Swingers: "Oh, behave."

Swingers: “Oh, behave!”

Edwin T. Scott Jr.

When we mention the word Swingers what usually comes to mind depends on the age and experience level of our audience. A younger person would think of Austin Powers, a comical parody of the 1960’s British Swinger lifestyle, an older person perhaps the wife swappers of the 1950’s or 1960’s. Either way, a false grin or giggle begins to cross our face at the thought of a person or person’s engaging in open extramarital sex. “It is taboo, immoral, and deviate,” we think to ourselves. Then something inside says to us that it is interesting, perhaps worth our looking at, even if only to justify our morbid curiosity.

Swinging is defined as the meeting of other couples for sexual interaction and has been interchangeably used with the term The Lifestyle, first coined by Dr. Robert McGinley the founder of the Lifestyles Organization, LSO Ltd. Couples involved in the Lifestyle are often refered to as “play couples” who engage in play with other couples in a variety of private or public settings. Swinging is viewed as a deviate subculture within the western Judeo-Christian society. Many swingers find themselves subjected to discrimination in the workplace, schools, and are socially excluded from their churches and communities when their private sexual lives become public.

So what is deviate anyway? One definition is “anything behavior that goes against the norms.” Another definition is “ruptures of moral behavior.” With terms like “norms” and “moral behavior” we are left the presumption that anything else is contrary and deviant. But who established the etiquette of relationships? To understand why swinging is labeled “deviant” by some; we must first ask ourselves, why are our norms and morals slanted today towards single partner relationships, making all others immoral? We must look into and understand the history of swinging and closely related sexual behaviors and how they have evolved over time to conflict with western norms.

Cultural anthropologists and evolutionary biologists both agree that a majority of the world cultures are non monogamous. They estimate that currently approximately 85 % of the world’s cultures that have been studied are predominately Polygynous. By contrast, western cultures maintain that they are monogamous; however they are in fact promiscuously involved with serial monogamy (where individuals may be monogamous but are involved with a number of consecutive relationships). Studies of both humans and bonobo chimpanzee primate cultures indicate that they are predominately non-monogamous and raise theories of a polygamous hominid ancestry of human beings.

Anthropologists attribute this preference to multiple partner sexuality to the ever changing needs of early hunter gather societies. Men were often absent from the village hunting or making war with other men, while women were left to raise their children, often in environmentally hazardous conditions that required them to select their mating partners for the successful passing of their genes through the offspring. The mechanisms of this gene passing have evolved over many millennium and many are autonomic, meaning they simply occur without forethought or conscious direction.

Here is where evolutionary biologists step in and explain that women’s bodies developed to promote the success of chosen gene mating partners over a variety of additional sexual partners. Their notion is that a human female is biologically predisposed to have her vagina filled with the semen of two or more males to support sperm competition. A similar and related topic is female sexual selection. Females of all species often engage males, seeking characteristics that support more desirable sperm for gene mating.

Chief amongst these characteristics is the length of the male penis and the size of the testes. Various species have evolved penis lengths in proportion to their ability to deliver a given volume of gene rich sperm. The length of the penis can ensure closer delivery to the opening of the cervix, thus ensuring maximum sperm delivery. In humans the average penis length is 4”, whereas studies have shown that women who engage in extra relational sexual activities, often site the desire for a male with a larger penis. On some subconscious level the woman is selecting a strong healthy gene mating partner, even if the superficial appearance is simply one increased pleasure. Who ever said size doesn’t matter?

Likewise, human males even today subconsciously control the level and amount of sperm ejaculation from a normal amount of approximately 200 million sperm per ejaculation, increasing to around 600 million sperm per ejaculation when their subconscious mind perceives that their mate has been bred with other males. Some prefer to refer to the theory in the masculine as the sperm warfare theory.

The earliest tradition of non-monogamous sex comes from the Apocryphal stories and traditions of the Hebrews about the first wife of Adam, a woman named Lilith who reportedly was put out by Adam and she took up residence in tree along a river, where she engaged in multiple sexual acts (possibly the world’s first gang bang) with demons to produce demonic offspring. The biblical patriarch Abraham not only engaged in Polygny (the taking of more than one wife by a man) by taking his wife Sarah’s handmaiden as a concubine to have children for her, but he also gave the Pharaoh of Egypt sexual access to Sarah in exchange for cattle, sheep, riches, and sojourning rights. When Abraham had nearly released Sarah permanently to Pharaoh God stepped in and returned her to Abraham, along with the blessing of Pharaoh.

Also prevalent in those cultures and later in the Greek and Roman Cultures there was a sexually illicit worship of their deities through liaisons with temple priestess, accompanied by donations and sacrifices to the deity of the temple. Women in these cultures, especially socially and politically affluent women would engage in this behavior as a means of attaining favored social status, and undoubtedly to satisfy their extramarital desires. During Roman times, though the acceptance of overt extramarital sexuality began to develop among the affluent sections of society. Swinging and orgiastic sex became a norm among the upper class.

According to Catullus in Poem 11 Clodia, the wife of a Roman nobleman engaged in a famous gang bang:

Let her live and be happy with her lovers, Three hundred of whom she holds at once in her embrace,  Loving none of them really, but again and again Rupturing every man’s thighs.

Pliny the Elder’s writing in his book Natural History , Book 10 Chapter 83(63), 172 about Messalina, the wife of Claudius Caesar and her gang banging:

Other animals become sated with venereal pleasures, man hardly knows any satiety. Messalina, the wife of Claudius Caesar, thinking this palm quite worthy of an empress, selected for the purpose of deciding the question, one of the notorious women who followed the profession of a hired prostitute; and the empress outdid her, after continuous intercourse, night and day, at the twenty fifth embrace.

From those early beginnings through the Middle Ages, and the sexual oppression of the Catholic Church, swinging would become a standard, albeit a secretive one amongst the elite and socially affluent of societies. It was in 300 AD at the Spanish Council of Elvira that the Church would institute the first prohibitions on clergy marriage and restrictions on concubinage in light of issues dealing with estates passing to multiple children in place of the Church. Then in 400 AD at the Council of Toledo stamped out concubinage for good with a sentence of excommunication on any person who kept in addition to their wife a concubine. The primary motivation for this was money, expansion of the church, and power base building, not morality. This sexual repression would sweep the world and those sexually liberal individuals and couples that once enjoyed open sexual access to multiple partners, regardless of marital statewould have to step back into the shadows. They would be demonized and stigmatized as pagan, demon worships, and deviates.

In the early years of World War II, American fighter pilots began to form tight knit groups for social and sexual support. These societies would often experience a high mortality rate among members in combat and long periods of the male member’s absence leaving the females behind. These pilots and their wives broke with the tradition of men going off to war, having illicit affairs while their wives stayed home, and maintaining a monogamous loyalty to them. They created parties and clubs referred to in the 1940’s and 1950’s as “key parties” or “key clubs.” At these parties men would place their car keys in a bowl and the ladies would draw out a key, going home with the lucky key’s owner.

Swingers have a come a long way despite the continual repression from the “religious and moral right.” Modern swingers no longer use titles such as “wife swappers,” “key clubs,” etc. and prefer to be referred to “play couples” engaged in a “Lifestyle.” In an October 2000 study in the Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality it was reported that swingers tend to be upper middle class, middles aged individuals in their third to fourth year of marriage when they enter the swinging lifestyle and generally are well educated-many with postgraduate degrees that are socially and politically influential. These individuals come from every walk of life and are predominately religious and participate in mainstream religious belief systems.

Our study of swingers has taken us from the earliest sexual preferences of humans, which favored multiple sex partners to the benefit of both sexes, we have come to understand the evolutionary and biological dictates of human sexuality and come forward through pre-modern cultures’ sexual socialization, to the sexual repression of the church, and stigmatization of natural human sexual behaviors. This repression continues today with modern day swingers seen as deviates despite research and data that would indicate to the contrary that swingers are by in large well educated, socially affluent, and economically stable individuals who fit well into the mainstream and far from deviation.