Beyond Group Sex: Doing Their Own Thing (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

by John Warren Wells

  He calmed me down and asked me if I wanted to come over and talk, that we didn’t have to do anything. I said no, and then I said I was sorry for building him up like this and not showing, and that I knew it would be frustrating for him if he couldn’t get another girl over. He said not to worry about that. I asked what he would do, and he said he supposed he would just jerk off.

  Something happened. Without even thinking I said, “Do it now. Do it right now and tell me about it, tell me what you’re doing and how it feels and everything.”

  He asked me if this was my particular kick. Not in a nasty way but very matter-of-fact. I said I didn’t know, but I was very excited at the thought. I told him to use dirty words and tell me exactly what he was doing and describe his cock and everything. He did, and he said he was imagining that his cock was in me, in my mouth, things like that. Telling me what he was doing and describing his fantasies at the same time.

  I had a powerful orgasm without so much as touching myself. It left me weak and tingling, almost jittery, the way you can get drinking too much strong coffee.

  I called him several times after that and he described various things he had done with other women, building up the scenes realistically. The same thing happened every time. And each time he would ask me to come over to his place, and each time I wanted to go but was afraid. Finally he said I could come over and we could have a sexual experience without any contact at all if that was what I wanted. He said if I preferred vicarious sex, I would enjoy it in person even more. Enjoy vicarious sex in person, that is. “You can come over and watch me jerk off. We’ll turn each other on from across the room.”

  I went over there. He didn’t look like what I had expected. I had a mental picture that was similar to Clark Gable, and he was shorter and pudgier than I anticipated. But I found out that this didn’t matter to me at all.

  We had coffee, and he told me about a girl he had seen recently who had to be frenched for hours before she was satisfied. The story excited me. Then he asked me if I would undress so that he could look at me while he masturbated. I did, and he stripped and began to handle himself. All the while he kept talking about my body and how attractive I was and asking me to open my legs and show him myself and asking me to handle my breasts and things like that. I kept telling myself that this was real, that it was actually happening. That I was really here and this was really happening.

  Afterward we went to bed. He was an incredible lover, really patient and sensitive, and I was so excited by what had gone on before that I was able to let loose completely for the first time in my life. It wasn’t that I hadn’t had orgasms before, and it wasn’t that I had been unable to get anything out of sex with men before, it was—oh, for the first time I was really getting off on what was happening to my body instead of on what was happening inside my head.

  I continued to see this man for quite a long time. I saw him no more often than once a week. His main interest, as he was completely willing to admit, was in having as many women as possible. It was the thrill of making a woman come whom he had never seen before that really motivated him. He himself said it was probably a virility anxiety hang-up, but he didn’t really care what it was because after forty-five years he was suddenly having the time of his life.

  He also said that ordinarily he would probably have stopped seeing me after a couple of times at the most, not because of me personally but because he was that way with almost everyone. Once the novelty of a woman wore off, it was like being married, he said. But he told me I represented a special challenge because he couldn’t get to me without games.

  Which was true. Now and then we would go directly to bed without some sort of vicarious thing, and I could enjoy it, but it didn’t really work for me. He was very proud of his oral technique and would go down on me for extended periods of time, and of course it felt divine, and I would get excited and have orgasms, but in order to do it I would have to let my mind wander and trip out on a fantasy. And he knew this, so I remained a challenge to him.

  I also think he liked the fact that the two of us wound up doing a lot of very kinky things. He had a projector, and we watched stag films together and fingered each other while we watched them. And a couple of times we went to Times Square and saw hard-core films. I had always wanted to go, but a woman can’t go alone. It isn’t just a case of embarrassment but men will bother you, and it can be awkward. We would sit together without any embarrassment, and the rest of the theater would be filled with men with their coats over their laps, sitting a few seats apart and never taking their hands out of their laps. One time I watched a very erotic scene of a girl sucking a man and got inspired, and I went down on him right there in the theater.

  We also went once to a swing. An orgy. We said that I had my period and thus neither of us would participate, but could we stay anyway? Nobody seemed to mind the presence of a couple of watchbirds. The monthly excuse is standard, and people will often go once to watch and then come back the next time to play after they’ve had the chance to assure themselves that it’s their scene.

  Then on two occasions when I called him he said he had another girl over there, or more likely on her way over, but that I could come and watch the two of them if I wanted. In both cases these were girls he knew fairly well, so that he knew they wouldn’t mind a watchbird, and as it happened, in both cases I ultimately joined in and had sex with both of them. These were my first experiences with other girls. But I had had so many lesbian fantasies that I was far less inhibited about getting into the act than you might have thought. I had already done this so many times in my mind, I had already put Susan through these paces, that it was natural enough. Especially natural because of the presence of a man. I think I would have been uptight about having my first lesbian experience if there was no one in the room but me and a strange girl.

  Another time he had a woman coming for the first time and told me to hurry over and watch them from the closet. He said he thought he would get a kick out of it. It was particularly sneaky because the woman was a very nervous and frightened housewife who was a virgin when she got married and whose husband couldn’t last long enough to satisfy her, and the husband never went down on her and she was so nervous she never suggested it to him, and she was terrified that someone would find out she was seeing another man, and she kept talking about all of this, kept opening up her soul, and here I was in the closet crouching there naked and fingering myself and taking in every word and every act. That was one incident in particular that I felt very guilty about afterward. I don’t know why, because no one was hurt; she never learned she was being watched. But I felt no guilt at the time; I felt nothing but excitement.

  We had such a strange relationship. I still call him once in a great while, but not very often, because we reached a point where I felt absurd keeping so much of myself a secret from him, and at the same time, I wasn’t ready to open up more. I haven’t seen him in a few months now. I suppose someday I’ll call him again, though. When I’m ready.

  He can’t call me because he doesn’t know my phone number or name or where I live. Right after I moved to this apartment I mentioned that I had moved. He asked where to, and I just shook my head, and he laughed and said he didn’t know where I moved from and I wouldn’t say where I moved to, so as far as he was concerned I hadn’t moved at all. I think he liked the fact that he knew virtually nothing about me. He never once attempted to pry. Never asked questions about my background. Nothing like that. I guess he liked the element of mystery, and I’m glad, because if he had ever tried to learn more about me I would have stopped seeing him.

  I’m like that. I gave out my phone number once because it was necessary in a certain set of circumstances, but before I gave it out I told the man in question that he could call me one time as arranged, but that afterward I wanted him to destroy the phone number and never call me again. He promised, and everything worked out fine; I planned to see him again, and then weeks later I got a call from him. When I heard
his voice I reacted as I did when I came home once and found my apartment burglarized. Exactly the same sense of invasion of privacy. I hung up on him and didn’t answer the phone again until the telephone company had changed my number. And I never called that man again.

  I don’t think the same thing would happen today under similar circumstances. I’m positive I wouldn’t react so strongly. Eventually I may find myself growing quite open about my life and less unwilling to let other people enter it. I don’t think I could ever conceivably get married. Or even live with somebody. I might reach a point where I could relate to a person and even love him, but I would want a place of my own to come home to.

  This is my place now, and it’s completely mine. The other place, the studio apartment, never mattered to me. I bought Salvation Army furniture while my twenty thousand dollars sat gathering dust in the savings and loan. I just bought a bed and a chair and a couple of lamps, and that was all. When I started to swing, I began to take more of an interest in my style of living. I started spending money on clothes and taking more time making up, not because of the effect it would have on other people but because it mattered suddenly to me. And I started looking for a decent place, and moved here, and spent a great deal of time and too much money getting it just the way I wanted it.

  For my own benefit exclusively. I’ve never brought anyone here. Do you realize that except for, like, repairmen and deliverymen, you’re the first person besides me to set foot in this place? I suppose because I wanted to let you know me, I also wanted to show you where I lived.

  • • •

  After several meetings with the first swinger she contacted, Katherine began gradually to seek out other similar connections through the advertising columns of the sex tabloids. An ad placed by a pair of self-described exhibitionists caught her eye; she managed over the telephone to assure herself that she would not be expected to have relations with either of them, then went to their suburban home and spent several hours watching stag films with them, listening to their deliberately erotic conversation, studying pornographic pictures of the two of them and others, and ultimately watching them have sexual relations. On that occasion she did not have sex with either of them, although she did sit around nude with them and permitted them to watch her handle herself.

  At the same time, she took a post-office box under an assumed name and began engaging in erotic correspondence, often writing letters toward the avowed goal of meeting with people when she had no intention whatsoever of meeting with them. She did this out of a desire to receive erotic letters, which excited her, and she would try to obtain photos of the couples who wrote to her. With a home photo-copying machine she would duplicate the photos she received and send them out as photos of herself in communicating with other couples.

  (This last is a rather common trick, and a swinging couple of my acquaintance once had the unsettling experience of receiving, from a new pen pal, pictures of themselves taken several years previously!)

  Before long, however, letter-writing began to lose its charm. Katherine was bothered at the thought of exploiting people patently for the sake of an essentially cheap thrill; furthermore, she could not dismiss the suspicion that some of her more willing correspondents were writing letters as fanciful as her own. In addition, letters and pornography in general held relatively less excitement for her now, partly because almost anyone eventually becomes saturated with pornography and immune to it, partly because she could substitute real experience.

  • • •

  I kept being surprised by how willing so many swingers were to accept me on my own terms. This probably has done more for me than therapy. One of the reasons I started writing phony letters is that I thought I had to pretend to be someone else, with a different sexual life style, if I expected anyone to be interested in me. If people described themselves as exhibitionists and just wanted someone to watch, then I knew I would be welcome. But otherwise I thought they would either resent me or be turned off by my presence or try to seduce me, because I thought of myself—well, on the one hand, I was being the person I really was, I was finally doing what I wanted to do, but I still thought the whole thing was shameful, at least in a part of my mind. Or I thought other people would think it was shameful, or abnormal, or weird, or sick, or, oh, anything like that.

  But then I began writing or calling up couples who were looking for single girls for threesomes. There are just so many couples into that scene. I read Three Is Not a Crowd, and there’s one thing I think you left out, and that’s that a lot of couples who want to get into swinging find it easier to start out with a threesome involving an extra girl, and after they go through those changes they can handle swinging with another couple or going to a group thing.

  I would tell these couples straight out that my main interest was observing. That I had certain hang-ups that made it impossible for me to have direct sex with anyone. Everybody I talked to, with a very few exceptions, was very understanding, and the majority wanted at least to meet me.

  Later I changed my line slightly, but the change actually just brought it that much closer to the truth. I would say or write that I enjoyed watching anybody do anything, and that most of the time watching was all I liked to do, but that occasionally I would join in if we all dug each other and the vibrations happened to be right. This made me sound like something less of a kook, and it gave them the opportunity to at least hope I would join in.

  And as it happens, I do join in far more often than not. Sometimes I can’t or don’t want to. I don’t like to have sex with a person unless I like the person. Not just physically. A really great-looking man or woman will turn me on sexually, but I rarely get specifically turned off because someone isn’t handsome or beautiful. But the personality is important. Which is interesting, because I hide so much of my own personality.

  Or at least I try to. Sometimes I wonder how well I succeed at that. Sometimes I think that just because my name and phone and address are a secret and I never give details of my personal life—that despite all that, these people I swing with know me a lot better than I think they do. That particular thought is partially disturbing, but at the same time it gives me a curious warm feeling that I can’t label or define. I guess what it comes down to is that I’m still going through a whole lot of changes and I’m ambivalent about certain things at this particular stage of the game.

  The decision to run my own ad may look like yet another step forward, but actually it wasn’t that at all. Maybe it did involve some sort of personal recognition of self in that I was crossing over the line from someone who answered ads to someone who placed them. That’s something like the line swingers cross when they start to get into bisexuality—it’s one thing for a man to let another man go down on him, or a girl to let another girl go down on her, but it’s another thing to return the favor. As though it’s a more homosexual thing to use your mouth than your genitals.

  Oh, there are just so many odd lines we all draw for ourselves. On the basis of what I’ve seen, almost all of the male swingers who are into bisexuality avoid even considering kissing each other on the mouth, although they’ll do everything else. And at least ninety percent of bi girls do kiss on the mouth, and about the only ones who won’t are ones who are just beginning to get into the whole scene . . .

  No, the real reason for placing an ad was that it’s so much more convenient. I already had the name and the post-office box, and now instead of writing all those letters, which was a chore, I just let letters come to me and pick the ones I want to answer. Actually, I make it a point to answer everything, with just a scribble of “not interested” if it’s not my scene. I have so many more to choose from this way. Also since Screw stopped publishing phone numbers there’s no one you can just call up.

  But another big problem was photographs. When you write a letter answering an ad you really should send a photograph. It’s expected, and if you don’t, you can figure on getting a far smaller percentage of your letters answered. Well, na
turally I have this thing about pictures. You know, it’s really ridiculous. I keep my name and my address secret for a reason, even if it’s a silly reason. Because otherwise people could get in touch with me against my will.

  But what does it matter if there are pictures of me floating around? Really, what earthly difference could it possibly make?

  Because who would there be to recognize it? For God’s sake, there’s nobody in the world who knows me, I’m Miss Totally Anonymous. Who could recognize my picture? My boss? Someone from my old therapy group? I mean, the only person who would ever get a look at the picture would be another swinger, and why be embarrassed if the people are into the same kind of things themselves?

  I’m paranoid on the subject, though. I won’t let people take pictures of me when I swing. Polaroids. Or I’ll insist that all copies of the pictures are destroyed when I leave. People have tried to argue me out of this, especially people who are really into photography and want to have a visual record of all the people they’ve swung with over the years. The thing is, they show pictures of other people to me, so it stands to reason they would show my picture to other people. No, that’s a hang-up I’m nowhere near over. Someday, maybe.

  But the best thing about running my own ad was something that hadn’t even occurred to me. I was swamped with replies, naturally. So many of the ads are either from couples or from guys that a girl’s ad draws tons of mail. I thought a lot would be purposely obscene or nasty. Now and then there’s a letter like that, or some crazy old woman quotes scripture at me, but most seem to be straight. And because of the wording of my ad I get a high percentage of replies from people who are particularly interested in a watchbird. Because their thing is exhibitionism, or because they’re just starting out and this is a very safe way to get an extra person in the bedroom without any commitments, or because a lot of people like to try anything different once in a while. I get letters from male and female gay couples, from all sorts of singles, from married couples. Or invitations to group things—a single girl is always welcome, even if she only wants to watch. As a matter of fact, in a group thing I would usually rather just watch, although I might like to pair off with one or two people immediately afterward.