Читать книгу Swinging: The Games Your Neighbours Play - Mark Brendon - Страница 16

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.