Swinging: The Games Your Neighbours Play

Swinging: The Games Your Neighbours Play Mark Brendon The Games Your Neighbours PlayYour neighbours are doing it.Your relatives are doing it.Even your colleagues are doing it.(Especially your colleagues.)But what is swinging?Despite being an activity enjoyed by millions worldwide (4 million in the US alone), little is known about the enormous subculture that exists. Turned on to swinging by a chance series of events in his life, author Mark Brendon found it to be stimulating, satisfying and emotionally rewarding, an experience totally at odds with the often cynical and always inaccurate picture presented by the media.Opening with an orgy scene where a tetchy husband is urging his otherwise-engaged wife to ‘hurry up, the babysitter’s waiting’ this revealing and edifying book is sure to shock some but aims to paint a realistic picture of the relative normality of this style of living. Filled with case studies, conversations and bon mots Brendon expertly crafts a fascinating book that manages to be an absorbing take on social history and a stimulating work of erotica all rolled into one.Honest, funny, thoughtful and erotic the author entertains and enlightens the reader as he describes attending parties held in clubs, on beaches and in private homes throughout Britain and beyond. He explores why, where and how your neighbours swing, outlines the subculture’s history, principles and rules and looks to a future in which swinging might just save some of our most cherished institutions – including marriage itself. Thoughtful, racy and funny, this fascinating book will appeal to experienced swingers and 'vanillas' alike.This is the only accurate guide available; a remarkable and fascinating insight into the world of swingers by a skilled and accomplished writer. Swinging The Games Your Neighbours Play Mark Brendon For those readers who are still curious about this scene and would like to have a look around for themselves, I have negotiated a special free trial membership of SDC, the world’s largest swingers’ organisation. You may love it or hate it, but you will at least discover that the members are human. Table of Contents Cover (#ua6b0d223-460a-59b1-8a11-d1c27fcf4c7d) Title Page (#uac542d76-be36-587f-aed1-0ccc1e6de66b) Dedication (#u59096777-e411-5dda-8de0-6a7729b21e21) Part I (#u3c9f28c3-811d-5472-93b0-fc1487c22b83) Chapter 1: Introduction and Apologia (#u8afd70ad-805c-5fff-9073-8a450bd6e91a) Chapter 2: Taming Lust (#u0d42b110-6a0e-501c-95c3-1e379ce5cebc) Chapter 3: It is Everywhere (#udff6211d-23bd-5b6a-a223-30a18b155ea8) Chapter 4: Affection, Flirtation, Adventure… (#u9da9a746-bf14-5863-a65b-b7e653c0aaf8) Chapter 5: ‘None of Us Wanted Ownership…’ (#ue9926bf6-34f4-53ff-adc7-f585705f2a4a) Chapter 6: A Whore and a Vagabond (#uaa3c8fa7-d52c-5373-8fa2-a384cf22e0e0) Part II (#ua210aec5-9f5b-5d5d-821c-e6a6a2c65856) Chapter 1: Swinging and Morality (#uaf523ee6-0457-5545-8df6-a8aaaba55fc0) Chapter 2: The Yuckiness Factor (#ucf3495bb-3e5a-5f3d-8a61-5270a6d3bfc4) Chapter 3: Does Gastronomy ‘Devalue’ Home Cooking? (#u1f0f3bf0-b1db-5440-a2ec-5d4f0291f0fe) Chapter 4: The Nastiest Obligation of All… (#uc7255692-a755-53d2-9292-9571ce6abf9b) Chapter 5: Sex = Immortality (#ued90cfe7-1460-5a10-84e1-310735fc470b) Chapter 6: The Vanilla One-Night Stand (#u8923d3ec-23ff-58d3-881a-8bf622d0d5fb) Chapter 7: Swinging and Health (#u7e839394-2271-5c38-b408-dbfadcfb1c23) Chapter 8: ‘I Was Born Naked in Eden, Wasn’t I?’ (#u722d94cc-672c-5759-99bf-2c6350534611) Part III (#u70025604-10bc-5680-97ad-59646c5c422a) Chapter 1: Invitation to an Orgy (#ub8677e9d-a9fc-54e9-bd40-c43e5e875d5d) Chapter 2: A Cinderella with a Fuck-Card (#u2b88a996-cb5a-59ec-b026-533cc6c80063) Chapter 3: The Warm-Up (#u4b38d24a-85a0-52ef-9cb3-9930ef85f930) Chapter 4: Dressing to Undress (#ue619531b-8c8a-5c32-ae71-25c9f5780e15) Chapter 5: Time to Play (#ufdde403b-b351-5a5a-911d-1677a98d1136) Chapter 6: Giuoco Delle Coppie (#u5bb862c0-7107-578e-b011-cfbed8394afa) Chapter 7: Intermezzo Interrotto (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 8: ‘After You‘ve—You Know?’ (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 9: Lessons Learned (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 10: After the Ball… (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 11: Swing-Clubs (#litres_trial_promo) Part IV (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 1: Defining Terms (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 2: Subcategories (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 3: Bisexuality in Swinging (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 4: Bonobosexuality (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 5: In Defense of Hedonism (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 6: When the Fun Was Taken Out of Sex (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 7: The Liberating Condom (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 8: The Origins of Swinging (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 9: An Anomalous Orgy (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 10: Swinging in the ’70s (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 11: The ’80s and Beyond (#litres_trial_promo) Part V (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 1: Cyberquesting (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 2: local-swingers.co.uk (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 3: Ticks and Feedback (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 4: Casting the Net (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 5: Dredging (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 6: sdc.com (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 7: Handling Meets (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 8: Odditoes… (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 9: …and Occasional Perils (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 10: Safer Than Trawling (#litres_trial_promo) Part VI (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 1: Who are Swingers? (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 2: ‘All Those Years, I’d Been Conned…’ (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 3: Class and Age (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 4: ‘It’s Me-Time Now…’ (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 5: Swinging and Marriage (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 6: Taking Over the Driving (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 7: The Single Female (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 8: The Single Male (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 9: Couples Starting Out (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 10: Not for the Impatient (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 11: Party Hosts (#litres_trial_promo) Part VII (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 1: Swinging and Emotions (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 2: Setting Limits (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 3: ‘Let the Girls Have Their Fun’ (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 4: Jealousy (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 5: Kamikaze Sperm (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 6: ‘Tongues, or He’ll Suspect!’ (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 7: Hotwife (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 8: The Danger of reality (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 9: Giving Up Swinging (#litres_trial_promo) Part VIII (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 1: Antecedents and Influences (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 2: Orgies as Seasonal Contraceptives? (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 3: The Persistence of Orgies (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 4: Dollymops and Midinettes (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 5: ‘Only Sex’ (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 6: Kissing and Fucking Considered as Fine Arts (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 7: The Freedom of Forgiveness (#litres_trial_promo) Part IX (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 1: All That Glisters… (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 2: Birmigham—A Model (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 3: Fun4Two (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 4: Paradise Rejected (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 5: having Your Cake and Eating it (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 6: ‘That Frivolous Pretence…’ (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 7: Elaboration, Adornment, Prolongation, Enrichment… (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 8: A Cautious Commendation (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 9: A Romantic Ending? (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 10: A Romantic Beginning (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) PART I (#ulink_fb3d7c30-5aa3-566d-8712-63713dc3b843) 1 INTRODUCTION AND APOLOGIA (#ulink_8152d4a1-1133-5d95-95ee-9491d153a309) LAST NIGHT, MY GIRLFRIEND CHRISTY and I were having sex with a woman—mid-thirties, toned, blonde. The blonde woman was lying on her back on a bed, hands fluttering at my hip-bones. She had slender legs encased in black hold-up stockings, a rose tattooed on her left inner thigh, a plush, shaven pussy on which we had both been lavishing attention for a good twenty minutes, a diamante ring in her belly-button, and a sweet smile. Neither of us could actually see that smile just then, because another girl was sitting on it—one pair of lips athwart another. This other girl was naked and tanned deep copper, with a sliver of white skin left by the tiniest of briefs. She had short, spiky, dark brown hair. She had introduced herself to us half an hour earlier as Laurie. She had shaken our hands then, pecked our cheeks, said ‘Hi! So, where are you from?’ Now she hung, gasping, her right hand gripping my left shoulder, her left on the nape of Christy’s neck. Her tongue lit a tangled fuse up my throat and along my jawbone and occasionally slithered into my mouth as we both—in our different ways—used the woman beneath us for our pleasure. The blonde woman’s tongue emerged to flicker at, and to writhe into, the cleft above it, vanished then returned like a gale-blown flame. Christy was on her hands and knees at right angles to us. Ducking down beneath Laurie, she nuzzled at the blonde woman’s breasts and stomach while her left hand reached down to finger the prone woman’s clitoris. She grinned up at me, then turned her head upward to kiss and nibble at Laurie’s nipples. Christy’s body was being jerked and breath and sound forced from her by the man kneeling behind her. This was Laurie’s boyfriend, who was—I think—called Steve. He was as fair as she was dark, with a bang of fair honey-coloured flopping over his face. He was not Christy’s type, and he did what he was doing monotonously, as though he had just one gear. He said ‘Yeah,’ each time his belly slapped against her buttocks. That was monotonous too. She did not even look at him. She was concentrating on the feasting and the sensations up front. Beyond us, on wall-to-wall mattresses, seven or eight naked couples were intertwined and grunting, giggling or moaning. Behind them again, against the wall, clothed couples stood watching, the men’s arms hanging limply over the women’s shoulders, the women occasionally moving to raise their lips like nymphing trout to kiss their men. One woman was squatting on the carpet at my right. Her head bobbed to and fro at the groins of two men who stood upright against the wall. Her eyes, however, constantly swivelled to the scene at the centre of the room. It was all really quite pleasant and, by most standards I think, interesting. Christy pulled herself away from this Steve and rolled onto her back. She grinned up at me again, then pulled herself down the bed until her arse was on the very edge and her feet on the carpet. She vanished from my sight. A moment later her hair, then her nose, pushed at my testicles. Her mouth was warm and wet. Steve had obviously followed her, because I felt her head banged rhythmically against the blonde girl’s groin. I moaned, I suppose. A quavering male voice close at hand bleated, ‘Er, darling…?’ Christy withdrew her head from between my legs. It was cold without her there. The man who addressed us wore a grey shirt, fawn chinos and carpet slippers. His hair was white, his face soft and pink. He fingered the gold-rimmed spectacles that hung beneath his chest. Bending down in front of me, he crossly addressed Laurie’s stomach and shaven pubis, which now slithered back and forth, a couple of feet away from his face—much closer to his wife’s. ‘Darling? Darling? Look, we really must be going. It’s half-past one. The sitter…’ Laurie politely raised her crotch and propped herself up on one leg so that the blonde woman could speak. She raised her head a few inches. Her lower face gleamed. She licked her lips. ‘Oh, come on, Roger,’ she said. ‘Give us a break. Oh, yeah…’ she creaked at me. ‘No, don’t stop, hun…’ Her eyes shifted back to her husband. ‘I mean, fuck the sitter. I am not going ’til these guys have come.’ She pulled her right arm back through Laurie’s legs, hooked it around her thigh and, with a deep laugh and an imperious ‘Bring that thing back, darling…’ pulled her back down on her. Roger took a step backward. He sighed. ‘It’s always the same,’ he told me with a shrug and a flap. ‘I mean, it’s alright for you guys, but some of us have to work.’ I leaned forward on my hands. ‘I know,’ I panted sympathetically as my cock slid in and out of his wife. ‘Still—oh, yes—you’ll be able to have a lie-in tomorrow, won’t you?’ ‘Me? Lie-in? Ha! Forget it. I’ve got to take Tom to cricket, then I’m meant to be driving in a road-race in Devon. And I have to be up at seven on Monday morning to get to work. And the bloody sitter charges double time after midnight.’ My lips were working as I tried to stop myself from laughing. This was swinging for you. Middle-class concerns with children and domestic budgets in amongst the groans and yelps of orgiasts. ‘Yes,’ I said sympathetically. ‘Wish I could get that sort of money for sitting on my arse…doing…mmm…nothing…’ Roger nodded. He had found a friend. ‘Well, do be as quick as you can, will you?’ he said. ‘If she lets you…’ I nodded obediently. Roger shuffled away towards the door. ‘Oh, and Karen!’ he turned and raised his voice. He spoke very slowly, as though to a very old foreigner. ‘I’ve got your bag, OK? And your shoes are outside the dark room.’ He shook his head sorrowfully, and told me, ‘She’s always losing things…’ As he shuffled from the room, Christy allowed a giggle to bubble up. She knelt up at my shoulder so that I felt her pussy damp and hot against my buttocks. Her fingers plucked at my nipples. ‘Come on, darling,’ she croaked in my ear. ‘For heaven’s sake, think about the sitter…’ Laurie’s hand reached out for mine and clasped it. She grit her teeth. Beneath her, Karen said, ‘Hmmff,’ and burbled. Christy and I laughed and kissed. Laurie leaned forward. Her tongue joined ours and slithered around them. Her eyes sparkled, so I kissed them too. Group hug, only naked and interlinked by tongues and genitals. We were all four united in playful naughtiness and companionship. In that moment, surely, we loved one another. 2 TAMING LUST (#ulink_51c49384-d9ea-5d22-9df5-8c206f3374b6) TO DATE ALMOST ALL the books and articles about swinging have been written by panting ‘vanillas’ (as non-swingers are known) alternately—or sometimes simultaneously—drooling and expressing disapproval. Theirs is surely the most disreputable form of journalism. Peeking in, urging on those observed, picking out the saleable or sensational aspects of its subjects’ activities, then retreating to don an enemy padre’s uniform. This book’s purpose is not to titillate—or, at least, not directly. If it opens up new prospects and inspires individuals or couples to conjure their own fantasies and make their own plans for sexual adventure, I am delighted. But it features few detailed accounts of sex, and studiously avoids the lyrical when it does so. I include the mundane little memoir of last night because, commonplace though it is, it summarises much of what swinging is about. There is the sensuality, of course, and the curiosity as to the sexuality of others. There are the senses of adventure and community and, perhaps above all, the affectionate playfulness… It also typifies the essential conventionality of swingers. Swingers by definition respect the sanctity—or, at least, the value—of secure, enduring marriage or partnership, and the requirements of children. They do not have extra-marital affairs, nor allow their emotions to be influenced by their sexual needs by falling ‘in love’ with their secretaries, gardeners, colleagues, personal trainers, spouse’s best friends or children’s schoolfellows, to the peril of their homes and their children’s welfare. They recognise, however, that the extended family has gone, the nuclear family couple is insufficient to meet their emotional and sexual needs, and the active sex-life-expectancy has been enormously prolonged over the past two centuries. For those reasons they cannot find all the adventure, interest and passion they require in one person, who inevitably has distinct needs and develops at a different pace from themselves. They therefore seek mutuality in shared sexual adventures. Let’s face it: it is a lot more amusing, convivial and revealing than, say, golf or fishing. And, while these have in large measure been gender-specific distractions—or refuges—from hearth and home, swinging is by definition a cross-gender and wholly mutual diversion. It takes lust—the wolf that snuffles and growls at the door of every marital home—tames it, and brings it into the house as an amusing and stimulating pet. To the seeker of pornography, those four or five bodies intertwined on the bed last night were merely performing an undifferentiated thing called sex. For those bodies’ owners, however, it was a celebration of one another, of the infinite variety of human responses and sensuous experience, and of their own strength, vivacity and beauty within that fleeting moment. And it was without recrimination or cost—except for babysitting fees. It was loving, laughing and irresponsible. It was play. 3 IT IS EVERYWHERE (#ulink_f82090f8-40fe-5572-8eab-39fb6a1387e0) SHOW ME AN URBAN TERRACE, suburban close or sleepy village, and I will show you swingers. In every city, market-town and village in the Western world and beyond, there are respectable groups, couples and singles who routinely engage in recreational sex with total strangers, or with people encountered for that purpose just minutes before. In time many of them become friends and, like any other social group, hold little parties at which they frequently run into one another, or invite one another over as if for supper. So Derek and Joan will ring Tony and Sharon and suggest that they come over for a drink and maybe a little shag. ‘Oh, and there’s this rather nice new couple who’ve just moved into the area…Nothing fancy. Just the six of us. And we can’t go on too late because Joan has to be in Westminster by eleven tomorrow…’ Sometimes these couples will go on holiday together, and perhaps they will go out one night to a Spanish, Mexican or Dominican swing-club to whoop it up with the locals. Sometimes they will go to Cap d’Agde—the French town wholly dedicated to nudism and swinging—or to one of many resorts and hotels throughout the world providing for ‘the Lifestyle’… There are millions of swingers worldwide (four million is the generally accepted estimate in the US alone) and many millions more who are curious about the lifestyle, or aspire to become part of it. It has become perhaps the Western world’s biggest and most rapidly booming subculture—and its most widespread secret. Although they are to be counted only in their thousands, ferretkeepers and Civil War enthusiasts, steam-train afficianados and cryptographers seeking to unravel the Beale code all have their own publications. For many reasons, however, there are few—if any—books by a practising swinger offering bona fide, sympathetic information and an insight into this massive social phenomenon. The problem is that swingers are, by nature and long habit, discreet. They may be unashamed—even proud—of their activities and of their fellows. They may know that the law protects them from overt discrimination. They, like ‘homosexual’ men and women, are adults engaged in an entirely consensual leisure activity which is—or, at least, should be—nobody’s business but their own. So, of course, were foxhunters and bareheaded motorcyclists, but that didn’t prevent government and illiberal moralists from pretending that it was the welfare of the fox or the rider that warranted their intervention (though they have shown no such concern for battery hens). Swingers have no prey. Even the commonplace transaction with a prostitute, the making of pornography, the habitual wine-bar or clubbing seduction, may be exploitative of one who, by reason of age, idiocy, poverty, drug-addiction, emotional need or force majeure, is in fact unwilling or reluctant. Swingers, however, play exclusively with other adults who have chosen this lifestyle. They obtain explicit consent before any sexual contact. Yet for all this, most swingers are unwilling to subject themselves or their families to the censorious and lubricious judgements of the media who, at one level, cringe like adolescents from acknowledgement of genitals (unless they are swathed in white slipper satin for religious ceremony or shaven and sanctified by ‘the miracle of birth’), and at the other, gawp at them with yearning but profess outrage at their functions. Sex may be the throbbing heart of our marketing and media culture, invariably—and oh, how wrongly—presented as desirable. We may regularly expose poor, bare, forked man—and woman—but, when we come to acknowledging that we actually have sexual functions and emissions, we might as well still be dressed as china bells. Over the past three years, while researching for this book, I have been a swinger. In the course of this period, I have visited many private parties and most of Britain’s principal swingers’ clubs, as well as hotels, beaches and resorts throughout Britain and beyond where adults openly engage in sexual play. I have had sex (in Clintonian and non-Clintonian senses) or—as swingers have it—I have ‘played’ with several hundreds of female strangers and acquaintances with whom I have little or no other connection. Sometimes they have been alone, sometimes in pairs. Sometimes there have been as many as seven or eight in one afternoon or evening. Quite often, I have known their forenames before I did so. I have generally done so in the presence of my girlfriend and these women’s husbands or boyfriends. And at the orgies that are our principal diversions, we have been amidst forty, fifty or sixty or more couples, most of them naked or sparsely clothed, and similarly engaged. Tabloid journalists pruriently ‘investigating’ the swing-scene always ‘make their excuses and leave’. I have stayed. I make no excuses for it. It has been instructive, companionable and often great fun. I could pretend to dispassion or disdain. I could now clamber back onto the raft of respectability and express disapproval of the swinging lifestyle. This would be both dishonest and unconvincing. Yes, sometimes the experience has been banal, squalid and depressing, but the same could be said of regular eating out or concert-going. This has been a function of peculiar people or circumstances, not of the activity itself. In general, I have found swingers amiable. They are sensualists and libertarians, unembarrassed and intent on sharing pleasures with childlike openness. Given its ubiquity and the diversity of its practitioners, however, swinging inevitably has its share of crass berks and power-hungry bitches who believe that tantra is a plural. But only in societies where responsibility has been usurped by law can such people thrive. Subcultures, if not illegal, are without the law. Swinging is therefore dependent on reciprocity and is self-policing. In my experience, such people are soon ostracised and find themselves on the grimy fringes of the movement. Should you find yourself amongst them, simply leave. Their faults are not those of the milieu which, in general, I have found to be good-natured and enormous fun. 4 AFFECTION, FLIRTATION, ADVENTURE… (#ulink_8742fed9-3100-51c6-9e8a-d863545bef75) I WAS 47 YEARS OLD when I set out on this journey. I had been married for seven miserable years and divorced for twelve, ten of which I had spent in a more or less monogamous relationship. Now, on leaving rehab for alcohol dependence, I was alone. ‘Sex is just another quick fix…’ my counsellor told me on my last morning at the clinic. Emma was charming, sympathetic, proficient, almost prim. I had to remind myself that before she became sober, she had lived the usual junky life of blurry jags, blags and shags on the streets. Now she crossed stockinged legs beneath her desk and wiggled the lavalliere at her throat. ‘…just another quick fix, another way of refusing to look at yourself and who you really are. As you know, it can be an addiction too.’ I shook my head. It was during my three-month stay in the clinic that my long-term girlfriend at last decided—really quite reasonably—that she had had enough. I was confronting a solitary existence out there. ‘Cocteau used to complain that he was asked to travel on a filthy, cramped train to nowhere,’ I told Emma, ‘but when he took opium, he was enabled to jump off and sit on the banks amidst the flowers, yet here were all these people urging him to get back on the train. I understand why it is not a good idea to take opium or alcohol if you are an addict, but I don’t understand why it is invariably bad to get off, stretch your legs and breathe the fresh air.’ ‘Sex can be just as dangerous as alcohol or opium,’ she said. ‘I’m sure it can, Em, but so can food or oxygen in excess. Doesn’t alter the fact that they are also essentials. And sex is—or it can be—a very good thing. It’s a loving thing, an adventure, a great game when played between equals and friends, a madness in controlled circumstances. It lets you escape from the paltry, transitory concerns and the isolation of every day. I think I can now live without alcohol, but I really don’t think that I can live without sex. You’ve just levelled all the mountains in my landscape. Now you seem to be telling me that I should cut down the trees as well. Just a featureless desert…’ ‘No, no, no,’ she soothed. ‘We’re not saying that you must avoid sex. Just relationships—and just for the time being.’ Outside on the gravel drive my fellow-patients sloped out of the front door and slumped onto benches or sprawled on the sun-dappled lawns to smoke and shake and chat. ‘Look, I know the rules,’ I said, ‘but I don’t understand them. No “relationships” for at least twelve months, and then only with a potplant. Then an undemanding pet like a hamster, then a dog, and finally another human being…And you say we don’t have to avoid sex? That pot-plant had better be a cactus.’ Emma intoned it like a catechism response. ‘Sex for its own sake is just using another person to escape from reality…’ ‘Yes? And? Flying is just an escape from the equally inexorable forces of gravity. It can take you somewhere you want to go, or you can just go for a whirl, land where you took off, and it gives you a thrill and a beautiful view of the world. And if it’s mutual?’ ‘…and you need to focus on who you are, what you need for happiness, and that must come from inside you. You need to find peace and serenity within yourself.’ ‘Certainly, but myself is a sexual being. Serene isn’t exactly easy when you’re shaking with longing every time you see a frolicsome sheep.’ ‘Hey, no! I’m not expecting you to be totally celibate…’ ‘Thank you.’ ‘…but only on the strict condition that you don’t give the other person power over your contentment or emotional stability. Your life depends upon that.’ ‘I know that. I realise that,’ I nodded. ‘But listen, Em. I still want to share large aspects of my life. I want affection and adventure and flirtation. I want freedom. Are you saying I should just be a brutal, uncaring exploiter, then? Hurting others who expect more of me? Love ’em and leave ’em, and to hell with the consequences? Is that how you ensure the next generation of patients here?’ ‘No, of course not,’ she smiled indulgently. ‘So, sex but no relationships? Which means—what? Whores?’ ‘No!’ She reconsidered. She gulped. ‘Well, maybe. Possibly. But that can leave you feeling lonely and degraded. Just someone strong and not needy…’ ‘I turn gay, then?’ ‘That’s not fair.’ Her lips writhed. She did unnecessary things with papers and smiled. ‘Look, Mark, there are many people of both genders who can give love without sex and can share sex without regarding it as proof of ownership or allowing it to become a replacement obsession. It shouldn’t be such a big deal for you…You must never allow it to take the place of your Higher Power.’ ‘Frustrated desire is far more likely to do that,’ I told her. ‘Not desire for sex, as such, but desire for the warmth, the closeness, the laughter, the excitement…’ ‘Precisely,’ she said, as if it meant or proved anything. ‘The excitement…’ She leaned across the desk and laid a hand on my forearm. ‘It’s all right,’ she added, ‘you’ll work it out.’ 5 ‘NONE OF US WANTED OWNERSHIP…’ (#ulink_a8c2a132-b10a-5d89-ad1b-327b732f953d) TWO MONTHS LATER, I was living sober and alone in a Somerset country cottage with a greyhound and sixteen laying hens. I was still no closer to working it out. I shared my counsellor’s views on dependent, grasping, vampiric relationships. I did not want to feign love or, ever again, to feel that my happiness depended entirely upon that of another human being, or vice versa. But neither did I want casual sex with strangers or—still worse—friends, and the resultant feelings of waste and emptiness. I had tried it, of course, since I had been sober. It is not hard today to find another pair of eyes in which needs—for validation, for comfort, for adventure, for belief—glimmer as they circle just beneath the bright surface sparkle. Six such pairs of eyes, then, had gazed up at mine from my groin and had rolled upward into momentary unconsciousness as their owners knelt or splayed like starfish beneath me. Two of these women had husbands, which was ideal, but one of them was already talking about leaving her husband—not to move in with me, of course. That would be far too gauche for a modern girl. No, but flats in town were hard to find. Maybe she could find somewhere just down the road from me… As for the remainder, two had left earrings on the first night, one her ‘special’ knickers. This merely demonstrated touching fidelity to convention. I too had never wanted one-night stands, nor regarded sex as so rare as to be desirable in itself. We were all agreed, then. But in that case, given that we wanted neither casual sex nor exclusivity and dependence, just what did we want? Well, I wanted to give each of them a key to my house so that she could turn up when she felt like it, sit and read or listen to music, slip into bed beside me when she wanted a chat, a cuddle or a fuck. I wanted a best friend who loved every part of me. I liked it when they cleaned my kitchen or changed the bed-linen in my absence. I loved it when they made friends with my dog. Did each such intimacy mean that I must further cut myself off from them because I was forced to deceive? What if two of them turned up on the same night? Must I then scamper around like the asinine husband of French farce, keeping them apart and hiding evidence? Must I conceal from each a large part of my nature and my life? And they too did not want—well, maybe the jewellery shop manageress who gradually colonised my drawers with her clothes did, but more by reflex than reason—to live happily ever after with me and to bear my children. They did not want me questioning them as to where they had been and what they had done with whom. None of us wanted ownership, but we all valued affection and courtesy and did not want to cause hurt. On the other hand, we were all sexually active and desirous and had—whatever this may mean—a great need to give and to share love. We craved adventure. We needed to explore other human territories. We wanted the freedom, the sanction, the blessing afforded by the acceptance of ourselves naked, unguarded, needy and wild. I would never marry again. I was pretty sure of that. I doubted, even, that I would ever live with anyone in the long term. I would spend a great deal of my life alone. Once I could cope with the reflex temptations to drink, I would no doubt venture down to the pub to sit sober and hope to fascinate or meet people through my work, and form transitory attachments. At times, she—whoever she might be—would become more dependent and demanding than I could stand, and the relationship would founder amidst grief and recriminations. At times, through weakness or chivalry, I would encourage such dependence, only to check myself and arduously to unravel the knots that I had so laboriously tied. There would, I supposed, be occasional prostitutes. This, too, would be a moral choice. I would opt for any halfway house which would acknowledge my nature yet obviate needless damage to myself or to others. It was not an exciting prospect, but it was all that I could allow myself. But at that point—one grey, rain-spangled morning—the gods took a kindly hand. 6 A WHORE AND A VAGABOND (#ulink_6a4c0c22-2292-5235-a248-eaa2911763a5) LISA WAS 36 AT THE TIME. She was a whore and a vagabond. She was also, amongst other things, an occasional psychiatric nurse, a registered childminder and a very good guitarist. She lived for the most part in a bright yellow Bedford van. She was part Romany on her mother’s side, gorgio on her father’s, with a sizeable slug of Afro-Caribbean in the mix. This made her hair black, lustrous and curly and her skin the colour of wet sand and silkier than any other I have ever encountered. Her father was a non-conformist minister, a Biblical scholar, a Grateful Dead-head and a former hippy with teeth like sunset Dolomites. I had met him at a lecture tht I had given in Manchester. He approached me afterwards to correct my interpretation of a text in Acts and to explain some hitherto unsuspected meanings—probably unsuspected even by Jerry Garcia—in Dark Star. For a grizzled, bearded minister of God, he could certainly down the Bushmills and played a mean game of pool. At the time, during my year’s separation from my long-term girlfriend before I went into rehab, I was living near Bath. Somewhere in the evening Gordon Shavalar had leaned on my shoulder and told me, through hot fluffy breath, that I should look up his daughter who was mostly based down west these days. I had taken him at his word. Lisa and I had met six or seven months before I had enrolled at the clinic. We had at once been attracted. She was a laconic, luxuriant sort of girl with a slender, athletic but sensuous frame, ornate tattoos on her left shoulder and down her right upper arm, forearms taut and sinewy as a hare’s, and a funny little rag doll face which suddenly sprang into life with a happy smile or a mock-sardonic sneer. Clothes looked uncomfortable and ungainly on her. Remove them, and she moved with an imperious degree of self-possession and a childlike natural elegance. She did not draw in her little round stomach or extend a hand to protect herself as she shambled about naked or in bra and knickers. She clothed herself in nudity. She wore it beautifully. She was a very lovely animal to watch. And she was a lovely animal with whom to make love—for that, mysteriously, was what we had found ourselves doing. I don’t know how it happens, how first the caressing and kissing and fucking move into synch, so that ferocity and tenderness, hunger and savour, adult and child, human and beast, male and female all coexist and intermingle. Then suddenly, fear and need and all the horrors and vulnerability are also offered up for inspection and approval, are blessed, sanctioned and loved, and memories from before birth—and maybe from before language—emerge, are recognised and find their echoes. Then distinctions vanish and you gaze into her eyes, and something deep within her says ‘Yes’ and opens up to babies or to death, or to whatever acceptance may bring, and you are lost and home, all at once. Which is a crappy mess of an explanation, but, if I could express it any better, it would not be worth doing. And, oh, it was. It is. ‘God,’ she had said, ‘I really like that energy.’ I did not understand this, but since other women have said much the same thing and since the energy is mine, I accepted it without objection. And so she had stayed, sometimes for as long as four whole days. Then she would start to be brisk and dismissive as she created distance between us so that she could escape, because her independence and her solitude were more sacred to her than anything else. And for weeks after her departure, if I called her on her mobile, it was, ‘Yes. What was it?’ and I would find myself cut off if I so much as dared to try to chat companionably. On one occasion, she reiterated without the least prompting, ‘It’s not as if we made love or anything. I mean, yes, it’s good sex, but for fuck’s sake, man…’ Sometimes she just fled so that she could be back in her wagon, with its little wood-burning stove and its bookcase with ropes anchoring each rank of books, and its tutus and flowery frocks hanging from the ceiling, and whips and giant patent fetish-boots tucked away beneath the bed. She would spend whole weeks just parked in a copse somewhere, smoking dope and chilling and ‘being real’. Sometimes she headed off with fellow-travellers to find a location for a rave or ‘free party’ out in the country and to send out the secret mobile phone messages that draw ‘cheesy quavers’ in from all over the country. I went to one of these with her—just two days and nights of drifting and dancing and sleeping, rough feasting and occasional, incidental fucking in the woods, all to the sounds of trance and techno and drum’n’bass. I liked everything except the sounds. Sometimes—for two or three months at a time, and for two or three days a week—she would take a job as a ‘working girl’ in a massage parlour. ‘Yeah, I’m proud of giving good value,’ she told me. ‘I can disconnect so it doesn’t touch me, but that doesn’t mean I don’t give them what they need.’ Once I introduced her to a dear old friend, a paediatric sister at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. The two women got on well. They teased me relentlessly. They walked the dog a lot together. Tilly, my nurse friend, came to a conclusion that surprised her. ‘I don’t know if it’s genetic, or a product of upbringing and experience,’ she said, ‘a deficiency or an attribute, but she and I are the same. Loads of women say to me about my job, “How can you give so much to a dying child, then come in and find him gone and his bed occupied by another, and just keep on giving?” So I get accused of being heartless and unnatural in the same breath as I’m called an angel and a saint. ‘And Lisa does the same, and she’s accused of being unnatural too. She’s a carer and gets paid for it. She just has that ability—like me—to cut herself off in order to survive. It doesn’t make her any less sincere or valuable, and she gets called all sorts of unpleasant names too. ‘It’s a female thing, I think. I don’t know. Maybe that’s just conditioning, but the caring thing is always associated with females and so is the ability to disconnect. So in some of us, the two exist side by side. Maybe we’re more highly developed than other women. Maybe we’re less developed—throwbacks or something. Either way, I reckon the world should be bloody glad we exist…’ Lisa had always told me (like a cross between Mary Poppins and Aslan, which is quite appropriate really), ‘One day, I’ll just be gone.’ One day, six weeks before I went to the clinic, she was. Her mobile number was unobtainable. So what did I do? I, of course, got drunk, and damned her. But that clogged Mancunian voice awoke me at ten o’clock that gloomy, sober morning. ‘Hi, baby boy! How’s it going? You off the sauce now, darlin’? How was the Gulag, then?’ ‘Lisa,’ I croaked, then sat up and cleared my throat. Rainwater was chuckling as it streamed from the gutter outside my window. ‘God, Lisa! How…? Hey, how are you?’ ‘I’m OK. Saw your mate Tim in Ashburton the other day. He told me where you were…’ ‘You just evaporated last time,’ I said. ‘I thought you’d gone for good.’ ‘Always told you, didn’t I? I come and go…’ ‘Oh, come, darling, come! Where’d you get to? Where are you now?’ ‘Could be with you in an hour, actually,’ she said. ‘Be really nice to see you…Yeah, go on. Shitty day. Give me directions and get the coffee pot on…’ I whooped as I laid down the receiver. It took Lisa just half an hour to have the fire lit in the sitting-room and to be in her usual state of undress in a red lacy bra and knickers. If there was contrivance or sexual intent there, it was carried lightly. She knew that I enjoyed watching her. She enjoyed being watched and the sensations and the freedom of nakedness. She lay open, her limbs petals to a flower in full bloom. Her head and shoulders were raised on brocade cushions. One knee was raised, the other hooked and sagging off the sofa. Her left hand lolled at the scarlet, lacy escarpment at her groin. Her right held a joint on which she drew deep. She had looked around the house and pronounced it ‘OK’. She had become quite excited about the still intact water-heating copper in the pantry. She had been in Avignon, she said, for the Festival, and had then wandered on down into Italy, but had not yet been ready to set off on her long discussed ‘big trip’ to Romania (where she hoped to buy a patch of land), and on through the Russias. She had returned just two weeks earlier, and had already found a massage parlour in Taunton where she now worked for a couple of days a week. She was also busy organising a huge late-summer rave, somewhere in the Wiltshire downs. I sat at my desk, telling her of the struggles of rehab and responding to—or, more often, deleting—emails. Concentration was not easy with those gaping thighs, inexorably framing and leading the eye to their apex. I swivelled my chair round. ‘Just what is it,’ I asked her in admittedly fatuous frustration, ‘about pussy?’ She giggled and shrugged. ‘Well, if you don’t know, I don’t reckon I can tell you.’ ‘No, I know it’s a daft question, but really, where does the visual power come from? Striptease, the can-can, the fan-dance, the split skirt, the miniskirt, they all posit a desire to see this somehow climactic organ. Men and women alike, we all crane and strain for that moment of revelation, but of what?’ ‘Nuts, isn’t it?’ ‘Very specifically, no.’ ‘Tee hee. S’pose not.’ ‘Anyhow, your arrival is a boon and blessing,’ I told her. ‘Not just because I love to see you, but because, for once, you’re not forbidden fruit. If women were available on prescription, I’d be told to take two of you before meals…’ ‘Hey. Not sure I like that,’ she said ruefully. ‘I like to be forbidden, or, at least, exotic…’ ‘Oh, darling, you are all of that,’ I growled. ‘…not sort of standard issue therapeutic. You mean this not being allowed to have a relationship bit? Well, yeah, at least you know that I’m not going to want to move in or depend on you or anyone else.’ ‘Exactly. Straight out of the text-books. Ex-addict’s dream…’ ‘You should be an escort in the States,’ she said suddenly. ‘My mate Annabel said that a while back when she heard your voice on the phone. She’s right, too. That voice, that energy, you’d make a fortune…’ ‘You reckon?’ I considered the irresponsible vision that her words conjured. ‘I’d almost do that, you know, if it didn’t just mean fat, blue-rinsed matrons, endless Viagra and the slow death of the soul. Lots of sex, adventure, lots of new, interesting people…’ ‘Yeah, you’re good at the giving bit,’ she said dreamily, readjusting the cushions so that she could lie back, ‘just no good at having things taken from you. Good at the excitement and the novelty, bad at the day-to-day grind…’ And that is when she said it. She said, ‘You ought to try swinging, you know. Probably not standard therapy, but you’d like it…’ ‘I don’t know…’ I frowned, but yes, my heartbeat quickened. On the one hand, the word evoked associations with freedom, sensuality and uncritical acceptance. I had enjoyed just eight very happy threesomes to date, and I had loved the experiences. There had been no pleading or striving for acceptance or pardon. Sexuality had simply been acknowledged, shared and celebrated. On the other hand, I associated the organised version with shamefaced suburban desperation, sleaze and squalor. I said, ‘It always sounded like fun in theory…’ ‘So, why not?’ ‘Ah, I wouldn’t know where to start,’ I said, very much hoping that she might have a few suggestions, ‘and I’m too ancient, aren’t I?’ ‘Of course you’re not! Fuck, there are swingers out there well into their sixties. You’d be a breath of fresh air. Decent looks, manners, slim. Answer to a maiden’s prayer, you.’ ‘Yeah, yeah. Well, I would like to try…’ I sidestepped out from behind the desk. I picked up my mug. As I bent to lift hers from the coffee-table, I kissed the top of her head. She raised her lips to kiss mine with a ‘Mmmmm’. ‘Anyhow,’ I asked, as I headed for the kitchen. ‘How do you know all this? Swinging’s not your scene, is it?’ She cocked her head this way and that. ‘Er, yes and no,’ she replied. ‘I mean, it’s a counter-culture, isn’t it? And there are real people on that scene. And they’re seekers, aren’t they? And the sex—the erotic stuff, the sights and stuff - can be really good.’ I walked into the kitchen, leaving the door open behind me. I flicked on the kettle and rinsed the mugs under the tap. ‘But yeah,’ she called over the sofa-back and her arm, ‘it’s mostly sort of middle-class and can be scared and up its own arse. But, you know, we’re talking people trying to face their fears and be what they are. I prefer the free party scene. Less accent on the sex there. Sex is just, you know, one of the means of expression, and everyone is just mad. The swing-scene, it’s like “We’re all mad and free but in a sane and respectable way”, you know?’ ‘But how—when were you involved?’ ‘Oh, shit. You can’t not be. You point me at ten houses, I’ll find you at least one swinging couple.’ I made the coffee and headed back into the sitting-room. ‘So, would you give me a hand?’ I asked casually. ‘Getting started, I mean.’ She shrugged. ‘Yeah, OK. You set it all up. I’m saving for a big trip, so I’m going to be around for the next six months or so. I’ll do a few parties and meets with you. Give me enough notice, I’ll come with you. You’ll make friends quickly, though.’ And that was that. In volunteering to escort me, Lisa was presumably volunteering to have sex with a number of males and females as yet unknown to us. This struck me as, at once, strange, shocking and exciting. I felt grateful to her. I still, for some reason, regarded such an undertaking as a sacrifice. She disabused me of the notion with a shrug. ‘Sex is a pleasure, and I don’t fuck people if I don’t fancy them, so it’s no big deal.’ No big deal to her, perhaps, but the notion that I could enjoy a full, exciting and adventurous social and sexual life, do no damage and return to privacy, hard work and freedom was enthralling. Lisa and I went to bed at around three o’clock. Darkness fell, lives began and ended, hours and half-hours pealed about the world. We did not notice. We took breaks for cigarettes and chat, and even once to take the dog out, lock up the hens and fry a few eggs for ourselves before returning to the chaotic and cluttered bedroom to resume our joyous conversation until early morning. I had been terrified when first I emerged from the clinic. For thirty years I had not fucked a girl without at least a glass of champagne to enhance her glamour and quiet my critical faculties. I had feared that the whole business might prove comical or simply depressing. I need not have worried. Sex was far better and more interesting and intense than in my drinking days. And now I had the chance to join the secret, underground society of swingers. PART II (#ulink_fd42a8cd-b4de-52d2-af0b-6525813785c6) 1 SWINGING AND MORALITY (#ulink_5c189af3-288c-57fc-af11-b45d838b0938) I WAS INTERESTED…Oh, bollocks. I was fascinated and excited at the prospect. For all my eagerness, I was properly cautious. My experiences of addictive activities had been good, which is to say in the long term, bloody awful. I took up smoking at fifteen in the music-school practice rooms. Now I accounted for an ounce of roll-up shag a day. I started drinking alcohol at seventeen and soon found myself downing a litre and a half of whisky, with Guinness on the side, every night. Cocaine had never been a threat. It had simply permitted greater alcohol consumption with more sex. It had just been a sauce to the principal ingredient. Swinging seemed to me logically and emotionally desirable, but I knew that many people thought it morally reprehensible. Until now, I had never really considered why. I discounted at once all objections from the huge majority. All those of both sexes who read or watch pornography—and they are to be counted in their billions—those who read with prurient delight of ‘three-in-a-bed romps’ in their newspapers, use prostitutes for sexual gratification, or regularly have sex for no better reason than hunger for sensual pleasure and shared warmth in a cold and hostile world—they all do, or dream of doing, the same things as the swing-set. It seemed to me that they should not add hypocrisy to pusillanimity. The commonest objection raised by the remainder was that sex is, or rather should be, an exclusive and sacred activity. ‘It’s the highest and deepest form of communication that we’ve got,’ wrote my old university friend, Juliette. ‘With someone you love, it can be glorious. With someone else, it can be squalid and degrading.’ I put this to Lisa. ‘Yeah, but is this some sort of philosophy or just a profession of psychosis?’ she demanded. ‘Sure, sex is better when you feel stimulated, and for lots of people that means when you feel secure. So doing it with someone you trust not to laugh at your bits, or your whimpering, nor take advantage of your vulnerability, makes it easier to let go and do it properly. So what? ‘That’s just like saying, back in the days when people were always poisoning one another or falling on one another in their cups, “The only good meal is one enjoyed in the bosom of your family”. But that’s just a reflection of fear in the world outside, not of the nature of food or eating out.’ For all that, this is the only objection to swinging to which I have had to defer. For myself, I have known both wonderful and deeply disappointing sexual experiences with strangers, kindred spirits and enemies, but maybe others really do enjoy a transcendent experience beyond my ken. I certainly cannot disprove it, but then neither could they prove their assertion—though many act as if it were a given, like those people who have visited just one foreign country and forever afterwards insist that it is the best and that they know ‘abroad’. Sex obviously did not evolve as a means to spiritual revelation or lifetime bonding, but it can undoubtedly play a part in both. But then, the same can be said of religion. The insistence that these are the sole purposes of both, however, has given rise to ordinances that they should be performed only in certain ways and with chosen people. And these have played a far greater role in the subjugation of genders, classes and individuals, than in that of increasing human happiness. The commonest distinction made is that between ‘making love’ and fucking. The former is supposedly desirable and morally praiseworthy (the word ‘love’ sanctifies, though emotions claiming that name have done infinitely more damage than, say, liking), the latter reprehensible. In fact, the distinction is simply that between good sex and bad. Good, responsive lovers make love even when they are strangers. We are human, after all—naked, needy, greedy, open and vulnerable. What in the name of God is not to love? 2 THE YUCKINESS FACTOR (#ulink_7d82097c-1ea4-5cc4-8114-41128f4a406b) I SOUGHT MORE TELLING reasons for disapproval. The next objection I encountered was the argument from personal distaste which, of course, is not an argument at all. ‘It’s just—I don’t know,’ said my neighbour, Tess. ‘It’s yucky. I mean, sex just is yucky really, unless you love the person…’ This confusion of ethical and aesthetic is common in our Disneyfied age, in which we strive to spare ourselves certain sights whose consequences we desire. And the blonde one is always the victim. We want meat, but are outraged at the sight of death, so our animals (rather like our aged relatives) are simply locked away from our view—and that of the sun. They are tortured throughout their lives so that we should not be exposed to the momentary discomfort of witnessing their merciful deaths. Once dead, they are moulded into breadcrumbed gobbets so that our children should not be traumatised by the thought of real animals dying to feed them. This same immoral conflation of the ‘yucky’ and the evil has been used to condemn abortion, homosexuality, miscegenation and even the culling of vermin. The middle-class majority finds it distasteful, therefore it is wrong. I was reared—as were most of the current swing-set—in an age of sexual caution and obscurantism in which ‘homosexuality’ was criminal and scorned, females must keep their legs clamped together for fear of revealing the very fact of genitalia, and fear of pregnancy and residual notions of propriety and property dominated heterosexual dealings. All our first sexual impulses were guided towards phallocentricity. Sex had one defining sine qua non—male ejaculation within just one female orifice. The notion that this orifice and related organs were in fact autonomous, with their own functions and feelings, was heresy. The availability of oral contraception was insufficient to banish the associations of pollution, pregnancy and possession. We adolesced into an age of licence, in which sex was recognised as a pleasure, not—or not necessarily—as a sacrament. There was a further major shift with the advent of AIDS. I had not used a condom until well after my thirty-fifth year. They are now standard prerequisites of all penetrative sex, save within exclusive relationships, at all levels of society. The pollutant, territory-marking aspects of sex have gone, rendering oral sex often more intimate and exclusive than genital or anal. Sex has not so much been demoted as democratised. A king may romp with children and still rule in pomp. Bouncy pop pap does not render a Bach chorale any the less sacred or moving. So, sex as a leisure activity need not devalue its own currency. This is not to say that—as with any other pleasure—that there is no risk of its becoming a fetish or an obsession, nor that it can or should be enjoyed without regard to those with whom it is shared. Merely that, when all courtesies have been considered, it can be enjoyed rather than denied due to jealousies or artificial and, in this age, apparently meaningless conventions. So much is now widely accepted—and, interestingly, more generally accepted it seems—by women who are empowered and independent. But they find themselves denied adequate sexual gratification, adventure or community, and increasingly resort to ‘smart-casual’ (within an inherently transient but orderly relationship, rather than casual or within a formal bond) sexual adventure. Personal tastes, of course, vary widely. Some find their own bodies and those of others repugnant and consider their functions—sex no less than defecation—somehow squalid and shameful. There may be a thousand sad reasons for such deviant idealism, but there is no reason for considering it a valid criticism. Again it tells us more of the afflicted person than of the activities despised. Sex, defecation and death exist. An aesthetic that finds them ugly, is therefore founded upon false premisses. It is fantastic. It is alienated. It is neurotic. It is, in religious terms, blasphemous. Still less arguable are the requirements of individual sexuality. Many—the porn-watchers amongst them—love to be surrounded by visual and auditory stimuli, and enjoy mild exhibitionism and voyeurism as fillips to their desire. Others prefer the security of the familiar and of privacy. Such particularity is no more valid grounds for disapproval than a preference for meat over fish, or for one gender over another. Privacy, after all, is a very new commodity in human society—a modern (fetishistic because peripheral to the sexual act itself) requirement. When Lisa and I questioned Tess, she conceded that her assessments of ‘yuckiness’ and desirability varied from circumstance to circumstance, day to day, and even hour to hour. ‘I mean, I generally think eating pussy is yucky, but there’ve been moments…But that’s just desire blinding me, isn’t it?’ She was gracious enough to admit that, for all she knew, her vision might be obscured by fear and considerations of propriety and cleared by sexual desire. Hardly the basis, then, for a constraint that could possibly be classified as ‘ethical’. 3 DOES GASTRONOMY ‘DEVALUE’ HOME COOKING? (#ulink_4982c9af-4ae5-5c2d-bbf2-a632222c4858) AT DINNER IN THEIR KITCHEN a couple of days later, Fiona—the ageless, very beautiful, Sloaney wife of a doctor friend—raised the argument that swinging somehow ‘devalues’ sex or the human body. Her husband Johnny (tactfully) and I (less so) confessed that we found this one incomprehensible. Grant that we all have sexual urges and that these are not of their nature specific. In what sense then can it be claimed that routine fulfilment of these urges within marriage or long-term relationships places a higher value on sex than what is, after all, a carefully prepared, long-anticipated, mutually exciting celebration of physical pleasures? Johnny chose much the same metaphor as Lisa. As well argue, he said, that a celebratory dinner at a fine restaurant with food prepared by strangers ‘devalues’ that prepared at home by spouses. Unsurprisingly for a doctor, Johnny placed little added value on the human body’s functions. ‘Look, Fi, I’m not denying there’s something lovely and consoling—sacramental, if you like—about good old cottage-pie on Monday and chicken fricass?e on Tuesday, even if the cottage-pie is watery and lumpy and the chicken bland—not that yours ever is, of course, darling. But you really can’t accuse Gordon Ramsay of destroying people’s pleasure in home cooking by giving them the occasional joys of exciting smells, textures and flavours in a luxurious and theatrical environment. ‘So yep, OK. I actually am basically a cottage-pie man. I like all that familiarity and prolonged proximity. It’s sort of the grout securing the tesserae of a relationship…’ ‘But it’s not to denigrate the importance of grout,’ I said, ‘to acknowledge that it can often be just a little dull.’ ‘Thank you, Mark,’ said Fi. The corner of her lips twitched. ‘No, come on! I’m sure you make brilliant steak and kidney and spag bol, and comfort-food and comfort-sex are both great things, but they are emotionally distinct from fine food and fantastic sex, both of which are generally enjoyed in public places amongst kindred spirits…’ ‘Though they’re too rich for everyday consumption,’ put in Johnny, ‘and probably simply for most metabolisms including mine. Just not Mark’s, though…’ And in truth, I have known many chefs and food critics who are privileged daily to eat the finest and rarest ingredients, but I have yet to encounter one who has lost the capacity to enjoy—or to appreciate the significance of—a bowl of champ, or a home-cooked hotpot. So, too, I have never met a swinger who no longer enjoys sex with his or her partner because of their shared adventures with others. On the contrary, visits to restaurants and forays into swinging both seem to stimulate appetite and inventiveness at home. Cheap fast food guzzled on the hoof simply to assuage hunger is, like casual sex, altogether another matter—just sad, abusive, unhealthy and unworthy. 4 THE NASTIEST OBJECTION OF ALL… (#ulink_3b50e23b-6a67-5b80-85f4-8308359da719) AND SO TO THE NASTIEST of all objections to swinging—the last refuge of the fascist who seeks to express disapproval whilst retaining putative liberal kudos. Like all truly vile arguments for constraints of freedom, this too takes an aesthetic form. These are the aesthetics of arrogance and intolerance. I consulted the Internet and visited the library for written accounts of swinging. Again and again, journalists who ‘exposed’ the scene—as though it were a secret freemasonry, rather than a subculture open to anyone with a few pounds in his pocket—expressed distaste for the bodies or the age of those whom they had observed at play. Suppose that a commentator were to write of a gay couple that, whilst their desires were acceptable and their affection charming, their sexual activities were disgusting because they were not in the first flush of youth and their bodies were sagging and wrinkled. Any editor worthy of the name would dismiss such a hack out of hand. Even in reviewing a public show, where—perhaps—it were more justifiable in that the audience pays for the pleasure of watching, any halfway decent commentator would surely hesitate to impute that a performer should desist on the grounds of cellulite or age. Yet journalists routinely deride swingers for being ordinary people with ordinary bodies, rather than glamour models and porn-stars. Astonishingly, it is the publications that drool most admiringly over the sexual antics of rock and celluloid divinities that sneer most repulsively at mere mortals for presuming to enjoy similar pleasures. In what other context would a supposedly impartial commentator be permitted to write of ‘lumpy, misshapen bodies going at it’ or ‘men with jiggle bellies and flaccid cocks getting to work on a pair of lady galumphers with hanging arses and stretch marks’? If this was about a middle-aged wedding, a sporting event or an amateur dramatics production, this would correctly be perceived as grossly offensive bad journalism, revealing far more of the writer than of his purported subject. Because it is about a party at Colette’s in New Orleans (a swingers’ club, where I have enjoyed several delightful evenings) such offensive drivel is published without question or cavil. Is there the least moral distinction between such irrelevant imposition of arbitrary and arrogant aesthetics and, for instance, racism or prejudice against the disabled? If so, I certainly cannot see it. Or is sexual pleasure, in this commentator’s world, restricted to those with fame, money and surgically enhanced physiques? Some swingers, I was to discover, are beautiful by any conventional standards. Some at whom we might not have spared more than a passing glance when upright and clothed prove beautiful by reason of their vulnerability, their sassy confidence, their passion and the sparkle in their eyes when naked and ecstatic. Some are decidedly physically unlovely—by my standards. But my standards have nothing to do with it. Yes, occasionally I have shuddered at the mountains of juddering, goose-pimpled flesh or at the shrivelled husks of bodies at certain parties, but at the same time I confess to admiration for, and sympathy with, those who nonetheless have the pride to play in defiance of a world still more judgemental than that which condemns the rest of the subculture. 5 SEX = IMMORALITY (#ulink_20c60c8b-62a8-59ad-9e75-61ae3d6db2ee) AGAIN AND AGAIN, I was to discover that it was not the circumstances or the consequences of sex but simply sex itself (or rather sexual pleasure; dutiful, wearisome sex appeared immune from censure) that was associated with immorality. This is no doubt the legacy at once of the notion that sex invariably means penetration and ejaculation, and so conception, and of the infantile conflation of inaccessibility or prohibition and naughtiness. The former was irrelevant. It seemed to me that the true moralist (I speak here not of the sorry fantasist who would construct morality for humans upon the premiss that we might or should be insubstantial spirit, but rather of him who would work human clay to its finest forms) should be concerned with the means whereby sex might best be enjoyed and celebrated without doing harm—not with its denial. As for the latter, whilst all play is of its nature ‘naughty’—irresponsible, daring, frivolous, ‘ludicrous’—I was no more willing to consider the greatest of all sensual pleasures and of inspirations to poetry and art a smutty, degenerate pastime, because of childish misunderstanding and fear, than I was about to devote half the Christmas budget to rebuilding the chimney for Santa. Lisa, who parked her wagon in a field 500 yards away on her visits, sometimes watched daytime television. One day, we saw a singularly ugly woman there. She was, of course, relating the tales of her misfortunes. She said that she had once made a living as a ‘clip artist’—one who posed as a prostitute, took a fee in advance from would-be clients, then ran away, providing no service in exchange for her fee. ‘Of course, I wasn’t going to do them,’ she said smugly. ‘I never lost my morals. I got my self-respect.’ This preposterous assertion passed unchallenged. Her listeners nodded. There was even a patter of applause. Here was a woman avowing that she had been an exploitative cheat and thief, occasioning untold distress to those who had entered into a contract with her in good faith. Yet she regarded herself as morally acceptable (and, by implication, honest prostitutes who rendered service in exchange for a fee as ‘immoral’) and retained ‘self-respect’ because her sorry genitals had remained inviolate. That is how far we have sunk into the association of ‘morality’ with a peculiar, proscriptive notion of sexual probity. If Mother Theresa had had a penchant for occasional adventures involving bondage or multiple partners, she would, de facto, have been irredeemably ‘immoral’. If a liar and cheat who has contributed nothing to the total of human happiness professes herself sexually useless, she is thereby redeemed. Many newspapers have so far profited from this absurd conflation that they regularly ‘expose’ people’s harmless consensual sexual practices, so causing irreparable hurt to their families and friends, whilst purporting to perform a ‘moral’ function. Sex is ‘immoral’, so victimisation and intrusion assume the guise of morality. Worse still, on the dubious principle that he who renounces pleasure is de facto morally superior to others (whence the respect afforded to vegetarians and ascetic but useless saints), any man—and most certainly any woman—who acknowledges enjoyment of sex without conventional sanction thereby loses credibility. So far as I can now discern from three years’ experience, there is little that can be branded ‘immoral’ in contemporary swinging. ‘Amoral’ is quite another matter, but the word presupposes that all sex should, of its nature and regardless of context, be a moral matter. Where there are resultant attachments and obligations involved, so, of course, it is. Where, however, we are talking about strangers pursuing mutual pleasure and explicitly committed to remaining unattached—at least to one another—to contraception, to courtesy and to safe sex, this is not so obvious. Remove from sex the grave consequences which made it a lifechanging, life-creating, life-destroying act. Separate it from the emotions and obligations inevitably surrounding such an act. Can we then enjoy it for itself as a life-asserting, liberating, ecstatic, communicative and companionable experience? A glance at many of the world’s societies, at our primate cousins and at our own people in youth, shows that many—if not all of us—can and do. The concept of sex as ‘sacred’ and exclusive is neither essential nor instinctive, but merely the product of social constructs and consequent economic necessities. Many of those constructs still remain in law and in tabloid morality, and, of course, in much of our literature and our customs. Over the past fifty years, however, with contraception reliable and women financially empowered, the circus wagons appear to have broken down and the more spirited animals have broken out of their cages and run on, often confused and scared (sometimes even savage) ahead. Again this is not to question the potential for sex to express a very particular love and commitment, nor to deny the value of such commitments. Both are fundamental tenets of swingers’ ethics. We are all surely aware, however, that this is not sex’s sole function. Unlike much of the routine sex of conventional marriage and relationships founded upon convenience or personal advantage unrelated to sexual desire (curious, that the people who most fervently sing of the searing flame of romantic love as the sole justification for sex are also the principal champions of dutiful contentment amidst its clinker), swinging sex is always desired by both or all parties. Emancipated woman has broken free of lifelong hire-purchase whoredom. Her transition to sensuous wantonness by choice—to anything by choice—is surely desirable. Unlike the ‘love’ affairs that break up politicians’ families, yet mysteriously win the sympathy of otherwise censorious tabloids because ‘love’ is posited, swingers’ long-term relationships tend to be stable and their adventures—if gregarious—courteous and discreet. Swingers’ children, business-partners and ‘straight’ friends generally remain unaware of their hobby. Unlike the febrile fumblings and jerkings of teenage clubbers, swinging has strictly enforced protocols ensuring mutual respect and sexual hygiene. Unlike the commonplace and grotesque parade/charades of winebars and drinks parties, there is no ambivalence or deception in swingers’ seduction, little chance of one partner expecting romance or commitment whilst the other is driven only by sexual urges. The ambiguities and the power-struggles that characterise one-on-one sexual relationships are renounced by swingers, to whom explicitness and mutuality are prerequisites. It was easy enough for me, as a liberally educated countryman, to accept sex as a gift of the gods and not, of its nature, ugly or immoral. I was surprised, however, to find not a single utilitarian objection to swinging vis ? vis its more conventional vanilla alternatives. 6 THE VANILLA ONE-NIGHT STAND (#ulink_f40a0ed6-e595-5fb6-aa0a-9e3e919cd18c) I CONSIDERED THOSE ALTERNATIVES. Aside from marriage or long-term commitment—which was not only prohibited for me, but must be at best self-deceptive and hurtful—there was only the standard, squalid, exploitative (all right, often mutually exploitative, but little the better for that) one-night stand. I had many experiences of these. They tended to be unsatisfactory. Their emotional duration, for at least one participant, seldom endured for just one night. Annabel is a friend of Lisa’s—a thirty-three-year-old mother-of-two and an occasional swinger. She gave me the following appraisal of commonplace ‘vanilla’ one-night stands: ‘Like most modern girls, I’ve had them. And, like most of my friends, I’ve found them OK but, yeah, sort of sad. ‘I mean, first, the sex is usually moderate. You have to be pretty good to suss one another out—what you like, what is allowed, what your fantasies are—first time, and usually after an evening of tension and posturing and drinking too much. ‘So it’s generally an urgent, clumsy sort of reconnaissance in which you’re both out to get what you can, and both of you are left feeling unfulfilled, impersonal and dissatisfied. Neither has given a good account of him- or herself. It’s all to do with need, nothing to do with celebration. ‘And the one-night stand uses the same language as love—all those secretive smiles and little trying-it-out caresses, the gifts and intimate revelations, the expressions of hopes and sadnesses and fears. When all that is over, perhaps you can both admit that you’re actually looking for an otherwise meaningless shag, but by then the emotional imbalance is guaranteed. ‘And it’s intimate. I don’t mean the sex. I mean the tooth brushing and teddy bears and your side of the bed, water or cigarettes on the bedside table, telephones and alarm-clocks, clothes folded neatly or just flung down in blobs on the floor. A bedroom is a private place. Bedtime has its private rituals. ‘When I’m in another person’s room, I must take in his or her memories and taste in books, pictures, furnishings and a thousand other things. When he or she is in mine, it’s the same thing. It’s my family photographs and the CDs I’m a bit embarrassed about, and my make-up and knickers scattered around the room. It’s an invasion. ‘Hotels are worse, if anything. Luggage is as intimate as it gets, and the morning after, there’s the clean impersonality of the room, the condoms like twisted slugs on the carpet, the scattered towels and clothes. They just underline the futility of all that “darling” stuff and all that snogging and panting. ‘And really one-night stands are very masculine things. By the nature of sexuality and its conventions—whether he’s in my house or I’m in his—I have to accept his masculinity whilst he has to make almost no concession to me. A hotel may put chocolates on the pillow and throw in a hairdryer and a couple of carnations, but it’s always a functional, masculine thing, and the male after a one-night stand has to get dressed in an identity. The old role of the swaggering male who has “scored” is hanging there ready for him. ‘I mean, I may have “scored” too, but I can’t dress up in that. Why would I? Why would getting fucked by one male out of millions be something to be proud of? ‘When I’m playing, though, the whole thing’s on my terms as much as—if not more than—on his. We’re on neutral territory designed to afford what are always thought of as female pleasures—sexy clothes, lush d?cor, soft lighting, crappy music, a drink in the hand, the caresses of warm water and attractive women, the powerful turn-on of other people having fun all about you—and there’s no pressure. If I feel like it, I can do nothing but chat and watch, or I can beckon to one man or woman out of twenty, then turn away from him or her when I’ve had enough or when another one takes my fancy. ‘Men and women are equals here, equally seeking fun and sensory pleasure and, at the end of it all, we dress and walk away having lost nothing. There’s just desire—or not—not need or loneliness. There’s no invasion of privacy or intimacy, just sex and sensuality, and it’s all celebration rather than purging. And let’s face it, the reason we have one-night stands, and the reason that they are one night, is that we want a shag. Face up to that and you can start going about it more logically, more safely and more joyfully. ‘I’ve never left a swingers’ party where I’ve played, without feeling pride and a nice warm sense of satisfaction. And I can honestly look back on them all with pleasure. I can’t think of a single one-night stand of which I can say the same.’ 7 SWINGING AND HEALTH (#ulink_49b354ad-3f89-5a4a-83e5-edd7773555a8) I TURNED, THEN, FROM theoretical to practical concerns. The health risks of swinging, it seemed, were small. ‘Oh, Lord, no. Swingers are like prostitutes,’ Johnny assured me. ‘They’re generally much safer than the sexually active public,because they expect to be having sex with strangers. So they take precautions in advance and demand that their partners do, and there’s none of that, “Oo-er, the passion was too much for us. Fuck the risk” stuff that I get from my patients all the time. ‘Technically, I suppose, there is a very small risk from unprotected oral sex with multiple partners, but it is negligible unless you have major oral lesions. And, from what I can gather, swinging men don’t often come in women’s mouths. Overall, and subject to all the usual cautions, I’d say you were safer there than in ordinary, single, sexually active civvy life.’ This left just one danger, and—as an addict—it is one of which I am acutely aware. With most pleasures, there is a law of diminishing returns. I was scared that orgiastic sex with multiple strangers might render all other sexual experiences tame and uninteresting, and would demand ever wilder extremes. Lisa reassured me. As far as she was concerned at least, there was room for different varieties of sex. ‘This is fantasy, like the fantasies you have when you’re masturbating—which can be pretty crazy and nasty, but actually only stimulate you when you’re back home making love with one person. I mean, unless you’re seriously ill, your fantasies of being forcibly fucked by a whole regiment don’t affect your enjoyment of sex with your nearest and dearest, do they? ‘It’s like the classical musician getting off on a night in the disco. You’re saying the same things but in different ways. Most swingers are in long-term relationships and have very busy sex lives together. I suppose it could happen, but the two things are just so different.’ I vowed to myself that I would remain alert to the possibility. I have done so. And yes, swinging sex proves one of those appetites that grows by what it feeds on, but it is an appetite for more kisses, more caresses, more sensual pleasures, more distinctive tastes and characteristic responses, more fun—not greater degrees of excess. Swinging sex has increased my appetite for—and, I hope, my proficiency in—more discreet and exclusive sexual communication. Astonishingly, despite the apparently general assumption that swinging was, somehow, obscurely morally wrong, I could find not a single valid ethical objection to it. I look forward to hearing of one that I missed. 8 ‘I WAS BORN NAKED IN EDEN, WASN’T I?’ (#ulink_b8241150-d55c-5e22-920a-775797618199) NOT ONLY, THEN, DID SWINGING SEEM to be safe and at worst morally neutral, but, according to Lisa, swingers enjoyed their hobby only subject to strict rules. Sir Francis Dashwood and his consciously rebellious, debauched friends in the Hellfire Club borrowed as the motto for their orgies Rabelais’s ‘Fay Ce Que Vouldra’ or ‘Do what you will’. Such anarchy, it seemed, is far removed from the ethos of modern swinging. Dashwood’s blasphemous orgies were fuelled (like their religious predecessors) by alcohol, drugs and incantation, and most of its female participants were prostitutes. But drunkenness is almost unknown at swingers’ parties, drugs—but for the odd joint out in the garden—are strictly forbidden, and working girls attend—if at all—only for a busman’s holiday. ‘They’re just straight social occasions,’ Lisa shrugged. ‘Meetings, greetings, gossip…Aside from the playrooms—and okay, the sometimes crazy, OTT costumes—the only thing that distinguishes them from vanilla drinks parties is the ease with which subjects that most people think of as threatening or difficult are openly discussed.” She was right there. Swingers’ conversation can seem startling when written down. Overheard from last night: ‘We really wanted to play with them but I got my period the very evening we arrived…’ ‘Oh, yes, we played with them—when was it, darling? Couple of months ago? That cock is terrifying!’ ‘Silly sod got so excited he came all over this new dress. I was like, “Oh, that’s good…No! Help! Christ!”, diving behind the sofa for cover. I could have killed him.’ But when you hear it, it’s so easy, so unaffected, so untainted by exhibitionism or connivance, that it might as well be fellow-golfers talking about courses. ‘The thing I love is that there’s no hidden sexual agenda here,’ Annabel told me. ‘Just for once, men and women, in front of their partners, can touch, kiss or express appreciation of other people without causing jealousy, or having to hide their sexual feelings beneath banter or allusion. ‘Swinging couples might enjoy a conversation and become friends but never consider having sex, or they could reject one another’s proposals of sex without causing any resentment.’ ‘You’ll enjoy it,’ said Lisa. ‘Stop fussing. It’s just good, clean fun…’ And then, when I raised my eyebrows, she added, ‘Yeah, well, it is clean. It’s uncluttered and untainted by all the world’s usual prejudices, fears and emotional complications. ‘It’s clean (and, okay, mucky) like rugby is clean—and battle is anything but. Swingers play just like children do—no expectations, inhibitions, imposed responsibilities, status. Even stereotypical sexual identities—gay, bi, straight, sub, dom, etc.—go by the board really. You just frolic in a fantasy world. ‘The reason the story of the Fall works so well is that we all do it, we all feel it,’ Lisa went on. ‘So, like at puberty, we taste forbidden fruit and are chucked out of Eden, and from then on we’re meant to be tainted and guilty. Whole areas of our bodies are taboo. All physical play from say thirteen onwards has to be cautious and inhibited, especially nowadays when the law has a mind as dirty as any perv. If it does inspire sexual response, we’re meant to feel ashamed. ‘So swingers, like us, think, “Hang on. I was born naked in Eden, wasn’t I? A naked princess in Eden. It’s my birthright. Why should my natural sexuality debar me? What jumped up arsehole says so?” As far as we’re concerned, it was the shame, not the tasting, that was the original sin. We aim to take our sexuality back into Eden, say “Fuck you” to those who don’t like it, and frolic and play proudly just like when we were children. ‘And everywhere else, it’s sort of adult concerns that decide who you fuck, like money, social background and how they’re dressed and…This is sex as a game, not a lasting social commitment. So you play with people of all backgrounds, people you might have nothing in common with in other circumstances, but here you’re united by just humanity, sensuality and acceptance of both in others. You don’t enquire into their race, wealth or social rank, just, “Is he or she fanciable and will he or she give a lot and have a laugh?”’ Caroline, 42, an estate agent acquaintance of Lisa’s, agreed. ‘God, the number of men and women I’ve seen in my life and I’ve thought, “Ooh, I’d do them if only it weren’t for their table-manners, or way of talking, or the idea of finding them there in the morning!” ‘But in the Lifestyle, all that goes out of the window. You can play with them because you’re both raunchy and they are pretty and have nice smiles, and it can be beautiful and warm and affectionate and—“Thanks, love, that was great and bye, bye”. No need to worry about anything else. ‘You go to a party. The welcome’s always warm. The jokes are uninhibited. Everyone’s kind and affectionate. And when the game is over, swingers go back to their normal, everyday identities and duties.’ Much is made today of avoidance of commitment. ‘He (or, less commonly, she) is afraid of commitment’ is generally used as an insult. It is seldom considered that avoidance of commitment might actually be desirable, intelligent and considerate, and that more grief is caused by commitments irresponsibly made—or assumed to be made—on the grounds of sexual attraction, than was ever caused by sex for its own sake. ‘Swingers can be attracted, have sex with someone and move on,’ said Lisa, ‘or, after sex, become their close friends, where everywhere else, relationships seem to be ordained simply by the fact of sex, whether it be good, bad or indifferent, and all the expectations and obligations, affections or guilty animosities arising from that fact.’ Swingers almost invariably refer to their hobby as ‘playing’. It is a word well chosen. War is dangerous and has many casualties. We therefore play games on sports fields in order to indulge the impulses which give rise to—and which spring from—war, but we play them only in public and subject to strict rules. Swinging (and sex too has many casualties) seems to be playing in the same sense. Just as rugby players hate one another only during the game and then afterwards retire to the bar for a drink, just as children desire the deaths of their enemies as they fire their fingers at them, then go home to share jellies and to pass-the-parcel, so—as Stevie Nicks relates—‘Players only love you when they’re playing.’ Afterwards, although the shared experience creates a bond, swingers return to their other lives and responsibilities. ‘The other frustrated fantasists indulging their whims are just playing unregulated war-games with real weapons,’ said Caroline, ‘and real weapons tend to have lives of their own and to fulfil their natures despite all the best intentions of those brandishing them.’ All in all—and yes, I acknowledge that I wanted to think thus, but this made it harder, not easier to believe—I really could not discern a single reason why I should not give swinging a whirl. Lisa had been growing increasingly frustrated with me as I questioned all and sundry as to their views. Now I yielded. ‘OK,’ I announced. ‘I want this. Let’s do it.’ PART III (#ulink_cf891d0d-3ca6-50ed-9379-b97583e473db) 1 INVITATION TO AN ORGY (#ulink_3319c44b-902e-5603-9b6f-32c4fb497b23) IF THIS WERE A PORNOGRAPHIC MEMOIR, I could devote the whole of it to encounters and orgies on the British swing-scene, which would doubtless be of passing interest to a certain sort of reader in the heat of sexual desire or frustration, but would repel the sated and, at length, bore even the wanker. This is not, as some will claim, because every encounter is the same and that orgies and participants meld into an amorphous blur. One could as well argue that every steeplechase, say, is trivial and forgettable, or every fine meal indistinguishable from another. It is simply untrue. A word, a name, a scent is sufficient to conjure each individual race or meal in all its brilliant intensity. And the principal joy of swinging sex is precisely that each new partner is wonderfully, excitingly different. For all that, a book which described steeplechase after steeplechase, dinner after dinner, must soon become monotonous. This is not a fault of the things described, but of our vocabulary and the terms of reference at our disposal with which to describe pleasure or, for that matter, pain. Caressing, kissing, licking, sucking, fucking—this is the basic, tawdry syntax of sex, just as boiling, frying, grilling and roasting are the terms with which we describe the core functions of the cook. They are just technical terms which tell us nothing of the infinite subtleties ordained on the one hand by the individual people, moods and circumstances, on the other by the peculiar nature of the ingredients and the facilities on offer. Cooking admits of minor distinctions—simmering, sauteeing and the like—but recipes do not begin to describe the subtleties and occasional glories of great food, lovingly prepared in the right context. Our attempts to do just that therefore tend to use metaphor and simile which alienate and obscure rather than enlighten. So I have a choice. I could attempt to describe in factual, actuarial terms the hundred or so orgies that I have attended in the past three years, and the couples whom I have met at my home—or at theirs—with a view to sexual adventure, and so bore rather than cajole the pants off the reader. Or I could wax as lyrical as each such event deserves, which might be of momentary interest to the wanker, but would fail to convey either information or a sense of the feelings involved to anyone save myself. Let’s go, then—for now at least—to just one swingers’ party. Let’s go—for the sake of honesty and in order to obviate any blase-ness which I may unwittingly have acquired—to my first such party, where I feigned assurance but gazed about me with all the incredulous delight of, say, Tom of the Water Babies transported to Disneyland, or Cinderella at last arriving at the palace. 2 A CINDERELLA WITH A FUCK-CARD (#ulink_b343bb9c-c735-5d5c-b7a7-dfb9e610cccc) I HAD—IN THE COURSE of a normal vanilla life—enjoyed just eight threesomes. In three of these, I had been one of two men with a girl. In the other five, I had been with two women. Oh, and there was a strange evening at my university where three female students asked their boyfriends—of whom I was one—to assist at a competition to establish which of them could come fastest. This led to inevitable protests that we males might have influenced the result, and so to exchanges of partners for non-penetrative sex. Only one of those threesomes had been with people who thought of themselves as swingers. I had also attended two wholesale orgies—one in Paris, when a student, and one more recently in Wimbledon, as the guest of an old friend. I was thirty-five, and Georgette had taken me along to observe. We separated at the door and went our own ways. I had sex with five women that night and fell passionately in love with each of them in turn. Three of them subsequently became friends and lovers. Soon afterwards, however, I was in a long-term relationship, and—for all the interest that the experience had awoken in me—my swinging career was cut short. Now, however, I was 47, divorced, and resuming where I had left off. Our first swingers’ party was in London’s Docklands. On the journey from the West Country, Lisa explained to me how swingers’ parties work. They are, it seemed, a cross between the disco parties of my teenage years and the drinks parties and receptions of adulthood. As at drinks parties, swingers meet—singly or in couples—form short-lived groups which absorb others, fragment and reform, and chatter a lot about the weather, sport, their sex lives, the cost of living, their possessions, their children and the government. As at the teenage party, where communication is generally limited to hair patting, sneering and preening followed by a bit of mutual gut wriggling, the intention of the whole business is manifest if largely unstated. At teenage parties the dance floor slowly empties as couple after couple retires into dark corners to slobber over one another, and to fondle one another’s crevices. Here too, couple after couple will drift off into the playrooms, remove their clothes and ‘play’. ‘Generally, you play with one another,’ explained Lisa, ‘and then others come and join you, or people playing on the bed or mattress beside you begin touching you and checking out your response. Maybe you like them and swap with them, or play as a foursome for a while. So, say you’ve got a girl sitting on a guy’s cock and the other girl’s sitting on his face and sucking the other guy or whatever. And then another couple is playing nearby, and one of you reaches out to stroke her or kiss him, and so it goes on…’ But few swingers spend an entire evening in the thick of the action. ‘You need a break—food, drink, a piss, even just a rest—so you go off into the social rooms again. And that’s the second way of meeting people you play with. You’re there—naked or just dressed in underwear or something—and you meet some people and like them, and one of you will say, “Shall we go and play?” so you all pile back in together and the whole thing starts all over again. ‘Of course, you may have no interest in the others playing around you. That’s cool,’ Lisa shrugged, ‘you just play with one another. Other people come along; you just shake your head, say “No, thanks.’” Most couples, she told me—again as at drinks parties—attend as couples and won’t be separated. ‘Some couples will just stick together for the first hour or so then split up, just coming back from time to time to check that the other one’s OK…’ In many ways, then, the swingers’ party seemed to me to resemble the more conventional sort of ball, with fucking at last taking its rightful throne from that unconvincing pretender, dance. The chatter, the introductions, the proposals accepted or rejected, the ‘excuse me’s’, the set-piece communal dances, the timorous ‘wallflowers’—even the conga—all find their echoes in the modern orgy. Lisa, a Georgette Heyer fan, liked this allusion. ‘Yeah. Quite fancy the idea of a fuck-card attached to my wrist: “May I have the honour of the 10.30 sixty-nine, or the midnight slow fuck?” “La, sir! But we barely know each other! Perhaps a well-lit blow-job would be more appropriate…” But yeah, basically, you’ve got the idea.’ 3 THE WARM-UP (#ulink_e1f6dfe8-a6a9-511e-ad0f-8b565a8facdb) THE DOCKLANDS PARTY WAS reassuringly small, and run by a trio of city business types who call themselves ‘Coupleszone’. The location of their regular orgies changed from month to month, but it was usually a luxurious flat or house somewhere within the square mile. This was a ‘Couples Only’ party. Many clubs and swingers’ groups permit a limited number of single males to enter on specific nights. Some men’s enthusiasm flags in the course of the evening, whilst women’s tends to remain constant or to increase with each adventure. These single men, therefore, provide a reserve energy supply. The usual convention in the clubs is that males are permitted on Friday nights, but only couples on Saturdays. The extent of selectivity imposed at each venue varies widely. At the better clubs—such as Chameleons in Birmingham and at Liberations in Leicester—single males must submit photographs and lengthy forms before they are considered, and must then remain on a waiting list for a long while before they will be admitted. Other clubs are less stringent in their requirements, particularly since single males must pay up to three times the entrance fee paid by couples. Single females, unsurprisingly, are always welcome. Most of these clubs also have ‘Greedy Girls’ nights in their calendars. At these, the single males (who again pay a great deal for the privilege) outnumber the women by a factor of three or more to one. Lisa and I travelled to London by train. I had booked into one of those supersonic, globetrotting hotels whose foyers boast acres of textured MDF panels, a great deal of curious lighting and 100-yard reception desks, staffed by one woman in a cardboard-cut-out suit and jabot and one man with a yellow tie. Piped music—like light—seeped and puddled into this vast space and dribbled from invisible speakers into the pill-capsule lift. Our room was a box with a huge window overlooking the Thames. Our bed was also a large, hard box. It did not matter. As Lisa said, ‘With any luck, we’ll be returning totally shagged at four in the morning, so who cares? It’s clean, isn’t it?’ This is a sound and thrifty principle for swingers. Luxury suites are wasted. She showered and enjoyed dressing up. This is always one of the most pleasurable and most childlike aspects of swinging. Women can indulge their every last ‘look at me’ fantasy of sweeping staircases, stilettos, thigh-high boots, slashed skirts or no skirt, glittering panties or no panties, satin, lace, leather, PVC or liquid latex. Some content themselves with lavish corsets or plain little black dresses. The only article of clothing that appears de rigueur is stockings—whether holdups or sustained with suspenders. Some enjoy fancy dress, and there are usually a few French maids, cowgirls, traffic-cops and the like in the mix. Lisa dressed simply that night. Her bra, thong and hold-up stockings were lemon yellow. She wore a short, black, accordion-pleated skirt and a scoop-yoked golden silken top with a parrot and jungle foliage design. Ferragamo—via Oxfam. I wore what would become my swinging uniform—black velvet evening slippers, black silk socks, plain black trousers, a white poplin shirt with gold links, and an off-the-peg blue blazer. I had thought carefully about this outfit. I retain it to this day because my reasoning still seems sound. On the one hand, I need to carry a pen (for names and numbers), cards, cigarettes and at least twenty condoms (some parties and clubs have bowls of free condoms in every room, but many rely on you to bring your own), and I am sufficiently fogeyish to want to make an effort—at least in part—to match that made by the women in their sparse but sexy finery. On the other, I was and am well aware that these clothes will—with luck—be worn for a short time only, and will spend the greater part of the evening crumpled and frequently trampled where they fall. A swingers’ party is not the place for your fragile Sunday best. I removed all credit cards from my coat and retained just ?60 in cash in my back pocket. It is unlikely that there will be petty thieves about—nor have I met any since then—but there seems no point in taking the risk, or putting temptation in anyone’s way. Lisa and I then learned spontaneously a regular and delicious feature of preparation for parties. As she raised a foot onto the armchair to lace her golden sandals, I dived in there and we played for fifteen minutes or so, which meant she had to rearrange her make-up and hair. Since then, I have dressed for hundreds of parties with many different women. We have always played together as part of the process. Sometimes, when we have guests round, I have played with as many as five girls in turn and together before setting off. This is the warm-up, the amuse-gueule, the delicious equivalent of the freshly baked bread, the Negroni, the sussuration of linen and the tattoo of cutlery and glass. It is an essential part of the fun. 4 DRESSING TO UNDRESS (#ulink_f0a63fa3-2000-5de3-9454-e129879e93d7) PLAY CONTINUED IN THE mini-cab. The driver, inevitably, got lost and asked us for directions. We were amused, then irritated. At length, after two calls to our hosts, we found ourselves at the electronic gates of a residential riverside block. We were buzzed into a hall lined with green brocade. The console tables were gilt, with marble tops. The chandelier was of giant Bohemian teardrops. The lift—for some strange reason in a building so plainly modern—was of the double gate, lattice variety. We were warmly greeted by a man in his mid-thirties. He was slim and well spoken. His sandy hair was receding, his chin of the sort with which furrows could be ploughed. His smile, however, carved a broad diamond on his face. His teeth were dazzling. Lisa plainly liked him. The girl beside him was a little younger. Her hair was short and blonde. Her eyes were blue and bright. She wore a clinging, dark blue jersey frock with a plunging bodice and a skirt that covered her knees. She kissed both of us on both cheeks. They could have been any prosperous couple welcoming us to spag-bol dinner with friends. Behind them, there was the usual rumble and chatter of a drinks party. Carl and Angie showed us around and introduced us to a few couples as we went. The guests were dressed conventionally enough. Here or there a skirt was slit to the hip. One woman wore PVC boots which snaked to mid-thigh. Another wore sandals like Lisa’s—laced, Greek-style, up the calf. Skirts might, on average, be a little shorter than usual—one was short enough to show stocking-tops—bodices cut a little lower, trousers a little rarer, but few people here would have looked out of place at a contemporary cocktail bar. The men were the usual confused mess denoted by the words ‘smart casual’. Their shirts and, no doubt, their trousers, were expensive and well pressed. There was no obviously man-made fibre on view. The shirts, however, flapped loose. The deck shoes and trainers seemed out of place. OK. To a fogey. Women’s choice of dress at swingers’ parties is, I was to learn, constrained by just one factor which may not be so pressing for others—the ease with which garments may be removed and, rather more important, put back on. Although she will strip off to play, a female swinger will then want to rejoin the throng outside the playrooms. Few like to do so totally naked. Intricate lace-up corsets or basques may be popular amongst beginners, but they are therefore rare amongst more experienced players, who generally favour expensive but mechanically simple underwear and dresses. Boots and shoes are the exception. Because swinging women tend to wear stockings, they need not remove their intricate and fanciful footwear when they undress. This makes for a delightful but sometimes alarming spectacle. I have often knelt on a mattress with stiletto heels flailing at groin level, their owners blissfully unaware of the nose-cutting, face-spiting dangers that they pose. Vanessa—a friend who came down from Warwickshire with her husband, Simon, to stay with us for a swinging weekend—spent an entire Saturday night party itching to join the action. But, having played soon after our arrival, then having had Simon, me and my swing-partner take twenty minutes to lace her up again, could not bring herself to go through the whole laborious process all over again. Of course, not every woman feels the need to dress after playing. Some enjoy the freedom of strutting their stuff and wandering about the party unclothed. Many, however, for peculiarly feminine reasons, choose not to be entirely naked. Sally, for example, always wore a thin gold chain around her belly. ‘I can’t explain it. All the bits that I’m meant to be worried about are on show, and it feels great, but that silly little chain just means that I’m wearing something which is mine. Weird, but there it is.’ Some private parties are—usually unoriginally—themed: Roman Orgy, Tarts and Vicars, Schooldays, Fetish…With very few exceptions, such themes can be ignored. They are opportunities for silliness and aids to playfulness, not requirements. There were two couples here who might be in their mid-twenties. There were three who might be in their late forties or early fifties. The average age, however, must be around thirty-five to forty-five. No one here was overweight. Neither of us wanted alcohol, so we had brought ten bottles of ginger beer and, as a gauche—considering we were paying ?25 admission—contribution to our hosts, a bottle of champagne. These were placed in the fridge in the kitchen. We were led back through the big living room with its balcony overlooking the river, then to the left again, into two bedrooms. Tonight, they were playrooms. The beds took up 90 per cent of the available space. We returned to the living room and chatted, first to one of the older couples—she, tall, blonde, tanned, slightly gaunt, in training for the London Marathon, he, shorter, smooth, with slicked-back greying dark hair and a slow, one-sided salesman’s smile. They holidayed at a naturist colony on the Isle of Wight and on their yacht which was moored in Torquay. Next week they were off to a swingers’ resort in Cancun, Mexico. Then came a younger foursome—the girls looking mildly ill at ease, the men falsely confident, limber and flash in their brilliant, open-necked shirts. Then a girl whom I particularly liked—a dark bob, strong dark features, a long, beautiful body in a swooping black dress with a slit skirt. She was an American academic, her subject the seventeenth-century English stage. He was a banker, but they were not here to play, they said, merely to observe. They had had some experience of the scene in Chicago, but had only heard rumours of the London swing-set. This was their first foray. Then a French girl, early thirties, tiny, trim, bright and bumptious—‘Hello, I am the bouncering person. May I have your name please?’—with a remarkably good looking husband—curly brown hair and an athlete’s body. He was an artist—formerly in the British army—she, a mother-of-two… But, interesting and congenial though all this was, it was the eyes that did the talking, not merely with those with whom we chatted, but with many others about the room. Perhaps it always is. At a straight drinks party too, we appraise with our eyes, approving, dismissing, interested, amused, desiring, but aware that we are likely to meet only a few of those whom we see. Eye contact is brief, decorous and frequently broken off out of fear. Just occasionally, our flickering gazes are drawn into a long, lingering, lip-licking maelstrom. Occasionally they are flung back with a mocking moue and a cock of the hips. In general, however, they pass—no doubt noticed but unacknowledged—the loose change of human transactions. Here, physical assessments were mirrored, smiles congenially returned. Glances were still fleeting, but they were frankly acknowledged. Later, we would all meet, or at least see one another, without these defensive clothes and manners. Time and again at such parties, I have observed a woman amidst the crowd, the ‘cut of whose jib’—as my father would say—pleases me. My glance has passed over her, and has been cursorily, inexpressively returned, but that merest split second longer than would be normal in the vanilla world. Initially, I took this for dismissal, but invariably, in the thick of orgiastic action, it has been she who has lain down beside me, she who has crawled across a mattress to suck me when I am going down on another woman, she who has welcomed me into her arms, often, by now, aware of my name. 5 TIME TO PLAY (#ulink_06f2e03f-5c5f-54c9-9769-7aea91050d56) LISA HAD BY NOW HAD enough of conventional socializing. She unbuttoned her shirt, threw it down and languorously danced to the music—now Getz and Gilberto. I was frankly nervous. ‘Hey, hang on,’ I said, looking over her shoulder at the impassive gazes of the others. ‘No need to be impatient!’ She unhooked her skirt. It slithered to the floor. She stepped out of it and kicked it under the sofa. ‘Why not?’ she shrugged. In bra, thong and stockings, she sashayed up to me and linked her fingers at the nape of my neck. Her pelvis rotated against mine. ‘I can’t be doing with all this chuntering,’ she said. ‘We’re here to play, aren’t we? Let’s play.’ She kissed me and, taking my hand, led me down the little corridor to the further bedroom. There were already two couples in the half light. The Isle of Wight sailors were in a snuffling and clicking sixty-nine beneath the window. The lamplight from outside slicked them in shifting blue. Closer at hand, a woman whom I had not noticed before—dark, glossy hair piled atop her head and escaping in artless curls down her cheeks—lay on her side. One foot was on the carpet, the other was up on the bed. She sucked the cock of a portly man lying on his back. Her shaven pussy was thus, inevitably, the part of her which first I met. It was very neat and pretty. I stood by the bed. Lisa sat. She unzipped my flies and unfastened the waistband. I removed the blazer, unbuttoned my shirt and shrugged it off. As we played, her left hand caressed the thigh of the brunette at her side. I dropped to my knees to lick between Lisa’s thighs. Following her lead, I too allowed my hand to creep up the brunette’s stockinged thigh. Her pussy was welcoming. I slipped two fingers inside her. Her bent leg sank to allow me better access. I knelt up to fuck Lisa, and still my fingers played with the other pussy at my right hand. Lisa’s crown now rested on the portly man’s hip. The brunette stopped sucking him to kiss her. I leaned over to kiss and suck on her nipples… Suddenly the bed and the floor all around it seemed filled with shifting bodies. And so the fugue began. 6 GIUOCO DELLE COPPIE (#ulink_b175f019-35f4-52a9-bd82-c05d2ab9fdbb) I FIND IT DIFFICULT TO EXPLAIN how confused and kaleidoscopic are my memories of orgies. This is not to say that the pictures which I retain are fuzzy. On the contrary, each is of heightened clarity—Lisa taking over from the Isle of Wight man in the sixty-nine with his wife, the brunette woman’s husband asking me, ‘Do you want to fuck her?’, and my response to her, ‘Do you want me to fuck you?’, she smiling, nodding… Lisa now sucking two men, one over her shoulder, one before her face, whilst her entire body jerks from the fucking she is receiving from behind… Then she and I are playing together and she on her back as one of those young, confused-looking women approaches naked, and Lisa says luxuriantly, ‘Oh, give me that!’ and pouts up as the girl sinks into her arms… And then it is Lisa’s turn to ask me ‘Do you want to fuck her?’ She has been crouching on her knees eating the girl for ten minutes as she asks me that. I tell her ‘Yes,’ and she grins. ‘She’s ready,’ she says, three fingers still in the writhing girl’s cunt. ‘Oh, is she ready. Oh, are you ready…’ and she pulls me around her and into the girl and slaps my buttocks by way of encouragement… Time vanishes. Hours full of activity and excitement seem minutes. Somehow we are in the other bedroom, and two girls are crouched at my groin. Lisa joins them and pairs off with one of them whilst the other one straddles me, and the room is full of growling, panting, purring, yelping, squealing, humming, slapping bodies. There is joking too, and chatter, and a lot of kissing and soft moaning. And then…Then there is a moment of magic which seems to make the whole orgy freeze-frame. Lisa is leaving the bed to get a drink, and suddenly there is a tall, elegant woman of much the same age ahead of her, and the two women embrace and kiss—oh so deeply, oh so intimately—hands fluttering and grasping at one another’s buttocks, backs and hair. They sink to the bed together, still kissing, still caressing, totally focused, one on the other. They suck one another’s fingers. They laugh softly into one another’s mouths. They kiss one another’s breasts and stomachs. They are wholly engrossed and so wholly engrossing. A space clears around them. The girl with me is watching them as Lisa’s head falls back onto my stomach and slowly the taller girl moves down her and laps between her legs. I stroke Lisa’s hair and her head rocks slowly from side to side. Her eyes are closed. Her hips bob up and down, circle and, at the last, buck violently. She bites her knuckles and squeals through them. She rolls onto her side, clamping her thighs about the other girl’s head, and the girl says ‘Mmmm’ and her eyes are wide and wondering. Lisa has told me that she rarely comes at parties. This, it seems, is one of the exceptions. Then it is Lisa’s turn, and she too, with a hundred little, loving kisses, descends to the other girl’s crotch. Again I supply—I am—the pillow, and the girl reaches up behind her head to grasp me as Lisa goes to work. Lisa’s eyes are wide open now, watching her beloved’s face as she nuzzles and licks into all that sweetness. It is all outstandingly, bewilderingly beautiful. The girl’s boyfriend, who has thus far passed unnoticed, has pulled on a condom and now penetrates Lisa from behind. He is in his late thirties or early forties with a shaven head and well-developed pecs and arms. He frowns deeply, almost anxiously as he fucks. He does not slam into Lisa, but fucks her slowly. The girls have ordained the rhythm to this dance. For all that, his intrusion has broken the spell. ‘I was only fucking him out of politeness because I was fucking his wife,’ Lisa shrugged afterwards, ‘but you know, he was seriously good. I really enjoyed it.’ The bodies about us start to move again. The music breaks in on the reverie. At some point, the dark girl turns over and we play together. At some point, the play extends into the living room and even out onto the balcony, where my American academic friend so far forgets herself allowing her husband and me to play with her as she leans on the balustrade and gazes out over the corkscrew lights in the Thames. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/mark-brendon/swinging-the-games-your-neighbours-play/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.