Sex Geek

An offshoot of a recent discussion on the Poly Canada list inspired me to write a bit about why I don’t like swingers’ culture.

It’s kinda fascinating, really, how the swingers are in some ways the odd ones out within the alternative sexuality spectrum. Not so much in that charming underdog way, though.

Okay, first things first. I know we freaks’n’perverts owe a lot to the swingers. The 2005 Supreme Court case that ruled swinging to be legal actually has massive repercussions on all kinds of subcultural sexual practices in Canada, basically because the ruling specified that acts performed in private, even if “private” means with the consensual participation of hundreds of people, cannot be considered harmful and therefore are not illegal. To quote the CTV article I linked to above:

“The definition of indecency is typically measured against what ordinary Canadians will tolerate. But in their ruling Wednesday, the Supreme Court judges said the test for indecency should not simply be whether an activity violates a ‘social consensus’ of community standards, but the actual harm it causes. ‘Consensual conduct behind code-locked doors can hardly be supposed to jeopardize a society as vigorous and tolerant as Canadian society,’ Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin wrote in the majority decision.”

Of course this has an impact on the rest of us. For your average vanilla monogamous person, not really. But for anyone who visits a dungeon with a back room, or attends a bathhouse event, or holds a private play or sex party, or stops at a gay sauna for an after-work blowjob, this ruling means that as long as the standards of privacy are maintained – in other words, some sort of informed consent that sexual acts may take place and that you as a participant in the event are not offended by this – we can do what we bloody well please, with no fear of prosecution. It was about fucking time. And the victory happened because the manager of a major Montreal swingers’ club happened to a) be a skilled lawyer and b) have the financial means (thanks, no doubt, to running the lucrative club in the first place) to support his case.

All right. Now I’ve said it; we owe them. Countless events I have attended since 2005, and doubtless many more I will attend in the future, no longer put me at the very real risk of getting arrested.

But that doesn’t mean I have to like swingers.

I tried! I really did! I attended more than one intro-to-swinging workshop held at L’Orage (now Club Nuances). I read the brochures. I read the websites. I even read a book (terribly written, poorly edited and cheaply printed) about swinging, produced in Montreal by another wealthy club owner. I’ve attended numerous events at swingers’ clubs. About the only thing I’ve never done, swinging-wise, is to actually swing.

What can I say? The people just squick me out! Both politically and personally. Ew, ew, ew.

As I see it, swingers remain unquestioning of most of standard-issue mainstream, married heterosexual (and heterosexist) assumptions. They take the mold, and buy into it, and then make one exception: they like to go out and have sex with their spouses in public, and/or with other people as well. And that’s kinda where it ends. They won’t be waving a flag at Pride. They won’t be signing petitions for re-listing trans surgeries. They won’t be donating their proceeds to ACCM. In fact, unless they’re about to get arrested, they seem to be completely apolitical.

To break it down a bit…

Despite all the earnest workshop leader’s assurances, and despite what books and magazines and newsletters say, the culture just isn’t all that respectful of women. I was told repeatedly in these workshops that it was considered poor form to get physical with someone before introducing yourself, asking if touch was OK, and so forth. I was also told that "no means no" and swingers know that a no should be taken with courtesy and respect. But on the several occasions I attended swingers’ events, I was repeatedly caressed or groped by men without even so much as a "hi, my name is" first… and then when I removed the offending hands, I was given funny looks or reacted to with defensiveness. Actions speak way louder than words!

The biggest local swingers’ club used to host a fetish night once a month, and the cultural differences between BDSMers and swingers were crystal clear. The SM players had to constantly police their boundaries while playing to prevent clueless swingers from walking up and grabbing the bottoms mid-scene without their consent. One of my friends actually had to resort to repeatedly slapping some guy’s hand away with her whip as he persistently tried to get in and grope. Ew!

Not to mention the creep factor with regard to all the guys who seem to feel it’s appropriate to just randomly start wanking while they look at women. ‘Cause really, I signed up to be someone’s free live porn entertainment.

Sure, some women may find it exciting and possibly even empowering to go to swingers’ events and get it on. After all, women are taught that our pleasure is supposed to be all about being the objects of male desire - and male desire is certainly available aplenty at swingers clubs. So if you’re a heterosexual female exhibitionist, you’ll fit right in… at least so I gather from the disproportionate number of naked-girl pictures (compared to virtually zero naked-guy pictures) in swingers’ newsletters, as well as content like wet t-shirt contests, bukkake experiences and so forth. Nothing’s wrong with this stuff in principle, if that’s your bag, but when it’s only the women being displayed and advertised this way it speaks volumes of the supposed equality in power relations at these events.

A male friend of mine was also really creeped out by the swinger scene - the last straw for him was when some guy approached him and asked if he could play with his girlfriend, as though she was owned by my friend rather than being an independent agent of her own sexuality.

I also experience the swingers’ world to be very extremely heterosexist. I showed up at a club once with a female partner, and the folks at the door had no clue what to do with us - apparently the only people who count as couples are the male/female kind, so she couldn’t figure out if she should charge us the couple rate, or let us in for free because we’re both women - but only single women are supposed to get in free! Argh. Talk about invalidating of our relationship!

And that’s despite all the suspiciously encouraging messages about female bisexuality. The Quebec swingers’ association goes so far as to state on their website that 90% (yes, they give a percentage) of women are bisexual and that only very rarely are men. No study has ever shown that kind of number, and even if you assume swinger women to be more likely to be bi than average, that’s a frickin’ colossal number. And of course they give no source for their figures. In truth, 90% of the women who go to swingers’ clubs are probably being pressured by their husband to make out with a woman for his entertainment - whether that makes them bisexual or not is anybody’s guess. Certainly, as a bi woman, I distinctly felt that my sexuality was only acceptable in the swingers’ world if it was there for the purpose of entertaining men - not if I actually (gasp!) fell in love with and had a relationship with a woman.

One longtime swinger I spoke to explained to me rather uncomfortably that she was "passively bisexual" - she could "handle it" if a woman went down on her or touched her, but she had no interest in returning the favour. Which sounds like a whole lot of "if you want me to, honey" to me. Again… can you say "ew"?

And they’re homophobic. Oh, lordy, are they homophobic. Girl-on-girl sex is just fine, but god forbid a man should get it on with another dude. Of course, it’s really unusual to find sexism in a place where there’s no homophobia and vice-versa; much of homophobia is tied up in hating effeminacy in men, being offended at the idea that a man might take a passive (penetrated) role in bed, etc. I have a hard time believing that anyone who sees the percieved "feminine" as such a shameful thing in men can truly say they respect it in women. Hatred of the feminine transcends the specifics of a given "phobia" and affects pretty much anyone who doesn’t fit with a really strict gender-role - whether by who they fuck, how they fuck, what they look like or how they behave.

Plus, anyplace that says women fucking women is fine but men fucking men is bad is not a place I want to be. Even if the blatant homophobia weren’t a sufficient turn-off, why would I go to experience my sexual freedom in a place that’s ultimately only accepting of it within narrow confines? To me that doesn’t feel like freedom at all, it feels like a marketplace where I’m the meat.

Overall, I’ve experienced the swingers’ world to be really narrow-minded about sexuality and gender, highly focused on women’s sexuality as a form of performance for men, and interested in paying only lip service to anything that looks like genuine full-spectrum respect for women and our sexual choices. So after many attempts to learn about and experience the culture – to find some sort of solidarity among sexual outlaws – I finally decided that the swingers’ world is just not a place I fit in.

I’m glad to take advantage of the sexual freedom their court ruling created, but I’ll do it among queers, thanks very much… people whose sexual freedom extends to their minds, rather than stopping below the belt.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 8th, 2007 at 11:08 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.