The Wife-Swap Report

The Games Swingers Play

A Sunday afternoon, the air crisp with the smell of burning leaves. Paul and Sheila are in particularly good spirits. Last night they went to another couple’s home for a party at which a total of a dozen persons were present. The evening seems to have been an unqualified success. They discuss it with a disarming lack of inhibitions, not so much as if to savor the experience as to convey to me the pleasure they took in it and the ease with which they are able to talk about it.

I suggest that perhaps they might discuss some of the ways they keep their swapping experiences fresh and varied. To an extent swinging does represent an attempt to avoid the presumed monotony of monogamous marital relations, and I wonder aloud whether or not the same aspect of monotony does not similarly threaten swingers. Paul agrees that this is so and points to it as a factor in precipitating their original disenchantment with the life.

SHEILA: Of course that’s the whole point — that you have to be careful not to substitute one routine for another. You have to keep things new and varied, and at the same time you have to avoid going overboard to the point where every date has to go a step further than the preceding one. I think we discussed all this before, didn’t we? It has a familiar ring to it.

JWW: Yes, but I was thinking of a different aspect. What I’m getting at is the question of how you manage this balance, this mutual avoidance of monotony and excess.

SHEILA: You have to be inventive, that’s all.

PAUL: That’s a big part of it. They say necessity is the mother of invention; well, if that’s so, then the father is monotony. But I think you make a mistake to credit inventiveness with making swinging stay interesting. More important than the new things you think of is the mental attitude you develop.

Face it — there are only so many ways to have sex. This may be more obvious when you’re limited to the same two people in a marital relationship, but it’s just as true in an orgy. There are only so many ways, so many sensations, so many methods of obtaining that happy little orgasm. If a person becomes obsessed with the need for variety, it can only turn out to be a hang-up. It’s more important to learn to enjoy what you’ve got than to be constantly yearning for more.

SHEILA: I think John is more interested in the actual methods of varying things. Aren’t you?

JWW: I think it might be of interest.

SHEILA: Well, anything to make our readers happy. It’s hard for me to believe that somebody is actually going to read all this, you know. I suppose if I really believed it I would have to weigh everything I say, or I would freeze up entirely or something...

There are certain things that a great many experienced swingers will do. I suppose you could call them games. First of all there are the icebreakers, and games of this sort are a sort of swinging version of the icebreaking games that civilians use, and to tell you the truth I think they make about as much sense.

The obvious ones, like Strip Poker or Strip Scrabble, are really too silly to talk about. I read about them all the time in phony books on swinging, but I don’t know anyone who makes much use of them. After all, once you get beyond the first stages of sexual freedom, you find out that nudity in and of itself isn’t that much of an aphrodisiac. I can’t get delirious at the thought of seeing another man’s penis, not after I’ve seen enough of them.

There’s a swinger’s version of Post Office and one of Spin the Bottle that works pretty nicely. And I would have to admit that these games serve a purpose when you have a large number of people together for the first time. A crowd of strangers is always inhibiting to certain people, and when you use this sort of game to develop a sort of round-robin petting match, it gets people into the spirit of the thing in a gradual way. Of course the ground rules vary according to the group. Sometimes it’s just a plain kissing game with the players naked. Other times different rules will be followed.

These games are usually used as icebreakers, but they also serve to vary the pace in groups that have been meeting together for some time. In the clubs, you know, you have to guard against falling into a set routine, and there are a lot of games that are used not because anybody’s absolutely crazy about them but just to break up the pattern.

PAUL: Which is one of the basic problems with clubs, and a good reason not to join one.

SHEILA: We felt that way, but not everyone does. Remember, there are advantages to a club. None of the dangers you always have in correspondence, for example. No worrying about meeting with people who will turn out to be a drag — and that happens pretty often no matter how you try to avoid it. And for some people a club helps to keep swinging in proportion.

JWW: I’m not sure I follow that last point.

SHEILA: Well, when you make all of your own arrangements, it’s very easy to find yourself going off the deep end, making so many swinging dates that you can’t keep up with your own schedule. Almost everyone seems to do this at one time or another, mainly because the average person can’t believe that there’s such a thing as too much sex.

PAUL: The clubs have set meeting times — once a week, twice a month, whatever. So you can regulate yourself that way. I don’t think that means much, to tell you the truth. If people are determined to overdo it, they can still make dates on the side.

SHEILA: From our experience, I would say that the clubs are far more oriented toward games and contests than people who meet privately on a couple-with-couple basis. Of course part of this is purely mathematical — you can’t really have much of a contest unless you have enough people to make it interesting.

PAUL: Don’t forget Swing.

SHEILA: I’d just as soon forget it, if you don’t mind. You know the game, don’t you, John? It’s sort of Monopoly for swingers, a commercially available board game that lends itself to a swap situation. Different cards order players to remove an article of clothing, or kiss all the other players, or race off to the bedroom with someone. Maybe ninety percent of the swingers we know have played it at one time or the other, and except for a few novices no one has been much impressed with it.

PAUL: It’s supposed to be funny.

SHEILA: And it doesn’t quite make it. But as far as that goes, humor isn’t always what you want to set the stage for an erotic evening, is it? The funny thing, though, is that a lot of nonswingers seem to own and play the game. It’s sold by mail order, you see, and the various ploys are vague enough so that I suppose if you weren’t a swinger you could just interpret them as risqué. I guess the same kind of people play the silly game as listen to those tacky party records, Belle Barth and the red-haired one, I forget her name.

PAUL: Rusty Warren.

SHEILA: That’s the one. You know the type — the very worst kind of nonswinger.

PAUL: We’ve heard — or maybe we’ve read — that the game is occasionally used for seduction purposes, either when a swinging couple wants to get a nonswinging couple in the mood or when somebody wants to get a civilian social group oriented in a swinging direction. Frankly, I have a hard time believing that this ever happens. I don’t despise the game quite as much as Sheila does because it doesn’t offend me. My charming wife has a tendency to take things personally.

SHEILA: All it offends is my taste.

PAUL: You’re just letting your experience show, honey. People who are new to swinging get a kick out of things like that. It’s largely a matter of kicking over the traces, I would guess. Everything that normal society would regard as outrageous becomes desirable for that reason...

We discuss the use of games in two-couple situations. Sheila remembers a young Southern couple whose entire approach to swap situations was humor-oriented, to such an extent that an evening in their presence was composed more of laughs than of sexual relations. We talk of the possible use of games and contests in the wild-party or orgy situation, and Paul says that they do not fit in there; if such a party is effective it works spontaneously, and if it is not, games and contests will not help it. We then turn to the subject of games and contests in the context of the swap-club experience. The Gordons belonged to a club in Louisville after a pair of bad mail-order experiences made them leery of meeting with strangers. Their club met two evenings a month at the home of one of the members. Total membership ranged from eight to twelve couples during the relatively brief period of time that Paul and Sheila belonged.

PAUL: The club had been in existence for well over a year by the time we were invited to join. By that time, incidentally, we had become acquainted with more than half the members. As I understand it, two couples started the club and gradually enlarged it. I don’t know how one would go about starting a club, or how the various ground rules would evolve, as everything was in operation by the time we got involved.

The basic operation was simple enough. Member couples took turns hosting the meetings, with us and another couple excused from this duty because we had no way to get the kids out of the house for an entire evening. The rest of the couples either had parents around town who would have their kids over for the night or, in some cases, had no kids at all to worry about. In ordinary swap situations no one worries about a sleeping kid in the house, but with a dozen couples on hand it’s a different story.

Meetings began promptly at eight-thirty, and you can rest assured that no one made a point of getting there fashionably late. That’s one thing about swingers — they somehow lose interest in some of the more senseless social conventions... Dress also seems to be of less significance to swingers, probably because you don’t keep your clothes on for very long.

A typical meeting would begin with up to an hour of general socialization, with light drinking and conversation. At this particular club there was an unspoken rule that the conversation during this early period would not be centered on sex. Anything else was a suitable topic — religion, politics, anything but sex. I think the object was to let the excitement build, and also to let people know each other in more than a purely sexual sense.

SHEILA: It was a particularly good idea, too. Especially for the second reason. From what other people have said, clubs can be absolutely deadening over a period of time when there’s nothing between the members but sex. What happens is that you have the anonymity of an orgy week after week without the excitement of strange bodies. You ball the same strangers every week — that’s what it amounts to. And that’s the main reason most clubs fall apart in a very short period of time.

JWW: I thought quite a few clubs lasted for long periods of time.

SHEILA: Some last for ten years or more, and those are the clubs everybody knows about. But they make up only the smallest minority of the clubs that come into existence. There are literally hundreds of clubs organized every year all over the country. It’s very easy to organize a club, you know. There’s nothing easier. Sometimes a single man will put a club together because it’s the easiest way for him to make contact with swingers. You wouldn’t think it would work, but it does. He runs an ad announcing the formation of a club in a given area and balances out the replies so that he has the same number of men as women, and he’s in business. It’s nothing to start a club, but I would guess that nine out of ten clubs don’t stay together for more than three or four months.

PAUL: Our Louisville club was a particularly good group, as groups go. I don’t know that it’ll last ten years, but it was well set up. As I said there would be up to an hour of general conversation. Then around nine the entertainment section started.

This could take any of a number of forms. It was the responsibility of the host and hostess to organize things, and they had all the leeway in the world as far as innovation was concerned. As I’m sure you can imagine, each couple tried to put on a better program than the one before, and the results were worth the effort. It was the same sort of unstated competition that civilian hostesses have to prepare the most exotic hors d’oeuvres.

The most common form of entertainment was movies, at least at first. When we first joined, it was evidently quite difficult to come by stag films in the Louisville area. The few films that were readily available were yellow with age. Then someone made contact with a distributor in I think Cincinnati, and we were able to get quality films, occasionally in Technicolor and once with a sound track.

The films were good up to a point, like everything else. We learned not to let a film show go on too long, because once we were conditioned to handle that kind of vicarious stimulation, an overlong show merely became a drag for everyone. The main function of the films, really, was to focus everyone’s attention on sex and let the tension build a little.

SHEILA: It also created an opportunity for a group grope. A little mutual fondling was perfectly permissible all around. Of course you weren’t supposed to get carried away.

PAUL: Or else you wind up with the film watching the audience.

SHEILA: It’s not hard to avoid when you’re experienced in that type of situation.

PAUL: There was a point, during our own first few months in the club, when good stag films were becoming available at a steady rate and there just wasn’t a meeting without one. Then one of the original members hosted a meeting and introduced an innovation. He had us all take seats for the movies, then rolled up the screen and put it away. We had just selected our partners, he explained; each man was then coupled with the girl on his left.

At that point everybody was told to strip. Then the rules of the contest were explained. The couples were not exactly partners, because each had the opposite goal. The women could do anything they wanted with the object of making the men ejaculate. The first woman to make her partner come was a winner, and the man who held out the longest was also a winner.

SHEILA: Paul won the game that first time, but it wasn’t exactly a victory to be proud of. He was put off by the whole idea, maybe because it came out of the blue like that. And he just didn’t get excited at all. His partner did everything she could. She would have had better luck with a corpse.

PAUL: It was terribly embarrassing, too, because the girl was colored. There was one colored couple in the group. This was in Louisville, remember, which is not Southern but not exactly Northern either, so a lot of the people down there thought it was really something pretty daring to swing with Negroes. We had done this before. However, I had never had relations yet with the Negro girl in the club, although Sheila had been with her husband, and I was really upset at the thought that she might think it was her color that kept me from responding to her. Perhaps it was worrying about this that reinforced everything, but whatever it was, nothing happened, and instead of being sent home from the party I was declared the winner, which didn’t make much sense.

There were no prizes that time. In fact that was all there was to the contest, and after it ended we got into the main part of the meeting. This was the same from one week to the next — couples were chosen by lot and went off by themselves to make love. A couple could stay together as long as they wanted before returning to the main room for group games if they felt in the mood. The general pattern was for a couple to go off and ball once, then either join another couple in a bedroom for a foursome or drift back to the living room and find some congenial sort of group activity.

As time went by, though, hosts and hostesses would make the contests more elaborate. For a while there were prizes for the winners, and then someone introduced the idea of rewarding the winners sexually. The male winner would receive the simultaneous attention of all the women in the group, for instance, or the female winner would take on every man in turn.

SHEILA: In certain clubs they do this every week, usually just selecting the man and woman by a drawing or something. It can be an extremely thrilling thing to have a whole slew of persons of the opposite sex all making love to you at once. This is considered a game in itself. In books I’ve seen it described at length, and called Center of Attraction, which is a logical enough name for it.

PAUL: Another variation that some genius worked out was fairly clever. Instead of rewarding the two winners, he set things up so that we would punish the two losers. The man who came first and the woman whose partner held out longest were declared the losers, and they had to pay a forfeit. This made the contest itself especially exciting in a kinky way. And the forfeits themselves made it easy to introduce some unusual elements into the meeting without offending anybody.

JWW: How do you mean?

PAUL: By requiring the losers to do things they wouldn’t do otherwise. The club itself was not particularly kinky, as swingers clubs go. There was more or less complete bisexuality for the girls, but no male homosexuality and no bondage or discipline, none of the Sadie Mae games. Nor did anyone go in much for gadgets or other offbeat things. It was felt generally that we wanted to avoid that sort of thing — Sheila and I had gotten involved to excess with kinky things in the past. But at the same time an experienced swinger generally likes to try these things once in a great while, as long as there’s a way to keep them a special treat and not a standard part of the game.

SHEILA: Certain acts are exciting because they’re unusual. But if you do them frequently they lose their unusual quality and they also seem perverse.

PAUL: That’s where the contest helped immeasurably. It provided a natural method of limiting the kinky stuff, and it also gave the person involved a good excuse, if he happened to need one. For instance, a man might be very leery at the thought of voluntarily performing a homosexual act with another man. I think I said that there was no male homosexuality in the group, and while I’m sure some of the fellows had bisexual inclinations, they kept them strictly quiet. Yet if a man lost a contest and the forfeit required him to perform fellatio upon another man, well, we were all sufficiently seasoned swingers so that we knew a single homosexual act wouldn’t make a man’s testicles wither. If a man happened to be geared that way, he had a chance to enjoy himself without looking like a faggot. Even if he didn’t swing that way, as most of us didn’t, you couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to do it and wanting to experience it, if only once. This made it easy.

JWW: Was this the usual forfeit?

PAUL: There was no “usual” forfeit as such, since the whole point was variety. Occasionally the forfeit was a performance which the male and female loser had to put on for the rest of the crowd. Or either or both of them might be used as victims for a bondage act — an act of submission. The actual forfeit could be anything that might be exciting now and then but that we wouldn’t feel comfortable with as a part of the standard repertoire.

JWW: Did anybody leave the club as a result of the forfeits?

PAUL: No.

SHEILA: This almost happened once, though. One time the forfeit was homosexual and one of the men flatly refused.

PAUL: Oh, I forgot about that.

SHEILA: He said he didn’t want to be a party poop or spoilsport, but he wasn’t willing to do anything that would make him feel dirty afterward, and that whether it was sensible of him or not he wouldn’t be comfortable performing a homosexual act. It could have been a really unpleasant situation all around, but the host smoothed things over quickly by suggesting an alternate. Do you remember what it was?

PAUL: Not offhand. What difference does it make?

SHEILA: None, I guess.

PAUL: We sort of dropped the male homosexual stuff from the forfeits after that. No one wanted to create tension...

Incidentally, as time went by we also developed a great many variations on the contest itself. We revamped an old game young boys use in masturbation sessions, with the object being to see which man could ejaculate the furthest. Things like this were strictly one-time contests introduced purely for the sake of variety.

SHEILA: As time went by, the forfeits changed a little. Inevitably the forbidden acts lost a little of their special quality. Then we would try to make the forfeit entertaining in another way, occasionally by introducing an element of humor. We might blindfold the person, for instance, and have him try to identify members of the opposite sex by touch or taste.

PAUL: Do you remember what we heard about the Denver club?

SHEILA: Oh, that’s absolutely disgusting! I’d just as soon you didn’t even mention it.

PAUL: Seriously?

SHEILA: I’m not sure I believe it, anyway.

PAUL: People have done odder things. Why should you find it so hard to believe?

SHEILA: I’m positive the story was embroidered. I don’t believe she didn’t know, and I don’t believe what she was supposed to have said. Do you?

PAUL: Maybe the people who told us tried to improve the story a little. Briefly, John, a group in Denver blindfolded a girl and had her try to guess which of the members was performing cunnilingus on her. According to the story we heard, they were fairly hard-core swingers and the gal was known as a good sport, which in a group like that meant she was sufficiently uninhibited to do it on television. So she entered into the spirit of the affair by squirming around and making it obvious that she enjoyed it no end, and saying that it must be a Democrat because she never had it so good, and guessing it must be a woman because no man was that sensitive, and so on. She kept guessing and kept getting it wrong, and finally they took the blindfold off and her “lover” was somebody’s German shepherd...

We continue to speculate on the pros and cons of club arrangements as they affect the quality of swinging. Both Paul and Sheila feel a club has both advantages and disadvantages, and that after a period of time the latter will inevitably come to outweigh the former. Paul explains that any club of substantial size will invariably have one or more couples as members whom a given club will find either undesirable or personally tedious, and as time goes by it becomes increasingly unpleasant to have relations, both social and sexual, with such people. “There are a lot of people you would have sex with once,” Sheila explains, “that you wouldn’t enjoy seeing a second time. In the club situation you feel this even more strongly, and sooner or later it has to get to you.” Both Paul and Sheila agree that they would not be inclined to join another club.

Later, I reintroduce the subject of generating variety, not at club meetings or in other group situations but in the course of general swinger socializing. How, I ask, do Paul and Sheila vary the style and quality of their sex lives now?

SHEILA: There’s really no special trick to it. It’s easy to go overboard this way, but it honestly isn’t essential. Variety has to be present in one’s life, but this doesn’t mean you have to seek it, or consciously plan for it. If you understand your own needs and capabilities, and if you learn what works and what doesn’t work, and if you just let things come naturally—

PAUL: That’s the main thing. You have to see new people without making a fetish of new contacts. And we’ve found it’s fun to keep a very open mind toward what we consider kinky acts — not as a frequent thing but on a one-time basis. Certain swingers will describe themselves in their ads or letters as being willing to try anything once. “Anything” covers too much ground, certainly — there are plenty of things I wouldn’t dream of trying, ever.

JWW: Such as?

PAUL: Oh, I wouldn’t know where to start. Believe me, there is absolutely no limit to what people will do. We’ve tried bondage and mild discipline once or twice, not because it’s that much of a kick for us but because we can get with it once in a while as a novelty. Well, that’s tame compared with some of the oddballs on the swinging scene. They’re absolute sadomasochists who practice actual torture on one another. I’m not exaggerating. They burn each other with cigarettes, they beat each other unconscious, they lacerate each other—

SHEILA: It seems incredible. No matter how sophisticated you are, you can’t really believe these people exist. But they do.

JWW: I’ve interviewed a few. The whole pattern of their conversation is weird. I’ll admit I have trouble establishing any kind of rapport with them.

PAUL: Of course a large percentage of them must be literally insane.

JWW: That’s probably true.

PAUL: You never know what to believe, but some friends of ours who aren’t given to bandying rumors about have told us that they’ve heard of deaths occurring during sadomasochistic torture. Some maniac gets carried away at a club meeting, and instead of just lashing some girl with his whip he wraps it around her neck and she strangles. Something like that. Of course the group hushes it up and you never hear any more about it. As I said, I don’t have anything approaching firsthand evidence, but I can believe it. I know what some of these nuts are like.

SHEILA: If they just whipped each other, I’d say fine, let them enjoy themselves, and at least it keeps them off the streets. God knows Paul and I are the last people to believe in imposing rules on other people. But some of these lunatics — I have to call them lunatics — some of them get their kicks by torturing people who don’t go for that sort of thing at all.

PAUL: In the early days, we several times met with people who wanted to work some variation of the discipline routine, but who hadn’t mentioned this in their correspondence. Fortunately none of them tried force. We know of one couple, though, who were horribly mistreated. They were swingers, but strictly limited to straight sex, you know, and they met this one couple and had a fine, normal evening and were invited to spend the following weekend with some friends of the other couple for what they thought would be more of the same. Well, it turned out that it was all a careful plot to have these people as torture victims. They went to the house as arranged, and right out of the blue they were overpowered and stripped and beaten and forced to perform various acts. I won’t go into details, I don’t want to, but let’s just say that they endured three hours of pain and humiliation and were then told that they had better not go to the authorities or they would be killed. Besides, how could they go to the police? They couldn’t confess that they were swappers, could they?

JWW: From my own studies, this sort of thing happens more often than the average person would suspect.

SHEILA: It’s really terrifying. And you know, I suppose it could happen to us, couldn’t it? We think it couldn’t because we are veterans at this sort of thing and can read between the lines of a letter, but don’t you suppose everyone thinks it couldn’t happen to him?

PAUL: All sorts of strange people. People who want to have their children join in the fun, which sickens me. People who have the gall to suggest that we have our children join in, which earned one friendly guy a sock in the nose from me. He couldn’t believe I’d hit him just because he’d suggested something like that. Hit him? I wanted to kill the son of a bitch.

SHEILA: That should give you an idea of a few of the things we don’t do, anyway. Generally we try to keep open minds, and to meet with different kinds of people and know them as people as well as sexually. And to meet mainly with individual couples, but to vary things by occasional dates with two or three other couples. And, finally, to let off steam now and then in a genuine all-out orgy.

Later that night I play back the tape. At first I compare the picture which Paul and Sheila convey of their swap club with what I have learned of the functioning of other such groups. I conclude that it is more or less typical. If anything, the group is, as they have said, somewhat better organized than most such clubs.

But before long my mind wanders, and I switch off the tape recorder and find myself thinking about Paul and Sheila and the particular form their marital adjustment has taken. I think of other swingers I have known and the lives they have made for themselves, and I conclude once again that Paul and Sheila are more similar to others I have known well than they are different, that their special quality is more a matter of how well they see themselves than how they live or think or feel.

I think again of the premise on which I tried to hang this particular interview session — i.e., the manner in which one assures variety and freshness in one’s career as a swinger. Earlier I had been somewhat irritated by their failure to grasp this premise, and now it occurs to me that the whole idea is basically absurd. And yet does not the absurdity speak, if not volumes, at least some extended chapters on the confused and confusing role of sex in the modern world? Is there not something especially revealing in the very idea of monotony as a peril in wife-swapping?

And I wonder, too, what sort of effect this process of seemingly interminable interviewing may have on the Gordons themselves. I have done no end of interviewing in this and allied fields, but never before have I spent an extended period of time with one individual or couple. In a sense, they have been forced into a role roughly equivalent to that of a patient in a psychoanalytical relationship. By seeking information for myself and for the reader, I inevitably probe in much the same way as an analyst might.

A day or two later, having had no intervening meetings with the Gordons, either together or separately, I dictate the following remarks to my tape recorder:

“How much time can one spend absorbed in sexual matters before they cease to be at all real? And how much of a role can sex play in human life before it completely loses touch with its original biological purpose? How far can we all go, as individuals and as a race? And what happens to us if and when we go too far?

“This project has affected me, though it will perhaps be some time before I know whether for better or for worse. I find myself wondering more and more frequently whether the profession of sexual researcher is fit work for a grown man. Even as I think that my white rats, my guinea pigs, my Paul and Sheila, ought to have more important things to occupy their minds, so do I think that I ought to be devoting my own time to more world-shaking work than their sexual preoccupations.

“And how my perspective grows distorted! Prolonged exposure to almost any attitude leads one to be increasingly exposed to regard that attitude as reasonable, even ordinary...

“How absorbed we are with ourselves, how obsessed with adjustments and relationships...”