September 4, 2002

Mother Nature sleeps around.

There may be more delicate ways of saying it, but that’s the bottom line. Forget the folk tales and romantic notions of furry, feathered creatures forging lasting bonds. Fact is, most wildlife enjoys, well, a wild life.

In recent years, researchers have steadily pared the list of animals believed to be monogamous, deleting even that veritable icon of fidelity – the swan.

Indeed, said Tim Birkhead, a professor of behavioral ecology at the University of Sheffield in England, the most striking result of these studies has been “the near elimination of the idea of male and female sexual monogamy.

“From organisms as different as snails, honey bees, mites, spiders, fish, frogs, lizards, snakes, birds and mammals, research has verified behavioral observations of females’ polyandry by showing that multiple paternity is widespread.”

In other words, said Birkhead in his book “Promiscuity,” “Females of most species … routinely copulate with different males.”

Quest for learning

This study guide is prepared by the Newspaper In Education Department of the Union-Tribune as an aid for teachers and parents. It is aligned with the California State Reading / Language Arts Framework and the Mathematics and Science Standards. The questions refer to the article on sexual relationships.

1. Polygamy has been and still is practiced in many human cultures. Make a chart showing the advantages and disadvantages to men and to women in polygamous relationships.

2. Why is culturally sanctioned polyandry so rare among humans?

3. In general, what qualities might female birds and mammals seek for themselves in a mate? What qualities might they seek on behalf of their future offspring? How are these two sets of qualities different from each other?

4. Do research on the deep sea angler fish. Why does its unusual sexual relationship make sense, considering its environment?

5. Write original sentences in which you correctly use each of the following words: dispel, furtive, icon, overt, pare.
The new understandings about promiscuity can be attributed largely to new and improved technology. Until the advent of DNA fingerprinting, animal behavior scientists were pretty much limited to what they could learn from long hours of observation and field work; from techniques like vasectomizing certain males, then waiting to see which females gave birth.

“There were clues that species were not as sexually monogamous as we thought,” said Gerald Borgia, a biologist at the University of Maryland, “but nothing very definitive.”

Quick, easy genetic tracing, however, has changed that.

For example, out of some 4,000 known mammal species, only a few dozen appear to form reliable pair-bonds: some bats, foxes, certain species of mice and rats, the giant otter of South America, the northern beaver, a few kinds of seals, small African antelope like the duiker, klipspringer and dik-dik.

Even in seemingly solitary species like orangutans and black bears, females have been found to get around, to copulate with more than one male, if available.

Primates practice all manner of reproductive behaviors, monogamy being the rarest of all. Gorillas and baboons practice polygyny, with males keeping harems of females. Lion tamarins – tiny monkeys found only in the Brazilian rain forest – can be polyandrous: females are served by assorted males. Chimpanzees and bonobos – our closest genetic relatives – are wholly promiscuous. Female chimps copulate a total of 500 to 1,000 times for each pregnancy; a 1997 DNA study found that 54 percent of baby chimps were fathered by males other than the female’s supposed partner.

Among primates, only siamangs, gibbons, some lemurs, lorises and a few New World monkeys display truly monogamous behaviors.

Birds do it – a lot Monogamy, of course, means different things, especially to scientists.

“Sexual monogamy” is defined as having sex with just one partner who is not having sex with anyone else. “Social monogamy” is less restrictive, and much more common in the animal world. Prairie voles – squat rodents indigenous to plains and grasslands – are considered to be a near-perfect monogamous species. They form pair-bonds that share a nest. Both male and female actively protect each other, their territory and their young. The male is an active parent and, if one of the pair dies, the survivor does not take a new mate.

Still, it’s not uncommon for a prairie vole, male or female, to engage in the occasional sexual dalliance with a vole not his or her mate.

Similarly, swans and other waterfowl like ducks and geese are now known to engage in promiscuous behaviors that include forced copulation or rape.

“Everyone has heard of how birds such as swans supposedly pair monogamously for life,” said Adrian Forsyth, a senior biodiversity scientist at the Smithsonian Institution and author of “A Natural History of Sex.”

“But in fact, monogamously paired female waterfowl are often subjected to copulation attempts by males other than their mates,” events that sometimes injure or kill the female. “Such forced copulations may be perpetrated by unpaired males that have been unable to attract a mate and have little to lose and something to gain by forcing themselves on a female.”

The only apparent controls upon this behavior by male waterfowl is female resistance and a mate coming to her defense. Mated males, however, are sometimes elsewhere: Studies show that mated waterfowl engage in forced copulations as well, Forsyth said.

More than 90 percent of birds are defined as socially monogamous. They commonly form distinct male-female pair-bonds, but these relationships tend not to be sexually exclusive, and in some species, as much as three-fourths of the resulting progeny are sired by males other than “dad.”

Birds are particularly instructive in the subject of monogamy, in part because their mating behaviors are usually overt and easily observed. Mammals, by contrast, tend to be quite furtive in matters of sex.

Moreover, birds behave a lot like humans, according to zoologist David P. Barash and psychiatrist Judith Eve Lipton in “The Myth of Monogamy.” They are inclined toward monogamy (the social kind at least) and it is strongly correlated with parental involvement by both partners.

“When it comes to dispelling the myth of monogamy,” said Barash, “most of the really useful discoveries in recent years have come from research by ornithologists.”

It is avian research that has primarily fueled new theories for why multiple matings seem to be the norm in the natural world.

For males, of course, the reason seems obvious enough. Promiscuous behavior maximizes paternity. The more often a male copulates, the greater the chance its genes will be passed along to future generations.

The surprise has been the increasing revelations of female promiscuity.

“Both sexes can be promiscuous,” said Birkhead, “but while males are renowned for their promiscuity, until very recently females were not.”

But viewed from a female perspective, mating with more than one male offers some decided advantages, scientists now say. First, it boosts sperm competition, which likely helps ensure that the best genes prevail. More practically, multiple partners mean more food and protection for the female as males compete for her favors.

The first modern biologist to specifically note the natural and widespread tendency of males to seek numerous sexual partners was Geoffrey A. Parker, a British behavioral ecologist who wrote, in 1970, “Sperm Competition and Its Evolutionary Consequences in the Insects.”

Parker’s paper was, well, seminal. It established the fundamental idea that sperm from more than one male will usually compete to fertilize a female’s egg. And, “sperm competition is essentially another way of saying nonmonogamy” said Barash and Lipton.

Humans imbue the word monogamy with myriad social, emotional and moral connotations. But fundamentally, monogamy is about biology, about the basic reproductive differences between male and female. It begins with sperm and the egg.

Male sperm production is relatively cheap. It doesn’t take much energy or resources. Regardless of species, males generally produce sperm abundantly. A single human ejaculation, for example, typically contains 250 million sperm and in a single month, a healthy male will produce billions.

Egg production is far tougher. A human female typically ovulates but one egg each month, and over a lifetime, perhaps 400 or so. The females of other species are similarly burdened. A female bird, for example, may lay a clutch of eggs equaling one-fifth of her total body weight. That’s a huge investment.

After fertilization, females in many species remain stuck with the bulk of parental duties, from nurturing the developing egg to tending young after birth.

For this reason – and others – females clearly have a vested interest in choosing the best possible mate, one who will most likely provide them with the strongest, fittest young requiring the least amount of work.

Thus, females shop around. Indeed, they never stop. Multiple matings, say researchers, provide a sort of fertility insurance in case partner No. 1 is deficient in some respect. Sparrow hawks copulate nearly 700 times per clutch. Female lions copulate an average of once every 15 minutes, day and night, during their four-day estrous cycle. Usually the sexual partner is also the primary partner, but not always. There’s always the chance a new and different male will introduce a better line of genes.

(Males have evolved a variety of creative ways to overcome female promiscuity, to help their sperm and genes prevail. The most obvious is the ability to mate repeatedly, or for long periods of time: Stick insects remain in flagrante delicto for 79 straight days. And many species have developed bizarre adaptations designed to foil other male suitors. Male ghost crabs inject a fluid into the female during coitus that hardens into an epoxylike plug to block subsequent mating efforts. Male damselflies and dragonflies, along with lots of other creatures, have penises armed with hooks and horns designed to scoop out the sperm of competitors.)

My one and only
Basic life forces may promote promiscuity, but sexual monogamy boasts some biochemical underpinnings of its own. Hormones like oxytocin, for example, are believed to generate feelings of affection and warmth.

“It turns out that copulation and close physical contact between partners triggers oxytocin release,” said Birkhead. “So frequent copulation between recently acquainted prairie vole partners (the principal subjects of oxytocin research) may result in a surge of oxytocin, which helps to cement the close relationship between male and female.”

But more to the point, sexual monogamy produces practical benefits. First, said Barash, it’s less dangerous. “Courtship and mating are risky, requiring that both partners venture out of their personal shell and become vulnerable to rejection, injury, bad choices, or just plain wasting of time and energy.”

Settling on a single partner for life tends to eliminate those problems.

In species that require both parents to feed and raise young (in some bird species, nestlings require feeding every 15 seconds), it’s simply prudent to establish a long-term work-sharing arrangement. Two parents generally mean a more reliable supply of food and greater protection for all involved.

And sexual monogamy is inherently more egalitarian: one male, one female.

There are ample examples of sexual monogamy in nature, albeit some are of questionable inspiration to humans. The screw-worm fly, despite its name, is strictly monogamous. Female screw-worms mate with just one male during their brief lives, a proclivity that has proved to be a fatal attraction because farmers can easily control the pest by releasing thousands of sterilized males upon a faithful and unsuspecting female fly population.

Certain species take monogamy to the extreme. The flatworm Diplozoon paradoxum is a fish parasite whose partners meet as “virgin adolescent larvae,” write Barash and Lipton.

“Whereupon they literally fuse at their midsections and subsequently become sexually mature; they remain ‘together’ (in every sense of the word) till death parts them – in some cases, years later.”

It could be worse. Consider angler fish – several species of which reside in the lightless depths of the ocean. Angler fish are one of the few vertebrate species in which the female is considerably larger than the male.

In fact, the male is a parasitic pipsqueak. After stumbling upon a female in the Stygian waters, he attaches himself to her underside like a wart. Birkhead is less poetic. Male angler fish, he writes, are “little more than bags of sperm” that tap directly into the female’s blood supply for nutrition.

The coupling is so complete, scientists speculate, that the female may actually control the seminal discharge of the male to ensure it takes place at the right time for fertilization of her eggs.

This is hardly the stuff of romance novels, but it’s monogamy.

And the fish, as far as anyone can tell, live happily ever after.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/science/20020904-9999_mz1c4monogam.html

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WHAT IS ETHICAL NON-MONOGAMY?
There are as many answers to this question as there are non-monogamous people. In general, non-monogamy means having the freedom to be sexually and/or emotionally involved with more than one person. When we say “ethical” non-monogamy, we mean any type of non-monogamous relationship practiced HONESTLY, with the mutual consent of all parties — where no one is deceived and everyone CHOOSES to enter this type of relationship.
Some non-monogamous people are married or live with a “primary” lover or spouse, but occasionally have casual sexual relationships outside their marriages. Other people oppose marriage and have more than one committed long-term relationship concurrently. Still others are in “group marriages,” living with several adults who share sexual and spousal relationships. Other people are inclined toward many relationships of a less committed nature, and are not seeking marriage or long-term relationships.
Many other people embrace the theory of non-monogamy and enjoy having the option of having more than one lover or spouse if they should desire, but may not have the time or energy for more than one relationship, or may not have met the right person or people to enter into such an arrangement. So even though they consider themselves non-monogamous, they may not “practice” non-monogamy, but they like having the option and having an agreement with their lover that this would be acceptable if it does happen. For many people, having the FREEDOM TO CHOOSE additional relationships is just as important and fulfilling as actually acting on this option and having other lovers.
Non-monogamy is nothing new–people have been non-monogamous since the beginning of humankind. However, until recently, it was considered immoral, deviant behavior in most cultures, was identified as a major taboo in most religions, and it was generally done secretly–”cheating” on one’s wife or husband and lying about it, while pretending to be the “faithful” spouse.
Due to sexism and women’s economic dependence on men throughout most of history, men could usually “get away with” extra-marital affairs, mistresses, sexual relationships with prostitutes, and even having several wives because women’s powerless economic and political position forced them to accept any and all behavior from their husbands. Women were much less at liberty to stray outside of marriage and have other relationships. This was partly because their primary responsibility for home and children seriously restricted their mobility, partly due to lack of effective birth control methods, and partly because the “adulteress” was usually severely punished by society for her transgression. However, the philandering husband generally was tolerated with a “boys will be boys” attitude. Unfortunately, this situation continues in most of the world. However, in Western industrialized nations, we have benefited from the so-called “sexual revolution of the 1960′s and 70′s. New freedoms were fueled by the advent of effective birth control methods like “the pill” and by women entering the paid labor force and demanding equality with men. This transformation of sexual mores allowed both men and women the opportunity to experiment with many new types of relationships and made it possible to reject the rigid sex roles and limitations of monogamous relationships, particularly marriage.

WHY ARE SOME PEOPLE NON-MONOGAMOUS?
No one knows the answer to this question, just as no one knows exactly why some people are gay and others are straight or bisexual. Some people are very happy with monogamous relationships, and argue that a monogamous relationship promises security, stability, and protection from AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. Others feel more fully loved and feel they can experience deeper intimacy in an exclusive relationship with one person. Others feel that monogamy is just simpler and more feasible to fit into their busy lives than non-monogamous relationships.
On the other hand, many people try to live a monogamous lifestyle and find it just does not meet their needs. They come to believe that it is unrealistic to expect any one person to fulfill all their needs for intimacy, companionship, love, and sex, for the rest of their lives. Most people practice “serial monogamy”–having one monogamous relationship after another, each one ending due to some area of incompatibility or dissatisfaction. Many people spend their whole life searching for the perfect mate only to find themselves dissatisfied time after time. They cannot maintain a monogamous relationship over the long haul, because one partner or the other “cheats” and has secret affairs, or one partner loses interest in the other, or one or both partners discover conflicts or incompatible needs. Many people become non-monogamous as a way of avoiding some of the problems they have experienced in monogamous relationships.

WHAT DOES ETHICAL NON-MONOGAMY OFFER?
Many monogamous relationships suffer from excessive dependency. Couples usually live together and spend their free time together, sometimes to the exclusion of all other intimate friendships. Each partner depends heavily on the other for emotional support, socializing, “family”, and community. Many people give up friends, social activities, even sports and hobbies if their partner doesn’t share an interest in these activities, and this creates resentment and dissatisfaction.
Monogamous couples are completely dependent on each other for affection and sex; and many become dissatisfied due to sexual incompatibilities, differences in level or frequency of sex, boredom with their sexual patterns. When they feel strong sexual attractions towards others they must repress these feelings or end their current relationship in order to have sex with someone else. Many complain bitterly that although they love their spouse and feel strongly attracted to him or her, the spouse doesn’t want sex frequently enough or does not enjoy the same sexual activities. This leaves one partner always wanting more sex or more variety in sexual practices, and the other always feeling pressured for sex, often resulting in one partner having secret affairs with other lovers to fulfill their sexual needs.
Ethical non-monogamy can alleviate some of these problems. Non-monogamous people are usually independent, and have many friends and many sources of emotional support rather than depending on spouse for everything. Non-monogamous people must be assertive and able to articulate their own needs clearly and honestly. Being in non-monogamous relationships offers the opportunity to meet all your needs rather than repress and resent whichever needs do not conveniently fit into your initial relationship. It allows each partner to have as much sex, or as little sex, as he or she wants; because the partner who wants more sex is free to have other sexual relationships. Many basically good relationships end because of sexual incompatibilities or because of excess dependency, and non-monogamy can offer a way to continue a good relationship while solving some of these problems. Ethical non-monogamy can strengthen relationships by encouraging each partner to be honest with themselves and each other, and to communicate clearly about feelings, needs, anxieties, and insecurities, including jealousy.

WHAT ARE THE PROBLEMS WITH NON-MONOGAMY?
Ideally, non-monogamy can enrich the lives of all parties involved and lead to deeper intimacy, love, and satisfaction. However, in real life, making a transition from traditional relationships to a non-monogamous lifestyle can be stressful and involve “growing pains”, because living in a new way requires learning new skills and overcoming a lifetime of socialization. What sounds idyllic and reasonable in theory is much more complicated and difficult to work out, logistically as well as emotionally. People with the best of intentions often discover that they have many intense insecurities and fears based on outdated core beliefs about themselves, about their partner(s), and about relationships and family in general.
Most people find that they experience jealousy, to a lesser or greater extent, especially when first embarking on this lifestyle. It usually takes time, thought, talking it out, and reassurance from partner(s) to let go of jealous feelings. Some people find that while they continue to feel jealous at times and to have feelings of conflict and ambivalence about their lifestyle and relationships, these feelings are greatly outweighed by a much more positive experience of the benefits and joys of non-monogamy.
After the initial fear of change and the anxiety of charting unknown territory subsides, many people feel comfortable with non-monogamy as long as they feel secure that they are loved and will not be abandoned. One strategy that has worked well to minimize fears and jealousy is to decide on rules and parameters which feel safe and supportive, and negotiate with your partner(s) to reach agreement on what type of non-monogamous lifestyle best fits your needs. For instance, Is it okay to have casual affairs? Do you want advance notice if your partner meets someone and wants to initiate a sexual relationship? Does your spouse or partner(s) have veto power over your choice of potential partners? Do you have an agreement on safe-sex guidelines to prevent being exposed to sexually transmitted diseases like syphilis, herpes, gonorrhea, chlamydia, hepatitis B, and AIDS? Do you want to participate in sexual relationships with more than one partner, or be involved with your partner(s) lovers? Do you feel you will have enough love and attention from your partner(s) if they have other relationships? How much time will you allow your partner(s) to spend with other lovers? Who will spend holidays and vacations together? What about children and other family members- do you want to have children, and who will have parental responsibilities? Will all partners live with you? Is one partner a primary spouse or are all partners equally important in terms of time and commitment? Will you pool your financial resources or do you want financial autonomy? Are you going to “come out” about your lifestyle to family, friends, and co-workers, or would you prefer to remain closeted? While many of these questions need to be addressed in ANY relationship, they are even more crucial to discuss in non-monogamous relationships, and can go a long way toward preventing misunderstandings, anger, and jealousy. Most people experience less of the anxiety and insecurities and more of the satisfaction and rewards of non-monogamy if they know what to expect, and feel secure that their partners will abide by rules that are mutually agreed upon.
Each situation is as unique as the particular individuals involved, and only trial and error will tell what will work for each relationship or family. A lifestyle may look great on paper but may feel completely different “on the ground,” and living the lifestyle- with an open mind and some rules that feel comfortable- is the only way to develop a long-term situation that works for everyone involved.

RESOURCES ON NON-MONOGAMY
If you feel that some type of non-monogamous lifestyle may be right for you, there are many resources available to help you think through issues and find support..

Support/discussion groups (no cost to attend):

• PolyOrlando
• PolyTampa
• Poly South Florida
• Poly Events & Groups (www.polyamory.org)

Seminars and Groups (fee is charged):

• Internet Resource Center, (Dr. Deborah Anapol), PO Box 4322, San Rafael, CA 94913 (415) 507-1739
• Loving More, (Ryam Nearing & Brett Hill) PO Box 4358, Boulder, CO 80306 (303) 543-7540
• Sunrise Center (Marin) Tantra & relationship workshops (415) 924-5483

Books on non-monogamy:
Polyfidelity Primer, Ryam Nearing,
Love Without Limits, D. Anapol, Internet Resource Center
Lovestyles, Tina Tessina
The Ethical Slut, Dossie Easton & Catherine Liszt
Breaking the Barriers to Desire, Kevin Lano & Claire Parry
Lesbian Polyfidelity, Celeste West
Publications on non-monogamy:
Loving More Magazine (www.lovemore.com) (303) 543-7540

Kathy Labriola provides low-fee counseling for individuals, couples, and groups. She has extensive experience assisting people with the challenges of non-traditional relationships, health problems and disabilities, HIV/AIDS, sexual orientation crises, political activism, and class struggle. She also facilitates discussion and support groups on open relationships, health and disabilities, and political activism and burnout. For further information, or to receive free educational pamphlets, call (510)464-4652.

Kathy Labriola
Counselor/Nurse
1307 University Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94702
(510)464-4652 or (510)841-5307
Article used by permission.

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5 DOUBLE STANDARDS & HUMAN RIGHTS
5.1 Pc PC

The following review appears on the londonfetishscene.com website
FIST, WEDNESDAY 23 JANUARY 2002

A dark alleyway leads the way to the club’s entrance in Imperial Gardens, setting the scene perfectly. Inside, Fist is a labyrinth of dark corridors lined with rubber and leather clad bodies.

The corridors lead into a dance room playing hard house music, a porn cinema, and a chill out room playing an eclectic mix of music where you can easily hold a group conversation without having to shout yourself hoarse! (You could also get your boots shined free of charge by the boot shine boy!) Above the cinema is a small gallery which I heard is used for orgies but we didn’t spend enough time there to find out.

The play room is located in a large gravel floored tent. Pitch black with just the sound of boots scraping on gravel, the only visible décor are the multiple rolls of kitchen paper hanging from the ceiling. Fist is pure sleaze.

Officially Fist is open to people of all genders and sexualities although in reality the clubbers are 95% gay male. However, the club which is owned and run by a woman openly welcomes women and I found it to be very friendly.

There were about 15-20 women there overall, pretty much all lesbian as far as I could tell. The small numbers meant that we banded together and soon had a group for socializing and sex alike. The men I spoke to were also friendly towards us. However, if large numbers of men, either partially or completely naked will seriously put you off then you might consider staying at home!

Fist is essentially about fucking. The equipment – three slings, is designed for sex rather than SM play. The fetish element of the club is in the strict dress code – rubber, leather, PVC, military or ‘just boots’. My friend was initially told she couldn’t come in because of their ‘no jeans’ policy (even ripped black jeans are unacceptable apparently) but luckily the club owner allowed her in. I wore lingerie, which isn’t officially on the dress code and had no problems. They are quite strict though, so be warned.

The sex here is hardcore, with people fucking, sucking and wanking round every corner. The play room is packed and you have to be quick to get a sling. Condoms, lube and latex gloves are all on hand although we took our own for convenience. I was lucky enough to end up in a sling surrounded by about 12 dykes, lining up to take a turn and grabbing me from all angles! Even the gay boys enjoyed the show we put on!

There’s plenty of action to watch just from the people around, but Fist also hosts a live performance at 1am. This time it was provided by Spike and Arlene who performed an amazing and intense cutting and branding scene. Arlene cut the words ‘Bitch’ ‘Slut’ and ‘Fist’ into Spike’s body, pressed a paper towel to each word and hung the words spelt in blood on the back wall before pressing a red hot branding iron into Spike’s belly three times over. Not for the faint hearted!

The upside to Fist, is the ‘anything goes’ atmosphere and low down dirty sleaze. The down side is the filth and there’s plenty of it. The toilets are a hot-spot for watersports and scat play [i.e. urination and excreta play] and before long they STINK! The sawdust on the floor quickly turns brown/green and you need a pretty strong stomach just to empty your bladder!

Similarly in the playroom, despite the rolls of paper the slings get covered in grease lube and so will anything else you leave lying around. I can’t even begin to describe the state of my friend’s waistcoat after it had been kicked around on the floor for a bit. Suffice to say she was embarrassed to take it to the dry cleaners! With body fluids a plenty you can’t expect it to smell alpine fresh but it can get a bit much after a while.

All in all I really enjoyed the night and I’d definitely go back. You can dance, chill, watch or fuck and each room caters ideally to its purpose. Despite being mainly men it seemed women friendly although I’d definitely advocate getting a group together. A fabulous night if you can stomach it!

The FIST party described above took place in licensed premises and at the time this review was written FIST had been holding such events for eight years. As it consists entirely of gay men and women, the police and courts allow them to enjoy themselves in ways that would lead to prosecution and conviction for heterosexuals.

FIST of course is not alone. Although the FIST aesthetic is a significant but minority genre within gay culture, the occurrence of sex is nearly universal wherever gay men gather. According to Nicholas Boles, the Conservative councillor and gay man who directs the think-tank Policy Exchange, writing in The Times Thunderer column

“London has more gay bars and pubs than any city in the world. There are probably more than a hundred gay club nights every week.”

He might have added that they usually take place in licensed premises; that public and group sex happen somewhere on the premises in almost all of them; that many of them have rooms specifically intended as places for sex; and that some such as gay saunas are simply sex clubs.

One website lists eight gay hotels, 14 gay saunas, 26 gay clubs and 128 gay bars in London alone. Saunas are advertised as possessing “loads of rest areas”, “a giant communal cruise room; a host of private rooms with video lounge”, “huge maze of private rest rooms” Rest areas and private rooms contain beds or couches and together with cruise rooms are provided to facilitate sexual encounters. The Saunabar in Covent Garden has “a suite of seven rest rooms” and “fully licensed bar”. In some gay pubs and bars the sex spills out from the back room or toilets into the saloon. According to one website review, at a gay pub in Bermondsey you can

“Watch men spill their beer as they order at the bar with a cock up their ass.”.

There is every reason to believe that gay saunas would be prosecuted as ‘brothels’ if used by heterosexual men and women for exactly the same activities. FIST would likely be prosecuted for ‘allowing a brothel on licensed premises’ and the owner for ‘living off immoral earnings’ if patronized by heterosexuals, because two heterosexual women offering themselves for lewdness with men creates a ‘brothel’.

1994, the year of the Club Whiplash arrests, was coincidentally the year FIST began its scatological gay orgies – with impunity.

Two years later the annual (pansexual but primarily heterosexual) Sex Maniacs’ Ball had to be cancelled after being threatened with prosecution by the Metropolitan Police – because its theme was to be a celebration of John Major’s then recent legalization of heterosexual anal sex (gay anal sex had been legalized almost 30 years earlier in 1967). Meanwhile FIST was sailing through its third unmolested year.

Two years after that again, in 1998 by which time Tony Blair was in power, the proprietor of a swingers’ club in Nevern, Pembrokeshire – a former major in the Army – was convicted and fined £2000 for keeping a brothel and living off immoral earnings because he allowed ordinary swingers activities. There was no suggestion of prostitution. He pleaded guilty

“because he had not wanted to embarrass friends by asking them to give evidence”.

The chairman of the magistrates had said

“We regard this as a very serious case”

but took into consideration that he had co-operated. The victim closed the business and went elsewhere. Dyfed-Powys Police had succeeded in running swingers off their patch. Meanwhile, FIST was enjoying its 5th year of coprophile orgies.

‘Living off immoral earnings’ is a particularly cruel charge to use in suppressing swingers. The imputation of actual prostitution is particularly humiliating especially for female swingers, who tend to be respectable married or professional women. It was the charge used to pass a nine month sentence on the husband of Liverpudlian porn actress Sabrina Johnson257 in 1996 (even though her films were made in the USA). Mrs Johnson commented

“It’s illegal for my husband to live off my earnings, because technically, if I do films, I’m classed as a prostitute, and my husband is a pimp…I can live off my work, but if I bought Graham a drink in a pub, he could be done again for living off immoral earnings.”

In June 2003 a photographer’s model in Warrington was raided and her husband cautioned for living off immoral earnings because the police considered his wife’s adult modeling to be prostitution. After the case the police handed back commercial porn videos taken in raids but the victim’s videos of his wife were never returned. It appears that in the UK it is legal for a husband to possess videos of other people having sex but not his own wife.

In its 9th year a complaint was eventually made against FIST which led to them seeking new premises. Thankfully there have never been any prosecutions, despite frenetic group anal sex regularly occurring within yards of a licensed bar from which alcohol was easily available. This provides an exemplary level of legal tolerance of sex, the FIST standard. Unfortunately it is a standard that the British government applies only to gays.

5.2 Human Rights and wrongs

The British government is obliged by the European Convention on Human rights not only to respect the privacy of women’s and swingers private lives (Article but also to grant women and swingers the same rights as gays (Article 14).
Clearly in applying the FIST standard to one sex and sexual persuasion but not the other, the government is violating its human rights obligations and discriminating against some of its citizens.

There are five arguments the government might use to defend the status quo.

Article 8.2: First, they could argue that Clause 2 of Article 8 of the Convention allows the state to legislate in the area of private morality for the protection of morals. But under Article 14 they would have to legislate equally harshly for gays and luckily there is not the remotest possibility of that happening (or of it being enforced).

Glib assertion: Second, they could (and do) assert glibly that the law is non-discriminatory between gays and heterosexuals. In her letter to me of 9 August 2002 the Home Secretary’s Advisor Lesley Dix pointed out that s6 of the Sexual Offences Act 1967 extended the definition of a brothel to include premises used for lewd homosexual practices.

That’s the theory. The practice is that swingers clubs get busted but none of the thousands of gay pubs and clubs ever do, despite the same activities that swingers practice being undertaken on an unimaginable scale in gay establishments. In consequence there is a huge gay leisure industry but the swingers scene is forced to remain underground.

It is emphatically not an adequate defense of the current state of affairs to point to equally illiberal laws against gays when those laws are a complete dead letter but the laws against heterosexuals engaging in the same activities are enforced relatively frequently. Discriminatory enforcement of the law is merely a more insidious breach of human rights than discriminatory legislation. Not that discriminatory enforcement is the UK’s only violation of the Convention – as we have seen the government’s Sexual Offences Act 2003 actually makes discrimination worse by legalizing gay orgies but not heterosexual ones.

Reacting to complaints: A third defense could be that the police live and let live and are only forced to take action when complaints are made. This would be disingenuous and would not fit the facts. The police act on complaints against swingers but do not and would not act on complaints against gays because after centuries of brutal discrimination they are now a politically favoured minority.

When a complaint was made about FIST the result was a gentle word of advice more in sorrow than in anger and no talk of charges. And rightly so – how could someone visit such a place without knowing what to expect? The idea that the unwary would have their sensibilities shocked is ludicrous.

Compare this with what happened at the Garden of Eden swingers club in Nevern. A woman, having heard tales of orgies, decided to visit the club after enquiring and being told that ‘anything goes’ with couples, lesbians, homosexuals and transvestites meeting there. She and her sister were collected from their home 60 miles away by a driver employed by the club. However, she was supposedly so shocked at finding 20 people having group sex in the swimming pool that she reported the matter to police and the owner was fined £2000. The difference between what happened to the Garden of Eden and what happened to FIST when complaints were made is the measure of how swingers are oppressed in Britain.

If a religious or otherwise anti-gay group ran a campaign of visiting gay clubs and bars and making complaints about what they found, nobody in their right mind could believe the police would initiate a huge closure operation against Britain’s gay culture. In contrast swingers are treated harshly in response to complaints about milder behaviour (no excreta) when by their human rights they should be treated the same.

Plausible deniability: The government’s fourth line of defense could be to claim that gay clubs and pubs are not explicitly fitted out for sex (and that they therefore do not breach any laws or regulations) whereas proper on-premises swingers clubs are flagrant, can have no other purpose and make it impossible for officialdom to turn a blind eye. In other worlds, legality hinges on how plausibly it can be denied that premises are sex clubs not on the actual fact of them being sex clubs.

It may be true that gay sex clubs could in theory function simply as saunas. But to see them as such requires considerable disingenuity. Firstly as regards the way they are designed (“giant communal cruise room” “40 man steam room” “Cinema room”); the way they are advertised (in gay magazines illustrated with pictures of naked and attractive men using ambiguous adjectives such as ‘friendly’ ‘steamy’ etc); the way they are operated (condoms and lubricating creams are often available free; disposal bins are provided in ‘rest rooms’); and of course what happens in them. Officialdom has to pretend to be blind to general social knowledge as well as to easily available print and Internet media to maintain these are not sex clubs.

But in addition this approach demonstrates a profound cultural and sexual bias. The fact is that many men (and not just gay men) actually enjoy sex in unromantic, uncomfortable, even sleazy environments. A light perusal of both heterosexual and gay male pornography establishes this very quickly. The casual encounter somewhere other than a bedroom is an integral component – even partly definitive – of the gay lifestyle. In particular, anonymous encounters (up to and including penetrative sex) in ‘groping groups’ of standing men in darkened rooms (and woods such a Hampstead West Heath in London) is a gay staple. This is what ‘cruise rooms’ in gay saunas are for.

In this important sense British gay sex clubs suit the predilections of their clientele at least as well if not better than would somewhere configured with lots of easily-soiled soft furnishings and king-sized beds. Needless to say that such a comfortable environment would be even further from the requirements of FIST’s clientele, happy as they are in a gravel floored tent with loo rolls hanging from the ceiling.

The contrast with the preferred environment of the female swinger could not be more pronounced. Female swingers demand uplifting premises with soft and inviting play spaces, flattering lighting and proper beds instead of clinical couches, mattresses or empty rooms. In short, something approximating to the standard continental swingers club.

So the current state of the law, approving sex clubs configured as sauna clubs while prohibiting sex clubs configured as swinging clubs, amounts in reality to sexist discrimination against women. The legal ‘sauna’ format is close to ideal for most gay sex club clientele while the illegal ‘swinger club’ format is close to necessary for most female and heterosexual sex club clientele. It is a clear case of discrimination whether intended or not and a violation of the human rights of women.

Community feeling: Fifth and finally, it could be argued that swinging is a grey area that, de facto, permits local communities to allow a level of provision they feel appropriate. There are after all a large number of swingers organizations. Thousands of swingers successfully pursue their hobby unbothered by the law as occasional persecutions and exposé’s affect relatively few. Some swingers clubs, notably La Chambre in Sheffield, are so open that they appear frequently in the media.

The European Convention on Human Rights applies to local government and the police as they and their powers are created by Act of Parliament. These public bodies are no more entitled to discriminate against swingers than is the British Government. There must be gay pubs or clubs in every single local government area of Great Britain. At the very least sex will take place regularly in the rooms of these places, that is if they do not have a purposely designated ‘back room’ for encounters. Yet I am not aware that there has ever been a single prosecution under the Disorderly Houses Act 1751 or for ‘keeping a brothel’ or ‘living off immoral earnings’, or ‘allowing a brothel on licensed premises’ of anyone managing gay premises.

Under the Human Rights Convention a municipality that permits licensed premises for gays to congregate and have sex must treat swingers equally.

The appeal to ‘community feeling’ is in any case bogus. The government would not tolerate ‘communities’ discriminating against gays if that was the genuine ‘community feeling’ (as it was in some places when gay premises were new and before local residents discovered they are trouble-free neighbors that do not corrupt their children). Swingers are entitled to the same protection.

The argument that the hand of repression is light and should be borne with equanimity invites comparison with the law relating to gays before 1967. Gay culture existed, there were meeting places, discreet events. But also sordid lives twisted by shame and the terror of discovery. Gays were, generally, a ridiculed minority in the country at large.

Now in the fourth decade of gay liberation the situation is transformed. Gays are big business. Gay culture has become a positive feature of all the world’s cosmopolitan cities, an international standard of civilization, affluence and fun. In London the annual Gay Pride festival is led by gay policemen in uniform. In can hardly be said that gays were better off lying low and getting on with it as best they could, as they had to before 1967. Given their human rights there is no reason to expect swingers to aspire to anything less – and no reason to withhold it from them.

La Chambre is a swingers club in Sheffield that appears to benefit from complete tolerance from the city council and South Yorkshire Police. It has featured in numerous broadcast and print media features about swingers. It is to the credit of the officials in Sheffield and the local constabulary that they are interpreting the law in the way that they do.

However, this issue throws up unacceptable vagaries in the application of the law, given the conviction of the Garden of Eden in Nevern, Pembrokeshire for being a swinging club. There is also the question of how, why and by what procedure the Government permits one businessman to become a monopoly supplier of legal swinging premises and how this affects the human rights of other businesspeople and his competitors and the government’s obligations under the EU single market.

The argument that South Yorkshire is a metropolitan area where it is natural to expect greater tolerance of sexual heterodoxy than in rural Pembrokeshire does not hold water. As we have seen, in London, the most cosmopolitan city in the country, the Metropolitan Police forced the cancellation of the Sex Maniacs Ball only two years before the Pembrokeshire prosecution.

England and Wales is one jurisdiction. The criminal law is the same everywhere and local authorities and the police have no role in deciding what the law is. How is it that a man in Sheffield can be feted on television for running an above-board swingers club, while a man in Pembrokeshire can be convicted for living off immoral earnings and keeping a brothel – for doing exactly the same thing? What does this say about the certainty of the law? How is a citizen to know where she can legally make love without being branded a prostitute?

5.3 Conclusion

Swinging is a safe, international, middle class and increasingly popular leisure choice for married and courting couples.

Research has shown clear benefits in terms of personal happiness and relationship stability among regular swingers and suggests that the rate of relationship failure in swinging is several orders less than for monogamous relationships.

Current criticism of swinging appears to be based on religious prejudice rather than study.

The government subsidies an organization which breaches the spirit if not the letter of its charitable status in anthologizing swingers.

The law as regards swingers is an utter disgrace. Though not applied severely enough to suppress all swinging activity, it is repressive enough to keep swinging underground and prevent businesses meeting the growing demand for swingers’ facilities.

The law is enforced with extreme inconsistency. While in most of the country including London swingers clubs and events are prosecuted and closed down if they stick their heads above the parapet, in one city a swinging club is protected from the injustice of the law and has become famous in the media.

Women swingers who engage in group sex are treated as prostitutes whereas men both gay and straight who do the same things are not. Gays are allowed to do all the things prohibited to swingers on a vast scale including having group sex, sex clubs, sex on licensed premises as well as holding public festivals.

The government’s maintenance of the laws against swingers and its refusal to implement a privacy law invites the gutter press to harass and persecute swingers even in their own homes.

The implications of the Human Rights Act 1998, with its requirements for respect and equal treatment for women and sexual minorities, have not been realised for swingers. The government’s similar but higher obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights are ignored.

In each of these respects the UK has fallen significantly and unacceptably behind Western and European norms.

5.4 Recommendations

1. The government should recognize its responsibilities under the European Convention on Human Rights and apply the same standards of tolerance towards women and swingers as it does to gays – the FIST standard.

2. The government should cease to fund Relate for an initial period of three to five years until it can demonstrate an internal culture change that accepts the scientific evidence on the benefits of swinging and swingers as successful relationship models; and abandons all discrimination against sexual minorities and prejudiced advice contrary to the findings of science.

3. The government should inquire into whether Relate has breached its Memorandum of Association and its charitable status in its campaign of discrimination against swingers.

4. In order to bring the law into compliance with human rights, swingers activities should be legalized in a comprehensive and complete way. To achieve this while making clear the new legal boundaries, the government should bring forward two Acts of Parliament. The first should be a Sexual Relations Act that would explicitly place women, heterosexuals (including swingers) and gays on an absolutely level playing field as regards their recreational sex; legalize heterosexual group sex; end the confusion between female swingers, sexual models and porn actresses on the one hand and prostitutes on the other; and repeal the statutory and common law offences that currently violate human rights in this area.

5. The second should be a sexuality-neutral Sex Clubs Act that would legalize sex clubs both gay and swinger; subject them to the same light regulatory regime; permit them to sell alcohol; clarify the planning and licensing roles of local authorities on sex clubs in such a way that does not permit them to veto sex clubs altogether; and repeal all existing laws that may be construed in conflict with the new act.

6 SOURCES

6.1 Endnotes

1 It has been suggested that it “had something to do with the music vernacular of the ’40s and the loose, free-form dances of that era.” (Gould quoted in Marino 1999) www.sfweekly.com/extra/beyond/swingers1.html. Another claimed origin is a minister denouncing “weird people swinging back and fro from bed to bed.” (Sez) www.loveplay.com/frmopnmar.htm.

2 “The discovery of bisexual enjoyment is not at all uncommon among female swingers…Whatever the reason or prevailing cultural forces, swinging is one of the only outlets that allows women in modern society to explore all aspects of their sexuality in a safe and comfortable setting.” (Terrien 2002), www.gwu.edu/~english/ccsc/2002 Pages/Terrien.htm.

3 “There are those who like to watch and those who like to be watched. There are “soft swingers” who engage in petting, foreplay and maybe even oral sex, but draw the line at intercourse. There are couples who only swap girl-on-girl, others who go for the whole enchilada. With some couples, only the woman swings and the man watches, or vice versa. Some enjoy threesomes with selected friends, others prefer anonymous group sex.” (Marino 1999) www.sfweekly.com/extra/beyond/swingers1.html.

4 Ibid.

5 “However welcoming the Lifestyle can seem to a couple’s peculiarities and perversions, there is one unwritten rule: Most women are bi/curious, but all the men are straight. A couple who swings in all directions would be politely asked to leave most clubs.” (Henry 2001). Also “”Girls are expected, certainly preferred, to be bisexual, but male-male contact is not only frowned upon, the mere request can get a guy hurt.” (Jade) www.lippyimp.com/junglegym.htm. See also www.sexuality.org/swinging.html.

6 e.g. seeking a girl-girl experience for the female partner.

7 e.g. only one partner may have full penetrative sex.

8 Such as couples who do not mind being in separate rooms during sexual activity.

9 Premier swingers contact magazines are Desire Contacts (www.desire.co.uk/) in the UK; Happy Weekend in Germany (www.happyweekend.de/start.eos); Interconnexion in France (www.connexline.com).

10 A Times article about contact ads in local newspapers concludes “the truly shocking thing was the plethora of messages from couples. Ream after ream of local ads are from “imaginative”, “carnal”, “curious”, or “juicy” married twosomes yearning to add that certain sparkle to their bedroom activity.” (Haran 2003).

11 British examples are (free) http://dirty-david.com, www.swing2us.com, www.sharers.co.uk/newframe.htmand (membership) www.photo-personals.co.uk/guest, www.swapscene.com, www.ukswingers.co.uk.

12 Florida-based Swingers Europe (www.swingerseurope.com) is currently the premier contacts and chatroom site for northern Europe and the UK.

13 Usually international e.g. www.whosoncam.com, www.anywebcam.com.

14 Houseparties are the origin of swinging (www.chezlouis.com/eng/history.htm, www.eroticguide.com/eu/classes/online/Swing/HISTORY.htm) and the practice is still strong, for example the one brilliantly portrayed by Natasha Carlish in her documentary The Orgy broadcast on Channel 5 4/1/01. British contact clubs such as Club Aphrodite (www.club-aphrodite.com/frame.htm) encourage their members to hold house parties. However there are also specialist party-throwing clubs. The most distinguished of these in the USA are Toga Joe’s in New York (www.togajoe.com) and Fling (www.flingevents.com/home.html) in California. UK examples are the long-running Toucan Club (www.btinternet.com/~ECB/toucan), the new Club Champagne (www.clubchampagne.com) and the select Fever (www.feverparties.com).

15 ‘Swingers club’ is an imprecise term. As well as party clubs and contacts clubs there are off-premises clubs where sex is not allowed and on-premises clubs where sex can actually take place. On-premises clubs are what swingers clubs are popularly imagined to be and is the sense in which the term is used here. On-premises clubs are usually either in nightclub/bar/lounge format (e.g. www.skinnydippersuk.com, www.velvetcurtain.net) or spa format (e.g. www.rios.co.uk/index.htm, www.club-paradise.nl). See www.nasca.com/states/nasca_faq.html.

16 e.g. www.bukkake.org.uk, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/midlandsukbukkake, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/londonbukkakeparties.

17 e.g. www.bi-bar.com, www.bisexualplayground.com/bisexual.html, www.alternativeconnections.com/bisexual-personals.htm.

18 e.g. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sexatthemovies.

19 e.g. www.londonfetishscene.com/Default.asp, www.clubwicked.org, www.torturegarden.com, www.kinky-kiwi.com/index1.html, www.cakelondon.com, www.hubbies.com, www.dpf.com/,www.adult-babies.com, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/human_equine, www.thehumanequine.com/the1.html, www.fetishlink.net/Pony.

20 i.e. couples and singles, in practice nearly always single men.

21 women who enjoy many men. The editor of French literary magazine Art Press published an account of her lifetime of gang-bangs (Millet 2002).

22 www.feverparties.com.

23 exhibitionism or swinging in public carparks (Lambert 2002).

24 www.libchrist.com.

25 www.libchrist.com/poly/polyvsswing.html.

26 www.swingworld.net/swinfo/priest.htm.

27 www.nasca.com/states/nasca_faq.html – whoare.

28 see for example www.voy.com/7895/108.html, an exchange of anecdotes about sex in church.

29 Bergstrand & Williams (2000) para 7 www.ejhs.org/volume3/swing/body.htm.

30 Ibid. para 7 citing Friendship Express 1994 & Miller 1994.

31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.

33 Ibid. para 21

34 Ibid. para 23

35 Ibid. para 14

36 Ibid. para 25

37 Kate Finnigan “Welcome to the pleasure dome” Elle May 2003 quoted in full at http://feverparties.com/media.htm.

38 Desire Contacts, Issue 5, August 2003 pp15-37.

39 Chrisafis, Angelique “What’s love got to do with it?” The Guardian G2 29 August 2003.

40 “The swinger takes it all” Cosmopolitan December 2001 quoted in full ibid.

41 Ibid. para 9

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid.

44 “Some swingers feel that a weak marriage probably will not survive swinging and that perhaps in such cases couples shouldn’t swing… Most swingers believe swinging is not for all married couples. They do believe that swinging is better than sneaking around corners and lying to the partner about an outside relationship.” Butler (1979).

45 Bergstrand & Williams (2000) para 6 www.ejhs.org/volume3/swing/body.htm.

46 Ibid. para 2 also Butler (1979) http://feverparties.com/First_timers_pages.htm.

47 Terrien 2002 www.gwu.edu/~english/ccsc/2002 Pages/Terrien.htm.

48 www.sexuality.org.

49 www.sexuality.org/swinging.html.

50 Filmmaker David Schisgall, who directed The Lifestyle: Group Sex in the Suburbs (www.7thart.com/current/lifestyle/thelife.html), quoted in Carina Chocano “Swap Meat” Salon People, online, 21/4/00 p2. http://cobrand.salon.com/people/feature/2000/04/21/lifestyle/index.html.

51 www.feverparties.com.

52 Ibid. (see First-Time Swingers Pages/ The joy of swinging).

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid. (see First-Time Swingers Pages/ Who should swing).

56 Ibid. ( see First-Time Swingers Pages/ The joy of swinging).

57 Ibid. (see First-Time Swingers Pages/ Who should swing).

58 Terrien 2002 www.gwu.edu/~english/ccsc/2002 Pages/Terrien.htm.

59 www.ejhs.org/volume3/swing/body.htm.

60 78.5% against 64% very happy compared with respondents to the University of Michigan General Social Survey, the standard demographic model of the US population (Bergstrand & Williams Table 14) www.ejhs.org/volume3/swing/body.htm.

61 Bergstrand & Williams Table 15.

62 Ibid.

63 Ibid.

64 Ibid. Table 17.

65 In answer to the question “At this point in your life would you say you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” swingers responded 58.8% against 32.2% very happy and 41.2% against 67.9% pretty or not too happy; (Bergstrand & Williams Table 20). Comparison with GSS.

66 In answer to the question “Is life exciting or dull?” swingers answered 75.9% against 54.4% exciting and 23.8% against 54.4% dull (Bergstrand & Williams Table 21). Comparison with GSS. www.ejhs.org/volume3/swing/body.htm.

67 Ibid. Table 16.

68 The most negative findings have been two contentious papers from the early seventies, Henshel (1973) & Varni (1974), that suggested men initiated most swinging. Henshel found men initiated swinging in 68% of cases from a sample of only 25 women in Toronto. Neither study considered whether the women habitually took a lead from their partners in other aspects of their relationship.

69 Henry (2001) http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/2001-06-13/cover.html.

70 Whitby (2003) p96.

71 www.drpetra.co.uk/press/index.html.

72 www.drpetra.co.uk/research/index.html.

73 www.the-sensual-magazine.com/pages/features/food.htm.

74 www.the-sensual-magazine.com/pages/features/girltalk.htm.

75 Whitby (2003) p96.

76 Butler (1979) quoted on http://feverparties.com/First_timers_pages.htm.

77 Honorary Professor at the Roehampton Institute of Surrey University and visiting professor at several other universities in the UK and abroad. She has authored more than 150 publications in 21 languages including Everything You Wanted To Know About Extraordinary Sex and is currently working on her fourth doctorate. www.upso.co.uk/petruska.htm, www.physis.co.uk/pc/pclark.htm, www.upso.co.uk/Everything_you.htm.

78 Clarkson, Petruska quoted in “Come together” Arena magazine, London, July 2003, p77.

79 p270.

80 Sometime President of the British Society of Medical and Dental Hypnosis, Director of the Scottish Refugee Council, President of the Indian Association of Strathclyde.

81 http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:LgxeDezQzAcJ:members.madasafish.com/

~cj_whitehound/Theatre_of_Cruelty/police.htm+%22prem+misra%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8.

82 www.scottishmediamonitor.com/articles2.cfm?ID=108.

83 www.newsfilter.org/paris.htm.

84 web.inter.nl.net/users/N.Leeuwis/club_uk.htm.

85 For example Fun4two www.fun4two.nl/,http://feverparties.com/fun4two.htm.

86 www.capdagde.com/en/activities/naturism.html.

87 www.naturist.org.uk/other.htm.

88 http://feverparties.com/capdagde.htm.

89 www.nasca.com/states/nasca_clubs.html, www.swingersboard.com/clubs/index.html.

90 http://clubsandparties.com/index1.htm.

91 www.nasca.com/states/nasca_convention.html.

92 Seminars at the “Lifestyles East” convention in the 465 room Radisson Deauville Hotel, Miami Beach in March 2003 included (among others): Aids & STDs; How to strip for your man; The art of entering a new lover; Gender preference: A historical look at the social constructions of heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual; The fun of hypnosis; Erotic and easy techniques to manually stimulate your guy; Using meditation to enhance your BDSM relationship style; Sex as a sacred and healing art; and How to meet new friends on the Internet together with several Q&A sessions and a couples’ massage workshop http://lifestyles-east.com/seminars.html.

93 http://clubsandparties.com/index1.htm.

94 Ibid.

95 www.swingersboard.com/clubs/clubs/foreign.html.

96 Clubsandparties.com (http://clubsandparties.com/) is an adjunct to Dirty-David (http://dirty-david.com/) the most popular free British swingers contact website.

97 http://clubsandparties.com/index1.htm.

98 Ibid.

99 www.les-chandelles.com/index2.php3, www.overside.fr/english/presentation/start.htm.

100 www.ccsida.com.

101 See 3 below.

102 http://clubsandparties.com/index1.htm.

103 Rapture, Endorphine Visions, Dreamworld, Penthouse swingers.

104 Capers=ClubAphrodite. FantasyFood=UKLiasons. LoveSwingers=Raptures. Scorpio.net=Scorpio. Censored, Desire & Passion and Limelight=Mystique. Members=Toucan Club.

105 L’amour, Club Rub, Torture Garden, Fringe.

106 Pleasuredome, FIST.

107 Club Aphrodite, Hedonism, Scorpio.

108 Rude Food.

109 Loungeparties, Paradise Club.

110 Fever.

111 Toucan Club.

112 Skinnydippers, Radlett, UKLiasons, Charles, Kent Castle.

113 Eureka, Silverleigh.

114 Rio’s, City Spa.

115 Cockatoo, CouplesZone.

116 Couples Club.

117 Mystique (http://themystiqueclub.com).

118 Halsbury’s Statutes 4th Edition Vol 12 p248.

119 Winter v Woolfe [1931] 1 KB 549, considered in Kelly v Purvis [1983] 1 All ER 525, [1983] 2 WLR 299.

120 Halsbury’s Statutes 4th edition Vol 12 p249.

121 Ibid.

122 www.black-rose.com/cuiru/archive/2-6/briefs2-6.html, www.urban75.com/Mag/sexual.html, www.sfc.org.uk/about.htm.

123 “…under section 33 of the 1956 Act of keeping or managing a brothel, as an element of reward is not necessarily required (Kelly v Purvis [1983] 1 All ER 525)”. House of Commons Research Paper 00/15 7/2/00. www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/rp2000/rp00-015.pdf.

124 Kelly v Purvis [1983] 1 All ER 525, [1983] 2 WLR 299.

125 25 Geo 2 c36.

126 Section 8.
127 www.sfc.org.uk/bill.htm. Keeping a Disorderly House was the charge used in the failed prosecution of Club Whiplash, a fetish club, in 1994. It was also one of the charges in the successful Operation Spanner prosecution of the consenting S&M practitioners arrested in 1989. www.barnsdle.demon.co.uk/span/sp-timel.html.

128 Licensing Act 1964, Section 176.

129 Section 138.

130 Sexual Offences Act 1956 s30 & 31.

131 See 18 September on www.melonfarmers.co.uk/news0998.htm, and 29 November on www.melonfarmers.co.uk/news1198.htm.

132 The Operation Spanner arrests.

133 The Club Whiplash case.

134 It was the 1751 Act that was threatened against the venue owners. www.black-rose.com/cuiru/archive/2-6/briefs2-6.html, www.urban75.com/Mag/sexual.html, www.sfc.org.uk/about.htm.

135 the prosecution and consequent closure of the Garden of Eden swinging club in Nevern, Pembrokeshire. See 18 September on www.melonfarmers.co.uk/news0998.htm, and 29 November on www.melonfarmers.co.uk/news1198.htm.

136 Paul Foster, ” Policy guidelines for the control of sex establishments” Croydon Borough Council Cabinet Consultative Paper 4/12/02. www.croydon.gov.uk/CSDept/Democratic/Agenda_Reports/CPanels/Env/4_Dec/CCP01202.R05.doc.

137 Ibid., Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1992.

138 MR conversation with sex establishment applicant.

139 Foster (2002).

140 www.unwelcomeguests.com.

141 http://uk.gay.com/printit/news/uk/1646.

142 Ross Clark “Kangaroo courting” The Spectator 30/11/02. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3025377.stm.

143 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3014239.stm.

144 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3025377.stm, http://uk.gay.com/printit/news/uk/1646.

145 “in some circumstances group sex acts between heterosexuals might involve the commission of an offence under section 33 of the 1956 Act of keeping or managing a brothel, as an element of reward is not necessarily required (Kelly v Purvis [1983] 1 All ER 525)”. House of Commons Research Paper 00/15 7/2/00 www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/rp2000/rp00-015.pdf.

146 Sexual Offences Act 1967 Section 1.

147 Lesley Dix, Home Office Sentencing & Offences Unit, 304, 50 St Anne’s Gate, London SW1H 9AT Ref SOU2002/02398.

148 Kelly v Purvis [1983] 1 All ER 525, [1983] 2 WLR 299.

149 Mahmood, Mazher “Who wants to bed a millionaire” News of the World 9/6/02.

150 No sex outside marriage.

151 http://feverparties.com/assets/Come_together.pdf.

152 22 June 2003. http://feverparties.com/assets/All_together_now.pdf www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-721020,00.html.

153 The 9 June story “Who wants to bed a millionaire?” and “Lessons in Lust” on 6 January. There was also on 13 October a cruel exposé of former Page 3 models working as call-girls..

154 www.relate.org.uk.

155 “Relate counselling is open to all. Whether you are married, living together, in a same-sex relationship, separated, divorced or single, our confidential service can help you to deal with your relationship difficulties.” www.relate.org.uk/rel_couns.html.

156 claiming a 93% significant improvement rate www.relate.org.uk/pst_home.html.

157 Relate Report & Accounts for the year ending 31 March 2002.

158 15 November 2001.

159 www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/12/31/nski31.xml.

160 www.juliacole.org.

161 Ibid.

162 www.pennellwomenshealth.org/index.htm.

163 www.femail.co.uk/pages/standard/index.html?in_page_id=177.

164 www.bbc.co.uk/health/profiles/julia_cole.shtml.

165 www.emotionalbliss.com.

166 www.chicklit.co.uk/lifestyle.asp?tested=y, www.zest.co.uk/cover_line1.html.

167 www.relate.org.uk/embliss.html.

168 “The swinger takes it all” Cosmopolitan December 2001 (quoted at http://feverparties.com/media.htm) describes her as “Relate Counsellor”.

169 www.mumsnet.com/experts/relationships.html.

170 www.sextherapyonline.org/frameset.htm.

171 Le Feuve (2002).

172 As part of “The swinger takes it all” Cosmopolitan December 2001 (quoted at http://feverparties.com/media.htm).

173 Butler (1979) quoted at http://feverparties.com/First_timers_pages.htm on the Serious Comment page.

174 www.zest.co.uk/cover_line1.html.

175 Butler (1979).

176 www.observer.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4601609,00.html.

177 Butler (1979). Relationship failure appears to be around seventeen and a half times more common among first marriages than among swingers. See 4.3 (ix) below.

178 Dixon (1984) www.sexuality.org/swinging.html.

179 Bailey, Michael J., June 2003 “A Sex Difference in the Specificity of Sexual Arousal” Psychological Science (forthcoming at time of writing). For press release see www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-06/nu-ssd061203.php, for full paper see www.psych.nwu.edu/psych/people/faculty/bailey/Publications/Chivers et al (final).pdf

180 Marino (1999) www.sfweekly.com/extra/beyond/swingers1.html.

181 Plumley, Peter 1994 “An Actuarial Analysis of the AIDS Epidemic in the US” www.virusmyth.net/aids/data/pptalk.htm Plumley is also author of ‘Modeling the AIDS Epidemic by Analysis of Sexual and Intravenous Drug Behavior’ and ‘An Analysis of the AIDS Epidemic as it Affects Heterosexuals,’ both published in the Transactions of the Society of Actuaries.

182 Ibid.

183 Ibid.

184 Marino (1999) www.sfweekly.com/extra/beyond/swingers1.html.

185 Ibid.

186 Plumley (1994) www.virusmyth.net/aids/data/pptalk.htm.

187 Ibid.

188 Ibid.

189 Ibid.

190 For example http://drziggy.com/Swinging and STD’s.htm www.sexuality.org/concise.html.

191 10 people are killed and 102 people seriously injured on the roads every day in the UK (www.dft.gov.uk/pns/DisplayPN.cgi?pn_id=2002_0236).

192 Butler (1979)(http://feverparties.com/First_timers_pages.htm / Serious Comment).

193 Paula Hall did it on Woman’s Hour, see 4.6 (xxi) below.

194 Covey (1989) p241.

195 “Come together” Arena July 2003 p77 http://feverparties.com/assets/Come_together.pdf.

196 Ibid.

197 www.papillondesalpes.com.

198 Sarah Womack, “Slippery slope as ski firm offers wife-swapping trips”, The Daily Telegraph 31/12/02 www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/12/31/nski31.xml.

199 Ibid.

200 Butler (1979) http://feverparties.com/First_timers_pages.htm.

201 Bergstrand & Williams (2000) para 29 & Table 17 www.ejhs.org/volume3/swing/body.htm.

202 www.scottishmediamonitor.com/articles2.cfm?ID=108.

203 www.bigglesguy.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/itchy.html.

204 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1502007.stm.

205 We both serve on the organising team of Fever www.feverparties.com.

206 www.emotionalbliss.com/country_1024.asp.

207 www.emotionalbliss.com/board/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=45&FORUM_ID=8& CAT_ID=1&Topic_Title=Swinging&Forum_Title=Questions+For+Julia

208 Fever involves approximately 150 couples with an average age under 30.

209 www.emotionalbliss.com/board/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=45&FORUM_ID=8& CAT_ID=1&Topic_Title=Swinging&Forum_Title=Questions+For+Julia.

210 Ibid.

211 Ibid.

212 Relate Client Survey January-March 2002 www.relate.org.uk/sextherapy.html.

213 Defeld (1974).

214 www.toucanclub.com.

215 Quoted in Dovkants & Arkell (2002) http://feverparties.com/Standard.htm.

216 www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/03_02_03/thursday/info1.shtml.

217 Perhaps 17.5 times higher. See 4.3 above.

218 Ibid.

219 See 1.3 above.

220 “[Women] are so concerned about society’s dim view of female promiscuity that they routinely claim to have slept with fewer partners than in reality… ‘Women are so sensitive about being labelled ‘sluts’ or ‘whores’ that they are very reluctant to be honest about their sexual behaviour, even in supposedly anonymous surveys’ said Terri Fisher, who led the study at Ohio State University.” Mark Henderson “Women exposed as the biggest liars about sex” The Times 14 July 2003.

221 Whitby (2003 ).

222 www.womanalive.co.uk.

223 Le Feuve (2002).

224 Ibid. p10

225 Ibid.

226 Ibid.

227 Ibid.

228 Ibid. p9.

229 See Section 1.2 www.libchrist.com.

230 http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu/oct1971/v28-3-bookreview14.htm.

231 Clause 2(2).

232 Relate Annual Report and Accounts for the year ended 31 March 2002, Section 2.1 (p3).

233 Relate Annual Report and Accounts for the year ended 31 March 2002, Section 2.1 (p3).

234 Ibid.

235 Ibid. p11, Statement of Financial Activities for the Year ended 31 March 2002. £52,820 came from non-governmental sources (p16).

236 Ibid. Section 5.1 (p6), Review of the financial position of Relate.

237 Ibid. p16, Notes to the Accounts No 7.

238 Relate has other income from the sale of services, investments etc.giving it a total income from all sources of £4,696,342 in 2001-02.

239 Year Ending 2001: £2,052,585; 2000: £2,002,525; 1999: £1,953,680; 1998: £1898,620; 1997: £1,683,020; 1996: £1,634,000; 1995: £1,593,500. (Relate Report and Accounts for the relevant years).

240 enumerated in this section above.

241 www.londonfetishscene.com/newsdesk/ViewArticle.asp?ArticleID=582.

242 www.fist.co.uk.

243 Boles, Nicholas “It’s time to flush gay men out of the water closet” The Times 11 June 2002.

244 http://gaylondon.co.uk.

245 www.saunaclub.co.uk.

246 Chariots, Liverpool Street (London) www.chariots.co.uk/chariots1.htm.

247 Chariots, Waterloo www.chariots.co.uk/chariots_waterloo.htm.

248 www.thesaunabar.com.

249 www.cruisingforsex.com.

250 www.cruisingforsex.com/single_posting.php?p_id=53035.

251 Licensing Act 1964, Section 176.

252 Sexual Offences Act 1956 s30-31.

253 See 2.2 above.

254 See 18 September on www.melonfarmers.co.uk/news0998.htm, and 29 November on www.melonfarmers.co.uk/news1198.htm.

255 29 November Ibid.

256 Ibid.

257 www.bgafd.co.uk/girls/s/s0001.shtml, www.sabrina4u.com.

258 www.adultvideonews.com/archives/199812/inner/invw.html.

259 Ibid.

260 www.modelheaven.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1152, www.melonfarmers.co.uk/enmodel.htm.

261 Someone had intercepted their mail, which included a letter asking her to do “boy/girl” shots for a photographer. With malice or unbelievable naivety the police had taken this to mean children, so their house was raided.

262 Article 8.1 Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence. www.pfc.org.uk/legal/echrtext.htm.

263 Article14 “The enjoyment of the rights and freedoms set forth in this Convention shall be secured without discrimination on any ground such as sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, association with a national minority, property, birth or other status.” Ibid.

264 Article 8.2 “There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.”

265 See 2.2 above.

266 Chariots, Liverpool Street (London) www.chariots.co.uk/chariots1.htm.

267 www.chariots.co.uk/chariots_waterloo.htm

268 www.chariots.co.uk/chariots_limehouse.htm.

269 www.lachambre.org.

6.2 References
Arena magazine, London, July 2003 “Come together” http://feverparties.com/assets/Come_together.pdf.
Bailey, Michael J., June 2003 “A Sex Difference in the Specificity of Sexual Arousal” Psychological Science (forthcoming at time of writing). For press release see www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-06/nu-ssd061203.php, for full paper see www.psych.nwu.edu/psych/people/faculty/bailey/Publications/Chivers et al (final).pdf.
Bergstrand, Dr Curtis & Williams, Ms Jennifer Blevins. “Today’s Alternative Marriage Styles: The Case of Swingers” Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality, Volume 3, 10/10/2000. Online. www.ejhs.org/volume3/swing/body.htm.
Boles, Nicholas “It’s time to flush gay men out of the water closet” The Times 11 June 2002.
Butler, Edgar W., Traditional Marriages and Emerging Alternatives, Harper & Row, 1979 pp465.
Carlish, Natasha. (4 January 2001) The Orgy; Channel 5, www.dreamfinder.net/About us.htm.
Chocano, Carina “Swap Meat” Salon People, online, 21/4/00 p2 (http://cobrand.salon.com/people/feature/2000/04/21/lifestyle/index.html).
Chrisafis, Angelique “What’s love got to do with it?” The Guardian G2 29 August 2003.
Clark, Ross “Kangaroo courting” The Spectator 30/11/02 www.feverparties.com/assets/Liddle.pdf.
Cosmopolitan December 2001 “The swinger takes it all”.
Covey, Stephen R, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Simon & Schuster UK Ltd 1989.
Defeld, D. (1974). “Dropouts from swinging” The Family Coordinator 23 p45-49 January 1974 cited in Jenks “Swinging: A review of the Literature” Archives of Sexual Behavior Vol 27 No 5 1998.
Dixon, Joan K. (1984). ”The commencement of bisexual activity in swinging married women over age thirty.” The Journal of Sex Research, 1984, 20(1): pp71-90.
Dovkants, Keith & Arkell, Harriet “City wine bar sex parties exposed” Evening Standard 10 May 2002 http://feverparties.com/Standard.htm.
Finnigan, Kate “Welcome to the pleasure dome” Elle magazine May 2003 quoted in full at http://feverparties.com/media.htm.
Foster, Paul, ” Policy guidelines for the control of sex establishments” Croydon Borough Council Cabinet Consultative Paper 4/12/02 www.croydon.gov.uk/CSDept/Democratic/Agenda_Reports/CPanels/Env/4_Dec/CCP041202.R05.doc.
Friendship Express (1996) “What is Swinging?” {Online} Available: http://tfexp.com/swinging.htm [June 1997].
Gould, Terry. (2000) The Lifestyle: A Look at the Erotic Rites Of Swingers. Firefly Books.
Haran, Maeve “Sex in the Shires” The Times T2 p12 13/5/03.
Henderson, Mark “Women exposed as the biggest liars about sex” The Times 14 July 2003.
Henry, Scott “This ain’t your father’s swing club” Creativeloafing.com, online, 13/6/01 http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/2001-06-13/cover.html.
Henshel A.M., (1973) “Swinging: A study of decision making in marriage” American Journal of Sociology Vol 4 pp885-891.
House Of Commons Research Paper 00/15 7/2/00 www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/rp2000/rp00-015.pdf.
Jade “Oh that jungle gym of love” Lippyimp.com, online, undated www.lippyimp.com/junglegym.htm.
Lambert, Olly. (3 January 2003) Hypersex; BBC2, www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2002/08_august/21/2autumn_factual.pdf, http://ontv.nzoom.com/ontv_detail/0,1584,189421-80-85,00.html.
Le Feuve, Cathy. (September 2002) “Interview with Paula Hall” Woman Alive.
Mahmood, Mazher “Who wants to bed a millionaire” News of the World 9 June 2002.
Marino, Jacqueline (16-22 January 1999) “The Secret Life of Swingers” Sfweekly.com, online, 16-22/6/99 www.sfweekly.com/extra/beyond/swingers1.html.
Miller, Paul. (1994) “Variations in Swinging” [Online] Available: http://222.tfexp.com/articles/miller1.htm [June, 1997].
Millet, Catherine. (2002) The Sexual Life of Catherine M.; Serpent’s Tail; London. www.serpentstail.com.
Plumley, Peter 1994 “An Actuarial Analysis of the AIDS Epidemic in the US” www.virusmyth.net/aids/data/pptalk.htm Plumley is also author of ‘Modeling the AIDS Epidemic by Analysis of Sexual and Intravenous Drug Behavior’ and ‘An Analysis of the AIDS Epidemic as it Affects Heterosexuals,’ both published in the Transactions of the Society of Actuaries.
Relate Annual Report and Accounts for the years ending 1995-2002.
Relate Client Survey January-March 2002 www.relate.org.uk/sextherapy.html.
Sez, Shirley “What is the swinging lifestyle?” Loveplay.com, online, undated www.loveplay.com/frmopnmar.htm.
Schisgall, David The Lifestyle: Group Sex in the Suburbs (www.7thart.com/current/lifestyle/thelife.html).
Terrien, Anne (20 April 2002) “Dis/located identities: Swinging and Contemporary Sexual Space” paper presented 20 April 2002 to the Composition and Cultural Studies Conference, English Department of George Washington University. Online, www.gwu.edu/~english/ccsc/2002 Pages/Terrien.htm.
Thio, A. (1988). Deviant Behavior, 3rd Ed., Harper-Collins, New York.
Varni, C. A. (1974). “An exploratory study of spouse swapping” In Smith, J. R., and Smith, L.G. (eds.), Beyond Monogamy: Recent Studies on Sexual Alternatives in Marriage, Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore.
Whitby, Pamela “Strangers on a train” Eve September 2003.
Womack, Sarah “Slippery slope as ski firm offers wife-swapping trips”, The Daily Telegraph 31/12/02.
6.3 Bibliography
Allen, Gina and Clement G. Martin, “Swapping And Swinging,” chapter in Intimacy, Cowles Book Company, 1971.
Avery, Paul and Emily Avery, “Some Notes on ‘Wife Swapping’,” in Sex in America, edited by Henry Anatole Grunwald, Transworld, 1965. (Originally published as a series of articles in the San Francisco Chronicle.)
Bartell, Gilbert D., “Group Sex among the Mid-Americans,” Journal of Sex Research, Vol. 6 No. 2.
Bartell, Gilbert D., Group Sex: a Scientist’s Eyewitness Report on The American Way of Swinging, Wyden Inc., 1971.
Beigel, Hugo, G., “In Defense of Mate Swapping,” Rational Living, Vol 4, No. 1.
Bell, Robert R., “‘Swinging’ The Sexual Exchange of Marriage Partners,” Sexual Behavior, May 1971.
Brecher, Edward M., The Sex Researchers, Little, Brown and Company, 1969.
Cole, Charles L. and Graham B. Spanier, “Co-marital Mate-sharing and Family Stability,” Journal of Sex Research, February 1974, This is a revision of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the National Council on Family Relations, November 4, 1972.
Cole, Charles L. and Graham B. Spanier, “Induction Into Mate-swapping: a Review,” Family Process, September 1973.
Cole, Charles L. and Graham B. Spanier, “Mate Swapping: Perceptions, Value Orientations, and Participation in a Midwestern Community,” Archives of Sexual Behavior, Vol. 4, No. 2. This is a revision of a paper titled “Mate Swapping: Participation, Knowledge and Values in a Midwestern Community” presented at the 1972 meeting of the Midwest Sociological Society.
Colton, Helen, “Group Sex,” in Sex After the Sexual Revolution, Association Press, 1972.
Comfort, Alex, “Sexuality in a Zero Growth Society,” Center Report, 1972.
Constantine, Larry L. and Joan M. Constantine, Group Marriage, The Macmillan Company, 1973.
Denfeld, Duane, “How Swingers Make Contact,” Sexual Behavior, April, 1972.
Denfeld, Duane and Michael Gordon, “The Sociology of Mate Swapping: or The Family That Swings Together Clings Together,” Journal of Sex Research, May 1970.
Gilmartin, Brian G., “That Swinging Couple down the Block,” Psychology Today, February 1975, p. 54.
Grold, James L., “Swinging: Sexual Freedom or Neurotic Escapism?”, American Journal of Psychiatry, October 1970.
Jenks, Richard J., “Swinging: A Replication and Test of a Theory,” The Journal of Sex Research, 1985, 21:2, p 199.
Jenks, Richard J., “Swinging: A Review of the Literature,” Archives of Sexual Behavior, 1998, 27:5, p 507.
Johnson, Ralph E., “Extramarital Intercourse: a Methodological Note,” Journal of Marriage and the Family, May 1970.
Neiger, Stehpen, “Mate Swapping: Can it Save a Marriage?,” Sexology, January 1971.
Neubeck, Gerhard, Extramarital Relations, Prentice-Hall, 1969.
O’Neill, George C. and Nena O’Neill, “Patterns in Group Sexual Activity,” Journal of Sex Research, Vol. 6, No. 2, May 1970.
Palson, Charles and Rebecca Palson, “Swinging in Wedlock,” Society, February 1972.
Ramey, James W., “Emerging Patterns of Innovative Behavior in Marriage,” The Family Coordinator, October 1972.
Rosengard, I. Stuart, “Mate Swapping: Why Is it So Popular?”, Sexology, June 1971.
Schupp, Cherie Evelyn, An Analysis of Some Social-psychological Factors Which Operate in the Functioning Relationship of Married Couples Who Exchange Mates for the Purpose of Sexual Experience, 1970, Dissertation published on demand by University Microfilms.
Smith, James R. and Lynn G. Smith, eds. Beyond Monogamy, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974.
Smith, James R. and Lynn G. Smith, “Co-marital Sex And The Sexual Freedom Movement,” Journal of Sex Research, May 1970.
Smith, James R. and Lynn G. Smith “Co-marital Sex: The Incorporation of Extramarital Sex Into the Marriage Relationship,” Critical Issues in Contemporary Sexual Behavior, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.
Smith, James R. and Lynn G. Smith “Intimacy, Ecstasy, and Eufunction: Some Neglected Dimensions of Sexual Counseling,” paper presented to the American Orthopsychiatric Association, Spring 1974.
Symonds, Carolyn, A Pilot Study of the Peripheral Behavior of Sexual Mate Swappers, Master’s thesis, University of California, Riverside, June 1968.
Symonds, Carolyn, “Sexual Mate Swapping: Violation of Norms And Reconciliation of Guilt,” in Studies In the Sociology of Sex, edited by James M. Henslin, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1971.
Varni, Charles A., “An Exploratory Study of Wife Swapping,” Pacific Sociological Review, Vol. 15 No. 4.
Walshok, Mary L., “The Emergence of a Middle-class Deviant Subculture: The Case of Swingers,” Social Problems, Spring 1971.

No related posts.

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.

No related posts.

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.

No related posts.

2 SWINGERS AND THE LAW

2.1 The dead hand of the state

The market is not at fault for the shoddy conditions that British swingers – and swingers visiting from overseas – are forced to endure. Demand for swingers’ establishments is high, rising and would expand much further in free market conditions. Swingers who seek to exercise their sexual freedom of choice – and entrepreneurs who seek to satisfy that demand – face obstruction from the state

British swingers are persecuted by laws at national and local level; they are persecuted by a press that does not recognise sexual acts as private, even in the home; and though they have no-one to speak on their behalf they are the victims of a campaign run by a well-funded NGO that jeopardises its professional and scientific reputation in its zeal to condemn them.

Their persecution violates two articles of the European Convention on Human Rights and stands in sharp contrast to the civil liberties now taken for granted by another sexual minority, gays.

The British government is responsible to a greater or lesser degree for every leg of the triad of persecution of swingers (law, press and bigotry); as well as the non-enforcement of the European Convention of Human Rights, despite its importation into British law by this very government; and the cruel inconsistency that allows gay men sexual carte blanche but criminalises the same activities when middle-class women are involved.

2.2 Legal repression of swingers

There was a time, before the Second World War, when the law reflected a wide social consensus in severely circumscribing permissible sexual conduct. The belief that it is appropriate for the state to regulate personal sexual behaviour has gradually withered. Piecemeal reforms have expanded the sexual space where the law is rightly silent, but more to the benefit of some sexual minorities than others. The most obvious beneficiaries have been gays. Those most obviously still persecuted are prostitutes. But even now in the C21st heterosexual couples who seek the thrill of recreational sex are also repressed, in some cases by archaic laws over 250 years old.

Under the Sexual Offences Act 1956 s33 it is an offence to run a brothel and case law has defined a brothel as”a place resorted to by persons of opposite sexes for the purpose of illicit intercourse”.

Prostitution does not have to occur. This means the authorities can deem a venue where swinging occurs to be a brothel and illegal. It does not even need to be a regular event. The Metropolitan Police have within the last 10 years threatened prosecution for a projected one-off event that was not even a dedicated sex party.

Under the same law

“in some circumstances group sex acts between heterosexuals might involve the commission of an offence…”

according to a House of Commons Research Paper. Under case law dating from only 1983 premises where more than one woman offers herself as a participant in indecent physical acts with men is also a brothel, even if full intercourse does not occur. So even swingers parties where there is no penetrative sex can be deemed brothels.

In fact it is usually the Disorderly Houses Act of 1751 that is used in prosecutions because its one unrepealed section allows the person in charge of the premises at the time to be charged as the brothel keeper regardless of who actually owns either the premises concerned or any entity renting them for the occasion. This should not be confused with the common law offence of Keeping a Disorderly House, which is also used against sexual adventurers.

Under the licensing laws it has been an offence to allow a “brothel” on licensed premises. The new Licensing Act 2003 changes this offence to one of “allowing disorderly conduct on licensed premises”.

It will be interesting to discover whether the police and the Crown Prosecution Service regards this as a liberalisation of the law or a change allowing them and the courts a more arbitrary discretion over what is prosecutable. Somehow I think I know the answer.

Even the traditional charge used against pimps – living off immoral earnings has been used as recently as 1998 to fine the proprietor of a swinging club.

Politicians or Chief Constables have the legal tools to clamp down on swingers whenever they perceive it to be in their interests, as they did in 1989, 1994, 1996 (when a threatened prosecution forced the cancellation of the Sex Maniacs’ Ball) and 1998.

For swingers the cumulative impact of these laws is devastating. Places where swingers congregate can attract prosecutions on seven different counts – two different definitions as a brothel under the Sexual Offences Act 1956; the Disorderly Houses Act 1751; at common law for keeping a disorderly house; under the Licensing Act for either allowing a brothel or for serving drinks without a licence (even free drinks are deemed to be included in the entrance price) and again under the Sexual Offences Act 1956 for living off immoral earnings.

These laws do not need to be applied with constant rigour. The legal uncertainty, the ever-present threat from a capricious state, destroys entrepreneurs’ ability to raise capital for swinging-related establishments and condemns British swingers to the shebeens. This violates the principle of certainty that enjoins a clear distinction between what is legal and what is criminal, what will be prosecuted and what will not, that is integral to the Rule of Law.

In addition to headline repression there is a dense tangle of regulatory repression at local government level that has been created by statute. Although local authorities are allowed to licence “sex establishments”, a licence does not protect an establishment from prosecution as a brothel or disorderly house.  In addition, local authorities can and do set the appropriate number of sex establishments for their area at nil.

Authorities are also at liberty to set their own application fees for sex establishment licences, a situation that leads to prohibitive charging. Some London boroughs charge £4,000. The London Borough of Sutton charges £8,400; Southwark £15,000; Merton £18,615; while the City of Westminster demands £28,531. And this is merely to consider an application.

A swinging club would also need an Entertainments Licence, probably a Change of Use certificate and an alcohol licence, all since the Licensing Act 2003 at the whim of its local authority.

The Labour government’s much heralded sexual offences legislation covers a wide area. Among other things it legalises gay cottaging (sex in public lavatories) when it does not cause offence to others and reduces the penalties for bestiality from life to two years. In May 2003 the Bill was amended to allay nudists’ fears that it would restrict their lifestyle.

The BBC reported that the Bill also legalised homosexual group sex.

“There’s nothing to stop heterosexual orgies, but take women out of the equation and you’ve currently got yourself a law suit…The new law takes a “gender neutral” approach to sex, granting equal rights to homosexuals and heterosexuals.”

Unfortunately while it is true that gay group sex is indeed legalised, it is equally true that heterosexual orgies are not. The new law merely repeals the old one that made gay sex legal in private only. It does not, as the BBC suggests, positively create a level playing field between gays and heterosexuals. The position of heterosexuals is untouched and the existing impediments crystallised in the case law decisions Winter v Woolfe 1931 and Kelly v Purvis 1983 remain. (In Winter v Woolfe a woman was convicted of keeping a brothel for allowing Cambridge University students to frolic with local girls – who were not prostitutes – on her premises, without charging. Kelly v Purvis concerned masseurs masturbating clients).

Labour has set its face against any liberalisation of the law regarding swinging. On 20 June 2002 I wrote to the Home Secretary asking him to “unambiguously legalise” swinging in the forthcoming Bill. His official replied that the Review that preceded the Bill had not had prostitution within its remit and that therefore the offences relating to brothels had not been reviewed.  Thus an omnibus bill that was liberalising towards favoured sexual minorities such as gays and zoophiles resolutely ignored the plight of swingers.

Consequently, although most of the Sexual Offences Act 1956 is repealed by the 2003 Act, the offences created by Sections 33 (keeping a brothel), 34 (landlord letting premises as brothel) and 35 (tenant letting premises as a brothel) remain on the statute book, as does the case law defining a brothel so widely it covers practically all swinging activity.

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SUMMARY
Swinging is a safe, international, middle class and increasingly popular leisure choice for married and courting couples. Yet contrary to its obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights, the United Kingdom effectively criminalises swingers in contrast to the high degree of tolerance it rightly extends to gay men for precisely the same activities. This provides the justification used by unethical elements in the press to harass swingers even in their own homes. The British government promotes bigotry against swingers by funding an NGO that campaigns against swingers by pretending contrary to the scientific evidence that their lifestyle is detrimental to any couple’s relationship. The British government should recognise its responsibilities under the European Convention on Human Rights to respect the sexuality of swingers and stop discriminating against them. It should cease to fund the NGO that campaigns against swingers and investigate whether it has breached its charitable status; and should legalise swingers’ activities and lightly regulate their dedicated premises through Acts of Parliament.
CONTENTS

• 1 Swingers for beginners
• 1.1 Characteristics
• 1.2 Demography
• 1.3 Perceived benefits
• 1.4 Research
• 1.5 Popularity
• 1.6 London and Paris compared
• 2 Swingers and the law
• 2.1 The dead hand of the state
• 2.2 Legal repression of swingers
• 3 Swingers and the press
• 3.1 Mahmood music
• 3.2 The case of Dougie Smith
• 3.3 Press, privacy and the law
• 4 Anti-swingers and their arguments
• 4.1 Bigots ‘R’ Us
• 4.2 Julia Cole in Cosmopolitan
• 4.3 Julia Cole in The Daily Telegraph
• 4.4 Julia Cole on Emotionalbliss.com
• 4.5 Denise Knowles in the Evening Standard
• 4.6 Paula Hall on Woman’s Hour
• 4.7 Paula Hall in Eve
• 4.8 Secret agenda
• 4.9 Thou shalt not
• 4.10 Cash for cant
• 5 Double standards and human rights
• 5.1 Pc PC
• 5.2 Human Rights and Wrongs
• 5.3 Conclusions
• 5.4 Recommendations
• 6 Sources
• 6.1 Endnotes
• 6.2 References
• 6.3 Bibliography

1 SWINGERS FOR BEGINNERS
1.1 Characteristics
Couples who jointly seek recreational sex with others while maintaining their emotional monogamy are most often called ‘swingers’.1 Swingers’ sexual habits are typically characterised by partner-swapping, female bisexuality2 and group sex.3 Full penetrative sex, though common, is not essential.4 Male bisexuality is absent.5 All swinging couples have their own rules of sexual behaviour and these come in an infinite variety from the restrictive,6 through the asymmetric7 to the relaxed.8
Swingers find each other through contact advertisements in magazines,9 newspapers10 and on websites,11 via chatrooms12 and webcam13 interfaces on the Internet, and at swingers parties14 and clubs.15
Swinging is only part of the world of recreational sex, which also includes hard-core gay and lesbian activity, the bukkake scene,16 the bisexual male scene,17 the adult cinema scene18 and the more directly sex-orientated sides of the various sexual specialities usually more associated with merely risqué displays. Recreational sex has in turn a wide penumbra of socio-sexual recreation, covering the whole spectrum of fun in a more-than-usually-sexual context but not normally actual sex. Most fetish, rubber and BDSM activities, adult babies, pony-girls19 etc. and much of the gay and lesbian worlds are part of this outer circle.
Swinging itself is internally diverse. Couples can prefer couples only scenes; mixed scenes;20 gang-bang scenes;21 a younger or smarter scene where this is available;22 party scenes; orgies; two-on-two scenes or ‘dogging’.23 Among the more earnest the diversity extends even to the philosophical. Christian swingers,24 for example, are among those who prefer the term ‘polyamory’25 which they feel gives due emphasis to the emotional dimension of the style of swinging they favour. In Toronto there is an (anonymous) clergyman who claims to have been a swinger for 10 years.26
1.2 Demography
Swinging is an enthusiasm that crosses social, economic, political and religious boundaries.27 The existence of a Christian swingers organisation in the USA is not as surprising as one might suppose (though they seem aware of the irony of their position).28 American research has consistently found that swingers are, as Bergstrand & Williams say
“surprisingly mainstream, even conservative, in their characteristics.”29
Up to 90% of swingers identify with a religion and up to 47% regularly attend their place of worship.30 More recent research has suggested lower levels of religious attachment that nevertheless are still higher than the norm.31 US swingers tend to be Republicans, middle to upper-middle class, middle-aged and (over 90%) white.32 They are less racist, less sexist and uphold traditional relationship roles less than the population at large,33 though they place the same importance on marriage and family life.34 The incidence of disturbed family backgrounds (a charge levied by critics of swinging35) is lower than average.36 This is not a subculture of the ghettos or the caravan parks.
The situation in Britain is not identical. There has been no research. In the absence of hard figures, from my own 8 years of experience I perceive that an earlier predominance of the late-middle aged and C2s among British swingers has abated. A substantial growth in the number of participants has brought with it a more balanced profile across ages, income and social background. In particular, economically successful couples in their thirties and aspirational 20-something graduates have begun swinging in considerable numbers.37 An analysis of couples advertising in Desire Contact magazine,38 Britain’s leading swingers contact publication, found an average age of 43 (men 45, women 41) with only 15% over 50, 26% under 40 and 59% in their 40s. The Guardian has suggested there are between 500,000 and 1m swingers in the UK.39 The Internet has vectored this minor social revolution.40
In British swingers clubs I have encountered people from the ranks of Hasidic Jewry, television presenters, ministerial advisers, retired diplomats, orchestral conductors, professional singers, dancers and sports-people, big corporate names, local councillors, classical and rock musicians, many doctors and lawyers, builders, taxi drivers, IT whiz kids, marketers, advertising geniuses and policemen & women. Just about every profession, every race and an extremely wide range of nationalities is represented. In my assessment Asians are statistically over-represented among UK swingers as, inevitably, are former Catholic schoolgirls. Among younger swingers the media (broadcasting, press and advertising industries) followed by lawyers and the self-employed are probably the largest occupational groups.
1.3 Perceived benefits
Bergstrand & Williams41 justify their academic interest in swingers by recounting American rates of admitted affairs (37% of husbands, 29% of wives), divorce, family instability and neglected children.42 In the light of this:
“any attempt to redefine “love” and strengthen the marital bond is worthy of our attention. If swingers have found a way to stabilize relationships, prolong family ties, and enrich the lives of couples we would be remiss if we did not take their lifestyle and their redefinition of monogamous love seriously.”43
It is not claimed for swinging that is appropriate for every relationship or even a large percentage of them.44 What is claimed is that it benefits or at least brings harmless enjoyment to a proportionately small but numerically large minority of couples. Estimates for the proportion of couples in the US who have included something that can be described as swinging at some point in their relationship vary from 1% to 15%.45
Although sexual promiscuity is posited as the antithesis of emotional fidelity in the western romantic tradition, swingers maintain that joint experiences of recreational sex enhance their sexual and emotional bonds. By openly acknowledging their individual desires for sexual variety and pursuing these needs together, swingers claim to obviate the usual sources of deceit, betrayal and guilt in relationships. These destructive impulses, they say, are replaced with a deeper understanding and a higher plane of trust.46
Some have argued that because of the very high degree of mutual knowledge and trust, this mental bond displaces sex from its status dictated by Judeo-Christian tradition as the central mystery of a relationship. Anne Terrien, a student at George Washington University, elucidated this point in a precocious conference paper delivered in 2002:
“At the heart of a strong swinging relationship is not sex at all; rather, there is the openness, trust, and communication necessary to both talk openly about desires and fantasies and to act on them within the bounds of commitment.”47
Butler (1979) quoted a female interviewee thus:
I have a lot more emotional aspects of life other than just sex. Sex is just one part of it. I have many years invested in building a complete and total relationship with my husband. Sex, like I say, is just one facet of it and it’s been exclusive where as all my other relationships with people have not been exclusive. I’m able to talk to people. I’m able to dance with people, with all these things then why can’t I have sex with them? It doesn’t have anything to do with the exclusive relationship I have with my partner, who happens to be my husband. This is my choice and it’s the total, exclusive relationship that I want to keep and want to have and I don’t want to get rid of; yet I do have needs to have sexual fulfilment that I can’t get from just one type of person. One person can’t satisfy all my needs, and I can’t satisfy all of anybody else’s needs. As far as I can see, that’s impossible.
The Society for Human Sexuality48 enumerates 14 potential advantages of swinging:

• Variety of sexual partners and experiences
• Pleasure and excitement
• Increased social life
• Watching others so as to learn new techniques for your spouse
• Overcoming sexual inhibitions
• “Recapturing one’s youth”
• Feeling reassured that you’re still attractive and desirable.
• Increasing mutual attraction and love within the marriage.
• Re-creating that “first date” feeling of anticipation and excitement, in a safe way that won’t harm your marriage, and to exercise social skills (e.g. flirting) that you may not have used in along time.
• It’s human nature to appreciate someone even more if you notice other people desiring them, which may explain why swinging makes me feel even more attracted to my partner.

Although this may vary slightly from club to club, I’ve found the swinging community to be quite accepting of a wide variety of body types, sizes, ages, and shapes.
It’s an opportunity to dress sexy or [in the case of on-premises parties] to go completely nude.
It’s an opportunity for people with healthy sex drives to have that aspect of themselves appreciated rather than snickered about.
It’s an opportunity to socialize and form friendships amongst people who are comfortable talking about sex openly.49
It has been commented that the swingers lifestyle is ‘banal’50 and this list certainly implies that some couples begin swinging with otherwise dull social lives, restricted outlets for conversation and self-expression, lacking in sexual self-confidence and with a feeling that their best years are behind them. Such a description fits a large percentage of middle-aged C1 and C2 couples. For historic reasons swinging has usually been considered, both by protagonists and antagonists, from the perspective of the middle-aged married person.
However, this is increasingly an out of date picture. Fever, the young swingers’ party club with which I am involved51 points to biology as a general explanation for the motivation of swingers.
“The thrill of sexual adventure is so powerful that we can follow it impulsively even when it threatens our happiness in other important areas of life. We are actually all biologically programmed to be like this – the optimum procreative strategy for both sexes is monogamy plus adultery.”52
In contrast to the 14 pros of swinging listed by the Society for Human Sexuality, Fever – whose partygoers are overwhelmingly unmarried and on average 14 years younger than the sample of swingers from Desire Contacts in 2.1 above – takes fast-paced social lives, expanding horizons, sexual self-confidence and the legitimacy of experimental sex with multiple partners for granted. “Recapturing youth”, improving sexual techniques, shedding inhibitions and socialising with people who are comfortable talking about sex do not figure.
“Swinging allows a couple to have sexual variety in the context of a loving relationship; constantly reaffirms the desirability of each partner in the eyes of the other; completely blows away the need or temptation for sexual deceit; provides sexual opportunities that are not really available to single people; and removes the prime cause of relationship breakdown. As each partner is instrumental in providing the other with fantastic sexual experiences beyond the hope of most people, swinging can actually reinforce the bonds between a couple.”53
Fever argues that swinging can benefit couples who are:
“BOTH sexually self-confident and adventurous and who don’t want emotional fulfilment to mean sexual retirement.”54
and enumerates six reasons why such a normal young couple might enjoy swinging.
“If you share your innermost sexual wishes and fantasies together. If acting them out together would bring you closer rather than provoke jealousy. If you are proud of your lover and want to show him or her off in an atmosphere where their talents will be appreciated. If having other people present would heighten your sexual enjoyment. If you both want to do things with your bodies that you cannot do by yourselves. If you would find making love with your lover and other people mind-expanding and self-esteem enhancing: then you should consider swinging.”55
Part of this echoes the earlier point made from an older perspective about gaining appreciation for having a high sex drive or being a good lover. If a couple’s hobby was chess, Fever claims, nobody would expect them to play only with each other.56
Fever highlights four extraordinary circumstances where they believe swinging may enhance or ultimately save a relationship “in almost a therapeutic way”:57
Couples with bisexual women, who clearly cannot find sexual fulfilment within a monogamous relationship either heterosexual or lesbian.
Other situations where one partner cannot satisfy all the sexual needs of the other
Couples with asymmetric levels of sexual experience, where one partner feels the need to ‘catch up’ with that of their partner without excluding him or her.
Couples for whom habitual promiscuity was such an important part of both their lives before they met that a monogamous relationship involves too great an abstention from pleasure to be realistically sustainable.
Finally, personal growth for both sexes but especially women is another benefit claimed for swinging. Anne Terrien offers the perspective that
“The outside world does not offer anywhere near the same degree of security in non-sexual situations let alone those that are sexually charged. Swinging can be seen as an incredible source of sexual freedom for women who would otherwise not have a sexual outlet other than that available within the bounds of marriage or commitment… Swinging offers not only sexual freedom, but also offers the ability for self-discovery.”58
This corroborates Butler’s seminal findings that in the “second stage of swinging”:
“a woman becomes selective because she no longer needs to prove she is desired or can satisfy other men. In order to make the experience meaningful, she arrives at a point where she feels that she must refuse the advances of many men. She learns to define her preferences more clearly and to learn to act on these preferences. This is an experience that many women never have because they rely on their husbands to make decisions in social situations. In short a woman learns to individuate both herself and others”
But how does this long litany of pros match up against scientifically researched cons?
1.4 Research
Swingers are an under-researched phenomenon. Bergstrand and Williams, whose work has already been cited, conducted the latest research, drawn from by far the biggest sample yet, with over 1000 participants from across the USA. Their paper “Today’s Alternative Marriage Styles: The Case of Swingers” published in the Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality in October 200059 is currently the leading authority on the subject. They are candid about the shortcomings of their methodology but it is significant that their findings are in line with previous studies on swingers going back 30 years. The paper summarises earlier research, is relatively short and worth reading in the original.
To those unfamiliar with the corpus of learning on swingers the results are surprising in both result and clarity. Bergstrand & Williams found that swingers are happier in their marriages than the norm.60 60% of swingers said that swinging improved their relationship and only 1.7% said it made their marriage less happy.61 Half of those who rated their relationship very happy before becoming swingers maintained it had become even happier.62 90% of those with less happy relationships said swinging improved them.63 Almost 70% of swingers claimed no problem with jealousy, around a quarter admitted to some jealousy but only 6% said it was very much a problem.64 Swingers rate themselves happier (59% against 32% very happy)65 and their lives much more exciting (76% against 54% exciting)66 than does the rest of the population, by surprisingly large margins. There was no difference between the responses of men and women.67
It would be conventional to contrast this study with others from which differing conclusions could be drawn. The problem is there are none.68 That is not to say they could not be some. A contemporary and properly sampled study of ex-swingers would be fascinating and if it established a verifiable rate for the success or failure of swinging relationships it would be seminal. However, in the last three decades what research has been done is relentlessly positive about swingers. Sceptics of swinging have produced not a single page of scientifically researched data to support their prejudices, as we shall see later in some detail.
A typical critic of swingers is Dr. David Woodsfellow, an Atlanta psychologist who claims to have counselled more than 1,000 couples in 24 years as a marriage therapist.
“When clients tell him they swing, he tells them to stop. ‘The human need for security – the question of ‘Am I not enough for you?’ – is real enough that most people can’t do this for long’ before one partner begins to feel threatened or coerced, he says. ‘I believe swinging is a recipe for disaster, and I’ve seen plenty of examples where it’s torn a marriage apart.’…the Lifestyle can easily compound problems in a shaky relationship and damage a healthy one, Woodsfellow says. ‘Now, most people believe that [swinging] doesn’t work for the vast majority of couples’ he says.”69
This is as good as scientific scepticism of swinging gets. Given the enormous weight of supposition in favour of the traditional monogamous relationship model, it is to say the least underwhelming.
Woodsfellow employs the rhetorical ruse of arguing against something his opponents do not maintain – a ‘straw man’ – in this case by upholding the uncontentious truth that swinging doesn’t work for most people and can cause more problems in a troubled relationship. The true burden of his argument lies in the sentence “I believe swinging is a recipe for disaster”. It has two components. One is that swinging is a recipe for disaster, not can be, not often is, not usually is, but always is a disaster.
The other is the weasel words we will encounter again – “I believe”. Dr Woodsfellow is prescribing narrow lifestyle strictures, with grave consequences for the happiness and fulfilment of millions of people, on the basis of personal faith. Nor quite enough faith, however, to quantify and publish his ‘research’ so that others can verify it.
Woodsfellow follows a pattern familiar from anti-swingers in the UK: ‘Therapists’ lay down prescriptive rules for the behaviour of others, absolute rules that allow no leeway for individual difference. They refuse to accept that any alternative relationship model can work for however small a proportion of the population. They justify themselves with reference to anecdotal encounters with troubled couples, who nevertheless have not been studied sufficiently to produce a scholarly paper, thus preventing the evidence from being verified or the conclusions challenged. These anecdotes in turn are drawn from a sample that excludes successful swingers, because happy people do not visit counsellors.
There are British examples of the tendency to offer advice to the public on the basis of unscientific (or even counter-scientific) anecdote that masks or misrepresents the consensus of learning on swinging. The BBC women’s magazine Eve70 reported Dr Petra Boynton as saying about swingers:
“…in many couples she’s encountered, the men enjoyed the experience, but the women are more reluctant – feeling that they’ll lose their partner if they don’t join in.”
Surprisingly, given her willingness to comment on this subject, although Boynton assures us she is distinguished in her field
“I am a world leader in taking sex and research to the public”71
her own list of expertises and researches72 does not include anything on swinging. (She has however broken new ground with her work on “ways to make cooking in relationships easier”73 and “girls’ nights out”74).
If accurately reported, Boynton’s comment
a) is apparently not based on published and falsifiable research by herself or anyone else.
b) is offered in vague and unscientific terms that cannot be challenged – how many swingers exactly has Dr Boynton “encountered” and what was the methodology of this study?
c) does not appear to be based on a valid sample
d) runs counter to the consensus of published research on swinging
Boynton’s credibility as an authority on swinging is not helped when she goes on to say:
“People do have successful open relationships but they should be aware that they can unleash many insecurities and worries”75
Open relationships are an entirely separate phenomenon from swinging. The academic consensus is that swinging is a development within traditional marriage whereas open relationships are something much more revolutionary. For example, in his seminal college textbook Butler wrote:
“Swinging marriages probably represent the least revolutionary of the emerging alternative lifestyles. Generally, swingers challenge traditional beliefs only in the area of sexual monogamy. Strong relationships outside the pair bond are still, for the most part, regarded as threats rather than potentials for personal growth…Swinging may be a preservative rather than a catalyst for change in the basic structure of the family in our society…swinging supports rather than disrupts monogamous marriage as it currently exists in our society.”76
An elementary error of this sort suggests Boynton has little familiarity with the basic paradigms of the subject. One hopes that one day Dr Boynton will make available the private information that convinces her to draw such widely differing conclusions from those who have undertaken and published research in the conventional scientific manner.
Not all therapists agree with the likes of Woodsfellow and Boynton. Professor Petrushka Clarkson,77 renowned Harley Street sex therapist and author, says group sex can be positive or negative for a couple:
“just the same as anything else – cars, food, alcohol, air travel.”78
Professor Clarkson cautions against general condemnation of swingers on the basis of unsuccessful personal experiences, the stock in trade of those therapists who can imagine no swinging experiences that differ from the failures of their own clients. And she also warns of those commentators who
“are only prescribing their own behaviour to others.”
This concurs with Thio (1988) that:
“We may conclude that swinging is like a two-edged sword – it may swing in the direction of positive consequences or in the opposite direction of negative consequences. The nature of the consequence depends more on the individual who uses the sword than on the sword itself”79
Glasgow’s Senior Consultant Psychiatrist Dr Prem Misra JP,80 an expert in treating sex-offenders and sex-crime victims81 told the Scottish Sunday Mail that
“in only two or three per cent of cases had the issue of ‘swinging’ ever became problematic for participants”82
In summation, insofar as science has yet been able to establish, the perceived benefits of swinging have been validated to an extraordinary degree. It remains true that swingers need more research, particularly in the UK, particularly among the younger unmarried swingers who did not exist when most of the major American studies were conducted. However it is significant that for 30 years studies have been uniform in suggesting the swinging lifestyle is beneficial for some couples. Those who refuse to accept these tentative conclusions are unable do so with reference to any scientific studies.
1.5 Popularity of swinging
Swinging is booming. The story is the same across the whole of western civilisation. Most large towns in western Europe have at least one swingers club. The most comprehensive listing available in English (http://clubsandparties.com) counts 61 in the Netherlands, 54 in Belgium, 107 in France, 117 in Germany, 152 in Italy, 113 in Spain, 23 in Austria and 9 in Switzerland. Virtually all of them are on-premises clubs. Paris has 40.83 The large number in the Low Countries84 include some which are renowned enough to be international travel destinations in their own right.85 Cap D’Agde,86 the famous nudist town in the South of France, has a population of 40,00087 in the summer months, many of them swingers. It has around half a dozen swinger clubs and the notorious ‘adult beach’ where people have sex in the dunes at sundown.88
There are around 400 clubs in North America89 and several swingers holiday resorts in the Caribbean.90 In the USA and Canada swingers also hold conventions91 where thousands of sexual adventurers fly from all over the continent to take over large hotels and party between the lectures and workshops.92 Australia has over 90 swingers clubs.93 They have spread to New Zealand, South Africa, Eastern Europe and South America.94 Even Malaysia has one.95
Swinging is booming in the UK too. Given the lower base, it must have increased by a greater factor here than on the continent. The most authoritative listing, Clubsandparties.com,96 includes 123 swingers clubs in the UK,97 more than in France (107).98 Although this does reflect the number of swinging enterprises in Britain (and the demand they are struggling to meet), there the likeness ends.
In France libertinage is recognised as a niche market within the leisure industry. Though standards vary the clubs are typically smart, licensed, well furnished, incorporate dancefloors and restaurants and have attractive playrooms99 (the areas of swinging clubs where sex takes place, as opposed to the purely social zones). In acknowledgement of the great popularity of swinging the French government runs a safe-sex campaign Couples Contre le SIDA100 directly targeted at club echangisme users.
The contrast with Britain could hardly be more stark. For while the French listing includes only on-premises clubs, very few of the British clubs have permanent venues and none are in the same league as continental clubs in terms of facilities. The clubs that do exist are little more than sexual shebeens. They live in a twilight world in constant fear of police or local authority busts, without serious investment, without alcohol licences, without higher spending consumers and the increased profits they bring. Consequently they are trapped in an artificial depression. Equally, their clientele run the gauntlet of cruel exposure by an ethically degraded press.101 Historically this has frightened away potential middle-class custom, leaving only those with little or nothing to lose. These lower socio-economic elements in turn militated for lowest-possible costs and minimum standards, adding to the downward pressure on suppliers.
Although more middle-class consumers have now entered the swinging market, they do not generally find the quality experiences they take for granted in the rest of the leisure industry. As a result, they return much less frequently and spend a fraction of what they could if their needs were properly met.
1.6 London and Paris compared
To illustrate the disparity between Britain and the rest of the economically advanced world, it is instructive to compare the 44 swingers clubs listed by Clubsandparties.com in London and the South East of England102 with the 31 it lists in Paris. The Parisian clubs are all purposely designed, licensed establishments open several nights a week if not every night and many incorporate a restaurant.
The real figure for SE England should be 32 as four are closed103 and eight are duplicate names.104 Four are only fetish clubs;105 2 are 100% gay in practice;106 three are contact clubs107 that also organise houseparties; five are believed by some to provide men with encounters with single women, particularly those who enjoy gang-bangs, not all of whom are amateurs. One is a dining club108 that meets in private houses, two are social clubs109 that arrange meetings in bars where sex does not take place, one is a quarterly party club that meets in private houses110 and one is a twice-monthly party club that meets in bars and restaurants closed to the general public for the night.111
The remaining 13 have some sort of premises of their own. Five of these are private houses outside Greater London sometimes used for swingers parties112 – in Brighton (weekly), Hertfordshire (monthly), Gatwick and Kent (once or twice a month) and Maidenhead (occasionally). Two are nudist establishments in the Kentish countryside113 and are used unofficially one evening a week only.
Of the last six in London itself, two are nudist/health clubs114 with weekly couples only nights; two are unoccupied houses converted to swingers venues115 but only used for one or two days on the weekend. All four are unlicensed and badly undercapitalised. One is a basement bar (with a licence) that has one or two swingers nights a week and no swingers facilities whatsoever.116 Finally, there is one in a warehouse in outer London117 with an unlicensed raffle-ticket bar, a weekly programme of events, some soft furnishings and plywood walls dividing it up into discrete areas. But it is still a structurally unaltered warehouse in outer London.
So despite first impressions London has in fact not a single, proper on-premises club to compare with Paris’s 31.
Admittedly property prices are higher in London and Parisian clubs are not uniformly excellent. They tend to be overpriced, many let in single men and there is often a noticeable percentage of older men with young women-of-uncertain-status. Nevertheless, a swinging couple in Paris has a very wide choice as consumers almost every day of the week. In London, for on average fewer than two days a week there is a risible choice between establishments so downmarket that they could not compete anywhere else in the western world.

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Considering that the essentialist qualities of monogamy are now being called into question by anthropologists, physical psychologists, psychiatrists, geneticists and others, what would explain its rise to dominance in western civilization? Perdue, (1986, p. 117) writing of the work of Talcott Parsons, states that Parsons believed “that the Christian church was the first crucible for Western culture”. Kathy Gaca (in Richlin, 2005) suggests that sexual morality in modern culture has been shaped by early Greek and Christian postures toward sex. Foucault (1978) also suggests that later in European history, Christian conanical and pastoral pronouncements played a primary role in defining appropriate sexual practices.

Furthering this line of thinking, I articulate a modest examination of the role of religion in defining the parameters of proper sexual behavior. Early in European history religious institutions managed to take control of sexual behavior and institutionalize it in relation to the discursive formations of the time. In so doing, codified religion assured itself a strong role in the organization and management of human affairs for a very long time. But where did the Christian church come up with its normative narrative regarding sexual behavior?
The Hebrew Background of Christian Sexual Norms

Barrington Moore, in his recent book “Moral Purity and Persecution in History” (2000), uses the concept of pollution to point out how sex was colonized as part of the narrative 4 which separated Hebrews as a people from those other cultures with which they came in contact. Sex was identified as part of a much larger category of polluting behaviors defining monotheistic Hebrews from other non-monotheists. Conversely, associated with this notion of pollution is its opposite, purity. The pure Hebrew must act in certain ways so as to remain defined as a desirable member of his/her community. As Moore points out, at this point in human history maintaining one’s standing in the community was of utmost importance, for being banished, or even ostracized, meant one’s chances for securing a good life, or even survival, dropped precipitously. The social construction of appropriate sexual behavior, then, serves as a means of socially ordering the community. It is a political tool as much as anything else.

Boswell notes that, “(p)rocreative purpose provided an early and influential rationale for controlling sexuality both inside and outside marriage” (1994, p. 112). Certainly in terms of species survival the reproductive aspect of sex has obviously been of significance for most of human history and therefore had to be dealt with by communities if they were to survive. As Moore (2000) suggests, the early Hebrew communities were small and in a precarious state of affairs. Thus, sexual reproduction was a significant responsibility for community members. Not only that, but a large family was a significant subsistence/economic asset. The need for reproduction, however, did not provide sex with a pro-social status in and of itself and was not the only reason for controlling sex. The Hebrews almost certainly controlled sexual behavior for purposes associated with paternity as well as population expansion and labor. Being a highly patriarchal society where women had low political status, males sought to assure themselves of proprietary control of their offspring by controlling female sexuality. Couple the need for population expansion with the proprietary nature of this particular form of strongly patriarchal social system and one begins to understand why, for example, for the Hebrews, same sex activity was considered inappropriate as well. Thinking about sexual activity from the point of view of patriarchy and inheritance, as well as the income associated with bride price, one can also see why a normative standard which prohibited females from being sexually active with more than one male came into being. Hence, it becomes obvious that a normative standard of monogamous heterosexuality would serve the interests of the Hebraic social order.

Even this superficial examination points out the socio-political nature of controlling sex. These are social/political and not “natural” pressures which act to shape the normative structure of sexual activity. Sex is used as a means of “governmentality”, that is, as a means of managing behavior so as to conform to a certain type of social organization. The discursive formation of sex penetrates and colonizes the cultural space and is then internalized by individuals as the natural and appropriate behavioral code. In this way, individuals self evaluate and regulate their behavior in accord with the dominant master narrative, making it much more difficult for them to comprehend the politics/power expressed in their actions. ( This seems to me to be an excellent example of the pervasiveness of power embedded in the social matrix which Foucault found so intriguing.)

Out of the context of this patriarchal Hebraic tradition arose a reformist movement lead by Jesus Christ. Christ held many of the tenets of the Hebrew canon, such as the transcendent nature of God, while at the same time preaching a new doctrine of peace, inclusivity and forgiveness. Many Hebrews joined this new cult and began following this new charismatic leader. This change in narrative doctrine represents the beginning of what becomes a significant “discontinuity” (Foucault, 1994). However, as Weber (in Coser, 1971) has pointed out, charisma is an ephemeral quality and is lost with the demise of the charismatic leader. Once such a leader is no longer able to rally the followers, a process of routinization takes place so as to maintain the movement. It is out of this reformist movement that the less charismatic and more routinized institution of Christianity was formed.

A significant factor associated with the rise of institutionalized Christianity is that this later Christian religious narrative/dogma remained grounded in a doctrine of transcendence, hierarchy, patriarchy and extended the orthodoxy of sexual pollution. In the Christian masternarrative the body was seen as part of the lower realm of nature/animal existence and nature was seen as wild and in need of being tamed. Notice that for the Christians, God is said to have given the natural world to “man” to rule over. The task of the human was to act as a steward, “husbanding” resources so as to *manage* the worldly realm for the good of this transcendent God. In the Christian iteration of the great chain of being doctrine, the human condition is understood as somehow above the rest of nature and yet, manifest in a body, hence, one must *manage* the animalistic aspects of the body as well. In order for humans to fulfill their transcendent character they must control those lower characteristics so as to rise above the way of the flesh.

The discursive formations articulated by the Hebraic and Christian masternarratives set the ground work for a canon of sexual control (a form of biopower/governmentality) which, although being called into question in contemporary society, none the less, still functions as a powerful normative guide regarding appropriate sexual behavior. The episteme/paradigm of these early monotheists, whose account of hierarchical transcendence became the dominant western theme, can be understood as the fundamental epistemic grid upon which later western social systems articulated their social scaffolding, especially, in this case, regarding the general understanding of sexual behavior in western civilization. It seems to me that it can be argued that it is at this early period in western civilization that preliminary processes of creating “docile bodies” (Foucault in Allen, 2004) can be identified. This might be seen as a rudimentary form of “biopolitics” in that the economy of power articulated by the masternarrative embeds control of human action in the social order. Social control is thereby wrested from the secular individual and sedimented in the religio-political social narrative. Martine Rothblatt, in “The Apartheid of Sex” asserts that religious doctrine functioned to extend control of female sexual behavior to one male in the form of monogamy. This form of normative control served “the objective of better cementing patriarchal control over women….” (1995, p. 41) From her perspective, religiously based normative monogamy is primarily a politics of patriarchal control.

Up to this point then, what I am arguing is that historically, sexual behavior was normatively determined by the exigencies of the communities, the general episteme of the culture and by the occasioned narratives articulated by significant members of the power structure of that cultural matrix, rather than from some essentialist master code grounded in a biology or larger civilizational context. However, as Christianity, an off shoot of Hebrew doctrine, came to dominate European society, it brought with it many of the memes 4 integrated into that particular cultural complex. With Christianity taking hold on the European continent many of the beliefs of its early proponents became integrated into the cultural episteme of the dominant societies of the time and thereby became the dominant masternarrative in western civilization.

In the statements of many early church fathers one can see that sex itself is condemned as a polluting act. For example, Paul, one of the towers of the early church states that “(i)t is good for a man not to touch a woman…” (Barash and Lipton, p. 182, 2001). “Influenced by such opinions and the belief that sexual abstinence was the highest Christian calling, many Christians in many times and places forswore sexual relations altogether, even with their spouses” (Boswell, 1994, p. 119) Christianity was and still is a transcendent monotheistic patriarchal religion very unlike the pagan traditions it was replacing. Especially after the onset of religious transformations in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the code of behavior became quite restrictive and unyielding. “There was only one way to gain signs of one’s state of grace as a portent of one’s being elect; namely, the methodical adherence to a God-pleasing code of conduct in whatever position the pious found himself…. The minimization of impulses and deviations from the religious code served the pious … as an indication of his selected status in the eyes of God (Gerth and Mills, 1953, p. 235). Had Europe followed any one of various other “pagan” religious narratives the cultural memeplex/paradigm around sexual behavior would have been decidedly different in later western society.
The Postmodern Turn

What is being suggested is that humans have wide potential for sexual expression which is not innately determined. The historic epoch and the epsiteme/paradigm of the specific culture play a very significant role in determining the proscriptive narrative associated with what is understood to be appropriate sexual behavior. Up until recently that narrative took the form of a totalizing masternarrative which allowed very little by way of alternative behavior. Through newly institutionalized means, identified by Foucault (1990), practices were instituted in the 17 th and 18 th centuries which solidified the production of the docile bodies necessary for a more disciplinary society. Behavior which did not correspond to the masternarrative, grounded in the Christian cultural paradigm, was defined as deviant, sick, insane, abhorrent, wicked or in some manner individually and socially offensive and problematic. People so defined were sanctioned in some manner so as to control their behavior in conformance with what was understood to be “Truth” relative to that particular epoch and episteme.

As both Kuhn and Foucault point out, however, paradigms/epistemes are not set in stone and do change (what Foucault called discontinuity) and with that change comes a new world view (1994). In his book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” Kuhn notes that: “…when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them. …. In so far as their only recourse to that world is through what they see and do, we may want to say that after a revolution (change in paradigm) scientists (people) are responding to a different world.” (Kuhn, 1973, p. 111, my insertions) In other words, for various reasons, paradigms change and when that happens what passed for truth before can and may be called into question. In these new cultural spaces, created by paradigmatic revolutions, new narratives can express very different understandings of how the world, life and/or society works.

I suggest that the concept of postmodernity refers to just such a revolution/discontinuity of world view. The episteme of the present epoch is being transformed by a variety of forces which include capitalism in its latest manifestation as an institution geared toward maximal consumption, the exceptionally rapid transformation and expansion of technology (see for example Jean-Francois Lyotard) and the growing crises of legitimation in a variety of institutions in contemporary society (eg., religion, science and government). Even Fredric Jameson, who doesn’t see postmodernity as necessarily a full break with the modern world but rather as simply a late stage of capitalism, notes that the normative standards of present society have changed drastically, and not necessarily to his liking.

“As for the postmodern revolt…, however, it must equally be stressed that its own offensive features – from obscurity and sexually explicit material to psychological squalor and overt expressions of social and political defiance, which transcend anything that might have been imagined at the most extreme moments of high modernism – no longer scandalise anyone and are not only received with the greatest complacency but have themselves become institutionalised and are at one with the official or public culture of Western society. (Jameson, 1984, 1994, p. 4).

In his book on the postmodern condition, Lyotard, (1984) asserts that one of the primary features of the postmodern world is the loss of faith in metanarratives. In fact, he considers this to be the defining factor of the postmodern state of affairs. For instance, he says, “(s)implifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanaratives.” (Lyotard, 1984, p. xxiv, emphasis in the original) What this suggests then, is that there is no longer any one central or core narrative which defines appropriate behavior such as was the case while Christianity held sway. Rather, there are now numerous micro narratives which serve to legitimate and direct behavior under various circumstances. As Gerth and Mills (1953, p. 116) put it years ago, there is an “…intrinsically social character to motivation…. The words which may fulfill this function are limited to the vocabulary of motives acceptable to given situations by given social circles.” In other words, the codes of conduct individuals draw upon to define and direct their behavior are socially situated and grounded in the episteme of specific epochs and potentially even specific social realms and this is even more the case now then when Gerth and Mills stated this point. The postmodern world is a more heterodox world than ever before.

As this relates to sexual behavior, what is happening in the contemporary consumer society is that forces associated with consumer capitalism, technology and institutional legitimation crises have created the cultural space for a situational narrative code which opens the market place of behaviors to an almost limitless array of expression. One example of constructing a new micro account of an otherwise historically dominant institutional narrative can be found in statements made by Christian swingers legitimating their non-monogamous behavior (see for example www.libchrist.com/bible/compatible.html). At this time in the history of advanced consumer societies there are few restrictive narratives associated with sexual expression which are not being deconstructed and delegitimated (see for ex. Rothblatt, 1995).

Foucault (1978) points out that sex is an exceptionally powerful behavioral node in the cultural matrix which became more administered in the last three humdred years than it had been even under the restrictions of earlier religious narrative. Although Foucault relegates structural analysis of this sort to a level of secondary concern, I believe it can be argued that a significant part of the reason for this increase in the administration of sex had to do with the turn toward the rational administration of the world in general, associated with the growth of capitalism as the economic form in western society and science as the technology for articulating truth. As Weber suggests (Coser, 1971), along with capitalism came a rise in rationalization and bureaurcratization. Increased management of sex in the life world co-arose with the transformation of the life world by a confluence of factors; increased religious asceticism, capitalism, rational calculation, bureacratization and the scientization of the life world being five of the more significant transformative forces. A Marxian account of this state of affairs might be that managing the social world, what Foucault refers to as discipline, became more important to capitalism because as the worker sold his labor on the market, the capitalist as buyer attempted to maximize his gain in terms of his labor purchase. In other words, the logical imperative of capitalism colonizes as much of the energy, both physical and mental, of the social system for market purposes as is possible. As the exploitation of labor was of keen interest to the owner, control of the laborer only seemed reasonable. The worker owed his livelihood to the owner and the owner felt it was his right to protect his interests by controlling the behavioral field. While it is true that non-disciplinary sex of the meanest sort expressed itself in the oppressed working class, as an acceptable form of behavior, sex was regulated and disciplined because, although “(s)ex had no industrial value” (Mumford, 1962, p. 180) the *disciplinary value* associated with this form of social control helped shape the “docile bodies” of the time into human capital. It was simply one more aspect of a disciplined social order mandated by the newly unfolding rational world. Foucault points out that the management of sex followed various paths at this time; for the working class he believes what he calls “alliance” played the primary role. “… (T)hey were subjected in specific ways to the deployment of “alliances”: the exploitation of legitimate marriage and fertility…” (1974, p.121). Here one can see how economic forces determine social relations. As is the case in all social systems, how these narratives are implemented varied across social categories.

In the latter part of the twentieth century, however, there was a change in the axial problematic of capitalism, from the issue of production to one of consumption. This change in economic imperative may be seen to correspond to changes in the axial problematic associated with the normative discipline/management of sexual expression in contemporary society. This transformation in disciplinary normative code is associated with an expansion in the market place of ideas relating to sex and sexuality. The issues associated with reproductive sex have become more complex and are being narrated as part of a new politics of freedom. With the advent of the birth control pill and the opening of the employment structure, women are becoming more self empowered agents in terms of directing their own futures. They are exerting their new found status as equal members of the economic order in ways that are reshaping the politics of sex as well as sexuality. As a consequence of these new social dynamics the discursive formations which held in the past are now being challenged. What it means to be a woman is being contested and reshaped. The concepts of sexuality and gender are coming under scrutiny. The individualism of the market place is now shaping the sexual identity of both men and women. The certainty of proper sexual behavior established by the modern metanarrative is now much more open to interpretation.

As noted, the advancement in reproductive technologies of recent decades has helped to precipitate this change in world view. On numerous occasions Rothblatt (1995) avers that the social order that held sway in the past can no longer continue to do so because of the numerous changes which have taken place in the social world. Gimenez (1991, p.1) points out that “(f)ertility control technologies” allow people to control reproduction and thereby allow for “the separation of sexuality from reproduction”. As I suggested earlier, technology has played a significant role in the fabrication of the postmodern condition. The transformation of technical potential relative to reproduction is an important impetus for the new social acceptance of non-reproductive sexual activity. With the advent of the potential to control the reproduction of the human species through easily facilitated means, such as the birth control pill, and the increasing potential to actually create human life outside of the context of actual human sexual activity, the forms of, and reasons for, control of sexual behavior are much different for society today than in the past. 5

Under this new state of affairs, transformed by these technologies of sex and with the axial problem in modern capitalist society more and more becoming one of consumption versus production, sex has taken on new value as an aspect of the market. For example, one of the problems faced by the contemporary capitalist is getting consumers to purchase his/her particular product versus one of the sundry other replications on the market. In the twentieth century, advertising was expanded and made more sophisticated to do just that, get people to buy a specific product, but as all manufacturers now advertise, the new problem is to engage what is becoming a highly cynical audience. As there is more and more advertising, marketers must somehow break through the confusion and chaos of messages to get the attention of potential consumers. One of the means to do this is to create sensational ads using sex to get attention. Hence, we have seen more and more ads in the past few decades associating sex with products, even if there is no intrinsic relationship. Under these circumstances varied sexual behavior is simply not that shocking any longer. As Foucault (1994) points out, because power is polymorphous in its effect, the outcomes of its use are not necessarily always in the direction of its application. Hence, although sex is now introduced into society as a sales vehicle its trajectory into the social order is also transforming mass behavior codes in ways which are tangential to its intended use. Now the expression of sexual activity is simply becoming blase’ due to the sheer number of exposures each individual has in the contemporary market place. Sex is losing its taboo quality (Layng, 1998).

With media programs such as “Sex in the City”, Howard Sterns and El Vacilion (Bonilla, 2006) becoming normal fare one can easily see how different the present social milieu is from even the 1950′s. Members of present day western society are more accommodating to variations on sexual expression 6 at least partially because of the way marketers have linked it with other, supposedly positive facets of life. To some extent then, the transformation of norms and attitudes toward sex may be understood as an unintended manifestation of simple classical conditioning. What I want to suggest here is that regardless of the actual causal mechanisms, the episteme/paradigm of contemporary consumer based society has changed and that within the cultural context of that change, for a growing segment of the society sexual practices such as swinging are no longer seen in the same light as they had been in the past. 7

In the consumer demand culture of advanced capitalism there seems to be increased legitimacy for a wide variety of behaviors which corresponds to a consumerist behavior code. As noted earlier, the central problematic of late consumer capitalism is one of consumption. What is consumed is of much less import than that consumption takes place. Note that after the 9/11 tragedy president Bush rallied Americans to go buy something. He did not delimit what should be consumed, that was of less significance than that something, anything, be purchased for consumption. It is consumption that underpins the structures and mind-set of late capitalism. Thus, it seems only reasonable that consumption would migrate from the realm of purely economic activity to that of general social activity and hence, sexual expression.

In fact, it can be argued that since we have little or no legitimate guiding masternarrative to shape human social conduct today, other than the a-moral economic code of the self interested pursuit of what is deemed profitable, individuals participating in “the Lifestyle” are simply acting in accord with the behavioral parameters of postmodern society. 8 I do not state this as an evaluative statement of good or bad but rather simply as indicative of the discursive formations guiding human comprehension and explication at this time. Hence, sexual behavior of the sort associated with swinging, as long as it does not cause physical problems for the community at large and does not cause problems for the participants, can not legitimately be ostracized in the context of contemporary heterodox society based on the orthodox moral hortatory of merely one cultural enclave, even if that enclave represents various powerful segments of the system. As Robert McGinley notes, “(j)ust look at our evolution as a nation and you’ll see where the playcouple fits in naturally.” (Gould, 2000; p. 25)
Conclusion

What I have tried to suggest here is that for various reasons the epistemic grid upon which discursive formations rest has changed and that such a change brings forth a new and different social reality. Capitalism, advanced technologies (especially reproductive and computational), the loss of faith in numerous fundamental institutions (note for example the recent scandals associated with the Catholic church and the impact this is having on the laity) and the general sense of estrangement from other primary institutions (especially government, as can be seen by the drop in voter participation in America) all appear to be implicated in the matrix of forces serving to transform the paradigm and masternarrative(s) which controlled society for the last several hundred years. The old classical and modern masternarratives, grounded in a different episteme, are being questioned and no longer hold a fully totalizing grip on all segments of society.

As a caveat, it must be noted however, that orthodox conventions expressed as social cannon still play a considerable role in determining what constitutes appropriate behavior for the general population. As Lyotard (1984) pointed out, postmodernity is uneven in its manifestation across societies as well as within social systems. None the less, it is evident that the modernist canon is being challenged and that certain enclaves of individuals are forging new and different situated micro narratives regarding appropriate standards for human conduct. In the context of contemporary advanced consumer society, sexual norms are being transformed to include a variety of sexual expression such as homosexuality, bisexuality and non-monogamous heterosexual relationships and the new postmodern paradigm appears to be shaping itself to accommodate this new diversity. Unless conditions change considerably in the coming years I see no reason why non-monogamous heterosexuality will not become a more normal and accepted manifestation of a presently widening array of sexual expressions.

Having said that, I feel it important to note that it may well be that conditions/contingencies change so as to reverse this trend and actually bring about a narrowing of behavioral potential. As environmental conditions worsen we may see a rebirth of frugality in all aspects of human existence, not just commodity consumption. The backlash of conservatism may also constrict the sexual market place; notice the recently renewed effort to dismantle Roe vs. Wade. If people want to continue to expand human potential it will be wise to pay attention to the narratives being forged to explicate acceptable human behavior and to attend to the biopolitics and governmentality of neoconservative political institutions as well as to the power/knowledge associated with the expansion of informational technologies and disciplines.

Endnotes
1. This paper is a more or less postmodern form of explication, in that I ground the validity of the narrative in what might be understood to be an inter-textual honorific style of claims making rather than valorizing the authority of the positivist, data based explanation. This is an unabashedly interpretive hermeneutic exegesis. I suggest that human action must be understood within the context of historically specific cultural, structural and epistemic patterns/matrices. Hence, to some extent, my approach is concordant with the concept of historical materialism, albeit without the attendant search for underlying universals and with a greater emphasis on cultural factors. This does not, however, mean that I eschew the facticity of biology or the prepotence of evolution. I am simply asserting a non-biologically essentialist elucidation of social factors which serve to fabricate a pragmatic explanation of changing sexual behavior. I do believe that biology plays a significant role in the expression of human action but that it is only one facet of understanding the human project. I suggest that due to the accumulation of culture over time, both in its material and non-material expressions, culture is playing a more and more prominent role in shaping human action. This being the case, the interrogation of culture becomes of utmost importance in comprehending human activity. The pertinent insight here is the suggestion that while biology does remain an important feature of the human condition, it, for all practical purposes, has remained in stasis while culture has continued to accumulate, now to such a point as to dominate the behavior field.

2. The concept “sex positive”, as I understand it, refers to viewing pleasurable versus reproductive sexual behavior pragmatically, in terms of its positive psychological and physical characteristics versus the negative connotations which have been associated with non-reproductive sex for many years.

3. Foucault’s concepts of discursive formation and episteme, along with Kuhn’s concept paradigm, will be used to indicate that human comprehension of the world is shaped by culture and sign. An episteme, as I understand it, can be understood as a sign code which gives order to things. Radford (2001), writing of issues of librarianship, states that “…a discursive formation (similar to episteme in Foucault’s late writing) refers to the ways in which a collection of texts are organized with respect to each other.” In a more abstract sense it refers to “the … idea: that a society in an historical epoch shared an unconscious cultural formation which set up the rules of reasoning … and the codes of cultural thought.” (Horus Gets In Gear, p. 3) As I am using paradigm one might think of it as a memeplex. That is, a set or pattern of meaning units which make up a thought container or matrix through which individuals within that memeplex view and understand the world. Paradigm, like episteme, exists more or less a priori the actor in each historical epoch. That is, they predate incumbents in the cultural system. They are not, as Kuhn has pointed out, temporally absolute and can and do change over time, however. One might think of the difference between these concepts as one, episteme, acting like the rules of thinking and associating significant signs and the other, paradigm, the content of what is thought.

4. Bevir and Rhodes (2001) suggest that: “… Narrative stands here as a form of explanation that unpacks human actions in terms of the beliefs and desires of the actors. It embodies particular theories about the rationality of actors, their institutional embeddedness, and their capacity for agency, as well typically as a historical story. …. A narrative thus bears at least a partial resemblance to Michel Foucault’s concept of an episteme or Thomas Kuhn’s of a paradigm.”

5. Certainly reproduction is still a significant issue and interestingly, due to the confluence of ideology and population dynamics some are now calling for an increase in reproduction (Steyn, 2006), but the exigencies of the contemporary global issues will almost certainly shape behavioral responses in a fundamentally different manner than in the past.

6. The concept of memes was first articulated by Richard Dawkins in his book “The Selfish Gene” in 1976. I understand this concept to refer to meaningful units situated in culture which somehow manage to remain a significant aspect of culture overtime not necessarily because they are true but because the meme provides a service to the user or the community in itself.

Tony Lezard (What is a meme) puts it like this: “Richard Dawkins, who coined the word in his book The Selfish Gene defines the meme as simply a unit of intellectual or cultural information that survives long enough to be recognized as such, and which can pass from mind to mind. There’s not much of a sense of describing thought processes, but nor is it just a model. As Richard Dawkins writes (this is from memory), ‘God indeed exists, if only as a pattern in brain structures replicated across the minds of billions of people throughout the world.’ (Of course the patterns aren’t physically identical, but they represent the same thing.)”

7. Note for example the large spread in the New York Times (1/11/04) SundayStyles section. Replete with erogenous pictures, the article does not present this as negative behavior but merely one more variation.

8. I believe for many people participating in the practice of swinging (who are known as play couples) these practices are not only more acceptable than in the past but actually fill a void for them which has been created by the late capitalist postmodern condition itself.
References

“Information on Swinging.” http://www.xxxwebspace.net/xguides/swinging/

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Bergrstand, Dr. Curtis and Jennifer Blevins Williams. 2000. “Today’s Alternative Marriage Styles: The Case of Swingers.” Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality Volume 3. http://www.ejhs.org/volume3/swing/body.htm

Bonilla, Dulce Reyes. 2006, February 15. “Let’s Talk About Sexo.” WWW.Alternet.org

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Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction Volume One. New York: Vintage Books.

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Giminez, Martha A. 1991. “The Mode of Reproduction in Transition – A Marxist-Feminist Analysis of the Effects of Reproductive Technologies” Gender & Society. 5: 334-350.

Gould, Terry. 1999. The Lifestyle. Buffalo, NY: Firefly Books.

Jameson, Frederic. 1984. “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review. 146: 53-92.

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Layng, Anthony. 1998. “Confronting the Public Nudity Taboo: Liberalization of American Mores.” USA Today. Sept.

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Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. 1963. New York: Harcourt Brace and World Inc.

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St. John, Warren. January 11, 2004. “Parties Where an ID is the Least of What you Show”. New York Times. Nat’l edition

No related posts.

Some think “Oh, horror, that’s supposed to be terrible.” Well it isn’t terrible and it you’re free enough to allow your partner to have the same freedom, then this is fine. It used to be taken for granted that the man could go out and get himself a gal here and there and not too much flap came from this; but, if the woman did it — ‘Oh, ” again, “that’s terrible and horrible.” I can’t accept that as being horrible and neither can my wife accept it as being horrible. As far as we’re concerned, it is a good way to charge yourself up once in a while and get yourself an experience that you just can’t get any other way. Your experiences with someone else enhance your own sexual experiences with your own partner. There are just some things you can’t do with your own, you have to get them from outside sources.
Most swingers believe that swinging is not for all married couples. They do believe that swinging is better than sneaking around corners and lying to the partner about an outside relationship. Most agree with the statement “I think if two people agree on sex other than with their partners, then swinging perhaps is for them.” To most swingers sex is a recreation which also satisfies a bodily hunger. One female swinger I interviewed responded as follows to the question of why she got involved in swinging:
As far as being asked why have you married if you’re going to get into swinging. I have a lot more emotional aspects of life other than just sex. Sex is just one part of it. I have many years invested in building a complete and total relationship with my husband. Sex, like I say, is just one facet of it and it’s been exclusive where as all my other relationships with people have not been exclusive. I’m able to talk to people. I’m able to dance with people, with all these things then why can’t I have sex with them ? It doesn’t have anything to do with the exclusive relationship I have with my partner, who happens to be my husband. This is my choice and it’s the total, exclusive relationship that I want to keep and want to have and I don’t want to get rid of; yet. I do have needs to have sexual fulfillment that I can’t get from just one type of person. One person can’t satisty all my needs, and I can’t satisfy all of anybody else’s needs. As far as I can see, that’s impossible.
Swingers systematically report that they find it very difficult to go to what they call “straight” parties where they end up playing the couples’ game, flirtation games, and other kinds of games. Most of them believe that at swinging parties one does not have to play games, put up the couple front or flirt: one is able to get down to the basics of life and have sex with one another it it is mutually desirable.
Reasons for Swinging
It is generally felt that you can divide swingers into those who participate for recreational and those who participate for utopian reasons. Recreational swingers see swinging as a social activity much like bowling, playing tennis and cards. Utopian swingers have a general philosophy of communitarianism and wish to share not only sex but all other aspects of life with their fellow participants.
At this time there are relatively few scientific data that indiciate what long-term effect swinging actually has on marriages. Nevertheless there is a general belief among swingers that swinging has a positive effect upon a marriage. They believe that sexual fidelity is harmful and breeds jealousy and a feeling of ownership between a husband and wife. According to them swinging does away with jealousy and helps each mate see the other as an individual and not as a possession. Another reason for participating in swinging is boredom with marital sex. Swingers feel that it is impossible tor one person to satisfy another sexually over an extended period of time. Swinging is seen as a method of adding new excitement to the marriage, perhaps even salvaging it. Most swingers know couples who have tried to salvage a bad marriage by swinging, but they augue that this generally has not been very successful. Most swingers believe that swinging alone cannot save a bad marriage. They do believe that it can strengthen a good marriage.
There may be deeper psychological reasons for swinging. It is believed that men may need to translate early sexual fantasies into reality and that women may be fulfilling social-romantic needs. Some believe that because of the marginality of the new middle class, they seek experiences with others in order to feel they belong. They participate in swinging to develop social ties and to satisty the need tor sexual fiulfillment that is a result of their restrictive middle-class backgrounds. Swinging gives them an opportunity to do both without disrupting their general lifestyle.
All reasons, whether social, psychological, or sociological, are at the present time only speculation. One could easily conclude that the reasons for participating in swinging are as varied as swingers themselves.
Jealousy In Swinging
Generally, swingers do not show jealousy on the surface. Most swingers argue that this is because by going to parties together and leaving together, they realize their commitment to each other as a couple. Thus, they do not feel threatened because the other partner has gone into another room to have sexual relations with another individual. One such swinger said, “We both know that each of us have experiences with other people and, yet, we come back to each other because we want to be together” They feel that this gives you a feeling of security that you never had before because you feel and know that the partner is coming back to you even though they have had a sexual relationship with someone else. They feel that this builds up selfconfidence and security.
For a couple to engage in swinging, they must throw off the belief that having sexual relations outside of marriage is improper; they must break the shackles of the double standard. That is, the wife will be having sexual relations with other males much as the male may have had sexual relations outside the marriage with another partner previously In an interview with me, one woman swinger reported:
I always felt perhaps I didn’t have a normal response, because I was never jealous .To me, it was always a compliment when my husband would have a good relationship with someone. Gee, he’s my partner. Its sort of a reflection of me, and the reason I feel this way is because I remember my first party where it was kind of late at night and I was sitting by the fireplace waiting for my husband and he appeared with this attractive woman and she came up to me and gave me a big hug and kiss and said “I’m so glad you came tonight. You have such a terrific husband ” It made me feel, not jealous, but warm and good and great. And she’s been our friend and I’m gratetul to her because I’ve never been jealous. Quite the opposite. That’s what it’s all about. Sharing a good thing.
Swinging for most women changes their view of the world and sexual relations. Many argue that it has made a complete turn-around in their life from the way they viewed the world two or three years before swinging. In attempting to determine what causes some women to go into swinging, I have already noted that many are urged by their husbands and others go into swinging to carry out their fantasies. One such woman I interviewed reported that she finally acquiesced in going to a swinging party saying that she would not participate but would be willing to go and observe, have dinner and a drink or two. She said:
Well, I had just enough to drink and I saw a man that I liked. I tried him and I liked him, I’m not kidding you. My whole outlook on life has changed — it’s been a scream. We have talked more, in fact, I think he wants to gag me now, and it’s just beautitul. I cannot believe our life since I started participating in swinging. When we first got married he was not particularly interested in sexual relations, but now he won’t leave me alone. For anyone in trouble, you should try it. He’s 33 and I’m 22, and I don’t know, but my sexual appetite is different from his. I mean, I guess I’m sowing my wild oats or whatever, while he just wants it once a week or sometimes twice. I was, like, climbing up the wall with sexual frustratlon — or putting it more bluntly, I was not getting enough, and it was driving me up the wall. Since participating in swinging, as I said, all he wants to do is talk and have sexual relations with me all the time.
Swingers believe that, perhaps, there is a swinging couple on every block and from this they argue that swingers are not “a bunch of freaked-out people.” One woman I interviewed reported that her first evening began when her husband came home and told her they were going to a swinging party. He had seen an ad in the paper, called them up, and the swing club had said to come over for an interview.
“So then he said to me, ?Okay we have an interview, we have to go right now, get your clothes on.” So I thought, wait a minute, we’re going to go. So I put my clothes on. I ‘m going to play along with this game and here we go. We ‘re just going for an interview, right! Well, the interview was at 8:00 and the party was at 9:00. So here we were and the next thing I know there were all these people taking their clothes off, and I thought, my God, help me. Tom’s really having a ball, that’s really what he was doing, and I’m sitting here on the couch having all these mixed emotions. I’m watching these people, and it’s not like any other party that I ever been to, not only in the fact that they are taking their clothes off, but they seem to be actually honest and good people, no phoney facade. In fact, I went to the bathroom and this other lady went with me and she asked me it I was having fun, I said, “Not really.” She said, “Well, why aren’t you balling? Haven’t you seen anything you want?” I said. “No, not really.” “Well,” she said, “listen, you’re missing the best thing in my husband, try him.” Well I had just enough to drink and I tried him and I liked him.
Advantages
Sexual variety, sexual fulfillment, and the potential of carrying out of one’s fantasies are among the advantages of swinging. Sexual excitation increases for both partners as a result of the new types of sexual experiences and there are discussions of actual sexual experiences. Women recieve a great deal of positive reinforcement; they may begin seeing themselves as more desirable. “Women uniformally report that they have bcen able to shed sexual inhibitions that they were raised with.” According to many swingers, you have more of a feeling of your own “personhood;” you think of yourself as a person and not a thing. As I was told during an interview:
You realize, hey, here I am — I don’t have to do all this garbage, and say all those horrible things that I never used to be able to say, and if people don’t like me for what I am, tough — that’s their problem, not mine and I think it really does build you up as a person.
Some swingers argue that swinging creates stronger bonds between couples. Married couples find that swinging increases their ability to communicate with each other. Many couples believe that if a married couple can discuss swinging together, they can discuss anything. Generally, swingers believe they experience individual growth and develop an ability to communicate better with other people.
Generally, swingers believe that swinging has a positive effect on their marriage. About 85 percent of both husbands and wives feel that swinging is not a threat to marriage or love between spouses. None of them reported that their marriage became worse since they began swinging, and the marjority feel their marriages have improved. Husbands in particular consistently reported a high level of marital happiness and adjustment. Apparently, swinging has had no negative effect on the sexual lives of the couples; in fact, swinging couples have sexual intercourse more frequently than the general population. More than half of the swinging couples have sex together more than four times a week as compared with only 16 percent of the general population. Many swingers reported that rather than dampening their ardor for each other, swinging often caused an arousal of sexual interest for each other. Many of them often engaged in sex together immeditely after resuming home trom a swinging party.
The effects ot swinging most often reported are the tollowing: (1) Couples experienced an increased feeling of warmth, closeness, and love, often most intense immediately after swinging, when the couple got together and exchanged their experiences. This is as if the swinging experience was proof of their love. (2) Knowledge and confidence regarding sexual technique was more fully developed. (3) Social life was enriched and active. (4) Couples became more open and honest with one another in all areas of their relationship. (5) A benefit for some was that sexual behavior was taken out ot the dark and became more of a taken-for granted normal activity.
Another effect of swinging is that there is a change in the meaning of sex — that is, of what is appropriate sexual behavior, in what situation, and with whom. Sexual behavior in swinging becomes more broadly defined to accommodate a wider range and choice of behavior than in a typical monogamous relationship. Sex takes on a different meaning for a wife and her spouse when she engages in oral-genital sex with another swinger in the presence of her husband. In addition, the idea that sexual exclusivity between marriage partners symbolizes devotion, trust, security, and love no longer holds, and nonexclusivity comes to symbolize these things. Further, sexual behavior loses its mystery, its secretiveness, and its aspect of “something done in the dark” and takes on more the character of normal everyday activity.
Projections
Swinging is an alternative that is emerging within the traditional structure of marriage in this country. Except for their participation in comarital sex, most swingers are living in a traditional nuclear family. One advantage for many people involved in swinging is that except for sexual bahavior, little change is required in major values related to the traditional family form. Swinging requires changing basic values related to monogamous sexual behavior or admitting values that are different, at least from what individuals have paid lip service to in the past. Families who swing find that except for sex related areas, it does not require substantial changes in behavioral and functional roles. There is some evidence, however, that such sexual activities sometimes require changes in how couples handle jealousy, power, and so forth in the marriage.
Swinging marrieds probably represent the least revolutionary of the emerging alternative lifestyles examined in this book. Generally, swingers challenge traditional beliefs only in the area of sexual monogamy. Strong relationships outside the pair bond are still, for the most part, regarded as threats rather than potentials for personal growth. Generally, contemporary swingers view sex as a recreation, which is relatively consistent with a consumer-oriented society, although there is development of personal growth and change through swinging. Swinging may be a preservative rather than a catalyst for change in the basic structure of the family in our society. Swinging may be viewed as a bridge between old and new values for persons who need old values to feel comfortable in our changing society. Swinging, for the most part, only violates the sexual exclusivity value and not other basic values revolving around the traditional nuclear family. Thus, Denfeld and Gordon (1970) conclude that rules on sex, paternity, and social relationships among swingers make it an adjunct to marriage rather than strictly an alternative. From their point of view, then, swinging supports rather than disrupts monogamous marriage as it currently exists in our society.

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