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

by Lawrence Block

  He grinned and said, “I’m a business major, with a minor in economics.”

  I barely heard him. I said, “Listen, I have to tell you this. I don’t want to go to my room. I want to go somewhere with you and I want your cock in my mouth, I want to suck you off.” I didn’t even believe the words I was saying. It seemed unreal, a dream.

  We spent the night at a motel. It was absolute magic. We went at each other until we were both absolutely drained, and we actually fell into a light sleep in the 69 position, and all through the night one of us would wake up and start in on the other, and we’d be off and running again.

  From that night on neither of us ever dated anyone else. We stuck to oral sex for the first month or so and then had coitus. I had been a little afraid that I wouldn’t enjoy it but it was great, really great. The danger of pregnancy bothered both of us, though, so we only had coitus very rarely for the rest of the year. We didn’t need it, we had all we ever dreamed of without it.

  Herbert graduated in June, and in July we were married. On our wedding night he ejaculated in my mouth and I realized all of a sudden that he was my man and this was his seed and I didn’t want to reject it, I wanted to retain it. I told him it was my way of consummating our marriage, and he made a pun and said something about jellied consommé, and the charming young couple lived happily ever after.

  • • •

  For the most part, the Wheelers did live happily ever after. Their personalities complemented one another ideally, and from a sexual standpoint it would be hard to imagine two persons more perfectly suited to each other. If anything, sex threatened to play too great a role in their marriage in that frequency of their lovemaking was such that they had very little spare time for other activities.

  After three years of marriage, the situation changed. Judy discovered that she was sterile, and Herbert was strongly opposed to the idea of adopting an infant. This difference of opinion, on top of Judy’s guilt feelings over her sterility, put a great strain upon their marriage. She also irrationally equated her oralism with her sterility, vaguely feeling that the two were symbolically related. They fought frequently and made love less often, and with less enthusiasm.

  Herbert began having extramarital relations. He picked up a girl in the course of an evening of heavy drinking and proved impotent; when he demanded that the girl fellate him she indignantly accused him of being homosexual. He had contacts with several prostitutes and a brief and disappointing affair with a girl who worked in his office. He also had a one-time affair with a widow whose stock portfolio he was managing. She began calling him constantly, and when her calls attracted Judy’s attention he confessed to the affair and his other incidents of adultery as well. The two discussed the relative merits of a trial separation and divorce. At this stage, Judy discussed her problems at length with a neighbor girl a few years her senior with whom she was very friendly. The friend stated that sex was almost always at the root of marital problems and stressed the need of combating boredom with variety. She specifically recommended oral sex, which brought hysterical laughter from Judy, who then explained how oralism was a leitmotif of the Wheelers’ sexual relationship.

  The friend and her husband were also oralists, and had been wife-swapping for over a year. She recommended this to Judy as a solution. Judy was very dubious about the whole thing but agreed to discuss it with Herbert. He in turn was no more than lukewarm to the idea. The two of them met several times with their neighbors for long discussions, during which they received the usual sales talk.

  • • •

  HERBERT: They told us that it was the only practical way to keep a marriage alive, that otherwise people would either cheat on each other or wind up with a stale sex life. I didn’t swallow this, but did start getting a yen for the other wife. And also felt we had nothing to lose, because the way things were going our marriage wouldn’t last long. But I think the most important thing was that the whole idea got Judy and me talking again. We discussed it, and found myself imagining her with other men, and realized that this excited me. To make a long story short, we met with them again and told them we were game. It started off awkwardly. It really is hard to get past the first step, but once we did it was just what the doctor ordered . . .

  JUDY: I remember one thing that astonished me was the different techniques. When the same two people make love over a period of years they just have to get into a rut. It doesn’t matter how many different ways you do it. It’s that you’re the same people and you learn lovemaking together and it always has the same basic rhythm to it. I never thought this was true with us because we were so inventive and used so many varied approaches. And with oral sex in particular no two people will do it quite the same way, it’s always different with a new person. The very first night Randy had me take his scrotum into my mouth and bring him to orgasm without touching his penis at all. It wasn’t that unusual a thing but it had never occurred to either of us. I did it to Herbert later that same night and he loved it and I loved doing it to him.

  • • •

  Since that initial experience with their neighbors, Herbert and Judy have never left the fold of swingers. From the onset they have sought out other couples with special interest in oralism and have never had difficulty in finding an ample supply of suitable partners. They do not enjoy meeting with more than one couple at time, nor do they have much enthusiasm for pluralistic practices. While they enjoy this sort of thing on an occasional basis, their preference is, as Herbert described it earlier, for quasi-love relationships in which each person devotes himself to the satisfaction of the other.

  We have already taken note of Herbert’s two experiments with homosexuality. Judy has found lesbian contacts somewhat more satisfactory, although she does not engage in them very often and does not consider herself anything resembling a genuine bisexual. “I have to be in the mood,” she said, “and have to be able to love the other girl. When it’s perfect I like it very much. There’s something sweet and tender about lesbianism that’s missing in heterosexuality, and when it works it’s very nice, but times like that are few and far between.”

  The Wheelers follow the old maxim of making new friends but keeping the old. There are eight or ten couples whom they swing with on a fairly regular basis, and at the same time they are regular advertisers in two club publications and are constantly looking for new friends.

  The following random comments should serve to fill out the reader’s understanding of the Wheelers and their particular place in the new sexual underground.

  • • •

  JUDY: One thing we’ve noticed with most swinging oralists is their lack of sexual selfishness. The biggest kick of all is not your own orgasm but the thrill that comes with taking another person over the top. Some girls will go on swinging dates during their menstrual period, anxious to please and not expecting anything in return. Of course I have to admit that I myself get as much personal pleasure, direct sexual pleasure, out of eating a guy as I do having him eat me. Of course the mouth is one of the most important erogenous zones. The tissues are very sensitive, especially in the lips, and I’ve gotten to the point where the sensation in my lips from fellating a man is as strong as the sensation in the labia during vaginal intercourse. I can reach orgasm just by doing that, nobody has to touch me or anything. It’s like this quivering in my lips, a pulsing thing, and at the same time I’ll have an orgasm in my pubic area as well. I have a feeling that you can come in any part of your body if you learn how to do it.

  • • •

  HERBERT: Swingers who didn’t start out as oralists usually become that way somewhere along the line. I think there may be a basic similarity between the personality of the swinger and of the oralist, but there’s an even more obvious explanation. You never have to worry about being unable to perform. A lot of men have a potency problem of one sort of another. They don’t get very hard, or they can’t keep going long enough to satisfy a woman, or whatever. And most men, except for the real studs,
can only manage a limited number of orgasms in the course of an evening. Or they may come more than once, but after the first shot they don’t get a firm erection. But even so, they can go on pleasing women orally as long as they want.

  • • •

  JUDY: We once went to what was described as a “french orgy.” I’m glad we went if only to see what it was like, but it wasn’t our sort of thing at all. There was a rule that you could only have oral contacts, nothing else was allowed, and the only way to describe it was that everybody was eating everybody all night long. We left early because there was something very mechanical and forced about it, and frankly it was very dull. I don’t like to use the word, but we felt it was perverted. There was one thing, though; before anybody did anything, the hostess announced that the party could not begin until she sucked off every man there. There were thirty couples present. All thirty men stood in a circle and she went from one to another and did each and every one of them. It didn’t take very long because the whole scene was so charged with sex that most of them came in less than a minute. I thought it was disgusting. Even so, I can’t deny that it was one of the most exciting things I’ve ever seen. An oral gangbang, gangblow. It’s the sort of thing I would like to do just once, but I don’t suppose I would ever go through with it.

  Seven:

  The Solitary Swingers

  While it may be true enough that it takes two to tango, today’s more stylish dances are of the sort which can be performed as well without a partner. And, in spite of all of the opportunities for freewheeling sexual liaisons created by the revolution in contemporary mores, a fairly sizeable sector of the new sexual underground is composed of men and women who eschew the tango and get their kicks by frugging themselves.

  One might easily misinterpret the role of autoeroticism in the sexual underground by putting the cart before the horse. It would be a mistake to infer that the permissive nature of the swinging society generates autoerotic activity. On the contrary, it seems far more likely that individuals whose sexual orientation is autoerotic in the first place find themselves drawn to the sexual underground because it affords them a suitable climate for fulfilling their particular desires. Whatever the particular bent of the individual’s autoerotic impulses—narcissism, voyeurism, exhibitionism, coprolalia, latent homosexuality, or whatever—the underground offers ways for the masturbator to make his sex life satisfactory, albeit solitary.

  A large number of auto-eroticists function primarily as consumers for the underground industry. In addition to purchasing the various gadgets discussed in an earlier chapter—vibrators, artificial sex organs, etc.—they are steady customers for material which assists them in formulating their masturbatory fantasies. These vicarious aids include verbal and graphic pornography. While liberalization of auto-obscenity statutes in recent years has led to a situation in which virtually any work of pornographic literature may be openly published and sold, the market for under-the-counter pornography has by no means disappeared. Smaller communities habitually exercise a tighter control over the public distribution of erotic works than the courts suggest is their due, either by enforcing laws with no regard for Supreme Court precedents—the average bookseller cannot afford to appeal local convictions—or by employing such extralegal pressures as boycott threats, etc., to insure that community standards are met. Thus the pornography aficionado in a small town may have to order, through the mails and at inflated prices, books readily available at the downtown newsstands of larger cities.

  Furthermore, present liberal trends have had little discernible effect insofar as pictorial pornography is concerned. The forces of censorship have long held to the old principle that a picture is worth a thousand words, and there have been no photographic Henry Millers or D. H. Lawrences to becloud the issue with questions of artistic integrity and redeeming social importance. Thus one may lawfully describe a sexual act in whatever words one chooses and at whatever length one deems desirable, while a photograph of that same act would be universally proscribed on the grounds of obscenity. Pictorial pornography, whether in the form of still photos or motion pictures, is very much part of the sexual underground.

  Just recently, however, certain enterprising individuals have begun to find a way around the problem of censorship. It has been recognized for some time that one can market virtually any product simply by fabricating a legitimate secondary use for it. The “Vibra-Finger,” the chief function of which should be strikingly obvious to anyone, has long been advertised as ideal for gum massage, although it would be safe to say that a majority of its purchasers massage rather another area entirely with the device. Similarly, a mail order genius touted a sort of do-it-yourself dildo kit as a “rubber broom handle cover” designed to “end annoying splinters in the hands.”

  Guided by this principle, several modern pornographers have set up shop under the umbrella of sex education. Reasoning that modern American society is tolerant of any excess committed in the name of education, they have outfitted themselves with institution-like names and have mounted full-scale mail-order campaigns offering books and motion pictures demonstrating basic positions for coitus and extracoital copulation. One of the more notable of these campaigns has been launched by a pair of married swingers based in southern California; they have printed a variety of photographs of themselves in book form and seem to be doing a land-office business.

  A glance through a representative array of swinger publications, ranging from the tabloids to the club bulletins, quickly reveals that the readership of these publications constitutes an important market for every variety of mail-order pornography.

  While a small percentage of those actively engaged in mate-trading do purchase a certain quantity of this material—the typical swinger is, after all, especially interested in sex and generally has a representative collection of pornography—it is unquestionably true that the volume buyers and steady customers are persons whose primary outlet takes the form of masturbation.

  “We began selling photos through the mail a little over a year ago,” a husband told me. “For a long time we’d been exchanging pictures with other couples and doing a lot of correspondence, and finally we got a letter from a ‘couple’ halfway across the country with an intimate photo enclosed, and we were pretty shaken up to discover that the performers in the photo were us. I wrote a pretty blistering letter in reply, and it wasn’t hard to figure out what had happened. Our correspondent was a single male getting his kicks by corresponding with swingers and collecting pictures of them. In order to keep up his end of things, he would buy pictures from commercial sources and pass them off as shots of himself and his wife. Somewhere along the way someone else had made copies of some pictures of me and my wife and was offering them for commercial sale. So we got furious and then calmed down, figuring that it was really pretty funny, and that if we had the name we might as well have the game.

  “Since then we’ve had ads running steadily. We limit ourselves entirely to the swinger publications—better response rate and reorders and less chance of squawk. All our business is done through the mails from a post office box, so we have no real way of knowing anything about our customers, but it seems pretty obvious that they’re men, married or single, who use the photos to get themselves excited. Naturally some of them write very filthy letters, but there are others who are absolute gentlemen. We have a stock group of photographs and also advertise our willingness to pose to order, and our big repeat business consists of a few clients who will write in great detail explaining the poses they want us to shoot for them. These men manage to let us know exactly what they want but never use a four-letter word or write anything the least bit distasteful. And they pay a very good price for it.

  “We change the P.O. box often enough so that the risk of interference from the postal inspectors is minimal, and of course everything goes via first class mail. We felt a little odd at first about putting ourselves on display this way. My wife wears a blonde wig for posing, and I have mustache
I use now and then. At any rate, we’re not inhibited that way as far as total strangers are concerned, and the chance of some non-swinging friend coming across the pictures seems pretty remote. We average a few hundred month out of the business, almost all of it pure profit, and of course the whole business is strictly cash so the government never sees a dime of it in taxes, which doesn’t hurt either.”

  • • •

  The auto-eroticist who enlarges his fantasies with such vicarious aids is no new phenomenon, and he does not function too differently within the framework of today’s sexual underground than he did in years past. For certain other auto-eroticists, however, the correspondence clubs catering to swingers have special value. These are the individuals who find sexual excitement through the medium of erotic correspondence. They most often combine verbal exhibitionism with verbal voyeurism, deriving pleasure from both the writing and the reading of pornographic letters.

  When circumstances are ideal, a pair of correspondents may find each other through the club bulletins and conduct lengthy correspondence to their mutual satisfaction. What they do, essentially, is produce pornography for one another. They will most often describe themselves in their advertisements as exclusively interested in correspondence, or may also express willingness to exchange photographs as well.

  A substantial number of such solitary swingers attempt to pass themselves off as more active members of the underground and correspond with an ostensible interest in an eventual meeting. They are thus the bane of the true active swingers, who generally prefer to avoid lengthy correspondence in favor of an early meeting with suitable partners.

  “You get lot of them nowadays,” a veteran swinger confided. “When you first come across one of the pen-pal types, you generally get fooled. We wrote to one ‘couple’ for a period of months. We’re in Connecticut and described ourselves as interested in meeting with couples within a radius of a hundred miles, so we were surprised to hear from this one couple in Colorado. But they—at least we thought of them as ‘they’—stated in their first letter that they were planning a trip east and would be able to visit us at our home. They sent intimate photos of themselves and a long letter right away describing their latest party in glowing detail. The photos were very attractive and we were certainly interested and replied with a fairly frank letter ourselves. This went on for a few months before we finally got the message. Their letters got more and more obscene, and ‘they’ kept urging us to tell them more about what we liked to do and who we did it with and so on, in more and more detail, and when we showed the letters to a more experienced couple they spotted them as typical pen-pal stuff and told us the odds were ten-to-one that our correspondent was a single man and that he was getting his kicks from writing to us and reading our letters, that there wasn’t a chance in the world we were in contact with an actual couple really interested in meeting us.”