The Lifestyle (31 page)

“You guys come to
a full
agreement—well that’s fantastic!” Bob praised Jean and her partner, Clark Ross, who ran a wilderness travel agency. “Anybody else have a hundred percent
compatibility in that regard? It doesn’t mean that you had the exact score as each one. The important part of the test’s that you knew what the
other’s
score would be. That’s the real crux of things.”

“I’m compatible with
both
my partners last night!” a woman named Sonia called.

“Now you got everything,” Bob said. “Was there anybody that experienced a big discrepancy, where they had a five of something and you had a one?”

There was a lot of talk in the rows as people went back to sharing scores and fantasies. But no one was brave enough to stand up, as in an encounter group, and confess a problem. Not yet.

“Not that you have to share here if you don’t want to,” Bob said, acknowledging the reticence. “Important thing is that couples share with each
other
—so they understand, each couple. Everybody likes to party, sure, but communication’s what we’re talking about. Communication is an enhancement to this lifestyle. It’s not a detractor. Because one of the things the owners were trying to accomplish by establishing this whole beautiful environment was to make it more comfortable for people, so they could feel fun and luxurious, yes, but there’s places all around to get off by yourselves and stop and say—‘Such and such just happened, how do you feel about that? How do I feel about that?’ You know, it doesn’t matter if there’s all this fun on the outside, if what’s on the inside—”

“I’ve got something to say on that,” said a very pale and frail-looking fellow in his early forties named Kenny, a transparently decent guy who worked in computers in Portland. He had arrived yesterday afternoon with his wife, Naomi, who could have been his twin in lean weight and five-foot-ten height. The previous night, at the “Happy Hooker and Joyous Gigolo Dance,” they both had been dolled up appropriately. Now they were dressed as if for gardening on a Saturday
afternoon, in runners, shorts, and T-shirts. “I don’t think anyone’s been more fearful at times than I have been myself this weekend,” he said, at which his wife took his hand.

“Have you guys ever been to a lifestyle occasion before?” a woman asked from the back.

“Well, yeah, but never like this here,” Kenny said. “I met people from all over the place and from all different levels here, and I believe the process can be too much for some of them sometimes. Coming into this is like the kid in the candy store. You rush in and find out that you go into sensory overload and you start to shut down, you go into shutdown. So here you are in a sex club, and your sex is shut down. And of course when that happens, you look around and everybody else seems to be doing just fine. In fact, more than just fine,” he laughed nervously.

“There’ve been times we’re driving home I think that way,” a fellow to my right said. “You’re not alone in that.”

“And do you talk about it?” Judy asked the guy. “Do you communicate?”

“Well, obviously—we’re back here,” he said.

“I think men should be shown just as much sensitivity as women are shown,” Judy said. “I don’t think they get shown enough in this environment. That’s one reason I prefer closed swinging in the cubbyholes, or a little, safe group of three or four. Because I want to give attention, and when you’re in a large group it’s a very difficult task.”

“There was actually a point made in a discussion we were having that women get paid way more attention than guys do,” Bob said. “What do you think of that?”

“That’s absolutely true,” Kenny’s wife said. “Because we spend so many years being thought of that way, we expect it.”

“It’s kind of fun, actually,” said a heavyset woman, “but I know what you mean. Of course, we do dress for attention.”

“Well, that impacts me,” Kenny said, “because everybody
was so into it, I felt left out. After a few tries, I tried to move ahead and get turned on, and all of a sudden reality set in. And so I thought, well maybe watching those videos—or maybe there’s something about me that’s wrong? I know you’re not supposed to be afraid here, but this is one man that does get fearful in that situation. I do get sensory overload, and I do shut down. It’s just part of it, we’ve been working on this and we do want to come back. But we left here last night and I said we’re not coming back. But—here we still are.”

“And how do you react to him when he feels so vulnerable?” Judy asked his wife.

“To me it’s more important how he’s feeling,” Naomi said. “So I just didn’t let anything happen. When it’s the other way, if I’m feeling vulnerable or jealous, I just tell him, ‘I’m having a problem with this woman. It’s not a big deal, I’m just letting you know it’s there.’ And if I can get that feeling out then usually what happens is that it comes together for me. Either he’ll say, ‘Okay, no problem,’ or I’ll see there isn’t a problem, or she and I will start talking and confirm. So it’s reciprocal.”

“So you check to see if the other partner is okay, is comfortable, is coping, is happy, is enjoying it,” Judy said. “There’s that nurturing that goes on—the caring, the communication. I feel the same when I meet a really attractive man. I feel like I’ve got to communicate with the woman first. Because I have to find out, he’s giving me all this attention—how does that sit with her? How many feel that’s the best approach?”

As in a school class, everyone raised a hand.

“Because you never know, say they’re new: Is this their first time? If it is, it’s really scary for her. I think for everyone it has to be really scary that first time.”

“That’s the first thing that hits you is being scared,” said Sonia, the one who was compatible with her two partners of the night before (one of whom had been Judy). Like my table-mates Edith and Beth the other night, and like many of the
women at the club, both Judy and Sonia were freely bisexual. “You went in a car,” Sonia continued, “and you went in holding hands and you went and sat down and when a guy came over and asked you to dance, you think right away, Where is this going to go?”

“How long did it stay scary?” Pia asked beside me.

“Actually, for me it worked through pretty quickly,” Sonia said. “I had a very nice first experience. I think it depends on that. He was very sensitive. But it’s more on Allen,” she said, referring to her husband beside her. She mussed his hair. “If I didn’t know that if I said, ‘Okay, we’re leaving,’ that we would really leave, then I don’t know about this. My feeling is that if a couple doesn’t have that, then there’s no way they can continue to swing and make it work—it’s not going to work. They’ve got to keep that sensitivity, that communication—then they’re really free to have a great time. But that has to be there from even the first time they’re thinking about getting involved.”

“I’m just curious,” my partner piped up. “How many women here initiated their first swinging experience?” About half the women raised their hands. Most of them were in the fastlane.

“How many had husbands initiate it?” The other half raised their hands.

“You can really almost tell who it was that would initiate the lifestyle in their relationship,” Judy explained. “They’re always so bubbly.”

Most of the media reports I read of swingers before I entered their world that summer admitted that consensuality rules reigned at parties: “No means no is the good news at the convention,” the British
Elle
observed at Lifestyles ’95. But almost
all stated that women were in the lifestyle only because their husbands forced them into it. “Apparently a lot of the women have come here to keep their men happy,”
Elles
writer, Lucie Young, claimed. When a woman explained to Young by the pool that entering the subculture had been jarring initially but that she had gone on to embrace it (“‘It was difficult at first, but by the second day it’s like right on’“), she was dismissed as self-deluded: “Her biggest fear was that her husband would have sex with someone who satisfied him better than she could.” Immediately after this judgment, however, Young noted: “Girl-girl petting is one of the major activities around the pool. Virtually all the women here define themselves as bisexual.” Virtually everyone was heterosexually available as well, Young pointed out, adding, “The rules, such as they are, are established by the wives and girlfriends.” Contradicting herself time and again with this catalogue, Young, with flat British contempt, resisted the temptation to get a handle on what was happening before her very eyes—heterosexually and bisexually—and on why, for some wives, “by the second day it’s like right on.” Like many journalists, she couldn’t accept the subculture’s total celebration of sexuality because she couldn’t get beyond the indisputable fact that in a lot of cases it is the husband who first suggests the idea of going to a lifestyle party, with the wife taking her own time to get used to the idea.

If you talk to veteran swinging wives who are completely out of the closet, like Jennifer Lomas, the business manager, Cathy Gardner, the mortgage broker, and Sherri Cooper, the social worker, they will tell you that the full weight of social conditioning keeps most women from initiating the idea of attending a swing club; therefore, it
is
usually the man who first makes the suggestion. Yet, they argue, the vast majority of women—whether straight or bisexual—are not “forced” into the lifestyle by abusive husbands.

Their logic is as follows: they differentiate between being encouraged by their husbands to attend a lifestyle event, enjoying it, then embracing the culture as a happy mode of marital living, and being abusively coerced into entering the lifestyle and not enjoying it at all.

They explain that middle-class women in our society are raised to regard spouse exchange as “detrimental, dangerous and just plain tacky,” while men are raised to find it alluring. However, once in the lifestyle, they say, most swinging wives (not all) consider themselves liberated from the social brakes that kept them from enjoying the abundant dressing up and permissive sexuality of the subculture. The lifestyle allows them the freedom to behave like the forbidden goddesses of Hollywood. Moreover, given that the rules of the lifestyle are “established by the wives” and preserve the stability of traditional marriage, Lomas et al. maintain that swinging women are able to act out their erotic fantasies with an exuberance equal to, if not greater than, that of their husbands.

There is considerable backing from academics to support them in this claim. “I think in this particular culture, in our society,” Jean Henry told me at New Horizons, indicating the women splashing in the pool with a variety of partners, “I’m not so sure that women have been left behind. In a way, I think, now it’s more acceptable for women to actively say ‘I like it,’ instead of having to pretend that they’re going into it under duress, or because the male in my life wants me to do this.”

Dr. Ted Mcllvenna, the director of the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, a graduate school in San Francisco, has canvassed hundreds of swingers over the years. Just after the New Horizons convention he told me that once lifestyle women, especially middle-aged women with incomes that allowed them to be independent of their husbands, “found that safe context, they took charge, as if it were the most natural way for them to express themselves. They went out, they
bought the clothes, they did the planning, they did everything to go back into that social milieu because it was a milieu that endorsed their sexuality.” A year and a half later Mcllvenna would set the
Los Angeles Times
back on its chair when he told a reporter: “Women are taking a more prominent role in these swing clubs. They call the shots. More women are working, and with that comes more power, affluence and associations. In the old days, men screwed around, and the women stayed home. Now women are out there.” The media can persist in claiming that women are in the lifestyle only to keep their husbands happy, but if reporters decide to make the calls, experts from numerous institutions will tell them a different story.

Obviously there is more to the lifestyle than just the act of sex: we are talking about a milieu. “We’ve found the majority of the people involved seem to be in it for the culture and the open socializing, not necessarily for the physical engagement,” Jean Henry told me at New Horizons. “Sexuality in the lifestyle is far more broadly defined than what you see over there.” She pointed to the Annex. “Sexuality helps define women to themselves in our culture as to whether you are attractive or not. This lifestyle is a way for women to get a feeling for being sexually attractive, i.e., ‘I am more feminine and I am a more effective woman because these men want to have sex with me, and, therefore, I have a power and an allure to my husband and to others, which I can carry with me.’”

Regarding this issue of self-image in the lifestyle, Jennifer Lomas pointed out that as middle-aged women express their fantasies within the subculture, they begin “to see themselves as hot stuff—and they have a lot of fun with that.” This is somewhat explained by the fact that for a lot of males within the lifestyle a healthy fifty-year-old woman is actually
more
erotic than a twenty-year-old: her total package of sexuality—even if Rubenesque—seems warm and frankly expressed as opposed to the icy hauteur paradigmatic models are apt to
vacuously exhibit on a dance floor in a straight nightclub. That is why one of the most oft-repeated sayings of veteran lifestyle women is: “You have to convince them to come but then you have to convince them to leave.” That is why Mcllvenna says: “The men initiate, the women perpetuate.” And, as Butler’s colleagues Lynn and James Smith found in their study of swingers: “Women are better able to make the necessary adjustments to sexual freedom after the initial stages of involvement than are men, even though it is usually the case that the men instigate the initial involvement.”