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

by Lawrence Block

  After high school graduation Lee went directly into the Army for three years, then joined his father in the family business. June, a year younger, held several clerical jobs after high school and continued working during the first two years of marriage until she became pregnant with the first of their three boys.

  Their premarital sexual experiences were nothing out of the ordinary. Lee first had coitus at age 16; he and seven other boys took turns with a mentally retarded girl who lived in the neighborhood and made a habit of that sort of thing. He went steady with a girl during his last year in high school and, after four months of increasingly more elaborate petting, had coitus with her. The act was repeated several times, always in automobiles, until a pregnancy scare led the girl to prohibit further copulation. They broke up shortly thereafter.

  During his army years, Lee was generally limited to prostitutes; other girls were not available. He enjoyed most of these contacts, and one prostitute introduced him to fellatio, which he had heard of, wondered about, and which he now enjoyed greatly. One of the few non-prostitutes with whom he had sex during this time, a tavern pickup, tried to get him to perform cunnilingus upon her and offered fellatio in return. He would have wanted the latter but the former disgusted him and he refused. “I was pretty square then,” he explained, laughing. “If she came around now I’d eat her with a spoon.”

  June remained a virgin throughout high school. Afterward she dated a local boy and, after the usual pattern of gradually increasing intimacy, permitted him to have coitus with her. The first time was painful and succeeding acts were unsatisfying for her. She knows now that her lover was troubled by premature ejaculation, but at the time she was convinced she was frigid and despaired of ever enjoying the act. She broke off with her lover and dated sporadically for some time with no sexual intimacy.

  Some time afterward she dated a salesman from the Midwest. She knew that he was married and that she probably would never seen him again, and decided to go to his motel room with him because it would be a safe way for her to find out whether or not she was frigid. She was pleasantly surprised to discover herself capable of a more than adequate sexual response, including orgasm.

  Despite this revelation, June did not have sexual relations again until she began dating Lee shortly after his discharge from the Army. They had known each other since childhood but had never dated, perhaps because Lee graduated from high school before June’s breasts were fully developed. While a strong breast fetish is commonplace among American males of Lee’s generation, his is far more pronounced than average. A large bosom is for him a sine qua non in reacting to a woman, and a particularly large-breasted woman will strike him as sexually desirable even if she has a face like a prune. In this connection, he will remark predictably that all women look the same in the dark; the fact that one is apt to remember what they looked like with the lights on does not seem to influence his reactions.

  By the time he returned, June had outgrown all her high school bras. “I couldn’t believe it was the same girl,” he recalls. “I figured she was wearing falsies, but I also figured I’d go out with her and do a little research, and it was a couple of weeks before I could get that bra off, but I’ll be damned if it wasn’t all her inside of it.”

  Within a few more weeks the two were making uncomfortable but enjoyable love in the back of his father’s station wagon, and not long afterward they were married. Both families were delighted with the match. Lee and June borrowed a down payment from their parents and bought a small house in a new development and set about the business of Living Happily Ever After. They were 22 and 21 when they married. Twelve years had passed when I interviewed them, in the course of which Lee had inherited the hardware store and June had delivered three boys. They had moved twice, each time to a larger house in a newer and more prestigious development. And, with the passage of time, they had developed some new ideas on the concept of Living Happily Ever After.

  • • •

  If the Sheltons are examples of the Beautiful People, and if the Hallidays are typical Modern Young Marrieds, one might call Lee and June Just Plain Folk. It is their very ordinariness that is striking about them; one thinks at first meeting something like, “If these people are swingers, what on earth are the squares like?”

  Lee at 34 is beginning to lose some hair. He has been putting on weight, and although he plays golf whenever the weather permits this exercise has not kept him from developing a slight beer belly. June is also slightly overweight. Her breasts, considerably larger than average, were almost intimidating in the tight sweater she sported for the interview. One found oneself thinking of cannon shells. Her face was less impressive. A natural brunette, she had recently metamorphosized as a redhead, and the new hair color was wrong for her. Age lines detract from what was obviously once a moderately attractive face. Taken together, the Kreinhausers are neither attractive nor unattractive. They are, again, ordinary.

  Lee himself said as much when I first suggested an interview. He insisted that he and June were pretty average folks, not much different from the normal run of persons on the swingers circuit. I told him that a study of swingers would ideally include both the standard and the less common types in order to present a full picture of the situation. This seemed to make sense to him. I gathered, too, that he was pleased by the attention and had an exhibitionistic desire to discuss his sex life with a stranger. Whatever his motivation, he consented to the interview. We met for drinks in the cocktail lounge of my motel, then went to my room where I taped the material which follows.

  • • •

  LEE: The way we got started with swinging was through the newspaper ads. If you’ve been around at all you know the papers I mean, nutty stories about sex crimes in front and a few pages of personal ads in the back. Some clown brought one of those papers into the store. There was a story in it he wanted me to read, something he thought was exciting as hell about a doctor in Germany who drugged his women patients and raped them. I guess it didn’t take much to excite this jerk, or maybe he’s got a hard-on for doctors, I don’t know. But I read the ads and that got to me.

  JWW: You had never thought of wife-swapping before?

  LEE: Oh, sure. You see these books on the newsstands, articles in the men’s magazines. I thought of it, you know, but I never thought of it as something for ordinary people like me and June. I mean, I thought how great it would be, having all these different women with no sweat. What else is anybody going to think? But actually reading the ads really brought it home. It wasn’t just knowing that people lived this way but knowing all it took was a stamp to get in touch with them and get in on the action. That made it real.

  JWW: Had you been married long at that time?

  LEE: Lemme see, it was five years ago, so we were married what? Seven years. The seven-year itch. Only I got the itch a long time before that.

  JUNE: You scratched it before then, too.

  LEE: I didn’t make a regular thing of it. It’s funny, a guy’ll get married really expecting that he’ll never want another woman but his wife. I really thought this at the time. Then we’re married and the honeymoon is over and I’d see another woman on the street and she would look as good to me as ever. Being married didn’t change that. Does it ever? But I still figured I would stay faithful to June. The hell, I was getting all I could handle at home and I figured I wouldn’t need anything else.

  JWW: When did you change your mind?

  LEE: It was when she was pregnant the first time. It wasn’t a case of being horny for somebody else but just being horny period. You can’t do it for six weeks before or six weeks after, and here we’d been going at it hot and heavy for two years, close to three years, plus before we were married, and you get used to having it steady and it’s hard to do without.

  JUNE: There are other ways, if you thought about it.

  LEE: Me? How about you? I thought about getting you to go down on me but the way I felt then it wasn’t a decent thing to suggest to your wi
fe. I was hoping you’d think of it on your own.

  JUNE: How? I didn’t even know about it then.

  LEE: We were both pretty square, see. Anyway, I got through the six weeks before without too much trouble, but after the kid was born I just couldn’t take it.

  There’s a colored whorehouse in town, not exactly a whorehouse but they hang around out in front and there are rooms you can go to with them. I was scared somebody would see me or I’d pick up a disease, especially that I’d pick up a disease and then bring it home to June. But I went about once a week until June was in shape again. The first time was an ordinary screw and I was really shook up about getting a dose. For a full week I kept going to the john and washing it with soap and water maybe five, six times a day. I must of had the cleanest one in town.

  The other times I figured I didn’t want to go through that kind of worrying again, so I didn’t have intercourse. Most of the time I would get a blow job, or this one time I had this fat colored girl who was really built, like a pair of watermelons, and I had her between them. I was very proud of myself, I thought I invented something new.

  JUNE: And all this time I’m sitting home with dirty diapers and formula and he’s out getting his ashes hauled.

  LEE: I stopped after you were in shape again. But there’s something about it, you cheat once and it stays in your mind. Like a girl who finally loses her cherry and suddenly she’s the easiest make in the world.

  JUNE: I was never like that—

  LEE: Jesus, don’t take everything personal. I didn’t mean you, and anyway it wasn’t like I started chasing around right away. But I didn’t turn anything down. As soon as she got pregnant the second time I thought to myself, well, a few more months and it is time to cat around, and when I realized what I was thinking I knew I was looking forward to it. What I did for the next couple years, oh, say I’d go out of town for a convention or something, at least once a trip I’d make sure I got next to something nice. A pickup if I could find one but usually a pro because they were easier to find and less aggravation. And there was this one customer I had, her husband was in the service and you could tell she was looking for it. She came in one day and started shaking her knobs in my face so I took her back in my office and put her up on the desk and threw it to her. Nothing special.

  JUNE: More than that, though. You and her had a thing going.

  LEE: A couple times at a motel, that’s all. I broke it off because she looked as though she was nutty enough to get serious, and I didn’t want anything complicated.

  That was about it, then. I’m an average sort of guy, I love my wife and kids, I work hard to keep the business going, I’m happy if you put me out on the golf course or stick me in front of the TV set with a couple cans of cold beer. And I’d say I was doing about as much catting around as the average Joe, no more and no less. If I was out of town, or if it came to me and I didn’t have to chase it, that’s all. I did more of it as June and I got less active ourselves, but that’s normal, too.

  JWW: Did June know you were unfaithful to her?

  LEE: No, she didn’t.

  JUNE: Oh, I could put two and two together. I figured he had a special kind of business going on those business trips, and then the second and third times I was pregnant I noticed he wasn’t complaining about doing without like he did before. You know what they say about woman’s intuition. But what I also figured was what I didn’t know wouldn’t hurt me. You can know something but not know it, if you know what I mean.

  JWW: And that was the situation with you, Lee, until you read the tabloid ads. Had you done anything yourself at that point, June?

  JUNE: Not a damn thing, and when I think of some of the chances I turned down while old tomcat here was enjoying himself, it burns me up. I thought about it. I thought that if I were somebody else I could really have a ball, but the way I thought of myself, it just wasn’t something I would do. About swapping I didn’t have any thoughts at all, because I honestly had never heard of it. I had heard the phrase, wife-swapping, but I thought it meant like some news stories I had read about two couples living next door to each other for years, and then one day they get divorced and each one marries the other one’s husband. I thought that was wife-swapping. I also heard the phrase “key clubs,” and I thought they meant like the Playboy Club.

  LEE: Which gives you an idea of how much she knew. We were both pretty square, come to think of it.

  JWW: And how was your marital sex life at this stage?

  LEE: Not the greatest. It wasn’t so much that we did it less as that it was no big deal, you know? We were used to each other, we would do it one time and it would be the same as a hundred other times. Partly because we only did it two ways. Her on top once in a while, but the rest of the time me on top. I wanted to try some variety—

  JUNE: But he was afraid I would ask him where he learned his new tricks!

  LEE: So it wasn’t good and it wasn’t bad. You could say it was average, considering how long we were married by then. The thing of it wasn’t that we sat around thinking how bad it was but that we didn’t realize how much better it could be.

  • • •

  Lee found it impossible to dismiss the idea generated by the newspaper ads. Using a fictitious name and his store address, he answered several couple ads, ostensibly to find out if they were genuine. A high percentage of these advertisers replied, many with photographs of themselves. Lee wanted to continue the correspondence but feared the couples would insist on a meeting. He stopped writing and instead began a careful and elaborate campaign designed to prepare June for what he had in mind.

  He bought every book he could find on the subject, partly because he wanted to find out as much as he could about it, and partly so that he could take them home and leave them around the house where she would be sure to find them.

  JUNE: I got the message after I picked up the third one. Before then I didn’t think he was interested and when I read them I was really amazed at what people did. It seemed disgusting at first.

  JWW: Did you mention the books to Lee?

  JUNE: Are you kidding? When I did see what he was getting at the last thing I was going to do was bring the subject up. I was really furious at first. Then I started thinking about it, and I thought about those monkey-business trips out of town, and I started to do a slow burn. Because now it was pretty obvious that he was cheating, and here I’m sitting home keeping my legs crossed. And another thing that burned me was that he would want me to be with other men just so he could get to other women. That he wouldn’t be jealous.

  JWW: So how did the subject come up?

  LEE: I brought it up because I could see hell would have three feet of snow before she mentioned it. We were watching TV and there was this sexy actress on the Tonight show, I forgot who, and I mentioned this, and June said who she was married to and that he was good-looking, so I said, “Look, I’ve been reading these books about swingers, what the hell, call this dish and her husband up and we’ll have ’em over to the house and swap.” It was just a joke to bring the subject up, but it was like opening a faucet. All of a sudden she had a hundred angry questions about why was I bringing home the books and who was I sleeping with and what kind of a woman did I think she was and I don’t know what.

  JUNE: I cooled off after awhile and then we really let our hair down and did some serious talking. We were still talking when the sun came up. We talked some more the next night and he brought home those letters he got and the pictures, and we decided maybe it was something we ought to try. We talked about all the couples in the books that said swapping brought them closer together and told each other it would do the same for us. That very night we did make love. We tried out some new ideas that we’d read about in the books and between the variations and being aroused with the idea of swapping it was more exciting for us than it had been in a long time. That seemed to prove our point, that getting involved in this sort of thing would help us enjoy our marriage more.

  JWW:
Would you say that was your main motive for—

  JUNE: No, no, no, nothing like that. Not for either of us. It was what we said but I didn’t believe it and neither did Lee. All we knew was we wanted to do it because we thought it would be exciting, but we couldn’t come right out and say that to each other, so we said the other. It meant he could have other women and I could have other men and there would be no sneaking around and no jealousy.

  LEE: And no expense, and no chance of disease or some damn fool girl getting pregnant.

  JUNE: Or getting in some mess where you fall in love with somebody else and a marriage goes down the drain.

  LEE: Right.

  JWW: So you both agreed to go ahead with it?

  LEE: We decided that very night. I brought home a new issue of the paper but we decided why wait to exchange opening letters when I already had these letters from half a dozen couples that I never answered. We went through the photographs and there was one that appealed to both of us very much. The woman was beautifully built with long blonde hair and a great set and June found the man appealing—

  JUNE: He was tall and slim. Not exactly handsome, but you would call him distinguished-looking.

  LEE: —and what’s more they seemed like regular people. He was a pharmacist with his own store, they were about the same age as us, and they lived not twenty-five miles away. I checked the phone book for their city to make sure they were using the right names, and as an extra check June drove all the way out there one afternoon to buy a bottle of aspirin from the guy and make sure he looked like the picture he sent. It was him, and his wife was working behind the counter.