The New Sexual Underground: Crossing the Last Boundaries (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior Book 10)

by Lawrence Block

  I told her of course how wonderful she made me feel, and that my only regret was that I had wanted to have coitus with her, but that I would do so when next we met. She laughed and told me not to be silly, that she did not have to be home for hours and we had an entire afternoon of pleasure ahead of us. I was astonished!

  JWW: You hadn’t gathered as much from your telephone conversation?

  ROBERT: Nothing of the sort, to be sure. There are things one does not discuss on an open line, certainly. Also she said she had not mentioned it in advance because if she is with a man and does not enjoy making love with him, then she will once in a while leave after a single time with him. I was absolutely unprepared for this. One always has the option of paying a girl extra for a second time, but I do not usually wish a call girl more than once at a time. After the orgasm one loses interest in the girl, and the entire routine of paying additional money for an additional time is without appeal. I was not worried about my potency, although it is of course true that I am not as young as I once was. Who is? But let me say only that I spent two and half more hours with Rita that afternoon, and that we did a variety of interesting things, some at her suggestion and others at mine, and that she climaxed frequently and I did so twice more.

  JWW: Obviously I don’t have to ask how she compared with other girls you had had in the past. Have you seen her very often since that day?

  ROBERT: I see Rita once month, which she tells me is as often as she will see anyone. I can understand her wishes and for my own part feel it is as well not to see her too often. I would not care to tire of her. I have since found several other girls in much the same position as Rita, although I have yet to find one I prefer over her as a sexual partner. It is a most unusual thing, is it not? This business of amateur prostitutes who act with their husbands’ good wishes.

  JWW: Yes, it’s very unusual.

  ROBERT: I would guess myself that she takes the money less for its own sake than because it justifies her acts. I do not believe that one can have sex constantly for both love and money.

  JWW: I think the money is valuable to her in that it proves her lovemaking is worth something.

  ROBERT: Could there be any doubt? But I do understand what it is that you mean. It is of the narcissism, is it not?

  JWW: Perhaps.

  ROBERT: But I will tell you this, and that is that I am not too quick to inquire into the explanations of Rita, why she is what she is. I am sufficiently happy that she exists—

  • • •

  In a subsequent interview at which Floyd was not present, I asked Rita some additional questions concerning her career. I wanted to know how it might have affected her feelings toward swinging in general.

  • • •

  RITA: I don’t think it has. We still meet other couples about as regularly as before. More, actually. Twice a week is standard with us, Friday and Saturday nights, and before we didn’t usually swing with other couples more than once a week.

  JWW: So you have the weekends for swinging and the weekdays for dates in New York.

  RITA: I don’t think of it that way, but I guess that’s what it amounts to.

  JWW: And you find swinging as satisfying as ever?

  RITA: Very definitely. And so does Floyd.

  JWW: Do the two of you often discuss your dates?

  RITA: We did at first. Now we don’t always talk about it, any more than he tells me every little thing about his day at the office.

  JWW: How do you think he feels about your dates?

  RITA: I know he’s glad we’ve got the extra income, and I’m sure he is pleased that I am enjoying myself. We aren’t the type to be jealous, really. And there’s another thing which he didn’t tell you about the other day, and which I don’t think he knows I know, but I’ll tell you now. At the time that this matter first came up, right at the beginning, I’m pretty sure he had little bit of guilty conscience. I can’t absolutely swear to it, but from what I gathered he was fucking one of the girls at his office. Taking her to lunch and then going to a hotel and screwing her.

  JWW: I see.

  RITA: So I suppose he eased his conscience by giving me the same freedom. And suppose that first time, when I had Gary while he sat in front of the television set, suppose that was partly my way of giving him some of his own back, because although it never came out in the open I had a pretty good idea what was going on. So that may be one of the secret reasons why the whole thing got started, but whatever it was, I’m glad of the way it all turned out.

  JWW: Have you discussed your dates with other swingers?

  RITA: With couples? I wouldn’t dream of it. But I did meet one girl who was doing almost the same thing. She brought the subject up and I played dumb while she told me all about it. She got fifteen dollars a shot, and she and her husband were prouder than hell about it. Floyd and I laughed our heads off after we left. According to him, she wasn’t even worth fifteen . . .

  Three:

  Three Is A Beautiful Number

  As Rita Polk’s story clearly shows, the sweeping changes brought about by the sexual revolution have by no means put an end to prostitution. Nor have they led to that other utopian vision of the early swingers—equality between the sexes. In the new sexual underground, men and women are not equal.

  The women have a distinct advantage.

  We have already learned something of the lot of the single man. He must pay to run an advertisement that a woman or a couple may run free. He is sufficiently abundant, and sufficiently deprived of single girls in comparable circumstances, so that he will answer any number of couple ads on the off-chance that he will contact someone interested in either separate dating or a threesome.

  The single girl, on the other hand, has far more action available to her than she can possibly handle. She has her pick of single male advertisers to contact through the clubs. Should she place an ad of her own, the response to it will almost always run twenty or more times as heavy as she would have expected.

  The predominant reasons for this state of affairs are not hard to figure out. Whether or not one would say that the double standard still prevails, it is undeniably true that the heritage of this double standard still is very much in existence. It is, by and large, the female who continues to adhere to the old standards of morality while the male is temperamentally more inclined to embrace the sexual revolution whole-heartedly.

  While this is the most obvious explanation, I cannot avoid the feeling that there is a deeper biological factor at work here. Perhaps it is the male’s role to seek, the female’s to be pursued and won. As such ethologists as Ardrey and Lorenz have pointed out, we are rather less different than we think from our animal ancestors. Certain traits which we have long regarded as deriving from our social environment prove on examination to be eons older than any human society. I suspect that much of the inequality of the sexes stems from such roots, that it is in fact inherent in our nature. If so, we can hardly expect the sexual revolution, a distinctly societal phenomenon, to put an end to it. Anyone who has ever owned a female cat in heat can well appreciate that it is the female who attracts and the male who pursues. One may presume that in any given city there are an equal number of male and female cats. Indeed, owners of male cats are somewhat more apt to have their pets gelded, since toms have the un-endearing habit of spraying upon the furniture while queens in heat merely make awful sounds for a few days at a time.

  Yet when a female is in heat, she does not have to go out pursuing males, and never does so. Instead she merely stays where she is, waves her tail in the air, rubs her face against the carpets, and utters sounds of distress. And in no time at all toms from miles around have come after her and will hurl themselves for hours against the walls of the house in the hope of making her acquaintance. If, as I suspect, we are all of us not so far removed from this level of sexuality, then it would seem that women will always have an easier time finding partners, sexual revolution notwithstanding. Yet there are special circumstances
in the sexual underground which accentuate the privileged position of the female swinger. And here we have a phenomenon plaguing the single male swinger with which the tomcat does not have to contend. As far as I have been able to determine, the ménage à trois is a wholly human invention.

  In the new sexual underground, the single female is constantly sought by couples for troilistic relationships.

  • • •

  Dan and Wendy Hayes are in their middle twenties. They live in a converted farmhouse in a fashionable area of Connecticut. Dan is a moderately successful cartoonist who travels to New York once a week to show his work to magazine editors. Wendy is a Bennington girl turned hippie turned housewife, a slender girl with straight black hair and deep blue eyes. She is an ardent antique collector and does her own refinishing. Her husband, a bearish young man with a full black beard, shares this interest with her. This is not the only interest they share.

  • • •

  DAN: We came very close to throwing your letter away, John. We couldn’t have made it more obvious in our ad that we were only interested in meeting single girls, but I don’t suppose there’s any way on earth to keep men from writing. Some of them figure that a threesome is a threesome, I guess, and others just wanted to show Wendy how much more fun she could have with them than with anyone else.

  WENDY: And don’t forget the phonies.

  DAN: Christ, yes. Men writing in pretending to be women. And you can’t go by the handwriting, either, because a big girl will often have a mannish hand. Pictures are no help. The only thing to do is set up a meeting at a distance where we can make sure that the respondent is really female, and that we’re interested. I checked you out and picked up one of your books, and if this is a legitimate interview we’ll certainly cooperate—

  WENDY: With the understanding that you’ll be properly discreet in changing names and so on—

  DAN: —but I also know that writers are human beings, too, so if this is all a device to get Wendy into the rack, well, it would save time if you said so now and no hard feelings.

  JWW: Wendy is certainly an attractive girl, but my interest in the two of you is hopelessly academic. I just want an interview.

  DAN: That does simplify things. Ready when you are, C.B . . .

  • • •

  I had written to Dan and Wendy, along with several others who had placed similar advertisements in correspondence club magazines, with the hope of learning more about the constantly increasing number of couples who are exclusively interested in establishing troilistic relationships with bisexual single girls. Requests for interviews always bring a dishearteningly low proportion of positive replies, but in this instance the proportion was especially small. I did eventually interview several such couples, of whom the Hayeses were easily the most interesting and articulate.

  In the course of the interview, Dan and Wendy reported at some length on their premarital sexual experience. Rather than present this material verbatim, let me summarize it briefly before continuing the interview in narrative form.

  Dan had a brief period of homosexual activity in his early teens. At summer camp, one of his counselors initiated Dan and several other boys in mutual masturbation in the form of a “circle jerk,” a practice in which the boys sat in a circle and each one manually masturbated the boy on his right (or left depending upon the group’s orientation). The camp session ended without the circle’s activity coming to light, and Dan subsequently learned that this sort of behavior was regarded as perverted and reprehensible. He never had any further homosexual contacts and says he has never felt strong urges in that direction.

  His first heterosexual experience came two years later and consisted of petting to orgasm with a girl in his class at school. Shortly thereafter he had coitus with another classmate, an “easy” girl who evidently made a habit of that sort of thing. He recalls that he had difficulty sustaining an erection, but that the girl aroused him orally and he was able to complete the coital act with no further difficulty.

  In college, he went through a long and unhappy love affair with a girl who, he later discovered, was simultaneously having lesbian relations with her roommate. The girl willingly had coitus with him but received no pleasure from it and could only enjoy sex when he performed cunnilingus. She eventually told him of her relationship with her roommate, whereupon he was disgusted and broke off the affair at once. She became exclusively homosexual while he dated and bedded a variety of girls. A year later he managed to seduce the original girl’s roommate. He admits that he did not find her at all attractive but felt a compulsive desire to have relations with her. Interestingly, she fell in love with him after they had had relations, but he refused to see her again.

  From this point until his meeting with Wendy, Dan led a generally ordinary sex life. He went through a normal frequency of affairs without forming any strong attachment to any particular girl. At the same time, his sexual fantasies centered upon female homosexuality. He was both interested and excited by novels dealing with this subject, and often imagined his sexual partners in bed with other girls. He further fantasized himself as the apex of a triangle with two lesbians.

  His fantasies came to fruition only once, at a Paris bordello he visited the summer after college graduation. Two of the prostitutes offered to put on show for him, at the conclusion of which he could have relations with one of the girls. He found the spectacle so exciting that he stayed the entire night, coaxing the girls into a variety of practices and having sex with them in a variety of ways—and spending far more than he could afford in the process. It was, he said, the most exciting experience in his entire life, and the memory of it constantly recurred during normal coital experiences later on.

  Wendy had no coital experience until her final year at Bennington. She was, she says, an extremely unattractive girl during adolescence and did very little dating. Heterosexual petting was thus limited in quantity and extent and provided her with little sexual gratification.

  She began masturbating at eleven or twelve and continued the practice on into her early years at college. Her masturbation was unaccompanied by fantasy; instead she simply gave herself up to narcissistic enjoyment of her own body and excited herself by manual stimulation of her nipples and clitoris. This practice always led to orgasm, and gave her considerable pleasure. Her guilt feelings were never strong enough to interrupt the practice for any length of time. She also reports that her reading indicated that masturbation was not harmful or abnormal, and this knowledge, while not wholly eliminating her guilt feelings, did help her to rationalize her behavior.

  Wendy’s initial experiences with lesbianism began in her freshman year at college. Her roommate, an attractive and sophisticated New York girl, had had considerable experience with heterosexual relations including both coitus and oral-genital contacts, but had had no homosexual experience. She discovered Wendy masturbating one day and the two discussed sex at some length. The conversation served to arouse them both, and the roommate joked that Wendy could always work off her excitement with her finger, but that she would have a difficult time finding a man at that hour.

  “We could pretend we were lesbians,” Wendy suggested. While neither of them had had any prior experience, the realistic school of modern fiction had insured that both of them knew what lesbians do. In the course of the next few hours they taught themselves enough to satisfy one another enormously.

  The two of them continued their relationship for the duration of the year, while the roommate continued to have periodic relations with males as well. The roommate transferred to another college the following year, but before long Wendy had succeeded in making contacts among the school’s lesbian coterie. In the course of the next three years she had two protracted affairs with girls and a number of short-term liaisons.

  Her attitude toward homosexuality during this time in college is interesting. Her only real worry was that she was exclusively homosexual and would be incapable of enjoying sexual relations with a man. At times
she was not bothered by the prospect of being a lifelong lesbian, while at other times she compared herself to her fellow students, many of whom functioned bisexually, and worried that she was abnormal and somehow unwholesome. Several times on dates she planned to give herself to a boy, if only for the sake of experiment, but she was in her final year before this eventually came about. It was unsuccessful but not traumatic. There was no pain, and while her partner’s premature ejaculation prevented her from reaching anything approaching climax, she had managed to become excited with a man.

  This reassured her, and afterward she resumed her homosexual activities without a second thought.

  Two years after graduation she met Dan at a party in New York. They established immediate rapport and had sexual relations the first night. She had had one heterosexual affair since coming to New York but had had almost no homosexual contacts. She spent the first night with Dan and enjoyed coitus but did not have an orgasm. The next morning he brought her to orgasm via cunnilingus, then had coitus with her and brought her to her first coital orgasm. They lived together for several months and, after a false pregnancy scare, decided that life would be simpler if they were married.

  By the time they married, each was well aware of the other’s earlier sexual experiences. Dan was excited by Wendy’s lesbian history, while she in turn thought his story of the Paris bordello immensely stimulating. Yet both of them gave no thought whatsoever to the possibility of extramarital sexual relations. Wendy regarded her homosexuality as a part of her past from which Dan’s love had rescued her. He in turn equated it with his own brief foray at mutual masturbation and felt it would play no greater role in her life than his experience had in his own. While it is quite obvious in retrospect that mutual interest in lesbianism had helped draw the two of them together, this possibility never occurred to them at the time.