The American Way Of Swinging

"Chicago area couple, early 30s, wish couples and single women interested in uninhibited experimentation. Also interested in good food, art films, music, complete evenings of enjoyment. Send address and photo."

That advertisement is typical of several placed in the magazine Kindred Spirits by Northern Illinois University Anthropology Professor Gilbert D. Bartell and his wife Ann. The Bartells were looking for people to take part in a study of group sex. The results of that three-year study were published in a refreshingly unclinical book called Group Sex: A Scientist's Eyewitness Report on the American Way of Swinging (Peter H. Wyden; $6.95).

During their investigation, the Bartells met hundreds of people interested in "swinging," an activity defined as "having sexual relations as a couple with at least one other individual." Although they spent quiet evenings with other couples, attended large sex parties and studied 280 swingers in depth, the Bartells diplomatically avoided going to bed with their subjects.

As Gilbert Bartell discovered, getting started in swinging is easy. All that is required is a copy of Kindred Spirits, Ecstasy, Swingers' Life, or any one of 50 scruffy magazines filled with ads and advice on "The Etiquette of Swinging" and "How to Organize an Enjoyable Swinging Party." Making contact with the all too willing advertisers is a simple matter.

A foursome's first meeting is "the equivalent of the conventional couple's coffee or Coke date." Then, says Bartell, a delicate mating dance begins. If the four like each other, they arrange a second encounter. The scenario is usually the same whether only two couples or as many as a dozen participate: extra towels are laid out, for there is "a constant traffic into and out of the bathtub and shower" (swingers are fanatics about personal cleanliness); candles or blue lights may be arranged; and sometimes a projector is set up to show stag films. Drinks are poured to ease tension, which is high. Swingers, it turns out, are not really liberated; they act "as if they are at a high school prom where no couple wishes to be the first one on the dance floor." Finally, after a decision is made to swing open (everyone together) or closed (separate rooms), someone suggests: "Let's go check on what's happening in the bedroom."

Taboo Terms. In bed the action is mostly conventional: "When a swinger becomes unusually venturesome," Bartell says, "the chances are that he will not find a cooperative partner." Still, vibrators are not uncommon, and homosexual behavior between the women is almost routine. Explains Bartell: "It turns men on to watch women together, and it conserves their own sexual energy." Sexual relations between the men is rare, however, and is considered bad form. Also taboo: terms of endearment between sexual partners.

How many Americans participate in group sex? Bartell puts the total at about 1,000,000. Most of his subjects, like the couples in the movie Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, were middleclass, "respectable" white suburbanites. They ranged in age from 18 to 70 and earned $10,000 or more a year. Of the men, 42% were salesmen, but some were dentists, professors, lawyers, engineers and chemists. Of the women, a few were teachers, but 78% were housewives who stayed home and looked after the children. Most of the parents sent the youngsters to Sunday school, frowned on drugs and hippies, had few outside interests of their own, and kept their swinging secret.

Scientists disagree on swingers' motives. Chicago Psychoanalyst Ner Littner feels that couples who swing are incapable of intimate relationships even with each other and use wife swapping "as a safety valve that keeps intimacy at a level each can tolerate." Bartell likens the suburban wasteland to the sterile Arctic habitat of the wife-swapping Eskimo. The sterile environment, he concludes, leads some people to try group sex simply to relieve boredom. Others hope it will make them feel young, avant-garde and sexually desirable. Moreover, swinging "is in keeping with American cultural patterns: to be popular, to have friends, to be busy."

Antithesis. The trouble is that swingers often find themselves too busy; the rule is to swing only once with the same couple (so that no intimate, marriage-destroying relationships develop). Thus the search for "beautiful" or "great" (contrasted with "moldy") partners is never ending. Eventually hours of the swingers' waking day are spent on the phone or writing letters to make new contacts--or driving hundreds of miles to meet them. Sheer exhaustion causes many to drop out of swinging after two years or so of frantic activity. More important is disillusionment. Finally able to act out adolescent fantasies, many swingers find that the fantasies were better than reality. Besides, there is generally a loss of self-esteem and identity, and an absence of commitment to partners whom they may well never see again. "This total noninvolvement represents the antithesis of sexual pleasure."

Behavioral scientists are divided about the effect that swinging can have on a couple. Los Angeles Psychiatrist L. James Grold says that it can become a troublesome addiction, but that for some people it is "a pleasurable sharing experience." Bartell doubts that swinging really benefits anyone much. Surprisingly, he found little evidence that it was responsible for marital discord or breakup among the couples he studied. In fact, some swingers insist that the opposite is true. Their claim: "The couple that swings together stays together."

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