Israeli couples are swinging to survive
One intrepid reporter ventures into the world of group sex, which, its adherents insist, is a way of preserving marital harmony.
Sapir College researcher Gali Avidov, who examined the various practicalities of swinging in the context of modern monogamy, argues that contrary to the standard claim that swinging constitutes a threat to love, to the institution of marriage and to the family as a whole, we need to take a new and fresh and sober look at the option of couple swapping.
Instead of viewing it as destructive, she writes in her research paper, perhaps we should see it as a model that could actually save monogamy from total collapse, an adaptive model that responds to the new reality of the 21st century and offers a combined solution, part of which accepts a monogamous partnership, and part of which undermines the generally accepted concept of erotic exclusivity – and all for the sake of preserving and strengthening the love and happiness of the partnership and family set-up.
But does this surprising theory stand up to the test of real life? Well, to examine this question from all angles, and positions, I recruited a free-spirited friend (just between us, would any man pass up on the offer?) and went to a swingers party to check things out for myself. Do I have what it takes to be a real swinger?
Zero sex appeal
The location of the party is kept under wraps. You won't find it on any Facebook group. The only way to participate in the experience is to send a message to a mysterious man and request the precise time and place. By now, I was already suspicious, but I held my tongue. After all, these are normative folk – monogamous in spirit, polygamous in body – who wish to preserve their privacy, who have no wish to publicize their choice of intimate entertainment, the kind at which our society raises an eyebrow and turns up its nose.
The entrance to the location fails to give off an air of eroticism or seduction. To the contrary, the industrial area in which the loft is located, with the fast-food stand on the right and the garage on the left, leaves my mojo somewhat depleted. And in contrast to the super-naughty and mega-cool feeling with which I arrived, the guard at the door didn't appear particularly moved by our presence, and didn't even bother to stop feverishly eating his sunflower seeds, more in keeping with a fan at a soccer match and less so with my definition of sexy.
We started off with a guided tour – the private rooms first. Each room comes with a small hot tub, a large bed, a bathroom and a toilet; and if the sleaze isn't enough for you by now, the background noise in all of the rooms is porn – and I don't mean the soft kind at all – to stave off any boredom. Aside from the rooms, the loft also includes a standard dance floor and a small bar. The make-up of the crowd, for the most part, is surprising – the kind of people you'd walk by at the grocery store, people you'd encounter in line at the National Insurance Institute, people with zero sex appeal.
The average age was north of 40. Most of the people there looked like parents, and even grandparents in some cases. "We're spring chickens here; everyone's looking at us," my new friend for the evening, an extremely attractive woman in her early 30s, proudly objectified the two of us – and then promptly undressed and slipped casually into the hot tub. One's body doesn’t play a part here; the flaws we routinely try to hide vanish in this matrix. No one here is a true super model, but it doesn’t matter at all. Here, everything goes – no judging, no scrutinizing.
Not only out of love
Couple after couple show up for the party. "Doesn't it bother you?" I ask of my new friend, who doesn't really take the trouble to cover her shapely body after getting out the water. "Are you really able to see your boyfriend having sex with someone else? Don't you get jealous?"
"There's emotional sex and there's mechanical sex, only for the body. They're two different things. She understands it, we both understand it," her boyfriend admonishes me, and I couldn't help but notice a touch of pity in his eyes for having to explain to me such an elementary fact.
There's no jealously there – only love, which, they say, comes from a shared open-mindedness. And in an effort to emphasize that it's not all talk, he tells us that his best friend is the guy who at that very moment is naked in the hot tub alongside his partner. "They even made out a little yesterday too, and it didn't bother me," he adds.
Our conversation is interrupted; my partner in the adventure is calling me over. "You have to come see this," he insists. Afraid of what I might find, I follow him down the loft's narrow passageway and peek astounded into a room with its door wide open. A pretty large group of people are shamelessly engaged in fervent sexually activity of various types and persuasions, all in a single bed – exposed body parts, moans and groans and exchanges of fluids, all out in the open, for all to see. Big Brother for adults only.
Embarrassed by my blatant voyeurism and intrusion on their intimacy, I suggest to my partner that perhaps we should leave, that perhaps we should return to our conversation with the naked girl in the other room, that perhaps we should flee while I still have some of my innocence intact. I've hardly had time to turn my head when one of the participants in the sexual feast fixes me with a piercing stare, undresses me with his eyes and with a casual gesture invites me to join in the festivities. Mortified, I stick close to the guy I came with, seeking protection from his body – not protection from the other people at the party, but protection from myself. With all my hushed openness, I'm the one who is afraid.
And still, I'm unable to avert my gaze. That thin line between right and wrong materializes in front of me in real time. The system of values on which I was raised cracks in the face of a single large bed and an entanglement of connected body parts, at angles I never before thought possible.
Things aren't very different in the other rooms. Even if I had tried to imagine the scene, I wouldn't have been able to paint such pictures. Meanwhile, I remain firmly fixed to my role as a wallflower, and join in with my eyes only. Hands reach out to us from time to time, and I gently repel them. The boundaries are clear; no one will touch you if you don't want them to. It's an unspoken rule, silent consent for respect and equality, clear-cut moral codes.
Everything is consensual
"Everything happens by mutual consent," stresses one of the organizers of the evening who has turned up to make sure everything is running smoothly. "If you go out to a club in Tel Aviv, there's a good chance you'll be harassed more so than here. Here, when someone says no – they stop. No one will treat you like you're just a hole," he says.
"Do you remember that woman who got pissed off with us?" my naked friend asks her partner. "There was this one couple; she was really hot, and he… well, what can I say? I compromised, and in the middle she decided no, and got pissed off when we didn't stop too."
And what about you guys, I ask. Don't you sometimes want to tell him to stop? She smiles a little – and again, like her partner's before, it's a smile with a touch of pity for me. "The advantages outweigh the disadvantages," she says. "I can't tell him to stop when I want the very same things for myself. There are no double standards here." And her partner sums things up: "When she is satisfied and I am satisfied, in all ways, we are both happier," he says.
They appear to be a real community – people who attend these parties on a regular basis, from all corners of the land. The acquaintanceships are personal; the sexuality, despite its in-your-face presence, is not crude at all. "Your hands are always cold," says one of the women to her partner for the night. "And with you, it's always good fun," he replies. I break into a small smile on the sidelines; under different circumstances, their exchange may even have been sweet.
Our cover story passes us off as a couple that has been together for a year; it's our first time at a swingers party, and we're looking to spice up our love life. Everyone we encounter is very welcoming, and eager to market their way of life. I try to get a handle on the bottom line: What does it do for their partnership? No one is that liberal; it's impossible.
"She's actually the one who has been pushing for it," my improvised partner says, getting a little too caught up in the situation at hand. "I'm not sure if it's such a good idea," he adds.
"You need to be flexible for the other party," says a blond woman with the biggest and perkiest breasts –"all natural, darling, and that's after two births; you can feel if you like" – I have ever seen. "It's all a matter of communication between the partners. If they are honest with one another, and say what they truly feel, it can only benefit the relationship."
I fix my partner with a meaningful look; but he appears to have missed her words of wisdom. After all, that's quite some rack before his eyes. "It depends on the partners," she continues. "It's not for everyone. Everyone marches to a different beat. We in any event are very pleased." She should know; after five years of experience in the scene, she will probably move on to complete a doctorate on the subject in the near future.
This is the place where middle-class values are trumped by basic urges, and I, too, begin to loosen up. True, the alcohol at the party flows freely like the water in the hot tub in the room, but that's not the reason at all. There's an overriding sense that anything and everything is permissible, that we're here today and tomorrow we'll drop off the kids at kindergarten and the two things don't clash.
"This break from routine," says one of the women, "fills me with the energy to deal with the day-to-day banality of the relationship."
In contrast, a daring young woman – or so I believed at least – like myself, who prior to coming was afraid to end the evening in the throes of a wild orgy, went as far as taking off my shoes at that party. Guilty as charged.
And thus I found myself engaged in conversations about relationships, sex and everything in between in one of the small rooms, where apart from trivialities such as the naked girl in the circle, the man with the exposed penis soaking in the hot tub next to me, and the noisy moans and groans that any respectable porn star would have been proud of, it was a perfectly normal social evening. Sex here isn't an anomaly; it's natural, a basic human instinct. And in such places, there's no one who seeks to suppress, compartmentalize or restrict it to a single partner.
In our society, in which people get married later and divorced quicker, in which one-night stands have become relationships for all intents and purposes and cheating the default, there may just be something in the theory, and swingers parties may simply be the 21st century's way of dealing with monogamy.
