The Wife-Swap Report (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior) Read online

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  PAUL: The club had been in existence for well over a year by the time we were invited to join. By that time, incidentally, we had become acquainted with more than half the members. As I understand it, two couples started the club and gradually enlarged it. I don’t know how one would go about starting a club, or how the various ground rules would evolve, as everything was in operation by the time we got involved.

  The basic operation was simple enough. Member couples took turns hosting the meetings, with us and another couple excused from this duty because we had no way to get the kids out of the house for an entire evening. The rest of the couples either had parents around town who would have their kids over for the night or, in some cases, had no kids at all to worry about. In ordinary swap situations no one worries about a sleeping kid in the house, but with a dozen couples on hand it’s a different story.

  Meetings began promptly at eight-thirty, and you can rest assured that no one made a point of getting there fashionably late. That’s one thing about swingers—they somehow lose interest in some of the more senseless social conventions . . . Dress also seems to be of less significance to swingers, probably because you don’t keep your clothes on for very long.

  A typical meeting would begin with up to an hour of general socialization, with light drinking and conversation. At this particular club there was an unspoken rule that the conversation during this early period would not be centered on sex. Anything else was a suitable topic—religion, politics, anything but sex. I think the object was to let the excitement build, and also to let people know each other in more than a purely sexual sense.

  SHEILA: It was a particularly good idea, too. Especially for the second reason. From what other people have said, clubs can be absolutely deadening over a period of time when there’s nothing between the members but sex. What happens is that you have the anonymity of an orgy week after week without the excitement of strange bodies. You ball the same strangers every week—that’s what it amounts to. And that’s the main reason most clubs fall apart in a very short period of time.

  JWW: I thought quite a few clubs lasted for long periods of time.

  SHEILA: Some last for ten years or more, and those are the clubs everybody knows about. But they make up only the smallest minority of the clubs that come into existence. There are literally hundreds of clubs organized every year all over the country. It’s very easy to organize a club, you know. There’s nothing easier. Sometimes a single man will put a club together because it’s the easiest way for him to make contact with swingers. You wouldn’t think it would work, but it does. He runs an ad announcing the formation of a club in a given area and balances out the replies so that he has the same number of men as women, and he’s in business. It’s nothing to start a club, but I would guess that nine out of ten clubs don’t stay together for more than three or four months.

  PAUL: Our Louisville club was a particularly good group, as groups go. I don’t know that it’ll last ten years, but it was well set up. As I said there would be up to an hour of general conversation. Then around nine the entertainment section started.

  This could take any of a number of forms. It was the responsibility of the host and hostess to organize things, and they had all the leeway in the world as far as innovation was concerned. As I’m sure you can imagine, each couple tried to put on a better program than the one before, and the results were worth the effort. It was the same sort of unstated competition that civilian hostesses have to prepare the most exotic hors d’oeuvres.

  The most common form of entertainment was movies, at least at first. When we first joined, it was evidently quite difficult to come by stag films in the Louisville area. The few films that were readily available were yellow with age. Then someone made contact with a distributor in I think Cincinnati, and we were able to get quality films, occasionally in Technicolor and once with a sound track.

  The films were good up to a point, like everything else. We learned not to let a film show go on too long, because once we were conditioned to handle that kind of vicarious stimulation, an overlong show merely became a drag for everyone. The main function of the films, really, was to focus everyone’s attention on sex and let the tension build a little.

  SHEILA: It also created an opportunity for a group grope. A little mutual fondling was perfectly permissible all around. Of course you weren’t supposed to get carried away.

  PAUL: Or else you wind up with the film watching the audience.

  SHEILA: It’s not hard to avoid when you’re experienced in that type of situation.

  PAUL: There was a point, during our own first few months in the club, when good stag films were becoming available at a steady rate and there just wasn’t a meeting without one. Then one of the original members hosted a meeting and introduced an innovation. He had us all take seats for the movies, then rolled up the screen and put it away. We had just selected our partners, he explained; each man was then coupled with the girl on his left.

  At that point everybody was told to strip. Then the rules of the contest were explained. The couples were not exactly partners, because each had the opposite goal. The women could do anything they wanted with the object of making the men ejaculate. The first woman to make her partner come was a winner, and the man who held out the longest was also a winner.

  SHEILA: Paul won the game that first time, but it wasn’t exactly a victory to be proud of. He was put off by the whole idea, maybe because it came out of the blue like that. And he just didn’t get excited at all. His partner did everything she could. She would have had better luck with a corpse.

  PAUL: It was terribly embarrassing, too, because the girl was colored. There was one colored couple in the group. This was in Louisville, remember, which is not Southern but not exactly Northern either, so a lot of the people down there thought it was really something pretty daring to swing with Negroes. We had done this before. However, I had never had relations yet with the Negro girl in the club, although Sheila had been with her husband, and I was really upset at the thought that she might think it was her color that kept me from responding to her. Perhaps it was worrying about this that reinforced everything, but whatever it was, nothing happened, and instead of being sent home from the party I was declared the winner, which didn’t make much sense.

  There were no prizes that time. In fact that was all there was to the contest, and after it ended we got into the main part of the meeting. This was the same from one week to the next—couples were chosen by lot and went off by themselves to make love. A couple could stay together as long as they wanted before returning to the main room for group games if they felt in the mood. The general pattern was for a couple to go off and ball once, then either join another couple in a bedroom for a foursome or drift back to the living room and find some congenial sort of group activity.

  As time went by, though, hosts and hostesses would make the contests more elaborate. For a while there were prizes for the winners, and then someone introduced the idea of rewarding the winners sexually. The male winner would receive the simultaneous attention of all the women in the group, for instance, or the female winner would take on every man in turn.

  SHEILA: In certain clubs they do this every week, usually just selecting the man and woman by a drawing or something. It can be an extremely thrilling thing to have a whole slew of persons of the opposite sex all making love to you at once. This is considered a game in itself. In books I’ve seen it described at length, and called Center of Attraction, which is a logical enough name for it.

  PAUL: Another variation that some genius worked out was fairly clever. Instead of rewarding the two winners, he set things up so that we would punish the two losers. The man who came first and the woman whose partner held out longest were declared the losers, and they had to pay a forfeit. This made the contest itself especially exciting in a kinky way. And the forfeits themselves made it easy to introduce some unusual elements into the meeting without offending anybody.
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  JWW: How do you mean?

  PAUL: By requiring the losers to do things they wouldn’t do otherwise. The club itself was not particularly kinky, as swingers clubs go. There was more or less complete bisexuality for the girls, but no male homosexuality and no bondage or discipline, none of the Sadie Mae games. Nor did anyone go in much for gadgets or other offbeat things. It was felt generally that we wanted to avoid that sort of thing—Sheila and I had gotten involved to excess with kinky things in the past. But at the same time an experienced swinger generally likes to try these things once in a great while, as long as there’s a way to keep them a special treat and not a standard part of the game.

  SHEILA: Certain acts are exciting because they’re unusual. But if you do them frequently they lose their unusual quality and they also seem perverse.

  PAUL: That’s where the contest helped immeasurably. It provided a natural method of limiting the kinky stuff, and it also gave the person involved a good excuse, if he happened to need one. For instance, a man might be very leery at the thought of voluntarily performing a homosexual act with another man. I think I said that there was no male homosexuality in the group, and while I’m sure some of the fellows had bisexual inclinations, they kept them strictly quiet. Yet if a man lost a contest and the forfeit required him to perform fellatio upon another man, well, we were all sufficiently seasoned swingers so that we knew a single homosexual act wouldn’t make a man’s testicles wither. If a man happened to be geared that way, he had a chance to enjoy himself without looking like a faggot. Even if he didn’t swing that way, as most of us didn’t, you couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to do it and wanting to experience it, if only once. This made it easy.

  JWW: Was this the usual forfeit?

  PAUL: There was no “usual” forfeit as such, since the whole point was variety. Occasionally the forfeit was a performance which the male and female loser had to put on for the rest of the crowd. Or either or both of them might be used as victims for a bondage act—an act of submission. The actual forfeit could be anything that might be exciting now and then but that we wouldn’t feel comfortable with as a part of the standard repertoire.

  JWW: Did anybody leave the club as a result of the forfeits?

  PAUL: No.

  SHEILA: This almost happened once, though. One time the forfeit was homosexual and one of the men flatly refused.

  PAUL: Oh, I forgot about that.

  SHEILA: He said he didn’t want to be a party poop or spoilsport, but he wasn’t willing to do anything that would make him feel dirty afterward, and that whether it was sensible of him or not he wouldn’t be comfortable performing a homosexual act. It could have been a really unpleasant situation all around, but the host smoothed things over quickly by suggesting an alternate. Do you remember what it was?

  PAUL: Not offhand. What difference does it make?

  SHEILA: None, I guess.

  PAUL: We sort of dropped the male homosexual stuff from the forfeits after that. No one wanted to create tension . . .

  Incidentally, as time went by we also developed a great many variations on the contest itself. We revamped an old game young boys use in masturbation sessions, with the object being to see which man could ejaculate the furthest. Things like this were strictly one-time contests introduced purely for the sake of variety.

  SHEILA: As time went by, the forfeits changed a little. Inevitably the forbidden acts lost a little of their special quality. Then we would try to make the forfeit entertaining in another way, occasionally by introducing an element of humor. We might blindfold the person, for instance, and have him try to identify members of the opposite sex by touch or taste.

  PAUL: Do you remember what we heard about the Denver club?

  SHEILA: Oh, that’s absolutely disgusting! I’d just as soon you didn’t even mention it.

  PAUL: Seriously?

  SHEILA: I’m not sure I believe it, anyway.

  PAUL: People have done odder things. Why should you find it so hard to believe?

  SHEILA: I’m positive the story was embroidered. I don’t believe she didn’t know, and I don’t believe what she was supposed to have said. Do you?

  PAUL: Maybe the people who told us tried to improve the story a little. Briefly, John, a group in Denver blindfolded a girl and had her try to guess which of the members was performing cunnilingus on her. According to the story we heard, they were fairly hard-core swingers and the gal was known as a good sport, which in a group like that meant she was sufficiently uninhibited to do it on television. So she entered into the spirit of the affair by squirming around and making it obvious that she enjoyed it no end, and saying that it must be a Democrat because she never had it so good, and guessing it must be a woman because no man was that sensitive, and so on. She kept guessing and kept getting it wrong, and finally they took the blindfold off and her “lover” was somebody’s German shepherd . . .

  • • •

  We continue to speculate on the pros and cons of club arrangements as they affect the quality of swinging. Both Paul and Sheila feel a club has both advantages and disadvantages, and that after a period of time the latter will inevitably come to outweigh the former. Paul explains that any club of substantial size will invariably have one or more couples as members whom a given club will find either undesirable or personally tedious, and as time goes by it becomes increasingly unpleasant to have relations, both social and sexual, with such people. “There are a lot of people you would have sex with once,” Sheila explains, “that you wouldn’t enjoy seeing a second time. In the club situation you feel this even more strongly, and sooner or later it has to get to you.” Both Paul and Sheila agree that they would not be inclined to join another club.

  Later, I reintroduce the subject of generating variety, not at club meetings or in other group situations but in the course of general swinger socializing. How, I ask, do Paul and Sheila vary the style and quality of their sex lives now?

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  SHEILA: There’s really no special trick to it. It’s easy to go overboard this way, but it honestly isn’t essential. Variety has to be present in one’s life, but this doesn’t mean you have to seek it, or consciously plan for it. If you understand your own needs and capabilities, and if you learn what works and what doesn’t work, and if you just let things come naturally—

  PAUL: That’s the main thing. You have to see new people without making a fetish of new contacts. And we’ve found it’s fun to keep a very open mind toward what we consider kinky acts—not as a frequent thing but on a one-time basis. Certain swingers will describe themselves in their ads or letters as being willing to try anything once. “Anything” covers too much ground, certainly—there are plenty of things I wouldn’t dream of trying, ever.

  JWW: Such as?

  PAUL: Oh, I wouldn’t know where to start. Believe me, there is absolutely no limit to what people will do. We’ve tried bondage and mild discipline once or twice, not because it’s that much of a kick for us but because we can get with it once in a while as a novelty. Well, that’s tame compared with some of the oddballs on the swinging scene. They’re absolute sadomasochists who practice actual torture on one another. I’m not exaggerating. They burn each other with cigarettes, they beat each other unconscious, they lacerate each other—

  SHEILA: It seems incredible. No matter how sophisticated you are, you can’t really believe these people exist. But they do.

  JWW: I’ve interviewed a few. The whole pattern of their conversation is weird. I’ll admit I have trouble establishing any kind of rapport with them.

  PAUL: Of course a large percentage of them must be literally insane.

  JWW: That’s probably true.

  PAUL: You never know what to believe, but some friends of ours who aren’t given to bandying rumors about have told us that they’ve heard of deaths occurring during sadomasochistic torture. Some maniac gets carried away at a club meeting, and instead of just lashing some girl with his whip he wraps it around
her neck and she strangles. Something like that. Of course the group hushes it up and you never hear any more about it. As I said, I don’t have anything approaching firsthand evidence, but I can believe it. I know what some of these nuts are like.

  SHEILA: If they just whipped each other, I’d say fine, let them enjoy themselves, and at least it keeps them off the streets. God knows Paul and I are the last people to believe in imposing rules on other people. But some of these lunatics—I have to call them lunatics—some of them get their kicks by torturing people who don’t go for that sort of thing at all.

  PAUL: In the early days, we several times met with people who wanted to work some variation of the discipline routine, but who hadn’t mentioned this in their correspondence. Fortunately none of them tried force. We know of one couple, though, who were horribly mistreated. They were swingers, but strictly limited to straight sex, you know, and they met this one couple and had a fine, normal evening and were invited to spend the following weekend with some friends of the other couple for what they thought would be more of the same. Well, it turned out that it was all a careful plot to have these people as torture victims. They went to the house as arranged, and right out of the blue they were overpowered and stripped and beaten and forced to perform various acts. I won’t go into details, I don’t want to, but let’s just say that they endured three hours of pain and humiliation and were then told that they had better not go to the authorities or they would be killed. Besides, how could they go to the police? They couldn’t confess that they were swappers, could they?

  JWW: From my own studies, this sort of thing happens more often than the average person would suspect.