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

by Lawrence Block

  “We did everything in the book, we made it a dozen different ways. Then they served us a great dinner with two different wines and we sat around talking about the swinging life. I was drinking it up with both ears. They couldn’t tell me enough, and I walked out of there neck-deep in plans, like my whole life had a direction now. And we get on the train, and Jimmie turns to me and says it’s an awful long ride just to get laid. That was Jimmie.”

  Further forays into the swinging society made two things abundantly clear to Marcia. First, this was obviously the stratum of society in which she belonged. Second, she could function there much more effectively without Jimmie.

  “A lot of the people we met liked me and didn’t care for Jimmie. Face it, he was a bum. He wasn’t even clean. It took an act of God to get him under a shower. But the big thing wasn’t that other people couldn’t stand Jimmie. It was that I couldn’t stand him any more myself, and there was no reason to go on living with him.

  “So I did the Alabama number again and came back single. I got my own place and started making contacts with people. I wasn’t back a week when the bell rang and it was Jimmie. He said, ‘Well, I see you got your old name back and everything. I just thought I’d drop by and say there’s no hard feelings on my part and I hope none on yours either.’ I said there were no feelings, hard or soft. ‘So why don’t we ball one last time for old time’s sake, and to see what it’s like now that we ain’t legal?’

  “So I figured why not, and we did, and it wasn’t bad but it was also nothing special, and when we were done he got up and gave me his lazy smile and said, ‘Well, ex-wife, you’re still the best lay in the world.’ And I said, ‘Well, sweetie, you’re still a son of a bitch and a bum, and it’s been fun.’ Then I sent him home and opened all the windows to air the place out, and that was Jimmie, and you can have him.”

  • • •

  With the termination of her second marriage, Marcia was able to find a comfortable and fulfilling niche for herself in the world of the swingers. She has been functioning as a swinger for several years and expects to go on forever, or until sex stops playing its current role in her life. “I’ve been a sexpot for a little over twenty years,” she says, “which is about as long a time as the average junkie stays on heroin, so maybe I’ll wake up one day and the desire won’t be there, and I’ll find some other kind of ribbon to wrap up my life in. Or maybe it’s more like alcohol where you stay on it forever and your body adapts to it, and then I’ll swing until I die. I’ll play whatever cards they deal me.”

  In every real sense, Marcia’s life at present is infinitely more stable and secure than anything she has known in the past. She has friends who not only accept her but actually treasure her for what she is. She earns a sufficient income by entertaining out-of-town buyers for several dress manufacturers.

  “You could technically call it prostitution,” she told me, “in that I go out with these fellows and I’m paid for it. I’ve always said I could never be a prostitute and I don’t feel that I’m one now. True, I’m being paid, but the guys I sleep with are not the guys who pay me. As far as they know I’m just a date, and what they try to do is take me out and show me a good time. They don’t want whores. They want a nice pleasant attractive girl who will end the evening by sleeping with them, and about a quarter of the time they don’t even make a pass and I get paid the same, sex or no sex. The way I look at it I’m paid to go out with them, and balling them is something I do because I want it as much as they do, which at least ninety percent of the time I do. They aren’t as good in bed as the average swinger, but for the most part they are very nice fellows who just want to have a good time, and they are gentle and considerate and it really makes them happy when you show them a really good time in the hay.”

  This picture of Marcia’s life among the swingers, stable and secure and happy as never before, takes on a sharper focus when one realizes that she is presently leading as wild a sex life as any I have ever heard of. She is a hard-core anything goes 32nd-degree Swinger. If her name was once scrawled on every high school men’s room wall in Queens, it is now entered in the little black book of every truly kinky swinger from Boston to Atlanta, but the little girl with the mousy hair and the buck teeth who was a doormat in one world is a divinity in the other.

  Any attempt at a biographical summary of Marcia’s life for the past few years is foredoomed. It could not possibly avoid reading exactly like the précis of a hard-core pornographic novel, with several aberrations piled one atop the other.

  Both the quantity and the variety of Marcia’s sexual contacts literally stagger the mind. Perhaps I can best illustrate this by simply stating that, after my first interview with her, I seriously toyed with the idea of erasing my tapes and writing the girl off as a pathological liar. I found it impossible to believe that she was telling the truth. Fortunately I first checked out her story by asking a variety of swingers about her. An astonishing number of them not only knew her but had had sex with her. A selection of their comments might be of value—

  • • •

  “Marcia Duffy? No matter how many women you have, that’s one you never forget. It’s not just that she can’t get enough. The world is full of women like that, hung-up stretched-out girls who can take on an army and never get done because they never get satisfied. But Marcia’s different. She gets her kicks and still wants more, and when you make it with her you don’t feel as though you’re inadequate. You feel that you’re the greatest lay in the world, and you’ve thrilled her beyond belief, and the reason she wants somebody else is no fault of your own, it’s just that she loves sex so much that she wants to ball the whole world. If she could roll the entire planet into a cylinder and jam it into her snatch I think she’d do it, and I think the Earth would quit before she did.”

  • • •

  “I only met her once, but it was something. We threw a stag for this friend of mine, a bachelor party. He and his bride had been swinging together for over a year and were only making it legal because she thought it would be groovy to have some kids, so it wasn’t the usual bachelor party thing at all. The guests were all male and all pretty seasoned swingers, and the entertainment was Marcia Duffy. I don’t know whose idea it was to bring her but they ought to give the guy a medal.

  “She walked into the room wearing a pair of stockings and a wedding veil and nothing else. Her body is nothing spectacular, hardly any breasts to speak of and not much padding anywhere. And she’s got this sort of horsy face. It’s a funny thing about her face. At first you think she’s ugly, and after awhile you decide she’s actually quite attractive, and later on you realize it doesn’t matter whether her face is ugly or pretty, but that there’s something about it that turns you on.

  “Four guys grabbed the bridegroom and stripped him and tied him to a table, and then Marcia went to work on him. She had him six ways and backwards. She played him for a solid hour until he was in such agony he would have cried if only he could have gotten the smile off his face. She drained him so completely we had to send him home in a matchbox.

  “Then she turned to the rest of us with a Shirley Temple smile and a little innocent voice and said that she was going to have the time of her life and hoped we had the same idea. And she said that if we had any wild ideas we should just name them, because she was an anything girl and there was no scene she wouldn’t make.

  “It was the most cockeyed orgy I’ve ever attended. There were about thirty of us and just one of her, and she did everything in the book and wrote a few new books beside. There wasn’t one of us who didn’t have her at least three times, and there wasn’t a part of her body that somebody didn’t get into, and there wasn’t a thing that happened that didn’t give that crazy doll a charge. I will never forget her. I could bang Sophia Loren in living color on the Sullivan show and it still wouldn’t drive that nutty horse-faced broad out of my mind.”

  • • •

  “. . . told me he saw Marcia Duffy getting herself go
bbled by a dog at Irv and Betsy’s anniversary party. I said listen, that’s not worth reporting, not where the Duffy kid is concerned. I said, that’s ordinarily too tame for her to bother with. Forget it, I said, but I’ll tell you what, I said, if you ever see her getting Greeked by a two-horned rhinoceros, then maybe you got a story worth repeating. Because, I said, this kid, this Duffy kid, she’d screw a snake if somebody would hold its head . . .”

  • • •

  “I’ve heard all the stories about her and I don’t care what they say, I cannot believe that Marcia is heterosexual. She may get some pleasure from men but anyone who makes love to a woman as well as she does is obviously a lesbian first and foremost. She is the most gentle and tender and warm and considerate lover I have ever had. Male or female. And that, lover, covers rather a lot of ground—”

  • • •

  Marcia herself tells many of the same stories about herself, but there is a difference. When she speaks, the awe which flavors other accounts is missing. She is quite matter-of-fact about her most incredible exploits, and this tone coupled with her earnest gaze and uncannily innocent manner makes one wonder if she is actually saying what one is hearing.

  “So many swingers will dig one variety of balling and then turn around and put down another as perverted,” she told me, wonderingly. “Like all the girls who love to go down on each other but think faggots are disgusting. Or all the swingers who come down hard on the Sadie Mae people. Faggots don’t bother me and neither does sadomasochism. As a matter of fact it’s a scene I like to make now and then. Not the extreme stuff, the torture stuff, because a person can get permanently injured and that turns me off. But other things.

  “Bondage, for example. It has a special kick to it when one person is tied up, restrained. It’s harmless but it adds variety as a change of pace. Or flagellation, a little paddling on the rear end. People talk a lot of psychological crud about it, but you don’t have to go that deep. It’s a physical thing the way a spanking will excite a person. The nerve endings down there are very closely related to the sexual business. I remember a party, they were almost all Sadie Mae types except this one teenager that somebody brought, a very cute type with red hair and freckles. She was probably eighteen but she looked all of twelve, and this made the whole routine very boss as far as a lot of the crowd was concerned. She thought it was just going to be a regular orgy, she’d been at Group Gropes with the Sexual Freedom League and she thought it was one of those things. But instead the whole idea was that they would take this girl by surprise and turn her out and show her what Sadie Mae was all about.

  “And that’s what happened. They had her tied up and fastened so that she was kneeling on the floor, and then they made her give some head to everybody, men and women too, and then they started on the paddling. They had all sorts of whips and rods. The Sadie Maes are very long on paraphernalia, they’re real collectors.

  “They lashed the kid for about half an hour. Not too hard, not hard enough to do any damage or give her more pain than she could handle, but hard enough so that no one could get the idea that she was being tickled. It was a whipping, plain and simple.

  “And she hated it, and she cried and begged all the way through it, and within half an hour it got to her. It just plain happened to her. All of a sudden she was squirming and moaning and making all sorts of wild noises, and then she was coming. An orgasm, and a big one. She wasn’t converted. When they finally let her out of there she ran away screaming. But it proved a point. When it’s done properly, a session of Sadie Mae will turn anybody on. That girl may never have thought it was sexy, not even while it was going on, but she came just the same.”

  An unattached male has many problems in developing contacts in the swinging society. For a single girl, however, no such problems exist; she is invariably sought actively by couples anxious for threesomes, is always welcome at parties and orgies. If she wants to get together for a swap session with a couple or couples and a partner is required, it is never a problem for her to find a man to join her.

  Thus Marcia has found it quite comfortable functioning as a single swinger—or a swingle, as the species is occasionally capsuled. She has not remarried, although a surprisingly high number of men have proposed marriage to her over the years.

  She told me, though, that she had not ruled out the possibility of an eventual third marriage.

  “I can see how it would work,” she said. “No romantic nonsense about true love conquering all, because things just don’t happen that way for people like me. But there have been a lot of decent guys I’ve met on the swinger circuit, and I can see how sooner or later I might meet one and want to hook up with him on a permanent basis. It hasn’t happened yet but I can see how it could.

  “He would have to be a person very much like me, that goes without saying. And our marriage would have to be a swingers’ marriage, and all the way. Not just that we would swing together but that we would both be perfectly free to swing separately. Complete freedom on both sides, that’s how it would have to be.”

  I asked her why she would want to bother with a marriage of that sort, assuming that romantic love did not enter the picture. Did she want some day to have children?

  “Jesus, don’t be silly. Can you see me as a mother? Anyway, that particular store has gone out of business. A year ago I showed a little sense and had my tubes tied.”

  I asked how she had managed to get the operation performed. It is one which doctors are reluctant to perform upon women who have not already had several children.

  “There are swinging doctors, too,” she said. “Doctors, lawyers, maybe even Indian chiefs, though I never met one. No, I wouldn’t want to have kids. I couldn’t handle it. But there’s other reasons to get married, if it’s the right kind of marriage. In any kind of life you feel the need to have something that’s steady, something permanent. Somebody who’ll always be there and you can talk to over the years. There’s a kind of loneliness you get as you grow older, a loneliness that works no matter how many people you surround yourself with or how much balling you do, and you want to have somebody close to you. I start feeling this from time to time now and I’m not even thirty yet. It’s not a strong feeling now, not strong enough to make me start hunting for a husband, but it could grow and things could change, and I wouldn’t be surprised, Johnny, if I was married by the time you finish writing your book.”

  (As of this writing, Marcia is still single.)

  “And anyway, if it doesn’t work out Alabama is only a couple of hours away, and they give me good service there, you know. They know me by now. They say if you get divorced three times the fourth is on the house . . .”

  Is she happy with her life? Does she think it’s the right kind of life? These are difficult questions for anyone. But Marcia considered them thoughtfully, fingering her long hair.

  “Well, I could say what’s happy and what’s right and so on, but forget that. I do what I want and I’m more alive than dead and that’s happy as far as I’m concerned. As far as the right kind of life is concerned, I can say it’s the right kind of life for me.

  “But I wouldn’t give a lecture at Radcliffe and say ‘Hop to it, girls, this is the way to live.’ Because it isn’t. You know, a lot of the time I would like to be somebody who lives in a house and never balls anyone but her husband and feels all full and happy from just that, the house and the kids and the husband. I’d rather be somebody like that than Marcia Moron the Sex Machine. I would also rather have a pretty face and straight teeth and blonde hair and good legs and big tits, but I don’t have these things and never will, any more than I’ll wake up one day and be Mrs. Happy Housewife with charge accounts and heavy furniture. That’s not the hand of cards I was dealt, so I might as well wish for wings.”

  “So you’re happy with the way you’ve played those cards?”

  “You could call it that. They’re not bad cards, they win a lot of small pots.”

  “And no regrets?”

&n
bsp; Her eyes widened slightly, and I understood the full strength of Marcia Duffy’s sex appeal.

  “Just one regret,” she said, her voice husky.

  “What’s that?”

  “That we’re here talking, Johnny, in a nice room with a comfortable bed in it, and we’re sitting in chairs with our clothes on when we could be having more fun naked in that bed. That’s a regret, Johnny, but it’s one we could probably handle.”

  Marcia Duffy.

  If it feels good, she’ll do it.

  Three Is Not A Crowd

  CLEVELAND AREA

  Refined, intelligent moderns, he 28 and muscular, she 29, C-cup, shapely, wish to hear from couples and swingles throughout Great Lakes region. Come one, come all—three is not a crowd . . .

  The above advertisement appeared in a recent issue of a magazine published by a correspondence club catering to members of the swinging society. It is typical of many such ads placed by couples anxious to enlarge their circles of sexual acquaintances. It is the last line, explaining cryptically that three is, contrary to the old adage, even better company than two, which separates this particular advertising message from the greater portion of notices placed by couples who are interested solely in meetings with other couples.

  The Cleveland couple has thus expressed a willingness to engage in what sexologists call troilism, what the French call a ménage à trois, and what an ever-increasing group of Americans call good clean family fun. For most swingers, troilism is a component of the sexual scene but hardly its main feature. Many enjoy an evening with a bisexual female as a pleasant change of pace from the more usual forms of couple games. Less frequently, couples will admit an unattached male to their bedroom, but there are always far more unattached males anxious to make this particular scene than there are couples willing to have them. Such threesomes most often occur in marriages in which the wife is clearly the dominant figure and the husband’s enjoyment of the sexual relations are largely voyeuristic.