Swinging: The Games Your Neighbours Play. Mark Brendon

in their newspapers, use prostitutes for sexual gratification, or regularly have sex for no better reason than hunger for sensual pleasure and shared warmth in a cold and hostile world—they all do, or dream of doing, the same things as the swing-set. It seemed to me that they should not add hypocrisy to pusillanimity.

      The commonest objection raised by the remainder was that sex is, or rather should be, an exclusive and sacred activity. ‘It’s the highest and deepest form of communication that we’ve got,’ wrote my old university friend, Juliette. ‘With someone you love, it can be glorious. With someone else, it can be squalid and degrading.’

      I put this to Lisa. ‘Yeah, but is this some sort of philosophy or just a profession of psychosis?’ she demanded. ‘Sure, sex is better when you feel stimulated, and for lots of people that means when you feel secure. So doing it with someone you trust not to laugh at your bits, or your whimpering, nor take advantage of your vulnerability, makes it easier to let go and do it properly. So what?

      ‘That’s just like saying, back in the days when people were always poisoning one another or falling on one another in their cups, “The only good meal is one enjoyed in the bosom of your family”. But that’s just a reflection of fear in the world outside, not of the nature of food or eating out.’

      For all that, this is the only objection to swinging to which I have had to defer.

      For myself, I have known both wonderful and deeply disappointing sexual experiences with strangers, kindred spirits and enemies, but maybe others really do enjoy a transcendent experience beyond my ken. I certainly cannot disprove it, but then neither could they prove their assertion—though many act as if it were a given, like those people who have visited just one foreign country and forever afterwards insist that it is the best and that they know ‘abroad’.

      Sex obviously did not evolve as a means to spiritual revelation or lifetime bonding, but it can undoubtedly play a part in both. But then, the same can be said of religion. The insistence that these are the sole purposes of both, however, has given rise to ordinances that they should be performed only in certain ways and with chosen people.

      And these have played a far greater role in the subjugation of genders, classes and individuals, than in that of increasing human happiness.

      The commonest distinction made is that between ‘making love’ and fucking. The former is supposedly desirable and morally praiseworthy (the word ‘love’ sanctifies, though emotions claiming that name have done infinitely more damage than, say, liking), the latter reprehensible.

      In fact, the distinction is simply that between good sex and bad. Good, responsive lovers make love even when they are strangers. We are human, after all—naked, needy, greedy, open and vulnerable. What in the name of God is not to love?

       2 THE YUCKINESS FACTOR

      I SOUGHT MORE TELLING reasons for disapproval.

      The next objection I encountered was the argument from personal distaste which, of course, is not an argument at all.

      ‘It’s just—I don’t know,’ said my neighbour, Tess. ‘It’s yucky. I mean, sex just is yucky really, unless you love the person…’

      This confusion of ethical and aesthetic is common in our Disneyfied age, in which we strive to spare ourselves certain sights whose consequences we desire. And the blonde one is always the victim.

      We want meat, but are outraged at the sight of death, so our animals (rather like our aged relatives) are simply locked away from our view—and that of the sun. They are tortured throughout their lives so that we should not be exposed to the momentary discomfort of witnessing their merciful deaths. Once dead, they are moulded into breadcrumbed gobbets so that our children should not be traumatised by the thought of real animals dying to feed them.

      This same immoral conflation of the ‘yucky’ and the evil has been used to condemn abortion, homosexuality, miscegenation and even the culling of vermin. The middle-class majority finds it distasteful, therefore it is wrong.

      I was reared—as were most of the current swing-set—in an age of sexual caution and obscurantism in which ‘homosexuality’ was criminal and scorned, females must keep their legs clamped together for fear of revealing the very fact of genitalia, and fear of pregnancy and residual notions of propriety and property dominated heterosexual dealings.

      All our first sexual impulses were guided towards phallocentricity. Sex had one defining sine qua non—male ejaculation within just one female orifice. The notion that this orifice and related organs were in fact autonomous, with their own functions and feelings, was heresy. The availability of oral contraception was insufficient to banish the associations of pollution, pregnancy and possession.

      We adolesced into an age of licence, in which sex was recognised as a pleasure, not—or not necessarily—as a sacrament.

      There was a further major shift with the advent of AIDS.

      I had not used a condom until well after my thirty-fifth year. They are now standard prerequisites of all penetrative sex, save within exclusive relationships, at all levels of society. The pollutant, territory-marking aspects of sex have gone, rendering oral sex often more intimate and exclusive than genital or anal.

      Sex has not so much been demoted as democratised. A king may romp with children and still rule in pomp. Bouncy pop pap does not render a Bach chorale any the less sacred or moving. So, sex as a leisure activity need not devalue its own currency.

      This is not to say that—as with any other pleasure—that there is no risk of its becoming a fetish or an obsession, nor that it can or should be enjoyed without regard to those with whom it is shared. Merely that, when all courtesies have been considered, it can be enjoyed rather than denied due to jealousies or artificial and, in this age, apparently meaningless conventions.

      So much is now widely accepted—and, interestingly, more generally accepted it seems—by women who are empowered and independent. But they find themselves denied adequate sexual gratification, adventure or community, and increasingly resort to ‘smart-casual’ (within an inherently transient but orderly relationship, rather than casual or within a formal bond) sexual adventure.

      Personal tastes, of course, vary widely. Some find their own bodies and those of others repugnant and consider their functions—sex no less than defecation—somehow squalid and shameful.

      There may be a thousand sad reasons for such deviant idealism, but there is no reason for considering it a valid criticism. Again it tells us more of the afflicted person than of the activities despised. Sex, defecation and death exist. An aesthetic that finds them ugly, is therefore founded upon false premisses. It is fantastic. It is alienated. It is neurotic. It is, in religious terms, blasphemous.

      Still less arguable are the requirements of individual sexuality. Many—the porn-watchers amongst them—love to be surrounded by visual and auditory stimuli, and enjoy mild exhibitionism and voyeurism as fillips to their desire. Others prefer the security of the familiar and of privacy.

      Such particularity is no more valid grounds for disapproval than a preference for meat over fish, or for one gender over another. Privacy, after all, is a very new commodity in human society—a modern (fetishistic because peripheral to the sexual act itself) requirement.

      When Lisa and I questioned Tess, she conceded that her assessments of ‘yuckiness’ and desirability varied from circumstance to circumstance, day to day, and even hour to hour. ‘I mean, I generally think eating pussy is yucky, but there’ve been moments…But that’s just desire blinding me, isn’t it?’

      She was gracious enough to admit that, for all she knew, her vision might be obscured by fear and considerations of propriety and cleared by sexual desire. Hardly the basis, then, for a constraint that could possibly be classified as ‘ethical’.