JWW: How do you indulge your special tastes in the fantasy area?
LESTER: In several ways. I read pornography, and in this I include not only the obvious gutter stuff but also histories of torture and other legitimate books which would only strike you as obscene if that happened to be your kick. I also collect weapons and torture implements. This is something I can do quite openly; and as it happens I have a collection which is recognized as one of the best in this part of the country, aside from institutional collections. Of course, some of my other collections don’t lend themselves to public display, such as the bondage photos and some rather unusual reels of film.
JWW: And you also correspond with persons contacted through the swinger clubs?
LESTER: To a degree, but less than I used to. There are a few men with whom I exchange letters. These have no obvious sexual content. We recount different tortures from our reading, and the letters themselves are far more scholarly in tone than they are obscene.
JWW: But you’ve also had some obscene correspondence?
LESTER: Yes, I have. There was a girl on a farm in Montana who wrote to me and said she would like to tell me about her experiences with spanking, but that she had no interest in anything beyond long-distance correspondence, which was fine as far as I was concerned. She wrote at length, and eventually I began describing some of the torture devices in my collection and explaining how they could be used on her. I broke this off, though, because I was leery of putting anything incriminating on paper. I also wrote to a dominant female type in the south but that was less successful. And there were some other brief incidents as well—
JWW: You never experimented with any overt sadomasochistic behavior?
LESTER: Not successfully. I once had an actual meeting with a dominant female whom I met through the clubs. We arranged that she would tie me up and spank me and that I would then be her slave and perform cunnilingus upon her. I knew it would be no good before I even met her, and it was as though I was just completely turned off by the entire thing. I went through with it more out of a sense of curiosity than anything else. It didn’t work at all, no excitement on my part and as a result no real kicks for her. Another time I paid a call girl to let me spank her, again to test myself and find out if I could respond to it, but the same thing happened. I smacked her once or twice and stopped, completely cold to the whole thing. We sat around and relaxed and forgot about the sadomasochist bit completely, and then I had ordinary intercourse with her, which was much more successful.
JWW: What role do your fantasies play in your life now?
LESTER: Occasionally they stimulate masturbation, but not always by any means. They mostly serve just to get me excited. Also I’ll drift into these fantasies while I’m making love to my wife. I have only the tenderest feelings toward my wife, wouldn’t hurt her for the world, but while we’re making love I can get myself highly excited by imagining tortures that I’ve read about. This used to give me terrible guilt feelings, but now I feel that she can’t read my mind and there’s certainly no danger of my confusing fantasy and reality, so I try not to let it bother me.
• • •
Persons with other sexual deviations also make use of the facilities of the sexual underground. It is not uncommon for a club bulletin to contain an ad in which a man requests girls and women to send him their used and unwashed undergarments, along with other fetish objects. Sometimes the advertiser offers to pay for such material.
At swinging parties, masturbation occasionally plays a part in the overall scheme of things, Husbands who delight in watching their wives engage in lesbian activity frequently heighten their voyeurism by manipulating themselves; sometimes they withhold climax until they have relations with the women, and at other times they continue the watching and handling process to the point of orgasm.
Most orgies are characterized by a certain amount of masturbatory activity. In the more freewheeling groups, voyeurism combined with autoeroticism is considered normal and acceptable, and some groups contain members who have no other sexual outlet. One man, for example, can only achieve erection and orgasm by watching his wife with other men. While his particular group does not consider him their most desirable member by any means, he is tolerated because his wife happens to be particularly desirable while his own predilection is considered harmless.
Eight:
It Started With A Swinging Honeymoon
When Dick and Patricia Breckenridge were united in holy matrimony, their marriage ceremony did not include that standard “and forsaking all others” line. Dick had written his own version of the marriage oath, ostensibly to make the ceremony more poetic and personal, but primarily to eliminate this particular phrase.
“We felt it was the worst sort of hypocrisy,” Patricia explained, “and we didn’t want to begin our marriage with a lie. We had already decided that the only marriage that could possibly be right for us was a swinging marriage, and the whole idea of forsaking all others was the furthest thing from our minds.
“The whole honeymoon itself was a swinging occasion. We had the usual wedding pictures taken at the church, but the real wedding pictures were the ones we took at the lodge where the whole wedding party went after the ceremony and reception. There were eight besides us, three ushers and three bridesmaids and Dick’s best man and my maid of honor, and they all stood around applauding and taking pictures while Dick and I consummated our marriage. I wore my veil throughout. Then the other four boys took turns with me while Dick worked his way through the girls, and we just sort of grooved like that for a solid week of swinging.
“So many couples tell how they turned to swinging after their marriages got dull, but ours never had a chance to get dull; we were swingers from the start . . .”
• • •
The swinging honeymoon which Patricia Breckinridge describes above is illustrative of a new development in today’s sexual underground. As she mentions, the typical couple has always turned to swinging or wife-swapping after several years of marital fidelity have resulted in a general atmosphere of sexual stagnation. The frequency of sexual contact gradually diminishes, the excitement of the sex act wears off, one or both partners participate in adulterous affairs—until at last, either through the suggestion of another couple or the reading of the husband or wife, wife-swapping turns up as a means of keeping sex alive and exciting without destroying the fabric of the marriage.
With any number of minor variations, this pattern has long been characteristic for the vast majority of married swingers. The few couples who did begin swinging at the outset consisted almost entirely of divorced persons in second marriages, one or both of whom had been involved in swinging in their prior marriage. A couple like the Breckinridges, swingers from their wedding night onward, was so rare as to be exceptional.
This is no longer the case. With the considerable increase in swinging in the past decade or so, and with the enormous publicity which has been focused upon the various manifestations of the sexual underground, coupled with extreme changes in pre-marital sexual behavior at all levels of society, an increasing number of young couples grow up regarding the swinging life not as a remedy for marital ills but as an end wholly desirable in itself.
Such persons usually have a history of extensive sexual experience throughout adolescence and often have attended parties and switched with other couples before marriage. Indeed, in many instances swinging marriages as a result of meetings at sex parties; the boy and girl begin by finding one another particularly suitable as sexual partners, discover other common bonds as well, and finally decide to “make it legal.” Occasionally they will decide to give up other contacts when they marry (a decision which is rarely maintained for any length of time after the wedding), but more often they take it for granted that group sex and couple trades will play a major role in their relationship from the beginning—although few go so far as the Breckinridges in bringing the wedding party along on the honeymoon for a postnuptial orgy!
; In a minority of instances, a relatively inexperienced bride and groom will decide before marriage to include in their marital relationship the pleasures of coeducational permissive adultery.
It is the steady growth of this trend in swinging which casts some doubt on the oft-proclaimed argument that wife-swapping is symptomatic almost entirely of the monotony characterizing contemporary marriages. When we examine situations in which swinging is regarded before marriage as an ideal, we are forced to re-examine this theory. It is quite evident that, for more and more young men and women, the hitherto unquestioned ideal of a lifetime of monogamous marriage, marked on both sides by complete sexual fidelity, is no longer viewed as desirable.
How has this come to pass? How has wife-swapping, originally viewed as the last-ditch attempt to save a marriage, in so short a time become a fundamental component of marriage, in some cases the very foundation of the marital union? How indeed have the trends which we group together under the umbrella of the sexual revolution so reshaped attitudes?
The increase in general knowledge on the subject of sexual behavior has undoubtedly acted to spur the sexual revolution on all its fronts; it is commonplace to observe, for example, that Kinsey’s revelation to the American public that a large percentage of married couples enjoyed oral-genital contacts did not only reassure those couples who engaged in such practices but gave other less experimental couples a model to follow. In other words, the wave of publicity which focuses upon any new development in behavior serves inevitably to heighten and spread the very trend it spotlights.
Let us consider how this applies here. When wife-swapping first began to receive some attention a decade or so ago, the average non-swinger barely knew of its existence. His immediate reaction to sensationalistic articles on the subject was apt to be one of shock and disgust at a practice which ran counter to not only his previously unquestioned standards of sexual morality but also his existential concept of what decent people do. As wife-swapping gradually increased in incidence, and as more detailed studies made the point time and time again that the average swinger was a well-educated member of the middle or upper-class, a typical solid citizen, some of his shock and disgust began inevitably to wane. Even so, by this time he had largely settled on his basic sexual attitudes, and it would generally take some sort of upsetting factor, such as a messy extramarital affair or the breakdown via impotence or frigidity of his own marital relationship, for wife-swapping to seem to him to be a viable alternative to monogamous fidelity.
For the generation of men and women now hitting their late teens and early twenties, the sexual climate of the nation has changed dramatically. There is no question that they attain a degree of sexual sophistication many levels above that of their parents’ generation. This is so not merely in respect to their actual premarital sexual experience but, equally importantly, in regard to their knowledge of sexual behavior.
A generation ago, the average adult scarcely knew that wife-swapping existed. Today, the average twelve-year-old knows that certain married couples trade partners for sexual variety. (One swinging couple whom I interviewed had always been very careful to keep their thirteen-year-old daughter from learning of their activities. The girl started off to a party at a friend’s house one evening, then came back explaining that she had forgotten her locker key. But why, her parents inquired, did she need the key to her school locker? She explained that the girls all put their keys in a hat and the boys each drew a key, and whichever girl he drew would be his partner for an evening of necking and light petting. “Just like all of you grownups do,” the child explained nonchalantly, “except that we don’t go all the way.”)
Teenagers who grow up with this sort of background, and who experiment actively and eagerly with sex, find it easy to accept the basic tenet of the swinging society, i.e., that limiting oneself to sexual relations with the same person year after year will sooner or later become monotonous. Because of their sophistication and their generally permissive attitudes, they may feel themselves drawn sexually to other individuals while maintaining a sexual relationship with their intended husband or wife. If they have gone so far as to have satisfying experiences with one or another form of group sex, they may be reluctant to sacrifice this sort of pleasure upon entering marriage and may see no reason to do so.
In these circumstances (and one must emphasize that such cases are by no means the rule, but that it is the direction of the trend which is more significant than the numbers involved), one prevents marital boredom by eliminating its causes in advance. The ultimate result is the phenomenon remarked upon by Patricia Breckinridge—the swinging honeymoon.
• • •
While the Breckinridges might best illustrate the most extreme example of this type of relationship which I have been able to observe in detail, their unequivocal approval of all aspects of swinging and their utter lack of inhibition detract somewhat from their usefulness in illustrating this chapter’s theme. Another young couple, Edmund and Moira Jefferson, serve as more articulate examples with a less extreme view of sexual morality who nonetheless embraced swinging before marriage. While they did not make their honeymoon a pluralistic orgy, they did enter into marriage with the certain understanding that they would begin swinging as soon as the glow of the honeymoon wore off.
Edmund at twenty-four is a law school graduate currently employed in the legal department of a major pharmaceutical firm. He is tall and well-groomed, with the sort of sculptured good looks one associates with movies featuring swordplay. Moira, just a year younger than her husband, is a slender, fair-complected brunette with large brown eyes made to seem larger by the tasteful application of eye makeup. The two look good together, and would be at home in a fashionable nightclub or on the terrace of an exclusive country club.
At the time I interviewed them they had been married for a little over two years. Their initial venture in extramarital sex took place less than two months after their wedding. Their activities at the time of the interview included membership in a group of thirteen couples who meet weekly for sexual exchange, plus occasional meetings with other couples contacted through the correspondence clubs.
• • •
EDMUND: I still had two years of law school to get through when Moira and I first started going together. Up to that time, I’d characterize my sex life as satisfactory but nothing spectacular. I was young when I first had coitus—fifteen at the time—in a gangbang that one of the fellows in my crowd had set up. After that one experience, I didn’t have anything approaching regular sex until I was in college. There were a few girls that I would take out and lay on the first date, but that was the exception rather than the rule. I would say that by the time I started going with Moira I had had extended affairs with seven or eight girls, and one-night stands with maybe a little more than that.
MOIRA: I still have enough of the old double standard in my makeup to make me glad that my husband had a little more premarital experience than I did. Not that I regret anything I did before then—
EDMUND: Don’t you regret some of the action you missed? I know I do.
MOIRA: Oh, once in while, but that’s beside the point. It’s just that I think there’s a better definition of male-female roles in marriage if the husband is more experienced.
EDMUND: See what happens when you marry a sociology major?
MOIRA: See what happens when you marry a know-it-all lawyer? Where was I?
JWW: Your premarital experience—
MOIRA: Oh, yes. I didn’t lose my virginity until I was in college, although in high school I was known far and wide as a very passionate necking partner. Somehow I held on to that little membrane. Pregnancy fear, I guess. Halfway through my freshman year in college I fell in love, and virgin or not I had already decided that when two people were in love they ought to be having sex together, and the boy I was in love with couldn’t have been more in agreement, and we did. I had one affair a year for the rest of my time in college, and each time it would be a rea
l love affair as far as I was concerned, and when it ended I would be utterly shattered and never have anything to do with sex until I went and fell in love again.
EDMUND: What lot to go through.
MOIRA: You can say that again. In my senior year, the boy I was going with planned to marry me after graduation. He had given me his fraternity pin and was just about at the point of setting a date for the wedding when it sudden dawned on me that the last thing I wanted to do was marry him, and realized why. We had been sleeping together for a couple of months, and what I finally saw was that he was a crashing bore in bed. If he had been my first lover I probably wouldn’t have realized this, but he was my fourth and he just wasn’t very exciting company. I gave him his pin back and found some kinder way of explaining why than the truth, and it was then that I realized you didn’t have to be in love to have sex, because shortly thereafter I went out with a boy I didn’t even like, let alone love, and he gave me the first decent screwing I’d had in months.
EDMUND: This is going on tape, honey.
MOIRA: Isn’t it all right to say screwing?
JWW: It’s all right.
MOIRA: Well, it was quite a revelation to discover you didn’t have to love someone to enjoy his company sexually. Not that I immediately set out to become a pushover, because I still felt that a full relationship was more desirable than a quick tumble. I suppose I had four lovers between the time I gave that clod his pin back and the time I met the poor man’s Clarence Darrow.
The New Sexual Underground: Crossing the Last Boundaries (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior Book 10) Page 14