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

by Lawrence Block

  DAN: More so than ever. Partly because we love each other more and know each other better. Partly because the hang-ups are out of the way. Partly because we know ourselves and each other better sexually, we know how to respond and excite.

  WENDY: And partly because we both have become very very good in bed.

  DAN: Braggart—

  Four:

  Love In The Electronic Age

  Marshall McLuhan, a man whom I have always found it easier to quote than to read, has had considerable impact of late with a maze of theoretical observations deriving from the premise that man’s culture is a function of his technology. Among his notions is the argument that verbal communication is rapidly becoming passé, a theory which McLuhan’s own verbal facility would seem to support.

  But it is interesting to note the many ways in which this century’s technological progress has influenced this century’s sexual behavior. The cliché example has long been the automobile, which suddenly equipped Americans young and old with a handy if cramped bedroom on wheels—and which in turn led to the evolution of the motel with all the attendant implications thereof. Improved techniques in contraception have played a similar role on the side of permissiveness. The Pill, like Ban, takes the worry out of being close.

  In the sexual underground, technological advances have similarly influenced sexual behavior, not only by facilitating contacts and minimizing dangers of disease, detection and pregnancy, but also by changing that which mankind has long been schooled to regard as immutable—i.e., the actual manner in which men and women participate in sexual relations. Any number of new inventions and applications of older products have provided human beings with new variations on the old theme.

  Inflatable life-size rubber dolls, body lubricants, battery-operated vibrating dildos, rubber clothing, depilatories, erection supports, these and many other ingenious devices provide the underground swinger with new and improved roads to the magic city of Orgasm. A small proportion of swingers are gadget nuts with extraordinary collections of sexual paraphernalia. The greater number are less mechanically oriented, but almost all swingers—and a fair number of non-swinging married couples as well—have at the least occasional experience with some of these devices.

  One might almost say that, in the new sexual underground, the massage is the medium.

  • • •

  Al and Toni Grant have been married for almost ten years and have three children. Al, thirty-three, is a mechanical engineer whose career has involved frequent relocation. At the time of the interview, the Grants were living in a new ranch house in a suburban community in eastern Pennsylvania.

  Tall and lanky, Al wears his hair in a crew cut, dresses conservatively, and gives off an air of extreme efficiency and dispatch. His hobbies parallel his vocational interest: in the short time that the Grants were in their new home, Al had already designed and installed an elaborate intercom system and had set up the extremely complicated stereo rig which he had earlier put together by himself. He does his own auto repairs and is presently toying with the idea of outfitting the house with a closed circuit television system.

  Toni Grant is also thirty-three but still looks very much like the high school cheerleader she was when she and Al first started dating seventeen years ago. The two went steady throughout their last two years in high school and four years of college, and were married immediately after graduation. Neither had had any sexual experience aside from masturbation before they began dating, and neither had any outside contacts whatsoever during the period of their courtship.

  • • •

  AL: We were halfway through college before we finally got around to having coitus. Not that we were slow, nothing like that, because sex was a major component of our relationship almost from the first date we had. But you have to remember this was in the bad old days before the Pill, and we were put off by the idea of pregnancy. I’d heard too many stories about leaky rubbers and punctured diaphragms and coitus that didn’t get interruptused in time to take a chance.

  TONI: We did find safe ways, though.

  JWW: Petting to orgasm?

  AL: Well, we gradually covered pretty much of the whole field of extracoital sex. We learned how to masturbate each other during high school, which is actually about as far as we wanted to go anyway in a parked car. In college we were able to get real privacy with a bed at our disposal. We taught ourselves the usual oral and anal techniques and just went on from there. I would make love to Toni between her breasts, under her arms, between her thighs, everywhere. I think we must have made love in every orifice but the usual one.

  TONI: The year before we graduated we finally had vaginal intercourse, I guess because it seemed so silly not to. Al used a condom, and it wasn’t very good for us. For one thing, it was as though we weren’t really in contact with each other. On top of that, we were both worried about it. After holding off on the main event for so many years we really had it built up terribly in our minds and both of us were terrified that I would get pregnant. Naturally that threw us off. We had trouble getting excited and it was all we could do to manage it. I didn’t have an orgasm, and while Al did, he could have had more fun playing with himself.

  AL: Actually, that was the only time we had coitus before we were married. It didn’t seem worthwhile repeating it.

  JWW: Was this first coital experience painful?

  TONI: Just emotionally. Oh, you mean the hymen! I’m afraid I lost that to a candle when I was fourteen. I was a wicked little masturbator before I met Al. Maybe that explains why it was so easy for me to have an orgasm with him—I’ve read that girls who masturbate a lot as teenagers have less trouble learning to respond to a man.

  AL: You certainly didn’t have any trouble.

  TONI: I don’t think either of us had any complaints on that score, did we?

  AL: Guess not.

  JWW: Did you continue to masturbate during your courtship?

  AL: Just each other. But once we were going together, we didn’t have any sexual energy left over for the solitary vice. We saw each other every day and we just couldn’t keep our hands off each other. In the six years we dated, I’m positive we had more orgasms together than the average couple has in the course of an entire marriage.

  TONI: We must have been the two horniest kids in the world.

  AL: We do both have particularly strong sex drives, but I think there’s more to it than that. What it boils down to is that we’re both complete sensualists and hedonists and always have been. We never ran around or even considered having sex with anybody else because we were having too much fun together to be interested. It may be different when you get older, but for young kids the ones who play the field are the ones who aren’t getting any satisfaction. They say nymphomaniacs can’t come, or if they do it’s not enough to satisfy them, and that’s why they go from one guy to another.

  TONI: And men are supposed to want different women because they have to prove their virility.

  JWW: I think it may be more complex than that, but I can appreciate your point.

  AL: It’s simple enough when you come right down to it. We had a really great time together. As far as I’m concerned, and Toni too, nothing on earth can compare to good sex. Not that we don’t have any interests outside the bedroom. I enjoy fooling around with mechanical things and electronics and Toni’s a great cook and loves spending time with the kids. But neither of us cares much about reading or watching television or night life or politics or any of that. And there’s nothing we like better than sex.

  • • •

  Unlike the majority of gadget-oriented swingers, who generally become involved with mechanical sexual devices after joining the ranks of wife-swappers, Al and Toni reversed the usual order of things. They began experimenting with various sexual aids in the first year of their marriage.

  • • •

  AL: We sort of fell into it, actually. What happened was I had a backache. I got out of the car and took a header on some ice a
nd landed smack on the base of my spine. Nothing serious, but the doc told me to sleep on a heating pad for the next month or so. I don’t know if it helped or not; but one night I rolled over on it in my sleep so that I was lying with my groin right on top of it. I woke up with a fantastic erection—

  TONI: I remember.

  AL: I’ll just bet you do. But what we did afterward was start using the heating pad in our lovemaking. We did different things like put it between our chests or under Toni’s behind or whatever. It wasn’t the world’s fair or anything, but we found that it added an interesting element and made for variety.

  JWW: Did you feel a need for variety at that stage?

  AL: We’ve never felt need for variety. Look, that’s a rotten question. Do I need to spend a fortune on stereo equipment? I could hear the same music on a thirty-dollar portable. Or there’s a couple we know, when they go out on the town the guy likes to have a few drinks. He’s not a lush but he likes to get stoned now and then. He’ll order a drink and his wife’ll say, “Dear, do you need another drink?” He doesn’t need it but he wants it. Or a guy at my office who collects old clocks. I’ve never been a collector so can’t completely understand how their minds work, but say this guy has fifty clocks in his basement and he goes out and buys another one to fool around with, or even just to put on the wall and look at. You could ask him if he really needs another clock and of course he doesn’t. All he really needs is a ten-dollar Timex watch.

  TONI: It’s the old puritan business, the idea that it’s either immoral or unhealthy to want more than the necessities. As far as sex goes, all anybody honestly needs to do is screw once a week in the standard position and get it over with as quickly as possible.

  JWW: Let me amend the question, then. At that stage, were you already interested in adding variety to your sexual relationship?

  AL: Sorry if I flew off the handle. Let’s see—variety. Well, here’s the whole point. We were always interested in just that from the day we first started making out in the back of my father’s car. But it was never that we felt something was lacking. Like this clown at the office—if you collect clocks, if that’s what really turns you on, then you never have too many clocks. You always want to go out and get another one.

  JWW: I see.

  AL: As I said, the heating pad was an unintentional discovery. And it wasn’t that big a deal, but what it did do was start me thinking. I’ve always been of a mechanical turn of mind and suddenly got the idea that there might be other things we could use. We had already done things like set up mirrors to watch ourselves and use a Polaroid camera with a timer to take intimate pictures of the two of us together, so we didn’t have any inhibitions to overcome. The first thing that I bought for us was a home massage unit. You know what those are?

  JWW: I’ve seen variety of them.

  AL: I checked them out at a discount house and found a professional masseur’s hand vibrator. It’s a very simple mechanism, an electric motor that straps to the back of your hand and imparts vibrations to the entire hand. I thought, incidentally, that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have Toni massage my back with it since I still had the backache, and as it happens it was helpful that way. But the thing was really fantastic as a sex toy. We still use it, and would say that most swingers do. As a matter of fact, I can’t imagine why any married couple would fail to own one.

  TONI: If you haven’t experienced it, you can’t believe how effective it is.

  AL: That’s for sure.

  TONI: I still remember how I reacted the first time. It just about drove me out of my mind. Wherever Al touched me I tingled in a way I can’t even begin to describe. I found out that I had erogenous zones I hadn’t even dreamed of. This is just a guess, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you could cure frigidity with the damn thing. It’s just about impossible not to respond to it.

  AL: I think that’s literally true, as a matter of fact. It draws blood to the region being massaged, which is the actual mechanics of an erection. We’ve found out, for example, that it’s possible to have an erection and an orgasm from massage without even having any sexual thoughts or urges. I don’t know about frigidity because the female orgasm is a little different, but I should think it would overcome psychic impotence in men. It might not be a cure, but it would solve the problem mechanically.

  TONI: We were like kids with a new toy. And of course my husband is the inventor type. He took the thing apart and put it back together again, and then he started figuring out attachments for it. He bought one of those rubber wieners they sell in pet shops as doggie toys and mounted it on the frame, so that he could use it to give me anal massage during vaginal intercourse, or vice versa—

  AL: Depending upon which vice is versa, of course.

  TONI: Funnnny. But what with one thing and another, before long the thing had more attachments than my vacuum cleaner. I told him he was the Thomas Alva Edison of sex.

  • • •

  It was their mutual interest in gadgets which led the Grants into the sexual underground. At a newsstand, Al was thumbing through a tabloid newspaper carrying swinger correspondence ads when several display advertisements caught his eye. These offered a variety of products for sale through the mails, including garments for fetishists and implements for sadomasochists and bondage fans. While these did not interest the Grants, there were additional offers which did. Among these were battery-operated dildos, the sort of condoms known as French ticklers, and body oil called “Love Balm.”

  • • •

  AL: We sent away for some of these. We never got the French ticklers. I guess the guy was working mail fraud, but who the hell is going to complain to the Post Office that his french ticklers weren’t delivered? The other products came, and we found them very useful. The body oil made for wild slippery sexual encounters and was also far and away the best lubricant for anal intercourse. The dildo was hollow steel encased in latex and was an improvement over that rubber hotdog I had been using.

  TONI: We also got kick out of reading the couple ads.

  JWW: Were you interested at the time?

  TONI: We discussed it and agreed that we weren’t. The idea of having sex with strangers was very foreign to us and we didn’t think it was the sort of thing we could relax and enjoy. There was nothing the two of us wouldn’t try together, but we were put off by the notion of having anyone else around at the time.

  AL: I must say, though, that I could see certain attractions in the idea. Just in terms of the acts that would be possible with extra people involved. For example, Toni had often said that she wished that I had an extra penis so that she could have me in two places at once. While I didn’t see much percentage in trying to grow an extra dork, I could imagine how she could get the same effect by having two men simultaneously. But as I said, or as Toni said, rather, the thought of sex with strangers was disturbing. Also, I didn’t like the idea of anyone else having my wife, or of my being intimate with someone other than Toni. Remember, we had been completely faithful since we started going together.

  JWW: How did you move toward swinging?

  AL: Through a reply to one of the ads in a later issue of the same tabloid. But it happened gradually and indirectly. One couple had an ad saying that they were interested in correspondence concerning nudism and photography, the two standard phrases in those early tabloid ads, and also that they were interested in mechanical inventions. It wasn’t hard to figure out what that meant, so we thought it might be worthwhile writing to them. Besides, they lived in Ohio at the time and we were a couple thousand miles away in Bakersfield, so we didn’t have to worry about them dropping in on us.

  TONI: We started corresponding with them and they turned out to be very interesting people. We told them that we were just interested in correspondence and not in swapping. They replied that they did swap occasionally, they were members of a small group that met once a month in the Cleveland area, but that they too were just as happy to stick to correspondence.

  AL: T
he husband was also an engineer but his bag was electronics. Besides the tips we exchanged on sex gadgets, he actually gave me some ideas for installing fire alarms in the kids’ rooms. We traded a lot of ideas on other things, too.

  TONI: And pictures. At first they just sent ordinary pictures of themselves, and then later on some nude pictures. By this time we had exchanged a great many letters and trusted their discretion, and we also felt we knew them well enough to send back the same of ourselves.

  AL: Besides, it would have been awkward to refuse. They then sent actual sex pictures, both of the two of them making love and some pictures that were taken at their swingers’ group showing them with other partners.

  JWW: Did you find these exciting?

  AL: I suppose anyone would, but we didn’t go absolutely out of our minds over them. Visual stimulation doesn’t have that great an effect on us. Still, they were exciting.

  JWW: And you sent back pictures of yourselves?

  AL: Not at first, but ultimately we did, yes.

  JWW: How did your ideas about swinging change during this time?

  TONI: I don’t think there was a conscious change, but naturally we were getting a shift in orientation. At first the whole idea of swingers was confined to the images we got from the ads. We did look through a few paperbacks on wife-swapping that told about the people involved as well as what they did, but even so those were just names and descriptions in books and not real people like ourselves. Through the letters, though, we really came to know Jack and Beverly. They were very much like ourselves and we had dozens of interests in common, except that they were involved in swapping and we weren’t. That made the idea less impossible for us to imagine.

  AL: That’s very true. Another thing, they frequently wrote about what they did at the swap parties. There was a game they played that they described. It’s a fairly common one among swingers but this was the first we had heard of it. A man and woman are selected by drawing lots, and each receives the simultaneous attention of all the other members of the opposite sex. The incident described involved oral caresses. There were eight couples at the party, so the lucky girl got simultaneously kissed and tongued by seven men at the same time, while the guy got the same treatment from seven girls.