J Wells - The Wife-Swap Report

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?