The Repression of Swingers Part 3

The Repression of Swingers in Early 21st Century Britain
Mark Roberts
Sociological Notes No. 28
ISSN 0267-7113, ISBN 1 85637 591 9

3 SWINGERS AND THE PRESS
3.1 Mahmood music
The News of the World, a racy Sunday tabloid, has for over half a century made a name for itself as Britain’s foremost violator of sexual privacy. Other tabloids do it but even when they do, the public thinks of it as News of the World-type journalism. Thus, colloquially, it is called the ‘News of the Screws’.
Here is just one example of its coverage of swingers.
In June 2002 the News of the World exposed a man who had held a sex party in his house.149 He had advertised for partygoers on the internet and that, ‘investigative reporter’ Mazher Mahmood crowed, “was his one crucial flaw”. Why it was illegitimate or illegal to do this is not explained, although it is clear that this is how he drew Mahmood’s malevolent attention.
There are four justifications that can be inferred from Mahmood’s report of this private event. The first might be called the Class War Opening. The victim’s wealth is laboured and exaggerated. The paper
“infiltrated a debauched millionaire’s wife-swapping club held amid priceless works of art in a magnificent Home Counties mansion.”
The host was “a multi-millionaire tycoon.” His guests had to
“demonstrate either wealth or social standing…or bring a stunning woman prepared to indulge in group sex, lesbian and bisexual sex.”
Thus the victim is identified as someone other, someone who is not one of us. We’re not picking on an ordinary joe like you, Mahmood is telling his readers, this guy’s a toff who thinks he can get away with things we can’t. He thinks he’s above the rules, he needs to be brought down a peg or two, he has it coming because he’s a bumptious upper-class twit. Therefore, in some way, it’s OK for us – on behalf of you, the public – to confidence trick entry to his house, steal photographs to print in a 3,000,000 circulation newspaper and hold his private doings at home up to public ridicule.
The second justification we can infer is a faux-moral disapproval – there was much “depravity”, people’s bodies were “pawed”, the host was “debauched”. Tabloid newspaper journalists are now just about the only people in the country that pretend the ‘traditional’ pattern of sexual behaviour150 is the social norm. The Royal Family has affairs, divorces, cohabits; the Church reaches out to gays, unmarried parents, the divorced and cohabitees. Very few people born in the last half century do not have some episode in their sexual past that they would prefer not to see in the Sunday newspapers. But for the News of the World, any sex that’s not between a married couple, under the sheets, at night, in the missionary position and quiet is a potential focus for pantomime outrage – and a possible justification for dishonestly worming their way into an individual’s confidence with the intention of traducing him or her in print.
Obviously this well-worn routine is hypocritical in that nobody who works at the NOTW lives in the way they pretend everyone else should. The real point however is that it is juvenile, cruel, ethically indefensible and calculatedly dishonest perhaps to the point of criminality.
The third self-justification is the ‘Masonic Gambit’.
“The contacts made at these parties effectively extended the group’s sphere of influence through the business world.”
This hint of skulduggery and supposedly Masonic-type behind-the-scenes influence in high places is of course ludicrous, given the subject is an ad hoc group of people wanting to have sex. It is presumably included to imply that there is a ‘public interest’ justification for the article rather more substantial than “He’s a toff. We’re jealous. Let’s get him!”
Finally we have the suggestion of illegality:
“Our dossier, including video evidence, is available to the authorities.”
Thus we are expected to accept that the ambiguity of the law justifies the stripping of any degree of privacy and dignity from a citizen and his guests in his own home.
3.2 The case of Dougie Smith
At the end of May 2003, the July edition of men’s style magazine Arena was published including a long and detailed article about a visit to a party thrown by my own swinging organisation, Fever.151 Along with descriptions of what went on that night and his reactions to it, the journalist extensively quoted “Dougie”.
Three weeks later the Sunday Times,152 the country’s premier multi-sectioned Sunday broadsheet, ran a number of articles about Fever including a front page story in which Dougie Smith (for it was he), the employee of a Conservative-aligned think-tank, announced that he was one of the organisers. The NOTW ran a small half-column report drawn from the Sunday Times. The Daily Record, the main downmarket Scottish tabloid, ran a follow-on story on Monday. Later in the week the Spectator ran the story on its cover, the Sunday Express and Manchester Evening News ran full pages while the Daily Mail gave it two.
Interestingly there was no follow-on story from the NOTW, despite the heady attraction of sex and politics. Dougie Smith has confessed what he does in his private life, despite his political role. Arena has published lurid accounts of what happens at Mr Smith’s parties and these have been echoed in the mid-market press (and The Spectator). The authorities to which Mazher Mahmood offers so many dossiers are in full possession of the facts. What ‘public interest’ justification now remains for these known quantities to be discovered again by one of the NOTW’s undercover reporters? It remains to be seen.
3.3 Press, privacy and the law
I doubt that Mahmood and his newspaper have an anti-swinging agenda, despite the Lady Bracknell imitations they ham up whenever they report it. After all, why would they want to kill the goose that lays the golden egg?
A survey of his output in 2002 shows that Mahmood produced around 17 stories, only two of which were exposés of swingers.153 No stories independently bylined to his sidekick Conrad Brown exposed swingers. Looking at the litany of petty crime revealed by most of Mahmood’s output, I believe the most likely explanation is that he goes after swingers (which after all is so easy) on slow news months or while waiting for more serious investigations to bear fruit. In other words, it is a cynically utilitarian approach to space filling in the paper that motivates Mahmood and the News of the World, one that all but acknowledges by their infrequency that stories about swingers are the bottom draw of investigative journalism.
This of course in no way mitigates the horrific consequences for individual swingers when Mahmood has nothing better to offer his masters in Wapping that month and casually decides to destroy their lives. In January 2002 he exposed a couple living in rural Cambridgeshire because they ran a swingers club – the female partner was a teacher in a local school. At the end of this story too he public-spiritedly offered his dossier to the authorities.
One ‘solution’ posited to the problem of media malice against swingers is a privacy law. There are arguments for that and not just for these reasons. However, that would be introducing a law to curtail the effects of earlier laws. While the state maintains laws that can and are easily construed by the police and the courts to mean swinging is illegal, it is difficult to blame the press for going along with the pantomime if it nets them an easy and salacious story now and again. It is an amoral approach but the press is taking its lead from our elected government, which in turn is taking an oppressive approach.
If, as in other countries, swinging was legal, swinging clubs existed across the country to match demand and most people knew someone who admitted to visiting them, the marketability of NOTW-type stories would wither on the vine.

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