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

  Some Questions and Answers, Pertinent and Impertinent

  SHEILA GORDON

  Are you glad you started swinging?

  That’s a tricky question. An awfully tricky question, because when you ask a person if he’s glad about something that happened to him a long time ago and that has set a whole pattern of his life since then, it’s the equivalent of asking him if he likes his life, his present situation. Because obviously I can’t imagine what my life now would be like if Paul and I had never started, so if I say I’m glad it means I think what we have now is better than we would possibly have had otherwise. And vice versa.

  Yes, I’m glad we started.

  Especially when I look at people who didn’t. I’ve read that swingers typify the overemphasis of sex in American culture, that swingers are people who are obsessed with sex. Well, you can’t really argue with that, can you? We’re all of us obviously obsessed with sex.

  But so is everybody else. Everybody. The whole fucking culture, the civilization, is obsessed with sex. Everything everybody reads or writes or says or does. The advertisements, Madison Avenue. Mouthwash commercials that just keep telling you that if you use their product nobody will know you like to suck. I’m sorry, this is awful, I’m being crude . . .

  Everybody is obsessed with sex, as if there’s nothing else in the world to think about. And the swingers are at least doing all the things that everybody else wants to do. We may be disgusting from time to time, and I feel we are, but we’re more honest than the rest of the world, and I do regard honesty as a virtue. A painful one, but a virtue all the same, and we’re not that long on virtues, are we?

  I’m glad we started.

  Do you think swinging is a permanent part of American culture?

  This is something swingers talk about frequently. And it’s a popular parlor game to speculate on the number of swinging couples in the country. The books estimate as high as ten million couples, or ten percent of the population. But I can’t even think in those terms, and I understand the estimates have no statistical validity.

  I do know the practice is spreading. People drop out, some of them stay out, but new people start in at a faster rate. And I can’t see any reason why the trend should shift.

  In a way, I think swinging is a part of a broader cultural trend. More than just sex. Increasing use of drugs, increasing rejection of all the old values. That’s the direction we’re all going, and I suppose someday it has to stop, but if the end is in sight I can’t see that far.

  Do you think it will always be a part of your life?

  Yes.

  I didn’t used to think so. I always thought that the idea of a couple of people in their sixties having a swap orgy was just too silly to think about. But then I remembered when I was a teen-ager and I couldn’t believe that married people actually made love after they were thirty or so.

  In time we may have trouble finding people willing to swing with us. You know, I think that might be the charm that would bring on a third and final suicide attempt.

  Let’s talk about something else.

  Would you want your children to become swingers?

  God, where did you get these questions?

  That’s so impossible to answer. They’re so young, and to look at them now and try to answer that question, well, of course it’s impossible. And of course I’ve asked myself the same question, of course I have, maybe a hundred times or more, and if you think that makes it the slightest damn bit easier to answer—

  Of course they don’t even know—I was going to say they don’t even know anything about sex at their ages, but I know that’s not true. They know more than I did at their age, I’m sure. But they don’t know about us, about swinging.

  There’s always that fear, you know, that you’ll be banging some stranger on the living room floor and one of the kids will wander in sleepy-eyed looking for a glass of water. It’s happened to people we know, and we’ve heard stories . . . Some of the time I think it’s a case of people wanting to get caught, like a husband committing adultery and wanting to be found out. But that’s one of the big what-ifs swingers flash on. What if the kids walk in, that’s one; and the other is, what if we answer an ad and it turns out to be your parents, or the minister and his wife, or whatever your particular trip may be . . .

  I wouldn’t want them to be swingers now, or at any time during their childhood. And when they’re older, when they’re old enough to make that decision for themselves, when they’re married, that is, then whether or not I would want it would not enter into it. I would have no right to want it or not want it. I would have no right to have my opinion.

  But that’s copping out, isn’t it?

  Shit.

  Okay. I would want them to swing if that was what they wanted. I would want them to follow their own instincts, and if they wanted to swap, to swing, I would rather they did that than that they repressed it.

  I would prefer not to know about it, however.

  And I don’t care if that’s logical or not.

  • • •

  PAUL GORDON

  Are you glad you started swinging?

  Today? Yes, definitely, one hundred percent.

  Because today I feel good, I feel positive. When things get to me I have a tendency to blame it all on the kind of life we lead. I suppose that’s natural enough. “Look, it’s raining, all because we became wife-swappers.” That sort of thing.

  All in all, given the kind of people we are, I’m sure our lives and our marriage are better off now than they would be if we stayed faithful to each other or if we cheated on the side.

  Do you think swinging is a permanent part of American culture?

  I’m not even certain that there’s anything very permanent about American culture itself. Or about the world. Even if everything doesn’t go boom one of these days—and I’m very much afraid it will—but even if it doesn’t, I don’t really think the world will last out the century. If it isn’t the famine it’ll be the pollution. One thing or another. I don’t hold out much possibility of things working out. So in that sense I think swinging will last as long as the world does, because it’s certainly not going to die out in the next thirty or forty years.

  More people do it every day. No one has any idea of the number, the figures you read are just wild guesses. What would numbers mean, anyway? They wouldn’t give a true picture, because as important as the numerical aspect is the nature of the people involved, their relative influence in the makeup of society.

  It’s not just American society, either. I think there’s probably a higher percentage of swingers in Canada, and I know there are a lot of them in England and France and Germany and other Western European countries.

  I can’t believe it will go away. Aside from all the arguments about the direction society is taking, more liberal and permissive and all, can you name me one single instance of a human vice dying out? Or even diminishing in number? When people learn a vice they don’t let go of it. Drinking, smoking, drugs, everything.

  Do you think it will always be a part of your life?

  I don’t know.

  I think there probably comes a time when it completely loses its thrill. This is pure guesswork, but I would think it would happen with age, that a person looks for his kicks in different areas.

  I’m not sure whether I hope that’s the case or not. Sometimes yes, sometimes no, I guess.

  Like everybody else, I hope I’ll be able to have sex forever, one way or the other. You know the old line, the toast: “May you live as long as you want to and may you want to as long as you live.” I guess everyone dreads the idea of losing his potency.

  I wonder if I’ll want younger women when I get old.

  Probably. Everybody seems to.

  Would you want your children to become swingers?

  First they’ll have to marry Negroes. Then we’ll see.

  The End

  About the Authors

  Lawrence Block has been writing
best-selling mystery and suspense fiction for half a century. A multiple recipient of the Edgar and Shamus awards, he has been designated a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, and received the Diamond Dagger for Life Achievement from the UK’s Crime Writers Association. His most recent novels are A Drop Of The Hard Stuff, featuring Matthew Scudder, and Getting Off, starring a very naughty young woman. Several of his books have been filmed, although not terribly well. He's well known for his books for writers, including the classic Telling Lies For Fun & Profit, and The Liar's Bible. In addition to prose works, he has written episodic television: Tilt! and the Wong Kar-wai film, My Blueberry Nights. He is a modest and humble fellow, although you would never guess as much from this biographical note.

  John Warren Wells emerged in the mid-1960s as a writer of sexological nonfiction, and produced twenty books in the ensuing decade. His works, in the main, consist of compilations of case histories selected to illuminate a particular theme, and topics range from female bisexuality (Women Who Swing Both Ways) and troilism (Three is Not a Crowd) to the evolving lifestyles of a decade of sexual liberation (The New Sexual Underground and Wide Open: The New Marriage). His groundbreaking work, Tricks of the Trade: A Hooker’s Handbook of Sexual Technique, was especially successful, and may have inspired Xaviera Hollander to write The Happy Hooker.

  One particularly noteworthy book, Different Strokes, consists of his screenplay and production diary for the pornographic feature film of that name, which he seems to have written and directed, in addition to playing a key role. His column, “Letters to John Warren Wells,” was a popular feature in Swank Magazine. The dedications of several books would seem to indicate that Wells carried on an extensive on-again, off-again relationship with Jill Emerson, herself the author of Threesome, A Week as Andrea Benstock, and, more recently, Getting Off. All of JWW’s books have been out of print for thirty-five years; that they are now available to a new generation of readers may be attributed to the technological miracle of eBooks and the apparently limitless ego and avarice of their author.

  Contact Lawrence Block:

  Email: [email protected]

  Blog: LB’s Blog

  Facebook: LB's Facebook Fan Page

  Website: www.lawrenceblock.com

  Twitter: @LawrenceBlock

  * * *

  John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior Ebooks

  3 Is Not A Crowd

  Beyond Group Sex: The New Sexual Life Styles

  Come Fly With Us

  Different Strokes: Or, How I (Gulp) Wrote, Directed & Starred in an X-Rated Movie

  Doing It!

  Eros and Capricorn

  The Male Hustler

  Older Women and Younger Men: The Mrs. Robinson Syndrome

  Sex and the Stewardess

  The Sex Therapists

  Sex Without Strings

  The New Sexual Underground

  The Taboo Breakers

  Tricks of the Trade: A Hooker’s Handbook of Sexual Technique

  Versatile Ladies: Women Who Swing Both Ways

  Wide Open: The New Marriage

  The Wife-Swap Report

  Wide Open: The New Marriage

  John Warren Wells

  Lawrence Block

  * * *

  copyright © 1973, 2012, Lawrence Block

  All Rights Reserved

  Introduction

  “May you live in interesting times.”

  The Chinese pronounce that line as a curse. In that sense, we’re all of us accursed, for our times are almost too interesting to be endured. The world is in the midst of an extraordinary period of social change, and the speed of that change gets more and more blinding. No aspect of human life remains untouched.

  It is hardly surprising, then, that the institution of marriage as traditionally structured has proved inadequate to a greater or lesser degree for a substantial proportion of the population. One result has been a surge of interest in diverse ways in which the fundamental idea of marriage can be adapted to meet present needs. Various forms of consensual adultery and plural marriage have begun to evolve. It is with these new marital life styles that this book is concerned.

  An introduction is a curious thing, written after the text of the book it is to precede. I had originally intended this introduction to contain some general remarks on marriage, and now I find myself more inclined to let the following chapters make their own inferential points in that area. I suspect that a book should be introduced to a reader much as two strangers are introduced at a cocktail party. The host brings them together, mumbles something brief and insubstantial, and then leaves the two to work things out on their own. I’ll do as little mumbling as possible.

  • • •

  The theme of Wide Open called for a departure from my usual form. In the other books I’ve written, case histories were examined one to a chapter, with the objective of revealing individual lives and personalities to the reader as fully as possible. Here, however, our interest is less in specific individuals than in the ways they have come to grips with the traditional monogamous marriage. Thus, each chapter examines not one but several cases, and is supplemented by brief quotes from other interview subjects and capsule summaries of other examples.

  All of the names of persons discussed in the pages to follow have been deliberately altered, as have all features which might tend to facilitate identification of them. And let me say that it has been a strain coming up with different names all the way through, and trying to remember which ones I’ve already used.

  • • •

  Finally, a word of apology. I kept having the feeling while writing this book that I was typing the word “relationship” an average of three times to the page. I have since proofread the text and must revise the estimate upward. It’s not a favorite word of mine to begin with, and the most annoying thing about it is its indispensability. If it gets on your nerves, cropping up so persistently, I’m sorry.

  John Warren Wells

  New York City

  April, 1973

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