The Lifestyle (9 page)

We exchanged the usual intros—name, home, occupation—with handshakes all around. One couple consisted of a petite court stenographer by the name of Phyllis and her mustachioed husband, Jay, an executive-type with rebelliously long hair, both in their mid-thirties. The other couple were a bit older but were actually physically more glamorous—a muscular gym teacher named Neal and his honey-blond wife, Corrie, who was a parole officer.

After I’d explained why I was on the tour, Jay asked if I was going to be describing any graphic swinging sex in my book.

“Actually, I don’t know how I’ll handle that part,” I replied. “Right now I’m just basically asking why everybody here is into the erotosexual lifestyle.”

“Well, it’s not everybody
with
everybody,” Neal said. “It’s the law of thirds. One third you like, one third you can take or leave, and one third you don’t like at all.”

“You want to know what I always find, the bottom line, the root of it all?” Phyllis said. “It’s that everybody wants that family connection. They want that feeling of being desired, wanted—and not just in a sexual way—socially and otherwise.”

“I think it’s because we all kind of revert back to our school days for a bit,” explained her husband, Jay. “You can socially interact, be wild and crazy, but yet you can still feel accepted, that it’s cool if you’re wild and crazy.”

“Then, of course, we all go home and live our responsible
anal lives,” Neal told me. He drifted over to Jay’s wife, Phyllis, then turned in the water and moved back against her body. Phyllis slipped her arms around Neal’s waist and ran her palms up through his chest hair.

“Well, you know, from a woman’s point of view,” said Neal’s wife, Corrie, “my personal opinion is that this is the best thing to come to without fear of being raped, mugged, or misunderstood.” Corrie moved forward along the sandy bottom to sit beside her husband Neal. She stroked his hand, which was stroking Phyllis’s knee.

“And feel sensual,” said Phyllis, tracing circles on Neal’s chest hair. “Feel fun, because most women—I should speak for myself—but I think we all are very inhibited.”

“Just as men are,” commented Neal, leaning his head back to Phyllis.

“But men have a—I don’t know,” Phyllis said. “Either they’ve been trained better than women to supersede their inhibitions and they’re not so intimidated by the idea of someone’s thoughts or looks or whatever. The internal stuff. Whereas here, it’s great; you can be in denial of your upbringing for a little.”

Jay, Phyllis’s husband, moved behind Corrie and ran his hands up over her tanned back. Corrie lifted her wet blond hair off her shoulders and inclined her neck forward. “That’s nice,” she said, responding to Jay’s firm neck massage.

There it was, I thought. Phyllis and Jay, Neal and Corrie, had now become Phyllis and Jay and Neal and Corrie. The law of thirds had dealt four-of-a-kind. We all waved to a few other naked couples wading into the water.

“In the lifestyle I’ve also enjoyed the conversations with women,” Phyllis told me. You could see in her face that she was trying to remember all the pertinent points she appreciated about swinging. “We’re sitting here talking like this—
like
this; where else do you get to talk about what we’re talking about?
I never get to talk about sexuality except with Jay and our friends. Sexuality is way more important than sex. It’s mental. It’s heart. I’ve appreciated this kind of honesty of sharing with people, struggles with sexuality as well as triumphs with sexuality.”

“Which isn’t to say there are times you would never do this,” Corrie said to me. “When you first fall in love you wouldn’t. Also when you’ve got very little ones this isn’t what you’re after. Or when you’re dealing with something like illness. It really is a
recreational
lifestyle. Don’t say it’s
serious business.”

“I wouldn’t argue with that,” Phyllis agreed. “You should tell people it’s got to be balanced. It’s got to be fun or it’s no fun.”

“Boy,” said Jay, lifting his foot around Corrie and shoving water my way, “I don’t know how you’ll ever explain this to normal society.”

“Hey, we
are
normal society!” a fast-food distributor by the name of Mark called from where he’d been listening in with his wife, Julia.
“They’re
all weird.” He meant that the real world was weird.

“Weird in secret,” Neal said, twisting around and putting his arm around Phyllis’s slight shoulder.

Mark drifted over with Julia in his arms. “No, seriously,” he said, “I think like everything, you got the bell-shaped curve—the majority of people would never do it. But then there are those who are freer thinkers, freer spirits, and who are really very secure in their relationships, which is absolutely vital.”

Mark was about forty-five and he thought he looked a little like Burt Reynolds, which you couldn’t deny once he’d mentioned it. He sat back in the shallows of the beach with Julia, his wife of twenty-five years on his lap, her full breasts clear of the water and her arms around his neck. “There is no question that you gotta be secure. When Julia and I first started this thing, I said, ‘Do you really wanna have another guy?’”

“And I said, ‘As long as you’re watching, Mark, and enjoying, I’m fine,’” Julia said.

Everybody broke up at that remark.

“You’ve
got
to watch, Mark, or she ain’t fine.”

“You probably got holes drilled in all your closets.”

“I gotta admit,” Mark said, “watching the ecstasy in her face the first couple of times, it was
great
. I loved it. I felt this closeness, a lot more love surging up in me—And I’m thinking to myself, ‘This is crazy.’ I really enjoyed it.”

“Now it’s gotten to the point,” Julia said to me, “where they have to be really good friends, we really have to like them, and even then it’s more we bring a woman in. Because as much as I enjoy men, I like women, to tell you the truth. Which is something I never considered before we got into this lifestyle. I love Mark, but I like women. And if a fellow I’m attracted to happens to come along with the woman, then that’s really a wonderful experience for me—but it takes time. We’re not indiscriminate like some.”

“The top priority for both of us is her,” Mark said. “We have one good friend who sometimes stays over, and when she gets excited she comes down to our bedroom. The next thing I know, she and Julia are out by the Jacuzzi, on one of the chaise lounges. Or else she’ll come down and say, ‘Okay, Mark, I’m taking your wife now.’ I say, ‘Okay.’ She says, ‘Leave the bedroom, but watch.’ Is that a turn on! Can you imagine! And you’re watching! That to me is the epitome of marital bliss.”

Phyllis turned her head from where it was resting against Neal’s back and looked at me thoughtfully. “What did you call this again?” she asked.

“The erotosexual lifestyle.”

“Yeah, I like that—I like that name.”

I still have an info sheet I received from LSO just before I went to my first Lifestyles convention in 1993. “Enter the ‘Playcouples’
of the nineties!” publicity director Steve Mason told prospective attendees like me. “Imagine, couples who like to meet, dance and party with other couples from around the world and who, quite frankly, get off on being openly erotic in semi-public settings. What better way to renew passion, to enhance romance?”

Those words—“openly erotic in semi-public settings”—and that sentiment—renewing a relationship by behaving in that way—are at the heart of the lifestyle. To the outside world it must seem mind-boggling that the playcouples at the Eden could be so nakedly at ease explaining and exhibiting to each other the details of what they considered “the epitome of marital bliss.” In the real world the conduct of extramarital sex is marked by secrecy and denial, but that is not the way playcouples behave when they feel safe. Married pairs like those at the Eden have been leaping the fence into the forbidden zone for so long, and finding that zone so regularly crowded with respectable people each time they’ve leapt, that among themselves they hardly even think of swinging as forbidden. Playcouples love open sexual play; they love talking about how much they love it; and they love sharing the specifics of the ways they personally experience it. That’s what makes them “different”—and it partly explains why they elicit such indignation, hostility, and fear in people to whom the rules of concealment serve as protections against both intrusion and exposure.

Since the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s we have assumed our culture to be totally open about sexuality, suffused with sex. But the efforts of pollsters tell a different story: suffused with sex we are; open to revealing our sexual secrets we are not. Sex is still one of the only subjects we demur or dissemble about. The academics behind the National Health and Social Life Survey devoted a fair portion of their 1995 book
Sex in America
to explaining why it took them seven years to design and complete what in other cases would have been a standard three-month canvass. To be sure, the U.S. Senate (that paradigm
of sexual openness) passed a law by a two-thirds majority barring public financing of the study, a telling poll in itself. But even after the authors had secured private backing they had to agonize over the wording of questions so as not to “make the interview sexy or provocative or offensive;” they inserted “checks and cross-checks” that would catch people up on lying; then they handpicked interviewers from among the most skilled and tactful professionals in the country—who had to repeatedly reassure those polled “that the information they provided would be obtained in privacy, held in confidence, and not associated with them personally.”

“Our study was completed only after a long and difficult struggle that shows, if nothing else, why it has been so enormously difficult for any social scientists to get any reliable data on sexual practices,” the authors wrote.

So entrenched is our tradition of sexual secrecy and lying about sex that the evidence for the practice of open eroticism has been ignored by many scientists when assessing the repertoire of “normal” sexual options for humans—just as homosexuality was once ignored. Prominent evolutionary anthropologists have made assumptions about the behavior of people today and, projecting it into the past, have implied that what swingers are up to has been unnatural for humans for at least the last thirty-five thousand years—even though they don’t really know how people had sex before writing was invented.

For instance, in
Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray
, Helen Fisher claimed that Cro-Magnon couples “must have coupled in the dark or out of view. Nowhere in the world do people regularly have coitus in public.” And in the journal
American Anthropologist
, Ernestine Friedl gleaned from the ethnographic evidence that “hidden coitus may safely be declared a near universal.” The logic offered for the universality of the public-sex taboo is that it must have arisen either to hide adultery or to exclude those
who could be aroused to interrupt sex and, in a competitive struggle, steal the body most desired for passing on genes. But when Fisher and Friedl decided that hidden coitus was universal, they may not have considered that the NHSL Survey showed that more men and women think group sex is appealing than think same gender sex is appealing. They certainly did not acknowledge the behavior of swingers, surprising in Fisher’s case because just ten miles from where she teaches at Rutgers University are two big swing clubs, Beginnings and Entre Nous. If she had made the drive she would have seen dozens of her neighbors regularly having coitus in public every weekend. And if she had spoken with her colleague at Rutgers, Dr. Norman Scherzer—who sometimes lectures on the swinger phenomenon both at Rutgers and as an adjunct professor in human sexuality at New York University—she would have discovered that today in North America at least three million taxpayers in the thirty- to sixty-year-old age bracket are frequenting places where the opportunity to par-take in open sexuality is the main drawing card. What is significant, Scherzer says, is that swingers are practicing their behavior in a subculture where there is very little competition for sexual mates, no desire to procreate, and no attempt to be secretive about sex. They are engaging in open eroticism as part of their marriage—and if you examine their behavior both historically and cross-culturally, Scherzer says, you will find that they are actually not doing anything new at all.