The Lifestyle (22 page)

Not surprisingly, Symons scorned Mary Jane Sherfey’s theory that the female’s “insatiable” capacity for orgasm had been successfully reproduced because it served an evolutionally important function: to make her promiscuously search out fertility and variety. While the admitted capacity of some women to experience ten, twenty, or fifty orgasms in a single hour seemed to contradict Symons’s own evolutionary logic that a sexual trait would not persist over thousands of generations unless it aided reproduction, in fact, Symons had a ready explanation. Multiple female orgasm could very well be a “functionless artifact” of female human anatomy, standing in
relation to the vitally functional male orgasm as the male’s inutile nipples stood in relation to the female’s lactating ones: “The ability of females to experience multiple orgasms may be an incidental effect of their inability to ejaculate,” Symons, with a straight face, told men and women alike—a deduction that, these days, prominent female anthropologists such as Sarah Blaffer Hrdy and Meredith Small view with some impatience. “To my knowledge, Sherfey’s argument has not been taken seriously by evolutionary biologists,” Symons wrote, about a dozen years before his own theories would begin to be questioned by the evolutionary biologists Robin Baker and Mark Bellis. Baker and Bellis were the first to document how men’s sperm were programmed to kill one another in the female reproductive tract, a battle the female actively promoted. In his book
Sperm Wars: The Science of Sex
, Baker hypothesized that “the traditional double standard may even betray an innate male understanding that if given the cultural freedom to do so, females would behave as licentiously as males.” This contrasted with Symons’s contention that “the sexually insatiable woman is to be found primarily, if not exclusively, in the ideology of feminism, the hopes of boys, and the fears of men.” “Happily promiscuous, nonpossessive, Rousseauian chimpanzees turned out not to exist,” he claimed, again a few years before scientists began to report that bonobo chimps were happily promiscuous and nonpossessive of partners in their very sensual social structure. “I am not convinced by the available evidence that such human beings exist either.”

Symons’s view of human sexuality is sometimes referred to as “the standard model.” Back in 1993, when I stopped thinking of swingers in terms of the standard model, I began to search for the evolutionary and biological inside story of their professed delights—the underlying logic to a lifestyle that seemed to defy logic. Here were thousands upon thousands of middle-aged wives behaving in a way once thought
nymphomaniacal; here were middle-aged husbands who had discovered that the promiscuity of their wives mysteriously turned their own orgasms into explosive events, involving what seemed to them like more seminal spurts than they usually experienced in “routine sex.” Weighing the usual explanations for “why couples swing” in the many cases where women admitted to no abusive coercion, I arrived at my own hypothesis for the persistence and growth of the lifestyle. Swinging couples of a certain age who were no longer threatened by the prospect of losing their mate, or, in the case of the men, having to raise a child not their own, had freed themselves to “play” at what humans and most other animals on the planet had very likely been programmed to achieve through multiple mating: the competition of the sperm of several males in the female reproductive tract. “Advanced preparation for this warfare is so strongly programmed into both the male and the female,” Robin Baker maintained, “that it continues blindly throughout life, even when the chances of such warfare seem minuscule to the conscious mind…. Why? Because, disturbing as this observation may be, past evolutionary imperatives have dictated that a female who promotes [sperm] competition may better the chances of her offspring having good genes.”

As Skala and I reviewed some of this literature after our tour with Jodie, it seemed to us that the evidence of evolution argued for, not against, the complements of pleasure and domesticity pursued by men and women at all levels in the lifestyle. “The swingers believe that human beings (both male and female) are intrinsically monogamous from a psycho-emotional and residential standpoint, but polygamous from a
sexual
standpoint,” Brian Gilmartin had argued in his National Science Foundation study, and Skala and I could see how many adulterers of both genders might secretly agree with that. While I’d learned that the behavior of swingers at a club
like New Horizons could be culturally shocking, requiring some forbearance to behold, and was certainly not the preference of the couples I had just spent time with in the Baja, there were telling social and biological explanations for what fastlane lifestylers were up to in their mirrored rooms. Responsible couples—leaders in society—do fill hundreds of swing clubs every single weekend around the world, and their pursuits have a basis in the evolutionary forces that have in part shaped all of us. Hidden within the unconscious processes that serve reproduction—processes that have evolved over millions of years to ensure the best male’s genes are received by the female—are our lifelong sexual yearnings for variety. In a Liberalia involving married swingers these yearnings are employed openly as aphrodisiacs, instead of secretly in the model followed by many couples. In fact swingers are intuitively aware of what evolution seems to have designed for them in the way of matrimony
and
promiscuity, and display a grandiose appetite for incorporating their urges into an acknowledged part of their emotionally monogamous pair-bond. Their “openly unfaithful” behavior, Baker noted, “promotes sperm warfare.”

“Every new couple we meet, we always say, ‘It’s the sex that puts you here, but it’s the people who keep you here,’” an auburn-haired woman named Edith said to Leslie at our table in the banquet room that night. It was about eleven o’clock, we were dawdling over dessert, and a slow country tune was playing too loudly from the speakers. The dance floor was no longer populated enough to absorb the echo, since three-quarters of the couples had gone back to the Annex—a stroll we were just now getting ready to take ourselves.

“Haven’t you ever gotten yourself into a situation where
what you’re feeling with one of those people becomes love?” Leslie asked.

“No, not really. I don’t need that emotional commitment—I’ve got Sol.” In contrast to the playful underwear costumes which had been on parade about us all night, Sol and Edith were unspectacularly covered in baggy white cotton. Perhaps that was because the two of them ran a health-food store and eschewed artificial fabrics. Certainly nothing about their organic appearance would have given you a clue that they were longtime members of New Horizons. They were in their early forties, with two teen boys now at home with Sol’s mother.

“We’re not having sex with someone because we’re looking for emotional commitment,” Sol said. “We’re looking for the open communication; then you have the ability to shed the mask that you put on for everyone else. We’ve found we can’t really do that anywhere but here, or with friends we meet here and get together with.”

“See?” Jodie said to Skala. “Wasn’t I telling you that this afternoon?”

“Yes, precisely,” Skala said. “Interesting.”

“You should understand,” a real-estate agent named Larry said to me, “once you draw down the wall of secrecy through sex, there are no more secrets. Once you see all your friends like that, all together—once they see you—everyone’s made themselves so vulnerable you’re not going to laugh at them over all the stupid things people laugh at each other for. You’re exposed to each other.” At the moment Larry’s wife, Beth, was out on on the dance floor, perhaps in what most people would consider an exposed position. Having just emerged from a dip in the pool, she wore only underpants and red heels as she moved to the heartthrob music in the tight embrace of a square-jawed car dealer named Konrad. Tall Beth’s chin rested on bald Konrad’s shoulder and her eyes were closed. As I watched, she pulled her face back and soul-kissed him.

“That doesn’t mean you have to have sex with all the people in the building here,” Edith said, “but you have to at least know that they are willing to bare their souls—such as you might experience
if
you had sex with them. And by so doing, you will get to know them internally, you know there won’t be any surprises—”

“No surprises—you know, it’s interesting to hear it stated like that,” Jodie interrupted, showing a more reflective side than she had that afternoon. She turned to Skala: “You were probably thinking, someone like her—that’s all she wants is surprises. But really, what she said is me all over. I like new experiences, but I don’t like surprises. Does that make sense to you?”

“I believe so,” Skala said. “You prefer your new experiences to be safe, without negativity?”

Jodie sipped some wine and swung her finger around at the few people remaining in the banquet room. “They’re all like that, without negativity. That’s why I love them so much.”

The dance tune ended, there was some scattered applause, and Beth returned to the table and sat in Larry’s lap. When Jodie had first introduced us, neither Beth nor Larry had believed I was writing a book. “That’s what they all say,” Larry had said, eyeing me up and down with a smirk. Like most fast-lane clubgoers they were impatient of denial and the sexual judgments deniers are apt to make in order to give themselves permission to go to clubs.

Konrad pulled his chair over and sat beside Beth. He had a shapely wife named Frieda, about a decade younger than his forty-five years. Frieda had gone back to the Annex with the rest of the crowd.

“The beauty of the lifestyle is that you get to have your catharsis and eat it too,” Beth said now, with her arms around her husband’s neck. Beth taught high-school English, and was pretty adept at twisting epigrams.

“How you feeling?” Larry asked her.

“All the good, horny things.” She bit Larry’s nose, then reached over and took Konrad’s hand.

“You will not find me complaining about these good horny things,” Konrad said, with a debonair Euro accent.

“For women this gives us a chance to go full circle,” Edith said. “We get a closer understanding of ourselves—more so than men understand themselves. Women are actually much more analytical than men are. We look at things from all angles—that seems to be our need; we’re very curious about all things—and in that need we feel our sexuality, our bisexuality, and when we come to allowing our need and curiosity to take over, we find out we like to help.” The expression “like to help” was swinger code for a wife’s being excited by her husband making love with another woman, and I believe that was where she was headed with her logic. Liking to help wasn’t necessarily dependent on a wife needing to “confirm” her relationship with a potential rival, but it usually involved the same sort of bisexual closeness. “There are a lot of possibilities out there,” Edith said. “Nonhurtful, pleasurable possibilities.”

“It definitely enhances all those possibilities,” Beth said. Theatrically she switched laps to Konrad, crossed her legs and put her hands behind her wet, blond hair, and threw her locks out across her bare shoulders. “I’m not unentangled from common sense,” she laughed, stroking Konrad’s shiny scalp. She tilted her head away from Konrad and looked at Skala. She was quite beautiful, and she knew how to set the light on her cheeks to accentuate that beauty. “My independence is intact here. I’m not giving up control.”

“There are studies which show women are generally in control of consensual situations,” Skala said.

“And it is
expected
here for her to be in control,” Konrad said. “So that is something that will be very hard for him to
convince anyone of.” He indicated me with a tip of his Rolex. “Because it is so different here.”

“The way I would handle it,” Sol advised me, “first you look at the men—they’re always supposed to be ready for this. Then you look at the women—unless they’re neophytes you won’t find many who aren’t just as ready. Every swinger knows the saying—”

“You have to convince them to come but then you have to convince them to leave,” Beth said. She leaned over to Leslie. “The fear every woman has is that she may get attacked in a swing club. But what’s the other side of that fear? Could I—me—
could I really enjoy myself in a swing club?
That’s even a more powerful fear. ‘My God—I’ve turned into a slut. How could I have fucked two guys last night?’”

Jodie whistled, returning to her old self. “Two guys! I can
not
take the tease another
minute!”
She stood up, pulled her sleeveless sweater over her head and headed out of the hall, turning right in the direction of the Annex. Through the windowed wall I watched her greet some swimmers as she cut across the pool deck, stripping out of her clothes.

“I just spent time with some swingers who don’t get into the big group thing,” I said. “They do like to watch, though.”

“For me, I like to have the release every so often,” Beth replied. “We’ve got three little ones—four, six, and eight, plus I’ve got 120 students who make me feel as sexy as that chair. So once a month I really enjoy this. That’s the total story—although I
can
do three weekends in a month,” she laughed. “For some reason, usually February.”