by Terry Gould
“And I said, ‘As long as you’re watching, Mark, and enjoying, I’m fine,’” Julia said.
Everybody broke up at that remark.
“You’ve got to watch, Mark, or she ain’t fine.”
“You probably got holes drilled in all your closets.”
“I gotta admit,” Mark said, “watching the ecstasy in her face the first couple of times, it was great. I loved it. I felt this closeness, a lot more love surging up in me—And I’m thinking to myself, ‘This is crazy.’ I really enjoyed it.”
“Now it’s gotten to the point,” Julia said to me, “where they have to be really good friends, we really have to like them, and even then it’s more we bring a woman in. Because as much as I enjoy men, I like women, to tell you the truth. Which is something I never considered before we got into this lifestyle. I love Mark, but I like women. And if a fellow I’m attracted to happens to come along with the woman, then that’s really a wonderful experience for me—but it takes time. We’re not indiscriminate like some.”
“The top priority for both of us is her,” Mark said. “We have one good friend who sometimes stays over, and when she gets excited she comes down to our bedroom. The next thing I know, she and Julia are out by the Jacuzzi, on one of the chaise lounges. Or else she’ll come down and say, ‘Okay, Mark, I’m taking your wife now.’ I say, ‘Okay.’ She says, ‘Leave the bedroom, but watch.’ Is that a turn on! Can you imagine! And you’re watching! That to me is the epitome of marital bliss.”
Phyllis turned her head from where it was resting against Neal’s back and looked at me thoughtfully. “What did you call this again?” she asked.
“The erotosexual lifestyle.”
“Yeah, I like that—I like that name.”
I still have an info sheet I received from LSO just before I went to my first Lifestyles convention in 1993. “Enter the ‘Playcouples’ of the nineties!” publicity director Steve Mason told prospective attendees like me. “Imagine, couples who like to meet, dance and party with other couples from around the world and who, quite frankly, get off on being openly erotic in semi-public settings. What better way to renew passion, to enhance romance?”
Those words—“openly erotic in semi-public settings”—and that sentiment—renewing a relationship by behaving in that way—are at the heart of the lifestyle. To the outside world it must seem mind-boggling that the playcouples at the Eden could be so nakedly at ease explaining and exhibiting to each other the details of what they considered “the epitome of marital bliss.” In the real world the conduct of extramarital sex is marked by secrecy and denial, but that is not the way playcouples behave when they feel safe. Married pairs like those at the Eden have been leaping the fence into the forbidden zone for so long, and finding that zone so regularly crowded with respectable people each time they’ve leapt, that among themselves they hardly even think of swinging as forbidden. Playcouples love open sexual play; they love talking about how much they love it; and they love sharing the specifics of the ways they personally experience it. That’s what makes them “different”—and it partly explains why they elicit such indignation, hostility, and fear in people to whom the rules of concealment serve as protections against both intrusion and exposure.
Since the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s we have assumed our culture to be totally open about sexuality, suffused with sex. But the efforts of pollsters tell a different story: suffused with sex we are; open to revealing our sexual secrets we are not. Sex is still one of the only subjects we demur or dissemble about. The academics behind the National Health and Social Life Survey devoted a fair portion of their 1995 book Sex in America to explaining why it took them seven years to design and complete what in other cases would have been a standard three-month canvass. To be sure, the U.S. Senate (that paradigm of sexual openness) passed a law by a two-thirds majority barring public financing of the study, a telling poll in itself. But even after the authors had secured private backing they had to agonize over the wording of questions so as not to “make the interview sexy or provocative or offensive;” they inserted “checks and cross-checks” that would catch people up on lying; then they handpicked interviewers from among the most skilled and tactful professionals in the country—who had to repeatedly reassure those polled “that the information they provided would be obtained in privacy, held in confidence, and not associated with them personally.”
“Our study was completed only after a long and difficult struggle that shows, if nothing else, why it has been so enormously difficult for any social scientists to get any reliable data on sexual practices,” the authors wrote.
So entrenched is our tradition of sexual secrecy and lying about sex that the evidence for the practice of open eroticism has been ignored by many scientists when assessing the repertoire of “normal” sexual options for humans—just as homosexuality was once ignored. Prominent evolutionary anthropologists have made assumptions about the behavior of people today and, projecting it into the past, have implied that what swingers are up to has been unnatural for humans for at least the last thirty-five thousand years—even though they don’t really know how people had sex before writing was invented.
For instance, in Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray, Helen Fisher claimed that Cro-Magnon couples “must have coupled in the dark or out of view. Nowhere in the world do people regularly have coitus in public.” And in the journal American Anthropologist, Ernestine Friedl gleaned from the ethnographic evidence that “hidden coitus may safely be declared a near universal.” The logic offered for the universality of the public-sex taboo is that it must have arisen either to hide adultery or to exclude those who could be aroused to interrupt sex and, in a competitive struggle, steal the body most desired for passing on genes. But when Fisher and Friedl decided that hidden coitus was universal, they may not have considered that the NHSL Survey showed that more men and women think group sex is appealing than think same gender sex is appealing. They certainly did not acknowledge the behavior of swingers, surprising in Fisher’s case because just ten miles from where she teaches at Rutgers University are two big swing clubs, Beginnings and Entre Nous. If she had made the drive she would have seen dozens of her neighbors regularly having coitus in public every weekend. And if she had spoken with her colleague at Rutgers, Dr. Norman Scherzer—who sometimes lectures on the swinger phenomenon both at Rutgers and as an adjunct professor in human sexuality at New York University—she would have discovered that today in North America at least three million taxpayers in the thirty- to sixty-year-old age bracket are frequenting places where the opportunity to par-take in open sexuality is the main drawing card. What is significant, Scherzer says, is that swingers are practicing their behavior in a subculture where there is very little competition for sexual mates, no desire to procreate, and no attempt to be secretive about sex. They are engaging in open eroticism as part of their marriage—and if you examine their behavior both historically and cross-culturally, Scherzer says, you will find that they are actually not doing anything new at all.
There are two components to the overt sexual culture of the lifestyle. One is a couple’s engagement in sex with groups of other people—generally referred to as orgiastic sex. The other is spouse exchange, which historically has been more discreet. Let’s look first at orgiastic sex, the behavior that never “regularly” takes place.
Organized, open sex is not unique to our era, our culture, or our hemisphere. It has occurred regularly for at least four thousand years, or since the time the Caananites held yearly sex festivals to honor the goddess Asherah and the god Baal in Abraham’s day. Unrestrained group sex and public intercourse with priestesses were frequent practices in the towns we know as Sodom and Gomorrah—until they were stamped out in a series of “righteous” wars led by the “avenging angels” of the same God who had thrown the biblical forebears of these citizens out of Eden. A little farther east, according to Herodotus, the highborn wives of Babylon worshi
pped the goddess Mylitta by going to her temple and having sex openly at least once in their lives.
As far as the West goes, the catalogue of public sex is almost continuous right down to today. The Greeks held several national sex fests, called Aphrodisia, Dionysia, and Lenea, the latter two subsidized by the state. First there was fasting, then there was feasting, then the population dressed as nymphs, bacchantes, and satyrs, marched through town and into the country, and, by late night, were having intercourse in sight of each other. They even had a special lesbian Dionysia practiced by Attic women, according to the ancient Greek travel writer Pausanias. The wild-haired worshippers dressed in goatskins, linked up with crowds of Delphian ladies, and climbed to the top of Mount Parnassus where they held ritual dancing and orgies. In the reign of Augustus Caesar, thousands of Romans who were members of the cult of Bacchus held orgies no fewer than five times a month. One raid of this ancient swing club by the Roman guard led to the arrest of seven thousand socialites.
After Rome fell, pagan Europe—which had been practicing orgiastic rites when Rome rose—continued on its merry way with festivals such as Beltane and the Feast of Fools, which eventually became our Mardi Gras and Fasching. In the late Renaissance a mystical cult of European cabalists held regular séances enlivened by orgies. And when the West’s explorers sailed the seas and began “discovering” aboriginal cultures untouched by their social norms, they found so many instances of public sex that for years the prime focus of the missionaries was imposing the position named after them.
Intriguingly, two of the matriarchal cultures they stumbled onto reversed Western norms regarding the secret consummation of sex and the public consumption of food. In these societies, the abundant availability of sex and the scarcity of food seems to have played a role in the reversal. On Vakuta Island in the Trobriands and on Tahiti, people ate in secret, guarding their meals in the face of fresh memories of famine. Not wanting to excite envy and conflict among diners, the Vakutans and Tahitians evolved norms that branded public eating shameful. Yet in both South Sea societies, citizens publicly copulated on special occasions. Women possessed status and property comparable to males and were relatively free to express their sexual desires, thus increasing the otherwise dear supply of sex that reigns in patriarchal societies where women have always been rigidly controlled to assure paternity. In addition, the myths of these islanders were erotopositive, and it is probably no historical and economic coincidence that pro-women pop stars such as Sarah McLachlan and painters such as Lilian Broca are now promoting an alternative “original” woman to the biblically demure Eve. She is Lilith, the apocryphal “first wife” of Adam, who is alleged to have been edited out of the Bible by the ancient patriarchs because of her openly expressed sexual desires. After leaving Adam, Lilith fulfilled herself on the shores of the Red Sea by having group sex with hundreds of male demons.
Today, a yearly trip to Brazil will reveal that the citizens never quite buckled under to the imposition of one man, one woman, one-at-a-time sex: for over a week during Mardi Gras Brazilians lift proscriptions against sex in public and group sex and combine their aboriginal, African, and European pagan heritages in a rite of consensual nonmonogamy they’ve idiomatically named sacanagem. It’s a loaded word understood by every citizen of the country, and when wives and husbands use it they mean they are going to publicly “seek pleasure” with other partners.
“Many peoples of the world, prior to European colonization and its attendant Christian missions, seem to have openly celebrated their sexuality, at least on occasion,” the British archaeologist Timothy Taylor observed in The Prehistory of Sex. “Days of sexual license, where adults had sex with as many partners as they wished quite publicly, seem to have occurred among North American Indian groups like the Huron. Jesuit missionaries were eager to crack down on such activity, so that by the time trained anthropologists arrived to study these communities in detail, from the nineteenth century onward, they found a very different culture from what the Jesuits had encountered.” Alluding to swingers, Taylor asserted that modern anthropologists like Friedl were “wrong to think that coitus is entirely hidden even in modern Western society. Although it is not an everyday public act, it is regularly performed in small private groups.”
Most swingers, of course, tell you they are not orgiasts. They may have sex with others in front of their own partners, but “it’s not everybody with everybody,” as Neal pointed out to me. Partner-sharing is far more common in swing culture than pile-on orgies and requires no historical digging to demonstrate as regular. The practice of spouse exchange is institutionalized in many cultures, partly because in some societies it has made good economic and political sense, partly because it has spiced up the sex lives of the participants. Its most famous practitioners are the Inuit, whose lifestyle at the time they ubiquitously practiced spouse exchange bore an intriguing resemblance to the modern suburbanite’s. The Inuit family tends to be nuclear, without the broad affiliations of a clan. Until the advent of the snowmobile, hunting for meat in the Arctic required them to be isolated from others, and when they did encounter their fellows, they often shared spouses as a way of increasing cooperation and lessening competition. Swingers, too, live in nuclear families, and they find their lifestyle an effective means of abating the isolation of suburban living. Couples in the lifestyle will tell you that in many ways their clubs are networking centers, since the range of members’ professions they are likely to meet extends into all fields. At a club like New Faces New Friends in Vancouver or WideWorld in Orange County, it is not extraordinary to see people exchanging business cards at the end of an evening and longtime acquaintances often offer each other advice and services as an extension of the sexual exchanges that take place on the weekends.
In a much less casual vein, some lifestyle spouse-sharers become so close they do resemble a clan. Here they approximate the customs of aboriginal societies that in the past practiced extra-mateship liaison as a way of solidifying a tribe or, as we have seen with World War II pilots, as a sort of insurance policy against the death of a spouse. The Banya Remarra of Rwanda shared spouses among “blood brothers”—relatives near or distant within the clan. The Siriono of the Bolivian Amazon had a clan culture of partner exchange that resembled that of the Remarra, while allowing almost complete sexual freedom as well: husbands and wives maintained the primary pair-bond but had as many as ten lovers within the clan, knitting a sexual web of solidarity.
The Toda tribe of India, however, extended the sexual freedom of marital partners to include just about anyone who struck their fancy, without requiring any clan obligation. “A [Toda] woman may have one or more recognized lovers as well as several husbands,” wrote anthropologist Clellan Ford and psychologist Frank Beach in 1951. “There is no censure of adultery. In fact, the Toda language includes no word for adultery. As far as these people are concerned, immorality attaches to the man who begrudges his wife to another.”
Ford and Beach discerned that 39 percent of the 139 cultures they studied throughout the world practiced approved adultery. While some of these societies forbade sexual liaisons as a general rule, “on certain special occasions the prohibitions are lifted for a short time and everyone is expected to have sexual intercourse with someone other than their spouse.”
Married lifestylers, then, combine all four varieties of spouse exchange: sometimes they reciprocate sexual liaisons with favors, like the Inuit; sometimes they become extraordinarily close with a few couples, approximating a clan; sometimes, like the Toda, they have casual sex; and sometimes they practice celebratory group sex, as when they partake in Mardi Gras or Halloween parties. They are typically North American in this regard, taking a little bit here and there to form a new twist on an old and varied practice.
Aside from a very small minority known as the “polyfidelitists,” however, lifestylers do not practice group marriage or communal living. As McGinley’s former employee Frank Lomas once told me: “Swingers like to shar
e bedrooms, but not bathrooms—at least for more than a weekend.” Here, too, they are typically North American, and if you recall the origins of modern swinging you can see how the behavior has been consistent for over half a century. Fighter pilots were fiercely independent souls who would probably die for you, even live for you—but they would not live with you.
In 1979, when the sociologist Edgar Butler tried to determine how many people were regularly engaging in swinging rites, he found widely differing estimates offered by sociologists and anthropologists, ranging from a low of one million people to a high of sixteen million. One pair of sociologists predicted in 1972 “that eventually 15 to 25 percent of all married couples will adopt swinging,” based on its growth curve in North America. According to McGinley, however, it seems likely that at no time has the figure been above where it stands today, at about three million participants—based on the number of clubs, the roster of club memberships, attendance at parties, and samples of private parties in selected cities—although he points out that the number in 1998 is up by about one million from the late eighties. Around the world there are probably another million or so active swingers, with offshore clubs most numerous in Germany, France, England, the Netherlands, and Belgium, and with other clubs scattered from India to Ecuador to Australia.
The point here is that swingers are not doing something historically irregular, just currently unusual. As Edward Brecher wrote in his chapter on swingers in The Sex Researchers: “Everyone is not like you, your loved ones, and your friends and neighbors—and even your loved ones, friends, and neighbors may not be as much like you as you commonly suppose.”
By my second day at the Eden I’d noticed a couple who were hanging back from most of the goings-on at the clothing-optional beach and at the resort’s disco: they went kayaking on their own in the morning and rented horses or played golf in the afternoon. Joe and Doris were a couple of handsome, 40-year-old businesspeople, and, as they quietly explained to me over breakfast on the open terrace by the pool, they were not swingers. Before they came on this trip they had had no idea that the word “lifestyle” meant swinging—they had thought it was just the name of the tour agency.