The next time I went out with that boy he tried to get me to suck him off. After I got him to tell me exactly what he meant, I refused point-blank and said I would never do anything of the sort. He tried to talk me into it, and the more he talked, the more interested I became in the whole procedure, although not in terms of doing it with him, but with Rob. I let him go on about how wonderful it felt and how really passionate girls liked to do it. I guess he expected me to refuse, although when I was using my hands on him he did keep trying to push my head down toward his penis. Once when my mouth was just a few inches from him I had an urge to do it, or at least to open my mouth and catch his come when he shot, but each time I pulled my head back and finally told him to stop it or I wouldn’t do anything at all for him, and that was the end of that.
So I couldn’t wait to get home and try it out with Rob, which I did as soon as I got home. He had at least heard of fellatio, although he thought it was something boys only did to each other, and that the boys who did it were fairies. He didn’t know for sure of anyone who did it, but had heard the usual sort of stories. I did it to him, and it was wonderful. At first I had trouble learning not to gag on his penis, but I learned quickly. I loved having him come in my mouth and swallowing it, and also loved taking him in my mouth when he was soft and tiny and working on him until he grew hard right in my mouth.
It was a few days after that when he told me he would like to kiss my genitals. It was not something he had ever heard or read of, but something he thought up on his own. Nor had I ever known anything about it, so you could say that we invented cunnilingus ourselves, which is something most people don’t believe when they hear it. In fact, it is surprising how many people do not get started with oral sex at all until they are actually swingers or on the verge of becoming swingers. They may be married for years and not even try it. The idea of just thinking it up by ourselves usually amazes them, as they all knew about it long before they were even willing to give it a try.
I don’t think at this stage that either of us thought what we were doing was wrong. Except that sex was supposed to be wrong whoever you did it with, which we knew was the way things were supposed to be but which we just did not believe. As far as our acts together being a special sin called “incest,” you may have trouble believing this, but that was something we never even considered.
We knew there was such a thing as incest, but at the time we thought of it in terms of marriage. You couldn’t marry your brother or sister or mother or father because that was incest and it was sinful, and because of the sin you would have deformed children, or they would be retarded.
We didn’t know that the sex act itself was incest. In fact, we didn’t think it would be incest if we screwed in the sense of its being worse than screwing in general. The reason we didn’t screw, besides being generally afraid of it at that point, was because we were fearful of having children, which we thought would have to be deformed or retarded or have something wrong with them.
There was even a point after we did start screwing when we would talk about how great it would be if we only could get married, but knew that we couldn’t because that would be incest, whereas we were screwing regularly and didn’t realize that it was the same thing as far as the rest of the world was concerned, married or not.
• • •
I did have trouble believing this at first, and cannot expect the reader to be less incredulous. When sex play between siblings occurs in early childhood or among extremely sheltered children, there is frequently no immediate awareness that any incest taboos have been transgressed. But in consideration of the sexual sophistication Rob and Emily had attained by this time, I was at first moved to take their insistence that they did not know to what extent they were violating social standards with at least a few grains of salt. As I interpreted it, each was probably aware that sexual relations between siblings were more strictly prohibited than identical relations between unrelated adolescents—but because neither had voiced this private awareness at the time, they now honestly thought it had not occurred to them.
I have since come closer to believing the literal truth of their statements on the subject. I cannot single out any evidence for my change in feeling other than the increasing understanding of another person that comes only through personal contact.
One element that initially reinforced my doubts was the perfect secrecy which cloaked their sexual intimacy from the beginning. Neither one of them ever seems to have so much as hinted at what they were doing to either a classmate or an adult, as if both knew implicitly that the subject was far too strictly forbidden to be brought to any kind of light. But I came to learn that neither had confided any sexual detail of any sort to others. Emily had had a desperate need to discuss her experiences at the drive-in theater, yet even before she seduced her brother she was not moved to talk about it with girlfriends, and instead sought out Rob as her confidant. Both were sufficiently imbued with orthodox normative mores—i.e., what everyone thinks is right, as distinguished from what everyone does—to know that all sex was deemed shameful and improper.
I am certain their mother had a tremendous amount to do with this. The combination of extremely puritanical values—her obsession with nudity was surely neurotic in light of her own behavior—with extremely unpuritanical habits is neatly echoed by the great dichotomy between what Rob and Emily were able to do with a minimum of guilt and what they were willing to profess. This unusual combination of guiltless private acceptance and a great desire for outward propriety has by no means ceased to color their life style; on the one hand, they are more at ease about their relationship than I would have thought possible, and on the other hand, they are more intent on keeping it a secret than they have to be. Only a very small number of their swinging partners are ever told the truth, despite the fact that the revelation is of the sort unlikely to disconcert many experienced members of the sexual underground.
It is interesting to note that neither Rob nor Emily seemed to resent their mother to any marked degree. They regarded her (quite realistically, I would say) as a tramp, without either condemning or endorsing her trampishness. While their unconscious feelings may be a bit less simple, on the surface they seem not to have cared for or about the woman very much one way or the other. They neither loved nor hated her, and one concludes she played a surprisingly unimportant role in their lives.
For the next several years, they managed the unlikely feat of continuing to have sexual relations virtually every day without becoming guilt-ridden and without letting anyone so much as suspect what they were doing. On frequent occasions they enjoyed sex at times when their mother was in the house and wide awake. They would presumably be doing their homework together, and their closed door was no cause for wonder, as they had been taught from childhood to keep their doors closed as a matter of course. Rob in particular said that such times had a special urgency and excitement to them, but it is hard to say whether this stemmed from the proximity of their mother specifically or if the presence of any other person in the house would have had the same effect. (Occasional sexual acts are enhanced for a majority of people when there is a slight danger of discovery or a sense of performing a private act in a public place. Katherine, the female voyeur of this book’s second chapter, found it far more stimulating to perform fellatio on her partner in a Times Square theater than to perform the act while watching the same sort of films in the privacy of his apartment.)
The relationship thrived with no evident adverse effect upon their ability to function in school or in social situations. Coitus was first performed a full two years after the onset of intimacy. A condom was used as a contraceptive measure. Either the condom itself or, more likely, concern over its reliability tended to limit their enjoyment of the act on this and other occasions. Even now, with Rob surgically sterile and Emily a user of birth-control pills (the latter because one’s swinging partners are not always vasectomy veterans), oral-genital relations remain their preferred form of congre
ss, with each other and with others as well.
Rob reported that they both did significantly better in school for having sex regularly. I would have been surprised if this were not the case. The average adolescent spends a third of his waking hours seeking sexual satisfaction and the other third worrying about it, and I would suspect any one with a steady and satisfactory sexual outlet would perform better academically.
(A decade ago this was demonstrable statistically on a university level. Students almost invariably raised their grades after getting married. Now, with stable sexual unions between students a commonplace feature of college life, it is harder to compile equivalent data.)
Their social life was also changed, and was affected in two ways at once. Both were more at ease in dating situations; Emily was able to relax more with boys, and Rob entered into dating with no difficulty. But at the same time, the secret they shared and their concomitant habit of using each other as sole and total confidant precluded the formation of an emotionally intimate relationship with anyone else, whether of the same or opposite sex. “We told each other everything,” Rob said, “and we didn’t tell anybody else anything at all.” Thus dating never really played its role as a mechanism of teaching sexual selection. The two of them had made their selection already and were pleased with it.
• • •
When we compare notes with other couples on how they got into swinging in the first place, one thing you’ll hear a lot of the time is either the husband or the wife saying they were worried at one point about their husband or wife perhaps meeting someone they would like better, or have a better time with sexually, and that this was one of the things that made them hesitate to swing. Others would want a threesome for this reason, especially husbands who wanted threesomes with a bi girl so that they would not have to worry or be jealous of their wives with another man. For some reason the sight of the wife with another woman would not make them jealous in this way. And we also have met people who do not like to swing with single couples, meaning couples who operate as a couple but are not married to each other. They’re afraid of this because singles are unattached and could form a relationship with someone they met at a swinging party, whereas you don’t run this risk with someone who is also committed to a marriage.
We have always thought of this as so silly. Because in thinking about swinging, which we did not have to do very long before deciding it was for us, that kind of jealousy never entered into it. If anything, you would think someone who was a swinger would be far beyond that kind of sexual jealousy, and I guess eventually most of them do outgrow it. But I even have heard wives say that they got into swinging because of jealousy; they couldn’t stand the idea of their husbands cheating and them not knowing about it, so they wanted to be there and get some for themselves at the same time.
Well, Rob and I are just not jealous, and that goes back to long before we were swingers, long before we were actually married, even before we were living together as man and wife but hadn’t taken the plunge of making it legal. If you can call it legal.
In fact, you could even say that we had the swinger philosophy from the time we were kids and first started having sex together. There was no question but that we would go out on dates just like anybody else. At the very first I asked Rob if it would bother him if I did things with other boys, and he didn’t even know what I was talking about, because what was there to be bothered about? He had been very excited that first time when I told him what I had done at the drive-in, and after that he always enjoyed hearing me tell him what I had done in the fullest possible detail, both out of interest and wanting to share it with me and because it got him hot.
It was the same with me when Rob began dating and seeing girls. I was very proud of him. He has always been tall for his age, and nowadays most people who meet us think we are the same age, or if anything, he is older. When he started dating he had no trouble getting girls his own age or even older than himself to go out with him, which made it easier for him to get someplace with them than with younger girls. Also he was so much more experienced than the average boy his age because of all the things we had done together. I was proud of him and loved to have him tell me what he had done and what the girl was like and what he liked and didn’t like about her and everything else, the more realistic the better. The most exciting thing was to both go out on separate dates on the same evening and do a tremendous amount of petting but not come, not letting ourselves come, and then getting together afterward and talking about it in all the gory details until we couldn’t stand it, and then going at each other like crazy. Not that we generally made a big thing about not coming with our dates, or not that we had anything in particular against it, but on special occasions this would make it a real treat for us.
The only thing that I guess you could put in the same class as jealousy was that neither of us wanted to screw anybody else until we had screwed each other, and we had at first decided not to screw each other, because of fear of getting pregnant. This was fine with me, as I did not want to screw anybody else, either, so it was no big deal for me to hold out, although it made a lot of boys miss out on something they really seemed to want. But I had gotten to the point where if I really liked a boy I was willing to suck him off, which I have always enjoyed, and when I did that there were never any complaints. The only thing was that if the boy was really experienced, he would ask me how I had gotten so good at it. Boys without experience couldn’t tell how good I was, because whom could they compare me to?
Eventually Rob had a girl that he was pretty sure he could screw, and he told me so and said he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to or not. I wanted him to, but at the same time I didn’t, and at first we couldn’t figure out why we felt this way, but we talked about it and realized that each of us wanted to be the other’s first. And that was really what made us get around to screwing for the first time.
After that we would do it now and then and try different positions just to see what they were like, but we never did it very often at that time, preferring oral sex, and out of fear of getting pregnant. For a long time I still didn’t do it with anybody else for that reason, meaning pregnancy. Then I did once or twice but couldn’t loosen up at all, and decided I didn’t like it enough to do it with anybody but Rob. As a matter of fact, I was never able to have an orgasm screwing another man until after we got into swinging and I was on the pill. I can really say the pill made the difference, because from the day I was on it I never had any trouble.
Rob did screw other girls, partly because it was easier for him to get them to do that than to do other things, and you can figure that out for yourself, because I can’t figure out what was the matter with them. Also he said a blow-job from a girl who didn’t know what she was doing wasn’t much fun, whereas it could be enjoyable to screw her even if she didn’t do anything but lie there.
We used to talk even then about how we wished we could see each other with other people. The closest we came was a couple of times when we went out on double dates. Rob didn’t have a car, of course, and I would talk my date into letting Rob and whoever he was going with have the back seat and go along with us. My date usually worried that Rob would cramp his style, being my brother and all, which was a real laugh, but I couldn’t let on what was so funny about it, so I would just say something snippy to the effect that if he managed to do half as well in the front seat as my little brother did in the back seat, then none of us would have anything to worry about.
• • •
One waits in vain for the sudden trauma of discovering that the relationship is incestuous, forbidden, immoral, unhealthy, etc. Such an element is an almost universal ingredient in cases of extended incestuous unions with which I have been directly or indirectly familiar. Even in short-term or single-occasion cases, the child often experiences severe aftershock many years later when the realization dawns that what she did with Uncle Charlie is widely regarded as a heinous crime against nature. It seems impossible to believe that
Rob and Emily simply grew from sibling sex in early adolescence to a sibling marriage some ten years later without ever interrupting their union and without ever experiencing profoundly disturbing guilt and anxiety.
Yet this seems to be very literally true.
There did come a time, of course, when both knew that their original concept of incest—that it implied marriage rather than sexual intimacy—was erroneous. This realization came prior to Emily’s graduation from high school. But by then they were both so thoroughly at ease in their relationship and so utterly adjusted to it that it was, if anything, the reverse of traumatic; previously they had been upset to think that they could not get married, since that would be incestuous. Now they saw that marriage to each other would be no more incestuous than what they were already doing and enjoying; thus they took delight in the idea that they eventually could get married—or, as they then anticipated, live together as man and wife in the eyes of the world, albeit without the formality of a legal ceremony.
And so their life together continued. After high school graduation Emily found work as a department-store salesgirl and continued to live at home. A year later Rob graduated and enrolled as a business major at the local community college. The summer before his senior year they used some of Emily’s savings and the proceeds from their mother’s small insurance policy (she had died the previous year, her death oddly unremarked by her children) to travel in Europe as man and wife. While their passports did not thus identify them, this did not come to anyone’s attention. After graduation Rob fulfilled his military obligation with a six-month hitch in the National Guard, after which he took a job with a local firm as a marketing trainee.
Beyond Group Sex: Doing Their Own Thing (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior) Page 13