The Taboo Breakers: Shock Troops of the Sexual Revolution (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

by Lawrence Block

  Table of Contents

  * * *

  Introduction: The World of the Swingers

  With a Little Help From Our Friends

  If It Feels Good I’ll Do It

  Three Is Not a Crowd

  I Came Four Times—How About You?

  What Are You Doing After the Orgy?

  Fit To Be Tied

  The Secret Swinger

  About the Author

  Excerpt: Beyond Group Sex

  The Taboo Breakers

  John Warren Wells

  Lawrence Block

  * * *

  copyright © 1968, 2012, Lawrence Block

  All Rights Reserved

  Introduction:

  The World of the Swingers

  A Long Island housewife packs her children off to school, then sits down at the breakfast room to write a letter. She writes three drafts before she is satisfied, then folds it, encloses nude full-length photographs of herself and her husband, and mails it off to a Post Office box in Jersey City. The letter is an invitation to a bisexual airline stewardess to join herself and her husband for an evening of troilistic activity. The housewife has written a great many letters in the past several days and wonders what portion of them will be answered. Single girls for threesomes are in great demand, she realizes. But she recalls the last time she and her mate entertained a young lady and decided it’s worth the effort.

  In Detroit, an automotive engineer and his wife leave their suburban ranch house and drive to a downtown hotel. They take a room, but stay in it only long enough for the dark-haired young wife to remove all her undergarments so that she is quite nude beneath her dress. Downstairs in the cocktail lounge they join another couple, a sales representative and his wife. They have never met before but recognize one another from photographs. They take a table together, order drinks, discover that they have several mutual friends. The conversation is desultory at first—the men talk football, the wives show each other pictures of their children. Each man dances one number with his own wife, after which they change partners for the next dance. The wives make their traditional pilgrimage to the ladies’ room; the men talk.

  “We’re game,” the engineer says.

  “Glad to hear it,” says the sales rep. “Mary’s crazy about you, and your Sheila is a little doll.”

  They smile. “How do you want to work it?” asks the engineer. “All in the same room or separate?”

  “I think separate, for openers at least.” The sales rep laughs. “After all, we hardly know each other.”

  The wives return from the powder room. The sales rep calls for the check, signs it. Then he goes upstairs with the engineer’s wife, while his own wife takes the engineer to her room.

  At a New England ski lodge, normally deserted in the off-season, two girls in their late teens stumble together into a bedroom and close the door. They are both nude. One collapses onto the bed and heaves a sigh. “I just had to get out of there,” she announces. “Two days is as long as an orgy should last. I’m beginning to understand what they mean by too much of a good thing. You know what I mean? After awhile you lose count, it’s just one man after another and it becomes impossible to concentrate.” She sighs again, then touches her genitals. “The thing of it is, it’s getting sore.”

  “I know what you mean,” the other girl says. “But it’s not as if I’m getting turned off sex.”

  “I’m hip. I know what you need.”

  “So do I.”

  “Someone to kiss it and make it feel better.”

  “Oh, you know it!” The girl sighs a third time and spreads herself on the bed. “I just want to lie here and float on a cloud. Just real passive, you know, and be kissed and eaten all soft and gentle and female.”

  “You sweet baby,” the other girl says, crouching over her. “Just close your eyes, sweetheart. You’re going to love this.”

  • • •

  Swingers.

  The word itself has had quite a history in the lexicon of mid-century American slang. When it first appeared a decade or so ago, it had little if any sexual connotation. A swinger was someone who was not a square, someone who went to nightclubs, dug jazz, danced the new dances, dressed well—in essence, someone whose ideas of a good time was a little more elaborate than sitting in front of the television set drinking beer from a can. The young marrieds, the country club set, the middle-class hippies—these were the swingers.

  But before these people had abandoned the swinger label, another group claimed it as its own. From the moment that wife-swapping first began to have considerable impact in America, its participants recognized that some “clean” euphemism for their activity was essential. One obviously could not run an ad in a newspaper describing oneself as a wife-swapper, mate-trader, sexual experimenter, or whatever.

  A variety of euphemisms saw temporary service. Couples described themselves as “modern” or “liberal” or “adventurous.” Others proclaimed their interest in sun-bathing or labeled themselves free-thinkers. All of these expressions served well enough to get the point across, but none really stuck. Then the word swinger was seized upon, and somehow it filled the bill to perfection. One could characterize oneself as a swinger without the slightest fear of compromising one’s position in the square or straight world; other swappers would get the message instantly, while the innocents of the world would simply assume that the self-styled swinger was no more than a person who liked to have a good time.

  Thus the meaning of the word changed almost overnight. Just as “gay” has become automatically translated as “homosexual” to the point where few persons use it in any other context whatsoever, so did swinger become the exclusive property of the sexually adventurous.

  But the word did not stop evolving at that point. Interestingly enough, its meaning became increasingly specific over the years to the point where only a certain type of wife-swapper would properly label himself a “swinger.” As wife-swapping became more widely practiced, and as sexual varietism became more and more commonly a component of the swapping scene, “swinger” came to be used to distinguish the no-holds-barred anything-goes couples from the more conservative swappers who merely wanted to exchange mates for an hour or an evening of more or less standard sexual relations.

  “We are only interested in simple swapping,” a letter might read, “and we are definitely not swingers.”

  • • •

  Swingers, swappers, modern liberal free-thinkers. Who precisely are these people? How do they get involved in the swinging life? What impact do they have upon the fabric of contemporary society? To what extent are they a symptom of it? And just what do they do, and with whom, and why?

  There are, to begin with, no fast answers, no ready generalizations that can do much more than obscure the more important aspects of what we might call the swinging society. Swingers vary tremendously in virtually all respects. They come from all strata of society, range widely in age, and have any number of diverse motives, attitudes, activities, and so on. A social critic could easily demonstrate that they reflect any number of societal stresses and ills. A psychologist could examine any swinger and illustrate how his or her sexual behavior derives directly from personal anxieties and neuroses. A theologian could relate swinging to widespread moral decay and the declining influence of religion in modern life. All such analyses would have certain things to recommend them, and all of them would fall somehow short of explaining what swingers are and why they do wh
at they do.

  There is no question but that various aspects of contemporary civilization have shaped the structure of the swinging society. One can readily argue that the world of social security and pension plans and employment insurance has eliminated many of the hazards of ordinary living to the point where the swinger may with some justification regard sexual experimentation as a sort of Last Frontier. And, on a more concrete level, one can hardly deny that two triumphs of technology, the Pill and the Polaroid, have enormously facilitated swinging. The Pill, an absolutely effective safeguard against unwanted pregnancy, has effectively eliminated the greatest obvious hazard of systematic adultery. With extramarital pregnancy no longer a risk, a man can play the cuckold without worrying that he will raise another man’s child as his own.

  In a very different way, the Polaroid enables swingers to send nude or obscene photographs of one another through the mails with little expense and less risk. A large proportion of swingers arrange all of their activity through correspondence with total strangers, and Polaroid photos enable them to learn in advance what (or whom) they are getting into.

  Yet any discussion of pills and Polaroids, of social ills and sexual permissiveness, of increased leisure time and widespread prosperity, is certain to leave a plethora of questions about the swinging experience unanswered. One cannot deal forever in generalities. The key point is that swingers are people. One can form one’s own opinion of them, labeling them as fools or sinners, as the shock troops of the sexual revolution, as hell-bent hedonists piling one thrill upon another. Conversely, one can applaud them as individuals who have successfully separated sex from love and who have found a satisfactory and satisfying way to overthrow inhibitions and repressions in their pursuit of sexual pleasure. The reader is free to make up his own mind in this regard. It is my concern, in the pages which follow, to depict some of the men and women who comprise the swinging society.

  It is as individuals that we shall meet these swingers. They are not composites or prototypes but individual men and women whom I have met and interviewed over the past several months. I have of course altered all of their names, and have occasionally changed the names of cities and states where such data might serve to identify the individuals involved. In every other respect, however, the swingers’ stories have been presented exactly as they were presented to me. In some instances I have reproduced dialogue verbatim from my tapes of interview sessions. In other cases, when the subject of an interview has been less articulate, I have rendered the material in narrative form in order that the reader may more readily assimilate it.

  The subjects themselves have been selected with the object of showing the many facets of the swinging society presently in existence. They represent only a minute portion of the swingers whom I was able to interview, but, taken together, I believe they convey a generally accurate picture of the overall swinging scene.

  • • •

  It seems to be de rigueur for a writer on sexual topics to explain at some lengths his reasons for writing a given book. This sort of apologia pro libro meo is not required of other authors—a man who has written a history of the French Revolution, for example, need not devote a few paragraphs to an explanation of his motives. But, modern sexual enlightenment notwithstanding, we still demand of the sexual observer that he justify his choice of subject matter and that he establish his credentials as an observer of social phenomena and prove that he is not just a dirty old man.

  My own interest in and involvement with the swinging society stems from a rather more personal element than the unfettered spirit of scientific inquiry. A little over a year ago, several months after I was divorced, the wife of a close friend began making unmistakable sexual advances to me. She was an extremely attractive woman and, although I found the idea of cuckolding my friend distasteful, I nevertheless took advantage of his absence on a business trip to spend a very enjoyable night with her.

  The following morning, in what novelists persist in calling the “cold clear light of dawn,” I was understandably worried that I had betrayed my friend, that I might be getting myself into an unpleasant situation, that their marriage might be destroyed, etc. The wife then demolished my fears (and, I must admit, rather shocked me) by explaining that her husband knew perfectly well what had happened, that he had arranged his “business trip” specifically so that we could be alone together, and that she and her husband have been active participants in wife-swapping for several years. “We didn’t know if you’d go for it if you knew the whole picture in advance,” she said, “but I knew you were hot for me, and I figured if we were alone together and one thing led to another you wouldn’t be unhappy. Are you?”

  I wasn’t, but I was certainly quite fascinated by my introduction to the swinging society. In the months that followed I became acquainted with a great many swingers and interviewed a considerable number of them at great length. When it came time to plan the organization of this present book, I consider detailing some of my own experiences herein. After some thought, I decided that I could serve my readers most objectively by omitting my own personal experiences with the swinging life. While they might make entertaining reading—I certainly found them entertaining at the time—they would necessarily be colored by my own perspective.

  In a similar fashion, I have tried to avoid two approaches which frequently are to be found in books on this and kindred subjects. I see no point, first, in uttering any clinical or moral judgments. The reader may decide for himself whether the various persons appearing in the following pages are sick or sane, saints or sinners, frustrated or contented with their psychosexual adjustment to modern life. In addition, I have avoided playing the numbers game. Various commentators have estimated the number of practicing swingers at anywhere from one to twenty million in the United States. I frankly have not the slightest idea just how many people are involved in the swinging society, nor do I care to guess. Statistics are undeniably valuable, and at the same time they are deceptive and dangerous when bandied about by those who have inadequate statistical training.

  Another approach commonly found in popular studies of sexual topics is one in which the author attempts to differentiate between normal and abnormal behavior. I must confess that normal is a word to which I particularly object, in part because it means something quite different to everyone who uses it.

  With swingers, the norm is that there is no norm. Swingers by definition are at odds to a greater or lesser degree with the normative and existential sexual mores of our society. In some instances, the only taboo which they violate is that proscribing adultery—in other words, the acts they perform are those which society would deem normal, but the promiscuity with which they perform them would lead others to label them abnormal. In other cases, the physical practices of the swingers involve acts which a variable proportion of the population would characterize as abnormal or perverted, ranging in type from extracoital forms of copulation to pluralism, homosexuality, bestiality, exhibitionism, etc. Swingers themselves are not very much more logical than the general run of the population in this regard; it is very common, for example, for a swinger to regard lesbian activity as wholly permissible while looking askance at male homosexual activity.

  One young woman whom I interviewed had taught her dog to copulate with her, and frequently took the animal to parties so that others could enjoy watching her perform with it. She told me of a couple she knew who had sexual relations with their own children. “They are absolutely disgusting,” she said. “People like that should be thrown in jail and left there to rot.”

  I later interviewed the couple in question, and they happened to mention the young lady with the well-trained dog. “I can’t understand a woman like that,” the husband told me earnestly. “Sex is an exchange between people. It’s part of the whole process of loving, and how a girl can dehumanize the whole thing and let an animal go down on her is beyond me.”

  De gustibus non disputandum est . . . one man’s fish is another man’s poisson
.

  • • •

  We have seen how the word swinger evolved as a euphemism for swapper. In similar fashion, any number of expressions have been developed in the swingers’ underground to replace the unprintable. Since a large portion of the material to follow is reproduced verbatim, I suspect the reader might find a glossary of various terms helpful. Some are used almost exclusively in advertisements and correspondence; others figure prominently in swingers’ conversations.

  Culture—Any of several special areas of activity, as:

  French Culture—Oral-genital relations, either fellatio or cunnilingus. This has become so widely recognized a term that instructors who give legitimate lessons in the French language have found it virtually impossible to advertise their services; they inevitably receive phone calls from persons assuming they are prostitutes specializing in oral pleasures. When the word culture is used alone, French culture is commonly implied.

  English Culture—Bondage and/or discipline, esp. flagellation. Sadomasochistic fun and games are also occasionally referred to as German or Prussian Culture.

  Greek Culture—Anal intercourse. In certain contexts the term indicates male homosexuality, but the first meaning is far more common.

  Roman Culture—Orgies, or some form of group sex.

  Sadie Mae—Sadomasochist.

  Docile—Indicates the passive partner in sadomasochistic relationships. Also rendered as weak-willed or submissive. The active role in such relationships is characteristic as strong, dominant, etc.

  Fond of Animals—Obviously, an inclination for bestiality.

  Husband A Joiner—A common phrase in advertisements placed by a woman seeking lesbian contacts, and indicating that the husband enjoys watching the lesbian activity and having relations with the participants.

  AC-DC—Bisexual. Other euphemisms include ambidextrous, switch-hitter, switcher, et. al.

  Group Grope—Variously, a free-for-all orgy, or a general mass petting session prior to pairing off at a swapping party, or any of several games in which nude couples try to identify their partners by touch in a dark room.