J Wells - The Wife-Swap Report

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...