I have often been asked why I am content to have sex with a total stranger at a swingers’ party but not in a one-night-stand (for that matter, I shudder from the enforced proximity of a crowded tube-train, yet revel in naked frolicking amidst strangers. For that, I have no explanation save, perhaps, that those strangers are de facto friends). The reasons are these, but, the more I think about it, the more I realise too that one-night-stands are essentially masculine things. By the nature of sexuality and its conventions, whether he is in my house or I in his, I must accept his masculinity whilst he must make almost no concession to my femininity. A hotel, for all its chocolates on the pillow and its hairdriers, is always a functional, masculine construct, and the male after a one-night-stand has to dress hastily in an identity. The identity of the male who has ‘scored’ is hanging there readily to hand. I too may have ‘scored’ in that that was my intention and it has been achieved, but I cannot – nor would I - dress in that. In what sense is having sex with one male out of millions a triumph?

At a swinger’s party, however, sex is on my terms as much, if not more, than on his. We are on neutral territory designed to afford what are commonly thought of as female pleasures – sexy clothes, lavish décor, soft lighting, seductive music, a drink in my hand, the caresses of warm water and of attractive women, the powerful visual stimulus of others in the throes of pleasure all about me - and I can beckon to one man or woman out of twenty, then turn away from him or her when I have had enough or another takes my fancy. Men and women are equals here, equally seeking sensory pleasure, and, at the end of it all, we dress and walk away having taken plenty from one another but having lost nothing. Sex here is always the consequence of desire, not of need or loneliness. There is no invasion or privacy or intimacy. There is just sex and sensuality, and here, it is all celebration rather than purging. Maybe it is not celebration of every last, least intimate detail of a man or woman, but of life and lust and mortality and mutuality – commonalty - and vigour.