Читать книгу Swinging: The Games Your Neighbours Play - Mark Brendon - Страница 22

IF THIS WERE A PORNOGRAPHIC MEMOIR, I could devote the whole of it to encounters and orgies on the British swing-scene, which would doubtless be of passing interest to a certain sort of reader in the heat of sexual desire or frustration, but would repel the sated and, at length, bore even the wanker.

This is not, as some will claim, because every encounter is the same and that orgies and participants meld into an amorphous blur. One could as well argue that every steeplechase, say, is trivial and forgettable, or every fine meal indistinguishable from another. It is simply untrue. A word, a name, a scent is sufficient to conjure each individual race or meal in all its brilliant intensity. And the principal joy of swinging sex is precisely that each new partner is wonderfully, excitingly different.

For all that, a book which described steeplechase after steeplechase, dinner after dinner, must soon become monotonous. This is not a fault of the things described, but of our vocabulary and the terms of reference at our disposal with which to describe pleasure or, for that matter, pain.

Caressing, kissing, licking, sucking, fucking—this is the basic, tawdry syntax of sex, just as boiling, frying, grilling and roasting are the terms with which we describe the core functions of the cook.

They are just technical terms which tell us nothing of the infinite subtleties ordained on the one hand by the individual people, moods and circumstances, on the other by the peculiar nature of the ingredients and the facilities on offer.

Cooking admits of minor distinctions—simmering, sauteeing and the like—but recipes do not begin to describe the subtleties and occasional glories of great food, lovingly prepared in the right context. Our attempts to do just that therefore tend to use metaphor and simile which alienate and obscure rather than enlighten.

So I have a choice. I could attempt to describe in factual, actuarial terms the hundred or so orgies that I have attended in the past three years, and the couples whom I have met at my home—or at theirs—with a view to sexual adventure, and so bore rather than cajole the pants off the reader. Or I could wax as lyrical as each such event deserves, which might be of momentary interest to the wanker, but would fail to convey either information or a sense of the feelings involved to anyone save myself.

Let’s go, then—for now at least—to just one swingers’ party.

Let’s go—for the sake of honesty and in order to obviate any blase-ness which I may unwittingly have acquired—to my first such party, where I feigned assurance but gazed about me with all the incredulous delight of, say, Tom of the Water Babies transported to Disneyland, or Cinderella at last arriving at the palace.