Mark Brendon - Swinging - The Games Your Neighbours Play

Although they are to be counted only in their thousands, ferretkeepers and Civil War enthusiasts, steam-train afficianados and cryptographers seeking to unravel the Beale code all have their own publications. For many reasons, however, there are few—if any—books by a practising swinger offering bona fide, sympathetic information and an insight into this massive social phenomenon.

The problem is that swingers are, by nature and long habit, discreet.

They may be unashamed—even proud—of their activities and of their fellows. They may know that the law protects them from overt discrimination. They, like ‘homosexual’ men and women, are adults engaged in an entirely consensual leisure activity which is—or, at least, should be—nobody’s business but their own.

So, of course, were foxhunters and bareheaded motorcyclists, but that didn’t prevent government and illiberal moralists from pretending that it was the welfare of the fox or the rider that warranted their intervention (though they have shown no such concern for battery hens).

Swingers have no prey. Even the commonplace transaction with a prostitute, the making of pornography, the habitual wine-bar or clubbing seduction, may be exploitative of one who, by reason of age, idiocy, poverty, drug-addiction, emotional need or force majeure , is in fact unwilling or reluctant. Swingers, however, play exclusively with other adults who have chosen this lifestyle. They obtain explicit consent before any sexual contact.

Yet for all this, most swingers are unwilling to subject themselves or their families to the censorious and lubricious judgements of the media who, at one level, cringe like adolescents from acknowledgement of genitals (unless they are swathed in white slipper satin for religious ceremony or shaven and sanctified by ‘the miracle of birth’), and at the other, gawp at them with yearning but profess outrage at their functions.

Sex may be the throbbing heart of our marketing and media culture, invariably—and oh, how wrongly—presented as desirable. We may regularly expose poor, bare, forked man—and woman—but, when we come to acknowledging that we actually have sexual functions and emissions, we might as well still be dressed as china bells.

Over the past three years, while researching for this book, I have been a swinger. In the course of this period, I have visited many private parties and most of Britain’s principal swingers’ clubs, as well as hotels, beaches and resorts throughout Britain and beyond where adults openly engage in sexual play.

I have had sex (in Clintonian and non-Clintonian senses) or—as swingers have it—I have ‘played’ with several hundreds of female strangers and acquaintances with whom I have little or no other connection. Sometimes they have been alone, sometimes in pairs. Sometimes there have been as many as seven or eight in one afternoon or evening. Quite often, I have known their forenames before I did so.

I have generally done so in the presence of my girlfriend and these women’s husbands or boyfriends. And at the orgies that are our principal diversions, we have been amidst forty, fifty or sixty or more couples, most of them naked or sparsely clothed, and similarly engaged.

Tabloid journalists pruriently ‘investigating’ the swing-scene always ‘make their excuses and leave’. I have stayed. I make no excuses for it. It has been instructive, companionable and often great fun.

I could pretend to dispassion or disdain. I could now clamber back onto the raft of respectability and express disapproval of the swinging lifestyle. This would be both dishonest and unconvincing.

Yes, sometimes the experience has been banal, squalid and depressing, but the same could be said of regular eating out or concert-going. This has been a function of peculiar people or circumstances, not of the activity itself.

In general, I have found swingers amiable. They are sensualists and libertarians, unembarrassed and intent on sharing pleasures with childlike openness. Given its ubiquity and the diversity of its practitioners, however, swinging inevitably has its share of crass berks and power-hungry bitches who believe that tantra is a plural.

But only in societies where responsibility has been usurped by law can such people thrive. Subcultures, if not illegal, are without the law. Swinging is therefore dependent on reciprocity and is self-policing. In my experience, such people are soon ostracised and find themselves on the grimy fringes of the movement. Should you find yourself amongst them, simply leave. Their faults are not those of the milieu which, in general, I have found to be good-natured and enormous fun.

I WAS 47 YEARS OLD when I set out on this journey. I had been married for seven miserable years and divorced for twelve, ten of which I had spent in a more or less monogamous relationship. Now, on leaving rehab for alcohol dependence, I was alone.

‘Sex is just another quick fix…’ my counsellor told me on my last morning at the clinic.

Emma was charming, sympathetic, proficient, almost prim. I had to remind myself that before she became sober, she had lived the usual junky life of blurry jags, blags and shags on the streets. Now she crossed stockinged legs beneath her desk and wiggled the lavalliere at her throat.

‘…just another quick fix, another way of refusing to look at yourself and who you really are. As you know, it can be an addiction too.’

I shook my head. It was during my three-month stay in the clinic that my long-term girlfriend at last decided—really quite reasonably—that she had had enough. I was confronting a solitary existence out there.

‘Cocteau used to complain that he was asked to travel on a filthy, cramped train to nowhere,’ I told Emma, ‘but when he took opium, he was enabled to jump off and sit on the banks amidst the flowers, yet here were all these people urging him to get back on the train. I understand why it is not a good idea to take opium or alcohol if you are an addict, but I don’t understand why it is invariably bad to get off, stretch your legs and breathe the fresh air.’

‘Sex can be just as dangerous as alcohol or opium,’ she said.

‘I’m sure it can, Em, but so can food or oxygen in excess. Doesn’t alter the fact that they are also essentials. And sex is—or it can be—a very good thing. It’s a loving thing, an adventure, a great game when played between equals and friends, a madness in controlled circumstances. It lets you escape from the paltry, transitory concerns and the isolation of every day. I think I can now live without alcohol, but I really don’t think that I can live without sex. You’ve just levelled all the mountains in my landscape. Now you seem to be telling me that I should cut down the trees as well. Just a featureless desert…’

‘No, no, no,’ she soothed. ‘We’re not saying that you must avoid sex. Just relationships—and just for the time being.’

Outside on the gravel drive my fellow-patients sloped out of the front door and slumped onto benches or sprawled on the sun-dappled lawns to smoke and shake and chat.

‘Look, I know the rules,’ I said, ‘but I don’t understand them. No “relationships” for at least twelve months, and then only with a potplant. Then an undemanding pet like a hamster, then a dog, and finally another human being…And you say we don’t have to avoid sex? That pot-plant had better be a cactus.’

Emma intoned it like a catechism response. ‘Sex for its own sake is just using another person to escape from reality…’

‘Yes? And? Flying is just an escape from the equally inexorable forces of gravity. It can take you somewhere you want to go, or you can just go for a whirl, land where you took off, and it gives you a thrill and a beautiful view of the world. And if it’s mutual?’