II

What is Swinging?

Now, there’s a question.

At first sight, it all seems so clear. Swinging, widely known as ‘the lifestyle’,  is recreational sex between two or more people who meet with the explicit purpose of enjoying sex together, generally without further commitment or emotional involvement. It often entails the swapping or sharing of conventional partners or spouses. It often entails attendance at parties or orgies at which those attending may have several sexual encounters with several people in one afternoon, evening or night.

And yet, whilst all of this is true, none of it is constantly true enough to rank as a definition. The statement is peppered with qualifying adverbs – ‘generally’, ‘frequently’ and so on.

Non-swingers who attend night-clubs or discos, after all, also often do so with the purpose of finding partners for recreational sex, however much they may pretend that they are looking for love or friendship. Neither love nor friendship is particularly well served by the short skirt, the sliver of fabric barely concealing the breasts, the cock-of-the-roost strut or the gut-wriggle and bump-and-grind thrust of the pubis on the dance-floor. All these are the semaphore of oestrus, whether or not one or both parties impose restraints before intercourse.

‘Generally without further commitment or emotional involvement’… Well, yes. That is the intention, as it is the intention of many who have ‘casual’ sex or engage prostitutes, but in all these instances I know of profounder attachments made in the course of such encounters.