Even so, even taking this into consideration, most of us aren’t that sensational nude. People feel a lot better with their clothes off, but if the party’s at the talk stage, I don’t see any advantage in nudity.
SHEILA: The rationale is that it not only breaks the ice, it just about heats the water. Admittedly, once you’re over the initial shock value, it does set the stage for sex. And people who like nude parties say that it avoids getting clothes dirty by tearing them off in a rush and just throwing them aside. I can understand this. I know when we first started going on swinging dates I had trouble finding my panties at the end of an evening. They just sort of got lost in the shuffle.
PAUL: Now she knows enough not to put them on in the first place.
SHEILA: I think, all in all, that you have a much better chance to develop a sense of anticipation if people are clothed at the beginning of a party. In any activity, anticipation is a sizable portion of the pleasure.
PAUL: The rest is memory. If you think about it, nothing’s much fun while it’s happening.
SHEILA: I’m serious, Paul.
PAUL: I’m not entirely kidding, either.
SHEILA: Well, I don’t know what I was going to say. You threw me off the track, but I don’t suppose it was earthshaking. I guess I just got carried away on the subject of nude parties, and that makes me sound like quite the old square, doesn’t it? I’ll say it again — maybe we’re getting old-fashioned, maybe younger people react differently...
There is a brief and rather vague free-wheeling discussion of Marshall McLuhan’s observations and how they might relate to the wife-swapping scene. At the time it seems that we develop some salient points, but when the discussion is transcribed it will appear quite meaningless and vacuous. Then we return to the specific area of the sex orgy. Paul and Sheila describe several at some length, their conversational attitudes quite matter-of-fact, even disinterested. They elaborate on a three-day affair which took place a year earlier at a small resort in the Catskill Mountains: a group of swingers booked the entire lodge for the weekend and invited a total of fifty couples to share expenses. From Friday afternoon until late Sunday, the entire lodge was completely given over to a sexual marathon, with an endless string of sexual contacts interrupted by brief intermissions for food and sleep and, according to Sheila, “so they could carry out the wounded.”
The actual activity of the orgies seems oddly unimportant, even monotonous to reproduce. I had given some thought to including a verbatim selection of Sheila’s description of her actions in the course of their “lust weekend,” but a perusal of the transcript has eliminated any inclination I once felt in that direction. The reader must understand that the structure of an orgy is such that everybody does as he pleases all at once; thus, one person’s recollection of an orgy is like the blind man’s view of the elephant — he has only touched and can only report on a fraction of the whole.
In another work, I have recorded my own impressions of an orgy that I was privileged to attend. I did this despite my general reluctance to insert personal material in my writings because I felt that an orgy could only be conveyed verbally in terms of its effect upon an individual and its relevance to him. With the same thought in mind, I find it preferable to omit Paul’s and Sheila’s description of orgies in favor of including some additional material on their reaction to orgies and the effect of such experience upon them. If the reader wonders what then actually goes on at such an event, let him be assured merely that everything he can imagine, absolutely everything, is being done somewhere by someone to someone, with someone else watching and someone else taking notes and someone else waiting his turn.
SHEILA: You know, we talked to someone about it afterward, and it was their first experience with something anywhere along these lines. They had swapped and partied but had never swung all out in this fashion. And the girl said, “Honestly, it was too much for us, it was fun but it was just too much.”
And that really is the whole idea, the whole point of it. That you do overextend yourself, that it’s too much all at once and knocks you out and drains you, and that you leave the whole thing completely and utterly depleted. Literally so. Your sexual parts ache and your body is completely exhausted and sex is the last thing on your mind, you just couldn’t do anything to save your soul.
The point is that it’s supposed to make you feel like this.
PAUL: When swingers who use orgies occasionally talk about the whole idea of an orgy, they’ll use phrases like “blowing off steam” or “getting something out of your system.” And these phrases are very accurate descriptions of what an orgy does. You get everything out of your system, you empty yourself. It isn’t just that you go on and on until you can’t do it any more. You go far past that point. You immerse yourself in it, you surpass your capacity again and again. And it gets to your mind sooner or later.
SHEILA: You lost me. You mean it’s like masturbation, it gives you pimples and drives you insane?
PAUL: Oh, you know what I mean, for Christ’s sake. You know the way a person is affected mentally when you drive yourself to exhaustion and on. That weekend, for example, it wasn’t just the sex, though God knows that was the major factor, but there was also the fact that nobody got any sleep to speak of and everybody was getting by on hardly any food. And when a person is forced to function under those conditions strange things will happen to his mental processes. Your mind makes strange leaps, strange connections. Your memory falls apart. Sometimes people get so that they can’t carry on a conversation because they can’t remember from one minute to the next whether they actually got around to saying something aloud or whether they just thought it.
SHEILA: Now I understand. I missed the point. I thought you were saying that it does something to your state of mind afterward. As far as shaking your mind up, I don’t know whether it’s the exhaustion that does it or just the sheer volume of sexual contests. When something goes on and on like that you get punchy, that’s all...
And afterwards you ache, and you’re beat, and you feel certain you’ll never want to screw anybody again, and that although you had fun you’d just as soon never go to another party like this one. And you won’t want to party like that again for months, but it won’t be more than a few days before you’re in the mood for sex again.
JWW: You talk about blowing off steam. Is there that much unresolved tension in your lives?
PAUL: Evidently, or otherwise we wouldn’t go.
JWW: That’s specious, isn’t it? There’s another explanation — that the orgy serves a different function.
PAUL: Like what?
JWW: That’s what I was wondering.
SHEILA: I think the comparison of sex binges to alcohol binges is valid. I think an orgy, like a drunk, is a way to get out of yourself.
JWW: To get out of yourself?
SHEILA: Yes, I would say so.
JWW: Because of a basic dissatisfaction with things as they are?
SHEILA: Probably... All swingers are dissatisfied people, you know. And I don’t mean that in the sexual sense, or even in the Sunday Supplement sense of the term. But swingers are people who want more, who want to exceed the role in life that is handed to them. They’re dissatisfied in the same basic way that successful businessmen are dissatisfied, that artists and creative geniuses are dissatisfied. It isn’t enough for them to be themselves, it isn’t enough for the world to be as it always has been. They want more.