The Repression of Swingers Part 4

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

4 ANTI-SWINGERS AND THEIR ARGUMENTS

4.1 Bigots ‘R’ Us

In the UK there is currently only one group in civil society that is ‘on a mission’ against swingers.

Formerly the National Marriage Guidance Council, Relate helps troubled partnerships by teaching the virtues of commitment and communication. It says it counsels anyone, including gays and lesbians. It recognises the importance of sex in relationships and provides an apparently effective psychosexual therapy service. The support it receives from the Army Benevolent Fund, the Army Central Fund and the RAF Benevolent Fund are presumably testament to the good work it is perceived to do among armed forces personnel.

Unfortunately for an otherwise laudable organisation, Relate condemns swinging wherever it is given an opportunity. Its spokeswomen absolutely will not countenance that any good can ever, in any circumstances, come from two people in a relationship exploring their sexuality in the context of another human being.

Relate has used its good standing to frighten people – young women particularly – out of pursuing potentially enjoyable or even beneficial sexual experiences that do not conform to its ideology (two people alone in a committed long-term relationship). Its spokeswomen have done this using shameful techniques that include reciting their own opinions and professional anecdotes as if they are scientific fact, even stooping on occasion to abuse. They have done it without having produced a single scientific paper in support of their views and in the face of contrary findings by the research that really has been done on swinging. And they have done it in a tone that sometimes verges on the hysterical, as readers may judge for themselves from the six case studies below.

Relate denied to me in an email that it has a view on swinging. Since then it has been quoted unambiguously as condemning the opening of a swingers hotel as “disturbing”.The precise extent to which Relate’s spokeswomen are following orders in pathologising swingers is not clear. What is certain is that journalists who go to Relate for an opinion on swingers are furnished with comment that is unscientific, biased and hostile – and for hidden motives.

We will examine cases involving three of Relate’s spokeswomen who between them have been responsible for almost all the public criticism of swingers in the UK in the C21st.
Julia Cole (aka Coles) is a prominent sex therapist and relationship counsellor. One of the media’s most-quoted sex experts, she has been agony aunt of the Sunday Express; Development Director of the Pennell Initiative on Women’s Health; author of several books and many articles on relationships; and expert advisor on a number of websites including the BBC’s and her own, where she sells vibrators designed by herself. Trained by Relate which advertises her vibrators on its website, she remains linked to the organisation and sometimes represents it in the media.

Denise Knowles is a Relate counsellor and psychosexual therapist who has been practising since 1990 and works in Northampton. Another oft-quoted Relate spokeswoman she is an expert adviser on Mumsnet, a parental advice website.

Paula Hall is another psychosexual therapist and relationship counsellor who works for Relate as well as running a private practice. She is part of the Relate national media team.

We shall examine 13 points made by Julia Cole over three media interviews, one by Denise Knowles in a single comment and nine by Paula Hall in two media appearances. For simplicity I have enumerated all the arguments sequentially.

4.2 Julia Cole in Cosmopolitan

In an interview published in the December 2001 edition of Cosmopolitan magazine Julia Cole issued a “warning” to young women against trying swinging. Countering research from the University of California proving that divorce among committed swingers is lower than the norm, Cole anathematised swinging on no fewer than eight counts.

i)    Swinging will ruin your chances of marriage and children

Cole pointed out that, as they get older, young women may “either want to start a family or long for more security with a stable partner”.

True of course, they may, though this sex counsellor seems unaware that not every young woman sees every lover as a potential husband (about 40% of women have had one-night stands and a third of women aged 25-34 have slept with someone whose name they did not know (ICM)). She also discounts the possibility of a stable swinging relationship, whereas swinging is characterised by stable relationships. Why a swinging episode in, say, a woman’s middle twenties would inhibit her achieving either a family or a “more stable” partner if desired in, say, her early thirties is not explained. The implication is that by swinging a woman becomes in some way damaged goods and spoils her future prospects. I have not been able to find any research supporting this contention.

ii) You should grow up and forget sex

Cole maintained that
“the pursuit of sex for its own sake is something people do at a certain stage in life, but often grow out of.”

So is reading The Beano, but that does not make it wrong at the time. Again we can only infer that Cole believes a swinging episode will do a young woman lasting harm in some unspecified (and unresearched) way and that, therefore, it should never be indulge in at all.

In isolation the statement would be a no more than a debatable observation. But that is not how Cole intends it. She is implying that pursuing sex is immature, even abnormal. Note the redefinition of sex as “sex for its own sake”.

“For its own sake” is a phrase used only in disparagement. Think of ‘cruelty for its own sake’, ‘killing for its own sake’. We can perhaps envisage these things might rarely, unfortunately, be necessary for a higher purpose. But for their own sake they are bestial, immoral, inhuman. Getting drunk for its own sake betokens someone who is at best socially dysfunctional, whereas everyone empathises with people getting merry for an understandable reason, such as celebrating some good fortune or one of life’s milestones. Much of the opposition to hunting hinges on the belief that huntsmen don’t need the quarry for food but enjoy the hunt ‘for its own sake’.

It appears that the only sex that Cole approves of is sex as a consequence of a loving relationship. Sex ‘for its own sake’ i.e. recreational sex, sex because it is fun, what most people just call ‘sex’, is something that Cole seems not to approve. Hence we begin to see that it is not just swinging to which Cole objects, it is any sex preceding a committed relationship. Strangely for a sex therapist there is no recognition that good sex can help create a committed relationship. Strange, because this is surely the way it happens for most couples?

In fact, of course, sex – irrespective of love – is a human need in the same way that love and affection are human needs. Not absolutely essential for physical health but very important for mental health and happiness. By demonising it in this way Cole seeks to frighten young women from following their harmless inclinations and to bring society into conformity with her ideology.

Parenthetically, given the levels of promiscuity among young people, the affairs endemic to the married state, the sexual revival associated with mid-life crises and the prevalence in swingers circles of long-married couples whose children have left home, one wonders to which “certain age” Cole is referring.

iii) If you want sex, there’s something wrong with you

Cole asserted that

“Those who don’t [grow out of the pursuit of sex for its own sake] may have issues over intimacy.”

Subliminally, Cole is telling women that if they or their boyfriends want to swing they are freaks. However, as with the last point this one applies to all recreational sex – from a one night stand through to regular sex with someone you don’t yet plan to marry.

Of course it is possible that among the individuals whose sex drives do not abate when they hit marriage or 30 there may be some who have emotional problems. But are the two conditions necessarily connected? Is sex-seeking a reliable indicator of mental disorder? Do sex-seeking and avoidance of intimacy characterise each other? Does swinging when you are younger increase the chances you will develop “issues over intimacy” when you are older?

The answers are no. Practically the whole unmarried male population and a large percentage of the unmarried female population are sex-seekers. Most of those whose primary goal is a committed relationship are often happy to settle for sex in the meantime. Some of those who seek a committed relationship do so because it is their preferred way of achieving sex, rather than with the intention of marrying their next long-term partner. Clearly such a huge proportion of the human race cannot be abnormal. And as for swinging spoiling your ability to form close emotional bonds, this simply contradicts the scientific evidence available to date.

iv) One partner is always being selfishly manipulated by the other

Cole ventured that during her counselling of swinging partners it often becomes apparent

“after a little digging”

That one partner is less enamoured than the other with the practice”.

It would be interesting to discover how many monogamous marriages would pass this test.

Let us leave aside (a) the possibility that Cole is getting the answer she is looking for after a bit of prompting. (b) the fact that “less enamoured” does not mean “against”. (c) that Cole’s claim is unverifiable given she has not authored a paper based on her research notes (immaculately documented though they no doubt are). (d) that Cole is in any case uncertain of her data, using imprecise terminology such as “often” instead of specifics. (e) that two individuals are always likely to have a slightly different perspective on any joint activity as they are not one organism.

The core problem with this statement is in fact the blatant partiality of the data. Only couples with problems in their relationship go to a counsellor. Cole’s sample consists only of self-selecting troubled relationships. No account is taken of the numberless swingers who do not go to counsellors. To draw any general conclusions from such a patently skewed sample is not only completely unscientific, it is against common sense.

Cole offers no reason to believe the swingers with troubled relationships who seek her professional help are any more representative of swingers as a group than her other clients typify non-swingers. Yet we do not hear Cole warning people about monogamy or marriage.

To illustrate how generally off-beam is Cole’s supposition that manipulation within couples accounts for female participation in swinging, it is instructive to refer to the research on female bisexuality among swingers. Female bisexuality is extremely prevalent among swingers. It is an area where the question legitimately arises of whether female swingers are acting entirely of their own choice or subject to pressure from partners who want to have sex with them and another woman, or who would be stimulated by seeing them with another woman.

The research on female bisexuality among swingers is by Dr Joan Dixon and was undertaken in 1984 from a sample of 50 women. All had experienced their earliest female-female sex experience after the age of 30 and while swinging. None had even fantasised about women before their first experience.

“Her study found that ‘the generally positive reactions of these subjects to their first sexual experience with other females after a lifetime of strict heterosexuality … progressed through repeated experience to an overwhelming general rating of excellent,’ that the ‘percentage of those whose masturbatory fantasies at times included other females as erotic sex objects rose from 4.5% to 61%,” and that every one of the women in her study now self-identified as bisexual.”

The explanation for this may lie in research conducted by Northwestern University (USA) in 2003 which suggested that although men tend to be straightforwardly either gay or straight, heterosexual women are capable of sexual arousal by either sex – in other words, women tend generally to be latently bisexual. Obviously the matter needs further study but Northwestern’s research does further indicate that bisexuality among female swingers is not a product of male manipulation.

v) Meeting people through the Internet is dangerous

Cole cited
“the dangers of meeting people over the internet.”

To a single teenage girl this would be wise advice. To a couple of adults it is extraordinarily patronising. No research justifies the imputation that swingers’ assignations arranged through the Internet carry a risk of violence. Cole ignores the fact that a middle-class couple meeting another middle-class couple is the typical non-party swinging scenario. Instead she leads her female readers to believe that if they become swingers there is a chance they could end up like Suzy Lamplugh.

vi) Swinging will give you an STD even if you practice safe sex

Cole also warned about

“issues of sexually transmitted diseases – even for those who practice safe sex”.

In one sense Cole has at last stumbled on a serious issue. The danger of spreading STDs will occur to everyone as a potential risk of recreational sex. In another sense, in claiming that STDs somehow vault prophylactics during swinging sex more than at other times Cole reduces her argument to farce.

There has only been one instance of HIV transmission related to swinging. It was in a Minneapolis swingers club in 1986 i.e. before AIDS was considered a problem for heterosexuals and before safe sex and universal condom use among swingers. All club members were tested for HIV and two female members were found to be positive. They had both repeatedly had unprotected anal sex with two bisexual men whose HIV status could not be determined later. Neither woman had subsequently infected any of their other sexual partners.

As Plumley said in his 1994 paper to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, swingers

“provide in effect a made-to-order laboratory for the study of transmission of HIV through multiple sexual partnerships and unprotected sex. If in fact the swinging lifestyle did present an “increased risk” of HIV infection, by now there would have been many cases of HIV and AIDS among the various swing clubs (or, more likely, the clubs would have closed up because of the unacceptability of the high risk).”

Agreeing that he had expected to find more evidence of infection, Plumley was forced to concede:

“Yet the facts are to the contrary. Robert McGinley, President of the North American Swing Club Association, is quoted…as stating categorically that “as far as we can tell, no person has ever contracted AIDS through heterosexual [i.e., penile-vaginal] swinging in North America”. His statement appears to be correct. This author has been unable to find any data which contradicts his statement or suggests anything to the contrary”.

Of course there are STDs other than AIDS. Sexologist Ted McIllvena, President of the Institute of Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco, had studied swingers for 16 years and compiled sex histories of 6,000 of them when he said in 1999:

“I’m still amazed at how few women in the swinging lifestyle have any STDs at all.”

McIlvenna is not a swinger himself. He is in fact a Methodist clergyman.

Plumley asked “How can this be?” given the relatively large number of casual partners with whom swingers had (at that time) unprotected sex. He suggested the answer lay in the ethics of swinging and the type of people involved. Usually middle-aged and middle class,

“they tend to be a generally healthier group than those most susceptible to HIV and AIDS.”

He went on:

“Because swingers are potentially vulnerable to the spread of the more contagious STDs, they are careful to watch for the symptoms of any STDs, and to take appropriate steps to correct any problems as quickly as possible, on those rare occasions when they occur.”

He also thought that swingers did not want their clubs to become the focus of public health concerns because that would provoke the authorities into shutting them down. They therefore exclude drug-users and prohibit the abuse of drugs at their events. This is easily corroborated by the number of swingers websites that carry messages about drugs and how to avoid STDs. Many American swingers clubs even exclude alcohol. Swinging is not in fact identified as a public health hazard in any country, including those where it is very popular, for example the Netherlands where there are half as many clubs as in the whole of France.

It is fair to examine swinging with a view to STD risk and instructive that all available evidence gives the lifestyle, as it is practised internationally today, a clean bill of health. Obviously, were practices within swinging to change then this conclusion might need to be reviewed.

However, Cole went further than this in her challenge on the subject. She asserted that safe sex will not protect couples from infection. The evidence, as we have seen, is that it does, at least to a high enough level of probability. Nevertheless, Cole plays on the fact that risk can never be reduced to zero and also treats STDs with excessive gravity, as if they are all terminal. What she is saying is that any sex outside a long-term mutually monogamous relationship carries a risk of infection greater than zero – and that any risk is too great a risk.

This is not a sensible strategy for dealing with the risks inherent in every aspect of daily life191 and not an approach she advocates in other areas, for example, the risk of drowning in swimming pools. It does not appear that Cole is drawing her conclusion from the evidence in a rational and scientific way. Rather it seems that the significance of the risk is being overplayed in order to justify a conclusion (don’t swing) reached for other reasons. Young women used to be frightened off pre-marital sex by being told that malicious people stuck pin-holes through the ends of condoms before they were sold. Cole is deploying a comparable old-wives’ tale against swingers.

vii) Your partner will leave you for another swinger

For only the second time, Cole touches on a legitimate concern that will occur to every couple considering swinging.

“it has been shown through research that it’s difficult for humans to separate sex and emotion. As a result, in some cases, it is possible for either spouse to become emotionally involved with a swinging partner and could feel the need to meet that person in secret – in other words start an actual affair.”

In fact research shows that swinging relationships are more durable than non-swinging ones. As they have no scientific refutations of research showing the benefits of swinging, it is common for anti-sex advocates to cite research on general sexuality instead and to extrapolate the findings as if they were iron laws. Here Cole cites the broadest possible conclusion to whatever research is being quoted, without giving us the percentage breakdowns. We can be certain that it was not 100% who said they cannot ever separate love and sex, yet Cole implies differing from the majority is bound to lead to disaster.

Of course there is a very marked tendency among humans to develop affection for people with whom they regularly have sex, even if they didn’t have such feelings before the sexual relationship developed. Given that, it is remarkable how many instances there are in life of the exact reverse, of people having casual sex, one night stands, using people while their true affections lie elsewhere or indeed while they are waiting to find a truer affection – as well as people having enjoyable recreational sex on a mutually agreed, non-emotional basis, as happens in swinging.

It is impossible to believe there are sentient adults in the UK who do not know it is possible for at least some people to have sex with A while loving B more, or to have sex with A while loving nobody. The prostitution industry that has been endemic to humanity since the beginning of time is predicated upon this simple fact.

So sociologically there is nothing extraordinary at all about swingers continuing to love their partners while ‘playing’ with other people. The difference is that swingers do it with the knowledge and permission and in the presence of their partner. How this can be a moral reverse from the usual pattern of the cheating husband, wife or partner is not self-evident.

It is often starvation of sexual variety that motivates affairs, despite other aspects of a relationship being happy. This is the great danger that swinging removes from relationships. A partner who hungers after experiences denied to him or her for years is far more likely to stray in this way than a partner who knows she or he can have what they like the next time they swing with their partner. As motivational guru Stephen R Covey epigrammizes in his seminal work The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,

“This is one of the greatest insights in the field of human motivation: Satisfied needs do not motivate”

Anecdotally, this is corroborated by the reporter who wrote in Arena magazine (July 2003) about his visit to a Fever party.

“Far from the event germinating mistrust or hurt, my feelings for Ms Arena [his girlfriend] have never been better. I am hugely proud of the beautiful, sophisticated and adventurous woman who was by my side. I am cleansed of any jealousy and laugh at the though of myself ever being compelled to be “unfaithful”…I have completely ceased letching at other girls in bars..”

He also approvingly quotes Dougie Smith as saying

“You don’t stand there staring at a sandwich when you know you’ve got a gourmet meal coming.”

The accusation that swinging makes affairs more likely is also borne of ignorance, not just of the research, but of the dynamics of swinging. Most two on two encounters are arranged in their details by the male partners. Contacting a person of the opposite sex from another swinging couple would be awkward and entail a high risk of discovery or failure. Couples who meet in swingers clubs often never know each others names let alone exchange contact details.

More than this, there is a strong ethic across swinging forbidding this behaviour – stronger, in fact, than the taboo against it among non-swingers, where such things are often treated with indulgence by third parties.

viii) A swinging relationship isn’t worth having

“The idea of swinging paints a false picture of what sex within a relationship is all about. If a person isn’t satisfied by their partner, they should work together to improve their sex life. Or perhaps they should just concede that they aren’t suited – and move on…”

In this extraordinary quotation, more than any other, Cole gives her game away. She is conceited enough to pronounce on “what sex within a relationship is all about”, to define the purpose of sex for everyone. There is no conception that a different model may work better for some people, for even a part of their lives. Sex for Cole must have exactly the same function in every relationship, and that is as a concomitant by-product of a long-term committed relationship and not as a human need or enjoyable exercise “for its own sake”.

Cole misdefines the need for sexual variety as dissatisfaction with a partner – a dichotomy as false as rejecting tea forever because one fancies coffee occasionally. She prescribes what she believes to be the sole permissible way of dealing with the ‘problem’.

But most of all she says that if you cannot comply with her rules, you should split up. No individual route to happiness, no bending of the model rules can be considered. Better in her view to be single, lonely, even to have ditched the love of your life than to have found bliss together in a sexually unorthodox way. Bliss, in Cole’s view, can ONLY be found through orthodoxy. Bliss, perhaps, IS Orthodoxy for Cole. She thinks like a character from the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s 1984.

4.3 Julia Cole in The Daily Telegraph

When a hotel at the French ski resort of Verbier decided to offer its chalets to swingers in December 2002, The Daily Telegraph reported:

“Relate, formerly the National Marriage Guidance Council, said the concept was disturbing. Julia Cole, a counsellor, said: “People often imagine this is just a bit of fun but it can cause a great deal of damage.

“I have met many couples who have taken part in this sort of thing and very often it causes tremendous unhappiness, guilt, and feelings that the relationship will not survive, which often it doesn’t.”

From this the general reader is intended to infer that Cole knows what she is talking about, and that swinging causes misery and relationship break up too often to be risked. Cole is exaggerating her credibility as an authority as well as projecting the opposite of the truth about swingers.

One wonders wearily how many swinging couples Cole has in fact discussed the issue with and what statistically valid (but unpublished) analysis she possesses which shows the consequences of swinging are “very often” so negative. Unless she cruises swinging clubs herself, the swingers she has met – however many or few that is, and we are not told – will be those who have come to her for help, the self-selecting sample we encountered earlier. To presume to give people ‘authoritative’ advice on how to live their lives using this as a reference base is not just unprofessional, it is charlatanism.

ix) Swinging will split you up

Cole asserts that swingers’ relationships often don’t survive. In fact they are longer lasting than non-swinging partnerships. There is simply no research that concludes to the contrary. Swingers’ clubs are full to bursting point all over the western world every Saturday night and it is implausible to argue that these are always predominantly new swingers, the old ones having split up. If this was the case the ‘Lifestyle’ would have died out as a subculture.

As we have already seen, the latest research points to significant unhappiness caused by the lifestyle in a maximum of around only 6% of swinging relationships (and it may be as low as 2%). The unhappiness rate for conventional marriages is at least double that (one in five wives and one in seven husbands wished they could wake up one morning and not be married any more (MORI)). Even if we assumed all the couples in this 6% eventually split, that rate of relationship failure compares well with the failure rate for first-marriages, currently 70% and at a 20 year low!

If we take a median figure for swingers relationships breaking up of 4%, this average would make swingers relationships 320% more durable than first marriages (i.e. a 96% as against a 30% survival rate). Taking into account that 100% of monogamous relationships that do not end in marriage (or cohabitation) end in failure, relationship breakdown can be said to be broadly speaking a monogamous phenomenon.

4.4 Julia Cole on Emotionalbliss.com

On 12 February 2003 my colleague Carl Morgan wrote to Julia Cole via the message board on her vibrator-sales website Emotionalbliss.com. At the time of writing the full exchange could still be read there.
Carl outlined various ways that swinging can help relationships, confirmed this from the experience of our own group and ended with a plea for tolerance:

“The conventional monogamous ideal will doubtless remain the most appropriate form of relationship for most couples. However, can you not accept that some people need to bend the model rules to find happiness and that it is good that they should do so? We feel that to deny this would be to ignore the evidence of hundreds of thousands of couples throughout the English-speaking world and Europe.”

On 17 February Cole replied that she did not agree. Her experience led her to believe swinging

“has the potential to be harmful”

and she cited four reasons. Though she did not have the courage of her convictions to assert a high likelihood of ‘harm’ from swinging (no research again), she was only interested in talking about the ‘harm’ that it may do. Note the weasel word “harm”, conflating connotations of physical and mental injury with, in reality and at worst, the discovery of deep sexual incompatibilities in a relationship.

x) Swinging will stop you having orgasms

“I have seen many men who suffer from erectile dysfunction and women with orgasm problems due to involvement in swinging. They described feeling that they were involved in a ‘sex olympics’ fearing that they would not live up to the standards of the group. Instead of sex being a loving expression of feeling, it became a competitive experience.”

It is a pity that Cole will not publish her ‘research’ because the credibility of this claim is thin indeed without scientifically verifiable corroboration. The problem is that to anyone with experience of swinging her story sounds like a guess as to what it is like, made by someone who has never experienced it. So much so that I simply don’t believe Cole is telling the truth when she claims to have seen “many” men and women who have these problems for the reasons she gives.

Swinging is not like a porn film, a genre with which Cole is obviously familiar. No-one is counting the orgasms, timing the lovemaking, measuring the penises or assessing the cubic volume of ejaculate. Penises simply do not have the same central importance in swinging that they have in pornography. Orgies are not like school sports days where everyone is trying to do their hardest for longest.

It is just about believable that somewhere, sometime, some men have been fazed by other men’s performances. It is utterly incredible that a woman could develop a difficulty achieving orgasm because she didn’t come as often or scream as loudly as other women in a swinging scenario.

Step back for a moment and consider the headline impression Cole is giving with this line of argument – swinging stops you coming/makes you impotent – in the context of the impressions she has sought to convey with earlier ploys. According to Cole, so far, swinging stops you getting married, having children and having orgasms; gives you an STD, causes your partner to have an affair despite the impotence it will have inflicted on him, splits you up and gets you murdered.

Taken together the improbably severe litany of personal cataclysms attributed to swinging imparts an indefinable whiff of hysteria to Cole’s case. It reminds me of an episode of Casey Jones and the Cannonball Express in which every piece of wood on the train, seats, floorboards etc.was chopped up and thrown in desperation into the furnace in order to keep the engine going and win a race.

Cole has no scientific backing for her claims, so she has to throw into the debate any argument her imagination can conjure up, however fanciful. Her increasingly dramatic assertions may have some impact on the credulous. However, taken as a whole and viewed in dispassionate perspective – each point being so marginally credible by itself, sometimes contradicting others and always scientifically unproven – each succeeding assertion undermines the credibility of those that have gone before. The whole corpus of Cole’s argument amounts to less than the sum of its parts because although one or two far-fetched hypotheses may turn out to be right, the reader feels his or her intelligence insulted when asked to accept that a dozen will.

Interestingly, in seeing “many” men and women whose ability to orgasm has been destroyed by swinging, Cole may be unique among her peers, according to Relate itself. Relate’s own recent client survey, drawn from the case notes of 200 sexual therapists, showed that in only half of cases seen did the male have a problem and in only a third of these (16.6%) was the problem erectile dysfunction. Overall 50% of cases were medical at root rather than psychological but erectile dysfunction was most likely to be related to medical problems. So we are looking at considerably less than half of 16.6%, perhaps around 4-5%, of men suffering from impotence from all non-physiological reasons – this in turn being from the usual skewed sample that excludes all the unambiguously healthy couples. The percentage of impotent men who contracted their ailment through swinging cannot be anything other than minute, that is if we believe it at all.

How remarkable it is that failed swingers should seek out Cole’s help in such disproportionate numbers while so assiduously avoiding her many professional colleagues!

Research done in 1974 asked therapists in the USA if any of their patients were ex-swingers and if so why they had stopped. The author admits the study is flawed, being only a sample of couples in therapy and reported second hand. However, in this case the fact the subjects were in therapy makes the results more relevant.

The paper found that jealousy was the reason given by 24% of couples in therapy who had failed at swinging; guilt was the reason for 15%; threat to the marriage for 15%; development of outside attachments 12%; boredom with swinging 11%; disappointment with swinging 7%; divorce or separation 6%; wife’s inability to “take it” 6%; fear of discovery 3%.

Remarkably, in precisely 0% of cases were erectile dysfunction or orgasm problems cited. Coles’ case notes may be the only evidence in the world that either has a causal connection with swinging. As such it seriously beholden upon her to publish in the interests of science.

xi) If they say they enjoy it, they are lying

“My experience suggests that members of couples are not equally keen on swinging. One partner may be much more interested than the other, pushing the less keen partner into sexual experiences they do not want. They often fear that if they do not take part, their partner will reject them. Others are told that if they do not join in they do not really love their partner. Most of this kind of manipulation goes on before the couple arrive at the swinging group, so nobody may know about it. If pressed, the unhappy partner may still say they want to join in for fear of losing their partner.”

This is a more trenchant reprise of argument (iv). The twist this time is that even if both partners say they enjoy themselves while swinging, one of them will be lying. How Cole knows this given that both partners are maintaining they have a good time is not explained. We have here the sort of circular argument used by the Spanish Inquisition.

It is perfectly conceivable that a bullying partner may achieve such a psychological grip on an emotionally vulnerable spouse that he/she endures swinging though preferring not to.

Several things can be said about this. First, there is no doubt that if Cole was able to demonstrate that this happened frequently from a scientifically balanced sample it would be significant. But don’t hold your breath.

Second, in the absence of that, research has shown that fewer than 2% of swingers feel their relationship is less happy than before they began swinging and that was the same across both sexes. It cannot be said that the unhappy state of affairs posited by Cole characterises swingers. In fact it is the reverse.

Third, it may be that such a one-sided relationship would be in the process of disintegration anyway. Indeed perhaps ought to be. A swinging episode might help to bring into relief the differences in what the partners want from life. Clearly, if one partner wants group sex and the other does not, that is a fundamental abyss in the relationship that will remain whether they actually practice it or not. The partner who is frustrated can be expected to find outlets for that frustration behind the other partner’s back, whether they are flings, affairs or the use of prostitutes. Swinging might be a catalyst but would not be the source of problems within the relationship.

Fourth, assuming that both partners are fully adult and not mentally defective, it is each person’s own responsibility to extricate themselves from a relationship that goes badly awry – unless of course there is tacit or even explicit domination/submission edge to the bond between the two.

Finally, in some relationships it might be rational for a person who was less keen to go along with swinging if the other partner wanted it so much. Rather than being the result of a power imbalance it might be part of a wider exchange of give and take within the relationship. Even in the scenario Cole paints not all less-keen partners would necessarily be repulsed by swinging. They might have an I-can-take-it-or-leave-it attitude or have a good time just occasionally, for example when they meet someone who engages them. It is perfectly possible that such a partner might choose to take an utilitarian view of sex given the totality of the relationship. Only those who share Cole’s horror at sex outside an exclusive, long term etc.etc.- a distinct minority among those born in the second half of the C20th – would regard such an arrangement in someone else’s relationship as an abomination.

xii) “Good sex” is sharing a life, not good sex

“I believe that good sex is not all about physical sensation. Swinging is all about what the body feels and does. It pays little attention to emotions and the spiritual connection between partners. Love and care for someone you know intimately, share a life with and whom you feel you can trust completely, make good sex, not varieties of partners or sexual experimentation with strangers.”

This is the definitive statement of Cole’s position, one that has been hinted at in her earlier remarks. It has two components. First, in beginning “I believe” Cole admits that she has no research to back her claims. Her position is a matter of faith.

Second, she defines “good sex” to mean the sexual encounters that occur within a long, trusting and monogamous relationship. “Good sex” for Cole specifically is not to be judged by physical sensations but by the degree of trust in and the length of the relationship in which it is contextualised.

I see this as a tragedy. If Cole has to redefine “good sex” in a way that excludes physical sensations, sexual techniques etc. she is throwing away the argument. It is not part of the swingers’ case that good sex (properly defined) is impossible in the sort of relationship described by Cole. Most swingers want to believe it is possible out of concern for the happiness of others, though not quite seeing that it would work for themselves. The swingers’ case is merely that sex in such a relationship is not the only way of achieving good sex – that some couples can find happiness in other ways.

However in this response Cole, by redefining “good sex” so that sex is of tangential relevance, practically admits that sex after such long starvation of variety is not up to much in any physically stimulating sense. It is a very defensive and underconfident rhetorical posture. If individuals who thoroughly enjoy a varied and active sex life, including “varieties of partners and sexual experimentation with strangers” are not having “good sex” then Cole has to explain what “good” they are having.

xiii) Do as I say, not as I do

“I think it also concerns me that many swingers have an evangelical stance. They seek to convince that what they are doing is good for others. This suggests that at least some swingers are not only trying to convince other people, but themselves as well.”

It is certainly true that new swingers are often enraptured by their experiences. However I profoundly doubt that in many cases this amounts to admitting it to other people beyond a favoured friend or two. From my own experience an infinitesimal percentage of swingers want to be known as such among family, friends and workmates. In any case the ‘jointly having an affair’, secret life aspect of swinging is one of its attractions. So I would argue it is not accurate to describe swingers generally as evangelistic. They may on occasion try to sleep with people who are not yet swingers but as that is what the rest of the human race spends so much time trying to achieve it can hardly be held against them.

Among those who have articulated the swinger’s case, I have not yet found one commentator who believes swinging is appropriate for everyone. However, given the suppression of swingers in the UK and the high degree of socialization into the sexual monogamy model, it is certain to suit more couples than practice it in Britain at the moment. Because the number of swingers is artificially held back from its natural level in the population, almost any exposure of it as a lifestyle option brings forward new recruits. Perhaps it is this to which Cole is alluding.

Cole and her colleagues’ determination that not a word shall be printed about swinging without including a rebuttal from Relate fits with this interpretation. They try hard to suppress the number of swingers but this keeps the number of unfulfilled potential swingers unnaturally high. Consequently, when new audiences are exposed to swinging there are a disproportionate number of receptive ears listening – not because of evangelization but because of oppression.

So much for the propagation of swinging. But evangelization is a word with its roots in religion and, as we shall see, it is a rather more accurate description of the work of Cole and her colleagues.

4.5 Denise Knowles in the Evening Standard
xiv) Swingers are emotionally immature

Commenting in the Evening Standard on 10 May 2002 about an article on London’s long established Toucan Club, Relate spokeswoman Denise Knowles said:

“Swingers sometimes say that their relationship is strengthened by having the freedom to experiment and share. They say they never get bored with their own partner and infidelity is never an issue. But the reality in many cases is that they are simply emotionally immature. They want the stability of a home and family but they also want the thrill of an adolescent lifestyle.”

I have pondered long on what exactly is being said here and why and have come to the conclusion that Knowles is simply being abusive.

‘Emotional immaturity’ is clearly something Knowles regards as bad. But even if it were true that emotional immaturity is bad and that swingers are emotionally immature, I don’t see that this refutes the benefits that these (‘emotionally immature’) individuals feel they gain from swinging. As Knowles does not claim to have a cure for emotional immaturity, she seems to be saying that emotionally immature people should just suffer rather than behave in a way – harmless to others – that makes their emotionally immature lives more enjoyable. In other words, they don’t fit into her plan for the world so they can go to hell.

Knowles’ purpose in using this phrase, it seems to me, is to label swingers with undesirable associations in the same way that Cole in point (iii) above sought to convince young women that there is something wrong with them if they want a varied sex life.

In reality, of course, seasoned swingers are among the most emotionally mature and sophisticated people you could meet. These are couples who hide no feelings from each other; whose high degree of sexual satisfaction, self-esteem and mutual understanding immunizes them from the unfulfilled crushes, suppressed passions and bottled-up yearnings that characterize other long-term relationships; and who frequently see their partner in flagrant with others without it denting their confidence in their mutual love and commitment.

4.6 Paula Hall on Woman’s Hour

On 6 February 2003 sex therapist and swinger Dee McDonald appeared on BBC Radio 4′s Woman’s Hour to discuss swinging with Relate spokeswoman Paula Hall. You can listen to the recording of the programme on the BBC website. Hall made eight points in her efforts to discourage listeners from considering swinging as a lifestyle option.

xv) Swinging plays Russian roulette with your relationship

Hall’s first point was that swinging is ‘risky’ in terms of provoking jealousy.

“You’re not quite sure what’s going to trigger it and it’s not until it happens that you have a problem and in that respect, that’s why it’s like Russian roulette. You don’t know when that bullet will fly and damage your relationship. And for me and I think for an awful lot of couples you need to seriously challenge whether it’s worth the risk”.

Asked if she accepted swinging might strengthen trust in a relationship, she would only concede that it does because

“taking and surviving risks is one way of proving trust”.

The implication was that if you become swingers disaster could strike unforeseen at any moment. True, but then so it can for ordinary relationships and marriages, both of which have higher break up rates than swinging couples.

Even if we ignored the statistical evidence proving the greater endurance of swinging relationships, Hall’s point takes no account of what would happen to a relationship if a couple who felt the need to become swingers repressed that urge. It seems to me that the chances of affairs, deceit or simple break up would be very high. But as we saw earlier in point (viii) by Julia Cole, Relate believes it is better for others to die lonely and unloved than to engage in swinging relationships.

Note the pre-feminist implication in several of the Relate team’s arguments that losing her current partner is the worst thing that could happen to a woman. Note also the otherworldly assumption that the alternative to swinging is monogamous bliss. Sadly perhaps this is far from the case, relationship break-ups being apparently a function of monogamy.218 For a sexually conventional person, the problem of a sexually adventurous partner is not solved by refusing to swing with them. If a person hankers strongly after sexual variety, and his or her partner is not interested in swinging, the chances are that he or she will achieve it behind the back of their partner with prostitutes, lovers or flings.

Paula Hall speaks only about the “risks” of swinging without considering the “risks” of not swinging. It is not the case that for their relationship to survive, a couple need only not be swingers. There is a lot more too it than that. It is easy to conceive of situations in which a little sexual elasticity militates for the long term health of a relationship. Swinging to an extent institutionalizes physical infidelity while emplacing firmer boundaries against emotional infidelity. For many couples, monogamy is riskier than swinging.

xvi) The feasibility of monogamy is a different question

Hall proceeded to get her wires well and truly crossed. She defined her opposition to swinging as not being based on support for monogamy. Responding to McDonald’s point that human beings are not naturally monogamous, she said:

“I think there’s an argument for serial monogamy and whether or not we are able to be monogamous our entire lifetime is a different argument”

This is a deeply disingenuous position. Hall criticizes swingers but declines the difficulty of arguing for the alternative, thus trying to have her cake and eat it. The problem with her fudge – serial monogamy – comes when children are involved. If we take her comment at face value it appears that for Hall, keeping your family together if it involves privately letting off a little sexual steam by swinging with your partner occasionally, is the big no-no. But the disruption of dragging your children through repeated divorces and school relocations as you traipse from short-term partner to short-term-partner is OK.

I wonder if she was speaking for Relate when she said this?

The most obvious explanation for Hall tying herself into such awful knots is that she wimped out of arguing monogamy with McDonald, because she has too much sense to stick to her Relate brief. But having departed from the script, she was lost in the woods and had to make things up on the hoof. Having abandoned one indefensible position she found herself in one even worse, as at least monogamy has a weight of supposition behind it. Nobody, however, favours serial divorce as the optimum nurturing environment for children.

xvii) Forget about instinct, you have free will

Having like Red Riding Hood allowed herself to be deflected from the set path, and found herself with the wolf, Hall fled back from all argument to the absolute certainty of “morality”. It took only 4 minutes and 36 seconds of the mildest debate with McDonald to reduce her to this.

“But we are not like animals. We do have morality. We do have a neo-cortex that has developed and I think not to bring morality into it reduces making love to mating like animals.”

Here we are, back with Cole’s belief that recreational sex (i.e. “sex for its own sake”) is bestial and immoral. Funny, because seconds earlier it was moral to make your kids’ lives hell just so you could get your rocks off left, right and centre.

The problem with this, as we discussed earlier, is that it is an argument against all sex outside long-term relationships. Something of a minority position as almost all the women listening will have indulged in sexual activity that would be immoral by this definition. And of course Relate knows that morality as an argument is not going to convince many people – that’s why it is the argument of last resort and why so much imagination goes into thinking up more practical (but unproven) reasons why women should not become swingers.

To digress only slightly, I suspect that a naive virgin on her wedding night with a nervous and bumbling bridegroom about to attempt something he has never even tried let alone mastered, will feel rather more ‘mated like an animal’ than a sophisticated female swinger with one of her experienced lovers who takes a pride in his performance. Yet Relate smiles on the former scenario and frowns on the latter.

xviii) Abuse

Rattled by her disaster on monogamy, Hall appears to have felt a surge of most untherapist-like aggression. The discussion continued thus:

Jenni Murray: “Isn’t it all rather smutty?”

Dee McDonald: “Not at all. It can be and that’s what some people like. But some people don’t like the smuttiness and for that reason there is a huge variety of types of connection…”

Paula Hall(interrupting): “But it’s still sleeping around!”

Dee McDonald: “It’s not sleeping around it’s about sharing an intimate experience and it’s about the couple. The primary reason for swinging. And some people do choose not to have intercourse…”

On one level this exchange speaks for itself. Having humiliated herself in argument and been forced back to crude ‘morality’ (contradicting her collapsed position on monogamy), Hall regresses even further to playground abuse. This is the sort of woman Relate puts up to the media as arbiter over the sexuality of the British public.

What, though, is the mindset of a woman who uses the phrase “sleeping around” with the pejorative connotations clearly intended here. “Sleeping around”, it would seem to Hall, is its own condemnation.

Once again, one of Relate’s spokeswomen has let slip that it is not just swingers that she condemns. For it is not only swingers who ‘sleep around’ just as it is not only swingers who enjoy “sex for its own sake”. If these are bad things than almost the whole unmarried population and the huge chunk of the married population who are or have been unfaithful are bad too.

xix) Ersatz alternatives are better
Next, Hall weakly offered non-swinging alternative means of achieving a comparable effect, such as – wait for it – reading Sons & Lovers. Following on from the excerpt above:

Dee McDonald: “It’s not sleeping around it’s about sharing an intimate experience and it’s about the couple. The primary reason for swinging. And some people do choose not to have intercourse, but titillate each other in the environment.”

Paula Hall: “But aren’t there safer alternative ways of doing that?”

Dee McDonald: “Like what?”

Paula Hall: “Reading books, sharing books, reading other titillating material be that Sons & Lovers or something from the top shelf of the local newsagent. Just communicating. I’m strongly in favour of couples communicating as a psychosexual therapist most certainly talking about their fantasies, talking about their sexual experience and expanding that together with each other whilst maintaining the boundaries around the couple’s relationship…”

One feels that with Hall there is a candle struggling somewhere out there in the darkness, some glimmer of human sensuality, however feeble and refracted. Alas her compromise with reality is a less internally coherent ideological position than Julia Cole’s extremism.

For Cole, sex seems to be a by-product of other more important factors in a very long term relationship and has no legitimate standing as a human need in itself. I believe Cole sees sex as most people see decorating. If you own a house you need to paint, and that can be fulfilling in a way – you can have fun with pattern books, colour charts and kitchen diagrams – but it’s pretty small part of owning a house and certainly not something anyone would miss if they didn’t own a property.

xx) Belief trumps science

The quotation above continues:
“…which I believe needs to be unique.”

“I believe” again, not “my research shows” or “the evidence suggests”. In place of science Relate offers mysticism and mandates these personal revelations as the only acceptable forms of human sexual behaviour – or non-behaviour, mostly. The fundamental charlatanism of the organization rests here. People expect therapists to have a non-judgmental, humanist approach to their problems. Behind the mask of therapy, Relate may be simply be applying its mystical-religious ideology. That is certainly what its spokeswomen do when commenting on swingers in the media.

For swingers, there does not need to be an unique thread in their relationship. It is the matrix of all the threads in their relationship that is unique, although most of them are shared with others at times and by mutual consent. The research on swingers shows this works for them.219 Why cannot Relate live with this?

xxi) Forget about free will, you have instinct

Later, asked if swinging was empowering of women, Hall warned against defining empowerment as becoming like men. Women are different, she argued:

“Men’s sexual desire is generally stronger and more persistent. Men enjoy a greater variety of sexual activities and men fantasize about more sexual partners. And even research that was done only about 6-8 months ago still reinforces that. I think what swinging does, it gives the opportunity for women to act like men.”

In other words, women whose actions vary from this Relate-preferred lower-libido norm are operating under false-consciousness at best and being manipulated at worst.
The very latest research indicates that women grossly under-report the extent of their sexual desires and experiences for fear of being labeled ‘sluts’ or ‘whores’ but this was published after Hall made this contribution.

The essential point is that Hall is happy to quote an atavistic predisposition approvingly when it suits her argument, whereas seconds earlier (in her argument (xvii) ‘Forget about instinct, you have free will’) women were exhorted to rise above their inner-animal and adhere to her version of ‘morality’. Genetic programming is OK when it equals sexual minimalism but needs to overridden by ‘morality’ when it equals ‘sleeping around’.

This is a contradiction. One can either believe man has free will to be ‘moral’ or not, or that he is fundamentally programmed by genes in which case there is no morality other than survival and reproduction. Whatever the answer, you cannot coherently argue from both perspectives in the same debate.

xxii) Using people

The final exchange in this programme was:

Jenni Murray: “Paula, is it [the Lifestyle] an euphemism or is it still wife-swapping for you?”

Paula Hall: “It’s using other people for titillation.”

Dee McDonald: “Sure. Absolutely. By mutual consent.”

So for Hall it is somehow wrong or immoral to be titillated by the presence of other people, even when they are being titillated in return. It is not, however, wrong to buy pornography (“something from the top shelf of your local newsagent”) and be titillated by that, as Hall advocates in point (xix) above. Why the interposition of a cameraman makes a difference to the morality of the situation; and why being titillated by another educated middle-class couple doing it for fun is less moral than being titillated by a teenage working class girl doing it to scrape a living, is not explained.

4.7 Paula Hall in Eve

The September 2003 issue of the BBC’s women’s magazine Eve carried an article on swinging by Pamela Whitby, which quotes Hall attacking swingers as dysfunctional.

xxiii) Swingers are trying to prove they are attractive

“Paula Hall, psycho-sexual therapist at Relate, points out that, though all the swingers I’ve met seem confident, happy people, often the desire to swing hides an underlying problem whereby either party needs to prove they are still attractive. ‘ What happens when you are 80 and nobody wants to swing with you?’ she asks.”

Well, your head doesn’t fall off. So what does happen?

When you are eighty there are a lot of things you may have done when younger that you cannot do any more – like being a sportsman for example, or a quack psychologist. The answer to Hall is that such people led much happier and more fulfilled lives, have a much greater stock of happy memories and fewer resentments and regrets about things they wished they had done, than if they had lived their lives as she would prefer.

Hall’s argument is fundamentally one about the futility of life and the inevitability of death, not something that will maximize your enjoyment of anything while you are on this Earth – including monogamy – if you muse upon it too deeply.

Even if some swingers do manifest this “problem”, how is it a problem? What would be its symptoms? People wanting to be considered attractive presumably look after themselves, take care to present themselves well in terms of dress and manners and generally respect their bodies and appearance more than is usual. Perhaps they cultivate being amusing company, witty conversationalists, good lovers.

In terms of problems facing humanity it’s not exactly third world poverty or Weapons of Mass Destruction is it? Hall is offering just another tawdry attempt to pathologise swingers, albeit one more conspicuously vacuous than most.

4.8 Secret agenda

To reprise, the scientific evidence about swinging shows it benefits those who enjoy it enough to do it regularly. Relate’s spokeswomen contradict the scientific evidence without being able to point to any scholarly studies supporting their arguments. They themselves make unscientific and unsubstantial claims – some quite hysterical – and all three of them are transparently motivated by something other than a dispassionate analysis of the facts about swinging. They seem to harbour pre-feminist concepts of womanhood whereby women who engage in sex “for its own sake” are considered ‘damaged goods’ and condemned for “sleeping around”.

Cole, Knowles and Hall’s comments cast more light on themselves and their prejudices than they do on swingers. In the cases of Paula Hall and Julia Cole, enough information is in the public domain to explain on their hidden motivation against swingers. Not only are they ‘on a mission’ against swingers, as I suggested in 4.1. Like The Blues Brothers, they are on a mission from God.

Hall and Cole are both people of strong religious conviction married to equally religious spouses. Hall believes she has been chosen by God for a special purpose while Cole is a damaged personality who has only ever had one sexual partner.

Woman Alive, Christian Media’s monthly magazine for Christian women, ran an interview with Paula Hall in September 2002. At that time Hall ran a Church youth group while her husband worked part-time for the local Church diocese. Hall has her own counseling practice, launched – she told the magazine – after seeking

“higher guidance” .

Many of her private clients are Christians too.

“The only time I’ll ever say I’m a Christian is if I’m asked. Occasionally if a client is struggling with a Christian issue I would say: ‘As a matter of fact, as well as being a counsellor, I’m a Christian’ and then I might ask them if they mind me taking off my Relate hat so I can help them address those issues.”

However, in another way, Hall’s religion intrudes into her client sessions without their knowledge.

“I do pray for my clients and for my working environment. During counseling sessions I frequently send up ‘arrow prayers’ for insight”.

Very professional.

Hall has difficulty keeping her religious views firmly in check during her therapy sessions because she meets so many people whose behaviour she abhors.

“She meets couples where disability is an issue, adult survivors of sexual abuse, couples on the verge of divorce and those within gay and lesbian relationships. ‘It’s hard at times! I do have personal views on issues like divorce, sexuality, abortion but I can’t let those into my counseling’.”

Hopefully this means Hall keeps her abusive outbursts for the radio studio and her patients, coping with abortions and worse traumas, are not lambasted for ‘sleeping around’ as they settle on her couch.

Hall is candid enough to confess, though without irony, that

“One of the common problems of the Christian sex life is the lack of fun. Somehow, it’s a sin if you enjoy it, any sense of experimentation and having fun is seen as rude, naughty, and focusing on sexual problems is a sin. It’s greedy to want a good sex life – it’s carnal desire!”

Hall concludes the interview by confiding she thinks

“God has got something up his sleeve”

for her. She says that one of the great things about being a Christian is

“It’s like living permanently in Christmas Eve because you’re not sure what you’re going to get tomorrow, but whatever it is, it’s going to be good!”

I wonder what proportion of the adult population would regard that as a well-balanced outlook? Aware of the stunningly grievous tomorrows that so many people endure – relatives of Lockerbie, Omagh and 9/11 atrocity victims for example – my own reaction is to feel that Hall is being offensively glib.

Julia Cole was interviewed by Catherine O’Brien of The Times for her “What does life tell us about love” column published on 12 February 2003.

In it Cole reveals that her father and elder brother died when she was in her early teens and that the resulting psychological damage had an enormous effect on her view of sex.

“having been bereaved, I couldn’t cope with the hurt involved in casual relationships”

Cole says she had no boyfriends until she met her future husband at 18, while they were both training as Sunday school teachers in a local church.

“It was six months before Peter asked me out because he was so shy. I have never forgotten the moment when he first put his arms around me and kissed me…He is the love of my life.”

Cole admits that her husband is the only sexual partner she has ever had.

“To me, monogamy is crucial – the trust and security that Peter and I share is what gives us a good sex life.”

Let us hope and accept that Cole’s marriage is as blissful as she maintains – a courtesy she does not return to swingers (see her argument (xi) ‘If they say they enjoy it they are lying’ ).

Cole is aware of the anomaly of being a sex therapist while her own sexual experience is so narrow.

“There are those who find it strange that I work as a psychosexual therapist and yet have had only one sexual partner.”

she confesses but feels the sex films she was shown during therapy training make up for it.

“In terms of understanding sexual experiences, I have probably seen more than 90% of the population.”

It is not a very convincing argument. Would Cole, upon seeing Saving Private Ryan, imagine she understood what it was like to land on D-Day better than 90% of the people who did it? The conceit implicit in Cole’s self-justification is breathtaking.

Lay aside for a moment the spurious notion that watching a film about something qualifies you as an authority rather better than practicing it. Even by Cole’s own admission her “understanding” is better only than 90% of the population, leaving some 6 million people in the UK rather wiser about sex than her – including presumably the swingers, who feature among the segment of the population with the greatest breadth of sexual experience.

It is worth being clear quite how different from normal Cole’s sexual life has been. Most people want to have full relationships, including sex, with nice boyfriends or girlfriends at every stage of their post-pubescent, premarital lives. Most people have had several romantic partners or a relatively long-term relationship before 18, certainly before marriage. Many have had one or more sexual relationship before 18 and anything up to several dozen before marriage. Most young people never see the inside of a church apart from the odd carol service and are caught up in secular matters.

Cole had no sexual or even romantic activity at all until after she met her future husband through church training – six months after, although Cole admits they fell for each other on sight.

I am not suggesting that the way Cole has conducted her sex life is wrong. Clearly it was appropriate for her, bearing in mind the distress of early bereavement from which she has never recovered. It is no part of the swinger’s argument to sneer at anyone’s religious beliefs or chosen path through life – advocating tolerance for diversity implies accepting that most will almost certainly choose a lifestyle different from one’s own.

Julia Cole’s life has been characterized by a comparatively extreme lack of romantic and sexual variety; an extreme lack that is profoundly atypical of most people’s experience of life; and an extreme lack that is profoundly atypical of what most people desire for their lives. Cole preaches her own extreme autobiography as the proper lifestyle choice for other people, including swingers, and Relate provides her the platform from which to do this.

With less personal breadth of sexual experience than the average teenager, Cole scolds the rest of humanity about the true meaning of sex in their relationships and tells swingers that a relationship not based on monogamy is not worth having. How would she know? It is a bit like the Vulcan Mr Spock or the android Data from Star Trek lecturing human beings that humour is illogical – it is something of which they have no experience and with which they cannot empathize.

Both Cole and Hall have sought under the Relate banner to pathologise swingers, to label them as sexually deviant manifestations of psychological disorders, as abnormal people in need of treatment. Yet the truth is that seasoned swingers are extraordinarily mature, well-adjusted individuals with exceptionally deep and strong emotional bonds with their spouses. The record shows that with their shrill and hectoring tone, warped personality on the one hand and belief in divine mission on the other, repressive sexual dogma, astonishing conceit and lack of self-consciousness, in reality it is Cole and Hall who are the freaks.

4.9 Thou shalt not

Cole’s religious perspective – in that it goes further than condemning swingers to looking askance at all recreational sex outside long-term relationships – is a throwback to a much more rigorous age of Christian chastity. It was widely accepted in the early C20th as discussed in 2.2 above but now, a hundred years later, large swathes of religious opinion – not just Christian swingers themselves – are much more liberal on the issue.

The late Seward Hilter, Professor at Chicago University Divinity School and later of Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey, the legendary pastoral care movement pioneer, discussed swinging in Theology Today as far back as 1971:

“Some of my pastor-students have been consulted by persons involved in swinging. Do we say to them, “Quit it or don’t come to church?” Especially if they say it has improved their marriage, what do you say or do? Crazy as I believe the whole thing is, we must rethink our principles.”

Re-examining Cole and Hall’s arguments against swinging, their religious bias provides the convincing rationale missing from their otherwise inexplicable positions.

Relate’s frequent use of “I believe” in exculpation of an inability to offer proof is not only to adopt an usage that is definitively religious. It also does so for ends that that manifestly coincide with religious dogma on lifestyle choices.

The deprecation of sex as a recreational activity and the refusal to recognize it as a human need unrelated to child-rearing are congruent with religious strictures on sex whether marital, pre-marital or extra-marital. The assertions that “good” sex cannot happen before the third or fourth decade of a relationship and that sexually adventurous relationships are spiritually worthless, downplay the importance of sex in human life to its canonically ordained position as the precursor of childbirth and no more.

The religious superstition that good times have to be ‘paid for’ later, as if happiness is a zero sum game, emerges again and again in Relate’s approach to swingers. For example the belief that a period of promiscuity in one’s youth has knock-on negative effects in later life (such as making ‘stable’ relationships difficult). Other examples of Relate trying to provoke moral panic on swinging are the suggestion that using the Internet to meet people for sex will bring violent just deserts; that swinging leads to relationship break-up; to contraction of terrible diseases; and to miraculous loss of the orgasm function. Every one of these notions is counter-scientific.

The baffling condemnation of swingers for wanting to be attractive makes sense only with the knowledge that, for the ascetically religious, vanity is a sin both per se and for provoking temptation in others. The pre-feminist inference that women are sexually docile and are tricked into swinging by voraciously priapic males mirrors extreme and outdated religious precepts about male and female sexuality.

The belief that women become spiritually ‘damaged goods’ through swinging has no derivation other than religious notions of female chastity and of the Virgin Mary as the ultimate role model for women. The fairytale notion that sex is appropriate only with one’s spouse after marriage, and never with anyone else if it can be helped, is in surprisingly good health at Relate.

4.10 Cash for cant

Relate’s Memorandum of Association includes in its objects:
“To promote research into all aspects of couple relationships and marriage and to make the results available to the public”.

Yet despite the repeated interventions of its spokeswomen in public debate about swinging, Relate has published no proper scientific research – not a single page – that justifies its opinions on this subject. That is, no research on a subject upon which Relate seeks to be regarded as an authority, despite its opinions contradicting the consensus of scientific evidence.

Relate further describes its role as:

“To help relationships and marriage withstand the pressures leading to breakdown.”

Yet it is clear that Relate comes to this role blinkered with prejudice as to how “pressures leading to breakdown” may be withstood. If its spokeswomen accurately reflect its position, Relate believes it is better for relationships to be destroyed than that to be saved through any form of swinging (see 4.2 above, argument (viii) ‘A swinging relationship isn’t worth having’).

Relate aims to deliver its services

“with cultural sensitivity and without discrimination.”

Yet, despite the scientific evidence of the benefits of swinging, Relate does discriminate against swinging as a lifestyle choice and swingers as successful relationship models.

Relate believes that

“people gain from an understanding of their sexuality.”

Yet the honesty of this must be questioned. It employs as its spokeswomen two religious individuals who harbour abiding prejudices as to the permissible forms of human sexuality, prejudices that inform the advice these spokeswomen give to young women through the media in the name of Relate.

It might be more accurate to conclude that despite its protestations, Relate’s agenda is to persuade people against recreational sex, to minimize the number of sexual partners individuals have and to restrict sexual contact to within long-established relationships – and that there seems to be an undeclared religious motive for this.

Relate received a grant-in-aid of £2,103,900 from the government in 2001-02, 97.6% of its unrestricted donor income. It received further project finance amounting to £357,517 of which the government provided 78.5%. The money Relate raised itself (£133,467), it did so at a cost (£87,081) of 65p in every pound given. The taxpayer’s proportion of Relate’s net donor income was thus 98.3%. Relate has been receiving similar grants-in-aid, adjusted upwards slightly each year, at least as far back as 1994-1995.

Despite the existence of established churches in England and Scotland, the British Government has a long tradition of subsidizing science but not belief. Given Relate’s insistence on giving advice contrary to the published scientific evidence in the area of swinging; the hidden role religion may play in motivating this; Relate’s willingness to campaign against a segment of the electorate (swingers) that finances it and to discriminate against them on the basis of their sexuality; and the various ways that Relate breaches its self-set objectives and benchmarks, the question arises of whether Relate is violating the conditions of its charitable status and whether it is a fitting recipient of such generous public funding.

Austerity is the antidote to hubris. A period of three to five years – perhaps one whole parliament – as a self-financing charity would force Relate to concentrate on its core competencies and greatly inhibit its appetite and capacity for freelance repression of parts of the British public. It would refocus the organization on its universally admired strengths but send an unmistakable signal that the public refuses to finance a hidden religious agenda, discrimination against sexual minorities or prejudiced advice contrary to the findings of science. If Relate had cleaned up its act after three years, consideration could be given to restoring a level of public subsidy.

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