Sex Without Strings: A Handbook for Consenting Adults (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

by Lawrence Block

  With people who dig it, though, it’s really subtle and loaded with nuance. Whereas ordinary fucking is pretty much the same. Even with positional variations, it’s about the same.

  I used to have fantasies about getting fucked and eaten at the same time. Then, when it finally happened, it wasn’t as great as I had imagined it would be.

  I’m getting ahead of myself, because this happened after the divorce. Oh, it only takes a minute to tell. It was a threesome, I was with a married couple, and she and I did a 69 while he took me doggie-style from the rear.

  Actually, this does tie in with what I was saying, with taboos, in connection with bisexuality. At first I didn’t even think much about this, because at our early swinging experiences it didn’t come up at all. Then we were at a party and there were a couple of women having sex, and I was so shook at the entire idea that I couldn’t even stay in the room. From then on I became more perceptive and realized that some subtle passes were being thrown at me, but I’ve always been fairly good at pretending to be dense when it suits me. That was one thing marriage to Stan had taught me very well.

  When I finally did go through with it, finally got into bisexual activity, it was for several reasons. The most obvious one was that Stan wanted me to do it and really pressured me into it. This surprised me, although I’ve since learned that this is a standard male fetish and seems to work just as strongly if not more strongly upon men with a very strong bias against male homosexuality. They want to watch girls pleasure each other. I don’t know why. I’m familiar with all the psychological arguments but I don’t know which ones are correct and which aren’t.

  Another reason was that I was afraid I would like it. That was a reason for my reluctance, and it was also a reason for my desire to try it and find out. It had occurred to me long ago that I might be a lesbian without knowing it. I’m sure most women have elements of this fear at one time or another. I felt that my repugnance might be related to a secret desire, and I finally decided it was better to find out once and for all than go on worrying about it.

  One night we were at this one couple’s house. We had swung with them a few times before this, and they were one of the rare couples that we both liked. Stan got on fine with the guy and loved balling his wife, and I liked the wife very much and could tolerate her husband, although he was nothing sensational and was not a particularly wonderful lover. This woman had made teasing passes at me previously, which I had laughed off as if I didn’t know she really meant it, and she said something similar, and Stan put in a few words of encouragement, and I decided, what the hell, why not, and I said I was game if she was. The facade we both kept up was that we were putting on a show for the boys to get them excited. This woman always operated under that pretense, but when I got to know her better she confided that she preferred women to men. She said something like “I’d leave my husband and live full-time with another woman if I just had the guts.” I guess she never developed the guts, because I understand she’s still married to him.

  Possibly because of her own inclinations, she said she would do me and I didn’t have to feel obliged to do anything in return. Naturally, she was superb at cunnilingus. The myth that all women are better than all men at this is just that, a complete myth, and I’ve known several men who were better at it than any woman who ever did it to me, but it is true that virtually all women are reasonably proficient at it, while a percentage of men really have no idea what to do.

  As good as she was, I didn’t get much of anything out of it. Part of this was uptightness. This was my first time and I was very unsure how I felt about it, and I’m sure that kept me from responding fully. I was very conscious of her being a woman and of there being something unnatural about this. I was also thinking about doing it to her. Although it was understood I didn’t have to, I knew I wanted to satisfy my own curiosity about how I would feel about it.

  When it was my turn, I found out that it was neither as good as I had feared nor as bad as I had feared. I was neither turned on nor sickened. This is probably a funny way to put it, but it was interesting. I had had it done to me so many times and it was extremely interesting to remember what I had liked and hadn’t liked and to act accordingly. I guess I did a good job, because her response was sensational and her excitement did make me feel sexy. It was much the same sense of accomplishment I get performing fellatio, but less gratifying physically and in other ways. I didn’t come when she ate me, although I had the brains to pretend to, and of course I didn’t come from doing her, but when her husband grabbed me immediately afterward and started fucking me it was wildly exciting, far more so than it had ever been with him before, and I’m sure the lesbian prelude had a lot to do with this.

  Later on I got into bisexuality mostly in the context of group sex. I still do it now and then, and I am now very much capable of having an orgasm with another woman from being eaten, but I cannot honestly characterize myself as bisexual. This may seem contradictory in that I’ve admitted I can enjoy relations with women, but say it because I can never really think of another woman as a sex object. I can’t look at a girl and get turned on by the thought of balling her. I can’t respond to her physical appearance, the way I can with a man. Also, I find it a lot harder to take intimate kissing with a girl than with a man. The unequivocal sex acts don’t bother me, but the thought of kissing and petting as an expression of sexual love for another female is something I find personally distasteful. I would be more apt to label myself as fundamentally heterosexual with a capacity to appreciate occasional lesbian relations, especially in the context of group sex.

  • • •

  After her divorce, Evelyn had a great deal of trouble evolving a sexual lifestyle for herself. As an unattached female working in a job situation where she had considerable contact with the public, she received a great deal of attention from men. However, most of it was not what she was looking for, and at the same time she was not too clear in her mind as to just what she was looking for.

  • • •

  I was very much at loose ends. The kids and I were new in this neighborhood—Stan had sold our other house, and I wanted a smaller place that would be more convenient to my office. And I was very new at being single. I could have called some of our swinging friends, but I really didn’t want to see anybody who knew Stan. Also, the circle we were in at the time was very much into confining itself to married couples only. Not only were singles unwelcome, but unmarried pairs were unwelcome; these people by and large were very middle-class and very much afraid of anything that might disturb the sanctity of their marriages. I was in no position to threaten anybody’s marriage, as the last thing on earth I wanted was another husband. But for this reason and others, I did not get in touch with them.

  The men I met through my job didn’t work out very well. First of all, the great majority of them were married. This was all right with me, and in fact I much prefer to date married men, but they were uptight about it, and that was something I didn’t want. They were almost all nervous that I was going to make a big romantic thing out of it, which was nonsense, and again it was sort of a case of a man fulfilling his fantasy and being unwilling to believe it, because all of these cheating husbands were looking for an absolute no-strings unemotional physical relationship, and that was just what I wanted myself, and they couldn’t believe it. At the same time, if they did believe it, they seemed taken aback. They didn’t want to get involved, but if a woman slept with them as casually as they slept with her, then she was a nut or a tramp or something.

  For a while I more or less abandoned sex. I turned down dates and saw nobody after work. Now and then I would get out my handy-dandy vibrator and masturbate, but I did that more out of a feeling that it was unhealthy to go without sex than because masturbation gave me any real pleasure. It doesn’t. It can give me an orgasm, it can even give me a terribly powerful orgasm, but that’s not as satisfying to me as having sex with a man I like even if I don’t have an orgasm with him.
/>   Then I thought about swinging. Of course, I was not naïve; I knew it was the easiest thing in the world for an unattached woman to function as a swinger. I’d read the magazines and I’d heard people talking, so I knew it was a cinch to do it. The reason I didn’t think of it sooner, I suppose, is that I had come to think of swinging as a function of my marital relationship with Stan, and the only thing from that marriage that I wanted to retain were the children, and sometimes I wasn’t too sure about them.

  I’m joking—I love them very much, but there’s no denying that immediately after the divorce I resented them. They tied me down, they kept me in one place, they limited me financially, and I think it was only human to go through a period of resenting them. I just made damn sure they never knew I resented them.

  The point is that, because of all this and also on the basis of my personal experience, I thought of swinging as something for married couples—and, based on most of the people we knew, something for fairly dull married couples. Of course, there are also bars in downtown Pittsburgh and out by the airport for what they call “swinging singles,” pickup joints for unattached young people. That just was not my scene. I can’t really stomach the calculating eye contact and the mindless small talk and the semi-subtle “let’s-go-to-my-place” horseshit. I’m also a little old for that. The girls are for the most part in their early and middle twenties, and I was a couple years north of thirty by this time.

  And one night, after I did accept a date for the first time in a while, and got a decent dinner out of it but decided not to go to bed with the guy, and then changed my mind over drinks and then he didn’t make a pass anyway, and I got home and thought, why in hell can’t I meet someone to have sex with on equal terms, with no crap involved and everything understood in advance, and so on—that was when I thought about swinging, and the more I thought about it, the more sense it made.

  I wasn’t sure how to go about it at first. Stan and I had never placed an ad, and I did not like the idea of putting my picture in a magazine. It wasn’t just that I was afraid of being recognized, because a lot of women guard against that possibility by covering their faces, just showing their tits to the world. But even so, I consider that degrading. I didn’t even like it when Stan used to send pictures of me to people we were corresponding with. It was distasteful to me. A couple of times I came very close to answering ads. I would read through the magazines until I found someone suitable in the Pittsburgh area and would write out a letter, but I never mailed any of these letters.

  Then I realized that I could easily run an ad without a picture. There are so few ads by single women. The magazines charge you if you don’t include a picture—they’re aware that those pictures help sell the magazines to a lot of non-swingers who just like to look at tits. But I didn’t mind paying a couple of dollars to keep my picture out of print, and I figured I would still draw a decent response.

  The ad I wrote read something like: “Single gal, divorced, thirty-two, weight and measurements blah blah blah, desires to meet men living in or passing through Pittsburgh for casual good times. Married men welcome. Include photo and phone.” Later on I added the line “No generosity on either side,” because some of the men who answered said they supposed I was a hooker and if so they weren’t interested, and another wrote to offer his stud services for pay. Since “generous” is a code word for financial reimbursement for sexual favors, this cleared things up. I got a good response, good enough so that I was able to throw nine out of ten letters in the garbage. I didn’t get any really sick pervert letters. I guess those generally go to women who show the world their bodies. But I did get a lot of letters from people there was no point in answering. A man who invited me to look him up if I was ever in Alaska, for instance. Another batch who were functional illiterates, and several who were so unappealing physically that there was no point in seeing them. But I was left with several letters from men in Pittsburgh and several more who said they visited the city regularly on business, and I made contact with several of them and it worked just fine.

  Things gradually evolved to the point where I have about half a dozen semi-regular boy friends, all of them living in or around Pittsburgh. All but one of them are married. They know they can call me at certain hours and make arrangements to see me. Sometimes we’ll go out to dinner. Sometimes they’ll have dinner at my place. Sometimes we go to a motel if it’s an early-evening thing and the boys are home and awake.

  With these fellows it’s not exclusively sexual. I like their company and they enjoy mine, and there are occasional times when we don’t even feel much like having sex and sit around like an old married couple in front of the television set. I don’t think there’s much deception involved. I know I’m primarily a convenience for them, and they know they’re primarily a convenience for me. They like to fuck and so do I.

  Now these are the men I see frequently. I also see a great many men once or twice and that’s it, either because they don’t call me again or I don’t take another date with them. There was a time when this bothered me. It bothered me when someone balled me and never called me again, and it bothered me to have to tell a man I didn’t think we should see each other anymore. But then I came to see that there is nothing wrong with fucking a man once and not fucking him again. Unless something about the person turns you off in a big way, the first time with almost anyone is exciting. The novelty, the challenge of pleasing the person, everything. I’m sure it’s a form of the same kind of notch-cutting I condemned Stan for. But on a higher plane, I think.

  Men operate this way all the time, and I’ve learned not to take offense if they don’t call me again. I recognize that it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with whether or not I pleased them, and that in any case there’s no law that says I have to thrill the eyes out of every man I go to bed with.

  But men don’t seem to like it when a woman takes that stance. I’ve had some awkward telephone calls and I’ve been called some nasty names.

  • • •

  I pointed out that a man prefers to believe that he can have sex at the snap of his fingers with any woman he has had sex with in the past. I don’t know why this is so, although I recognize that the rule seems to hold as true for me as anyone else.

  • • •

  Maybe it’s a compulsion to build a harem. Once a man sleeps with a girl, she’s his concubine, she belongs to him. Even if he’s not possessive about her, he likes the idea that she’s there when he wants her.

  The best people for purely casual sex are businessmen from out of town. They’re really great. They have money to spend, and that doesn’t hurt, but it not the important thing. Better than that is that they’re not so uptight about being seen with you in public. They’re out on the town and they want to have a good time. They don’t worry that you’ll make trouble for them with their wives, because you’re not going to be able to get in touch with their wives. I can really understand why airline hostesses have such a good time.

  • • •

  At the present, Evelyn’s swinging consists largely of one-to-one relationships of the sort she has described. However, she also has continued to involve herself on an occasional basis with group sex.

  • • •

  I’ve said I don’t like big parties. That’s still true, although once in a great while I’ll go to one. Some of the guys I know might get invited to a sex party, and of course they have to bring a girl to get in, so I get invited pretty frequently. I generally turn down these invitations, but every now and then the idea sounds good to me and I go. Sometimes a party can be a fairly good experience. Let’s face it, there are times when the idea of being fucked by a great number of guys is exciting. It’s rarely as nice in practice as it is in the imagination, but once in a while I give it a try.

  What I do like on a more frequent basis are small groups, three or four or five people. I frequently will get responses to my ad from a couple. In most cases the wife is bisexual, but not always. One girl, for examp
le, went to some length in her initial letter to explain that she was not bi, that she had no interest in having sex with another woman, that the whole thought turned her off, but that her husband wanted other women and she didn’t want to swing with another couple because she didn’t want to have relations with another man. She didn’t want to deprive him of his right to other women but didn’t want him sneaking around behind her back, and so she’d like it if I came over and balled him, in private if I insisted, or with her watching if that was all right with me.

  I wrote back a sort of tentative letter to see what I would get next, and what I got was a letter, again from the wife, coaxing me to ball her husband and going on at great length and in oppressive detail about what a great fuck he was, the size of his cock, blah blah blah. That usually turns me off, and letters like that go straight into the garbage, but something intrigued me about this gal, so I met with them and we sat around and talked for a while and then he and I fucked while she watched. She fingered herself furiously while we watched, and as soon as we were done she rushed over and went down on him and brought him to another climax.

  Well, I’ll tell you. This girl was about twenty-three or twenty-four and really beautiful, genuinely blonde and slim and sweet, and I did something I never did before or since. I decided to make her. She had all this oh I’m a hundred percent straight crap, and here she got off fantastically from eating him after he’d been in me, and I decided to do a job on her. I didn’t try anything that night but I saw them again a week later and I nailed her, and she loved it every bit as much as I knew she would. And I loved it. I suppose it was the role I was playing or something, but that was the only time I really got into it. Correction—I saw them a few other times and we did some nice threesies, and I enjoyed her on those occasions as well. With other women, though, I’ve never felt anything like that. I got such an enormous thrill out of tonguing her.