by Dan Savage
“People say such hateful things about swingers,” David said. “We spread diseases; we have no self-control. But we’re very safe, and a swinging environment is controlled and respectful. But you would only know that if you went to one with an open mind, and you saw that people were using condoms, very cautiously, and that everyone was friendly and respectful of each other.”
Bridget especially hates the idea that wives are forced into swinging by controlling husbands.
“The truth is, most women go to their first party because their husbands want to go,” said Bridget. “And most couples don’t do anything at their first party. But it’s also true that it’s the wives who insist on going to more and more parties. Here’s this place where you can be totally sexually free and open in public and completely safe at the same time. How many women get to experience that in their lives? And to share that experience with my husband is a joy.”
David and Bridget are quick to admit that they’re part of the problem. The myths about their lifestyle will be dispelled only when swingers who don’t fit the stereotype come out. Just as potheads with dreads are likelier to be open about smoking marijuana, it’s the sex-crazed lunatics whose lives revolve around sex who are likelier to be open about swinging. If couples like David and Bridget never come out, then their rabbis, priests, friends, family, and neighbors will never reexamine their preconceptions about swingers. It’s a catch-22: Until the Davids and Bridgets come out, it won’t be safe for the Davids and Bridgets to come out.
The nightmare scenario in this catch-22, of course, is that their own children may grow up to believe all the hateful things that are said about swingers—they’re sex-crazed lunatics, wives are forced into swinging by controlling husbands, they spread diseases—and then find out their own parents are swingers. All it would take is a club newsletter, a piece of e-mail, an explicit phone message . . .
And it’s not just their kids David and Bridget worry about. They were on the dance floor at a club near their home once when someone tapped Bridget on the shoulder.
“I turned around and there was this cousin of mine,” said Bridget. “It was a distant cousin, not someone I knew that well, but I was flipped out. He told David his date thought he was cute, like the four of us should go off somewhere together. That was way too incestuous for me.” They’ve never returned to the club where they ran into Bridget’s cousin.
The club they usually attend is in another Chicago suburb. The club is in a private home, and it’s an elaborate setup, with a dance floor, a bar, half a dozen bedrooms, an orgy room, and room for light—very light—bondage and S&M. It sounds like a straight version of a gay bathhouse, but while there are maybe three gay bathhouses in the Chicago area, there are at least nine straight swingers clubs.
David goes up to his office and brings back the newsletter for the club they frequent. There’s a party tomorrow night that David and Bridget will be attending. According to the newsletter, I missed a talent contest held at the most recent party. (“You can sing karaoke, do a dance, or strip, or tell jokes—whatever you’d like!”) The newsletter included a list of upcoming theme parties (Back to School, Talent Contest II, Sci-Fi Night, Oktoberfest Party), a list of birthdays of clubs members, some bad clip art, and a funny story someone found on-line about Saint Peter trying to explain the “suburban tribe” to a perplexed God. I assumed the story was about the tribe of suburban swingers who frequent the club but it turned out to be about suburbanites and their lawns. On the back of the newsletter were the names and addresses of nine other swingers clubs in the Chicago area, clubs with nudge-nudge names like Private Affairs, Couples Hideaway, Club Adventure.
David and Bridget usually attend two parties a month. David’s mother, who lives nearby, baby-sits on those Saturday nights.
“It’s her time with the boys, and it’s our date night,” said Bridget. “She thinks we’re going to dinner and a movie. She’s asleep in the guest room when we get come home. We don’t bring people home, and no one is the wiser.”
“We are always having to pretend we’ve seen all these movies we haven’t seen,” laughs David. “Mom thinks we see two movies a month, so we’re always ‘up’ on movies, you know? She calls us from video stores. ‘You saw Bicentennial Man, didn’t you? Was it good or bad? Should I rent it?’ And I have to say, ‘What was that, Mom? Bicentennial Man? Uh, two thumbs up, Mom.’ ”
They’ve worked out a system to silently communicate with each other at a club, whether they’re on the dance floor or in an orgy room. They make eye contact with each other constantly (“nonverbal checking in”), and if they wind up on opposite sides of the room a tug on the ear means “come back and be with me.” In an orgy room or during a group-grope on the dance floor, three taps on the shoulder or thigh means, “I’m uncomfortable, let’s take a break.”
But it’s been a long time since they’ve had to use the three taps.
“We almost never feel uncomfortable,” said Bridget.
“The last time she had to tap me three times was when we ran into her cousin,” said David. “Those three taps just about dislocated my shoulder.”
David and Bridget laughed. We’d moved into the living room, onto the couch, and Bridget was sitting next to David, leaning into him.
“When we’re at a party,” David continued, “we’ll sometimes look at each other and say, ‘Who has more fun than we do?’ Because no one does.” David looked at Bridget. “We’ve been married ten years, and no couple has more fun than we do.”
“There are times when I’m walking up the block waving to people, and I think, ‘Oh, if the neighbors only knew!’ ” Bridget said. “People would be shocked.”
But isn’t it possible that some of your neighbors are swingers? Couldn’t they be sitting in their living rooms in Buffalo Grove, saying the exact same thing?
“That’s possible, that’s possible,” David said, his eyes twinkling. “I guess it just goes to show that you can’t take people at face value.”
“All people have secrets.” Bridget nodded. “But some people’s secrets are more fun.”
The thrill of keeping a secret may be the penultimate reason David and Bridget don’t plan on coming out, running a very close second to the disapproval of their friends and family. Like a businessman who gets a secret charge out of wearing panties under his power suit, David and Bridget get a little if-they-only-knew charge when they wave to neighbors. They’re a married couple in their forties with one mortgage, two cars, and three kids; they’re adults with responsibilities and big-time jobs—and they lie to David’s mother about where they’ve been like a couple of horny teenagers. Twice a month they get to be accomplices and coconspirators, sinning in secret so as not to scandalize their friends, families, neighbors, and rabbi.
“Having a secret is fun. But the important thing is we feel closer as a couple thanks to the parties,” said Bridget. “It puts some extra zest into our sex life, the sex life we share with each other.”
David and Bridget emphasized that they do have a sex life outside of the parties.
“We make love just about every day,” Bridget said, “whether we go to a club or not.”
“There are times when I can’t believe how lucky we are,” David said. “She’ll be on her knees, kissing another woman, while I’m fucking her from behind—”
David stopped when he saw the startled look on my face. For all the talk about sex, this was the first even remotely graphic thing David or Bridget had said, and I was taken aback. Seeing them going through all the parenting motions that evening—feeding their kids, correcting their kids, running herd on their kids—I had come to see them through the lens that strips known parents of all sexual energy and agency. Despite all the talk about sex and secrets and parties, David and Bridget were a mom and a dad in my mind’s eye, not sexual adventurers, and to have David suddenly create a mental image that was so specific and overtly sexual—well, I giggled a little nervously and instinctively looked around for the bo
ys. Our voices had been getting louder and louder after we moved to the couch in the living room. Bridget followed my eyes and then got up and walked over to the top of the stairs, just to make sure the boys were still anesthetized in front of the TV.
“Where I was going was—,” David whispered.
“Try not to shock the sex-advice columnist, honey.”
“—in a normal marriage, if you’re attracted to someone else, you can’t mention it to your partner. But because we can be honest with each other, we can really share our fantasies and desires, and that brings us closer together. All of my fantasies involve my wife—how many married men can say that?”
I ask them the obvious question, the one that’s inevitably put to swingers: Don’t they get jealous watching each other mess around with other people?
“Married people who aren’t in the lifestyle sometimes get jealous,” Bridget said. “You can’t avoid feeling jealous from time to time. All married people are attracted to people they’re not married to. It happens to all couples. But we can talk about it. Our feelings of jealousy, they arise because we can be honest with each other about sex in ways that nonswinging couples can’t. Being in this environment makes you communicate more, and more honestly, than most couples. We don’t have to lie and pretend that we don’t find other people attractive.”
Swinging is not for everyone, as all swingers are quick to emphasize. By contrast, according to Bennett, Bork, Buchanan, Dr. Laura, Alan Keyes, et alia, monogamy is for everyone—whether we like it or not. Swinging has allowed David and Bridget to incorporate normal, healthy lust, one of the natural sins, into their marriage. Rather than seeing their attraction to other people pull them away from each other, David and Bridget have made lust something they do together and share and, most important, control and police.
“I don’t feel like we’re doing anything wrong,” said David. “The Torah says a man should leave his parents and cling to his wife. Well, we’ve been together for ten years and in the lifestyle for four years, and we’re still clinging to each other.”
“This may sound crazy, but what we’re doing feels to us like the most natural thing in the world,” said Bridget.
And so it is.
This may come as shock to some—David’s mother, my mother, the pope in Rome—but humans didn’t evolve two-to-a-bungalow. We evolved in sprawling, multigenerational tribes, like apes or hippies, our sex lives messy and communal, with little privacy and no rules. Early humans made it up as they went, since God didn’t see fit to deliver the Commandments for the first 37,000 years of our species’ existence. (And it was another 1,200 years before he sent his son down for a lynching, Roman-style.) Without Commandments or virtuecrats to tell us what to do—or who to do it to or how often to do it to them—early humans pretty much did whatever they liked. In evolutionary terms, monogamous coupling is a recent development, one that’s virtually unheard of in the animal kingdom. The supposed monogamous behavior of certain animals—one kind of primate, a couple of species of birds—turned out, upon closer examination, to be so much wishful thinking on our part.
To his credit, Bennett admits monogamy is unnatural. As with global warming, the scientific evidence against monogamy being “natural” is so vast that only the most dishonest of conservative pundits pretend otherwise. In The Broken Hearth Bennett admits to something many conservative critics wouldn’t admit under torture: “Evolutionary biologists tell us that both women and men, but especially men, are naturally promiscuous,” Bennett writes. “They also assure us that a sexually exclusive, lifelong commitment is unnatural.”
Maybe he’s trying to be chivalrous, but Bennett doesn’t tell the whole truth. Contemporary research into human sexuality is showing that women aren’t any less “naturally promiscuous” than men. Indeed, women may be more naturally promiscuous.
In The Lifestyle, Terry Gould cites the work of groundbreaking sex researcher Mary Jane Sherfey. In the 1960s, Sherfey discovered that “the female’s clitoris was an internal system as large and as refined as a male’s penis.” Orgasms derived from clitoral stimulation alone had long been dismissed as “immature,” and women who thought twice about their clitorises were labeled nymphomaniacs. The vaginal orgasm was considered appropriate, desirable, and “mature”; the clitoral orgasm—indeed the clitoris itself—was dismissed as lesser, base, and “vestigial.” But Sherfey discovered that there was no such thing as a vaginal orgasm. Some women could climax from vaginal intercourse alone because their internal clitoral tissue—the majority of their clitoral tissue—was being stimulated. But most women needed stimulation of the “head” of the clitoris, the exposed part, in order to climax—just as most men need stimulation of the head of their penises to climax.
It was Sherfey’s research, published in 1966, that first demonstrated that the clitoris was as central to a woman’s experience of sexual pleasure—and to her ability to orgasm—as a man’s penis was to his.
What does this have to do with female promiscuity? Well, in studying female and male sexual response cycles, Sherfey documented a shocking difference: “Whereas in males the engorged blood drains back from [the penis],” writes Gould, “resulting in a comparatively long recovery time, in a woman each orgasm is followed by an almost immediate refilling of the erectile chambers. This subsequent engorgement is in no way diminished from the first and produces even more arousal in the tissues. Consequently, the more orgasms a woman has, Sherfey wrote, ‘the stronger they become; the more orgasms she has, the more she can have. To all intents and purposes, the human female is sexually insatiable. . . .’ ” (The emphasis is Sherfey’s.)
It’s a staggering thought for straight men: No woman can ever—ever—be truly satisfied by just one man. Ever, ever, ever. That may be overstating it a little. One man could conceivably satisfy one woman—provided he’s willing to bring her a dozen or more orgasms before he enjoys his one comparatively pathetic and brief little orgasm. Or, if he comes too soon, he may be able to satisfy her if he’s willing to continue stimulating her with his tongue and fingers—or her vibrator—until he’s ready to go again. And again and again and again. (Straight guys can say what they like about male homosexuality but, hey, at least I can roll over and go to sleep with a clear conscience after my partner has one orgasm.)
While most women are, as Sherfey wrote, “unaware of the extent of [their] orgasmic capacity,” the same can’t be said of women in the lifestyle. Like Bridget, most women attend their first swing events at the request of their husbands. And many of these women soon discover that it’s female sexuality, not male sexuality, that finds its ultimate expression at swing clubs. Which may explain why, as Gould points out (and Bridget concurred), husbands may bring wives to their first party but it’s wives who drag husbands back again and again.
So what’s in it for the husbands? The wives in swinging couples get multiple partners and an evening of orgasms too numerous to count. Beyond the obvious (and not insignificant) perks of variety and novelty, why would a man want to watch other men bring his wife to orgasm after orgasm? Especially when he can have only one himself?
Sperm competition.
Back to the science of swinging: Males of a primate species have large testicles if other males are mating at the same time with the same females. Gorillas, to take one example, live in cohesive groups comprising one adult male, two to three adult females, and their offspring. When a gorilla female is ready to mate, normally only one adult male is there as a partner. Since one alpha male monopolizes all the females, the four-hundred-pound male gorilla has relatively tiny testes (relative to his body size), because his sperm doesn’t have to compete with the sperm of other males.
Compared to gorillas, chimps live in more loosely structured social groups, with a lot of males and females, and when a female chimp is in heat, she typically mates with every male in her group—and some sneak off at night to mate with males in other groups. And she does all this mating in a twenty-four-hour period. So there’s an
awful lot of sperm sloshing around inside her the next day, all of it racing to get to her one egg. The male with the biggest testicles produces the most sperm, making his sperm the likeliest to win the competition, fertilize the egg, and pass his genes—including the one for big balls—on to the next generation of chimps.
So how do the testicles of Homo sapiens measure up? The balls of the human male are larger compared to our body size than they would be if Homo sapiens had evolved with some expectation of female faithfulness. The size of our balls tells us that human sperm, unlike gorilla sperm, evolved to compete with the sperm of other males, presumably in the vaginal canal. The balls of human males aren’t as big as the balls of male chimps—relative to our respective sizes—because female humans don’t fuck around as much as female chimps. But human females were still designed for fucking around.
But what’s in swinging for men? Researchers have discovered that human males are programmed to ejaculate more sperm when they know or suspect that their female partners have recently been with other males. To ejaculate more sperm, males have longer-lasting, more intense orgasms. Gould calls it “sperm competition syndrome,” and in most men it’s a subconscious response to a long absence or a suspected infidelity. When a husband returns from a business trip (or the wife returns), the husband is anxious to make love to his wife. Sure, absence makes the heart grow fonder. But absence also triggers a physiological response, an evolutionary stratagem, that prompts the man to have sex with “his” woman. His body assumes her body has some other male’s semen in it. He may think he wants to have sex with his wife right away because he’s happy to see her, but his body wants to have sex right away because it wants to “flood out” the semen of any other males who mated with his woman while he was away.