Erwin
No danger for her, Erwin. There’s a slight danger for you, though; if she does it often enough, you may find yourself walking around with a goofy smile on your face. But seriously, folks . . . no, there’s no danger in ingesting semen. It’s not even fattening, and is high in protein and various vitamins and trace minerals, especially zinc. Odd Facts Dept: Pumpkin seeds are rich in zinc. In sections where consumption of pumpkin seeds is high, as in areas of the Balkans, the incidence of prostate trouble is virtually nil. Which might suggest that your fiancée will never have to worry about prostate trouble. But then she probably wouldn’t anyway, would she?
I wonder if male homosexuals have a lower incidence of prostate trouble as a result of ingesting semen over the years? I also wonder how one would go about finding out the answer to that one?
Interesting how many men find fellatio more enjoyable if their sperm is swallowed. It could obviously matter strongly one way or the other to the fellator, but why should it make all that much difference to the fellatee? There are obvious answers— “Reject my seed and you’re symbolically rejecting me”—but I wonder if there isn’t more to it than that? Anybody have any clever ideas?
A good sex book for newlyweds? That’s a tougher one, Erwin. God knows there are a lot of bad ones. I’d recommend Dr. Benjamin Morse’s A Modern Marriage Manual as a good basic guide. And there’s a book of mine called Eros & Capricorn, which discusses sexual technique in terms of the erotica of other civilizations.
I’m also very partial to The Sensuous Woman, which everybody, male or female, ought to read. (Judging from the sales figures, just about everybody already has.) And judging by the rest of your letter, Erwin, I’m not entirely convinced that you need a book for newlyweds . . .
Dear Mr. Wells,
I have read most of your books and have enjoyed them. I especially like the way you write about swinging and that you are both accurate and sympathetic at the same time. My husband and I would probably be considered novice swingers, having been “in the swim” for only four months. However we have already seen enough to know that it is for us and that it is the wave of the future.
You don’t have to answer this question, but we have discussed this point several times and both of us wonder if you are a swinger yourself. From what we have read it is hard to be certain either way.
Maybe you want it that way. My feeling is that you would not understand the whys and wherefores of the swinging scene so well unless you were a part of it. It’s none of my business but I am curious. Do you swing? And do you ever swing with people you have interviewed? And if so could you tell me which ones they were in your books? If it is none of my business just say so and we will not be offended, as I hope you will not be offended by my boldness in putting this question to you . . .
Patricia
I’m certainly glad you asked me that question, Patricia.
Eh.
Do I swing? Well, yeah, now and then. Probably less often than you think, but now and then, yeah.
Do I ever swing with people I have interviewed? Well, uh, yes. Not very often, but once in a while it happens that way.
Could I tell you which ones they were in my books?
I suppose I could, but I don’t think I will. Look how much fun you can have trying to dope it out for yourselves . . .
A funny word, swinging. It’s had a rather long career for a slang expression. Fifteen years ago you hardly ever heard it used with a particular underground context. Wife-swapping (occasionally rendered as mate-swapping to lessen its male chauvinist implications) was the term most usually heard. It was, however, much too direct for advertisements, which were far more obliquely couched than they are nowadays. Couples would advertise themselves euphemistically as being “interested in photography and sunbathing” and would describe themselves as modern, liberal, fun-loving, free-thinking, or swinging. At the time the word was pure euphemism and was borrowed from the whole culture, where it meant (and still continues to mean) someone who enjoys having a good time.
For one reason or another, swinging turned out to be the perfect word for the new morality. All of its connotations were right. Further, it was a word that could be dropped into a conversation with friends in such a way that it would seem perfectly natural if they were civilians but revealing if they were swingers themselves.
Then, for a brief period of time, the word took on a more specialized meaning in the underground. A swinger was not merely a person who exchanged mates for sexual purposes but who did group things, engaged in some of the less common forms of sex, etc. Thus in an exploratory letter a couple might describe themselves this way: “We are uninhibited and enjoy swapping partners but we are not swingers and are not interested in that sort of thing.” This semantic stage did not last long. Swinger remains the universal term in the sexual underground, and yet retains its old Good-Time Charlie image in the straight world. Which, let me tell you, can make for a hell of a lot of confusion.
Consider this. A couple of months ago I met, after an exchange of letters, a husband and wife who had been into swinging for several years. They felt that their own experience in getting started was unusual if not unique. I thought so myself.
The husband had heard about swinging from a friend at work. He was a salesman, on the road five nights out of seven; his wife had two children and was tied down; they had been married for about twelve years and the joy had gone out of their relationship, sexual and otherwise.
So he came home one day, discussed with his wife this problem that they were both aware of, and, spurred on by her agreement with his summary of the problem, blurted out his proposed solution.
“I think we should try swinging,” he said.
“Great,” she said.
“You mean it?”
“Sure.”
“Honestly?”
“Why not? I think it’s a great idea.”
“Then I’ll contact another couple, some real swingers, and set up a date,” he said.
And he did.
A couple of weeks later, they drove to their carefully arranged meeting with a couple with whom the husband had corresponded. And, halfway there, it developed that there was a slight misunderstanding between the two of them. To wit: she thought swinging meant going out on the town, having a lot to drink, and yelling whoopee a lot. And now for the first time she realized that she was on her way to meet a strange man and was expected to go to bed with him.
“I was sort of taken aback,” she told me. A neat sense of understatement, I think. She was sort of taken aback and the Edsel was sort of a disappointment.
Happens she ultimately went through with it. They met the other couple as scheduled, confessed the wife’s misinterpretation of her commitment, and for the next seven hours she tried to decide what she was going to do. She decided to give it a try, and did, and liked it well enough, and they’ve been swinging ever since.
A misunderstanding of such dimensions must be rather rare, although it’s not uncommon for a self-described swinger to have the wife’s understanding of the term. And I’ve known of several cases of girls who were invited to “swinging parties” without realizing that group sex was in the offing. In those cases, though, there seemed to be an element of willful misunderstanding operating; their dates knew the girls did not understand the connotation of the word “swinging,” knew, too, that the girls would not agree to go to a sex party if they knew what it was, and either hoped the girls would go along with it once they were there or didn’t much care whether they did or not. (The ground rules of many orgies tend to encourage this sort of thing. Males are not admitted without a date, but once inside the date can keep her clothes on and not participate, while the man can amuse himself with somebody else.)
Swinger can mean different things to different people. But what exactly does it mean in the context of this column? Who’s a swinger and who isn’t?
This is a somewhat more complicated matter than separating sheep from goats. Let�
�s try this as a working definition: A swinger is someone who participates in extramarital sexual relations for recreational purposes. This definition permits a good deal of leeway, as well it might. Swinging may be heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. It may involve group activity or be limited to twosomes. It may be engaged in by marrieds or singles, and with or without the marriage partners consent and/or participation. It may be purely physical, the anonymous coupling of strangers. It may involve considerable emotional feeling of the participants for one another, with occasional swinging groups taking on the aspects of a group marriage to a greater or lesser degree.
I was discussing various aspects of swinging at a party this past weekend. The people gathered there were not swingers—or if they were they kept it to themselves—but once again I was struck by the considerable interest in the subject that is so often shown by people who are not into swinging and have no intention of moving in this direction. Even among people who go to some lengths to emphasize their disapproval of any form of group sex or mate trading, there’s a great desire to know just what happens, just who does what and with which and to whom, and just what sort of people are involved. I heard the following questions at the party, and have been hearing them in similar contexts for years:
What kind of people are involved?
All kinds. Rich, poor, old, young, urban, rural, small town. Businessmen, professional men, clergymen, blue-collar workers. All types.
Most typically, swingers are couples who have been married eight or ten years, with neither party having had very much premarital experience.
But this “typical” pattern is changing. Middle-aged couples are getting into swinging after twenty or more years of monogamous marriage. On the other hand, couples in their early twenties are entering marriage with swinging taken for granted as a part of married life.
Does swinging actually hold marriages together? Or does it break them up?
Probably neither. A lot of swingers will insist that their new hobby has prevented a divorce, and there’s no question that it often brings couples closer together and rejuvenates a sexually-stale relationship. How often it literally prevents divorce is something else again.
It sometimes happens that people swing together in an attempt to save a marriage and wind up getting divorced anyway. I doubt that swinging causes these divorces, any more than cobalt treatments cause the deaths of terminal cancer patients. If a marriage is on the way out, swinging won’t save it.
I was on a radio show a while back with a clinical psychologist from Cincinnati. He said he’d treated many persons with some swinging experience, and that it had always had a deleterious effect upon their personalities and their marriages. As I said at the time, those who have positive experiences with swinging, those who enjoy it and find it worthwhile, are not likely to take their troubles to a psychiatric clinic. I’m sure my own viewpoint is based on somewhat lopsided evidence, too—I don’t hear from the ones who become guilt-ridden or neurotic—but I can’t believe swinging is as likely to have negative effects as his experience might suggest.
How do the guys get their wives to go along with it?
When I hear this question, my immediate reaction is that it tells me something about the person asking it. It’s tempting to reply that the swinging philosophy precludes this approach—that no one “gets” anybody to “go along” with anything. The idea is that you do it together, that it’s not a matter of the manipulation of the wife by the husband. And why assume that it’s the male who wants to do it and the female who’s holding back? Up against the wall, Male Chauvinist Pig!
Fact remains, though, that most couples get into swinging at the husband’s instigation. Even in cases where the wife has already thought about it and actively desired it, it’s generally up to the husband to suggest it and coax her into it. Yes, I’ve known of cases where it’s the other way around. But very few of them.
Why? Because the double standard still exists and has its strongest effect upon women. A wife will frequently fear that her husband does not really want her to have sex with other men, and that, whatever he may say on the subject, he will wind up treasuring her less if she balls other men and enjoys it. She will also worry that she will not be attractive to another man and will be inadequate in bed. “I had never slept with anyone but him in my entire life,” a wife told me, “and I wondered if I would be any good at it. And if I would be capable of responding to another man. For that matter, I guess I was afraid that it would work—that I would respond to another man and enjoy it, and that I would like myself less afterward. I was afraid that I would find out I was that kind of woman, and I didn’t know if I wanted to be that kind of woman. It’s hard to get entirely away from the way you were brought up. I learned to think in terms of good girls and bad girls and still resisted the idea of being a bad girl. Even though I didn’t really believe all of that any more intellectually, it still had a grip on me deep down inside.”
So how do they get their wives to go along with it? By making their own feelings very clear and letting their wives examine their own feelings in return. By providing sufficient assurance that swinging, whether it turns out well or badly, will not work any fundamental change on their own marriage. And by not pushing too hard. Anybody who forces anybody to do anything has missed the whole point of swinging.
What about the children?
Most swingers raise their children more openly. They tend to support sex education and familial nudity. At the same time, most of them keep their children in the dark about their own sexual activities.
I would be very interested in hearing from swingers whose children know of their parents’ activities. How did they find out? How was it explained to them? And what seems to have been the overall effect? If you’ve had first hand experience in this regard, please let me hear from you.
Do you think swinging is good or bad for the people involved in it?
I used to duck this question. In early books on the subject I generally took a slight anti-swinging position, largely because of censorship possibilities. Since then I’ve made it a habit neither to approve nor disapprove, if only because I did not think my own opinions were wholly relevant.
Now, prefacing my reply with the admonition that this is only my own opinion and certainly not to be regarded as gospel, I’ll say that I think swinging probably does considerably more good than harm for the people who get into it. And I would say that this holds whether or not they enjoy it, and whether they stay in it or drift away from it.
My feelings stem from a basic conviction of mine, which is that it is better whenever possible to gratify desires than to suppress them, better to act out one’s fantasies in a safe and non-destructive manner than to brood permanently upon them. The words safe and non-destructive are important here; impulses toward suicide and heroin addiction are thus ruled out in advance. But when your fantasy involves something that causes no harm to yourself or another, that makes you neither a junkie nor a felon nor a corpse, I suspect it’s better to do it than to want to.
• • •
THINGS WORTH READING:
The Sexual Power of Marijuana, an Ace paperback by Barbara Lewis, sound information intelligently presented . . . Lawrence Block’s Ronald Rabbit is a Dirty Old Man, hard cover from Bernard Geis, and either the funniest book or the dirtiest funny book I’ve read. It may do for anal intercourse what Portnoy’s Complaint did for masturbation . . . Alec Waugh’s A Spy in the Family (Signet), entertaining and erotic and a brilliantly literate presentation of the swinging philosophy . . . and The Male Hustler, a new survey of male homosexual prostitution. I forget the authors name, but his initials are J.W.W.
Keep those cards and letters coming. And grope on!
Chapter Two
Of late quite a few correspondents of mine have read Three Is Not A Crowd, a book of mine which discusses the ménage à trois in the light of four case histories, all of them involving trios of two women and a man. These permanent alternatives to trad
itional marriage are a good deal less visible than certain other departures from the norm, and some of the letters I’ve received suggest that various forms of plural marriage, formal or informal, may occur rather more often than a glance at the surface would suggest.
Herewith a selection:
Dear JWW,
Just finished Three Is Not A Crowd. I found it on the newsstand in a supermarket just one day after submitting a paper in a Family Relationships class on multilateral marriage. Boy, I wish I had found your book sooner. The literature is rather limited.
My wife and I have been involved in a ménage à trois for a couple of years now, but are looking beyond that, mostly due to the growth of my wife’s own interest in the “you-can-love-more-than-one” concept. We are presently on the “prowl” for another couple with the aim of a reasonably permanent four-party multilateral marriage. It seems to be the ideal that we have settled on (or near).
If you are going to be producing a book on a topic that you feel we could contribute to, please feel free to let us know. We’ll be glad to hash it over with you. Meanwhile, if you know a decent bibliography on the subject, yell!
Dave and Paula
I’m very much interested in learning more about Dave and Paula’s scene, as I indicated in my reply to them. A book of mine currently in preparation, tentatively entitled New Styles in Marriage, will deal with various forms of group marriage. I’ve no idea how many people are actually getting into it, or are moving in that direction, but I do know that a variety of novels on the subject have been selling at a rate obviously unexplained by their literary value, which seems to be nil. While I can’t quite believe that the traditional nuclear family is on the way out, I imagine more and more people will be experimenting with various alternatives to it in the immediate future.
Doing It! - Going Beyond the Sexual Revolution (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior Book 13) Page 2