The Lifestyle Read Online Free Page B

and they had not been treated kindly by studio audiences on TV talk shows, who’d shouted them down with catcalls such as “We hope you die of AIDS!”
    “Most swingers will tell you they’re not in it for an orgy,” said Frank, son of an Air Force sergeant-major, after he and Jennifer had delivered a convention seminar called “Social Games for Fun, Laughter and Intimacy.” “Some are like that, but everyone else is in it for the social interaction and the erotic acceptance. You wind up with a trusting fellowship,” he added, using a phrase that perhaps came from his occasional attendance at his local black Baptist Church.
    I had been reading about some of the economic origins of spouse exchange, and so I asked Jennifer about her relationships with swingers outside of parties. It turned out she and Frank were part of a tight-knit group of thirty couples who cooperated in every way, like a tribe. They had an investment club, a camping club, and a ski club. “When people stop the sexual control, it’s such a relief to them,” Jennifer told me. “You can be married twenty or thirty years, and you can go to a lifestyle party with your partner and have the security of your relationship throughout. You can do that right into old age. I think that holds a lot of appeal for women—it’s why you see them running the show here.”
    Whether or not women actually “ran the show,” there is no question that at the theme dances Leslie and I attended hundreds of middle-aged ladies displayed their sexuality to men in a way that made us both wonder how the world had gone on as it had for five thousand years. By the night of the grand finale Erotic Costume Ball I understood that these people had tilted their lives 23 degrees sideways and believed they were now properly aligned with the natural axis of the earth. I heard people say things like: “The minority knows more about the majority than the majority knows about the minority.” And this, from a European woman dressed as Marlene Dietrich: “When you’re forty the lifestyle is permitted; when you’re sixty it’s recommended; and when you’re eighty it’s compulsory.”
    On the morning after the erotic costume ball I stepped outinto the solar furnace of Las Vegas Boulevard and took a walk south. Behind me, on one end of the strip, the attendees at the organized sex convention were waiting for limos to take them to the airport. At the other end of the strip the attendees at the ongoing organized crime “convention” were in full swing. I thought of what Ellie had told me at the New Faces New Friends dance regarding her opinion of the straight world: “Just young brutes, old brutes. Men proving themselves. Sex and anger—sex and jealousy.” As a journalist, as a man, I was standing between two worlds back then. For so long I had been surrounded by criminal brutes who used force and violence to demonstrate their attractiveness to women, and, on the other side of the law, men who fought the good fight against them—but perhaps for not entirely different reasons. At some level, I believed, every male understood that one of the rewards of living dangerously was being considered attractive by women. The equation is one of the biological mysteries of life. Lawmen, lawyers, gangsters, and journalists were particularly well placed to demonstrate to women that they were hunters able to provide resources and excitement. And yet here in Las Vegas (of all places), and at New Faces New Friends, and even at Vancouver Circles, the swinging men I’d met didn’t need, or want, to pose as dangerous risk takers to make themselves more attractive to women. Swinging women didn’t need, or want, them to do so. The exhibition of strength and assets was not necessary for the acquisition of partners in their world. I had the feeling I had been witnessing something profound in the swing world—tacky as it was to most people. It was a way of living that my previous reporting experience