Sex and the Stewardess

LAUREN — The Swinger

“I think a lot of girls cop out on the whole stewardess scene. You hear them all the time going on about how being a stew has made a whore out of this girl or a tramp out of this one or an emotional wreck out of that one, and I suppose it must happen that way from time to time, but I think, oh, you know, I think it’s a lot like psychoanalysis. It was something somebody on television said about it once, I think it was Johnny Carson. He said it seemed like an expensive way to cop out on your parents. You know, figuring out all the ways that they’re responsible for the fact that you fucked up your own life.”

She drew on a cigarette, blew out smoke, studied the end of the cigarette thoughtfully. “I have a theory that people make their own messes in life. Maybe that’s not something you would go so far as to call a theory. just a way of looking at things, maybe.

“But I believe this. And I also believe, I really do, that for most girls their character and all is pretty well formed by the time they’re in high school. Their moral position and how they are going to think about things and react to things. I know there are what you call late bloomers or late developers, you know, who don’t get started the same time as everybody else. Girls who hide their light under a bushel for years just conforming and living quietly, and then all of a sudden they open up to themselves and start swinging harder than anyone else. But even so I would think that the potential was all there and it would have come out sooner or later and nothing would change it at all.

“Sometimes I think, oh, that it’s all locked up inside us from the moment we’re born. From the moment we’re conceived, even. All locked up within us and waiting to come out. All in the genes, all of it, what we’re going to look like and act like and feel like. And it doesn’t matter how often you get your diaper changed or whether your mother loves you or if you get into the right sorority or anything else, because no matter how it goes it all comes out the same in the end.

“People tell me that this is completely crazy, and I suppose you think so yourself, and maybe you’re right, but I see things this way and it’s honestly the way I look at things and what I believe...

“Now in my own case, if you just looked at the obvious facts you might say, well, Lauren led a fairly quiet life until she became a stewardess, and now, zowie, she’s an all-out swinger. And you might put two and two together and come up with the theory that being a stew was what turned me into a swinger.

“Not true. See, I was like this all the time, all primed and ready to go. It was just a question of time and place. I even let myself go a little in high school, and not just to the point that I wasn’t a virgin by graduation, but that I got into some fairly kinky scenes. But, see, nobody really knew. Not my parents, not the school authorities, and not the majority of the other kids. I was either lucky or I had a pretty good feeling for who would keep it to themselves and who would spread the word around; so, not to get into specifics now, whatever I did in high school it was boss kicks for me and no blot on the old reputation.

“If anything, I would say that I became a stewardess because I wanted to swing. It was more to it than just that, sure. Anything to get out of Chillicothe, like. But other girls would come into it, some of them, with this really holy air about them, as if being a stew was like going into holy orders or becoming an army nurse. You know the attitude. And a very large number were hot to get married. They had heard how the average stew can marry a successful man after a few months in the air, and that was what they were there for...

“Me, I wanted to get creatively laid. To cut loose and really ball. And really, where could you find a better situation? No one really cares what you do. As long as you handle your job properly and don’t let the late hours show in your face, and as long as you don’t disgrace the good name of the airline, nobody really gives a damn. The pilot isn’t your father.

“Also, it’s a great way to meet swingers. In my eyes, people who fly a lot of the time are a world removed from people who stay home. There’s a tremendous difference. People who fly are open to new experiences, new places, new people. They’re sharper and hipper. They’re also generally on the make. All of this I appreciate.

“Not that I’m a walking — flying — nymphomaniac who wants nothing but constant sex sex sex. But I do have to admit that it’s a major interest of mine, and that I like way-out scenes and all of that. To me it’s all part of having an exciting time, and having an exciting time is what I figure I was put on earth to do.

“See?”

Lauren is bright and buoyant and bubbly, with short blonde hair and a pixyish face and figure. Her eyes vary from green to brown. “I guess they change with my moods,” she told me impishly. “They become a very bright green when I have an orgasm. Someone told me this, and you know me, I had to see for myself, right? Typical, right? So it was really crazy. I had this little mirror, and I sprawled out there and held onto the mirror and like stared at myself, and this fellow went down on me. It was really weird. It felt almost scientific, like an experiment. Human Sexual Response. Did you read it? The book? Out of sight, right — with wires attached to everything and all? I felt a little like that. ‘Und now, chentlemen, ve vill determine vezzer or not ziss girl’s eyes change color ven she pops her tube.’ Lauren the Mad Scientist. It was hard to get quite into the mood at first, but one makes sacrifices for science, and this fellow ate me like a starving man, and I got there, I’m happy to say. And they do. My eyes, that is. A very brilliant shade of green.

“You’ll have to see for yourself some time—”

Lauren at twenty-three has been flying for almost three years. While it is generally true that neither the airlines nor one’s colleagues are apt to attempt the role of moral arbiters, and while one would be hard pressed to find a more permissive vocational environment, Lauren is nevertheless regarded by many of those who know her as unusually wild. “I suppose a lot of us do some of the wacky things she does,” one girl told me, “but if we do, we tend to keep them to ourselves. I went to a party that you would have to call an orgy, for example. But I didn’t broadcast the news. Lauren, though, is an utter case. When she goes to an orgy she does everything but show around pictures of herself. She has told me more about some of her experiences than I really care to know.”

“I don’t care who knows,” Lauren has said in return. “I’m, you know, like a long way from Chillicothe. I’ve had it with the don’t-disgrace-your-family bit. That sucks, it really does. Why hide what you do? I’m not ashamed of what I do... look, I’ve read a couple of your books on swingers. I don’t have to tell you. You know what’s happening. Everything’s changing, right? Everybody’s coming alive and opening up. The sexual revolution and all that jazz.

“I mean, the sexual revolution to some girls is an expression to explain to themselves how come they aren’t virgins anymore. To me it’s a lot more than that. I really believe what the Bob Dylan song says. The times they are a-changing, baby. Truth.

“I like to tell the other girls about it when I come back from a really crazy scene. I like to watch their reactions, part uptight but always part excited. I really dig blowing their minds that way. And that’s what it takes to make a revolution, you know. Not doing it and keeping it to yourself. That’s the Victorian scene all over again, with everybody going off in private for his juicy little jollies, and everybody being straight as an arrow on the surface, so that all you would wind up with was guilt. But doing it and talking about it, letting everybody know, that opens things up and opens people up. I don’t mean to say that I’m accomplishing anything all by myself, you know, but my attitude, the way I see it, is that at least I’m doing my thing, and I’m on the right side.”

LAUREN: I don’t know when it all started. In the books the girls always start at the beginning, somewhere deep in the bowels of their childhood, and tell about the first time they fingered themselves or kissed a boy or got laid or how they wanted to ball their fathers. That’s such a massive bring-down, all of that.

JWW: It helps develop a sense of a person, and perhaps shows how one thing leads to another.

LAUREN: If you don’t mind, I’d just as soon skip it.

JWW: All right.

LAUREN: I don’t like all that digging in the past. Maybe that’s part of my thing, that I’ve got something tucked away back there that I don’t want to think about. Well, fine. Solid. If there’s something I don’t want to think about, I would just as soon leave it buried and not think about it.

So as far as how I got the way I am, well, the hell with all that. But as for how I started to swing after I became a stewardess, that’s something else. I’d dig talking about that.

JWW: Fine.

LAUREN: As a matter of fact, I think that would be more interesting to read about anyway, don’t you? And more valuable to the people who read the book. I’m hip that most of the readers, that probably a majority of them, are cats who want something horny to read while they’re beating off. I like to read horny books myself from time to time. But I also read a great many sex books — and this is why I read your books, John — so that I can learn something. A person can learn a lot that way. And it would stand to reason, wouldn’t it, that some of your readers will be girls who are interested in becoming stews, and maybe some of them will be interested for the same reason I was...

I’ll tell you something. When I first got to stew school, I thought, wow, what a total mistake. Because I had always had this picture of stewardesses having this really wild life, really wicked, and here stew school was like entering a convent. I’m serious. No exaggeration, I felt like a Carmelite nun. There was an electrified fence around the place and no men except the decrepit gardener, and honest to God I thought we were going to have to swear an oath of poverty, chastity and obedience.

JWW: Not chastity, but—

LAUREN: Right, I was going to say that. Poverty and obedience are part of the game, all right. But not chastity.

Well, actually it was just as well that there was nothing much to do during training. They really teach you everything all at once, and drinking during the evenings would have been too much, not to talk about anything sexy. There were some girls who would sneak out and meet a boyfriend on the sly, and sneak back in again, and one of them got caught and thrown out of the class just when I had almost made up my mind to try it. So that taught me a lesson, and I stayed with the straight and proper life until I got my wings.

I learned an incredible amount. Part of what I learned was internal and personal. This was the first time I had been away from home, you know, and although I was smack in the middle of a regular beehive full of women, still in all I was away from home and away from people I knew, and in a sense I was alone. When you have a heavy dose of yourself for company you have to learn things about yourself... but that’s pretty heavy to talk about now. Beyond that, you learn so many things in stew training. How to make yourself attractive, how to have a bright personality, how to establish warm feelings with a passenger with just a smile and a friendly word — all of the shit they throw at you in the airlines commercials about how we make it so much of a groove to fly, but really it’s all true, because we are experts at this and we care about it, and that makes a difference.

To understand this, to really get the message, all you would really have to do is take a good long look at the entering members of a stewardess training class. Look them over and talk to them, and then come back when they finish their training and look at them again and talk to them again.

Everybody knows that stewardesses are attractive. I understand they were better-looking some years back, when there were fewer flights and the airlines could really afford to be choosy, but even now the average stew is a very attractive girl, let’s face it. But if you saw what we look like before we become stews, you might be in for a shock. Because if you peel the average stewardess down you come up with a girl who isn’t that much better looking than the average all-American girl.

But we know how to wear clothes and makeup, and our posture is perfect, and we handle our faces well, and smile a lot, and that makes all the difference. Here’s something similar — if you go to New York and walk down Fifth Avenue during lunch hour, you’ll see so many pretty girls, and if you did the same thing in Chillicothe there will be a much lower percentage of girls that you would look twice at. I was going to say Los Angeles along with New York, but that’s another matter because there really are more pretty girls there, what with so many going out to Hollywood. But the point isn’t that girls are prettier in New York, but that they are more sophisticated about dressing attractively and getting their hair styled in a fashionable way and using makeup creatively, while the girls in a small town in the Midwest don’t know how to do this, or don’t take the trouble. And it’s much the same way with stews.

So the point is that stew training was worth it, even if it was a lot like going to jail...

When I got my wings, I got into the center of things in a hurry. I had a deep yearning for something. I knew it was out there but I didn’t know just what it was.

JWW: Do you mean simply that you wanted sex?

LAUREN: No, it was more than that. I sort of sensed that there was a world of excitement that I didn’t really know anything about, and I was impatient to get connected with it. I guess you could say that I anticipated the swinging scene even though I had no real understanding of what it was or what went on there.

At the beginning, I was dating constantly and having a whole lot of sex, and yet, I don’t know, I was vaguely discontented, vaguely, oh, disappointed about the whole thing. I would be on a flight, and I would be having a ball just going through the stewardess role. I dig flying to begin with, and I dig meeting new people, and I was so excited about what I was doing, actually being a stew and doing all the things I had been trained to do. I was like a little kid. Anyway, I would be on a flight, and guys would flirt with me, which I enjoyed from the start, and I learned how to size them up and guess which ones would be fun, and I would take dates. Also I went out with pilots now and then, but I sort of sensed from the beginning that this wasn’t my major scene. I have always had the feeling that it would be a mistake to get involved with someone you have to go to work with the next day or the next week.

So for the most part I dated passengers. I knew the things all stews know — how to tell if a man is married or single by looking not only for the wedding ring but for the white mark that shows he took the ring off. There are a lot of different ways to interpret that white mark, incidentally. First of all, it’s an obvious tip-off that the guy is looking for action. He’s married and he’s trying to hide the fact, so if he appeals to you, there’s no question that you can get something started with him. On the other hand, the man who makes a play for you but leaves his wedding ring on, with him you have the advantage of knowing exactly where you stand. Everything is right out there in the open. He’s saying, Dig, I’m married, and I wouldn’t insult your intelligence or your character by trying to hide the fact, but we’re both grown-up people and we know what we like, so why be sneaky? A man with that attitude is likely to be enjoyable company. It’s funny, really — the guys who take off the wedding rings would probably do better if they left them on...

Of course you can read too much into this. I know a fellow, for example, who had that telltale white mark on his finger, and it turned out that he was married and very straight about it, he never played around as far as I know, but he had been on a diet and lost so much weight that his fingers actually got thinner, and the ring was too big and he had left it at a jeweler’s to have it made smaller. He wasn’t a swinger, he was just a weight-watcher.

JWW: I had something similar. I took my ring off when I was divorced, naturally, and girls would think I was being coy when they noticed the white mark. As a matter of fact, I got a little monomaniacal on the subject and took to holding my left hand in front of a sunlamp.

LAUREN: That’s too much... another thing, and this may seem snobbish, and actually I guess that’s exactly what it is, but one thing you learn before you even set foot on a plane is that you’re better off dating fellows who fly first-class than the fellows in the tourist section. It’s not that they’re more likely to be wealthy. I don’t even know that that’s the case. A lot of rich men just don’t like the idea of paying extra money for first-cabin service. But the ones who do are the ones who believe money is to spend, and that’s the kind of person I’d rather have dinner with, all things considered. On domestic flights, you know, it just doesn’t cost that much extra to fly first class. I know the corporations usually send their men tourist class, but even so if you have any style you just take the tickets the company gets for you and turn them in for first-class, and pay the difference yourself. And if a man won’t do that, well, he generally doesn’t care much about having a really good time, and if that’s so I’d rather not go out with him. Of course this is a generalization, and it’s probably unfair to a lot of swinging guys who travel tourist just as a matter of course without even thinking about it. But, you know, up in the sky you have to make generalizations and snap judgments, and this is one easy way to do it.

But to get back to the subject, I was dating these fellows and having plenty of great dinners and drinking at all the best night clubs and seeing the ceilings of a lot of hotel rooms, and it was fun, believe me, but it wasn’t what I was looking for. I felt something was missing.

Now when a lot of girls say this what they mean is that love was missing. The whole scene of fast meetings and going right off to bed and never seeing the guy again, this gets to a lot of girls after a while. You’d be surprised, because some of them are very enthusiastic about it at first, and they’ll give you a whole line about how they’re liberated young ladies and they can really cut loose and swing this way, and after a couple of months of instant sex they find out they’re not so free after all, and they want to be loved for their sweet and beautiful souls and not just for their tits and asses.

Look, I’m inclined to say the words, you know, but you can change it when you write it all up...

With me, it was the opposite. I didn’t want any love scene. That was the last thing I wanted. Maybe someday, and with the right guy, and with God knows how many other qualifications, but in the meantime, like, forget it. I have enough to think about inside of my own head without getting involved with somebody else.

What I wanted was something more thrilling. Well, kicks, really. Sexual kicks. Let’s not beat around the bush — I wanted really swinging times. Something more than just having ordinary sex with one man in the course of a night.

To put it simply, I wanted to get involved in the whole scene of swinging. The parties, the swap groups, the whole trip.

JWW: You knew about the scene?

LAUREN: I did and I didn’t. I had read about it. Some of the books were fairly straight, and then there are other swap books you see around, I’m sure you know the kind I mean, which are obviously phony. Just a device for descriptions of orgies designed to get the reader hot. But even so, I guess all of those books have a germ of truth in them somewhere. So I did have an idea of what was going on, but you know, it was something that happened in books. I might have fantasies about it but at the same time it wasn’t, oh, real for me.

JWW: You liked the idea, but you couldn’t believe those people really existed.

LAUREN: Right. They weren’t real.

Then this one flight, Boston to Denver with a stop at I think Kansas City, there was this very groovy passenger going straight through to Denver, and I got to talking to him. He was the advertising manager of a company in Denver and he had been in New York getting wined and dined by the advertising agency, and now he was on his way home. He was making a nice pitch to me, not too heavy but coming on fairly strong, and he was a very attractive man, tall and handsome and I guess late thirties, and, oh, sexy. My type.

But he was wearing a wedding ring, and although I had nothing against going out with married men, I also realized that, you know, he was going to Denver and Denver was his home base, so it was a cinch I wouldn’t be dating him that trip. Now under those circumstances a lot of guys will try for your phone number and make arrangements to call you when they get to your home base or something like that, but he wasn’t playing it that way. He was talking about my joining him for dinner that night.

So I thought, what the hell, and I looked at him and said, “You know, we could probably have a swinging time together, but do you think your wife would approve?”

“Oh, she’s liberal,” he said.

Now this is a common answer, generally meaning that the wife doesn’t care what the husband does out-of-town, and generally it’s a load of shit anyway. So I said something to the effect that she might want to see him on his first night back in town.

“She will,” he said. “But she likes company. You’ll join us for dinner, and maybe the neighbors will drop over, and we can always dig up an extra man to make it an even six.”

I thought at first he meant he could get an extra man as a date for me. Then he sort of spelled it out and, bright girl that I am, I got the message. Light dawned.

“We’re swingers,” he explained. “You seem like a pretty swinging kid yourself, and you really appeal to me, and I thought maybe you’d like to join us. Why don’t you think it over?”

I didn’t have to think it over. I told him I was game and that was all there was to it.

JWW: How did it go?

LAUREN: Like a dream. Literally like a dream. I checked into my room at the airport inn and then met him in the lounge for a drink. He had called his wife and everything was set. We drove out to his place, a very plush split-level on the hillside with a view that went on for miles. His wife was just a few years older than I was, a redhead with a fantastic body and a very wicked smile. And one of those low voices, she sounded like Lizbeth Scott in those Bogart movies. I’ve always wished I had a voice like that, and instead I’ve got this perky squeaky little voice that I hate.

We had dinner, and then we sat around talking, and we had a few rounds of drinks, and then his wife excused herself and while she was gone he made a pass at me. He took me in his arms and kissed me, and I was excited instantly, and he put his hand under my skirt and played with me and I came almost immediately. I’ve always been able to come quite easily but this was different. The whole scene was turning me on, see. The idea that his wife was in the other room and that she knew what was going on and that she grooved with the whole thing, this made it all very exciting to me.

JWW: You didn’t feel at all inhibited?

LAUREN: I can honestly say that I didn’t. At the very first it was a little awkward going into the house and meeting the wife, but swingers know how to put a person at their ease. Swingers are very much like stewardesses in that respect, as far as that goes. Incidentally, of the swinging wives that I have met, you might be surprised what a high percentage of them are former stews...

But after the first few moments with the two of them, no, there was no inhibition on my part. And certainly none on theirs. You know, they had made this scene before.

JWW: Yes, I would imagine.

LAUREN: So we got out of our clothes, you know, and he played with me some more, and went down on me, and then we screwed on the couch. It was really great. Part of it, of course, was what I already mentioned, the whole excitement of the involvement with his wife and all, but there was also the fact that he was particularly good at making love. This is one really wonderful thing about swingers, incidentally. Both the men and the women are very much better at sex than the ordinary run of people.

JWW: In terms of sexual technique?

LAUREN: Definitely. There is just no question about it. For one thing, they aren’t uptight about sex. They get plenty of it all the time and they don’t have to worry about their ability. Also they make it with a lot of different people and they experiment constantly, and this has to make a big difference. They learn different things and they have, you know, a very open attitude about sex. It’s a big point of honor with them, a source of pride, to be very well versed in sexual technique.

Another thing, and that is that swingers are just more attractive than the average person. Physically attractive. Not because they were born beautiful but because they take the trouble. They exercise and keep fit. Most married women, even the ones who want to go on looking young and beautiful, well, they wear girdles all the time and let their stomach muscles go flat and flabby. Because they only care how they look with clothes on. But swingers are concerned about looking good in the nude. Some of them don’t dress well at all, but you can be sure they undress well, and that’s how they keep score. The men, too, keep attractive. And they keep their nails clean and their breath fresh and bathe frequently — they do all the things that keep them from being in any way offensive. Little things can turn people off, and swingers are very careful not to do anything that will turn anybody off.

JWW: Was that the extent of your first swinging session?

LAUREN: Are you kidding? That was barely the beginning. After we had made it, we were sharing a cigarette, and his wife walked in. She had all her clothes off and it was then that I realized what a really stunning figure she had. She pulled up a chair and sat down next to us, and the three of us were talking casually, and then without a word she began performing fellatio on her husband. This was really startling to me. Not the act, Christ, I had learned to do this years ago, even before I lost my virginity. But the whole situation, the scene. Here I was still lying in his arms, and there was his wife kneeling over him and sucking him off.

It was tremendously exciting to watch. It was really fantastic. At first I watched, and then I had to get into the act, and I started kissing him on the chest and throat and like that, and he fingered me a little and sucked my breasts, and you know, figure it out for yourself, but it was all great.

The couple from down the street came over later on, and we all got tangled up together. They were also very groovy people, very attractive. I never did get back to the hotel room until the next morning. I must have dozed off from time to time but I didn’t get any actual sleep to speak of, not really. The five of us were busy all night. In the morning the guy drove me back to the airport and gave me a couple of Benzedrine pills to get me through the day, because I had a flight coming up and I wanted to be half-way human for it. No problem at all, as it turned out. The bennies did the job and I was bright and bushy-tailed, in addition to being very goddamn well laid.

Oh, believe it! You know all about the swinging scene so I don’t really have to tell you about it, but you can imagine the tangles that can get going when you have three girls and two guys. And I was just so receptive to all of this. I had been reading and fantasizing about it for so long, getting all of these wild ideas in my head, and now it was all there for me and all I had to do was participate, and God, did I ever participate.

I had this tremendous desire to have two men at once. I think every girl must think about this. Don’t you think so?

JWW: Perhaps.

LAUREN: I would think so myself. At this time, for instance, I had learned to enjoy eating a man, and of course I had always enjoyed intercourse. So how could you help wanting to see what it was like to experience both of these things at the same time?

Of course I wanted to, and I tried it that night, and, well, it was great. In fact I liked all of the things I did that night.

All of them...

The only thing that almost stopped me was the woman thing.

JWW: Lesbianism?

LAUREN: Well, you know, I wouldn’t exactly call it lesbianism when two girls get together at a session. Lesbianism or homosexuality or whatever you want to call it, it implies more to me than that. You know what I mean? It’s a whole way of life, the attitudes you form and everything. I have known some lesbians, and they are in a different bag entirely. Whereas on the other hand it’s hard to find a woman involved in swinging to any real extent who doesn’t make the scene with another girl from time to time. Not in private, but at a party.

JWW: Yes, that seems to be true.

LAUREN: So I wouldn’t call it lesbianism. Just a part of swinging. In the same way, there are quite a few guys nowadays who will have sex with other men at a swinging session, and yet you would never think to call any of these guys a fairy, or homosexual in any sense.

JWW: That’s a good deal less common than the other side of the coin, female homosexuality.

LAUREN: It is, but it’s getting more common, I think. Or maybe I’m just moving with a wilder crowd lately, but I think more men are coming out of their shells. Maybe they used to be worried about latent homosexuality, or about other people thinking that they were queer, and now they aren’t worried anymore. I don’t know.

That first night, though, I was hip enough from what I had read to know that lesbian stuff was apt to happen at swinging parties. In fact I found myself thinking about it from the beginning, wondering if it would happen. I had more or less decided that I would try to find a cool way to let them know that it wasn’t my scene. But at the same time I’m sure I had a strong urge to try it.

I said before that I wasn’t at all inhibited. Well, scratch that. I was inhibited about the girl-girl scene. Not enormously uptight about it, but let’s say a little bit inhibited.

JWW: How did it get started?

LAUREN: It got started with me left out of it, as a matter of fact.

JWW: How do you mean?

LAUREN: The two other girls, the wives. We had gone through a sort of five-way scene which was wild, and everybody was sort of cooling off, sipping drinks and sprawled out and talking, and one of the husbands suggested to the redhead that she put on a show with the other wife. And the two women talked back and forth about it. One said she had almost forgotten what the other tasted like, and talk like that. The talk was almost as erotic as the act itself. Then they petted with each other, and finished with a sixty-nine. Their husbands watched but didn’t join in. They watched until both girls got their jollies.

JWW: And you watched as well?

LAUREN: Of course. What else was I going to do? Look at the television set?

JWW: I suppose not.

LAUREN: Afterward my hostess, the redhead, just turned and looked at me. And then they were all looking at me, and I didn’t know what to do or say. It was a very strange moment.

And I just realized that I had to find out what it was like. What it felt like. And you know, it was great. At first I thought that I just wanted to have it done to me, to be eaten by one of them, and then I realized that that was a lot of crap. I actually wanted the complete trip, dig, and we wound up in a three-way tangle, and it was a mindblower. It really was. I hadn’t expected to dig it that much, but I did.

In a sense it was the high point of the evening, because, you know, this was a really far-out thing for me and a scene I hadn’t expected to make, let alone enjoy that much. But really, the whole evening was one big high point.

That evening with the two couples represented the crossing of a sexual Rubicon for Lauren. From that point on, she considered herself a member of the Swinging Generation and conducted her social life accordingly. She developed contacts supplied by the Denver couple, added new contacts of her own, and became increasingly involved in group sexual activities throughout the country.

“For a person who travels,” she explained, “the swinging scene is really ideal. When you spend your life bouncing from one city to another, you honestly don’t have the time to develop long-term relationships. And assuming that what you want is to have sex on the run and enjoy it, well, the problem is that with most people it takes a long time to develop a really good sexual relationship. You have to learn each other’s bodies, you know. You have to get the feel of the whole thing, and this takes time that you just don’t have available when you have to fly to Omaha first thing in the morning.

“But with swingers, there’s this immediate rapport. It starts with rapport on an emotional level. There’s none of this business of feeling each other out conversationally. Swingers don’t have to go through that shit, any more than you have to worry about your wardrobe at a nudist camp. You know, it really amounts to pretty much the same thing, doesn’t it? Swingers are like nudists. They don’t worry about putting clothes on their minds and hiding their desires. Putting clothes on their minds — that sounds almost precious enough to be from a Jim Webb song, but you dig what I mean. There’s this immediate honesty, because you’re all swingers and you all know what you’re there for, so why bother coming on strong with each other?

“But at the same time, even though they don’t try to falsify things, swingers are very intent upon making a good impression. They work hard to put you at your ease and make you feel at home. And all of this makes for a much better scene when you hit a strange city than you would get sitting around some creepy nightclub with some clown who keeps putting his hand on your leg and pretending it’s an accident.

“I don’t want to give you the idea that my entire bag is group sex. I would say that I like that the most not just because I’m kinky but because frankly that’s usually the most fun for all concerned. When there are just two people in a room there are just so many things they can do, and they can only do it for so long before one or both of them gets too tired or too bored or plain worn out. With a group, everybody gets turned on by everybody else and the whole level of excitement is much higher. And lasts much longer. And in a strange way there’s a lot more individual leeway in a group scene. For instance, if a guy and a gal are together, and if he can’t get it up for the moment, it can be a very tense and unhappy scene all around. He feels compelled to do her some good, and she is brought down by the fact that he’s not hard and therefore she figures she must be turning him off, and you know, one thing leads to another and nobody is exactly happy.

“But if the same thing happens at a group thing and it does, incidentally, because anybody is apt to be turned off at any particular moment, you know — well, then, the party goes on around the guy. If he feels like participating he can always go down on somebody or finger somebody and the chances are that no one will even notice that he isn’t physically excited. Or he can just sit around and watch if that’s what he would rather do. You know the saying, whatever turns you on, well, that’s what it’s all about.

“I have a particular advantage as far as swinging is concerned. Well, you could even say it’s an advantage as far as sex in general is concerned, but especially in terms of the swinging scene. And that’s that I’m a girl

“See, extra girls are always in big demand. You know the way it works. The whole scene is up to here with extra guys who want to go to orgies or have parties with couples. I’ve been to parties advertised in the underground newspapers where they will specify that only couples will be admitted, and in the course of the evening maybe fifty dateless guys will try to talk their way in, and it’s an odd thing if one girl shows up unescorted. So an extra girl will always be in demand if only to balance out the extra men who are always available.

“But on top of that, every group would rather have more girls on hand. I’m not exactly sure why this is. Maybe it’s because every man has this dream of himself as the sultan of his own private harem, and wants to have extra women all over the place. Or maybe it’s this big lesbian element in the swinging scene. I suppose that’s possible. Of course I don’t have to tell you that the whole idea of the threesome is very big right now. In the club bulletins, I would say that a quarter to a third of them are just for that purpose — married couples who want an extra girl for a threesome. Sometimes these people are just looking for casual sex and sometimes they really want a permanent three-way living agreement...”

Did she expect to go on living this way indefinitely? Or did she have a different sort of future in mind?

“I would hate to give up swinging. I’m sure I wouldn’t want to do that. But I know I’ll want to get married sooner or later. If I met the right man now, I think I might almost be ready to start wearing a ring.”

What sort of man would she want?

“A swinger,” she answered, without hesitation. “No question about it. I think it would be good to be married because otherwise sooner or later a person winds up lonely. You look at your life after a certain age and if you don’t have memories to share with some other person, it is just an empty life. I haven’t felt this way myself yet, I’m too young, I think. But I have heard people talk, and I can understand what it must be like.

“But if marriage meant turning square, I don’t think I could make it. Not for any length of time. Oh, people talk about love and the way it changes a person, but I don’t know. Maybe some day I’ll understand that kind of love, maybe I’ll believe it, but for the time being I can only say that, like, I don’t believe that kind of love exists. Or that it exists for me.

“See, I know about sex. I know all about sex. Maybe that’s putting it a little heavy, but, oh, I’ve been making the scene for a long time now, and it’s a fairly crazy scene at that, and I know it pretty well. And one thing I don’t know much of anything about is love.

“You know, like what is it? What’s it all about? Dig, John, I would almost like to be very cool about this now, very sophisticated, but you know, what am I trying to prove? I’ll admit it — there’s this thing that people call love and I don’t know what it feels like.

“I’ve never really cared about anybody but myself. Not the way people do when they’re in love...

“So screw it. I mean, I’m a happy kid, I have a good time. Right? I enjoy myself. I know how to swing and I know how to let myself go and have a really good time. I can walk into a party and not know anybody and a couple of hours later I’ve copped every joint in the room and I’ve come all over the place and I don’t know much about love, but like the old joke, I know what I like. Right?

“If I meet a man, and if he’s a nice guy and bright to talk to and comfortable to be with and good in the hay, I mean really he would have to be very damned good in the hay or I would probably be very conscious of what was wrong with his style. But if he was all those things, and I dug him and he dug me, you know, to be with. And if he was a swinger and if we both liked to make the same kind of scenes. And if he made a good enough living so that we could live a decent life, but at the same time he had enough time off so that we could cut loose and swing together.

“Well, if we had all of that going for each other, I don’t guess I would ask too many questions about love. And in that case I’d be glad to give up stewing and all and get married. I would do it. I guess anybody would.”