J Wells - The Wife-Swap Report

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

PAUL: When you read about orgies or hear the word used in conversation, there’s really no telling what people really have in mind. To some people, an orgy is any social evening in which the participants have more than three or four drinks. I suppose the average civilian would figure that any swinging evening was an orgy, or that any time two couples had sexual relations in the same room, that that sort of thing would come under the heading of orgy. Swingers have different definitions, but even then the word has a variety of meanings.

In my way of thinking, an orgy is a party with at least a dozen couples and no real ground rules at all, with everyone doing whatever seems like a good idea at the moment. Ideally the people don’t all know each other very well, and ideally everyone has the mental attitude that this particular occasion is going to be something special, something out of the beaten path. At a real orgy, a swinger will do things that he might not do in the course of an ordinary party.

SHEILA: Of course, there are some people who only swing at orgies. They never swap or anything else, but a couple of times a year they go off to an orgy and let everything go.

PAUL: I can’t see that, myself.

SHEILA: Well, that’s because we regard swinging as a way of life, as a part of our way of life. Others use it as an escape valve. You were telling me about someone at the office who drinks that way, never takes a drink all year and then goes on a binge?

PAUL: He does it a couple of times a year. If he takes one drink he can’t stop, he’s that kind of alcoholic, so he stays dry for months on end until I guess things get to be too much for him, I don’t know, and then he takes a train up to Boston and gets a hotel room there and stays drunk for anywhere from three days to a week. He stays completely smashed and then one morning he wakes up and according to him he knows instantly that it’s over, that he’s had it, and he comes back again. I see what you mean, that some people go on sex binges the same way. I prefer our approach to life, myself.

JWW: Do you make much use of orgies?

SHEILA: Oh, just once in a while, and I couldn’t really say how often because it’s not as if we operated on a schedule. A few times a year, maybe. It just happens, something comes up, somebody tells us there’s a party and we do or don’t decide to go.

PAUL: The real place for orgies is the West Coast, especially in the Los Angeles area. California has always been more free-wheeling generally in swinging matters, as I guess you know. For example, a single guy has a lot less trouble getting in on the action out there. In the swinger publications, the correspondence-club magazines, there are always a large proportion of ads from California that will come out and say “Three is not a crowd” or “Single men welcome,” whereas other advertisers will more than likely go out of their way to discourage single men.

As far as orgies are concerned, from what I understand it’s hard to live out there without getting invited to one every weekend.

SHEILA: I can’t believe it’s that free.

PAUL: Close to it, I think. I know I’ve seen ads for orgies, and I don’t mean in swinger publications, either. Right in the regular newspapers, not to mention the underground paper, I think it’s the Free Press. It couldn’t be any freer. They’re careful about the wording of the ads, but you barely have to be a swinger to get the message.

SHEILA: I know that some orgies on the Coast are sponsored by something called the Sexual Freedom League. No one seems to know if there’s really one organization with that name or if different people make a habit of borrowing the name. Also, I’m not sure that what they do is exactly what we would call an orgy.

PAUL: Sometimes.

SHEILA: But not always. Some friends of ours went once and said the meeting was a sort of a mixer for swingers. It was a nude party, which is what they generally do in California, unless I’ve been misinformed. You take your clothes off when you arrive and the party starts with everyone sitting around naked talking about politics and the movies and things, and then people pair off. The party we heard about had more men than women at it and relatively few married couples. I gather that it was a very young crowd. Our friends said they couldn’t get in the mood, it wasn’t their kind of party, and they left.

PAUL: When you get those young kids, and especially out in California, I suppose everybody gets high on marijuana or methedrine or LSD, and maybe it would be hard to relate to someone who was high that way if you weren’t high yourself.

SHEILA: I know that we’ve gone to nude parties right here in New Jersey, and once in New York City.

PAUL: They don’t work out so well.

SHEILA: Not for us, at least. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, although God knows I’ve certainly never thought of myself that way. But I don’t much care for the idea of being stark naked when I’m meeting someone for the first time. The mood isn’t sexual and nudity in itself isn’t exciting, not really, but at the same time I have to admit that it is embarrassing. There are some devout nudists in the swingers movement—

PAUL: They are some of the craziest people in the world.

SHEILA: Some of them are very nice people, but they’re out of their heads. All this poetic swill about the body being beautiful and natural and clean. They manage to make a religion out of the whole thing. And they’re also a bunch of nutty sun-worshipers, burning themselves so black all over that I imagine most of them die of skin cancer sooner or later. But to get back to the nude parties, what people apparently don’t realize is that the average person looks better with clothes on.

PAUL: Most people, let’s face it, are not beautiful. Swingers are head and shoulders ahead of the rest of the world in this regard. Not because they necessarily had a head start in the looks department, but because they take better care of themselves. Well, it stands to reason. The average person never gets seen naked except by whoever they’re married to, and in the average marriage they don’t care what their partner thinks, so there’s no incentive to stay in good physical shape. Swingers are very intent on being attractive, not only dressed but nude as well. On the other hand, civilians are apt to be better dressed. Sheila and I buy decent clothes, all things considered, but we can’t begin to approach the wardrobes of a great many of our nonswinging acquaintances. Because swingers may be just as anxious to make a good impression socially, but they know that they’ll be judged more on their appearance nude than how they look with their clothes on.

Even so, even taking this into consideration, most of us aren’t that sensational nude. People feel a lot better with their clothes off, but if the party’s at the talk stage, I don’t see any advantage in nudity.

SHEILA: The rationale is that it not only breaks the ice, it just about heats the water. Admittedly, once you’re over the initial shock value, it does set the stage for sex. And people who like nude parties say that it avoids getting clothes dirty by tearing them off in a rush and just throwing them aside. I can understand this. I know when we first started going on swinging dates I had trouble finding my panties at the end of an evening. They just sort of got lost in the shuffle.

PAUL: Now she knows enough not to put them on in the first place.

SHEILA: I think, all in all, that you have a much better chance to develop a sense of anticipation if people are clothed at the beginning of a party. In any activity, anticipation is a sizable portion of the pleasure.