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

by Lawrence Block

  In the course of my researches, I did have the good luck to encounter one couple whose participation in swinging life was limited exclusively to threesomes, with either an extra man or an extra woman joining husband and wife. Their threesomes were by no means limited to one-night stands; in quite a few cases they had entertained a male or female guest at their home for a week or more, and commonly took a girl or young man along as their guest on vacations in Europe or the West Indies.

  • • •

  David and Carole Shelton were at first quite reluctant to grant me an interview. They were, in fact, rather put out that I had learned of their existence, and considerably more annoyed at the thought of my making their sexual predilections public information. It was only after I had presented gilt-edged personal references and assured them that any material written about them would incorporate neither their names nor any data about them which would serve to identify them that they consented to discuss their lives as swingers.

  The Sheltons are unquestionably several social strata above the garden variety swinger. Both David and Carole came from socially prominent families, attended exclusive private schools, and inherited substantial wealth. Their wit, poise, and good looks, along with their urbanity and zest for living, qualify them for inclusion in whatever “In” group enjoys semantic popularity—the Beautiful People, the Jet Set, or what you will.

  The very rich, according to F. Scott Fitzgerald, are different from you and me. “Yes, they have more money,” Hemingway is supposed to have retorted, but the truth of Fitzgerald’s observation is undeniable. Perhaps one of the less significant of these differences, but one of special relevance here, is the particular standards of the rich regarding sexual morality. A great deal of leeway is permitted to members of this class who are otherwise acceptable persons, and unusual sexual behavior which would automatically lead to ostracism in middle-class society is tacitly accepted in many of the higher social circles. Everyone may know that BeeJay had a thing going with her brother a few years back, and everyone may nod and cluck over Everett’s weakness for Arab boys, but no one claims BeeJay as an incestuous little mink or fails to invite Everett to the Charity Ball.

  Thus it is not unlikely that, in the particular social world in which David and Carole Shelton move, their troilistic activities are at the least suspected and most likely generally recognized. Nevertheless the possibility of their being identified as a result of our interview genuinely worried them. “It’s not merely a question of publicity,” David pointed out. “There’s also the omnipresent threat of criminal prosecution. I needn’t remind you of the tiresome laws regarding sexual behavior. Not only the Blue Laws, for we’re not quite paranoid enough to worry about being sent to jail for extracoital copulation or homosexual contacts, not in this day and age. But the authorities do take a rather dim view of sexual relations with minors, and I’m afraid I must say we do rather a lot of that. The laws are damned unrealistic, don’t you think? The age of consent is 18 in most states, and I can’t recall the last time I so much as heard of an 18-year-old virgin outside of a cloistered convent. Or inside now that I think of it.”

  “I can understand establishing some legal age of consent,” Carole put in. “One does want to protect little children from degenerates, surely. But the present situation is foolish, and it could become inconvenient.”

  I assured them that no recognition could be made from the material as I would prepare it. For this reason, I have made rather more than the usual alterations in biographical specifics concerning David and Carole, but with these insignificant exceptions the material quoted from their interview is verbatim.

  • • •

  David Shelton is in his early forties. He is just under six feet in height. A regular tennis player and skier, he has maintained a trim, even elegant figure. His hair is jet black gone slightly gray at the temples. He has a broad forehead, cool blue eyes, aristocratic features, and a precisely trimmed black moustache. When I interviewed him he was wearing a maroon smoking jacket with pearl gray slacks and turtle-skin loafers. It was an ensemble few men could have worn without looking foppish; David appeared at ease and eminently in style.

  Carole, a dark blonde, stood almost as tall as her husband. She is almost fifteen years younger than her husband and married him ten years ago during the summer vacation following her first and only year of college. Her face is strikingly beautiful, her figure quite opulent. David said at one point that his wife was living proof that well-bred girls were not invariably flat-chested.

  Our interview began, not awkwardly in that the Sheltons were too graceful to permit one to become ill at ease in their company, but rather tentatively; I did not know quite how to broach the subject. We approached it obliquely by discussing some of my research findings to date. They were very much interested in the size and scope of America’s swinging society, and the operations of the correspondence clubs especially fascinated them.

  • • •

  DAVID: One reads this sort of thing in Sunday supplements and never knows how large a grain of salt ought to be taken with it. What does astonish me is that presumably sensible men and women will compromise themselves by sending letters and photographs to total strangers. Don’t they get into a bit of trouble?

  JWW: The Post Office Department has made things difficult for quite a few swingers. And there are always stories about people who have had trouble with blackmailers.

  DAVID: I can imagine. But here we’re interviewing you, aren’t we, and oughtn’t it to be the other way around? You want to know who does what and with which and to whom, to quote the old limerick, don’t you? I might say that from what you’ve told me I can understand why we would be of interest. We do run parallel to these swingers you’ve talked of in some respects, and yet in other ways we’re not like them at all.

  CAROLE: We did trade partners once, you know.

  DAVID: That was purely a lark, it was years ago, and you’ll remember it was singularly unsuccessful. No, I’m thinking more along the lines of what we do now, and I think Mr. Wells is as well. True? Now let me see how best to put this.

  Well. Carole and I are very much in love and have been ever since we met. By this I mean not merely that we care for each other and desire happiness for each other. Ours is a more profound sort of love. We actually require one another’s company so intensely that a separation of more than a few hours is genuinely painful. We play the same sports, read the same books, cherish the same friends, and truly share everything. Our thoughts, our hopes, our fears, our sorrows, everything. If you cut Carole I would bleed. It’s that sort of closeness, and I’m making such a point of this because we’ve found our sort of love to be a very rare and precious thing indeed.

  CAROLE: And the same closeness pertains in sex, of course.

  DAVID: Of course. Sexually we are quite perfect together. That does sound unspeakably pompous, doesn’t it?

  CAROLE: Yes.

  DAVID: You must learn not to answer rhetorical questions. If pompous, true nevertheless. We anticipate one another, we share one another’s responses. In sexual matters, each of us in a sense becomes the other. Yin and yang, everything its opposite, a whole comprising the sum of its parts—you might say, actually, that Carole and I are component parts of a living entity known as The Sheltons. We add up to one person with two bodies.

  CAROLE: Which is where the value of a third person arises. I’m sorry, am I getting ahead of things?

  DAVID: Not really. I was going to make the same point but take a little longer to get there. Look, try to visualize Carole and myself as separate halves of a single emotional organism. Now, in that sense, when the two of us make love—which, I might add, we do far more frequently than we add a stranger to our boudoir—but when we make love, you might almost regard our activity as autoerotic. Do you follow me?

  JWW: Yes, but—

  CAROLE: God knows it’s not at all like sitting on the toilet and playing with oneself—

  DAVID: What an unflatt
ering thought—

  CAROLE: —but there is an autoerotic element, if not what you would call a masturbatory one. Do you think narcissistic has a better connotation, dear?

  DAVID: Yes.

  CAROLE: The other smacks so of pimply adolescents. David told you that each of us is the other, or that each of us is half of a dual being. Thus when we embrace each other we embrace ourselves.

  DAVID: Of course all lovemaking is narcissistic, to the extent that one sees oneself in one’s partner.

  CAROLE: Yes. And the more complete the identification—or, if you will, the stronger and more profound one’s love—the more narcissistic the performance becomes. Not in a negative but in a purely descriptive sense.

  DAVID: If you can follow that line of thought, the next step is not too difficult. When Carole and I share the sexual affections of a third party, a young man or young lady, it simply adds a new dimensions to our sexual lives. This emotional entity, this living being which we call The Sheltons, abandons narcissism for a moment and takes a lover from the outside world. Do you follow me? It’s an involved line of reasoning, and I’d surely hate to defend it before a television audience, or even present it to a jury of my peers, whoever such might be. I do believe it holds water, though.

  JWW: Perhaps, but—

  DAVID: You’ve found a hole in my theory?

  JWW: Not that. I find it very interesting, and in a way it fits in with certain emotional tendencies I’ve noted in conventional wife-swapping, if there is such a thing. But if you’ll forgive an impertinence—

  DAVID: Oh Lord, in view of the topic under discussion I do think we may all speak frankly!

  JWW: Well, I was going to say that your argument had a smell of sophistry about it.

  DAVID: (Laughing.) Oh, that is good. I suppose it does, doesn’t it? I was going to say that it had rather a Jesuitical flavor to it, but I doubt that the Jesuits would delight in the comparison. It’s true, though; I’m sure if Thomas Aquinas ever found himself in the unhappy position of marshalling arguments for troilism he would hit upon just the line I’ve taken. Still, you’ll want to consider it. Carole and I think there’s truth in it over and above the display of dazzling logical virtuosity, eh?

  CAROLE: We also know it doesn’t pretend to tell the whole story.

  DAVID: Hardly. Another fact worth noting is that we are a rather kinky pair. Or what’s the word Toni likes so much? Pervy?

  CAROLE: Yes. And just for the record, I dislike that word at least as much as Toni likes it.

  DAVID: I’ll banish it from my working vocabulary forthwith. Let’s stay with kinky, then. We both of us have many perverse impulses, coupled with a special delight in that which is forbidden. And why, incidentally, do all these liberal and enlightened persons you talk of make such a point of denying the obvious attraction of forbidden fruit? Methinks they protest too much, but don’t they realize the Limbo that awaits them on the day when all acts are permissible? Nothing will yield a special secret thrill any more.

  CAROLE: Tell Mr. Wells what you said the other day about pornography.

  DAVID: I only said that as soon as pornography is readily available it loses what the courts call its appeal to the prurient interest, and without it the trash is no earthly good, is it? The anti-obscenity statutes are all stuff and nonsense, but they did perform the negative function of preserving the potency of underground pornography. It wasn’t too very long ago that one felt a quivering in one’s loins upon seeing the word fuck in print. Because it was forbidden, obviously, not because of any magical property of those four letters. Now there are no unprintable words any more, no actions that can’t be discussed at length in print. Fuck fuck fuck. Cunt cocksucker. I can talk like that, and you can print it in your book, and no one will raise an eyebrow, much less a phallus. I know there’s nothing too much more absurd than being nostalgic for the dirty words of one’s youth, but there you have it. They served a purpose, and now that anyone can write them anywhere they’ve been quite emasculated.

  CAROLE: You’d think we spent our younger days reading stacks of dirty books. I did read quite a few, now that I think of it. Smuggled in from Paris. And of course it was the lure of forbidden fruit. I would get an anticipatory tingle just looking at the covers.

  DAVID: And there was never anything more sedate than the covers Maurice put on those things.

  CAROLE: I know, he packaged them like textbooks. David, don’t you think Mr. Wells might want to know something about the lives we led before we were married? You told him we were kinky and we used to like dirty books, but I’d hate to sum up my impetuous youth so briefly. Will you begin?

  DAVID: I will begin by getting us all fresh drinks, and then you will recite your sexual autobiography for us. Ladies first, after all. Besides, as Rousseau said to St. Augustine, you have so much less to confess.

  CAROLE: I’m sure Rousseau never would have said anything of the sort. And I wonder whether I’ve just been complimented or insulted.

  DAVID: Neither, my love. I was speaking not qualitatively but quantitatively. You had so much less time available for premarital sin than I.

  CAROLE: I started younger.

  DAVID: E’en so, e’en so. You were my child bride, and I a cradle-robbing old roué. Same for you, love? And another Scotch, Mr. Wells, or would you prefer a brandy?

  • • •

  The “confessions” of David and Carole Shelton need not be reproduced verbatim. While they made interesting listening at the time and would no doubt make interesting reading now, especially from a psychoanalytical standpoint, a simple factual summary of their premarital sexual experiences should suffice to equip the reader with enough background to place their later troilistic experiences in proper perspective.

  Carole, an only child of divorced parents, had her first sexual experience at age 10 at the hands of her Scottish governess. The woman, whose task it was to bathe the child, caressed Carole’s genitals until the girl became aroused. Then she took Carole to her room, explaining that she would tell her about men and love and marriage. This lecture concerning the facts of life was accompanied by a stack of pornographic photos showing a great array of sexual acts, several of which Carole recalls quite vividly. The governess disrobed, displayed her own body to Carole, masturbated in front of Carole both manually and with the aid of a Naturalistic rubber phallus, and in the course of several weeks gave the child an extremely intensive course in the various techniques of autoeroticism and lesbianism.

  This relationship ended when Carole’s mother discovered it. The governess left to seek other employment and Carole was limited for the next several years to solitary sexual pursuits. She did manage to retain several obscene photographs which the woman had loaned her, along with a mimeographed pornographic story of an unfortunate young lady who was kidnapped by Arabs, beaten, raped, burned on the breasts and genitals, bitten in various places, and otherwise maltreated, until at the conclusion of the booklet she stopped hating all of these indignities and let herself relax and enjoy them. Armed with the booklet and the photos, Carole masturbated incessantly, experimenting with various techniques and learning how to best excite and gratify herself. It was in the course of one such experiment, in which she employed an automatic pencil, that she punctured her hymen—“So you could say I lost my virginity before my twelfth birthday.”

  At 14 Carole was sent to a Swiss boarding school where lesbianism was almost universal. For a time she had a crush on an older girl and fancied herself in love, but for the most part her homosexual activities had little if any emotional overtones. “We did it because it was far more pleasurable to have one’s clitoris caressed with another girl’s tongue than with one’s own finger, and we also did it because it was against the rules. There is no social class as fanatically rebellious as rich girls at exclusive boarding schools. We would have brushed our teeth forty times a day if the Head had told us we weren’t allowed to.”

  At 15, an Italian youth, the son of a count, finished the job the au
tomatic pencil had begun. For the remainder of her days at the Swiss school, Carole was as promiscuous as her circumstances would allow. Like the majority of her classmates, she devoted a great share of her energies to devising ways to leave the school grounds at night and meet boys for sexual dalliance. And, again like most of her classmates, she continued to have casual lesbian relations during this time. She says that she had no more sexual activity than was commonplace at the school, and that the desire to flout authority was at least as great a motivator as the desire for sexual pleasure.

  “I suspect most of us were too sophisticated to have much of a sense of sin. I know I never thought of sex as being right or wrong. It was neither—it was simply Not Allowed, like smoking or drinking or reading after Lights Out. The object was to do it without getting caught, and if one did get caught it wasn’t all that awful. The usual punishment was loss of privileges, and the worst that could happen for a chronic offender was expulsion. Since we hated the place, we weren’t too put off by the thought of being sent away from it. One’s Mummy and Daddy would be upset, but one saw Mummy and Daddy too infrequently to worry that much about them. So one simply broke the rules and had the fun of telling the others all the deliciously dirty things one had done.”

  After graduation from the boarding school, Carole returned to the States where she enrolled at one of the more well known eastern women’s colleges. She led a moderately active sex life during the year she spent there, including one homosexual episode and casual weekend sex with dates from an Ivy League men’s school. By the spring, however, she found herself growing restless. She found her dates quite boring and ultimately ceased dating altogether. She gave up sex, more out of dissatisfaction than anything else, and spent her free time either reading philosophical novels or drinking wine alone in her room. “I had romantic thoughts of drinking myself to death, but all I liked was a light Moselle, and it was hard to do more than get a little tiddly, let alone develop symptoms of acute alcoholism.”