The Lifestyle

T
ribal rituals of spouse exchange. Neolithic hordes dancing naked upon the heath. Whole cities pouring into the streets in libidinous revelry.

Throughout human history these practices have been used as a means to extend kinship ties, as celebrations of fertility, or as an annual blowing off of steam. Erotic rites were common in Canaan when God made His covenant with Abraham. As late as the 1940s “extra-mateship liaison” was an approved custom in 39 percent of cultures studied throughout the world—from the Himalayas to the South Seas and from the Arctic to the Amazon. Today we know that there is a deeper, unconscious motivation behind the rituals. They combine the two biological imperatives that paradoxically have governed the sex lives of humans for eons: the drive to seek long-term partners for raising children, and the equally powerful drive for genetic and sexual variety.

Of course, many of us do not accept shared eroticism between couples as a normal part of life. Sensual play between more than two people is often seen as coercive, compulsive, or even evil. That belief is the chief reason one of the great stories of our time has remained truly untold.

This book breaks the lock on denial. It tells the story of “the lifestyle,” a subculture that is now thriving worldwide, one in which millions of middle-class, married couples openly express their erotic fantasies with others. Accompany your own spouse to a lifestyle event and you will change your mind about the boundaries of behavior for pair-bonded humans.
Acting within strict rules of etiquette, lifestyle couples participate to varying degrees in everything from sexual costume parties to multipartner sex as a form of social recreation within marriage. Every ball they attend revives the time-honored tradition of the rustic bacchanal.

The lifestyle has grown so quickly in recent years that, wherever you live, you won’t have trouble finding it. It is not an underground movement or a cult. It is a public, grass-roots, heterosexual orientation among mainstream couples who claim to have overcome the kind of loneliness, jealousy, and shame adulterous marrieds endure. Lifestyle “playcouples” belong to three hundred formally affiliated clubs in two dozen countries, and to thousands of unaffiliated clubs. They have their own travel industry that flies them to a dozen vacation spots catering to their tastes. Hundreds of magazines and thousands of Web sites, news groups, and chat rooms keep them connected. Large lifestyle conventions are held eleven times a year in eight U.S. states, sometimes monopolizing entire resorts. The three-day Lifestyles ’96 convention in San Diego drew thirty-five hundred people from 437 cities in seven countries. One-third of the participants had postgraduate degrees; almost a third voted Republican; 40 percent considered themselves practicing Protestants, Catholics or Jews. Public figures with towering positions in society, pro-sex feminists, and even evangelical Christians attended the convention as “lifestylers.”

But where did this term “lifestyle” come from? Aren’t the couples who say they are “in the lifestyle” talking about
swinging
—the free and easy sharing of spouses at parties? Lifestylers will patiently tell you that some of their number don’t go that far. They adopted their global name in the 1980s because more and more “straight” couples were attending their events and they wanted to be freed from the snappy terms that made them into media fast food. A lifestyle party quite
often does not culminate in sexual intercourse among couples; roughly 10 percent of the people who attend just like being in an atmosphere where such an interchange is conceivable. Lifestylers believe they live in a certain
style
that melds responsible family values—matrimony, children, emotional monogamy—with the erotic cultivation of their marriages through the practice of rites they celebrate as fun and natural.

It’s that simple. And it’s that complicated.

Even the most avid proponents of the subculture admit the behavior of playcouples can sometimes appear pornographic—a threat to civil society—especially when strobe-lit in a camera’s flash or summed up by the bug-eyed mainstream press as a shocking expose of swingers running rampant. Lifestylers have been described as “uncivilized,” “dangerous,” “smelly,” “repellent,” “tacky,” and “revolting,” labeled as “deviates” and zoomorphized as lizards and hippos. Never comfortable with the chaos of sex, city police forces and government agencies regularly investigate lifestyle clubs: they infiltrate dances and threaten to withdraw the liquor licenses of the hotels that host them; they raid private homes and charge participants with public lewdness; and they sometimes wind up arresting themselves since a number of male and female police officers are lifestyle members.

Despite this harassment by morality squads, most studies show lifestylers to be “absolutely not deviant” and “quite normal psychologically.” They also note the behavior of swingers “does not involve a victim.” The movement has a California-based overseeing body, called the Lifestyles Organization, or LSO, that certifies clubs as ethical, nondiscriminatory, and law-abiding. The lifestyle’s out-of-the-closet spokespeople, who come from the ranks of social workers and business managers, doctors and mortgage brokers, insist their millions of compatriots behave in a safe and consensual fashion. On LSO’s board of directors sits an executive from Mensa and a former chair
of the sociology department at the University of California at Riverside. They broaden the discussion of the lifestyle by claiming that when examined in the cool light of the latest research on the biological, evolutionary, and emotional roots of human sexuality, the lives of many playcouples force us to re-ask some of the most crucial questions of human history. Why, for instance, has the word “morals” always referred almost entirely to sexual matters? Why has sexual self-sacrifice always been seen as morally superior to sexual indulgence? And why has religion always been so angrily focused on controlling our sex lives, from the time God sent down fire and brimstone to exterminate homosexuals and orgiasts to the Rev. Billy Graham’s remark that “if God doesn’t do to America what he did to Sodom and Gomorrah, He owes them an apology”?

For average citizens, however, it comes down to this question: Can you dress for the harem or the beach, go to a party with your spouse of ten years, enjoy a night of bacchic sexuality, and still be a good, happily married parent?

You can if you’re in the lifestyle. At least according to lifestylers.

Although the lifestyle’s tradition of sharing spouses has remained unchanged since the subculture’s public emergence after World War II, the media’s reporting of the practice has gone through various incarnations. Back in the 1950s it was dubbed “wife swapping” in the male-centered press, which alleged that otherwise straight suburban husbands were having their wives throw house keys into a hat to see who would retire with whom for the evening. In the sexually revolutionary sixties wife swapping progressed to a more democratically arranged swinging. Millions watched the 1969 film
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
enlivened by the crowded engagements of
California couples who were treated as adventurous and hip in some press outlets, although their real-life counterparts in the heartland were usually declared “bizarre” and “sick.” The seventies saw couples warned away from swinging because of the herpes virus and in the eighties they were informed they could die of AIDS if they participated. By the end of the Reagan era swinging was supposedly over, a relic, like LSD and Charles Manson, of the darker side of the best-forgotten past. In their 1989 book
Burning Desires
, journalists Steve Chappie and David Talbot surveyed the coupling patterns of Americans and declared spouse sharing belly up, doused by “a wave of sexual terror.” AIDS-terrified swing clubs were closing and those dwindling deviants who hung on seemed to belong in a Fellini film. Swingers had changed their name but they couldn’t change the new realities of sex. A Lifestyles convention of die-hards in Las Vegas exhibited mounds of “wilted flesh pushed towards dangerous extremes in the service of pleasure.” Hip young people were repulsed. “There was no doubt about it: swinging was no longer cool.”

That was the way the lifestyle appeared to me back in 1989, when I was assigned by a Vancouver magazine to produce a feature article on the local swing-club scene. For years my writing had focused on the dark world of organized crime and so I approached the assignment as an investigation of the dark world of organized sex. I infiltrated one dance and one orgy put on by a group of mostly working-class souls in a club called the Vancouver Circles and then rang the warning bell of disease and degeneracy in my article. At a quick glance I concluded that these people needed a dip in the gene pool. Their group sex violated every romantic notion I’d been brought up to believe in and contravened every religious doctrine designed to free the mind from the body so as to promote unselfish behavior. At the same time, they seemed to tear to shreds the warnings about promiscuity issued by health organizations
throughout the world. The only things I found intriguing about swingers was that they didn’t need to numb themselves with booze to have sex in their unusual way, and they insisted they were just behaving like the movie stars of their day. They even used the term “heterophobia” to describe their treatment in the press.

Not surprisingly, swingers were repugnant to the feminists I talked to, who disbelieved that dancing in see-through lingerie and sharing spouses could be a woman’s fantasy, and who were therefore convinced that the wives in Vancouver Circles had to have been coerced into participating. They were disgusting to the moral majority who lived around the Legion-type halls where they held their dances and who saw them as harbingers of the apocalypse and falling real-estate prices. And they were thought of as pathological freaks by the academic liberals I interviewed, who assessed swingers as probably trying to escape their problems in ways that could be equated with addictive drug use.