Читать книгу Swinging: The Games Your Neighbours Play - Mark Brendon - Страница 13

I WAS INTERESTED…Oh, bollocks. I was fascinated and excited at the prospect.

For all my eagerness, I was properly cautious.

My experiences of addictive activities had been good, which is to say in the long term, bloody awful.

I took up smoking at fifteen in the music-school practice rooms. Now I accounted for an ounce of roll-up shag a day. I started drinking alcohol at seventeen and soon found myself downing a litre and a half of whisky, with Guinness on the side, every night. Cocaine had never been a threat. It had simply permitted greater alcohol consumption with more sex. It had just been a sauce to the principal ingredient.

Swinging seemed to me logically and emotionally desirable, but I knew that many people thought it morally reprehensible. Until now, I had never really considered why.

I discounted at once all objections from the huge majority. All those of both sexes who read or watch pornography—and they are to be counted in their billions—those who read with prurient delight of ‘three-in-a-bed romps’ 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?