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The Lifestyle

Page 20

by Terry Gould


  But not swinging husbands. They enjoy the feeling engendered by a wife’s sexual “infidelity.” This, I suggest, is partly because they have learned to experience an automatic reaction they can use for their own pleasure—“sperm competition syndrome.” SCS could explain the biology behind the pleasures swinging men get from sharing their wives. The 1.5 million men in the subculture appear to be able to accept and capitalize on what every man seems to be programmed by evolution to accomplish when he consciously or unconsciously suspects a partner has been unfaithful. “We’re hypothesizing that men may actually ejaculate sooner when they perceive a potential risk of sperm competition,” Tom Shackleford, a researcher at the University of Michigan, told the curious millions watching the documentary “What Do Women Really Want?” on The Learning Channel in 1997. (Although he was probably not referring to swinging men, who usually know how to control and savor their quickened urges.) Men, Shackleford continued, “may actually ejaculate more forcefully; the ejaculation may subjectively seem more intense, the orgasm may seem more intense, and the sexual relief following ejaculation may be more intense. All of this having been selected as a counter to potential sperm competition.” It was as if a suspicious male suddenly enjoyed (or endured) a biological syndrome, since his ejaculate was also awesomely rich in sperm cells.

  Probably every “cuckolded” straight man has experienced SCS and felt the urgent drive to engage in sexual activity with his “betraying” partner. But in our society, as Wright pointed out, the straight man usually experiences this sexual imperative as rage or self-torment. The syndrome can produce a range of behaviors: a man can start out asking hectoring questions then progress to masochistically demanding to know every last detail of a liaison—“Did you go down on him? How many times did you come? You let him what?” SCS can end in reconciliatory sex, violence, rape, or even murder. “‘My gut reaction to this,’” confessed one husband to author Dalma Heyn on his discovery of his wife’s infidelity, “‘was so deep, so violent, I felt my stomach being pulled out of me. I’m surprised, sometimes, that I didn’t kill or maim one of them, because I was nuts.’” Men almost never admit that their physiological response to encountering their partner having sex with another has a red-hot core of sexual desire to it. But when we understand the biology of why men universally obsess over the details afterward, we can see that something fundamental to human evolution is transpiring inside his body.

  As I’ve reiterated in this book, the most venerable criticism of the lifestyle is that it is merely a means for men to have sex with women other than their spouse. Without doubt, almost every swinging man enjoys that pleasure, but if you probe a little deeper into their sexuality these men will tell you that being with their wife while she is being intimate with others is one of the most powerful draws of inviting another couple into their marriage for a night. As Elliot had told me at the Eden Resort: “It was like I was watching a movie star in a love scene. I can’t believe how beautiful she gets. So hot!” Female swing-club owners concur: “It’s a favorite fantasy of guys in the lifestyle, in my experience,” Chris Cosby of C.A.S.T. Couples in Houston, Texas, told me at a Lifestyles convention. And Patti Johnson, who runs San Francisco’s Bay City Socials, and who believes that the lifestyle is built on “matriarchal principles” that are geared as much for the female’s pleasure and desire for male attention as for the male’s desire for multiple partners, said, “It fits together nicely, like a puzzle; a woman gets to be treated like a queen, and a guy gets to feel he’s married to a queen, with all the guys wanting what he’s got. They get really charged with all the flirtation.” Long before much was known about sperm competition, the observant Gay Talese, author of Thy Neighbor’s Wife, described this counterintuitive reaction of even neophyte swinging men to their wives’ encounters at an orgiastic swing club in California: “Men who noticed that their wives aroused other men became in many cases aroused by them themselves and strove to repossess them.”

  In a manner unseen in straight society, lifestyle husbands have become connoisseurs at transmuting the natural urge to wipe out the competition into the pleasurable urge to—as Robin Baker put it—“duke it out inside the female to win the right to fertilize the egg.”

  Let’s look briefly at how SCS works; why swinging husbands would consciously use it to eroticize their marital sex lives; and how it fits in with the willing promiscuity of wives who are comfortable in the lifestyle. SCS gives a whole new meaning to Iago’s advice to Othello: “Look to your wife, observe her well with Cassio.”

  Until recently it was thought that the number of sperm a man deposited in his partner, and the force of his orgasm, depended on how recently the man had ejaculated. If a man masturbated on, say, Wednesday, then made love on Friday, he’d ejaculate less sperm with less force on the Friday when he made love. It was also assumed that all the sperm in a man’s ejaculate had one purpose. After a “routine” ejaculation of between 100 million and 300 million sperm cells, the seminal pool on the floor of the vagina seeped into the cervix and the sperm swam through the uterus and then to the fallopian tubes where they endeavored to meet up with an egg if one were floating by. If a woman had sex with two men, it was thought that the sperm from both partners would simply swim in their usual manner to the ovum, and one sperm cell would blindly win the race. The general consensus of biologists was that a fellow was equipped with enough sperm so that if he got lucky with a naughty wife, it would be a fair race between him and the cuckolded husband, and vice versa. Essentially, the theory of human sperm competition was viewed from a philandering man’s perspective: there was just no evidence that females could aggressively and promiscuously promote such competition in their bodies.

  Then, in the early 1990s, Baker and Bellis persuaded cohabiting students at the University of Manchester to use condoms and deliver to the lab each day the semen the males had ejaculated. The couples recorded the intimate details of their lives on questionnaires. The researchers examined the behavior of the males’ sperm when it encountered another’s, analyzed paternity tests, and conducted surveys of the females to find the prevalence of multiple mating within five-day periods.

  In 1995 Baker and Bellis published their complete findings in Human Sperm Competition: Copulation, Masturbation and Infidelity, which demolished the notion that sperm were merely programmed to swim to the ovum, that females were “naturally” monogamous, and that males’ ejaculations and inseminate were not governed in any critical way by millions of years of female behavior. They discovered the smoking gun of “natural” human female infidelity. “There’s Kinsey,” pronounced Sarah Blaffer Hrdy in an interview in 1997, “there’s Masters and Johnson, there’s Baker and Bellis. They’re giants in the world of sex research. I think they’re heroes.”

  Their “disturbing” conclusion was that these sexual adaptations were so fundamental that they could only have been shaped by evolution. The “innate” male fear of female licentiousness appeared justified. In our evolutionary past, monogamy had probably never existed as a biological “norm” for our species. Nor did it exist today. “Every one of us,” Baker wrote in his popular book Sperm Wars, “is the person we are today because one of our recent ancestors produced an ejaculate competitive enough to win a sperm war.” Embedded for millions of years in the genes of every man is the absolute conviction that his partner could be having sex with someone else within days, hours, or minutes of having sex with him. The longer the time she spends away from him, the more convinced his body becomes—the body being a more accurate measure of evolutionary tendencies than a wishful mind. What I have termed SCS, and the increased pleasure in ejaculation it causes men, is the naturally selected manner in which males combat spousal licentiousness. Whenever a husband prepares to have sex with his wife, he unconsciously weighs the odds that she has been, or will be, unfaithful to him: “To increase the chances of winning the sperm wars that might follow, he needs to introduce more sperm. And this is just what he does.” Unconscious in straig
ht men, cultivated and enjoyed by swinging men, SCS is a product of nature.

  Suppose a straight couple are living together in ostensible monogamy, seeing each other every day and having sex a couple of times a week. Every time they make “routine” love the man will deposit some 200 million sperm cells, depending on how much his “loading muscles” squeeze out from the two sperm tubes rising out of the testicles and on the number of orgasmic spurts he employs to deliver the sperm and seminal fluid from the prostate. According to the old view, all these sperm were, by design, fertile egg-getters. But Baker and Bellis thought there could be another reason for the profusion. They discovered that less than 1 percent of a male’s vast number of sperm were programmed for this job. More than four-fifths—“kamikaze sperm”—were designed to actively hunt down and kill the sperm cells of other males in the female’s vagina, cervix, and womb. And just under one-fifth—“blockers”—were designed to obstruct the path of another male’s sperm. Hence the billions of sperm a male’s testicles produce every month—enough to fertilize every female on the planet—most of them warriors ready for combat in the bodies of philandering women.

  According to Baker and Bellis, a male would be totally unaware of the different war divisions in his inseminate, nor would he be able to control the number of “troops” he was ejaculating. At work was a blind evolutionary process governed by genetic inheritance: this process had selected for both the composition of a male’s sperm based on the probability of having to fight a war, and the amount of sperm cells the male’s body instinctively knew it must deliver to the female based on the immediate likelihood of that war. The routine delivery of millions of sperm, which could survive up to five days in the female, served as a kind of screen against surprise attack by a rival. Baker called the act of routine sex “topping up.”

  Returning to our straight couple, suppose the man’s wife goes away for three days on a business trip with some colleagues that include an ex-boyfriend. Consciously the husband thinks she’s a loyal wife, but his genetic inheritance tells him differently. The night before she returns he feels the urge to masturbate, out of boredom he thinks. But his body is telling him to expel “old” sperm and shunt to the front of his sperm tubes younger sperm ready for battle. Normally, after three days without sex, he would inseminate her with the usual number of sperm. Their time apart, however, signals to the husband’s most basic instinct that an enemy could be at the gate, and his body begins preparing for war. Eventually, the single cannon shot of that war will be an act of increased pleasure.

  Let’s suppose the man’s wife has indeed not been loyal, and she comes home with her reproductive tract secretly filled with the sperm of her ex-boyfriend. According to Baker she will then be unconsciously driven to do something very curious (something lifestyle wives, almost without exception, and without much resistance from their husbands, do as well). “When she gets home, she works very hard to have sex with her partner.” Whether or not she really desires to get pregnant, her unconscious mind is telling her the following: that “she wants to have her egg fertilized by her ex-boyfriend only if his ejaculate is also the most fertile and competitive. In other words, her body wants to promote sperm warfare between the two men—”

  As the couple make love and he approaches orgasm, his body begins to “load” sperm into his urethra—600 million sperm, not 200 million, regardless of whether he has masturbated during her absence. His loading muscles are more forceful than usual, shunting to the front nearly the full length of the two sperm tubes, and he spurts in a surprisingly pleasurable orgasm that, according to Tom Shackleford’s hypothesis (and you can confirm it with the testimony of any swinging husband), feels stronger and longer-lasting than the ones he experiences in routine sex.

  Since his wife’s body is full of her lover’s sperm, the two “armies” set at each other, exactly as she had unconsciously planned and he had unconsciously prepared for. Now her orgasm comes into play, evidence that she is fully equipped by evolution to participate in the competition.

  By varying the timing of her orgasm, she can favor one set of sperm over the other for uptake into the cervix. If she orgasms before her husband’s insemination, her cervix will descend and absorb acidic mucus, which will hinder the passage of the alkaline sperm. She will be as unconscious of planning this timing as her husband will be of planning the number of sperm he delivers. As Josef Skala explained to me, if she has unconsciously chosen to favor her extramarital lover’s sperm with the timing of her orgasm, a greater proportion of her husband’s sperm will leak out of her body after sex as “flowback.”

  Let me point out here, as Baker does, that this competition can entail the inseminates of more than two men in a woman. “Once a woman’s body contains sperm from two or more different men, those sperm compete for the prize of fertilizing the egg…. It is indeed a war—a war between two (or more) armies.” [Italics mine.]

  To illustrate for his readers the natural drive of men and women to establish sperm competition in a group-sex encounter, Baker set up a fictional scenario involving two couples that he called “fair exchange.” He assessed the behavior of the two couples as being congruent with one of the ways people were programmed to behave—that is, as “a recognizable part of the rich mosaic of human sexuality—a part, moreover, that promotes sperm warfare.”

  In Baker’s scenario, one of the wives initiated the “swapping.” “Eventually, as they lay together, it was the serious stroking and kissing of their bodies by the other couple that took them across the threshold from embarrassment to intense sexual arousal. The intercourse they had, while still being caressed by the other couple, was the most exciting either had ever experienced…. Watching his partner have sex with another man excited the childless man once more. He could barely wait for his friend to withdraw before taking over.” He had orgasmed minutes before and would now orgasm again. He would have been experiencing sperm competition syndrome.

  In this fictional vignette the couple “never repeated the exercise.” In fact, many couples in the lifestyle indulge in the exercise no more than once a year when they feel drawn to experience the “intense sexual arousal” it causes them. Or, if they are fastlane swingers, they may seek it once a week. They may frequent clubs like New Horizons or they may have a small circle of discreet friends who never go to clubs and who hardly “swing” at all. But if we look at all lifestylers in this biological way—from the inside out—we can at least begin to comprehend why they do what they do and the reasons they say it gives them pleasure. It is easy enough to declare the lifestyle abnormal, but millions are in it, and we should weigh the good arguments that the behavior could have a natural basis. It involves the programmed urge of both males and females to promote or fight sperm wars in females, the casual female bisexuality and group sex so prevalent in our close relatives the bonobos, and the voyeuristic pleasures of males who—as assured of their partner’s emotional fidelity as their partner is of theirs—know how to enjoy the hot reaction of their bodies to spousal “infidelity.” Indeed, the new revised latest edition of the standard model is actually catching up to swingers. Now females are thought to be “semimonogamous,” “mildly promiscuous,” and capable of “multiple mating.” No one, however, has yet dared to put a number to the adjectives “semi,” “mildly,” and “multiple,” and, thus far, at any rate, Baker and Bellis have not reported on the three big fastlane swing clubs—Connections, Number One, and Adam and Eve—in their university town of Manchester, nor on the dozen other big clubs in Britain. Perhaps if they paid a visit they might discover that thousands of mainstream marrieds have an unreserved idea of what number we should read into that word multiple.

  An hour after Skala, Leslie, and I had first come upon our tablemates in the video room, they were all more or less played out and singing vibrantly in the showers. An hour after that the Annex was empty. All the fastlane couples in the club who had been fondling and titillating—they’d all changed back into their fantasy outfits or Be
rmuda shorts and sneakers and gone back to the banquet hall. By one-thirty in the morning most of them were sitting around tables chastely gossiping and laughing and drinking soft drinks and eating whole-wheat sandwiches prepared by Connie and her dad. In a few days they would all return to society as law-abiding middle-class taxpayers.

  “What’s your opinion, Skala?” I asked.

  Skala took a bite of his ham and cheese sandwich and chewed and didn’t say anything. Then he sipped some of his drink. Then he said, enigmatic as Vishnu: “Their pleasure is derived from being aroused.”

  I waited.

  Then he said: “Their arousal is most important to them. That’s the essence of their sexual pleasure, and maybe their lifestyle. The older women are most sexually arousable and pleasure oriented, and the men look at the women and if the women are aroused that gives them their pleasure. I have not seen many male orgasms here tonight. They seem to know their orgasm kills their arousal. Not for the female but for the male. The actual coming is not that important to the males—they seem to like to stay in that state adoring the women. The Grecian urn. Or your Hindu sculptures.

  “It’s just my first night,” he said. “I’ll give you another opinion tomorrow.”

  * A final point should be made: in humans ovulation is actually not all that “hidden.” Astrid Jute, a biologist working at the Ludwig Bolton Institute in Austria, discovered in 1996 that the testosterone level of men rises markedly when they inhale an odorless cocktail of pheromones called “copulines” secreted by an ovulating woman. Men also rate unattractive women as prettier when smelling the stuff. In addition, a couple of studies have shown that women going to bars when near ovulation not only bare more flesh, but they tend to wear more jewelry. “These adornments, it seems, have the advertising value of a chimpanzee’s pink genital swellings,” the science writer Robert Wright has noted.

 

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