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

by Lawrence Block

  I agree, but I wouldn’t want to predict the course the storm will take, or the extent of its violence. I think Mike must eventually explode. He hasn’t yet, because he has been compensated by a smoother marriage, a hotter wife, and a deep dip into his own fantasies.

  Some day the balance will tip. Frank’s vanity, and gluttony will outweigh the rest. (They may already, but Mike, knowing he has a rhino by the tail, is stalling for time.) Even HE can’t know what will happen when his temper finally gives way. (And he HAS one. Beware the gentle man!)

  If Frank is forced to leave, which way will Dena jump?

  Into Mike’s arms?

  Into Frank’s arms?

  Into hysteria?

  Into madness?

  Dena once told me, “I had a father problem.”

  Yes, Dena. And the world is round.

  • • •

  I’m generally inclined to let my friend’s letter stand on its own. However, I’ll have to take exception to his last statement. As a member of the Flat Earth Society of Canada, I must point out that the world is flat, as anyone willing to trust the evidence of his senses can readily see.

  Marv

  The solitary swinger with the most difficult time of it is the man who wants to swing who is married to a woman who does not. I could not begin to estimate how many men find themselves in this position at one time or another, but their number is certainly substantial. I am constantly receiving letters from such men. They want advice on how to get their wives to swing, or ask for suggestions as to how they can operate on their own. I’m afraid I’m rarely of much help to them.

  In some cases, I’m unconvinced of the sincerity of their desires. However large the number of swingers in contemporary America, there is surely a much larger number of persons of whom the whole notion of swinging is a very alluring fantasy. I would go so far as to say that group sex and consensual mutual adultery is the predominant fantasy of the American middle class.

  And it is eminently possible to delight in a fantasy without truly wishing to bring it to fulfillment. Sadomasochistic pornography, for example, has a very large and very enthusiastic audience composed primarily of persons to whom the thought of actually acting out these cruel fantasies is utterly revolting. (That an occasional maniac who does act out such fantasies is also an admirer of such pornography is an argument invariably advanced on behalf of censorship, and, I think, a wholly specious one.)

  As far as swinging is concerned, I don’t doubt that most of the men (and, to a lesser extent, women) who relish it in fantasy are consciously convinced they would really like to practice it in actuality; fantasies are most effective when one is able to believe in the possibility of their sometime fulfillment. But I am sure some of these people are deluding themselves. Any number of men are certain they would be delighted if their wives would agree to swing—yet they go to great lengths to avoid bringing up the subject at all. They argue that their wives are emphatically not the type, that even the suggestion would have a detrimental effect on their relationships, that they know their partners well enough to avoid broaching the topic, and so on. There is probably a degree of truth in these arguments, but I cannot avoid feeling that the wish is often father to the thought.

  Perhaps they themselves are not all that open-minded about swinging, and use their arguments as rationalization for their own unconscious doubts. Perhaps their double-standard morality is such that they could not conceive of being married to a woman who would wholeheartedly embrace what they are reluctant to suggest. Perhaps—well, you get the idea.

  Certainly, a great many men do have wives who are reluctant to swing. And certainly a great many of them try to talk their wives into swinging, and many of them succeed—most couples who do get into swinging do so because it was the man’s idea, and in most cases the wife has needed substantial convincing over a period of time before giving her agreement. And, just as certainly, many men make a real attempt to get their wives to swing and are not successful. For some of them the matter ends there. For others, as well as for men who have not attempted to introduce their wives to swinging, there is another route. They attempt to swing on their own, generally behind the wife’s back but occasionally with her implied or stated acquiescence.

  How well do they do?

  Not terribly well, most of the time. The problem of the single male swinger is great enough when he is genuinely single, as we have seen, and it is greatly compounded when he is married. He has less mobility, less time available, and often less discretionary income. He has to worry about exposure, often on two fronts—not only does he have to worry that his wife will find out what he is doing, but if he has mismanaged things sufficiently, he has to guard against his playmates’ finding out that he is indeed married. Many swingers who will accept a single man as a partner are considerably less sanguine about swinging with a married man. The cheater is an object of scorn for not a few of them, which is not hard to understand; concealing one’s activities from one’s spouse does not set well with those who make a virtue of keeping one’s indiscretions out in the open.

  Yet a great many married men do swing on their own.

  In Southern California (where everything is easier anyway) I met a young law student who had been married for about three years. We met at a swinging party in the Valley with about fifty people in attendance. He had brought a date, a girl he had not seen before and most likely would not see again, and with whom he had not and would probably not have sexual relations. This date was arranged for him by the Sexual Freedom Alliance, an out-in-the-open organization based in Hollywood which brings people together for this sort of thing, and charges a membership fee of around fifty dollars a year for their unlimited services. (As I said, everything’s easier in Southern California.)

  He had needed the girl to come to the party, as single men were not otherwise admitted. In return for her company he had provided transportation there and back and had paid the party’s ten-dollar admission fee. Since their arrival they had gone their separate ways, and by the time I got to talking to him he had done the dirty deed with two young ladies and expected to manage one more performance before returning home to his wife.

  “My marriage is sexually boring,” he said. “I married too young and knew it was a mistake right away, but it’s good in certain other respects. It’s possible we may get divorced eventually, but for the time being I want to keep my marriage intact.

  “But that doesn’t mean I don’t need a sexual outlet. I do. About a year ago I got involved with a girl. It was a very heavy relationship and it almost wrecked my marriage. Toward the end this girl started calling me at home—that sort of thing. I would some of the time think I was in love with her and wanted to marry her and other times I would realize that it was just sex and in every other respect she bored me and I found my wife a more genuinely interesting person.

  “So I broke off with the girl, which was also difficult, and then I was talking with someone and heard about these parties and how you could arrange for a date to go with you. So I’ll go to a party once or twice a week. It’s not hard to get away. As far as my wife is concerned, I’m spending a lot of extra time at the law library. Law school is a cinch, I’ve got the right kind of mind for it, I can breeze through all my courses, but she doesn’t know that. There’s no way she can reach me at the law library to check up on me. I call Sexual Freedom Alliance, I get a date arranged, bring her here—unless we just hit it off perfectly, which has happened a couple of times, in which case we never do get to the party.

  “But we usually end up at the party, because, frankly, most of the girls you get as dates this way are dogs, and I just think of them as tickets of admission. I have some good casual sex and I go home feeling fulfilled. It’s not always impersonal. When you go to the same parties more or less regularly, you keep running into a lot of the same people. There’s a turnover, but there’s also a basic core group of people you see again and again.

  “And there’s a certain amount of
socializing that goes on. You’re welcome to spend all your time in the bedrooms if you want, but unless you’re Superman you don’t want to ball nonstop for four hours, so you spend a certain amount of time in the living room talking to people. There are girls here who I consider friends. We go to bed some of the time, and we just talk some of the time, and it’s good sex, and it’s good conversation, and it’s completely casual with no chains attached and no threat to my marriage. Or to my peace of mind.”

  For this man, swinging as a married cheater is no great problem. But for a man who lives in a town of five thousand people in the middle of Arkansas, things just are not that easy.

  Yet men in very forbidding circumstances do manage to get their acts together. In another book, Beyond Group Sex, I wrote about Grant Burdon. I won’t go into his story here, having covered so much of it before, but will point out that one could hardly envision a less favorable environment for this sort of swinging than his situation—he is a Protestant minister in a small town in Western Pennsylvania. His income is limited and his professional position obviously precarious; yet, with his wife’s acquiescence, he manages to conduct a very fulfilling private life of sexual freedom, swinging with singles and couples all over the country.

  Marv’s experiences seem to me to be quite interesting in this context. Perhaps I should stress that my sole contact with Marv has been through the mails, and I am thus presenting his revelations in letter form as received. This has advantages and disadvantages for the reader. On the plus side, Marv’s story is presented directly, without having to be filtered through the perceptions and occasional misperceptions of an interviewer. On the minus side, there are elements of Marv we are less likely to find out about, not the least of which is whether he is writing the truth.

  There is, needless to say, a very powerful advantage for the writer: It’s a sight easier to sit here and retype some letters virtually verbatim than to spend hours interviewing and additional hours turning those interviews into coherent narrative. Ah, well. Show me a man who doesn’t take the easy way out and I’ll show you a man who goes through life pushing doors plainly marked PULL.

  Dear Mr. Wells:

  I am writing to you after reading several of your books . . .

  My problem is, I guess, run-of-the-mill. For months now I have been wanting to be a swinger, swapper, whatever you want to call it. I am a very loving person and need a rich and rewarding sex life. Meaning, having sex for the rest of my life with only one woman is not enough for me.

  The problem is my wife. She will have nothing to do with this. In fact, she will not hear of it. She is a woman with strong religious convictions and has little interest in sex in or out of marriage. She enjoys it when we have sex but would not miss it if we didn’t. She never refuses me but if I do not suggest it for weeks at a time, there is no difference for her. To this woman sex means in a dark room with lights out after children are in bed, and in one position only, and with no eagerness for foreplay first. She just wants to do it and be done with it and does not want to talk about it or about sex in general.

  Lately I have tried to bring up the subject. I could not do this by saying I was interested in it but told her some of the things I had read in your books and by other writers on this subject. Her reaction was, she did not even want to hear about it. That I should not be reading books like this. That books like this should not be written, that it was sinful even to write about the sins of others in a way such as would make them attractive to others.

  This is the shituation I am in:

  (That’s his spelling, and I wouldn’t change it for the world—JWW)

  This is the woman I am supposed to spend the rest of my life with having sex only with her.

  You might say, leave this woman. I would but for the children. They are my children and I would not leave their upbringing to her alone. Also, she is a good wife in many ways and I would not want to hurt her . . .

  So what it comes to is this: How can a man swing if his wife is against it? Do not tell me to talk her into it, as it is no use. Believe me, it is no use.

  I have a magazine called Select with thousands of ads of swingers. I have read this magazine so many times I almost know it by heart. In ad after ad it says “No single men.” But what is a single man to do? Also, how can I make contact in a way that will keep all of this from my wife?

  I guess you will just throw this letter in the wastebasket, but will hope for an answer from you. I like your books very much and find them interesting and exciting, although I must say they are no substitute for the real thing.

  Sincerely,

  Marv

  I didn’t throw his letter into the wastebasket, although there’s no denying I was tempted; I get an awful lot of letters very much like this one. But I replied, albeit briefly, telling Marv his first step ought to be to rent a Post Office Box, and adding that he would probably have to write a great many letters in order to get a handful of replies, but that if he was persistent, and if he avoided answering ads that did specify “No single men” and made a special point of answering those with the phrase “Three is not a crowd,” he would probably do well sooner or later. I added that I hoped he would keep me posted on how he made out, and I mailed the letter without expecting ever to hear from him again.

  About five months later I received the following letter from Marv, with a P.O. box as the return address:

  Dear Jack,

  Don’t know if you remember me but I wrote you some time ago about my problem . . .

  Well, I took your advice. I want to thank you for taking the time to answer my letter. It was what you wrote that made me “take the plunge.” You also said to let you know how I made out so I will take you at your word.

  Once I make up my mind to do something, I go ahead and do it. I do not know if I gave you any personal details in my last letter, so here goes, so that you can get the full picture of me. I am forty-two years old, married since I was twenty-seven. I own a dry cleaning business here in ——— and have lived here all my life. I have three children, two girls and a boy, their ages are thirteen, ten, and eight . . .

  After receiving your letter I sat down and took my time getting things thought out in my mind. Then I decided there was no use kidding myself. I could go on having daydreams and reading books and thinking or I could take action. I have always been a believer in action or would still be working for somebody else instead of in business for myself.

  The first thing I did was to rent a Post Office Box, as you said. Then I bought a new copy of Select as the one I had was out of date and I did not know if the same people would still be advertising for friends. Then I went through the ads for an area within a two-hundred-mile radius of where I live. I checked off every ad that was promising in any way. Then I went through those ads I checked and picked the most promising of the bunch and wound up with forty-seven ads. I found three more to make it an even fifty and I went to work.

  I had a photograph taken of myself and had fifty copies made. Not a nude or seminude but a full length photo, which is enough to give anyone a fairly good idea of what I look like. Then I wrote the same letter fifty times with only slight variations. I typed up fifty envelopes and sent off the fifty letters. I put the letters in a large envelope addressed to the magazine along with my check for fifty dollars. I mailed it right away before I lost my nerve.

  Let me tell you this, Jack. Once that envelope was in the mail I felt like fifty different kinds of damned fool. Between the photographs and the fifty dollars for a forwarding fee of a dollar a letter—believe me, Select must be making a fortune if there are many guys like me around—I had close to a hundred dollars invested in this business. Also, it came to me that out of fifty couples and girls chosen at random, there was a good chance of hitting a blackmailer or troublemaker somewhere in the bunch. But that was why I mailed the package right away, on account of knowing I would have second thoughts on the matter and wanting to get it over and done with before my second thoughts c
ould intrude.

  One of my motives for writing you is this: Because I did write so many letters, fifty in all, maybe I can give you a picture which is of some value from a statistical point of view. My other motive is that you asked me to write!

  Of the fifty letters I sent out, I received exactly seventeen replies. As you probably know, the magazine makes a big deal about advertisers guaranteeing to reply to all the letters they receive. They also print a lot of bullshit about revoking advertising privileges for advertisers not following this policy. Jack—don’t you believe it!! Of the fifty people I wrote to, exactly 66% did not reply! Remember that I did not send obscene material through the mails and did not write obscene or overly suggestive letters, and yet two-thirds did not reply, not even with a postcard saying thanks but no thanks! I was going to report this to Select but decided, why bother? Let’s face it, Jack. They know which side of the bread holds the butter. They are not going to cost themselves advertising on this account, whatever they say in print!

  Now, of my seventeen replies, ten wrote to say thanks but no thanks, in about so many words, either to say that they did not swing with single men or that they had more single men than they knew what to do with. I can understand their position and respect them for having the decency to make a reply. Of the other seven, three indicated that the husband was bisexual. This was a mistake on my part, in that I failed to spell out in my own letters that I am not bisexual. (At least, I don’t think I am, and that is not what I am looking for, at least not for the present time being.)

  That left four letters. Puts me in mind of a story you probably know, Jack, about the fellow who every day would stop the first one hundred pretty women he met and ask them each if they wanted to fuck. He would get his face slapped ninety-nine times a day, but he would also get laid once a day! In other words, four out of fifty ain’t bad!