SHEILA: That’s one side of it, that we stayed away from the whole scene of correspondence clubs much longer than we would have otherwise. But on the other side of the scale, we got into more sophisticated sex than we would have otherwise.
PAUL: Very true.
JWW: Why was that the case?
PAUL: Let me see, what’s the best way to explain it? I suppose by contrasting our story with that of another couple, a couple of kids we were comparing notes with not long ago. In certain respects their story parallels ours — their situation, if not their story.
They’re about our age, and they’ve been swinging for five years, almost the same amount of time as we have. Instead of getting involved through another couple, they followed the fairly common pattern of the husband reading about swinging and getting interested, and gradually talking the wife into it. I would say nine out of ten couples start this way. Maybe the percentage is higher, I don’t know. They began immediately with correspondence, and they started swinging at the rate of a couple a week. They would see certain couples more than once, but they made a big pitch for variety. For security reasons they made a point of swinging with people fifty miles or more from their home base, so it was actually easier for them to have variety than to exchange visits regularly with another couple.
The point is that the variety and the novelty of meeting new people all the time made it more or less unnecessary for them to go overboard looking for sexual variety. As a result they were swinging for months without doing anything more out of the ordinary than changing partners and having sex in separate rooms. There was enough of a challenge in getting to know another couple and breaking the ice, and then there was enough novelty in making love to a stranger, so that the kinkier swingers’ games didn’t come into the picture for them for a long time, really.
We, of course, were just the other side of the coin. We didn’t have the variety of partners, so our thing became more and more sophisticated from a purely sexual standpoint.
To put it another way, for them the steady kick was doing the same thing with different people, while for us it was doing different things with the same people.
SHEILA: We certainly did plenty of different things.
PAUL: That’s for sure.
JWW: What pattern did your experimentation take?
SHEILA: A sort of Rorschach inkblot pattern, spreading out in all directions at once.
PAUL: At first, when we were just trading partners for simple sexual intercourse, what we did in swap sessions was basically what we did in our own marriages. We had already experimented with fellatio and cunnilingus as well as with most of the basic coital positions. Naturally we had a more distinctly experimental attitude when we started swinging because of our increased interest in technique. Also I think we got somewhat more oriented toward oral sex.
SHEILA: Because it feels so groovy.
PAUL: Cut it out! Seriously, this seems to be universal among swingers. One of the major reasons is that an individual is always physically capable of performing orally, while this isn’t true of coitus. The increased sexual activity swingers enjoy is such that a man has more opportunities to make love than he can shake a stick at — or that he has a stick to shake at, if you follow me.
But I seem to have gotten off the track. As I was saying, we became more oral-oriented than we had been, and I gather this was true for the Creightons as well. We also got into anal intercourse. Jeff and Jan had had no experience at all with this. Sheila and I had tried it out early in our marriage, as a matter of fact, and she hadn’t cared for it.
SHEILA: It hurt, damn it! Later on I found out that a person can learn to relax the sphincter muscles so that it isn’t painful. And using the right lubricant makes a difference, and if you can learn to get excited in that area — well, that underscores the whole point, really. There are techniques involved in anything, and when you get with swinging you’re apt to become increasingly aware of technique.
PAUL: Let me see, Then we began to get into threesomes and all that, and that was particularly exciting. I suppose if you had to draw a line, that was where we began to get to the kinky stage.
JWW: I notice you use that word a lot — “kinky.” Just how do you mean it? Obscene? Perverted?
SHEILA: Perverted, but in a nice way. Right?
PAUL: Beautiful. That hits it on the nose...
SHEILA: But I think you would have to say we hit the kinky stage before we started with the threesomes. We began with pictures before then. Jeff had a Polaroid, and once we got to the point of all making love in the same room, it was just a short step to taking pictures of each other. Of course you know that the Polaroid camera is God’s gift to swingers. Well, the pictures we took could only have been taken with a Polaroid, since none of us had a darkroom.
PAUL: Pictures, and threesomes, and from there on in I’d be hard put to say just what we did and when. Let’s see — we first made it with them in May, and sometime in August or September we stopped going to separate rooms, and a month or two after that we were swinging with pictures and threesomes and almost anything we might have read or dreamed up and wanted to try out. Contests, that sort of thing.
JWW: Contests?
PAUL: This was an idea we got from what we read. They do it in the larger clubs. For example, you divide into couples and the object is to see which girl can make her partner have an orgasm first. That would be one type of contest, but it could work any way at all.
JWW: I see. The sort of party games that large groups of swingers often use.
SHEILA: And they work fairly well in groups, but with just four of us they were pretty silly, actually. We tried them out, though, because we wanted to try anything.
I wonder if I can find the right words to explain this. It’s very easy to get a wholly false impression of those months. When you read about something like this in a book the message seems to be that the people are compelled by a hunger for stronger and stronger kicks. Like a heroin addict who has to have more and more of the drug in order to get high or whatever it is that they get. Is heroin like that?
JWW: To an extent. Amphetamines are a better example, or barbiturates.
SHEILA: I’m afraid we’re not up on the drug scene. Swingers are more apt to stay away from things like that, you know. Some people try sex stimulants, but more of us tend to stick with high-protein diets and health foods. The only drug everybody takes is birth control pills...
She talks briefly about the impact of birth-control pills and other technological advances upon the sexual revolution in general and the society of swingers in particular. The discussion ranges far afield, touching too upon the various paraphernalia which swingers have taken to using in the past few years — artificial phalluses and vaginas, vibrators for vaginal and anal massage, French ticklers and coronal extenders, etc. Ultimately Sheila returns to her point — that their turn toward increasingly “kinky” activity was more than a symptom of dissatisfaction and the need for ever-more enervating stimulation.
SHEILA: Here’s what I’m getting at. You have to realize that this whole swinging scene, all of it, was a completely new world for us. It was absolutely new, and we found ourselves getting tremendous pleasure out of everything we did. Even those stupid party games, even things like that were a thrill as a novel experience. And because of this of course we wanted to try everything once.