Doing It! - Going Beyond the Sexual Revolution (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior Book 13)

by Lawrence Block

  A bibliography on group marriage? There I couldn’t be very helpful, I’m afraid, though since replying to Dave and Paula I’ve been informed of a book coming out this fall from M. Evans. I believe the title is Open Marriage, but the precise approach is hard to determine.

  Plural marriage is often linked to swinging in the popular literature on the subject, no doubt because both are a departure from traditional sexual monogamy. It would seem to me, though, that the two phenomena are utterly different. Standard swinging, involving the exchange of sexual partners among married couples for recreational sex, is based upon a desire to ensure sexual variety within the framework of monogamous marriage. For the swinger, adultery itself becomes part of the fabric of such a marriage. The idea that swingers as a whole have gotten past jealousy is by no means true; many swingers are quite capable of being jealous of their mates, but their jealousy is motivated by something other than sexual intimacy. “I never mind her balling some guy,” a man put it recently, “but I get very uptight when I see her off in the corner talking to some guy. I don’t care who she balls but I don’t want her falling in love with anybody but me.”

  Plural marriage has a different premise, which Dave labels the “you-can-love-more-than-one” concept. To one for whom plural marriage is appealing, love is not regarded as exclusive, nor is it seen as being diminished by virtue of being shared.

  Any of you out there with plural marriage experience? Share your ideas with the rest of us.

  Dear Mr. Wells,

  I have just completed your book Three Is Not A Crowd and found it to be most interesting and educational. I was surprised to note however that in each case the girls had bi-sexual tendencies or were complete lesbians.

  I have been enjoying sexual relations with two ladies and I am most anxious for the three of us to get together. However, both girls are completely hetero and the thought of relations with the same sex turns both of them off. Each one knows that I have been having sex with the other with no objection. My question to you is this—is it possible to have sex with three when each girl is “straight”?

  Roy

  Is it possible? Sure, it’s possible. Anything’s possible. There are no rules for this sort of thing, are there? You just do what you want.

  It’s been my experience that most one-man-two-women threesomes involve some form of sexual relations between the women. Certainly this has been the case in threesomes composed of swingers, since female bisexuality is very nearly universal in the swingers’ sexual underground. But this does not mean that such relations are a sine qua non of a threesome. I’ve known several in which the women remained completely heterosexual. I’ve also known of several one-woman-two-men threesomes in which no homosexual relations occurred between the men.

  A psychologist might well argue that homosexuality is always a component in threesomes whether any overt sex of that nature takes place or not; the argument would hold that on an unconscious plane the two parties of the same sex were making love to each other through the medium of the person of the opposite sex. Hard to say just how valid that theory is. It’s difficult to reject it out of hand, but I’m not sure how much significance it has.

  Dear Mr. Wells.

  Your Three Is Not A Crowd really rang a bell around here. I am involved in a situation which is much the same in several respects. It is now only a matter of bringing it all out into the open. I am a claims adjuster for an insurance company and live in a small town. Ten months ago my wife’s older sister and a brother-in-law died leaving a girl of seventeen whom we took into our own home, having no children of our own. I was attracted to the girl immediately but never thought to do anything about it. However it was soon to be seen that the attraction was mutual.

  Let me only say that before very long one thing led to another. The girl was no virgin and had had considerable experience for a girl her age, in contrast to my wife who was a virgin when I married her. (I had had some experience before marriage, but only with my wife after our marriage.) My niece made it obvious she would not mind having sex with me and I must admit I did not try too hard to resist. I was surprised and delighted to discover that I loved my wife all the more for sleeping with my niece. As a matter of fact after twelve years of marriage I suddenly found myself having more frequent relations with my wife than ever, and finding the relations more exciting since they had been in our honeymoon days.

  So now I have the great joy of having two mistresses, one a loving and well-endowed woman in her early thirties, the other a slender nymph of eighteen. For a considerable time I dreaded the prospect of my wife finding out about this, although at the same time I felt some guilt over keeping it a secret from her. But in the intervening months I have become certain, from things she has said and other thing as well, that she is aware of my relationship with our niece. I am positive that she knows about it. And what is more, it is my suspicion that she does not object a bit!

  And yet she will never come right out and say anything about it.

  Here is my problem. The ideal for me would be if I could find a way to bring it all out in the open. This was in my mind for some time and was brought even more to the surface by your book. I would like for us all to go to bed together every night. The three of us, which would give me the pleasure of making love to two so beautiful women at once and would also give me the pleasure of watching the two of them together. It would be good for them also, giving them something to do on such nights when I am too tired to make love, or in the event I am away overnight on business.

  Also I have the feeling both of them would go for it. I have no grounds for thinking this as far as my wife is concerned except for my impression of some looks she has given the girl and comments she has made. As for the girl, I am the closest thing to certain that she has had some experience with her own sex. She has denied this but in such a way to keep me from believing her denials. Also I know for a fact she is strongly attracted to my wife, and has commented often on the size and shape of my wife’s breasts and the beauty of her full womanly figure.

  My problem is how to get the three of us in bed together. I wish I could come right out and suggest it but I guess I have cold feet. I have made it a point to leave your book where my wife could read it. If she has read it, she has kept it to herself. I have also taken chances, making love to my niece at such times when there was the chance my wife would catch us in the act. It seems to me that if she did, it might serve to break the ice. But so far nothing has happened. I feel it would be to the good for all of us if everything were out in the open and all of us in bed together, but I am worried that I could upset the whole apple cart by doing the wrong thing.

  I don’t really have any questions, unless you happen to know of anyone else who has been in the same position and so could offer advice based on how somebody else handled a situation of this sort . . .

  Harvey

  I haven’t known of anyone in precisely this position, although I’ve known of a few variations on the same theme. The technique of leaving books on a tempting subject around the house is so common as almost to constitute a cliché—how many swinging wives first had their husbands broach the subject in this fashion?

  It occurs to me that Harvey may be a little over-optimistic in his assumption that both his niece and his wife would be delighted with a threesome if only it could be achieved. This might very well be possible, certainly, but it is also possible that his interpretation of rather thin evidence is largely a matter of wish fulfillment on his part. Important, too, to avoid confusing his wife’s tolerance of his relations with their niece with a desire for a threesome, or even with out-and-out approval of the existing relationship. Wives will often put up with any number of things so long as the possibility exists in their minds that nothing is in fact going on. But there is evidently a difference between virtual certainty of a relationship between husband and niece and walking in on the two of them in bed.

  Were I Harvey, I think I would be inclined to make haste cautiously.r />
  Dear Mr. Wells,

  You have enlightened me so very much by your New Sexual Underground. In fact I found it one of the easiest to read. You asked for ideas and I have one. It seems to me everyone else is taken care of but those fifty-five and over. What do they do? I don’t think they disintegrate.

  Would it be possible to have a personal interview to discuss this further? I usually come to New York one afternoon a week. I would appreciate hearing from you. I truly do not have anyone to talk to re the above subject.

  Many thanks for your indulgence.

  Sincerely,

  Margaret

  I wrote to Margaret to tell her I would be very glad to get together with her, that I was indeed interested in the question she raised. Is the New Morality inaccessible to the middle-aged?

  Margaret called me a week later and subsequently came to my apartment on a recent weekday afternoon. I found her a very pleasant and attractive woman, alert and well-spoken, with a particular inclination to talk frankly and openly about her situation. Further, I found her situation quite remarkable. I think it illustrates several important aspects of the sexual revolution. It illustrates, too, the way in which a single incident can rather dramatically change a person’s entire orientation.

  In Margaret’s case, a radio program changed her life.

  Three or four months before I saw her, Margaret was at home on Long Island listening to Long John Nebel’s late-night talk show. His guest was Gilbert Bartell, author of a book entitled Group Sex. Before that night, Margaret had been utterly unaware of the phenomenon of group sex, utterly unaware of swinging, utterly unaware in fact of the majority of the behavioral changes which constitute the sexual revolution.

  “I was fascinated by what I heard. I felt that maybe I had been missing out on something important, that all of this was passing me by.”

  For the past ten years, life in general had been passing Margaret by. Ten years ago, she had retired from her job as executive secretary and office manager for a Manhattan firm and moved back to a small town on Long Island to care for her aging mother. Now, at fifty-two, she has lived a decade without any sexual outlet whatsoever.

  “This never bothered me. I haven’t dated since I moved back to the Island. I took it for granted that this was the way things happened—you get older and, if you haven’t married, you tend to lose touch with people.”

  Prior to this retirement Margaret had had several affairs. “Sex was never a casual matter with me. The few men I did have affairs with, there was always extreme emotional involvement on both sides. I was engaged a total of ten times over the years and in some instances had sexual affairs with my fiancé. I always enjoyed it, but looking back I may have enjoyed it because I didn’t know what I was missing. Female orgasm, I didn’t know about it, that women could come. I knew I pleased the men I slept with. They couldn’t get enough of me. But I didn’t know that there was a pleasure which I wasn’t reaching.”

  After hearing Long John’s show, Margaret immediately wrote out a check and sent away for the Bartell book. When it came she read it through twice. It was the cornerstone of an extended vicarious involvement in the world of the New Morality. Her interest in the subject rapidly became an obsessive preoccupation.

  Her weekly trips to New York served this end. She was soon haunting large bookstores in the midtown area, purchasing various factual studies of swinging and group sex. By the time I saw her, three or at the most four months after she heard that radio program, she reeled off perhaps a dozen titles of books in the field she had read, and spoke of having hidden books all over her house, secreting them in drawers and closets where her mother would be unlikely to come upon them. From her observations I gathered that she had not merely read these books but had literally studied them, poring over them as if they were maps showing the way to Shangri-La.

  More remarkably, she began to visit midtown theaters where pornographic movies are shown. I have never seen an unattended woman in one of these theaters, and the notion of a settled middle-aged middle-class suburban spinster regularly visiting the Times Square porn houses is unique in my experience.

  “I picked the theaters over on Eighth Avenue where I wouldn’t be likely to run into anyone I knew,” she confided. “And I would go at nine or ten in the morning when they were almost empty so I wouldn’t have to worry about anyone trying to sit next to me. No one ever bothered me. No one took any notice of me, and I never saw anyone I recognized. The closest I came was once when I was buying books and saw a woman I used to work with, but fortunately I saw her before she saw me and I moved to another section and pretended to be looking at cookbooks. I would have died of embarrassment if she had seen what I was looking at originally.”

  She saw quite a variety of pornographic movies, but insisted that they interested her more than they excited her. Before long she was judging them in terms of camera techniques and acting ability. One was superior to the others in this respect, and afterward she generally found herself overly aware of the amateurish quality of subsequent films.

  At a newsstand, she purchased a copy of a swingers’ correspondence club magazine. She found the ads interesting but was not tempted to reply to any of them. She asked me several times if there were clubs for swingers in New York and if it would be possible for her to attend a meeting.

  On the one hand, Margaret was very anxious to try out all the things she had been reading about. Her only experience had been conventionally heterosexual and monogamous, yet she felt that she might well be amenable to bisexual contacts and all forms of group sex play.

  At the same time, she was nervous about actually getting her feet wet. She voiced several fears—that she might contract venereal disease, that she might be blackmailed or exposed, that she might find herself in an uncomfortable situation of one sort or another and be better advised to leave well enough alone.

  She worries, too, that perhaps she is too old for this new world which has just now opened up for her. In her reading she encountered case histories of young swinging couples who preferred to avoid swinging with older couples, and asked me several times if young people think people her age are “moldy and unattractive.”

  Will Margaret actually do anything? Or will she go on reading sex books behind closed doors? I don’t really know. I tried to answer her questions as well as I could without recommending either course of action to her. I suggested that, should she move in the direction of active swinging, she do so cautiously, using a Post Office box taken out in a false name, sending no photographs through the mail, and arranging preliminary meetings in safe public places.

  “It’s so much easier for a man than for a woman,” she said. This I found rather interesting. Certainly it is easier for a man than for a woman to have done what she has already done—to go to movies, to purchase sex books, etc. But it is infinitely easier for a woman to become an active swinger, easier for her to find a suitable and willing partner of the opposite sex, easier to be accepted into a group situation. She was quite surprised to hear this, which in turn surprised me, as most of the books she had so carefully read make precisely this point. I suspect her attitude has been a rationale for her reluctance to commit herself one way or the other.

  Whatever Margaret does in the future (and I do hope she’ll keep me informed) I found her story an intriguing one. Although information about swinging and group sex has been widely available for over a decade, it is only in the past year or so that the sexual climate has opened up to the point where the traditional media have paid it any attention. And it was only through the traditional media that Margaret, sheltered as she was, could have been exposed to it.

  Dear Mr. Wells,

  In Tricks of the Trade many of the girls you interview say that men come to them for oral sex because this is something they cannot get at home . . . My problem is slightly different. While my wife is willing to take my penis into her mouth, she just does not know what to do with it once she has it there. I have had oral sex with prostitu
tes plus with a girl I was engaged to before meeting my wife and feel there is nothing to surpass the thrill of fellatio when properly performed.

  The question is, how do you get a woman to do it properly when she is willing but does not know how?

  Stephen

  It might not hurt to tell her what you have in mind.

  I suppose that answer sounds flippant, but it’s serious enough. Stephen’s question is similar to another one that comes up from time to time—How do you get your wife to perform fellatio (or anal intercourse, or coitus standing on one’s head, or whatever) in the first place? Short of developing one’s capacity for extrasensory perception, it would seem a logical first step to bring the subject up conversationally. When married people can’t talk to each other, they have trouble doing other things to each other as well.

  In purely technical terms, fellatio is rather more complex than coitus. While some women seem to have been born knowing what to do, the vast majority have to learn. There are books which discuss the techniques involved—Tricks of the Trade is one, The Sensuous Woman another—but a simple explanation of what one’s wife is doing wrong and what she might do to improve her style could work wonders all by itself.

  Of course, some men prefer that their wives not go down on them, or that they do it poorly. Perhaps so they’ll have an excuse to look elsewhere. Perhaps out of some puritanical hangover—one does not want one’s saintly wife to be too adept at an act one still thinks of as dirty or perverse. In which case, Stephen, you’ll have to get your own head together before you get the kind of head you’re looking for.

  Dear Mr. Wells,

  My wife and I have recently read The New Sexual Underground and enjoyed it immensely. We were particularly interested in Chapter Four: Love in the Electronic Age as we have had some experiences of our own in this area of behavior but have read extremely little on the subject.