Swinging: The Games Your Neighbours Play. Mark Brendon

HOME COOKING?

      AT DINNER IN THEIR KITCHEN a couple of days later, Fiona—the ageless, very beautiful, Sloaney wife of a doctor friend—raised the argument that swinging somehow ‘devalues’ sex or the human body.

      Her husband Johnny (tactfully) and I (less so) confessed that we found this one incomprehensible.

      Grant that we all have sexual urges and that these are not of their nature specific. In what sense then can it be claimed that routine fulfilment of these urges within marriage or long-term relationships places a higher value on sex than what is, after all, a carefully prepared, long-anticipated, mutually exciting celebration of physical pleasures?

      Johnny chose much the same metaphor as Lisa. As well argue, he said, that a celebratory dinner at a fine restaurant with food prepared by strangers ‘devalues’ that prepared at home by spouses.

      Unsurprisingly for a doctor, Johnny placed little added value on the human body’s functions. ‘Look, Fi, I’m not denying there’s something lovely and consoling—sacramental, if you like—about good old cottage-pie on Monday and chicken fricassée on Tuesday, even if the cottage-pie is watery and lumpy and the chicken bland—not that yours ever is, of course, darling. But you really can’t accuse Gordon Ramsay of destroying people’s pleasure in home cooking by giving them the occasional joys of exciting smells, textures and flavours in a luxurious and theatrical environment.

      ‘So yep, OK. I actually am basically a cottage-pie man. I like all that familiarity and prolonged proximity. It’s sort of the grout securing the tesserae of a relationship…’

      ‘But it’s not to denigrate the importance of grout,’ I said, ‘to acknowledge that it can often be just a little dull.’

      ‘Thank you, Mark,’ said Fi. The corner of her lips twitched.

      ‘No, come on! I’m sure you make brilliant steak and kidney and spag bol, and comfort-food and comfort-sex are both great things, but they are emotionally distinct from fine food and fantastic sex, both of which are generally enjoyed in public places amongst kindred spirits…’

      ‘Though they’re too rich for everyday consumption,’ put in Johnny, ‘and probably simply for most metabolisms including mine. Just not Mark’s, though…’

      And in truth, I have known many chefs and food critics who are privileged daily to eat the finest and rarest ingredients, but I have yet to encounter one who has lost the capacity to enjoy—or to appreciate the significance of—a bowl of champ, or a home-cooked hotpot.

      So, too, I have never met a swinger who no longer enjoys sex with his or her partner because of their shared adventures with others. On the contrary, visits to restaurants and forays into swinging both seem to stimulate appetite and inventiveness at home.

      Cheap fast food guzzled on the hoof simply to assuage hunger is, like casual sex, altogether another matter—just sad, abusive, unhealthy and unworthy.

       4 THE NASTIEST OBJECTION OF ALL…

      AND SO TO THE NASTIEST of all objections to swinging—the last refuge of the fascist who seeks to express disapproval whilst retaining putative liberal kudos. Like all truly vile arguments for constraints of freedom, this too takes an aesthetic form. These are the aesthetics of arrogance and intolerance.

      I consulted the Internet and visited the library for written accounts of swinging. Again and again, journalists who ‘exposed’ the scene—as though it were a secret freemasonry, rather than a subculture open to anyone with a few pounds in his pocket—expressed distaste for the bodies or the age of those whom they had observed at play.

      Suppose that a commentator were to write of a gay couple that, whilst their desires were acceptable and their affection charming, their sexual activities were disgusting because they were not in the first flush of youth and their bodies were sagging and wrinkled.

      Any editor worthy of the name would dismiss such a hack out of hand. Even in reviewing a public show, where—perhaps—it were more justifiable in that the audience pays for the pleasure of watching, any halfway decent commentator would surely hesitate to impute that a performer should desist on the grounds of cellulite or age.

      Yet journalists routinely deride swingers for being ordinary people with ordinary bodies, rather than glamour models and porn-stars.

      Astonishingly, it is the publications that drool most admiringly over the sexual antics of rock and celluloid divinities that sneer most repulsively at mere mortals for presuming to enjoy similar pleasures.

      In what other context would a supposedly impartial commentator be permitted to write of ‘lumpy, misshapen bodies going at it’ or ‘men with jiggle bellies and flaccid cocks getting to work on a pair of lady galumphers with hanging arses and stretch marks’?

      If this was about a middle-aged wedding, a sporting event or an amateur dramatics production, this would correctly be perceived as grossly offensive bad journalism, revealing far more of the writer than of his purported subject. Because it is about a party at Colette’s in New Orleans (a swingers’ club, where I have enjoyed several delightful evenings) such offensive drivel is published without question or cavil.

      Is there the least moral distinction between such irrelevant imposition of arbitrary and arrogant aesthetics and, for instance, racism or prejudice against the disabled? If so, I certainly cannot see it. Or is sexual pleasure, in this commentator’s world, restricted to those with fame, money and surgically enhanced physiques?

      Some swingers, I was to discover, are beautiful by any conventional standards. Some at whom we might not have spared more than a passing glance when upright and clothed prove beautiful by reason of their vulnerability, their sassy confidence, their passion and the sparkle in their eyes when naked and ecstatic. Some are decidedly physically unlovely—by my standards.

      But my standards have nothing to do with it.

      Yes, occasionally I have shuddered at the mountains of juddering, goose-pimpled flesh or at the shrivelled husks of bodies at certain parties, but at the same time I confess to admiration for, and sympathy with, those who nonetheless have the pride to play in defiance of a world still more judgemental than that which condemns the rest of the subculture.

       5 SEX = IMMORALITY

      AGAIN AND AGAIN, I was to discover that it was not the circumstances or the consequences of sex but simply sex itself (or rather sexual pleasure; dutiful, wearisome sex appeared immune from censure) that was associated with immorality.

      This is no doubt the legacy at once of the notion that sex invariably means penetration and ejaculation, and so conception, and of the infantile conflation of inaccessibility or prohibition and naughtiness.

      The former was irrelevant. It seemed to me that the true moralist (I speak here not of the sorry fantasist who would construct morality for humans upon the premiss that we might or should be insubstantial spirit, but rather of him who would work human clay to its finest forms) should be concerned with the means whereby sex might best be enjoyed and celebrated without doing harm—not with its denial.

      As for the latter, whilst all play is of its nature ‘naughty’—irresponsible, daring, frivolous, ‘ludicrous’—I was no more willing to consider the greatest of all sensual pleasures and of inspirations to poetry and art a smutty, degenerate pastime, because of childish misunderstanding and fear, than I was about to devote half the Christmas budget to rebuilding the chimney for Santa.

      Lisa, who parked her wagon in a field 500 yards away on her visits, sometimes watched daytime television. One day, we saw a singularly ugly woman there. She was, of course, relating the tales of her misfortunes. She said that she had once made a living as a ‘clip artist’—one who posed as a prostitute,