The Lifestyle (32 page)

In my interview with Cathy Gardner, a handsome, forty-nine-year-old grandmother who attended clubs at least twice a month with her husband, Dan, she took the point of view of a libertarian in order to turn on its head the notion that females remain in the subculture to please their husbands. “Aren’t some women being coerced to
not
be in the lifestyle?” she asked. “I’m happily married for so many years, I
love
my lifestyle, so I naturally ask the question: Who is doing the coercing? And my answer is, society, religion, television, they’re training people all the time, in a way making sure women act a certain way. I think people like me are actually rebelling against being told to
not
be in the lifestyle.”

The forty-one-year-old Jennifer Lomas held a similar view: “When I think back on how we first got involved in this, it’s clear to me now how my upbringing was saying no, no, no, how it wouldn’t even let me get to first base on the thought. That’s the point that everyone picks up on as to why swinging is supposed to be a man’s game. They say, ‘Well, if women love the lifestyle so much, how come they’re not the ones dragging their husbands to clubs to begin with?’ The answer is it happens sometimes—actually more and more as society is changing, and not just with bisexual women. But the real answer is that women are brought up so that you’re supposed to find one guy and live happily ever after, or, absolute maximum, play
around on the side. Nobody ever told me until I got into the lifestyle that two people could get married and have sex with other people and be happy. But for men, it’s almost the reverse message. Get married and sow your wild oats. That’s why they usually take the lead. Then, like me and Cathy Gardner,” she laughed, “the women take over.”

In the case of the forty-five-year-old social worker Sherri Cooper—another handsome grandmother, but a bisexual—she had been the one to take the lead and persuade her husband, Danny, a carpenter, to become involved in the lifestyle. “Commentators walk in here, take a look around, and say, ‘These can’t be normal women, they’re all unhappy or crazy,’” Cooper told me at a convention. “That’s what they say, and that’s what people believe. I always wonder, would they go to a convention of lesbians and say the same thing? They look at me like I’m from another planet when I tell them ‘This was my idea to come here.’”

Increasingly, bisexual wives who have heard about the lifestyle are initiating involvement in the subculture. Yet, as Jennifer pointed out, and as was evident at New Horizons, “as society changes,” even some straight women are taking the lead.

However, the typical journey of couples who end up firmly in the lifestyle most closely resembles that taken by Jennifer and her husband Frank: it was Frank’s idea. After Frank first suggested swinging he became what sociologists refer to as an
encourager
. Encouragers make up the vast majority of men in relationships in which wives perpetuate swinging. “Male encouragers,” Butler wrote, “reject the double standard on idealistic grounds, mainly egalitarianism; they feel swinging will be a positive experience for themselves and their wives.” Frank’s ongoing encouragement led Jennifer to enter
the enthusiasm stage
. “The wife finds she no longer feels guilt about participating in comarital sex,” Butler reported. “She is
actually beginning to relish it to an even greater extent than her husband.”

That is the claim of many swingers when they speak to sociologists (and reporters). The lifestyle has its dropouts; there are what sociologists call
user males;
yet the warning message in NASCA’s
Etiquette in Swinging
and on its Web site makes it clear that the subculture only wants people who fit certain criteria to get involved with swinging. It is the same warning delivered to couples in screening interviews before they are allowed to visit a club. “Swinging is not for everyone…. A positive feeling about yourself, your mate and relationship is important. People who are jealous, play social games, have a poor opinion of the opposite sex, are deeply religious or have relationship problems are among those who are not likely to enjoy swinging.”

As the saying in the lifestyle goes, “Swinging never made a bad marriage good,” and most swingers believe that. Indeed, after years of investigating a subculture that is far more rule-bound, discriminating, and controlled than it appears, Edgar Butler, Jean Henry, and Ted Mcllvenna have found that the least-told story is how pleased happily married couples
in
the lifestyle are
with
the lifestyle—even though it may have taken them some time to get to that stage.

For Jennifer Lomas the transition from straight to swinger wasn’t instantaneous by any means, and it wasn’t without complications. As Jennifer described it, her journey into the lifestyle followed a predictable pattern in which she and her husband eventually experienced comarital sex. Some couples never get to that point and stay “soft” for the entire time they are in the lifestyle. Some try it and find it an upsetting experience they never want to revisit. For Frank and Jennifer the journey took years. It involved, as she would tell me, a process of overcoming justifiable fears; retracing false steps; receiving positive reinforcement from people she respected and trusted;
and, finally, establishing a context of permission in the right environment. Eventually she felt comfortable enough to enter a new culture—the lifestyle.

To Jennifer’s mind, one of the lessons of her tale for neophyte swingers was that there is a right way and a wrong way to step into her world. The right way allows couples to take a look around and have the rules explained to them, so that they can decide whether they want to stay, return some other time, or never come back. We should listen to Jennifer’s story.

Like a lot of lifestyle women, Jennifer is ebullient and prone to using a lot of body language when speaking. In looks and personality she is one of the more attractive lifestyle women: tall and shapely, redheaded and tanned, and full of expository asides about the joys of open sensuality that she has come to accept as part of her life. Yet she is no compulsive-looking seductress: in the daytime she generally wears sweat socks and sneakers, shorts and a plain blouse, and very little makeup. After asking the loquacious Frank to excuse us so I could have a couple of hours to hear his wife’s side without interruption, Jennifer and I sat down in the interview lounge of the Lifestyles Organization. Here, as an LSO employee between 1989 and 1995, Jennifer had grilled hundreds of first-time couples for any hint of abuse before she allowed them to attend a swing party at the organization’s mansion; by the time a neophyte couple had left the room she’d explained to them the lifestyle’s rigid rules. She’d since moved on from her job at LSO to take a position as business manager of Laser Tech Engineering and was as little shy of relating stories about the reactions of her coworkers and friends to her being an out-of-the-closet swinger as of her sex life.

“We were married, I think, ten years when Frank first
brought this up,” Jennifer began. “I was in my late twenties, never had another man; Frank never had another woman—since we were married anyway. Our sex life was great. I was completely happy. Great job, great husband, we hiked, bowled, skied—the California good life.

“One day, he’s coming home from work at the bank, he sees a smut magazine on a stand,
West Coast Swingers
. He takes a look.” Here she put one hand behind her flaming hair and put her other hand on her hip. “You know,” she burst into laughter. “Tarty stuff. So he really wanted it, but he was raised Baptist; he was so embarrassed, he thought about stealing it. Anyway, he buys it, and he brings it home and shows it to me. ‘Look at this, honey. Can you get over it? Look what she’s wearing. Do you think that guy’s a turn-on?’ Blah blah blah. ‘Yeah, well, so?’ I said. ‘They’re swingers.’ Because it was filled with really crude people and creepy captions.”

“You mean like, ‘Bi wife and well-hung guy want to meet other couples’?” I asked.

“Yeah, yeah, the full treatment. It was nauseating. I was totally typical. I didn’t want anything to do with it; I was totally disgusted by the whole idea. And, of course, my first thoughts were, ‘There must be something wrong with me, why do you want other women?’ He said, ‘I don’t want other women myself—I want it with you.’ And I thought, Yeah, right! He said, ‘No, no, no—look at all this erotic stuff going on. You don’t think that guy’s good-looking?’ ‘Yeah, well, forget it, throw it out,’ I said.

“Actually, Frank and I talked about it for a very long time,” Jennifer went on. “He was very patient. We were talking at least three years. And, you know, during that time we started to play the games, just between us. He was buying lingerie and dresses for me and posing me for pictures and falling over backward at how I looked like his tart fantasy. I guess, for me, it came to a point where I started having a good time with
the fantasy, just at that level. You know, ‘what would you do if’ business. ‘In the happiest wife’s dreams, many men pass through,’ as they say. I sort of let myself go in my mind.”

“Why did you decide to turn the fantasy into reality?” I asked.

“I can’t remember what exactly it was that turned the key for me,” she said. “I think it was because he just seemed to be getting off so much on
me
as a fantasy that I finally felt reassured. I think it was probably then. And I said, ‘Okay, just for a look.’

“Well, we had a
really shitty
first experience,” Jennifer told me in laughter. “I was disgusted. We went at it in the worst way. We answered an ad. We were so naive, we didn’t know
what
we were doing. You want to know the rules, Terry? Don’t answer an ad to first get into it. Rule numero uno
uno!
There’s clubs literally everywhere that hold Friday-night dances where there’s no swinging and you can meet couples and talk with them and find out if it’s for you. If you want the on-premises club stuff you go to their party house on Saturday and you know everybody’s screened in an interview. Ads you don’t know why they’re doing it that way.”

“Maybe they’re just afraid to go out in public,” I said.

“That’s a big reason, actually. But you just don’t know if there’s another reason. Well, we found out there was. Frank and the guy talk on the phone and on a Saturday night we go to their condo. Big fantasy. This is it. I wore all the doo-dads,” she giggled. “And they open the door, and of course the picture they put in the ad was about ten years old. And the lady’s got a sixties hairdo. But anyway, at least they didn’t meet us at the door naked. Plus, they were actually very civilized once we got to talking. These were our first swingers, right? So just the fact that they didn’t jump us was a bonus in my book.

“So we’re there and we’re drinking some wine and they’re sitting over on one end of the couch and we’re on the other
end. Three videos later I’m fishing around in my mind for a good excuse to leave without hurting their feelings—then they start kissing each other, and then he’s undressing her and himself—oh God, not a pretty picture. On top of that, he couldn’t even get it up for his own wife.”

“You sat there and watched them?” I asked.

“The room was pretty dark, thank God. So Frank, he says something like, ‘Well, I just want to thank you folks for allowing us to share this intimate time with you’—something gracious. And all I’m thinking is, This is not exactly the highlight of my life. I felt for them, but that wasn’t the point, you know. The least they could have done was put a footnote in the ad—‘Taken 1962, add pounds, subtract hair.’

“So—I can tell you something about the lifestyle at the beginning. If you go in blind and ignorant like we did, and answer an ad, that’s what you wind up with. Neither of you know what you’re doing. It’s all strange—and you wind up in a Three Stooges movie.”

She shook her head and sighed. “I mean, I think Curly’s pretty cute, but—”

“Did that upset your relationship?”

“No, no, that wasn’t even a thought,” she said. “By then that never entered my mind that there was a problem with our relationship. But it sure killed the fantasy for me for two years. I wouldn’t even get into the games properly.

“Okay—so one day he comes home from work and says, ‘Jennifer, Jennifer! This guy at work—.’ Apparently he heard of this sophisticated party club. ‘Everybody’s really together and intelligent and professional,’ he says. ‘They’ve been hanging out for years. If there’s any unfit people they’ve been weeded out.’

“I put him off for a while, then I thought, Well, if it hadn’t’ve been so ridiculous the last time, it might’ve worked out. I honestly did in a part of me enjoy the fantasy of being sensual with
other people. It wasn’t like a ravenous desire, but whenever I would think of it, it would be something pretty—
not
like a swinger ad. So, as they say, I ‘allowed’ myself to say yes. It’s very important to keep up appearances to yourself that you’re just going along.

“Well, this was a great party. And everyone’s nice looking, well mannered—and I was talking with the women and the guys just like at a straight party. There were environmentalists there and doctors and people from all stripes. Really non-threatening. There was no sex at all going on, but the outfits were pretty interesting. So we spent a couple of hours talking with this couple about what it was all about, and the dos and don’ts, and their experiences good and bad. The talk was really right. Then we went to their apartment and—oh wow! All of a sudden I understood, I enjoyed it. They were both so terrific, really relaxed and playful and full of laughter. And they had massage oil, and fragrances, and it was like, if we consummate this, we consummate it—if not, not. Of course we did,” she laughed. “We giggled the whole time! It was so light. It was a turning point for me. We really hit it off with this couple as friends.