The Lifestyle (27 page)

The almost universally shared reaction to jealousy by men in the lifestyle is particularly hard to understand because it seems to violate how all men are biologically programmed to react to spousal infidelity. Until quite recently, from a biological point of view, it was actually
easier
to understand how
women could accept their swinging husbands than it was to understand the reaction of men to their swinging wives. “If indeed a man’s great Darwinian peril is cuckoldry, and a woman’s is desertion, then male and female jealousy should differ,” Robert Wright wrote in
The Moral Animal
. “Male jealousy should focus on
sexual
infidelity, and males should be quite unforgiving of it; a female, though she’ll hardly applaud a partner’s extracurricular activities, since they consume time and divert resources, should be more concerned with
emotional
infidelity…. These predictions have been confirmed—by eons of folk wisdom and, over the past few decades, by considerable data.”

The data is actually confirmed in the lifestyle—for women. One of the foundational convictions of longtime swingers is that friendly sex between lifestylers poses no real threat of emotional infidelity to a marriage; thus, in lifestyle theory, the greatest threat of “social sexuality” should be lessened for wives. And according to their own testimony, it is. “These people,” Gilmartin reported, “do not see deep, long-lasting friendships with their swinging partners as competitive with the
committed
type of love characteristic of a sound marriage. Friends who see each other very often are regarded as ‘loving’ one another, but in a
noncommitted
way.” In the culture of veteran female lifestylers, then, a husband’s “noncommitted” sex is appreciated by her as part of the all-around social warmth attendant to swinging in a safe environment; when it is interpreted by her as posing an emotional threat to her marriage, she either talks to her husband and calls a halt to the proceedings or, as mentioned, she embraces the rival woman bisexually and “confirms” that the threat is unwarranted. Either way, she usually (not always) resolves the issue.

For a man, however, his wife’s lack of “love” for a sex partner should not mitigate against his automatic reaction. “What drives men craziest is the thought of their mate in bed with
another man,” Wright observed. “They don’t dwell as much as women do on any attendant emotional attachment, or the possible loss of the mate’s time and attention—Husbands tend to respond to infidelity with rage; and even after it subsides, they often have trouble contemplating a continued relationship with the infidel.”

But not swinging husbands. They enjoy the feeling engendered by a wife’s sexual “infidelity.” This, I suggest, is partly because they have learned to experience an automatic reaction they can use for their own pleasure—“sperm competition syndrome.” SCS could explain the biology behind the pleasures swinging men get from sharing their wives. The 1.5 million men in the subculture appear to be able to accept and capitalize on what every man seems to be programmed by evolution to accomplish when he consciously or unconsciously suspects a partner has been unfaithful. “We’re hypothesizing that men may actually ejaculate sooner when they perceive a potential risk of sperm competition,” Tom Shackleford, a researcher at the University of Michigan, told the curious millions watching the documentary “What Do Women Really Want?” on The Learning Channel in 1997. (Although he was probably not referring to swinging men, who usually know how to control and savor their quickened urges.) Men, Shackleford continued, “may actually ejaculate more forcefully; the ejaculation may subjectively seem more intense, the orgasm may seem more intense, and the sexual relief following ejaculation may be more intense. All of this having been selected as a counter to potential sperm competition.” It was as if a suspicious male suddenly enjoyed (or endured) a biological syndrome, since his ejaculate was also awesomely rich in sperm cells.

Probably every “cuckolded” straight man has experienced SCS and felt the urgent drive to engage in sexual activity with his “betraying” partner. But in our society, as Wright pointed out, the straight man usually experiences this sexual
imperative as rage or self-torment. The syndrome can produce a range of behaviors: a man can start out asking hectoring questions then progress to masochistically demanding to know every last detail of a liaison—“Did you go down on him? How many times did you come? You let him
what?”
SCS can end in reconciliatory sex, violence, rape, or even murder. “‘My gut reaction to this,’” confessed one husband to author Dalma Heyn on his discovery of his wife’s infidelity, “‘was so deep, so violent, I felt my stomach being pulled out of me. I’m surprised, sometimes, that I didn’t kill or maim one of them, because I was nuts.’” Men almost never admit that their physiological response to encountering their partner having sex with another has a red-hot core of sexual desire to it. But when we understand the biology of why men universally obsess over the details afterward, we can see that something fundamental to human evolution is transpiring inside his body.

As I’ve reiterated in this book, the most venerable criticism of the lifestyle is that it is merely a means for men to have sex with women other than their spouse. Without doubt, almost every swinging man enjoys that pleasure, but if you probe a little deeper into their sexuality these men will tell you that being with their wife while she is being intimate with others is one of the most powerful draws of inviting another couple into their marriage for a night. As Elliot had told me at the Eden Resort: “It was like I was watching a movie star in a love scene. I can’t believe how
beautiful
she gets. So hot!” Female swing-club owners concur: “It’s a favorite fantasy of guys in the lifestyle, in my experience,” Chris Cosby of C.A.S.T. Couples in Houston, Texas, told me at a Lifestyles convention. And Patti Johnson, who runs San Francisco’s Bay City Socials, and who believes that the lifestyle is built on “matriarchal principles” that are geared as much for the female’s pleasure and desire for male attention as for the male’s desire for multiple partners, said, “It fits together nicely, like a puzzle; a woman gets to be
treated like a queen, and a guy gets to feel he’s married to a queen, with all the guys wanting what he’s got. They get really charged with all the flirtation.” Long before much was known about sperm competition, the observant Gay Talese, author of
Thy Neighbor’s Wife
, described this counterintuitive reaction of even neophyte swinging men to their wives’ encounters at an orgiastic swing club in California: “Men who noticed that their wives aroused other men became in many cases aroused by them themselves and strove to repossess them.”

In a manner unseen in straight society, lifestyle husbands have become connoisseurs at transmuting the natural urge to wipe out the competition into the pleasurable urge to—as Robin Baker put it—“duke it out inside the female to win the right to fertilize the egg.”

Let’s look briefly at how SCS works; why swinging husbands would consciously use it to eroticize their marital sex lives; and how it fits in with the willing promiscuity of wives who are comfortable in the lifestyle. SCS gives a whole new meaning to Iago’s advice to Othello: “Look to your wife, observe her well with Cassio.”

Until recently it was thought that the number of sperm a man deposited in his partner, and the force of his orgasm, depended on how recently the man had ejaculated. If a man masturbated on, say, Wednesday, then made love on Friday, he’d ejaculate less sperm with less force on the Friday when he made love. It was also assumed that all the sperm in a man’s ejaculate had one purpose. After a “routine” ejaculation of between 100 million and 300 million sperm cells, the seminal pool on the floor of the vagina seeped into the cervix and the sperm swam through the uterus and then to the fallopian tubes where they endeavored to meet up with an egg if one were floating by. If a woman had sex with two men, it was thought that the sperm from both partners would simply swim in their usual manner
to the ovum, and one sperm cell would blindly win the race. The general consensus of biologists was that a fellow was equipped with enough sperm so that if he got lucky with a naughty wife, it would be a fair race between him and the cuckolded husband, and vice versa. Essentially, the theory of human sperm competition was viewed from a philandering man’s perspective: there was just no evidence that females could aggressively and promiscuously promote such competition in their bodies.

Then, in the early 1990s, Baker and Bellis persuaded cohabiting students at the University of Manchester to use condoms and deliver to the lab each day the semen the males had ejaculated. The couples recorded the intimate details of their lives on questionnaires. The researchers examined the behavior of the males’ sperm when it encountered another’s, analyzed paternity tests, and conducted surveys of the females to find the prevalence of multiple mating within five-day periods.

In 1995 Baker and Bellis published their complete findings in
Human Sperm Competition: Copulation, Masturbation and Infidelity
, which demolished the notion that sperm were merely programmed to swim to the ovum, that females were “naturally” monogamous, and that males’ ejaculations and inseminate were not governed in any critical way by millions of years of female behavior. They discovered the smoking gun of “natural” human female infidelity. “There’s Kinsey,” pronounced Sarah Blaffer Hrdy in an interview in 1997, “there’s Masters and Johnson, there’s Baker and Bellis. They’re giants in the world of sex research. I think they’re heroes.”

Their “disturbing” conclusion was that these sexual adaptations were so fundamental that they could only have been shaped by evolution. The “innate” male fear of female licentiousness appeared justified. In our evolutionary past, monogamy had probably never existed as a biological “norm” for our species. Nor did it exist today. “Every one of us,” Baker
wrote in his popular book
Sperm Wars
, “is the person we are today because one of our recent ancestors produced an ejaculate competitive enough to win a sperm war.” Embedded for millions of years in the genes of every man is the absolute conviction that his partner could be having sex with someone else within days, hours, or minutes of having sex with him. The longer the time she spends away from him, the more convinced his
body
becomes—the body being a more accurate measure of evolutionary tendencies than a wishful mind. What I have termed SCS, and the increased pleasure in ejaculation it causes men, is the naturally selected manner in which males combat spousal licentiousness. Whenever a husband prepares to have sex with his wife, he unconsciously weighs the odds that she has been, or will be, unfaithful to him: “To increase the chances of winning the sperm wars that might follow, he needs to introduce more sperm. And this is just what he does.” Unconscious in straight men, cultivated and enjoyed by swinging men, SCS is a product of nature.

Suppose a straight couple are living together in ostensible monogamy, seeing each other every day and having sex a couple of times a week. Every time they make “routine” love the man will deposit some 200 million sperm cells, depending on how much his “loading muscles” squeeze out from the two sperm tubes rising out of the testicles and on the number of orgasmic spurts he employs to deliver the sperm and seminal fluid from the prostate. According to the old view, all these sperm were, by design, fertile egg-getters. But Baker and Bellis thought there could be another reason for the profusion. They discovered that less than 1 percent of a male’s vast number of sperm were programmed for this job. More than four-fifths—“kamikaze sperm”—were designed to actively hunt down and kill the sperm cells of other males in the female’s vagina, cervix, and womb. And just under one-fifth—“blockers”—were designed to obstruct the path of another male’s sperm.
Hence the billions of sperm a male’s testicles produce every month—enough to fertilize every female on the planet—most of them warriors ready for combat in the bodies of philandering women.

According to Baker and Bellis, a male would be totally unaware of the different war divisions in his inseminate, nor would he be able to control the number of “troops” he was ejaculating. At work was a blind evolutionary process governed by genetic inheritance: this process had selected for both the composition of a male’s sperm based on the probability of having to fight a war, and the amount of sperm cells the male’s body instinctively knew it must deliver to the female based on the immediate likelihood of that war. The routine delivery of millions of sperm, which could survive up to five days in the female, served as a kind of screen against surprise attack by a rival. Baker called the act of routine sex “topping up.”

Returning to our straight couple, suppose the man’s wife goes away for three days on a business trip with some colleagues that include an ex-boyfriend. Consciously the husband thinks she’s a loyal wife, but his genetic inheritance tells him differently. The night before she returns he feels the urge to masturbate, out of boredom he thinks. But his body is telling him to expel “old” sperm and shunt to the front of his sperm tubes younger sperm ready for battle. Normally, after three days without sex, he would inseminate her with the usual number of sperm. Their time apart, however, signals to the husband’s most basic instinct that an enemy could be at the gate, and his body begins preparing for war. Eventually, the single cannon shot of that war will be an act of increased pleasure.

Let’s suppose the man’s wife has indeed not been loyal, and she comes home with her reproductive tract secretly filled with the sperm of her ex-boyfriend. According to Baker she will then be unconsciously driven to do something very curious (something lifestyle wives, almost without exception, and without
much resistance from their husbands, do as well). “When she gets home, she works very hard to have sex with her partner.” Whether or not she really desires to get pregnant, her unconscious mind is telling her the following: that “she wants to have her egg fertilized by her ex-boyfriend only if his ejaculate is also the most fertile and competitive. In other words, her body wants to promote
sperm warfare
between the two men—”