Beyond Group Sex: Doing Their Own Thing (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

by John Warren Wells

  But even if the situation is all different with that couple, and despite the fact that in the book they come across as very different people from us, all artistic and unconventional and sort of hippies in a way, they still must have been through things that we could identify with. Of course, it would be even better with a couple who had still more in common with us, because there are so many things about this kind of a situation that no one else could possibly appreciate without going through it for yourself. Things you would never think of until they happened to come up in your life.

  Like maiden names, for instance. Rob and I lived together as man and wife for quite some time before we actually did get married. He always introduced me as his wife, and we were Mr. and Mrs. as far as anyone was concerned. And I didn’t have to go through changing my identification, either, because I didn’t have to change my last name in order to play the part of Rob’s wife.

  But the first time I had to fill out a form where you had to give your maiden name, I didn’t know what to put. If I was married to Rob, my maiden name would be a repeat of my last name, and all you get that way are funny looks. I started using my mother’s maiden name, which is the name I used when I ultimately did get married, and that was fine and easy to remember until the day I opened a savings account and gave my name and then her maiden name as my own, and then they wanted to know my mother’s maiden name for their records, at which point I almost keeled over from shock. They ask things like that so nobody can clean out your account with your passbook, because they won’t know the information. I just stammered and said I couldn’t remember it, and the bank officer gave me one of the funniest looks I’ve ever received in my life.

  Another thing that is sort of weird is when people tell you you look enough alike to pass for brother and sister. This is something you’ll hear said to almost any married couple that looks at all alike, and Rob and I do have a very definite family resemblance, and because we’re so close emotionally our faces tend to assume similar expressions, so we hear it all the time, both from swingers and from total strangers. We’ve gotten used to it years ago. But sometimes when you hear it you wonder if there’s an undercurrent to the sentence, as if the person really suspects that you are brother and sister and watching your reactions to see if his suspicions will be confirmed. Especially when the person asking the question is a swinger.

  Generally we just say that this is something everybody says, which is true, and try to pass it off as insignificantly as possible, Or I’ll say, “No, he’s really my father,” or Rob’ll say, “As a matter of fact, Emily’s my mother,” and we’ll laugh it off in that fashion.

  When you called the first time and talked about interviewing us, I really thought you knew, because what else would be the point in interviewing us in the first place, since there’s nothing very special about us to distinguish us from all the other swingers in the world. And also you mentioned the name of the person who had recommended us to you, and he and his wife are two of the few people who know, so I more or less took it for granted that he had told you. I thought you weren’t saying anything over the phone because there are things people don’t say over telephones, or possibly because you thought maybe you were being put on by the guy and you would wait until you met us to see what would happen.

  As a matter of fact, I was pretty ticked off with him for telling you. We would never have told him if we hadn’t trusted him to keep it to himself, just him and his wife. And since then we had swung with them again, and there were other couples present, and he never said a word to the others about Rob and me being brother and sister. If anything, he got a kick out of the fact that he knew it and the others didn’t. So I called him up, or rather Rob did, to ask what on earth he meant letting the cat out of the bag, and also to make sure that you were all right, never having read any of your books at the time or not remembering your name if I had read some. And then he insisted that he hadn’t told you anything and that we could play it honest with you or not, depending how we felt about it.

  Rob and I discussed it between then and the time you came over here and decided that whether or not we let the cat out of the bag would depend on how you came across and how we felt about you, and that either of us could feel free to say it if the feeling was right, without having to check to see how the other felt. Anyway, each of us always knows how the other feels about just about everything. We can just about read each other’s minds, and anyway, our minds are so much alike in the first place.

  As you found out, it didn’t take us long enough to make up our minds about you, and from the look on your face it was pretty obvious that our friend was telling the truth about not having let you in on the secret, because nobody could possibly manage to look that surprised, not and be faking it, or if you did, you would deserve an Academy Award for your performance, because it was that convincing.

  • • •

  My surprise was convincing because it was wholly unfeigned; I had had no intimation in advance that Rob and Emily were related except as husband and wife. Their physical resemblance, while indisputable, was not particularly striking. Both had regular and even features, light brown hair, and brown eyes. There was no striking feature that they shared which shouted out the suggestion of a blood relationship.

  I had called them at the suggestion of another swinger whom I had interviewed and with whom I had subsequently struck up a friendship. “You’ll absolutely have to interview Rob and Emily,” he told me. “They’re really something special, believe me.”

  How, I had asked, were they special? I would see, he assured me. I pressed him for details. Were they interracial? Especially unorthodox in sexual habits? Was there a wide discrepancy in their ages? What was so special about them?

  He answered that they had been married for six or seven years, had no children, lived in a suburb, that Rob was a marketing executive with a large corporation, that they were infrequent churchgoers and politically middle-of-the-road, although like most swingers they were liberal on questions of censorship, rights of privacy, and sexual freedom. Their sexual habits, according to my friend’s point of view, were on the conservative side; they preferred swinging with just one other couple to group scenes, and while Emily was into bisexualism, Rob was not.

  Then why should I interview them?

  “You’ll have to find that out for yourself,” he told me with a disquieting smile.

  I must admit that I was frankly apprehensive about the whole thing. While the majority of persons in the sexual underground are very pleasant people to be with, there is inevitably a sprinkling of nuts and cranks one would rather not have anything to do with. It seemed unlikely that my friend would purposely arrange an unpleasant experience for me. Still, I had not known him that long and did not know him that well, and it was not inconceivable that he had a rather bizarre sense of humor. It also occurred to me that he might think it funny to send me merrily on my way to interview a pair of people who were not swingers at all, in the hope that I or they or all of us would find the experience faintly humiliating.

  I thus phoned instead of writing, and assured myself that Rob and Emily did know my friend and were obviously swingers of one sort or another. When I arrived at their doorstep, I met an attractive but unremarkable couple in their late twenties, Rob tall and lean, Emily a head shorter and slender. We sat drinking iced coffee in their living room. After a certain amount of exploratory conversation, I asked them how they had first gotten into swinging.

  “It was an easy adjustment for us to make,” Rob said. “You see, Emily and I are brother and sister in addition to being husband and wife, and once you’ve gotten past traditional morality enough to accept that, it’s no big deal to get into swinging.”

  My reaction, which was probably fairly interesting to watch, was prompted far more by the complete unexpectedness of the revelation than anything else. Various interviews and correspondence have come to convince me that incest occurs far more often than one generally suspects.

 
; Certainly the greater portion of such incidents comprise contacts in which at least one of the participants is a child. Of these, the sexual seduction of a young girl by an older male relation—father, stepfather, uncle—is far and away the most common. (The father-daughter relationship, incidentally, is unique in that it is not specifically proscribed in that section of the book of Leviticus which defines incest. This may be regarded as indicative of a particular view on the subject on the part of either God or Moses, as you prefer.)

  The number of officially reported contacts of this nature is high; obviously the number that go unreported is infinitely greater. Nor are such relationships always of short duration. R. E. L. Masters has reported a case of a father who seduced his ten-year-old daughter and continued to have relations with her for almost six years, later seducing her younger sister at an even more tender age; and Dr. Benjamin Morse showed me a letter several years ago from an utterly distraught woman from one of the Rocky Mountain states in which she begged his advice, explaining that her husband had been having sexual intercourse nightly with their daughter since the child was nine. The girl was now fourteen, and the mother, who had known what was going on almost from the beginning, was unable to persuade her husband to discontinue the affair. Even her threats to report him to the authorities would not deter him, and the poor woman literally did not know what to do.

  There is considerably less known about incestuous relations carried on among adults, whether parent and child or siblings. (I am, of course, not concerned here with situations that are variously regarded as legal incest, such as the marriage of first cousins.) Little is known because such a relationship is so easy to disguise and persons who participate therein are so strongly motivated to maintain their secret. The new permissiveness in sexual matters has not eased the traditional incest taboos to any appreciable extent, nor does it seem likely to do so except in certain numerically insignificant areas of the sexual counterculture.

  I strongly doubt that this dearth of information denotes a dearth of incident. As I have remarked elsewhere, an incestuous alliance is probably the easiest sexual idiosyncrasy to conceal, with the possible exception of autoeroticism. In any area of our society, two biologically related persons may live together without anyone suspecting that they also have sex together. Indeed, I know of a pair of rather obvious lesbians, unrelated to each other, who have simplified the problem of living together in a small community by actually passing themselves off as sisters, explaining away their different last names by stating that one of them was married and has since been divorced. If a brother and sister choose to live under the same roof, if a daughter keeps house for a father, or a son goes on living with his mother, they need hardly worry about arousing suspicion so long as they refrain from copulating in front of open windows in lighted rooms.

  This is by no means to suggest that the cohabitation of blood relatives should serve as grounds for suspicion, for heaven’s sake. I’m sure the proportion of such living arrangements in which overt incest exists is roughly akin to the proportion of pork in a can of pork and beans, but I’m also sure that much the same ratio prevails between reported cases and the whole.

  In Three Is Not a Crowd, a study for four permanent troilistic arrangements, one case concerned a young man, his wife, and his sister. It is this case to which Emily referred in the passage earlier in this chapter. Peter and Wanda, the brother and sister, began sexual relations with each other at eight and nine respectively, several years earlier than Rob and Emily. Early on, they felt it was unfair that brothers and sisters were not allowed to marry each other, and made occasional plans throughout the years that followed to move to another city, change their names, and live together permanently as man and wife. Peter and I speculated at the time on the frequency with which this very thing must happen, and agreed that it probably happens far more often than most people would guess. But while I had heard periodically of brother-and-sister teams who swung together as a couple, I had not yet met or confirmed the existence of siblings married to each other.

  I found Rob and Emily particularly good subjects. As a very general rule, it has been my experience that the more specialized and uncommon a person’s sexual life style is, the more anxious he is to talk about it in detail—once he has decided to talk about it openly in the first place, that is. The more closely one guards this sort of secret, the greater the relief at having a not unsympathetic ear to pour it into.

  In addition to seeing the couple together twice, I also spoke with Emily alone on several other occasions. I thus got to know her somewhat better than I did her husband-brother. For this reason the material that follows is here rendered in Emily’s words, which would seem simpler and more straightforward than attempting to present it in the form of a dialogue.

  There is a particular fact that I have been hard I put to decide whether or not to mention, and that is that Emily and I had sexual relations during those meetings when Rob was not present, presumably with his knowledge and approval. Whether this nugget of information is relevant to an understanding of either Rob or Emily or the author is something I cannot determine. I mention it on the chance that it might be, and on the theory that he who devotes so much time and effort to revealing other people’s sex lives to the world is hardly justified in making a fetish of personal privacy. I hope few readers will be taken aback to learn that my interaction with subjects now and then transcends the purely verbal plane; it would perhaps assure them to know that this happens rarely, and that one needs the talents of a diplomat to explain to not a few subjects that for the most part one’s interest as a journalist does not imply interest in any other capacity. Rather a thorny problem at times . . .

  Emily and Rob spoke at some length about their background, which seems to have been rather ordinary. Both of their parents were only children, and the last of their grandparents died early in Rob and Emily’s childhood. Their father, an alcoholic who seems to have been emotionally unstable, deserted the family on several occasions, disappearing permanently when Emily was nine and Rob seven and a half. Their mother worked afternoons and early evenings as a cocktail waitress, frequently staying out all night. While she never failed to support her children adequately, they brought themselves up to a considerable extent, preparing their own meals much of the time and laundering their own clothes. Neither seems to resent either their father’s desertion or their mother’s benign neglect. The mother has since died, and never knew that Emily and Rob were having sexual relations. The father has not been heard from since his departure, and his children do not know and do not profess to care whether he is alive or dead.

  • • •

  We were always very close as children because there were just the two of us, but I don’t know if we were that much closer than any brother and sister would be in that set of circumstances. All we had was each other. We would both have friends at school, but neither of us ever had a best friend.

  Looking back on it, I’m a little surprised that we didn’t get started sexually earlier than we did. The other brother and sister that you wrote about started much earlier. And of the swingers who know the truth about us, several have mentioned that they used to fool around with their brother or sister, as the case may be, and that this happened very early on, say, between the ages of eight and ten.

  What may have had something to do with this is that we were never in the habit of being naked in front of anybody, not even each other. I believe this was my mother’s doing, that she gave us a sense of shame about nudity and being nude in anyone’s presence. This had an effect on us for a long period of time and may have an effect to this very day. When we began swinging, for example, I had little worry about the idea of having sex with someone, but with each new person I met I was a little anxious about the moment when I would be undressed for the first time. Then, on the other hand, once I was comfortable being nude in a certain person’s presence I took particular pleasure in it, getting a kick out of it almost.

  In a way it is surpr
ising that my mother would be such a puritan on the subject of nudity, even to the point where she made either of us feel ashamed to be seen by her, let alone by each other. Because as far as her own morals were concerned, you would have to say that she was what you could only call a tramp, in that she would pick up strange men where she worked and let them have sex with her, although there was never a time when she brought them to our house. Whether or not she actually ever took money from any of them I don’t know.

  If Rob and I had grown up like the ones in your book, taking baths together, for example, I think we would have started touching each other as a matter of course, and it would have gone on from there in the natural fashion. I agree completely with the brother in your book saying that nothing could be more natural than for a brother and sister to discover sex together. I think in most cases it would wind up being just that, with the two of them having sex for a while and then moving on to other partners, because most brothers and sisters in my experience would not be suited to be that close to each other and would be more fulfilled with other partners. And just judging from the number of people who suddenly open up and mention that they did various things with a brother or sister during childhood, and who would never get around to mentioning this if they did not know first that Rob and I were brother and sister, I would say that this is what happens very, very often, that there is this contact, which may not go as far as actual intercourse but that it does happen for a while and then the two either grow out of it or they stop it because of knowing that it is supposed to be wrong.

  When we were children I had seen Rob a couple of times, just to catch a glimpse of him naked, and he had seen me in the same way, but never up close and never actually one of us showing himself to the other. However, we were always free and easy when it came to talking about sex with each other. As children we both began to find things out at about the same time, because while I was a year and a half older, this was balanced out by the fact that boys would find out about these things earlier than girls. And at school the girls would talk only to each other about this, and so would the boys, and then later on Rob and I would sit around and compare notes on what we had learned.