Swinging: The Games Your Neighbours Play. Mark Brendon

I wasn’t going to do them,’ she said smugly. ‘I never lost my morals. I got my self-respect.’

      This preposterous assertion passed unchallenged. Her listeners nodded. There was even a patter of applause.

      Here was a woman avowing that she had been an exploitative cheat and thief, occasioning untold distress to those who had entered into a contract with her in good faith. Yet she regarded herself as morally acceptable (and, by implication, honest prostitutes who rendered service in exchange for a fee as ‘immoral’) and retained ‘self-respect’ because her sorry genitals had remained inviolate.

      That is how far we have sunk into the association of ‘morality’ with a peculiar, proscriptive notion of sexual probity.

      If Mother Theresa had had a penchant for occasional adventures involving bondage or multiple partners, she would, de facto, have been irredeemably ‘immoral’. If a liar and cheat who has contributed nothing to the total of human happiness professes herself sexually useless, she is thereby redeemed.

      Many newspapers have so far profited from this absurd conflation that they regularly ‘expose’ people’s harmless consensual sexual practices, so causing irreparable hurt to their families and friends, whilst purporting to perform a ‘moral’ function. Sex is ‘immoral’, so victimisation and intrusion assume the guise of morality.

      Worse still, on the dubious principle that he who renounces pleasure is de facto morally superior to others (whence the respect afforded to vegetarians and ascetic but useless saints), any man—and most certainly any woman—who acknowledges enjoyment of sex without conventional sanction thereby loses credibility.

      So far as I can now discern from three years’ experience, there is little that can be branded ‘immoral’ in contemporary swinging.

      ‘Amoral’ is quite another matter, but the word presupposes that all sex should, of its nature and regardless of context, be a moral matter.

      Where there are resultant attachments and obligations involved, so, of course, it is. Where, however, we are talking about strangers pursuing mutual pleasure and explicitly committed to remaining unattached—at least to one another—to contraception, to courtesy and to safe sex, this is not so obvious.

      Remove from sex the grave consequences which made it a lifechanging, life-creating, life-destroying act. Separate it from the emotions and obligations inevitably surrounding such an act. Can we then enjoy it for itself as a life-asserting, liberating, ecstatic, communicative and companionable experience?

      A glance at many of the world’s societies, at our primate cousins and at our own people in youth, shows that many—if not all of us—can and do. The concept of sex as ‘sacred’ and exclusive is neither essential nor instinctive, but merely the product of social constructs and consequent economic necessities.

      Many of those constructs still remain in law and in tabloid morality, and, of course, in much of our literature and our customs. Over the past fifty years, however, with contraception reliable and women financially empowered, the circus wagons appear to have broken down and the more spirited animals have broken out of their cages and run on, often confused and scared (sometimes even savage) ahead.

      Again this is not to question the potential for sex to express a very particular love and commitment, nor to deny the value of such commitments. Both are fundamental tenets of swingers’ ethics. We are all surely aware, however, that this is not sex’s sole function.

      Unlike much of the routine sex of conventional marriage and relationships founded upon convenience or personal advantage unrelated to sexual desire (curious, that the people who most fervently sing of the searing flame of romantic love as the sole justification for sex are also the principal champions of dutiful contentment amidst its clinker), swinging sex is always desired by both or all parties.

      Emancipated woman has broken free of lifelong hire-purchase whoredom. Her transition to sensuous wantonness by choice—to anything by choice—is surely desirable.

      Unlike the ‘love’ affairs that break up politicians’ families, yet mysteriously win the sympathy of otherwise censorious tabloids because ‘love’ is posited, swingers’ long-term relationships tend to be stable and their adventures—if gregarious—courteous and discreet. Swingers’ children, business-partners and ‘straight’ friends generally remain unaware of their hobby.

      Unlike the febrile fumblings and jerkings of teenage clubbers, swinging has strictly enforced protocols ensuring mutual respect and sexual hygiene.

      Unlike the commonplace and grotesque parade/charades of winebars and drinks parties, there is no ambivalence or deception in swingers’ seduction, little chance of one partner expecting romance or commitment whilst the other is driven only by sexual urges. The ambiguities and the power-struggles that characterise one-on-one sexual relationships are renounced by swingers, to whom explicitness and mutuality are prerequisites.

      It was easy enough for me, as a liberally educated countryman, to accept sex as a gift of the gods and not, of its nature, ugly or immoral. I was surprised, however, to find not a single utilitarian objection to swinging vis à vis its more conventional vanilla alternatives.

       6 THE VANILLA ONE-NIGHT STAND

      I CONSIDERED THOSE ALTERNATIVES. Aside from marriage or long-term commitment—which was not only prohibited for me, but must be at best self-deceptive and hurtful—there was only the standard, squalid, exploitative (all right, often mutually exploitative, but little the better for that) one-night stand.

      I had many experiences of these. They tended to be unsatisfactory. Their emotional duration, for at least one participant, seldom endured for just one night.

      Annabel is a friend of Lisa’s—a thirty-three-year-old mother-of-two and an occasional swinger. She gave me the following appraisal of commonplace ‘vanilla’ one-night stands:

      ‘Like most modern girls, I’ve had them. And, like most of my friends, I’ve found them OK but, yeah, sort of sad.

      ‘I mean, first, the sex is usually moderate. You have to be pretty good to suss one another out—what you like, what is allowed, what your fantasies are—first time, and usually after an evening of tension and posturing and drinking too much.

      ‘So it’s generally an urgent, clumsy sort of reconnaissance in which you’re both out to get what you can, and both of you are left feeling unfulfilled, impersonal and dissatisfied. Neither has given a good account of him- or herself. It’s all to do with need, nothing to do with celebration.

      ‘And the one-night stand uses the same language as love—all those secretive smiles and little trying-it-out caresses, the gifts and intimate revelations, the expressions of hopes and sadnesses and fears. When all that is over, perhaps you can both admit that you’re actually looking for an otherwise meaningless shag, but by then the emotional imbalance is guaranteed.

      ‘And it’s intimate. I don’t mean the sex. I mean the tooth brushing and teddy bears and your side of the bed, water or cigarettes on the bedside table, telephones and alarm-clocks, clothes folded neatly or just flung down in blobs on the floor. A bedroom is a private place. Bedtime has its private rituals.

      ‘When I’m in another person’s room, I must take in his or her memories and taste in books, pictures, furnishings and a thousand other things. When he or she is in mine, it’s the same thing. It’s my family photographs and the CDs I’m a bit embarrassed about, and my make-up and knickers scattered around the room. It’s an invasion.

      ‘Hotels are worse, if anything. Luggage is as intimate as it gets, and the morning after, there’s the clean impersonality of the room, the condoms like twisted slugs on the carpet, the scattered towels and clothes. They just underline the futility of all that “darling” stuff and all that snogging and panting.

      ‘And really one-night stands are very masculine things. By the