The Lifestyle (21 page)

“This way, this way,” she sang. “We’ll have to move because there’ll be a big tour coming through soon.” She led us quickly through the “Sultan’s Tent” and “Miss Daisy’s Academy” and the the “Amtrack Room,” reminiscing all the while about her experiences on the pillows and divans and benches and tables. Then, walking back down from the top floor “Loft,” whose two hundred square feet of mattresses was reflected in beveled mirror-walls to produce multiple images, she stopped and turned to my wife.

“Do you like women?”

“As friends,” Leslie said.

“You know, I actually didn’t think I liked women sexually either, until this one time, I was in there with three young men”—she pointed to the Sultan’s Tent as we passed it—“and I was just enjoying the luxurious oral on all those soft pillows with my eyes closed and their hands all over me and whatnot, and all of a sudden I thought, Wow! does that guy ever know what he is doing, who
is
that? So I opened my eyes and there’s long, silky hair on my belly from this young woman who was this guy’s wife going down on me. So she says, ‘It’s just pleasure, darling.’ So I thought, Okay, close your eyes, relax. And
so I did. And I realized, Hey, I’m comfortable with this—why not? So, you see, whether you just visit once or every weekend, there’s always another little room of your mind that you might say, ‘Well, I might like to go in there.’ Speaking of rooms, I’ll take you into the Dungeon now.”

“The
Dungeon?”
I heard my wife whisper behind me, which caused Skala, following behind, to erupt in laughter.

“What’s that?” Jodie asked, turning around. “Oh, I see. No, no, no, it’s not what it sounds like at all.” She flicked on a flood light and we made our way down a long staircase, creepily creaky. “This is just play stuff.” On the landing above the firepit she pulled back the set of bars and we entered a room painted white and bathed in light from a ten-foot window. “See, it’s not
really
a dark dungeon—everything they build here is really middle class. Which isn’t to say it’s
everybody’s
thing. I guess it’s a matter of taste.” Against the window was a line of beds covered in leopard-print fabric at the foot of which were soft, fuzzy stirrups. “You’d be surprised at how ladies go
crazy
in here, though.” She took down from the wall a couple of feather ticklers with whip handles, and then a pair of “chains,” which were actually strips of fishing net. She threw the chains over the stirrups and backhandedly tickled and whipped the bed, pointing to the mirrored wall and mocking a tongue-lolling look of lost pleasure. “Not my thing at all,” she laughed to her reflection, “but there’s always a crowd of couples. You figure it out. Beats me!”

She led us out the other end of the Dungeon, past a king-size waterbed, more bunk beds and other mirrored rooms floored with mattresses and hung with love hammocks, and then to the firepit again, where we ran into a dozen middle-aged couples being led through the main door by a pair with teddy-bear badges on their chests that said “Don and Judy.” “See!” Jodie laughed. “The early bird gets the worm and the private tour!”

We were introduced in a blur of names and were walking back down the long passageway towards the pool when my wife asked, “Your boyfriend doesn’t mind you coming here by yourself?”

“Not at all. He’s a very wonderful younger gentleman—you’d love him,” Jodie said. “He knows I don’t think I’d ever want to be with one man again. I’m single and a totally independent nonconformist, with all my children grown. I don’t need or want one man. And he says he finds me very refreshing.”

“Because generally the lifestyle is only for couples,” I remarked.

“Oh God, I really get into this conversation with some husbands a lot here—some guys just don’t seem to get it, only the women,” she said confidentially to my wife. “See, the lifestyle refers to a lot of different things,” she said to me. “Most of the people here are couples—and that’s the lifestyle for them, it’s very arousing for them. But I have several girl-friends in the lifestyle who are single professionals like me—I’ll introduce you tonight, one’s a massage therapist, another’s a welfare-fraud investigator—and we just find we’re really at home here; it’s a very wonderful life for us. Most of us, we lived our whole lives without knowing this was possible, and then we came here, one way or another, and, like I said, it was like this was really what we’d been looking for our whole lives. My circle of couples here is so close, it’s like a real tribe. Oh, by the way, here, this is one of the lecture rooms where they give seminars,” she said, rolling back sliding-glass doors into an empty room above the pool. “Some people will be bringing sleeping bags and spending the night here too. See, that’s the banquet hall on the far side.” She pointed down the length of the pool back to where we had started out.

“You are saying that this is a space that you and your friends feel comfortable in every weekend,” Skala said,
seeming to want to get it right as we walked above the pool to the second-floor dining area.

“Exactly.”

“You and your friends came here,” Skala said flatly and with clarity, “and you were looking for something, and when you experienced it here you instantly knew you had found it. There was no adjustment period.”

“Well, before my marriage I was actually very promiscuous—my whole life I’d been very curious in sex, but it was never fulfilling because it always felt wrong. Just a minute.
Hi, Stan!
Yoo-hoo! Ready or not, here I come!” she called down from the dining room banister to a young D.J. setting up equipment below. He waved back and blew her a kiss. “I met him last week, isn’t he cute? Anyway, this is fulfilling because it doesn’t feel wrong. It’s just a very natural way for me to be, it feels right. So, yes, I found a place that has always been a part of me, no one introduced something new to me here because it’s a part of me. This is the only place I’ve ever found where I can be that part.”

“I see,” Skala said.

The three of us stood leaning against the banister while Jodie ran to the stairs in her heels, clickity-clacked down the flight, and dashed across the dance floor below us to Stan. She embraced him, kissed him passionately, and, getting to her knees, pulled his shorts and underwear right down to his ankles. Skala looked at me and I looked at Skala.

“Interesting,” my wife said.

“The strength of the drive determines the force required to suppress it,” Mary Jane Sherfey wrote regarding female sexuality, and a big swing club is the place to go to see many women like Jodie offering uninhibited evidence of why that
suppression might have been so forceful throughout history. It is also, paradoxically, the place to see male jealousy—the irrepressible emotion behind that murderously repressive force—turned on its head, with husbands enjoying rushes of lust for their promiscuous wives, then overwhelmed by volcanic orgasms they cannot explain but which they want to repeat. Here couples lie with their mouths glued in love while they have sex with others. Here there are romantic games of seduction but almost no competition among men for women. Here a wife’s jealousy is sparked less by her husband having sex with another than by the possibility that he is feeling love for his new partner. Yet wifely jealousy is minimized because, as Brian Gilmartin says, “Swingers believe that couples with good, strong marriages are highly unlikely to ‘fall in love’ with someone with whom they are not married.” In fact, at clubs like New Horizons, a bond is usually formed among potential female rivals: wives are often casually bisexual with one another, expressing a pleasure that is so sanctioned in the sub-culture that it bears the name “confirming.” Although they may have just met that night, “most swingers value the emotion of friendship with the couples with whom they share their recreational pursuit.” And when these friendly recreational pursuits are finally over, another party begins: “After having spent hours in an orgiastic social setting,” couples return home “even more erotically charged toward their spouse than when they left” and have the best sex of all—with each other. “Swingers
expect
swinging to have this aphrodisiac function for conjugal coitus, and so it does.” Finally, on Monday morning they all go back to work as teachers or pharmacists, therapists or editors—and begin planning for the next event, all the while aware of the central meaning of their erotic rites: “The idea is to protect and defend the marital unions of everyone involved, yet still enable everyone to enjoy playful, recreational sex.”

It’s another world that doesn’t seem to make sense on any cultural, evolutionary, or biological level, although the underlying logic of the lifestyle on all these levels is written so tinily in code and acted out in such a visually overwhelming fashion that until recently we just haven’t had the proper instruments and perspective to read its message.

In fact, until the mid-1990s, the message of the lifestyle phenomenon was so indecipherable, its milieus and activities so foreign to the experiences of most people, that most often it was written off as a perverse aberration that should never have been interpreted in the sixties as “sexual freedom.” Swinging wives, we were told, could not really be “choosing” to have promiscuous sex with friends, because even nonhuman primates were discriminating in their choice of sex partners. Therefore wives were either being forced into the lifestyle by husbands anxious to swap them for other partners, or they were victims of some psychological malady that compelled them to act in this unnaturally hedonistic manner. “Swinging is fundamentally a male device for obtaining extramarital sex,” one of the world’s leading evolutionary anthropologists, Donald Symons, concluded in the sociobiologist’s “handbook” on sex,
The Evolution of Human Sexuality
, published in 1981. “Presently available evidence,” Symons wrote, “supports the view that human males typically experience an autonomous desire for a variety of sex partners and human females are far less likely to do so.”

From Darwin’s day until quite recently, the belief that there is a profound evolutionary difference between the male and female desire for sexual variety has been the starting point for the analysis of the traditional double standard. It has also been used as a fundamental argument against the possibility that women could be getting any satisfaction from the lifestyle. According to theoreticians, human females evolved to be very choosy about mates for a crucially important reason: they
invest far more heavily in offspring than do males. Females produce only one ovum per month to the male’s profligate billions of sperm in the same period. A single copulation can result in a long pregnancy and the delivery of a helpless infant who must be breast-fed and protected for years until the child can fend for itself. But while the life of a female is virtually monopolized by the consequence of sex, a male is free to desert her and go off with his infinite supply of sperm and have sex with other females. Over millions of years, therefore, those females who successfully raised children must have delayed mating until they were able to assess a male’s potential as a provider and protector during the child’s infancy. Then, during courtship and after birth, the female would have assured the male through fidelity that the child could be only his. According to this scenario, female sexual pleasure and the female sex drive must have evolved to be limited and under the female’s careful control: if her urges were as powerful and indiscriminate as the male’s they would have jeopardized the survival of her offspring, to say nothing of her own survival if she were to have sex with partners other than her mate. “Men everywhere prefer their wives to be sexually faithful,” Symons wrote, and men throughout history have been homicidally unkind to women if presented with another man’s child to care for. At the end of the day, those women who mated promiscuously for pleasure must have lost out in the evolutionary battle to produce the greatest number of surviving offspring—which is the bottom line of evolution.

Symons said this accounted for why women had almost always been on the receiving end of men’s sexual desires, not the initiators; why their genitalia developed to be merely an atrophied version of the male’s; and why women were far less driven to achieve orgasmic pleasure than men—whose genetic interests were served well by sowing their seed far and wide in their insatiable quest for variety. “There is no compelling
evidence,” Symons contended, “that natural selection favored females that were capable of orgasm, either in the evolution of mammals or specifically in the human lineage.” Symons even offered explanations for why female orgasm served no biological function, and “might actually be dysfunctional.”

Symons, whom the sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson declared had come close to providing “the ultimate meaning of sexuality,” summed up the logic behind the female’s limited desire for pleasure with steamroller inexorability: “If orgasm were so rewarding an experience that it became an autonomous need, it might conceivably undermine a woman’s efficient management of sexuality. Throughout evolutionary history, perhaps nothing was more critical to a female’s reproductive success than the circumstances surrounding copulation and conception. A woman’s reproductive success is jeopardized by anything that interferes with her ability: to conceive no children that cannot be raised; to induce males to aid her and her children; to maximize the return on sexual favors she bestows; and to minimize the risk of violence or withdrawal of support by her husband and kinsmen. This view of female sexuality is a major theme of this [Symons’] book; it is the biological reality that underlies W. H. Auden’s observation that ‘men are playboys, women realists.’”