. Something was definitely happening that might not yet be
mainstream but was flowing parallel to the mainstream; it was being fed by the mainstream through underground channels, and the swinging lifestyle just might, if the force of that flow ran its banks, actually merge with the main channel.

The big question, of course, is: Will it?

Twenty years ago Edgar Butler had predicted “that swinging, as an emerging alternative lifestyle, will continue to exist and probably grow substantially in the future.” In his Ph.D. thesis McGinley had made the same argument. “All evidence points to swinging as a natural desire. It is not new, only its ready availability is new.”

To date, those predictions have proved accurate: swinging continues to exist, and it has grown substantially. The annual Lifestyles convention is a mega-event. Miniconventions are taking place every Saturday night in the smallest towns, and new clubs are opening all the time. In Legion halls and hotels, normal people dress the same as at the big conventions, talk the same, and do the same things with one another on the dance floor and in the bedrooms. It is just possible that we are entering an era in which the playcouple lifestyle is going to take a big jump in popularity. I have several reasons for feeling that way.

The first is that there has been a sea change in the North American public’s overall attitude to unconventional sexual behavior. It can be summed up in the oft-used phrase, “It’s none of my business,” and it augurs well that swingers may have less to fear now than ever before if they are “outted.” In a study of middle-class Americans published in 1998,
One Nation, After All
, the sociologist Alan Wolfe deduced that, at least at the time he’d written his book, the media were completely out of touch with the new wave of public tolerance for the private sex lives of
individuals—even public individuals, as demonstrated by the “leave him alone” reaction of most Americans when the media began endlessly repeating Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s detailed exposure of the consensual sexual activities of President Bill Clinton. They accepted that he was married and that he lied about having had sex with a White House intern. They were aware—and willing to admit they were aware—that their own sex lives were not as clean as the driven snow either. Sexual condemnation, once an automatic reaction even in the face of one’s own personal sexual indulgence, was finally being assessed by common people as “no longer cool”—just as swinging had once been assessed. The
Gazette
could in all seriousness ask the question: “Do orgies fall within acceptable community standards?” The answer seemed to be: “Yes.”

A second reason I believe the playcouple lifestyle will grow is because of the sexual, social, and economic empowerment of women. It is very difficult to describe to someone who has not been to a club or convention how “sexually liberated” women can behave in those environments. Many of them are self-confident, independent professionals who choose to emulate both the new and the old icons of movie stardom—without guilt, without fear, without heart-wrenching emotional attachment to their partners in bed, and without feeling they have sacrificed their love for their husbands and families by having a delightful sexual experience. Given everything we have been brought up to believe about “the relatively low female sex drive,” and that that drive is predicated on a lasting bond, swinging women are a new breed to behold. They obviously enjoy their lifestyle within their marriages and in the larger subculture—where the kinds of expressions once reserved for men are permitted, and are safe for them to experience. They seem to truly prefer the lifestyle to standard monogamy, as it is taken for granted their husbands do. It
is not a recommended “cure” for a couple’s sexual problems, if they have any, and it probably doesn’t offer any therapeutic “benefits.” But for women it does offer social-sexual fun in marriages that can handle it and provided all the ethical and emotional rules are followed. Wives find out relatively quickly whether they can deal with spouse exchange, how their husbands react to their enjoyments, and what level of participation they are comfortable with in the lifestyle. Some remain soft swingers. Ninety percent move on to one of the other levels—right up to “hard core.” Even those who engage at this level maintain that they enjoy this too, without ill effect.

The last reason I believe we are in for a jump in swinging is because of the commercial and electronic means swingers are now taking advantage of to get in touch with one another. Type “swinger” on the Internet and you will see that the old reviews that were swinger publications of the past have evolved esthetically—well, at least a bit—and have certainly grown in distribution. You don’t even have to click on “NASCA” or “Lifestyles”: innumerable swinger-contact links are up and running around the planet, many of them affiliated with LSO, and many of them independent of the organization (so watch yourself)- Most of these links have sheaves of members’ home pages—hot pink household displays with interactive communication, steamy text, baroque cartoons, and naked centerfolds inviting an e-mail. Twelve hours later, when you click off, you will swear that three-quarters of the world is covered in water and the other quarter in swingers. And they’re all advertising themselves to the nonswinging millions.