Skipping Towards Gomorrah (14 page)

To his credit, Bennett admits monogamy is unnatural. As with global warming, the scientific evidence against monogamy being “natural” is so vast that only the most dishonest of conservative pundits pretend otherwise. In
The Broken Hearth
Bennett admits to something many conservative critics wouldn't admit under torture: “Evolutionary biologists tell us that both women and men, but especially men, are naturally promiscuous,” Bennett writes. “They also assure us that a sexually exclusive, lifelong commitment is unnatural.”

Maybe he's trying to be chivalrous, but Bennett doesn't tell the whole truth. Contemporary research into human sexuality is showing that women aren't any less “naturally promiscuous” than men. Indeed, women may be more naturally promiscuous.

In
The Lifestyle,
Terry Gould cites the work of groundbreaking sex researcher Mary Jane Sherfey. In the 1960s, Sherfey discovered that “the female's clitoris was an internal system as large and as refined as a male's penis.” Orgasms derived from clitoral stimulation alone had long been dismissed as “immature,” and women who thought twice about their clitorises were labeled nymphomaniacs. The vaginal orgasm was considered appropriate, desirable, and “mature”; the clitoral orgasm—indeed the clitoris itself—was dismissed as lesser, base, and “vestigial.” But Sherfey discovered that there was no such thing as a vaginal orgasm. Some women could climax from vaginal intercourse alone because their internal clitoral tissue—the majority of their clitoral tissue—was being stimulated. But most women needed stimulation of the “head” of the clitoris, the exposed part, in order to climax—just as most men need stimulation of the head of their penises to climax.

It was Sherfey's research, published in 1966, that first demonstrated that the clitoris was as central to a woman's experience of sexual pleasure—and to her ability to orgasm—as a man's penis was to his.

What does this have to do with female promiscuity? Well, in studying female and male sexual response cycles, Sherfey documented a shocking difference: “Whereas in males the engorged blood drains back from [the penis],” writes Gould, “resulting in a comparatively long recovery time, in a woman each orgasm is followed by an almost immediate refilling of the erectile chambers. This subsequent engorgement is in no way diminished from the first and produces even more arousal in the tissues. Consequently, the more orgasms a woman has, Sherfey wrote, ‘the stronger they become; the more orgasms she has, the more she
can
have.
To all intents and purposes, the human female is sexually insatiable. . . .
' ” (The emphasis is Sherfey's.)

It's a staggering thought for straight men: No woman can ever—
ever
—be truly satisfied by just one man. Ever, ever, ever. That may be overstating it a little. One man could conceivably satisfy one woman—provided he's willing to bring her a dozen or more orgasms
before
he enjoys his one comparatively pathetic and brief little orgasm. Or, if he comes too soon, he may be able to satisfy her if he's willing to continue stimulating her with his tongue and fingers—or her vibrator—until he's ready to go again. And again and again and again. (Straight guys can say what they like about male homosexuality but, hey, at least I can roll over and go to sleep with a clear conscience after my partner has one orgasm.)

While most women are, as Sherfey wrote, “unaware of the extent of [their] orgasmic capacity,” the same can't be said of women in the lifestyle. Like Bridget, most women attend their first swing events at the request of their husbands. And many of these women soon discover that it's female sexuality, not male sexuality, that finds its ultimate expression at swing clubs. Which may explain why, as Gould points out (and Bridget concurred), husbands may bring wives to their first party but it's wives who drag husbands back again and again.

So what's in it for the husbands? The wives in swinging couples get multiple partners and an evening of orgasms too numerous to count. Beyond the obvious (and not insignificant) perks of variety and novelty, why would a man want to watch other men bring his wife to orgasm after orgasm? Especially when he can have only one himself?

Sperm competition.

Back to the science of swinging: Males of a primate species have large testicles if other males are mating at the same time with the same females. Gorillas, to take one example, live in cohesive groups comprising one adult male, two to three adult females, and their offspring. When a gorilla female is ready to mate, normally only one adult male is there as a partner. Since one alpha male monopolizes all the females, the four-hundred-pound male gorilla has relatively tiny testes (relative to his body size),
because his sperm doesn't have to compete with the sperm of other males
.

Compared to gorillas, chimps live in more loosely structured social groups, with a lot of males and females, and when a female chimp is in heat, she typically mates with every male in her group—and some sneak off at night to mate with males in other groups. And she does all this mating in a twenty-four-hour period. So there's an awful lot of sperm sloshing around inside her the next day, all of it racing to get to her one egg. The male with the biggest testicles produces the most sperm, making his sperm the likeliest to win the competition, fertilize the egg, and pass his genes—including the one for big balls—on to the next generation of chimps.

So how do the testicles of
Homo sapiens
measure up? The balls of the human male are larger compared to our body size than they would be if
Homo sapiens
had evolved with some expectation of female faithfulness. The size of our balls tells us that human sperm, unlike gorilla sperm, evolved to compete with the sperm of other males, presumably in the vaginal canal. The balls of human males aren't as big as the balls of male chimps—relative to our respective sizes—because female humans don't fuck around as much as female chimps. But human females were still designed for fucking around.

But what's in swinging for men? Researchers have discovered that human males are programmed to ejaculate more sperm when they know or suspect that their female partners have recently been with other males. To ejaculate more sperm, males have longer-lasting, more intense orgasms. Gould calls it “sperm competition syndrome,” and in most men it's a subconscious response to a long absence or a suspected infidelity. When a husband returns from a business trip (or the wife returns), the husband is anxious to make love to his wife. Sure, absence makes the heart grow fonder. But absence also triggers a physiological response, an evolutionary stratagem, that prompts the man to have sex with “his” woman. His body assumes her body has some other male's semen in it. He may think he wants to have sex with his wife right away because he's happy to see her, but his body wants to have sex right away because it wants to “flood out” the semen of any other males who mated with his woman while he was away.

At a swingers' party, where no one is in competition for the affections and loyalty of his spouse, the men are free to enjoy the feeling of sperm competition without having the abandonment worries that usually accompany an infidelity. In other words, Gould writes, men subconsciously cultivate and savor the longer, more intense orgasms induced by the sperm-competition response. In
The Lifestyle
and other writings about swingers, husbands are described as literally beaming as they wait their turn to mount their wives—their naturally insatiable wives—while their wives have sex with one, two, three or more men. Then the husbands mount their wives for one long-lasting, mind-blowing, ultraintense orgasm. And then he goes to sleep. Or, if the husband had an orgasm with someone else's wife, when he gets his wife home from the party or early the next morning he wakes up and has a mind-blowing sperm competition orgasm, his body instinctively attempting to flood out the other men's sperm. (No sperm, I should note, is actually left in his wife. Swingers are strict about sexual safety, so men wear condoms without question or complaint. Also, not every couple who attends swingers parties and conventions has intercourse. Some couples come to enjoy the sexually charged environment, and some limit their sexual play with others to masturbation or oral sex, reserving intercourse for their spouses.)

So while many straight men might think swinging husbands have to be crazy to share “their” wives with other men, these husbands may actually be the sanest and most rational men around. Aware that he can never completely satisfy his wife—no man can—the swinging husband enlists the services of other men he can trust in getting the job done. It's like a bunch of Amish guys getting together to build a barn.

 

W
hile Bennett acknowledges that monogamy isn't natural—and he deserves nothing but praise for his honesty—he fails to draw the obvious conclusion: Only fools would build marriages with monogamy as their foundation (and only a foolish society would demand such behavior). Instead Bennett recommends men and women do the
unnatural
thing: “If we hope to preserve the humanly ennobling qualities associated with marriage and family life—monogamy, lifetime commitment, child-centeredness—we have to be prepared to repel assaults, including those mounted under the banner of ‘nature.' ” To make marriage stronger, Bennett would have married men and women engage in a lifelong battle against their own sexualities. (I expect Bennett to leap to his feet in my defense the next time someone condemns homosexuality for being “unnatural.” If unnatural is good enough for straight, then, godammit, unnatural is good enough for me!) Lust is a powerful and, at times, irresistible force in our lives. To make the survival of a marriage hang on the ability of both husband and wife to control their natural, lustful, extramarital urges for decades seems foolish in the extreme.

Before I go any further I want to say that I'm a fan of marriage. I would like very much to get married myself, which Bennett would object to, but if anything I've written in this chapter gives Bill Bennett a nosebleed, it will probably be this: I consider myself a conservative when it comes to marriage. I agree with Bennett when he says that divorce is too easy to obtain; I agree that some couples get divorced for selfish reasons; I think couples should be encouraged to stay together for the kids; and I know from personal experience just how painful divorce is for all involved. I think marriage is so important that no one should rush into it—and so important that no one should rush out, either. I also believe that children are better off with two married parents in the house. (That's why I would marry my son's other father, if that option were open to us.)

And it's precisely because I'm conservative on this issue that I believe we need to take a more realistic—and relaxed—attitude towards lust and adultery.

We conservatives are supposed to be the realists, right? It's those liberals who are dreamy idealists, always trying to “improve people.” So my fundamental conservatism compels me to point out that putting monogamy first—“monogamy, lifetime commitment, child-centeredness”—undermines and destabilizes more marriages than it saves. Adultery “touches” 80 percent of all marriages; married people lust after people who aren't their spouses because that's how our creator made us. We're wired to cheat, we're tempted by thoughts of cheating when we're awake, and we dream about cheating when we're asleep. Hell, we think about cheating while we're having sex with our
spouses
. And in almost every marriage, the husband or the wife—
or both
—eventually cheats.

As that's the case, telling people that monogamy comes first—making adultery the ultimate betrayal—sets millions of serviceable, salvageable marriages up for failure. Any true conservative would, I believe, prepare people for marriages as they are, not as we would like them to be, and should help people construct their relationships in such a way that they routinely survive routine adulteries. If adultery touches 80 percent of marriages, then we shouldn't encourage people to harbor unrealistic expectations of lifelong fidelity. Nor should we encourage people to view adultery as a marriage-ending betrayal, a violation so severe that the wronged party can only regain his or her self-respect by divorcing the cheating (son of a) bitch. Instead, conservatives should encourage people to regard adultery as perhaps sad and, yes, a betrayal, but a common sort of betrayal, one that's natural, understandable, and one that any decent relationship should be able to survive.

In his chapter on the state of marriage, Bennett identifies unrealistic expectations as one of the challenges we pro-marriage conservatives face. “Pastoral counselors tell me of a recurring problem they confront: extremely high, unrealistically high, expectations surrounding marriage and family life.” My point exactly, only Bennett is one of the people pumping up unrealistic expectations, promoting the idea that monogamy, something we humans aren't very good at, is a rock on which we should build marriage and family life.

My hard-assed, realistic, soft-on-adultery position is deeply conservative because it takes people how they are (or how they evolved) and not how they ideally should be. To make a behavior humans did not evolve to be very skilled at the foundation and cornerstone of an institution as important as marriage is unwise in the extreme. Yet in
The Broken Hearth,
Bennett thoughtlessly suggests that some marriages “ought to end in divorce,” as they are “irretrievably broken, destroyed by infidelity . . .” But if adultery is common and divorce is undesirable, then no man who calls himself a conservative should endorse the idea that a marriage ought not survive an infidelity. The true conservative would encourage couples to regard adultery as an unfortunate event that can be endured and forgiven. Or, as David and Bridget demonstrate, celebrated.