Читать книгу Swinging: The Games Your Neighbours Play - Mark Brendon - Страница 18

I CONSIDERED THOSE ALTERNATIVES. Aside from marriage or long-term commitment—which was not only prohibited for me, but must be at best self-deceptive and hurtful—there was only the standard, squalid, exploitative (all right, often mutually exploitative, but little the better for that) one-night stand.

I had many experiences of these. They tended to be unsatisfactory. Their emotional duration, for at least one participant, seldom endured for just one night.

Annabel is a friend of Lisa’s—a thirty-three-year-old mother-of-two and an occasional swinger. She gave me the following appraisal of commonplace ‘vanilla’ one-night stands:

‘Like most modern girls, I’ve had them. And, like most of my friends, I’ve found them OK but, yeah, sort of sad.

‘I mean, first, the sex is usually moderate. You have to be pretty good to suss one another out—what you like, what is allowed, what your fantasies are—first time, and usually after an evening of tension and posturing and drinking too much.

‘So it’s generally an urgent, clumsy sort of reconnaissance in which you’re both out to get what you can, and both of you are left feeling unfulfilled, impersonal and dissatisfied. Neither has given a good account of him- or herself. It’s all to do with need, nothing to do with celebration.

‘And the one-night stand uses the same language as love—all those secretive smiles and little trying-it-out caresses, the gifts and intimate revelations, the expressions of hopes and sadnesses and fears. When all that is over, perhaps you can both admit that you’re actually looking for an otherwise meaningless shag, but by then the emotional imbalance is guaranteed.

‘And it’s intimate. I don’t mean the sex. I mean the tooth brushing and teddy bears and your side of the bed, water or cigarettes on the bedside table, telephones and alarm-clocks, clothes folded neatly or just flung down in blobs on the floor. A bedroom is a private place. Bedtime has its private rituals.

‘When I’m in another person’s room, I must take in his or her memories and taste in books, pictures, furnishings and a thousand other things. When he or she is in mine, it’s the same thing. It’s my family photographs and the CDs I’m a bit embarrassed about, and my make-up and knickers scattered around the room. It’s an invasion.

‘Hotels are worse, if anything. Luggage is as intimate as it gets, and the morning after, there’s the clean impersonality of the room, the condoms like twisted slugs on the carpet, the scattered towels and clothes. They just underline the futility of all that “darling” stuff and all that snogging and panting.

‘And really one-night stands are very masculine things. By the nature of sexuality and its conventions—whether he’s in my house or I’m in his—I have to accept his masculinity whilst he has to make almost no concession to me. A hotel may put chocolates on the pillow and throw in a hairdryer and a couple of carnations, but it’s always a functional, masculine thing, and the male after a one-night stand has to get dressed in an identity. The old role of the swaggering male who has “scored” is hanging there ready for him.

‘I mean, I may have “scored” too, but I can’t dress up in that. Why would I? Why would getting fucked by one male out of millions be something to be proud of?

‘When I’m playing, though, the whole thing’s on my terms as much as—if not more than—on his. We’re on neutral territory designed to afford what are always thought of as female pleasures—sexy clothes, lush décor, soft lighting, crappy music, a drink in the hand, the caresses of warm water and attractive women, the powerful turn-on of other people having fun all about you—and there’s no pressure. If I feel like it, I can do nothing but chat and watch, or I can beckon to one man or woman out of twenty, then turn away from him or her when I’ve had enough or when another one takes my fancy.

‘Men and women are equals here, equally seeking fun and sensory pleasure and, at the end of it all, we dress and walk away having lost nothing. There’s just desire—or not—not need or loneliness. There’s no invasion of privacy or intimacy, just sex and sensuality, and it’s all celebration rather than purging. And let’s face it, the reason we have one-night stands, and the reason that they are one night, is that we want a shag. Face up to that and you can start going about it more logically, more safely and more joyfully.

‘I’ve never left a swingers’ party where I’ve played, without feeling pride and a nice warm sense of satisfaction. And I can honestly look back on them all with pleasure. I can’t think of a single one-night stand of which I can say the same.’