KEN: Getting undressed was a one-minute operation, because nobody wears more than necessary to an orgy. No underwear, for example. Guys wear slacks and a shirt and girls wear a dress. Otherwise it’s impossible to keep track of your clothing, since no one wears a stitch all weekend anyway.
CLAIRE: When we walked into the main living room, the overall scene was one of relaxed foreplay. Nobody was actually making it but everyone was starting to get into the mood. There were a half dozen conversations going on at once, and people would be talking and feeling each other at the same time. For instance, there was a redhead with really spectacular breasts deep in conversation with an assistant director on the other side of the room. They were talking about a movie that he liked and she hated, and she was absorbed in the conversation, and at the same time a guy next to her was sucking her breasts and she had her hand on his cock and was playing with him. And this sort of thing was going on all over the room, but no one had gotten around to balling yet.
KEN: They got around to it before very long, though. And once things really started to swing it was the wildest. It was a huge house, and when the group in the living room broke up you could just go from room to room and there would be people balling wherever you went. Then there were two special rooms for special arrangements. One was the theater. Will and Penny have a fantastic library of sex films. People in the movie industry don’t have to make do with the usual run of stag films. They make their own, and some of the better ones are done in full color and sound and are as professionally produced as the commercial stuff. Sometimes they’ll even have a writer work up dialogue and shoot the stuff with a couple of cameras. I’ve never seen better films than the ones Will showed, and he had it set up so that they would play non-stop with the projector running automatically. If you felt like it, you could go in there and watch the films anytime you wanted to.
The other room was the reverse—there was a camera there focused on the bed, and if you felt like performing for posterity you could go in there, flick a switch, and let the camera record your great moments. There were black masks available for the shyer types, too.
CLAIRE: It would be impossible to describe everything that went on. I don’t know everything that Ken did, and of course he doesn’t know everything that I was in on. As a matter of fact, I’m sure I don’t remember more than half of the weekend myself. There were stretches where I did nothing but screw for hours at a time, and it would take a better memory than mine to remember just what I did and with whom. But if it would help give you a picture of the whole thing, I could tell you part of it, and then Ken could tell what he remembers.
JWW: I think that would be good.
CLAIRE: Well, let’s see. On the ride down, we agreed that Jeff would have me to start the party going, and that Lili and Ken would make it together for openers, too. We joined everybody in the living room and sort of joined in the general conversation and group grope. I got goosed a few dozen times and propositioned left and right, but first I wanted to make it with Jeff. There was a rocking chair free. He sat on it and I sat on his lap facing him, and when he was inside of me a girl came over and rocked the chair back and forth for us. Then one of the guys who had propositioned me asked me if I’d like to go upstairs with him. We found a room to ourselves and went to it. He had me kneel over the bed and gave it to me Greek style. In the middle of this another couple came in and joined us. The girl got on the bed and spread herself out so that I could get at her orally, and her partner stood alongside her and let her give him the same treatment in return. Then, when the first guy finished, the second man wanted to have either me or the other girl the same way.
She refused, said she was built too small. I was willing but a little frightened because of the size of his penis. It was no longer than normal but about twice the usual thickness and I was afraid he would tear my anus apart. I told him I was willing to try but he couldn’t get it in, so the other girl and I tried everything we could to make him come, but nothing worked. He screwed one of us and ate the other one and kept switching back and forth and couldn’t make it. I guess he was an anal-erotic type and couldn’t make it any other way, and he finally went off to find somebody who was built to accommodate him.
I wandered off to another room where two guys and a girl were partying with Lili. The guys were eating her back and front and the girl was sitting on her face. I fixed myself so that I could take one of the guys orally while I jerked the other one off with my hands. While all of this was going on another guy must have joined the party, because the next thing I knew I was being screwed. He did a good job, finished, and went away, and I never did see who it was.
KEN: At that sort of orgy, you get that all the time. You never have a chance to talk to anybody and you never do know the names of half the people, and a lot of the time it isn’t really a matter of people at all, it’s just organs. Things keep happening and you get too caught up in what’s going on at any particular moment to pay much attention to external circumstances.
In one way, you’re a little better off if you’re a man. You wouldn’t think this would be true but it is. See, you learn over the years, if you really swing hard and fast, how to have satisfactory intercourse without ejaculating. Most men would probably think this is impossible. Once you learn how to manage it, there’s nothing easier. It isn’t so much a question of withholding orgasm as it is a matter of teaching your body to have the actual physical and emotional thrill of a genuine orgasm without emitting any semen. This way you don’t deplete yourself and you can go on for hours on end, getting a complete thrill each time but remaining potent for the next encounter. Thus at a three-day orgy I may ejaculate no more than five or six times a day, which may sound like a lot in itself but which isn’t enough to exhaust a man in good sexual condition. But at the same time I’ll actually have sex with dozens of girls, and each time I’ll have one or more of these non-ejaculatory orgasms.
JWW: But why is it harder for the women?
CLAIRE: Because we naturally come the usual way every time, and you can only stand so much of that. An orgasm is tiring, face it. Another thing that gets to you is the feeling, after the first few hours, that you’re a sex machine that everybody’s been dumping their excess passion in. Despite what Ken said, there aren’t that many men who hold it in. Most of them let it out, and it gets messy. By midnight the first night I had taken three or four showers and I still felt pretty sloppy. Whenever I stood up semen would run out of me, and I had the usual taste in my mouth, and I was already beginning to get a little sore.
KEN: I think you get the general idea, as far as what happens in that type of scene. The thing is, you really don’t remember specific encounters in detail, not the greater majority of them. The whole point is that you immerse yourself entirely in sexual activity, you get caught up in it and live entirely in the moment. Whatever crazy urge you have, whatever you desire to do with whoever appeals to you, you just go ahead and do it.
CLAIRE: At the same time there’s a sort of rhythm to an orgy. Nobody gets to sleep the first night. Besides being high on excitement, it’s standard procedure to use a little speed.
KEN: She means amphetamine.
CLAIRE: Like Dexedrine, for example. It keeps you awake and hops you up a little, just enough so that you concentrate very hard on what you’re doing and your attention never wanders. It’s not a sex stimulant in the sense of making you more easily turned on, like Spanish Fly or ginseng root or whatever, but it improves performance.
KEN: At least it seems to.
CLAIRE: So between the speed and the natural excitement, no one goes to sleep. But after the first few hours of unrestrained sex, a sort of lull will set in for most people. That’s when you’re apt to go sit and watch the movies, for example.
KEN: Or watch other people.
CLAIRE: That’s right. As a matter of fact, I’d say a third of the time is spent wandering around, talking, and watching other people ball. This is all accepted. It’s taken for granted th
at anyone who wants privacy will go to a room and lock the door, and if the door’s not locked that means visitors are welcome, whether they want to join in or watch.
KEN: Some clowns do nothing but watch. They’ll go to an orgy and never have relations with anyone. Instead they just watch and masturbate. They aren’t exactly in demand on the party circuit, but they’re accepted to a certain degree.
CLAIRE: They don’t subtract from the excitement, certainly. It’s always more erotic with someone watching.
KEN: So the thing is that the weekend runs in spurts—
CLAIRE: No kidding, sugar.
KEN: You’ve got a dirty mind. It runs in cycles and—
CLAIRE: You could even say it runs in spurts and snatches, if you wanted to.
KEN: Cut it out, will you? It’s cyclical, with periods of intense activity followed by stretches of relative calm. Somewhere in mid-morning the second day Claire and I generally get together for a private romp, comparing notes on what’s been going on so far and what we’ve done and with whom, and we’ll make love, and then we generally catch a few hours sleep. We’ll wake up around dinner hour Saturday and start in where we left off.
CLAIRE: And keep it up until Sunday afternoon, with maybe a nap in-between. Saturday night there may be some special entertainment. This most recent time at Will and Penny’s they had a couple of acts that everyone watched. There was a hooker hired for the occasion who was something of a contortionist. She could roll herself up into a ball and lick her own twat—
KEN: I know a limerick along those lines.
CLAIRE: Well, keep it to yourself. She did that, and she also put on a show with her dog. It wasn’t much as animal acts go, but the other bit got everybody pretty excited, and afterward she was available for anyone who wanted to make it with her. I guess Will Graham must have given her a couple of hundred for the evening. Then more of the same all night long with time off for an occasional nap or rest period, and we were back at our own place by nightfall Sunday.
JWW: How do you feel when it’s over?
CLAIRE: Tired, obviously. Exhausted, drained.
KEN: Sore.
CLAIRE: That too, and sometimes it’s no joke. One time Ken’s penis was absolutely raw. He was too embarrassed to go to a doctor—
KEN: Can you blame me?
CLAIRE: —and we abstained from sex for a week before it was healed. But the main thing is that you do feel as though you’ve gotten everything out of your system, so much so that it wasn’t any great hardship to spend the next week without sex, as far as that goes. And you just feel, oh, I don’t know exactly.
KEN: Purged.
CLAIRE: That’s it, I guess. The way it is now, the general pattern of going all out at an orgy and then cooling it for a few months, I think it’s just about ideal for us. But sometimes, to tell you the truth, I wish we hadn’t gotten this deeply involved in the first place.
KEN: I sometimes feel the same way. It’s . . . well, I believe very much in sexual freedom, in individual rights, and I’m not hung up enough on the whole concept of morality to worry that what we’re doing is wrong in a moral sense. At the same time, I can’t help recognizing it as decadent. It’s that if only by definition. The whole notion of swinging is fundamentally decadent, and the orgy is nothing but swinging carried to its logical conclusion.
JWW: Yet you feel swinging is right for you?
KEN: Very definitely. Claire and I seem to be decadent people. And there’s another thing. Once you get used to a new kick, it’s very difficult to get along without it. The sexual system builds up a tolerance much the same as the body develops a tolerance to certain drugs. You read this nonsense in the papers about people requiring stronger and stronger sexual thrills, well, it’s not entirely nonsense. To a certain extent it’s exactly what we found happening to us. Trying to limit ourselves to less extreme acts didn’t work, so we decided to go all-out once in awhile and cut down the frequency, and that works pretty well.
CLAIRE: We’re always ready and anxious when it comes time to go to an orgy, and afterwards we’re always relaxed again, sated. So they do what they’re supposed to do.
Fit To Be Tied
ARNOLD: I don’t know about all this. I’ve read, oh, any number of books on swinging, along with specialized material on bondage and the bondage clubs, and they all have a definite tone.
MONA: They make it sound as though people like us are a bunch of perverts.
ARNOLD: That’s it exactly.
JWW: Do you consider yourself perverted?
ARNOLD: I don’t see why we should be considered perverts, no. As far as I’m concerned, Mona and I are normal people. We lead what is basically a normal life. We’ve been married for eight years, we have three children, we live a decent life in a decent community.
MONA: And we have ordinary sexual relations on an average of three to four times a week. We hardly ever practice bondage at home. It’s almost exclusively reserved for meetings.
ARNOLD: As far as that goes, the meetings themselves aren’t that far out. I’ve read about clubs where people really go off their nut. Whippings and torture, really inhuman activity. As I said, I’ve read about them, but to tell you the truth I’m not sure they honestly exist, or if they do they must be extremely rare. The group we meet with, well, there’s not a member who would have anything to do with that sort of activity.
JWW: What do you do, then?
ARNOLD: We have bondage situations. We’ll have a person or persons selected as the subject for the evening, and that person will be restrained and forced to perform certain sexual acts. But the acts themselves will be perfectly normal—coitus and oral and anal copulation, nothing that isn’t a part of the average marriage, as everybody damn well knows. It’s the acts themselves that are the reason for the group’s existence. The bondage and the punishment aspects are just to provide a little added spice.
JWW: But these aspects are always a part of the meeting?
ARNOLD: Yes.
JWW: They’re never passed up in favor of simply concentrating on the sex act?
ARNOLD: No, I don’t suppose they are.
JWW: Well, I’m sure you see what I’m getting at. I don’t want to use this interview to make you look perverted—as a matter of fact, I’m trying to keep the whole question of what is or is not normal out of this study. But I think you’ll agree that if the club meetings are always focused on some facet of bondage or discipline or whatever you wish to call it, that you have to agree that it’s more than just an added spice.
MONA: That’s true, but—
JWW: And I wondered if you had any ideas why you emphasize bondage in this fashion and to this extent.
ARNOLD: Because it excites us, obviously. And because well, I’m no psychiatrist, but when you’re involved in this sort of thing you do a lot of reading in the field. Even without the training, I suppose I’ll have to say that I have a fair idea of what makes us tick.
JWW: I see.
ARNOLD: And what it comes down to, well, to reverse my direction entirely, I guess you could only call it a perversion of the normal sexual impulses. Which would tend to confirm that we’re perverts after all, which is the opposite of what I was trying to prove a minute ago.
MONA: I’ll tell you what it is. Forget perverted and normal, okay? The thing with all the stuff you read, material about bondage, is you always get the feeling from reading it that these people in the case histories are absolutely nuts. Right?
ARNOLD: Yes, that’s the whole thing. See, John, when you write this up, that’s one thing you don’t want to do. Don’t make us look like we’re a bunch of nuts falling off a tree. You know the story of the guy in the insane asylum, and somebody asks him how much two and two is, and he gives the right answer? And then he says, “Look, I may be crazy but I’m not stupid.” It’s like that. We may be abnormal or perverted or whatever you want to call it. The average bondage fan makes a big thing about how normal it is, but I think we all of us know better than that
, and those of us with a certain degree of insight could even make some pretty good guesses as to why we operate the way we do.
MONA: The beatings you got as a kid, for example.
ARNOLD: That’s one example, I could think of plenty of others. The hell with that. The point is, John, like with the nut in the asylum. Let the people know that we may be perverted, whatever that means. But we’re not crazy!
• • •
The mild forms of sadomasochism are extremely difficult for the average person—swinger or square—to comprehend. While almost anyone can understand the basic appeal of wife-swapping, however repugnant the idea may be personally, it is far more difficult for someone with no strong sadomasochistic bent to understand why bondage and discipline have so many adherents. And, at the same time, the vile sexual crimes and tortures of the aggressive sadist make an odd sort of sense to most people—they simply characterize these acts as the natural desires of a warped mind. But when sadomasochism takes a milder form, when its devotees find sexual fulfillment by acting out involved master-slave relationships, by administering mild spankings or flagellating one another moderately, or by tying partners prior to copulation, the average person is unable to understand the attraction of the sport.
Thus it becomes a simple matter to write of people like Arnold and Mona Carter as, well, nutty.
A closer look at the Carters, along with some of the other members of their bondage group, reveals that their practices gratify a great many desires which would otherwise be impossible to fulfill. In a great many cases, bondage and/or discipline permit the practitioner to rationalize acts and desires which, owing to his personality, he is unable either to accept or to suppress. In other cases, an individual’s sexual attitudes will have been shaped, probably in childhood, to a point where sexual pleasure is permanently associated with pain, humiliation, punishment, or whatever.
The Taboo Breakers: Shock Troops of the Sexual Revolution (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior) Page 14