The New Sexual Underground: Crossing the Last Boundaries (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior Book 10)

by Lawrence Block

  Since then, my informant continued, he had learned to spot such pen-pals with ease. “In their ads they almost always request a frank letter or a photo right away. This is a tip-off. You’ll see lines like Please be frank for we are shockproof, that sort of approach. Now the real swingers, people who are more interested in doing it than talking about it, are generally pretty goddamn careful to avoid going into great detail in letters, especially at the onset of correspondence. The last thing anyone wants is to get nailed by the Post Office finks for sending obscene material through the mails. If we do send sexy pictures through the mail, for instance, we always are very careful to ship them separately with no letter enclosed and no return address. Of course there’s still the chance that you’ll answer a blind ad placed by a postal inspector, but when they hustle you that way the courts call it entrapment, and because of a couple of favorable rulings they’ve cut down on that lately. Though why they don’t just stick to getting the mail delivered instead of snooping into everybody’s private business is beyond me. If they didn’t have to support their crew of finks and snoopers, maybe they wouldn’t have to raise the postal rates every year.

  “But that’s beside the point. The main thing is that swingers are pretty careful about how they express themselves through the mails. When it comes to discussing sexual preferences, we always stick to the same sort of euphemisms that are used in the ads—French culture for oral sex, Greek for anal, versatile for bisexual, Roman culture for orgies, that sort of way of expressing yourself without coming right out and saying anything. So if you see an ad inviting ‘frank’ correspondence, or if you get a really obscene letter from some clown, you can be pretty certain it’s a pen-pal and not a sincere person anxious to meet you. It may not be a single man—there are plenty of women who play the same game, although it’s generally believed that a lot of the pen-pals who describe themselves as females are latent fairies. And there are some couples who get their kicks this way, too. They tease around with letters to swingers, and I guess the correspondence gives them a vicarious charge that peps up their own sex life. Then too, some of them will start off just interested in correspondence, and after a while they get used to the idea of swinging and are interested in actual meetings with another swinging couple. I’ve heard of this happening with couples where one partner is interested in swinging and the other is kind of inhibited or confused about the whole scene. Most often the husband will want to swing and the wife won’t, so they’ll start off looking for correspondence with the husband looking to educate his wife to the point where she’ll participate. But in these cases the couple won’t be interested in obscene letters as much as in learning more about the whole swinging scene and hearing all the arguments in favor of it. We got a letter recently from a man who wanted my wife to write his wife telling her how swinging helped our marriage. We didn’t reply, as a matter of fact, because we personally think that whole bit is something for couples to work out on their own without our help, but it seemed as though it was a legitimate letter and not someone just looking for horny letters.”

  In the course of my own research, I found no end of evidence of the existence of “pen-pals” but had more than a little trouble obtaining interviews with members of the species. Occasional advertisers who frankly described themselves as interested only in correspondence were willing to write at some length about the practice but, true to their habits, by and large refused to meet with me for an interview. The more clandestine pen-pals who passed themselves off as active swingers continued this deception when replying to my letters. They would often write at length about their sexual experiences and would describe their sexual excitement at the moment of writing, but when I identified myself as a researcher and requested an interview I was either advised that this was out of the question or, more commonly, the correspondence was simply terminated abruptly.

  I eventually resorted to the stratagem of making no mention of my research. I selected an advertisement which described the advertiser as a twenty-two-year old young women with impressive measurements and an interest in “any and all swinging activities mentioned in these pages.” The ad included the usual injunction to be perfectly frank and candid in replying and expressed a willingness to travel anywhere in the continental United States to meet with men, women or couples for swinging times. It was fairly obvious from the ad’s general tone that whoever had placed it was more interested in exchanging obscene letters than anything else, and so I took the liberty of violating postal statutes by writing the sort of “frank and candid” letter which the advertiser seemed to desire.

  In the following few months I had a total of a dozen letters from this particular correspondent, who lived in a large city in the Pacific Northwest. The following passages should give an idea of the type of letters received and the manner in which my pen-pal’s literary voyeurism and exhibitionism manifested itself.

  Your last letter was an absolute gas! When I got home from the office today and saw the envelope on the hall table I got all wet immediately and couldn’t wait until I was alone in my room to read it. I have now read it over and over, with the letter in one hand and my other hand constantly on my throbbing cunt. Your description was so realistic I just couldn’t keep from playing with myself. You devil, you make me so horny I can’t stand it! I wish you were here right now. I’ll bet your big cock could do a better job than my hand . . .

  . . . I have to tell you what I did last night. I hope it won’t shock you to learn that I like girls as well as boys. I guess I am just too sexy to limit myself, don’t you think? But last night I had a few drinks after work with a beautiful Negro girl who works in my office. She is only nineteen and very lovely, with skin the color of coffee and a magnificent body . . . We wound up at her apartment, both of us pretty drunk, and both of us so hot we couldn’t stand it. Without a word she lifted my skirt and pulled down my panties and began to suck me. I had three delightful orgasms and then we both got completely undressed and she let me play with her marvelous brown titties and lick her sweet pussy. She had removed her pubic hair and was smooth as silk down there, and I just couldn’t get enough of that marvelous delicious pussy. I wish you could have watched us. Can you picture the two of us now in your mind, loving and sucking one another? I hope you are getting really hot reading this, and that you will now take your cock in your hands and jerk off at the thought of we two girls in bed together . . .

  . . . If you were here I would love to do everything to you. I would even let you fuck me in the ass although I am sure that your huge prick would just about tear me in half, but I wouldn’t mind because know it would thrill me so much. And then I would suck you and make you hard as rock all over again. Please write again and tell me what it feels like for you when a beautiful young girl is sucking you. Can you hold out a long time? I’ll bet you can. And do you like to shoot off in a girl’s mouth? Please describe this, and how she looks with the come dribbling out of the comers of her mouth. I’ll read every word over and over and I’ll sure wish that girl was me!

  The reader may take exception to the extremely outspoken nature of the material quoted above. I have rendered it with as few cuts as possible because its extreme obscenity is so much a part of the syndrome involved. My correspondent always went into great detail concerning her state of sexual arousal while reading my letters and while replying to them, and expressed the hope time and time again that I was comparably aroused by her letters. The sexual contacts which she described were fantastic in the same way that the great bulk of pornographic literature is fantastic—all her partners were the ultimate in desirability and enthusiasm, all contacts were perfection, every orgasm was magic. It was evident throughout that all of the events she described were imaginary.

  Before very long I had reached the point where further correspondence along the same lines did not seem worthwhile. At this stage I wrote to my pen-pal and for the first time followed her advice by being wholly frank with her. I described myself as a sex researcher and told her
that I would very much like to interview her at length, either by mail or in person, to learn more about the manner in which she obtained sexual gratification through correspondence. I was not at all surprised when my letter brought no response whatsoever.

  On my next trip to the West Coast, I made it a point to go to her city and get in touch with her. Her address turned out to be a mail drop, but by discreet bribery I was able to come up with her actual name and address, and visited her unannounced at her home.

  I began by introducing myself as a polltaker and spent a few minutes asking inane questions about her habits of television viewing, using this time to form a few general impressions of her. She was not at all the sensation she described herself as, but was instead a rather plain-looking housewife in her middle thirties, soft-spoken and retiring, not at all the sort of person one would expect to be the source of the variety of letters she had sent me.

  When I did identify myself, I regretted having done so almost immediately. The poor woman was very badly shocked, and for a moment I was fearful that I might have unwittingly precipitated a heart attack. She finally managed to regain her composure and accepted my assurance that I had no interest in exposing her or in causing her any discomfort. The brief interview which I managed to conduct was marked by her profound embarrassment.

  She admitted that she had been engaging in pornographic correspondence for a period of more than year. She had been married for sixteen years and had several children. She and her husband had never had a particularly satisfying sexual relationship. She had had no sexual experience before marriage and had never had extramarital relations. For the past six years, since the birth of their youngest child, she and her husband had relations very infrequently and she reported that she almost never achieved orgasm in intercourse. Nor had she ever practiced any of the extracoital or homosexual practices alluded to in the letters.

  She attributed her letter-writing practices to a series of obscene phone calls which she had received several months before she began her first attempts at correspondence. The caller, a deep-voiced male whose identity she never learned, called her every afternoon for a period of several weeks. On each occasion he would speak obscenely to her, telling her what sexual acts he would like to perform with her.

  “The first two times I was just shocked and hung up the phone. The third time something happened, it was very exciting to me, and in the middle of the conversation I had a spontaneous orgasm that was unlike anything I had ever experienced before. I was excited later on remembering it and masturbated and again had an orgasm.”

  From that point on the daily phone calls became a ritual. While she never spoke to her caller, she listened avidly until he terminated each conversation, and she aroused herself digitally while he spoke to her. She described these autoerotic experiences as extremely powerful. When the phone calls ceased abruptly, she found herself in a constant state of sexual tension. She began surreptitiously purchasing erotic books and masturbating while reading them, but found this an inadequate substitute for the telephone calls.

  At a store which sold this type of literature, she came across a club bulletin and read the correspondence ads, which served to stimulate her to masturbation more effectively than the novels she had been reading. Before she reached the point of placing an advertisement, she had already created an elaborate fictional persona, an alter ego who took the form of the twenty-two-year-old nymphomaniac she subsequently became through the medium of correspondence. She eventually made arrangements for receipt of mail at a downtown rooming house and placed an advertisement in one of the club bulletins.

  “I get a great deal of response to the ads,” she told me. “There are very few single women advertising, and so I get letters from a great number of single men and from some couples as well. I don’t answer them all, only those that are from a long distance away so that there won’t be the danger of their desiring a meeting, and also only those that I find exciting. Of the ones I answer, there’s a percentage who never write a second time, but I’ve been generally lucky and have several people to whom I’ve been writing for as long as six months.”

  The letters themselves function almost as fetish objects. She keeps them all in a safe deposit box which she rented under a false name, and keeps copies of her own letters as well. She masturbates while reading each letter and also while writing her replies. She has read certain letters over and over, to the point where they have literally fallen to pieces.

  She confessed, with much embarrassment, that several of my letters were particularly stimulating to her.

  I asked if she hadn’t ever desired to meet her correspondents. She said at first that she wanted very much to meet them but knew “it was out of the question.” When pressed for an explanation, she admitted that her desire for actual meetings was part of her fantasy and that she actually never had any real intention of establishing face-to-face contact with any of the men who wrote to her.

  She offered any number of rationalizations for this attitude. She said that she was afraid her husband might find out, that she might become pregnant or contract a disease through sexual contact with stranger, that she found adultery morally reprehensible, etc. After I had pointed out the fallacy of these arguments (she ran at least as great a risk of discovery through obscene correspondence as through actual participation, pregnancy and venereal disease could easily be avoided, and her behavior in correspondence was morally equivalent to adultery) she finally agreed that these arguments were immaterial. Her real motives stemmed from the conviction that she herself was not sexually desirable and the fear that no real-life sexual encounter could be as perfectly thrilling as her world of sexual fantasy.

  I took some pains to assure her that, while she might not be the youthful knockout she described in her letters, she was nevertheless not unattractive by any means, and that any number of men would be quite delighted to have sex with her. While they might not provide her with the spectacular delights she wrote about, they would certainly offer the alternative of reality.

  “But I would be so embarrassed,” she said suddenly.

  “Are you embarrassed now?”

  “You mean talking with you? No, not the way I was at first. But—”

  Our interview terminated shortly thereafter, and I never expected to hear from this woman again, nor did I really think she would ever change from pen-pal to swinger. Just a few weeks ago, however, I did receive a letter from her in which she told me that she had finally “come out into the sunshine” by meeting with a man met through the correspondence clubs and having sex with him. Since then, she added, she had given up correspondence, was in the process of divorcing her husband, and intended to become an out-and-out swinger. She wrote at some length of her more recent swinging experiences, including a troilistic meeting with a married couple and attendance at a nude party.

  While there is a certain ring of truth to her letter, I cannot be certain whether she has actually reoriented herself as she says or whether this latest letter is in fact a continuation of her correspondence-fantasy. Her letter concludes with the expression of regret that she was still inhibited when I saw her, and that we thus did not have sexual relations. “The next time you come to town,” she wrote, “I’ll gladly do all the things for you that I wrote in my other pretend letters.” It is conceivable that she means this; it is equally possible that she only wrote these words to stimulate herself auto-erotically.

  The correspondence clubs also provide refuge for individuals who confine their sexual practices to the more “normal” acts but who experience vicarious excitement in more bizarre realms. This is especially common in respect to sadomasochism. While there is a large sub-group in the swinging society devoted to overt sadomasochistic acts, ranging from mild bondage and discipline to outright torture, there are also a great many persons who would be literally sickened at participating in such acts but who derive extreme excitement from enjoying them in fantasy.

  Lester, a New York attorney of forty-one,
is a good example. He is in many respects a model husband and father, and except for occasional encounters with call girls he has no extramarital sexual outlets.

  From early adolescence, Lester has always been stimulated by sadistic literature. Accounts of the torture and murder of women particularly excite him, but he also responds vicariously to accounts of men dominated and abused by beautiful women. He underwent psychoanalysis several years ago and has advanced several theories to explain the manner in which his sadomasochistic fantasies established themselves, but we need not bother probing them here.

  • • •

  LESTER: One of the reasons I started going to the shrink was the fear that I might snap. You read about that sort of thing all the time, some quiet and inoffensive guy goes berserk and launches himself on an orgy of rape and murder. The thought that I might be capable of doing something like that made me physically ill. I would wake up in the night in a sweat at the thought. But I realize now that this will never happen. There’s a short circuit in my sexual makeup that renders sadism and torture exciting on a fantasy level, but my own ego structure is such that I could never be anything but horrified by those acts on a realistic plane. For instance, I don’t even respond to newspaper stories of sex crimes, while the same story in a work of pornographic fiction would stimulate me. The article is too real, and so I overcompensate by being even more disgusted and upset by the article than the average person.