Swinging: The Games Your Neighbours Play. Mark Brendon

it was the shame, not the tasting, that was the original sin. We aim to take our sexuality back into Eden, say “Fuck you” to those who don’t like it, and frolic and play proudly just like when we were children.

      ‘And everywhere else, it’s sort of adult concerns that decide who you fuck, like money, social background and how they’re dressed and…This is sex as a game, not a lasting social commitment. So you play with people of all backgrounds, people you might have nothing in common with in other circumstances, but here you’re united by just humanity, sensuality and acceptance of both in others. You don’t enquire into their race, wealth or social rank, just, “Is he or she fanciable and will he or she give a lot and have a laugh?”’

      Caroline, 42, an estate agent acquaintance of Lisa’s, agreed. ‘God, the number of men and women I’ve seen in my life and I’ve thought, “Ooh, I’d do them if only it weren’t for their table-manners, or way of talking, or the idea of finding them there in the morning!”

      ‘But in the Lifestyle, all that goes out of the window. You can play with them because you’re both raunchy and they are pretty and have nice smiles, and it can be beautiful and warm and affectionate and—“Thanks, love, that was great and bye, bye”. No need to worry about anything else.

      ‘You go to a party. The welcome’s always warm. The jokes are uninhibited. Everyone’s kind and affectionate. And when the game is over, swingers go back to their normal, everyday identities and duties.’

      Much is made today of avoidance of commitment. ‘He (or, less commonly, she) is afraid of commitment’ is generally used as an insult. It is seldom considered that avoidance of commitment might actually be desirable, intelligent and considerate, and that more grief is caused by commitments irresponsibly made—or assumed to be made—on the grounds of sexual attraction, than was ever caused by sex for its own sake.

      ‘Swingers can be attracted, have sex with someone and move on,’ said Lisa, ‘or, after sex, become their close friends, where everywhere else, relationships seem to be ordained simply by the fact of sex, whether it be good, bad or indifferent, and all the expectations and obligations, affections or guilty animosities arising from that fact.’

      Swingers almost invariably refer to their hobby as ‘playing’. It is a word well chosen. War is dangerous and has many casualties. We therefore play games on sports fields in order to indulge the impulses which give rise to—and which spring from—war, but we play them only in public and subject to strict rules.

      Swinging (and sex too has many casualties) seems to be playing in the same sense. Just as rugby players hate one another only during the game and then afterwards retire to the bar for a drink, just as children desire the deaths of their enemies as they fire their fingers at them, then go home to share jellies and to pass-the-parcel, so—as Stevie Nicks relates—‘Players only love you when they’re playing.’

      Afterwards, although the shared experience creates a bond, swingers return to their other lives and responsibilities.

      ‘The other frustrated fantasists indulging their whims are just playing unregulated war-games with real weapons,’ said Caroline, ‘and real weapons tend to have lives of their own and to fulfil their natures despite all the best intentions of those brandishing them.’

      All in all—and yes, I acknowledge that I wanted to think thus, but this made it harder, not easier to believe—I really could not discern a single reason why I should not give swinging a whirl.

      Lisa had been growing increasingly frustrated with me as I questioned all and sundry as to their views.

      Now I yielded. ‘OK,’ I announced. ‘I want this. Let’s do it.’

PART III

       1 INVITATION TO AN ORGY

      IF THIS WERE A PORNOGRAPHIC MEMOIR, I could devote the whole of it to encounters and orgies on the British swing-scene, which would doubtless be of passing interest to a certain sort of reader in the heat of sexual desire or frustration, but would repel the sated and, at length, bore even the wanker.

      This is not, as some will claim, because every encounter is the same and that orgies and participants meld into an amorphous blur. One could as well argue that every steeplechase, say, is trivial and forgettable, or every fine meal indistinguishable from another. It is simply untrue. A word, a name, a scent is sufficient to conjure each individual race or meal in all its brilliant intensity. And the principal joy of swinging sex is precisely that each new partner is wonderfully, excitingly different.

      For all that, a book which described steeplechase after steeplechase, dinner after dinner, must soon become monotonous. This is not a fault of the things described, but of our vocabulary and the terms of reference at our disposal with which to describe pleasure or, for that matter, pain.

      Caressing, kissing, licking, sucking, fucking—this is the basic, tawdry syntax of sex, just as boiling, frying, grilling and roasting are the terms with which we describe the core functions of the cook.

      They are just technical terms which tell us nothing of the infinite subtleties ordained on the one hand by the individual people, moods and circumstances, on the other by the peculiar nature of the ingredients and the facilities on offer.

      Cooking admits of minor distinctions—simmering, sauteeing and the like—but recipes do not begin to describe the subtleties and occasional glories of great food, lovingly prepared in the right context. Our attempts to do just that therefore tend to use metaphor and simile which alienate and obscure rather than enlighten.

      So I have a choice. I could attempt to describe in factual, actuarial terms the hundred or so orgies that I have attended in the past three years, and the couples whom I have met at my home—or at theirs—with a view to sexual adventure, and so bore rather than cajole the pants off the reader. Or I could wax as lyrical as each such event deserves, which might be of momentary interest to the wanker, but would fail to convey either information or a sense of the feelings involved to anyone save myself.

      Let’s go, then—for now at least—to just one swingers’ party.

      Let’s go—for the sake of honesty and in order to obviate any blase-ness which I may unwittingly have acquired—to my first such party, where I feigned assurance but gazed about me with all the incredulous delight of, say, Tom of the Water Babies transported to Disneyland, or Cinderella at last arriving at the palace.

       2 A CINDERELLA WITH A FUCK-CARD

      I HAD—IN THE COURSE of a normal vanilla life—enjoyed just eight threesomes. In three of these, I had been one of two men with a girl. In the other five, I had been with two women. Oh, and there was a strange evening at my university where three female students asked their boyfriends—of whom I was one—to assist at a competition to establish which of them could come fastest. This led to inevitable protests that we males might have influenced the result, and so to exchanges of partners for non-penetrative sex.

      Only one of those threesomes had been with people who thought of themselves as swingers.

      I had also attended two wholesale orgies—one in Paris, when a student, and one more recently in Wimbledon, as the guest of an old friend. I was thirty-five, and Georgette had taken me along to observe. We separated at the door and went our own ways. I had sex with five women that night and fell passionately in love with each of them in turn. Three of them subsequently became friends and lovers.

      Soon afterwards, however, I was in a long-term relationship, and—for all the interest that the experience had awoken in me—my swinging career was cut short.

      Now, however, I was 47, divorced, and resuming where I had