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

by Lawrence Block

  Camera Fan—This or any other mention of photography indicates an interest in taking or exchanging pornographic photos.

  Enjoys Correspondence—Some hangers-on in the swinging society avoid personal contacts but write lengthy obscene letters to one another and exchange photographs. This phrase is the indicator.

  Linguist—Indicates talent or desire for performing orally. Originally derives from cunning linguist as a rather obvious code phrase for cunnilingus.

  Well-endowed—Used to suggest that a male has a particularly large penis. Almost any word relating to size refers to the genitalia; when a woman expresses a desire to meet large or small men, she is not talking about their height or weight but about their sexual apparatus.

  Exotic, Bizarre, Unusual—Formerly indicating any swinging activity, these adjectives are now used primarily in a negative sense. An advertiser specifying “No Exotics” means he is not interested in sadomasochism, homosexuality, or any of the more outré forms of sexual relations.

  Generous—Willing to pay. Prostitutes advertising in swingers’ media will describe themselves as anxious to meet generous or financially secure males, females, couples, or whatever.

  Amateur Model—Occasionally a euphemism for a prostitute, or indicates a willingness to model for obscene photos, or that the advertiser has such photos for sale, depending upon contact.

  Television—Transvestism. The practice was first abbreviated as TV, then extended again as television, a particularly interesting instance of the way underworld slang develops.

  With A Little Help From Our Friends

  Roy and Barbara Halliday look very much like Madison Avenue’s idea of America’s Young Moderns, graduates of the Pepsi Generation and veterans of the Dodge Rebellion, living the good clean life in the affluent society. They live in an exclusive development on the outskirts of Youngstown, Ohio, where Roy works as a systems analyst—“an efficiency expert for computers,” he calls himself. His salary is $16,000 a year. The Hallidays have two children, a boy nine and a girl seven. Roy is 34, a little over six feet tall, with the slender build of a cross-country runner. He wears his hair in a longish, crew-cut; his tastes in dress run to tweeds and vested suits and regimental striped ties.

  Barbara, two years younger, has striking blonde hair which she frankly admits is not her natural color. “One thing about swinging,” she says, “not only your hairdresser knows for sure. Although we do know one girl who bleaches down there, too. But I think that’s carrying things a little too far.” A tall, shapely girl, Barbara swam competitively in college and retains the well-muscled body of a swimmer. Her breasts, though considerably larger than average, do not require the support of a bra. Her features are slightly on this harsh side, her nose a bit long, her jaw rather strong. While not beautiful, she is strikingly attractive.

  For over three years, Roy and Barbara have belonged to a group of Youngstown-area swingers. Once a week they meet with seven other couples for an evening of organized adultery.

  ROY: When we first got involved in the swinging life, I can honestly say we had no idea what it was all about. It was the furthest thing from our minds.

  BARBARA: But we were certainly ready for it.

  ROY: Well, as it turned out—

  BARBARA: You were certainly ready for variety, honey. You had already proved that, remember?

  ROY: What my dear wife means is that I had a little fling about six months before we got started with the group. That was before we moved to Youngstown. There was a girl who worked in my office, a cute little brunette with huge brown eyes, and she made it obvious that she was available. Barb and I had been married almost nine years then, which made me two years late in developing the traditional seven-year itch. Anyway, it was quite an itch, and I scratched it.

  JWW: How did you feel about it?

  ROY: Very guilty. It’s hard for me to believe now just how guilty I felt. I told myself that it wouldn’t hurt Barb as long as she didn’t know about it, and after I had been sleeping with Rosie a few times I just couldn’t stand the guilt, and I went to Barb and confessed. I Told All.

  JWW: What was your reaction, Barbara?

  BARBARA: Reactions, you mean. I reacted about five different ways at once. You know the way society conditions people. I had grown up believing that a man and a woman met and fell in love and got married, and once they were married they never wanted to have sex with anyone but their marriage partner. Of course human beings just aren’t built that way, but I wasn’t bright enough to know that at the time. When Roy told me about that little slut—

  ROY: Don’t tell me you still resent her?

  BARBARA: I guess I must. Isn’t that silly? But I was thinking about how I felt at the time. It really tore me apart. I felt terribly hurt and shocked and disgusted. I was sure something was wrong with me, because if Roy had to look elsewhere for sex it meant that I wasn’t giving him everything he wanted. And I felt that he had betrayed me, that our marriage vows were something sacred and he had done me a great injury by breaking them. And, oh, what else? I felt that he was soiled by it all, and that it would be dirty for us to have sex together. Brilliant, wasn’t I? My husband was screwing another girl and I was going to compete with her by not letting him near me. I’m surprised he didn’t walk out permanently.

  JWW: Did you feel any desire to cheat on him in return?

  BARBARA: Oh, certainly. Not a specific desire, no particular letch for any particular man. Just the feeling that what was sauce for the goose would be sauce for the gander, and that the best way to repay him would be by evening the score and going out and having an affair with someone. But I never seriously considered doing this, I just thought it would be a good thing to do. Oh, one other thing. When I thought of him with Rosie I was very turned on by the picture of the two of them together.

  ROY: You never told me that.

  BARBARA: I didn’t realize it myself, but it’s true. I would picture the two of you together and think about what you did to each other. It made me uncomfortable, but I think largely because I found it exciting and couldn’t accept it. I wondered if she Frenched him. Roy always wanted me to do that and I didn’t like to—

  ROY: Knowing you now, that’s pretty hard to believe—

  BARBARA: Well, I’ve come a long way since then.

  ROY: And a great many times, too.

  BARBARA: Stop it. What was I saying? Oh, yes. I wondered if she Frenched him—

  ROY: She didn’t, as a matter of fact.

  BARBARA: —and I pictured her, you know, with her mouth on him, and I was tremendously excited without knowing it. Anyway, you get the general idea. I reacted a dozen ways at once, and for awhile it looked as though our marriage was going to break up, and then we worked things out and Roy decided to make the move to Youngstown and everything was good again. Better than ever, actually. Once we were back together again we found that our sex life was a lot more satisfying than it had been. Roy seemed much more exciting to me as a lover, and I was far more anxious to please him. We made love more frequently and had a better time doing it.

  JWW: You think this was a direct result of his extramarital affair?

  ROY: Isn’t it obvious? That little bit of variety which I enjoyed directly and which Barb experienced secondhand rejuvenated our stale marriage. But neither of us understood it at the time. For my part, I swore up and down never to stray from the straight and narrow path again. I felt I was getting a second chance to make our marriage work. It’s amazing the way society conditions you to think in clichés. You get to the point where you can’t make obvious logical conclusions because of the way your mind has been conditioned.

  BARBARA: Like brainwashing.

  ROY: Right, except no one does it to you. It just happens, it’s part of growing up in a sexually repressed society. At any rate, that’s how it went. I was going to be Joe True-Blue forever onward. I even tried to monitor my own thoughts. I tried to keep myself from thinking of the times I had been with Rosie, and I fought the
impulse to look at pretty girls on the street and imagine what they would be like in bed. How can you help what you think? Thoughts just happen to a person, but I really tried to fight it.

  BARBARA: And then we moved to Youngstown.

  ROY: Right. And Rosie was part of the past, and we were both certain that it was monogamy and fidelity until death do us part. Which meant in a year or so one of us would have had a sneaky nasty little affair, and this time it would have sent Barb flying off to Reno.

  BARBARA: Fortunately, we met Greg and Sue.

  ROY: Right—we had a little help from our friends.

  • • •

  Greg Metzger was a data programming supervisor working for the same company that employed Roy. The Metzgers lived less than two blocks away from the Hallidays, and the two couples began seeing one another socially almost immediately upon the Hallidays’ arrival in Youngstown. The two men rode to work together, the wives met frequently for coffee during the afternoons, and the couples got together every weekend for an evening of cards and conversation. While the Metzgers planned an eventual swapping arrangement from the beginning of the relationship, they were careful not to make obvious overtures until they sensed that Roy and Barbara were prepared for them. “They must have dropped a few clues along the way,” Roy suggested, “but we were too square to get the message, and they let things slide until they sensed that we were ready.”

  It was several months before the Metzgers felt “ready.” By that time, the two couples had become extremely close. Barbara had confided in Sue about Roy’s extramarital affair, and Roy had mentioned the episode to Greg, who confessed to a similar episode and suggested that extramarital relations sometimes brought people closer together. The suggestion led Roy to look back on his affair in a somewhat different light, and helped prepare him for a new attitude toward adultery.

  Then, on a Friday night at the Metzgers’ home, the first real overtures were made.

  • • •

  ROY: We had gone over there to play bridge, but Greg met us at the door with a pair of stiff drinks and told us that he was damned if he felt like looking at a deck of cards after the kind of week he’d put in at the office. He said he felt like getting a little tight and unwinding. It sounded like a good idea to us, too. We went down to their basement recreation room and Greg put a stack of records on the stereo and kept pouring the drinks.

  At first we just talked, but the conversation got a little sexier than usual. Greg told a few jokes, and Sue told one that at the time struck me as a hell of a rough joke for a woman to come out with in mixed company. But it seemed to fit the kind of mood we were all in. Naturally, it made me start thinking about Sue. She’s a hell of an attractive girl to begin with, very small and slim and boyish, with short dark hair and deep blue eyes. Almost purple eyes, actually. And she was wearing a peasant blouse, I think it’s called, with a scoop neckline, and she kept bringing a tray of hors d’oeuvres around and bending over to offer it to me, and there was nothing boyish about the view from where I sat. She was wearing one of those bras that support from beneath so that the upper halves of her breasts were bare. It was a voyeur’s dream, and I sat there determined to avoid getting horny at the sight of her. You know—she was my friend and Greg was my friend and I loved my wife and therefore it would be absolutely disgusting of me to get a jolt out of staring at her tits. When actually it would have been goddamned unnatural of me not to.

  BARBARA: The funny thing is that I knew Sue was giving him a show on purpose, and yet it never occurred to me to resent it. We were all such good friends, you know, and beside that Greg was busy paying attention to me. He kept complimenting me on my appearance and the way I was dressed, and he would throw out lines like “Not many girls have the figure to wear clothes like you do,” that kind of thing. He made me very much aware that he found me attractive. I was delighted, and I didn’t realize that what I felt was sexual excitement, but of course it was. Nothing excites a woman as much as knowing that a man finds her desirable.

  ROY: From then on in they handled everything pretty brilliantly. They were very smooth about it. A very danceable record started playing, and Greg said he thought he’d dance with his wife just as a change of pace, and he took Sue in his arms and danced with her. I’ve never been much on dancing, not in years, but when one couple starts dancing the other couple can’t sit around looking at the woodwork, so Barb and I began dancing, too. I was dancing with Barb and I found myself hoping we would switch partners for the next number. I was even trying to think of a tactful way to suggest it. I didn’t have any long-range plans in mind. I just wanted to dance with her. At least I thought that was all I wanted.

  But Greg beat me to the punch. When the record ended he turned to Barb and bowed and asked her if she danced as well as she looked, and a few seconds later he was dancing with her and I had Sue in my arms. She started dancing close almost immediately and I felt her breasts pressing against me. When that record ended nobody said anything, and so we kept the same partners. She was wearing a wicked perfume, and she danced clumsily on purpose every now and then, so that we bumped together in a very pleasant way. Of course I got an erection

  BARBARA: So did Greg. I almost died when I felt it pressing against my belly. The first thing I felt was embarrassment. I must have blushed like crazy. Then I got a wonderful warm feeling all over. I’d had quite a bit to drink, and all I wanted to do was go on dancing like that forever, just Greg and me and that wonderful hard penis pressing against me, and not think about anything, just enjoy the feeling.

  ROY: I’m sure I was more embarrassed than Barb was. All I could think was how goddamned indecent it was. I tried to move away so that Sue wouldn’t notice it. I was sure she would be disgusted. But she kept pressing against me, and all at once she put her head back and looked up at me. She opened those blue-violet eyes all the way and let this slow sexy smile spread all over her face. She didn’t say a word, but she was telling me that she knew what she had done to me and that she was very pleased about the whole thing. That look did it for me. From that moment on I wanted her. I didn’t really think I was going to have her, but I damn well wanted her.

  We danced one more number. It was practically a pantomime of coitus. We hardly moved our feet, just stood swaying together with my erection rubbing back and forth against her.

  Then the music stopped and we stopped dancing. Shock treatment, I guess. They wanted to give us a chance to think about what had just happened. I just stood there with a stupid grin on my face. Greg went off to make fresh drinks and Barb scooted off to the john—

  BARBARA: I knew my face was flushed and I wanted to cool off.

  ROY: —and there I was alone with Sue. I went over and lit a cigarette. I offered her one but she just shook her head and smiled. Then I decided to make conversation, I don’t know what, I guess I said some dumb thing or other, and she didn’t answer, she just went on smiling and didn’t answer me. Then she took a step toward me and said, “I like the way you dance, Roy, I like it very much.”

  My mouth was dry and my heart was pounding like mad. I couldn’t get my breath. She took a step closer and said that she would like to dance with me some more. I was fool enough to mention that there was no music playing. “We don’t need music,” she said. Then she was in my arms, pressing against me from head to toe. She was such a tiny little thing. I bent down to her and we kissed. I had just meant to give her an ordinary kiss but her mouth opened instantly and she began using her tongue.

  Then while we were still kissing her hand moved around and fastened on my penis. She gave it these rhythmic little squeezes. I thought I was going to go out of my mind. Then she pulled her head away, and I thought she was ashamed of herself and wanted to stop, but when I saw the look on her face I knew better. And her hand was still on me, she was still squeezing me.

  She said, “Oh, I want this, Roy,” and squeezed me. She said, “Oh, I want this, I want it very much.” I couldn’t say anything. It was all very unreal. I
t had the quality of a dream, and I felt as though I could do any thing wanted and it wouldn’t matter because it was a dream.

  She pursed her lips and made a little O of her mouth. Then she said, “You know how I want it, my darling? I want it in my mouth. I want to kiss it, Roy. I want to suck it.”

  That did it. That was just plain it as far as I was concerned. I think Greg and Barb and the whole Russian Army could have walked into the room just about then and it wouldn’t have made the slightest bit of difference. Sue had managed to hit my major fantasy right on the nose. Years ago, before I was married, I went with a prostitute once. I was nervous as hell and couldn’t get it up, so she performed fellatio and took care of me that way. I never got it out of my mind. Barb had never wanted to do it and I was pretty reluctant to ask her. I wanted her to and at the same time I didn’t, as if it was a dirty act and it would soil her to perform it. But, well, you get the general idea. When Sue said that I went out of my mind. I forgot about Barb, I forgot about Greg, I forgot about everything.

  I kissed her again and ran my hands all over her. I grabbed her little buttocks and pressed them tight against me. I could feel the warmth of her groin burning into me. I just couldn’t get enough of her.

  The next thing I knew we were on the couch. She made me lie down on my back and told me to close my eyes. I left them open, though. I wanted to watch her. She took off her blouse and her bra. Then she unbuttoned my shirt and leaned over me, kissing me and rubbing her breasts against my chest. All the while her hand was busy with the zipper of my pants. She opened my pants and found what she was looking for. She moved her hand up and down on it and kept whispering to me, telling me what she was going to do.

  The she crouched over me and told me it was beautiful and she loved it, and then she went to work on me. Sue is an extremely oral person. I’ve learned since that she can reach orgasm just by performing fellatio on a man. She doesn’t have to be touched or anything. Just doing it is enough to make it for her.