It’s becoming socially more easy to arrange, and personal taste apart we see no earthly reason why pairs of friends shouldn’t make love together as plenty now do.
Whether they also swap partners is a matter of preference. They would need either to be very good friends or total strangers, and we suspect it might go less well in practice than in fantasy-there is high impotence rate in initial tries of this kind, since our inhibitions are often more alive than we realize. Some experienced couples enthuse about exchanges.
Others regret them as disruptive or don’t try them because they don’t want to jeopardize the extraordinary mutuality which grows with real and total sex communication. This wouldn’t affect the mere non-swap type of proximity. Since friends already swap hints on sex it seems natural to demonstrate, and one can learn a lot by watching, apart from the turn-on from other people’s excitement.
The famous one-way mirror scene is for real no playing voyeurs or for birdwatchers who don’t want to put their subject off. In fact it takes very little intercourse to make most people oblivious of their surroundings, though some might come down with a bump afterwards. Most men could take the social setting excited by the idea, others turned violently off.
Orgies, by contrast, need a hell of a lot of ‘Martini-Lubrication’, which is a point in itself. One can’t shed two millenia of preachments with one’s underclothes. They tend to be ruined by liberal intellectuals who invariably end up talking rather than doing – and fall to the ground still talking.
Hence we can well believe that the best orgiasts are the prosperous upper middle class, minor jet setters, and showbiz. It would be interesting to see how they manage, but we have a biased suspicion that after a few goes for the hell of it they be as dull, or as conscientiously jolly, as the non-sex parties given by the same types; also that we get better fun at home, unless they are all experts, which we doubt. If there were a top-grade sex society, it would still either not get over the lack of instinctive feedback between strangers as against real lovers, or end up as a closed circle.
Novelty itself does excite-the key-club, draw-lots game is an occasional in most countries and a religious ritual in India; we suggest this is usually, though not quite always, a secular male enthusiasm. We can’t see any prohibitive objection between real friends, if the women, in particular, are adult, well-adjusted and storkproof, and the men not simply trying to prove something. It would be a better bid to organize this only if the women want to draw lots for a man.
Summing up, this isn’t in our view a high-grade sex game but connected chiefly with self-reassurance. (All too often the active personnel are those who seem to be unsuccessful in intimate relationships.)
That is a worthy aim, but not the point of high-grade sex. There is no reason why sex should not be social if you wish-whether it’s also promiscuous is a matter of taste, both partners having equal votes on this, since occasional no-holds-barred orgies are an important anthropological resource for man, there may be a case for them.
Usually the woman partner gets shanghaied. There could also be complications and anxieties, but there always can be complications, even at bridge parties. And we don’t deny that there are a lot of fabulous party games for such occasions that one could devise. Oddly enough, regular swingers seem to get bored with these after a few tries and go back to at least a temporary couple-relationship. Remember, too, some of your best friends have venereal disease, and that the Pill makes it easier to catch it.
Some groups have been brought to a standstill, not by venereal disease, but by an increase in minor non-venereal infections. Try switching to an acid-gel or phenymercuric acetate contraceptive, or using one of these as well, and wash with soap between contacts.
Adjusted people who try bisexual activities in a two-couple setting don’t, Errors and Omissions Excepted, run any risk of getting stuck like that, though the bisexual element is an important turn-on in all swapping. We all have a counter-sexual component. Expressed like this, without any anxiety, it’s if anything helpful. If you feel intuitively that it’s better left alone, leave it alone!
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