The Wife-Swap Report (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

by Lawrence Block

  SHEILA: It’s really terrifying. And you know, I suppose it could happen to us, couldn’t it? We think it couldn’t because we are veterans at this sort of thing and can read between the lines of a letter, but don’t you suppose everyone thinks it couldn’t happen to him?

  PAUL: All sorts of strange people. People who want to have their children join in the fun, which sickens me. People who have the gall to suggest that we have our children join in, which earned one friendly guy a sock in the nose from me. He couldn’t believe I’d hit him just because he’d suggested something like that. Hit him? I wanted to kill the son of a bitch.

  SHEILA: That should give you an idea of a few of the things we don’t do, anyway. Generally we try to keep open minds, and to meet with different kinds of people and know them as people as well as sexually. And to meet mainly with individual couples, but to vary things by occasional dates with two or three other couples. And, finally, to let off steam now and then in a genuine all-out orgy.

  • • •

  Later that night I play back the tape. At first I compare the picture which Paul and Sheila convey of their swap club with what I have learned of the functioning of other such groups. I conclude that it is more or less typical. If anything, the group is, as they have said, somewhat better organized than most such clubs.

  But before long my mind wanders, and I switch off the tape recorder and find myself thinking about Paul and Sheila and the particular form their marital adjustment has taken. I think of other swingers I have known and the lives they have made for themselves, and I conclude once again that Paul and Sheila are more similar to others I have known well than they are different, that their special quality is more a matter of how well they see themselves than how they live or think or feel.

  I think again of the premise on which I tried to hang this particular interview session—i.e., the manner in which one assures variety and freshness in one’s career as a swinger. Earlier I had been somewhat irritated by their failure to grasp this premise, and now it occurs to me that the whole idea is basically absurd. And yet does not the absurdity speak, if not volumes, at least some extended chapters on the confused and confusing role of sex in the modern world? Is there not something especially revealing in the very idea of monotony as a peril in wife-swapping?

  And I wonder, too, what sort of effect this process of seemingly interminable interviewing may have on the Gordons themselves. I have done no end of interviewing in this and allied fields, but never before have I spent an extended period of time with one individual or couple. In a sense, they have been forced into a role roughly equivalent to that of a patient in a psychoanalytical relationship. By seeking information for myself and for the reader, I inevitably probe in much the same way as an analyst might.

  A day or two later, having had no intervening meetings with the Gordons, either together or separately, I dictate the following remarks to my tape recorder:

  “How much time can one spend absorbed in sexual matters before they cease to be at all real? And how much of a role can sex play in human life before it completely loses touch with its original biological purpose? How far can we all go, as individuals and as a race? And what happens to us if and when we go too far?

  “This project has affected me, though it will perhaps be some time before I know whether for better or for worse. I find myself wondering more and more frequently whether the profession of sexual researcher is fit work for a grown man. Even as I think that my white rats, my guinea pigs, my Paul and Sheila, ought to have more important things to occupy their minds, so do I think that I ought to be devoting my own time to more world-shaking work than their sexual preoccupations.

  “And how my perspective grows distorted! Prolonged exposure to almost any attitude leads one to be increasingly exposed to regard that attitude as reasonable, even ordinary . . .

  “How absorbed we are with ourselves, how obsessed with adjustments and relationships . . .”

  Orgies, Nude Parties, and Lust Weekends

  PAUL: When you read about orgies or hear the word used in conversation, there’s really no telling what people really have in mind. To some people, an orgy is any social evening in which the participants have more than three or four drinks. I suppose the average civilian would figure that any swinging evening was an orgy, or that any time two couples had sexual relations in the same room, that that sort of thing would come under the heading of orgy. Swingers have different definitions, but even then the word has a variety of meanings.

  In my way of thinking, an orgy is a party with at least a dozen couples and no real ground rules at all, with everyone doing whatever seems like a good idea at the moment. Ideally the people don’t all know each other very well, and ideally everyone has the mental attitude that this particular occasion is going to be something special, something out of the beaten path. At a real orgy, a swinger will do things that he might not do in the course of an ordinary party.

  SHEILA: Of course, there are some people who only swing at orgies. They never swap or anything else, but a couple of times a year they go off to an orgy and let everything go.

  PAUL: I can’t see that, myself.

  SHEILA: Well, that’s because we regard swinging as a way of life, as a part of our way of life. Others use it as an escape valve. You were telling me about someone at the office who drinks that way, never takes a drink all year and then goes on a binge?

  PAUL: He does it a couple of times a year. If he takes one drink he can’t stop, he’s that kind of alcoholic, so he stays dry for months on end until I guess things get to be too much for him, I don’t know, and then he takes a train up to Boston and gets a hotel room there and stays drunk for anywhere from three days to a week. He stays completely smashed and then one morning he wakes up and according to him he knows instantly that it’s over, that he’s had it, and he comes back again. I see what you mean, that some people go on sex binges the same way. I prefer our approach to life, myself.

  JWW: Do you make much use of orgies?

  SHEILA: Oh, just once in a while, and I couldn’t really say how often because it’s not as if we operated on a schedule. A few times a year, maybe. It just happens, something comes up, somebody tells us there’s a party and we do or don’t decide to go.

  PAUL: The real place for orgies is the West Coast, especially in the Los Angeles area. California has always been more free-wheeling generally in swinging matters, as I guess you know. For example, a single guy has a lot less trouble getting in on the action out there. In the swinger publications, the correspondence-club magazines, there are always a large proportion of ads from California that will come out and say “Three is not a crowd” or “Single men welcome,” whereas other advertisers will more than likely go out of their way to discourage single men.

  As far as orgies are concerned, from what I understand it’s hard to live out there without getting invited to one every weekend.

  SHEILA: I can’t believe it’s that free.

  PAUL: Close to it, I think. I know I’ve seen ads for orgies, and I don’t mean in swinger publications, either. Right in the regular newspapers, not to mention the underground paper, I think it’s the Free Press. It couldn’t be any freer. They’re careful about the wording of the ads, but you barely have to be a swinger to get the message.

  SHEILA: I know that some orgies on the Coast are sponsored by something called the Sexual Freedom League. No one seems to know if there’s really one organization with that name or if different people make a habit of borrowing the name. Also, I’m not sure that what they do is exactly what we would call an orgy.

  PAUL: Sometimes.

  SHEILA: But not always. Some friends of ours went once and said the meeting was a sort of a mixer for swingers. It was a nude party, which is what they generally do in California, unless I’ve been misinformed. You take your clothes off when you arrive and the party starts with everyone sitting around naked talking about politics and the movies and things, and then people pair off. The party we heard
about had more men than women at it and relatively few married couples. I gather that it was a very young crowd. Our friends said they couldn’t get in the mood, it wasn’t their kind of party, and they left.

  PAUL: When you get those young kids, and especially out in California, I suppose everybody gets high on marijuana or methedrine or LSD, and maybe it would be hard to relate to someone who was high that way if you weren’t high yourself.

  SHEILA: I know that we’ve gone to nude parties right here in New Jersey, and once in New York City.

  PAUL: They don’t work out so well.

  SHEILA: Not for us, at least. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, although God knows I’ve certainly never thought of myself that way. But I don’t much care for the idea of being stark naked when I’m meeting someone for the first time. The mood isn’t sexual and nudity in itself isn’t exciting, not really, but at the same time I have to admit that it is embarrassing. There are some devout nudists in the swingers movement—

  PAUL: They are some of the craziest people in the world.

  SHEILA: Some of them are very nice people, but they’re out of their heads. All this poetic swill about the body being beautiful and natural and clean. They manage to make a religion out of the whole thing. And they’re also a bunch of nutty sun-worshipers, burning themselves so black all over that I imagine most of them die of skin cancer sooner or later. But to get back to the nude parties, what people apparently don’t realize is that the average person looks better with clothes on.

  PAUL: Most people, let’s face it, are not beautiful. Swingers are head and shoulders ahead of the rest of the world in this regard. Not because they necessarily had a head start in the looks department, but because they take better care of themselves. Well, it stands to reason. The average person never gets seen naked except by whoever they’re married to, and in the average marriage they don’t care what their partner thinks, so there’s no incentive to stay in good physical shape. Swingers are very intent on being attractive, not only dressed but nude as well. On the other hand, civilians are apt to be better dressed. Sheila and I buy decent clothes, all things considered, but we can’t begin to approach the wardrobes of a great many of our nonswinging acquaintances. Because swingers may be just as anxious to make a good impression socially, but they know that they’ll be judged more on their appearance nude than how they look with their clothes on.

  Even so, even taking this into consideration, most of us aren’t that sensational nude. People feel a lot better with their clothes off, but if the party’s at the talk stage, I don’t see any advantage in nudity.

  SHEILA: The rationale is that it not only breaks the ice, it just about heats the water. Admittedly, once you’re over the initial shock value, it does set the stage for sex. And people who like nude parties say that it avoids getting clothes dirty by tearing them off in a rush and just throwing them aside. I can understand this. I know when we first started going on swinging dates I had trouble finding my panties at the end of an evening. They just sort of got lost in the shuffle.

  PAUL: Now she knows enough not to put them on in the first place.

  SHEILA: I think, all in all, that you have a much better chance to develop a sense of anticipation if people are clothed at the beginning of a party. In any activity, anticipation is a sizable portion of the pleasure.

  PAUL: The rest is memory. If you think about it, nothing’s much fun while it’s happening.

  SHEILA: I’m serious, Paul.

  PAUL: I’m not entirely kidding, either.

  SHEILA: Well, I don’t know what I was going to say. You threw me off the track, but I don’t suppose it was earthshaking. I guess I just got carried away on the subject of nude parties, and that makes me sound like quite the old square, doesn’t it? I’ll say it again—maybe we’re getting old-fashioned, maybe younger people react differently . . .

  • • •

  There is a brief and rather vague free-wheeling discussion of Marshall McLuhan’s observations and how they might relate to the wife-swapping scene. At the time it seems that we develop some salient points, but when the discussion is transcribed it will appear quite meaningless and vacuous. Then we return to the specific area of the sex orgy. Paul and Sheila describe several at some length, their conversational attitudes quite matter-of-fact, even disinterested. They elaborate on a three-day affair which took place a year earlier at a small resort in the Catskill Mountains: a group of swingers booked the entire lodge for the weekend and invited a total of fifty couples to share expenses. From Friday afternoon until late Sunday, the entire lodge was completely given over to a sexual marathon, with an endless string of sexual contacts interrupted by brief intermissions for food and sleep and, according to Sheila, “so they could carry out the wounded.”

  The actual activity of the orgies seems oddly unimportant, even monotonous to reproduce. I had given some thought to including a verbatim selection of Sheila’s description of her actions in the course of their “lust weekend,” but a perusal of the transcript has eliminated any inclination I once felt in that direction. The reader must understand that the structure of an orgy is such that everybody does as he pleases all at once; thus, one person’s recollection of an orgy is like the blind man’s view of the elephant—he has only touched and can only report on a fraction of the whole.

  In another work, I have recorded my own impressions of an orgy that I was privileged to attend. I did this despite my general reluctance to insert personal material in my writings because I felt that an orgy could only be conveyed verbally in terms of its effect upon an individual and its relevance to him. With the same thought in mind, I find it preferable to omit Paul’s and Sheila’s description of orgies in favor of including some additional material on their reaction to orgies and the effect of such experience upon them. If the reader wonders what then actually goes on at such an event, let him be assured merely that everything he can imagine, absolutely everything, is being done somewhere by someone to someone, with someone else watching and someone else taking notes and someone else waiting his turn.

  • • •

  SHEILA: You know, we talked to someone about it afterward, and it was their first experience with something anywhere along these lines. They had swapped and partied but had never swung all out in this fashion. And the girl said, “Honestly, it was too much for us, it was fun but it was just too much.”

  And that really is the whole idea, the whole point of it. That you do overextend yourself, that it’s too much all at once and knocks you out and drains you, and that you leave the whole thing completely and utterly depleted. Literally so. Your sexual parts ache and your body is completely exhausted and sex is the last thing on your mind, you just couldn’t do anything to save your soul.

  The point is that it’s supposed to make you feel like this.

  PAUL: When swingers who use orgies occasionally talk about the whole idea of an orgy, they’ll use phrases like “blowing off steam” or “getting something out of your system.” And these phrases are very accurate descriptions of what an orgy does. You get everything out of your system, you empty yourself. It isn’t just that you go on and on until you can’t do it any more. You go far past that point. You immerse yourself in it, you surpass your capacity again and again. And it gets to your mind sooner or later.

  SHEILA: You lost me. You mean it’s like masturbation, it gives you pimples and drives you insane?

  PAUL: Oh, you know what I mean, for Christ’s sake. You know the way a person is affected mentally when you drive yourself to exhaustion and on. That weekend, for example, it wasn’t just the sex, though God knows that was the major factor, but there was also the fact that nobody got any sleep to speak of and everybody was getting by on hardly any food. And when a person is forced to function under those conditions strange things will happen to his mental processes. Your mind makes strange leaps, strange connections. Your memory falls apart. Sometimes people get so that they can’t carry on a conversation because they can’t remember from on
e minute to the next whether they actually got around to saying something aloud or whether they just thought it.

  SHEILA: Now I understand. I missed the point. I thought you were saying that it does something to your state of mind afterward. As far as shaking your mind up, I don’t know whether it’s the exhaustion that does it or just the sheer volume of sexual contests. When something goes on and on like that you get punchy, that’s all . . .

  And afterwards you ache, and you’re beat, and you feel certain you’ll never want to screw anybody again, and that although you had fun you’d just as soon never go to another party like this one. And you won’t want to party like that again for months, but it won’t be more than a few days before you’re in the mood for sex again.

  JWW: You talk about blowing off steam. Is there that much unresolved tension in your lives?

  PAUL: Evidently, or otherwise we wouldn’t go.

  JWW: That’s specious, isn’t it? There’s another explanation—that the orgy serves a different function.

  PAUL: Like what?

  JWW: That’s what I was wondering.

  SHEILA: I think the comparison of sex binges to alcohol binges is valid. I think an orgy, like a drunk, is a way to get out of yourself.

  JWW: To get out of yourself?

  SHEILA: Yes, I would say so.

  JWW: Because of a basic dissatisfaction with things as they are?

  SHEILA: Probably . . . All swingers are dissatisfied people, you know. And I don’t mean that in the sexual sense, or even in the Sunday Supplement sense of the term. But swingers are people who want more, who want to exceed the role in life that is handed to them. They’re dissatisfied in the same basic way that successful businessmen are dissatisfied, that artists and creative geniuses are dissatisfied. It isn’t enough for them to be themselves, it isn’t enough for the world to be as it always has been. They want more.

  And they’re dissatisfied, and once in a while it catches up with them, with any of us. It has to. And when that happens you often have a need to get away from yourself, to get out of yourself. I suppose a swinger could use drink or drugs to do it. Any kind of a binge will do, but we’re people who react to things in sexual terms, so what could be more natural than to select a sex binge? The hangover isn’t too bad, and you don’t ruin your liver—