The Lifestyle (10 page)

There are two components to the overt sexual culture of the lifestyle. One is a couple’s engagement in sex with groups of other people—generally referred to as orgiastic sex. The other is spouse exchange, which historically has been more discreet.
Let’s look first at orgiastic sex, the behavior that never “regularly” takes place.

Organized, open sex is not unique to our era, our culture, or our hemisphere. It has occurred regularly for at least four thousand years, or since the time the Caananites held yearly sex festivals to honor the goddess Asherah and the god Baal in Abraham’s day. Unrestrained group sex and public intercourse with priestesses were frequent practices in the towns we know as Sodom and Gomorrah—until they were stamped out in a series of “righteous” wars led by the “avenging angels” of the same God who had thrown the biblical forebears of these citizens out of Eden. A little farther east, according to Herodotus, the highborn wives of Babylon worshipped the goddess Mylitta by going to her temple and having sex openly at least once in their lives.

As far as the West goes, the catalogue of public sex is almost continuous right down to today. The Greeks held several national sex fests, called Aphrodisia, Dionysia, and Lenea, the latter two subsidized by the state. First there was fasting, then there was feasting, then the population dressed as nymphs, bacchantes, and satyrs, marched through town and into the country, and, by late night, were having intercourse in sight of each other. They even had a special lesbian Dionysia practiced by Attic women, according to the ancient Greek travel writer Pausanias. The wild-haired worshippers dressed in goatskins, linked up with crowds of Delphian ladies, and climbed to the top of Mount Parnassus where they held ritual dancing and orgies. In the reign of Augustus Caesar, thousands of Romans who were members of the cult of Bacchus held orgies no fewer than five times a month. One raid of this ancient swing club by the Roman guard led to the arrest of seven thousand socialites.

After Rome fell, pagan Europe—which had been practicing orgiastic rites when Rome rose—continued on its merry way with festivals such as Beltane and the Feast of Fools,
which eventually became our Mardi Gras and Fasching. In the late Renaissance a mystical cult of European cabalists held regular séances enlivened by orgies. And when the West’s explorers sailed the seas and began “discovering” aboriginal cultures untouched by their social norms, they found so many instances of public sex that for years the prime focus of the missionaries was imposing the position named after them.

Intriguingly, two of the matriarchal cultures they stumbled onto reversed Western norms regarding the secret consummation of sex and the public consumption of food. In these societies, the abundant availability of sex and the scarcity of food seems to have played a role in the reversal. On Vakuta Island in the Trobriands and on Tahiti, people ate in secret, guarding their meals in the face of fresh memories of famine. Not wanting to excite envy and conflict among diners, the Vakutans and Tahitians evolved norms that branded public eating shameful. Yet in both South Sea societies, citizens publicly copulated on special occasions. Women possessed status and property comparable to males and were relatively free to express their sexual desires, thus increasing the otherwise dear supply of sex that reigns in patriarchal societies where women have always been rigidly controlled to assure paternity. In addition, the myths of these islanders were erotopositive, and it is probably no historical and economic coincidence that pro-women pop stars such as Sarah McLachlan and painters such as Lilian Broca are now promoting an alternative “original” woman to the biblically demure Eve. She is Lilith, the apocryphal “first wife” of Adam, who is alleged to have been edited out of the Bible by the ancient patriarchs because of her openly expressed sexual desires. After leaving Adam, Lilith fulfilled herself on the shores of the Red Sea by having group sex with hundreds of male demons.

Today, a yearly trip to Brazil will reveal that the citizens never quite buckled under to the imposition of one man, one
woman, one-at-a-time sex: for over a week during Mardi Gras Brazilians lift proscriptions against sex in public and group sex and combine their aboriginal, African, and European pagan heritages in a rite of consensual nonmonogamy they’ve idiomatically named
sacanagem
. It’s a loaded word understood by every citizen of the country, and when wives and husbands use it they mean they are going to publicly “seek pleasure” with other partners.

“Many peoples of the world, prior to European colonization and its attendant Christian missions, seem to have openly celebrated their sexuality, at least on occasion,” the British archaeologist Timothy Taylor observed in
The Prehistory of Sex
. “Days of sexual license, where adults had sex with as many partners as they wished quite publicly, seem to have occurred among North American Indian groups like the Huron. Jesuit missionaries were eager to crack down on such activity, so that by the time trained anthropologists arrived to study these communities in detail, from the nineteenth century onward, they found a very different culture from what the Jesuits had encountered.” Alluding to swingers, Taylor asserted that modern anthropologists like Friedl were “wrong to think that coitus is entirely hidden even in modern Western society. Although it is not an everyday public act, it is regularly performed in small private groups.”

Most swingers, of course, tell you they are not orgiasts. They may have sex with others in front of their own partners, but “it’s not everybody with everybody,” as Neal pointed out to me. Partner-sharing is far more common in swing culture than pile-on orgies and requires no historical digging to demonstrate as regular. The practice of spouse exchange is institutionalized in many cultures, partly because in some societies it
has made good economic and political sense, partly because it has spiced up the sex lives of the participants. Its most famous practitioners are the Inuit, whose lifestyle at the time they ubiquitously practiced spouse exchange bore an intriguing resemblance to the modern suburbanite’s. The Inuit family tends to be nuclear, without the broad affiliations of a clan. Until the advent of the snowmobile, hunting for meat in the Arctic required them to be isolated from others, and when they did encounter their fellows, they often shared spouses as a way of increasing cooperation and lessening competition. Swingers, too, live in nuclear families, and they find their lifestyle an effective means of abating the isolation of suburban living. Couples in the lifestyle will tell you that in many ways their clubs are networking centers, since the range of members’ professions they are likely to meet extends into all fields. At a club like New Faces New Friends in Vancouver or WideWorld in Orange County, it is not extraordinary to see people exchanging business cards at the end of an evening and longtime acquaintances often offer each other advice and services as an extension of the sexual exchanges that take place on the weekends.

In a much less casual vein, some lifestyle spouse-sharers become so close they do resemble a clan. Here they approximate the customs of aboriginal societies that in the past practiced extra-mateship liaison as a way of solidifying a tribe or, as we have seen with World War II pilots, as a sort of insurance policy against the death of a spouse. The Banya Remarra of Rwanda shared spouses among “blood brothers”—relatives near or distant within the clan. The Siriono of the Bolivian Amazon had a clan culture of partner exchange that resembled that of the Remarra, while allowing almost complete sexual freedom as well: husbands and wives maintained the primary pair-bond but had as many as ten lovers within the clan, knitting a sexual web of solidarity.

The Toda tribe of India, however, extended the sexual freedom of marital partners to include just about anyone who struck their fancy, without requiring any clan obligation. “A [Toda] woman may have one or more recognized lovers as well as several husbands,” wrote anthropologist Clellan Ford and psychologist Frank Beach in 1951. “There is no censure of adultery. In fact, the Toda language includes no word for adultery. As far as these people are concerned, immorality attaches to the man who begrudges his wife to another.”

Ford and Beach discerned that 39 percent of the 139 cultures they studied throughout the world practiced approved adultery. While some of these societies forbade sexual liaisons as a general rule, “on certain special occasions the prohibitions are lifted for a short time and everyone is expected to have sexual intercourse with someone other than their spouse.”

Married lifestylers, then, combine all four varieties of spouse exchange: sometimes they reciprocate sexual liaisons with favors, like the Inuit; sometimes they become extraordinarily close with a few couples, approximating a clan; sometimes, like the Toda, they have casual sex; and sometimes they practice celebratory group sex, as when they partake in Mardi Gras or Halloween parties. They are typically North American in this regard, taking a little bit here and there to form a new twist on an old and varied practice.

Aside from a very small minority known as the “polyfidelitists,” however, lifestylers do not practice group marriage or communal living. As McGinley’s former employee Frank Lomas once told me: “Swingers like to share bedrooms, but not bathrooms—at least for more than a weekend.” Here, too, they are typically North American, and if you recall the origins of modern swinging you can see how the behavior has been consistent for over half a century. Fighter pilots were fiercely independent souls who would probably die for you, even live for you—but they would not live
with
you.

In 1979, when the sociologist Edgar Butler tried to determine how many people were regularly engaging in swinging rites, he found widely differing estimates offered by sociologists and anthropologists, ranging from a low of one million people to a high of sixteen million. One pair of sociologists predicted in 1972 “that eventually 15 to 25 percent of all married couples will adopt swinging,” based on its growth curve in North America. According to McGinley, however, it seems likely that at no time has the figure been above where it stands today, at about three million participants—based on the number of clubs, the roster of club memberships, attendance at parties, and samples of private parties in selected cities—although he points out that the number in 1998 is up by about one million from the late eighties. Around the world there are probably another million or so active swingers, with offshore clubs most numerous in Germany, France, England, the Netherlands, and Belgium, and with other clubs scattered from India to Ecuador to Australia.

The point here is that swingers are not doing something historically irregular, just currently unusual. As Edward Brecher wrote in his chapter on swingers in
The Sex Researchers:
“Everyone is not like you, your loved ones, and your friends and neighbors—and even your loved ones, friends, and neighbors may not be as much like you as you commonly suppose.”

By my second day at the Eden I’d noticed a couple who were hanging back from most of the goings-on at the clothing-optional beach and at the resort’s disco: they went kayaking on their own in the morning and rented horses or played golf in the afternoon. Joe and Doris were a couple of handsome, 40-year-old businesspeople, and, as they quietly explained to me over breakfast on the open terrace by the pool, they were
not swingers. Before they came on this trip they had had no idea that the word “lifestyle” meant swinging—they had thought it was just the name of the tour agency.

“We wanted to come to the Eden’s nude beach,” Doris told me, “but when we called the Aero California office they said the flight was full—that we should phone Lifestyles Tours because they had a whole bunch of seats reserved.”

I was skeptical, but it could have happened that way. Lifestyles agents do not specifically describe their tours as swinger vacations because nonswinging playcouples often take them. The phrases “adults-only tour” and “for open-minded couples,” plus some fleshy photos of nude bathers in the brochures, were generally thought to signal the right message. A Lifestyles tour was actually cheaper than going on your own and the atmosphere was spicy if you chose to hang around with the people you flew in with.