by Terry Gould
“There’ve been times we’re driving home I think that way,” a fellow to my right said. “You’re not alone in that.”
“And do you talk about it?” Judy asked the guy. “Do you communicate?”
“Well, obviously—we’re back here,” he said.
“I think men should be shown just as much sensitivity as women are shown,” Judy said. “I don’t think they get shown enough in this environment. That’s one reason I prefer closed swinging in the cubbyholes, or a little, safe group of three or four. Because I want to give attention, and when you’re in a large group it’s a very difficult task.”
“There was actually a point made in a discussion we were having that women get paid way more attention than guys do,” Bob said. “What do you think of that?”
“That’s absolutely true,” Kenny’s wife said. “Because we spend so many years being thought of that way, we expect it.”
“It’s kind of fun, actually,” said a heavyset woman, “but I know what you mean. Of course, we do dress for attention.”
“Well, that impacts me,” Kenny said, “because everybody was so into it, I felt left out. After a few tries, I tried to move ahead and get turned on, and all of a sudden reality set in. And so I thought, well maybe watching those videos—or maybe there’s something about me that’s wrong? I know you’re not supposed to be afraid here, but this is one man that does get fearful in that situation. I do get sensory overload, and I do shut down. It’s just part of it, we’ve been working on this and we do want to come back. But we left here last night and I said we’re not coming back. But—here we still are.”
“And how do you react to him when he feels so vulnerable?” Judy asked his wife.
“To me it’s more important how he’s feeling,” Naomi said. “So I just didn’t let anything happen. When it’s the other way, if I’m feeling vulnerable or jealous, I just tell him, ‘I’m having a problem with this woman. It’s not a big deal, I’m just letting you know it’s there.’ And if I can get that feeling out then usually what happens is that it comes together for me. Either he’ll say, ‘Okay, no problem,’ or I’ll see there isn’t a problem, or she and I will start talking and confirm. So it’s reciprocal.”
“So you check to see if the other partner is okay, is comfortable, is coping, is happy, is enjoying it,” Judy said. “There’s that nurturing that goes on—the caring, the communication. I feel the same when I meet a really attractive man. I feel like I’ve got to communicate with the woman first. Because I have to find out, he’s giving me all this attention—how does that sit with her? How many feel that’s the best approach?”
As in a school class, everyone raised a hand.
“Because you never know, say they’re new: Is this their first time? If it is, it’s really scary for her. I think for everyone it has to be really scary that first time.”
“That’s the first thing that hits you is being scared,” said Sonia, the one who was compatible with her two partners of the night before (one of whom had been Judy). Like my table-mates Edith and Beth the other night, and like many of the women at the club, both Judy and Sonia were freely bisexual. “You went in a car,” Sonia continued, “and you went in holding hands and you went and sat down and when a guy came over and asked you to dance, you think right away, Where is this going to go?”
“How long did it stay scary?” Pia asked beside me.
“Actually, for me it worked through pretty quickly,” Sonia said. “I had a very nice first experience. I think it depends on that. He was very sensitive. But it’s more on Allen,” she said, referring to her husband beside her. She mussed his hair. “If I didn’t know that if I said, ‘Okay, we’re leaving,’ that we would really leave, then I don’t know about this. My feeling is that if a couple doesn’t have that, then there’s no way they can continue to swing and make it work—it’s not going to work. They’ve got to keep that sensitivity, that communication—then they’re really free to have a great time. But that has to be there from even the first time they’re thinking about getting involved.”
“I’m just curious,” my partner piped up. “How many women here initiated their first swinging experience?” About half the women raised their hands. Most of them were in the fastlane.
“How many had husbands initiate it?” The other half raised their hands.
“You can really almost tell who it was that would initiate the lifestyle in their relationship,” Judy explained. “They’re always so bubbly.”
Most of the media reports I read of swingers before I entered their world that summer admitted that consensuality rules reigned at parties: “No means no is the good news at the convention,” the British Elle observed at Lifestyles ’95. But almost all stated that women were in the lifestyle only because their husbands forced them into it. “Apparently a lot of the women have come here to keep their men happy,” Elles writer, Lucie Young, claimed. When a woman explained to Young by the pool that entering the subculture had been jarring initially but that she had gone on to embrace it (“‘It was difficult at first, but by the second day it’s like right on’“), she was dismissed as self-deluded: “Her biggest fear was that her husband would have sex with someone who satisfied him better than she could.” Immediately after this judgment, however, Young noted: “Girl-girl petting is one of the major activities around the pool. Virtually all the women here define themselves as bisexual.” Virtually everyone was heterosexually available as well, Young pointed out, adding, “The rules, such as they are, are established by the wives and girlfriends.” Contradicting herself time and again with this catalogue, Young, with flat British contempt, resisted the temptation to get a handle on what was happening before her very eyes—heterosexually and bisexually—and on why, for some wives, “by the second day it’s like right on.” Like many journalists, she couldn’t accept the subculture’s total celebration of sexuality because she couldn’t get beyond the indisputable fact that in a lot of cases it is the husband who first suggests the idea of going to a lifestyle party, with the wife taking her own time to get used to the idea.
If you talk to veteran swinging wives who are completely out of the closet, like Jennifer Lomas, the business manager, Cathy Gardner, the mortgage broker, and Sherri Cooper, the social worker, they will tell you that the full weight of social conditioning keeps most women from initiating the idea of attending a swing club; therefore, it is usually the man who first makes the suggestion. Yet, they argue, the vast majority of women—whether straight or bisexual—are not “forced” into the lifestyle by abusive husbands.
Their logic is as follows: they differentiate between being encouraged by their husbands to attend a lifestyle event, enjoying it, then embracing the culture as a happy mode of marital living, and being abusively coerced into entering the lifestyle and not enjoying it at all.
They explain that middle-class women in our society are raised to regard spouse exchange as “detrimental, dangerous and just plain tacky,” while men are raised to find it alluring. However, once in the lifestyle, they say, most swinging wives (not all) consider themselves liberated from the social brakes that kept them from enjoying the abundant dressing up and permissive sexuality of the subculture. The lifestyle allows them the freedom to behave like the forbidden goddesses of Hollywood. Moreover, given that the rules of the lifestyle are “established by the wives” and preserve the stability of traditional marriage, Lomas et al. maintain that swinging women are able to act out their erotic fantasies with an exuberance equal to, if not greater than, that of their husbands.
There is considerable backing from academics to support them in this claim. “I think in this particular culture, in our society,” Jean Henry told me at New Horizons, indicating the women splashing in the pool with a variety of partners, “I’m not so sure that women have been left behind. In a way, I think, now it’s more acceptable for women to actively say ‘I like it,’ instead of having to pretend that they’re going into it under duress, or because the male
in my life wants me to do this.”
Dr. Ted Mcllvenna, the director of the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, a graduate school in San Francisco, has canvassed hundreds of swingers over the years. Just after the New Horizons convention he told me that once lifestyle women, especially middle-aged women with incomes that allowed them to be independent of their husbands, “found that safe context, they took charge, as if it were the most natural way for them to express themselves. They went out, they bought the clothes, they did the planning, they did everything to go back into that social milieu because it was a milieu that endorsed their sexuality.” A year and a half later Mcllvenna would set the Los Angeles Times back on its chair when he told a reporter: “Women are taking a more prominent role in these swing clubs. They call the shots. More women are working, and with that comes more power, affluence and associations. In the old days, men screwed around, and the women stayed home. Now women are out there.” The media can persist in claiming that women are in the lifestyle only to keep their husbands happy, but if reporters decide to make the calls, experts from numerous institutions will tell them a different story.
Obviously there is more to the lifestyle than just the act of sex: we are talking about a milieu. “We’ve found the majority of the people involved seem to be in it for the culture and the open socializing, not necessarily for the physical engagement,” Jean Henry told me at New Horizons. “Sexuality in the lifestyle is far more broadly defined than what you see over there.” She pointed to the Annex. “Sexuality helps define women to themselves in our culture as to whether you are attractive or not. This lifestyle is a way for women to get a feeling for being sexually attractive, i.e., ‘I am more feminine and I am a more effective woman because these men want to have sex with me, and, therefore, I have a power and an allure to my husband and to others, which I can carry with me.’”
Regarding this issue of self-image in the lifestyle, Jennifer Lomas pointed out that as middle-aged women express their fantasies within the subculture, they begin “to see themselves as hot stuff—and they have a lot of fun with that.” This is somewhat explained by the fact that for a lot of males within the lifestyle a healthy fifty-year-old woman is actually more erotic than a twenty-year-old: her total package of sexuality—even if Rubenesque—seems warm and frankly expressed as opposed to the icy hauteur paradigmatic models are apt to vacuously exhibit on a dance floor in a straight nightclub. That is why one of the most oft-repeated sayings of veteran lifestyle women is: “You have to convince them to come but then you have to convince them to leave.” That is why Mcllvenna says: “The men initiate, the women perpetuate.” And, as Butler’s colleagues Lynn and James Smith found in their study of swingers: “Women are better able to make the necessary adjustments to sexual freedom after the initial stages of involvement than are men, even though it is usually the case that the men instigate the initial involvement.”
In my interview with Cathy Gardner, a handsome, forty-nine-year-old grandmother who attended clubs at least twice a month with her husband, Dan, she took the point of view of a libertarian in order to turn on its head the notion that females remain in the subculture to please their husbands. “Aren’t some women being coerced to not be in the lifestyle?” she asked. “I’m happily married for so many years, I love my lifestyle, so I naturally ask the question: Who is doing the coercing? And my answer is, society, religion, television, they’re training people all the time, in a way making sure women act a certain way. I think people like me are actually rebelling against being told to not be in the lifestyle.”
The forty-one-year-old Jennifer Lomas held a similar view: “When I think back on how we first got involved in this, it’s clear to me now how my upbringing was saying no, no, no, how it wouldn’t even let me get to first base on the thought. That’s the point that everyone picks up on as to why swinging is supposed to be a man’s game. They say, ‘Well, if women love the lifestyle so much, how come they’re not the ones dragging their husbands to clubs to begin with?’ The answer is it happens sometimes—actually more and more as society is changing, and not just with bisexual women. But the real answer is that women are brought up so that you’re supposed to find one guy and live happily ever after, or, absolute maximum, play around on the side. Nobody ever told me until I got into the lifestyle that two people could get married and have sex with other people and be happy. But for men, it’s almost the reverse message. Get married and sow your wild oats. That’s why they usually take the lead. Then, like me and Cathy Gardner,” she laughed, “the women take over.”
In the case of the forty-five-year-old social worker Sherri Cooper—another handsome grandmother, but a bisexual—she had been the one to take the lead and persuade her husband, Danny, a carpenter, to become involved in the lifestyle. “Commentators walk in here, take a look around, and say, ‘These can’t be normal women, they’re all unhappy or crazy,’” Cooper told me at a convention. “That’s what they say, and that’s what people believe. I always wonder, would they go to a convention of lesbians and say the same thing? They look at me like I’m from another planet when I tell them ‘This was my idea to come here.’”
Increasingly, bisexual wives who have heard about the lifestyle are initiating involvement in the subculture. Yet, as Jennifer pointed out, and as was evident at New Horizons, “as society changes,” even some straight women are taking the lead.
However, the typical journey of couples who end up firmly in the lifestyle most closely resembles that taken by Jennifer and her husband Frank: it was Frank’s idea. After Frank first suggested swinging he became what sociologists refer to as an encourager. Encouragers make up the vast majority of men in relationships in which wives perpetuate swinging. “Male encouragers,” Butler wrote, “reject the double standard on idealistic grounds, mainly egalitarianism; they feel swinging will be a positive experience for themselves and their wives.” Frank’s ongoing encouragement led Jennifer to enter the enthusiasm stage. “The wife finds she no longer feels guilt about participating in comarital sex,” Butler reported. “She is actually beginning to relish it to an even greater extent than her husband.”
That is the claim of many swingers when they speak to sociologists (and reporters). The lifestyle has its dropouts; there are what sociologists call user males; yet the warning message in NASCA’s Etiquette in Swinging and on its Web site makes it clear that the subculture only wants people who fit certain criteria to get involved with swinging. It is the same warning delivered to couples in screening interviews before they are allowed to visit a club. “Swinging is not for everyone…. A positive feeling about yourself, your mate and relationship is important. People who are jealous, play social games, have a poor opinion of the opposite sex, are deeply religious or have relationship problems are among those who are not likely to enjoy swinging.”
As the saying in the lifestyle goes, “Swinging never made a bad marriage good,” and most swingers believe that. Indeed, after years of investigating a subculture that is far more rule-bound, discriminating, and controlled than it appears, Edgar Butler, Jean Henry, and Ted Mcllvenna have found that the least-told story is how pleased happily married couples in the lifestyle are with the lifestyle—even though it may have taken them some time to get to that stage.
For Jennifer Lomas the transition from straight to swinger wasn’t instantaneous by any means, and it wasn’t without complications. As Jennifer described it, her journey into the lifestyle followed a predictable pattern in which she and her husband eventually experienced comarital sex. Some couples never get to that point and stay “soft” for the entire time they are in the lifestyle. Some try it and find it an upsetting experience they never want to revisit. For Frank and Jennifer the journey took years. It involved, as she would tell me, a process of overcoming justifiable fears; retracing false steps; receiving positive reinforcement from people she respected and trusted; and, finally, establishing a context of permission in the right environment. Eventually she felt comfortabl
e enough to enter a new culture—the lifestyle.
To Jennifer’s mind, one of the lessons of her tale for neophyte swingers was that there is a right way and a wrong way to step into her world. The right way allows couples to take a look around and have the rules explained to them, so that they can decide whether they want to stay, return some other time, or never come back. We should listen to Jennifer’s story.
Like a lot of lifestyle women, Jennifer is ebullient and prone to using a lot of body language when speaking. In looks and personality she is one of the more attractive lifestyle women: tall and shapely, redheaded and tanned, and full of expository asides about the joys of open sensuality that she has come to accept as part of her life. Yet she is no compulsive-looking seductress: in the daytime she generally wears sweat socks and sneakers, shorts and a plain blouse, and very little makeup. After asking the loquacious Frank to excuse us so I could have a couple of hours to hear his wife’s side without interruption, Jennifer and I sat down in the interview lounge of the Lifestyles Organization. Here, as an LSO employee between 1989 and 1995, Jennifer had grilled hundreds of first-time couples for any hint of abuse before she allowed them to attend a swing party at the organization’s mansion; by the time a neophyte couple had left the room she’d explained to them the lifestyle’s rigid rules. She’d since moved on from her job at LSO to take a position as business manager of Laser Tech Engineering and was as little shy of relating stories about the reactions of her coworkers and friends to her being an out-of-the-closet swinger as of her sex life.
“We were married, I think, ten years when Frank first brought this up,” Jennifer began. “I was in my late twenties, never had another man; Frank never had another woman—since we were married anyway. Our sex life was great. I was completely happy. Great job, great husband, we hiked, bowled, skied—the California good life.