The Lifestyle (23 page)

“Everyone is a sexual person,” Larry reasoned, lifting Beth’s legs into his lap and taking off her high heels. With both hands he caressed her painted toes as if they were strings on a lyre. “Everyone is an emotional person. If you feel good about your sexuality, then you can feel emotionally good about other people too.”

“I’ll tell you guys frankly, when I was young I wasn’t into this at all,” Beth stated to us. “The first time Larry said we should give this a try, I got here and I thought, Look at all these old people, yuck! I was twenty-five, but now I’m thirty-five, lemme at it! I wanted love and all the rest. Now I’ve got love—now I want all the rest.”

“How long have you been involved like that?” Leslie asked.

“Since after I got over my depression from my third child,” Beth said. “Three years now. We baby-stepped the first couple of months, then we had a group fantasy situation—all our friends—Konrad and Frieda, Sol and Edith.” She looked around, probably for the other couples I’d seen her dancing with that evening, who had gone back to the Annex. “They all kept saying, ‘Are you okay with this? Is this all right for you?’ They were
so
nice, doing all sorts of things; I was the Queen of Sheba, and it was just terrific.”

“When we drove home, I asked her, ‘How did you like it?’” Larry related. “She says, ‘It was all right.’ So I asked, ‘Well, did you
like
all these guys?’”

“I was still afraid to say how
much
I liked it,” Beth recalled, “that he would think, ‘I’ve created a monster!’ Of course, you let go after that. But the first time it can be a shock; you have to try and feel each other out emotionally.”

“Unfortunately,” Sol said, “some guys, it’s like, ‘What do you mean you liked other men? I brought you here but I expected you to hate it!’”

“Right! So he keeps begging me, ‘Tell me more, tell me more.’ So I told him, ‘You want to know? Here it is: It was
rea-l-ly
great. I had the best time. The men were so nice, it was so great. I never came so many times in my life.’ Well!” she laughed. “He got so excited, we made love at a rest stop. That’s his biggest fantasy since two years after we were married! Watching me.”

“Every swinging man’s got to like experiencing that,”
Larry observed. “If they don’t, it’s not going to work as a couple.”

“Terry’s trying to explain that biologically,” Leslie said.

I told them I was coming up with a general theory to explain the lifestyle, from its soft end to its hard-core limits. In 1971 the science journalist Edward Brecher had reviewed Mary Jane Sherfey’s theories on the sexually insatiable female and coined the term “Sherfey syndrome”—which he defined as “unlimited multi-orgasmic response in coitus with an uninterrupted series of males.” He’d reported Sherfey syndrome as being the exception at swing clubs, but that it was experienced by normal, middle-class women without any ill effect on either their bourgeois marriages or their “sensitive maternal behavior.” I had therefore derived a “syndrome” for husbands who were counterintuitively aroused by their wives’ enjoyments—from soft-end flirtation to the extreme Sherfian response. I called it “sperm competition syndrome”—SCS. “It’s a biological explanation for why swinging men get excited by watching their wives flirt or have sex,” I said. “It has to do with increased sperm ejaculation and orgasm pleasure.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Sol said. “Why would it be abnormal if every man who feels it is normal? It’s alternative.”

“The truth of biology is men are supposed to have this visual desire to come every twenty minutes in a different woman, and I’m sure that’s true,” Edith said. “For women it’s more of a social desire. But women burn up the vibrators pretty good, too.”

Sol stood up. “Blast off to the satellite?” he asked, hands at his side, imitating a rocketship.

“Ten, nine, eight—” Beth cracked, swaying her bottom to the left and right with each count. She pulled her legs from Larry’s lap and jumped off of Konrad, stepped into her high heels, thrust her chest out and shook her breasts.

Arm in arm, the five rocked to the door of the banquet hall and followed Jodie’s route to the other end of the premises.

“There’s going to be a lot of naked people in there,” I told Leslie and Skala as we trailed after our tablemates across the pool deck. We climbed the spiral stairs to the second-level corridor that crossed over to the Annex.

Ahead of us, at the far end of the corridor, Beth grandly pulled both wooden doors open at once. She held them for us gallantly until we got up to her and stepped through. One sweeping glance at the Annex would have made you conclude that the fantastic parade of couplings depicted on India’s Tantric shrines could very well have been derived from life.

G
iven the cooperative pastimes of the couples at New Horizons, it is startling to think that Charles Darwin once concluded that females were sexually passive creatures, virtually forced to have sex with males. “The female, on the other hand,” he wrote in 1871, “with the rarest exception, is less eager than the male. As the illustrious Hunter long ago observed, she generally ‘requires to be courted’ she is coy, and may even be seen endeavoring for a long time to escape from the male.”

The Annex aside for the moment, the illustrious Hunter probably would have gone faint at the sight of how sexually aggressive women can behave in even a modern European disco. And the Victorian Darwin almost certainly would have experienced a similar giddiness to realize that everyday married women frequent these haunts actively looking for adulterous sex. Over a period of several weekends in 1993, researchers from the University of Vienna studied women who showed up at a mainstream dance hall. They found that those in long-term, stable relationships were most likely to attend alone when they were ovulating, and they arrived for the evening wearing skimpy clothes as a prelude to infidelity. For most of the other women, the closer they were to ovulating, the skimpier their clothes. In other words, they were showing an arousal pattern we don’t usually associate with humans but which Mary Jane Sherfey claimed was “homologous to the period of heat of certain higher primates.” From the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern, virtually every research study has
shown that during the two weeks around ovulation women have more sexual fantasies and are more likely to initiate sex and be unfaithful to their partners than at other times.

The term “male bias” is frequently used to slam scientists who have concluded that normal females are passive baby-making machines. Darwin—the supposed founder of the tradition of male bias in evolutionary biology—is, of course, also the genius who reasoned through the very processes of evolution. Life arose in its simplest form from nonliving matter, he concluded, and gradually achieved its variety through “numerous, successive, slight modifications.” The modifications happened randomly, and if they resulted in a life form slightly better equipped to survive and reproduce in a competitive and changing environment, they endured. Thus, from life’s first emergence in a chemical sea perhaps four billion years ago, probably as a tiny bit of nucleic acid able to clone itself (what we now call a gene), one successful modification was added to another, with organisms of greater and greater complexity diverging from that single common gene until tens of millions of species of plants and animals evolved on earth to take their own routes of genetic change.

Darwin called the two components of evolution “random variation,” for the chance modifications made in reproduction, and “natural selection,” for the crucial process whereby those modifications prospered or died off. Natural selection is widely acknowledged as
the
major force in biological evolution, and it is an exceedingly simple process. Stand naked in front of a mirror and behold its result. Traits that helped your ancestors survive and reproduce were “selected for,” and you have them. Traits that hindered survival and reproduction were “selected against,” and you don’t. Today it is thought that the process of reproduction you engage in, sexual reproduction, probably evolved as a gradual improvement over the cloning process a couple of billion of years ago. Cloning is one cell turning into
two; sexual reproduction is two cells turning into one. The combination of two sets of genes from a male and female of the same species to form a new individual gave the species a greater chance to vary its genetic makeup with each new generation and to adapt to ever-changing threats—which included staying ahead of enemies that wanted to eat it from without and parasitic diseases that wanted to feed off it from within. The pleasures of sex, and the hormones that drive animals to experience them, evolved to draw the two sexes irresistibly together to unify their genes and perhaps mix up the options a bit for the next generation. On a biological level, both the male and female orgasm arose to serve our reproductive success.

When Darwin first published his version of evolution in
The Origin of Species
in 1859, there was much gnashing of teeth in religious circles, but the capitalist-imperialist culture of his day was largely ready to accept a survival-of-the-fittest doctrine. Unfortunately for science, Darwin’s time was governed by a certitude far more unshakable than the faith in biblical creation: it was the faith that females were much less interested in sex than were males. In fact, respected authorities argued that females didn’t enjoy coitus at all. And so when Darwin tried to explain why only the males of many species possessed spectacular characteristics that actually hindered survival—like the cumbersome antlers of the stag or the long heavy peacock’s tail—he came up with an hypothesis based almost exclusively on the male’s point of view. On the one hand, Darwin saw males as so driven by lust that they had developed their costly accouterments in order to better compete with each other for females, either through direct combat or garish display. On the other hand, he saw females as demure, mentally dull, and as removed from lust as he considered Victorian women to be: they sat back, watched the show, and at the end of the day submitted not to “the male which is the most attractive to her, but the one which is the least distasteful.” In
a way, nature acted like a cattle breeder: the passive females accepted only battle-winning stags with the biggest racks, or the peacocks with the most impressive fans—that is, “supposing that their mental capacity sufficed for the choice.” Generation by generation, this natural process selected for the exaggeration of those male characteristics signaling competitive health and virility. Since females wound up selecting for those characteristics, Darwin called the process “sexual selection.”

There was, however, a group of hairy females whose spectacular difference from the
males
of their species he just couldn’t figure out. “No case interested and perplexed me so much,” he wrote, “as the brightly colored hinder end and adjoining parts of certain monkeys.” He simply could not imagine that those flaming folds of exquisitely sensitive flesh were sexual swellings—that they, and the hormones which caused them, were driving the females with a “male-like” lust for twelve days at a time. Every bit as spectacular and “selected for” as a peacock’s tail, the folds functioned to signal ovulation and to solicit sex for the female from multiple male partners—sometimes from every single male in the troop and, most delectably, if she could get away with it, from males outside the troop.

Darwin’s inability to overcome his cultural conditioning in the matter of female sexuality is thought by some anthropologists to point to a frailty inherent in the entire field of evolutionary thought. It is why, to my mind, the implications of the sex lives of couples in the lifestyle have been pretty much ignored—except by mavericks. Theorizing and conducting studies to test their theories, scientists in the field of evolution can, in the end, act more like polemicists out to prove a cultural point. (As a nonscientist, I am not above this myself.) Darwin himself described
The Origin of Species
as “one long argument,” and from his own day to the mid-1960s the evolutionary theory that only nymphomaniacs felt promiscuous desire held fast: it matched the culturally accepted behaviour of females.
At the same time female behavior seemed to match the theory that they were extremely selective about who they had sex with, that is, who they wanted to father their offspring—which was ostensibly the reason they had sex. Those who acted otherwise were considered evolutionary aberrants. Not until scientists themselves began living in a social milieu where respectable women started being openly promiscuous—as many previously had been in secret—did they say, “Let’s modify our ideas about millions of years of evolution to accommodate this natural behavior.” Often scientists were the newly aware women. “I was a young adult in the sixties,” reflected Patricia Gowaty, a scientist who conducted one of the first studies of philandering female birds. “And I could look around me and see that there was a lot of social monogamy in people, but I could readily see this might not correlate with genetic monogamy because both men and women were having affairs. So I created a hypothesis about my own social life and the things that I could see around me.” In this way mainstream evolutionary theory, no matter where it stands at any particular moment, can be said, like the media, to reflect, indeed to support, mainstream norms. Theory tends to change when it acknowledges a newly acceptable human behavior that has long been declared unnatural. Then scientists look back into the distant past, or at DNA, or at animals like bonobos, with new eyes. By the same token evolutionary theorists can tend not to notice unfamiliar or unacceptable behavior even when it is going on all around them. Perhaps that is why Helen Fisher, who went a long way to explaining female infidelity as natural, could theorize that Cro-Magnon people had sex only in the dark, at the back of the cave. Year to year, mainstream evolutionary theory changes, usually in tandem with some acknowledgment of present human behavior.