CHAPTER ONE -- MONOGAMY SUCKS

MONOGAMY SUCKS, A SWINGER’S TALE, PART 1
By George Pappas, COPYRIGHT, 2010

CHAPTER ONE -- MONOGAMY SUCKS

BELMONT SHORE
LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA

Monogamy sucks.

I came to this sobering realization shortly after my thirty-fifth birthday. I had recently ended a dissatisfying relationship with yet another girlfriend because I was sexually restless and convinced I was missing out on something. This had become the frustrating pattern of my love life. Initially, I was enthralled with a new relationship, but typically after several months (sometimes weeks, days or even hours) I would grow bored and long to be single again.

There was no denying I was in the throes of a mid-thirties (not quite mid-life) lust crisis.

I am hardly alone in this. I believe this sexual restlessness, this strong need to explore is experienced by many men and women who are married or in long term relationships. They harbor these secret feelings in their hearts and at times act on them.

I am convinced that many who embrace monogamy are in deep denial. The rest of us tolerate it or grow to despise this unrealistic societal restriction of our natural impulses to sexually pursue pleasure with as many as partners as possible.

All I know is staying faithful frustrated me to no end as I attempted to make my way through a wasteland of failed love affairs and relationships. The thrill of the new – new pussy, new sexual adventures – intrigued and haunted me. Fidelity is also a struggle for a lot of other men, but many don’t have the guts to come out and say it for fearing the wrath of society and women in particular.

My name is Jake Dalmas and what follows is my diary. It is a strange document of how breaking the bonds of monogamy and ditching boring relationship sex led me on an always interesting, hilarious, intriguing and even at times nightmarish journey into the provocative world of swinging and casual sex.

How did I come to cross the line from conventional relationships into the sexually charged, but largely misunderstood scene of alternative sexual relationships or what is commonly known as swinging?

Lust, curiosity and boredom, mostly. Those were the driving forces that pushed me into forbidden territory. I was tired of being the good boyfriend who always remained faithful. I wanted the adventure and wild sex I had read about without being dishonest with myself and cheating on any of the women I was involved with. I guess I wanted to be a bad boy without being a lying asshole.

Deep down I still preferred serious relationships and still even believed I wanted to get married someday. However, as I have a low threshold for sexual boredom, I began to realize that this conventional lifestyle wasn’t a realistic option for me. My imagination burned with visions of orgies, wild sexual couplings, threesomes, and lusty adventures with women of every background, size and age. There was a porno movie playing in my head all the time.

My urges and desires began to affect every aspect of my life. After a while, I had trouble concentrating on anything else. I almost lost my job as a reporter at a daily newspaper because of this obsession, and later had to move into a less stressful public relations job so I would have more time to work out my sexual malaise.

Several of my girlfriends accused me of cheating on them. Well, I have to admit that I was unfaithful in my fantasies. Most of the time when I had sex with my girlfriends, I fantasized about other women. It was really the only way I could fuck them after a while. I was beginning to feel betrayed by my overactive sexual imagination.

Although I never acted on any of these lusty fantasies while I was in a relationship, I knew I was just fooling myself. It was only a matter of time. I wanted other women. There was no denying it. I began to wonder if we are truly monogamous beings? Some scientists are now struggling to explain the roots of our infidelity and there have been several scientific studies hinting that monogamy may not be natural. No one is really immune. Even former President Bill Clinton (and a number of presidents before him) couldn’t find a way to deal with their sexual urges.

I was searching for answers to my sexual confusion. But the bottom line: I was hoping to get laid as much as possible. I just wanted to have one day in my life like Hugh Hefner’s typical day at the Playboy Mansion (every hot blooded heterosexual American boy’s dream) and just bed down a bevy of sexy, stunning ladies.

I was also very curious about casual sex or put another way -- sex without relationship headaches and bullshit. Was it just a myth from the 1960s or 70s? Did it still exist? How far would people go to spice up their sex lives? Was the sexual revolution long over? Was it just a false myth that we couldn’t let go of?

Yet I embarked on my sexual sojourn with mixed feelings of trepidation, lust and excitement. Honestly, I was even somewhat scared. I was entering unknown territory, unchartered waters for me. I didn’t know what to expect. All I had to go on was rumor, fantasy and sketchy information provided by the Internet, men’s and women’s magazines and swinger rags.

Hollywood and the media only added to my confusion. Swinging or casual sex has been depicted in numerous slanted sensationalist media reports, and in movies such as “Bob, Ted, Carol and Alice” and the “Ice Storm,” as a pastime of bored suburbanites, sexual addicts, perverts, freaks, and the emotionally disturbed. Swinging has never truly been taken seriously by Hollywood or by mainstream society for that matter. Typically, it has been portrayed as some sort of freak show.

However, during my two-year journey into this sexual frontier, I discovered that the sexual revolution never really ended -- it just went underground. I came to view many of the swingers I met – even those I despised -- as erotic explorers and free spirits (not freaks) trying to find pleasure in life that many times lacks any. I know that was also my motivation to explore this sexual world. There had to be more than the traditional, boring relationship sex life for those of us with overactive erotic imaginations.

Casual sex is fast becoming the new recreational drug for American couples and singles in the new century. These erotic adventurers are craving the next hot encounter, the next sexual high.

You can never underestimate the power of lust and sexual fantasy. I believe everyone has been a swinger at least once in their lives. In their minds and imaginations, that is.

Swinging just may be America’s growing underground weekend sport. Each weekend married or unmarried couples hook up with other couples or male and female singles for no-strings sex. They are weekend sexual warriors looking for a new thrill, a new pleasure conquest. They can often be just total strangers meeting for a few hours of pleasure and excitement. They meet in swing clubs, through classified ads, 900 lines and now the Internet. In fact, right now this kind of erotic exploration is occurring in motel rooms, swing clubs and private parties held in beautiful homes right in your neighborhood. Maybe there will be a swing party going on right next door to you this weekend and you won’t even know it.

Each weekend (or vacation) represents an intriguing new adventure for these sexual explorers. In their own fashion, they are attempting to break out of societal restrictions and take more control over their erotic lives. I believe it is a response to monogamy and boredom.

Swinging is not dead. Wild sex has not vanished despite the threat of AIDS and other STDs. Casual sex is not an amusing ritual from the free wheeling 60s and 70s. Swinging is actually going more mainstream these days than many would care to admit. There are about 3 million swingers in the U.S. according to recent surveys and studies, but I think those figures are too low.

People you’d never suspect could have the wildest sex lives. A housewife from Redondo Beach could make Madonna look like a nun as she fucks 10 guys in one night. Or a hairdresser from Kansas could spend Saturday night having a threesome with her husband and his best friend.

Who are these people?

They could be anyone. They might be your neighbors. They are doctors, lawyers, CEOs of large corporations, sports stars, successful business people, actors, directors, writers, blue collar workers, truck drivers, warehouse workers, housewives and working women with children. They are family people with kids living the suburban life. They are the nice people living next door to you. They are work colleagues. They could be your best friend or even a family member. They could be the girlfriend in high school, who gave you a lousy blow job and didn’t seem into sex, but has since experienced sexual adventures far beyond anything you could have dreamed. Or they could be the boy you used to know in high school, who never talked to the girls, and now orchestrates a gangbang with 12 guys fucking his wife or maybe he fucks two or three women in a night.

I think you know a swinger right now and don’t even suspect it.

My cousin Jacob is a typical example. He holds the prevailing mainstream disdain toward swinging and has trouble understanding my interest in this sexual pastime. He down deep believes swinging is adulterous, disloyal and freakish.

However, he was a swinger at one time in his life and didn’t even know it. My cousin’s relationship with his one of his girlfriends came out of a threesome episode. During a weekend trip to Las Vegas, my cousin’s best friend Jack invited him to fuck his wife Julie. Soon after their sexual encounter, my cousin initiated an affair with Julie behind Jack’s back. A year later, Julie divorced her husband and moved in with my cousin. It all started with a threesome. The only difference is my cousin didn’t understand the concept of casual sex and consequently, he broke up someone else’s marriage. As with anything, there are risks. You have to know the rules of the game if you are going to play. I only mention it here because of my cousin’s hypocrisy about swinging and how it is shared by many in mainstream American society. His relationship with Julie was sparked by the kind of sexual adventure – a threesome -- he criticizes so harshly now.

You won’t find any celebrities or any sexual experts in the following diary -- just everyday people searching for something different to spice up and expand their sexual lives. For many of the couples I met along the way, it’s not marriage, but fidelity that they grew bored with. They craved variety, adventure and new forms of pleasure. That didn’t mean they couldn’t fall in love, have conventional lives with children and a house with the picket fence and a seemingly ideal surburban American Dream. They simply don’t agree with the conventional wisdom concerning sex and monogamy. Although it is changing somewhat, unfortunately, many in our society still see these swingers as abnormal and titillating freakish subjects for the TV talk show circuit rather than just open-minded and adventurous people.

Swinging is a sexual world shrouded in secrecy mostly the result of this societal disapproval. It truly is a hidden society with its own set of rules, language and mores. Discretion is a way of life for swingers. Let’s face it -- a lot people just don’t get it or are disgusted and horrified by the idea of another man or woman pleasing and fucking their spouses or long-time girlfriends or boyfriends.

Swinging is a state of mind, not just a lifestyle choice. Some people call it “sport fucking,” but I think it is more than that. Alternative sex offers an opportunity to explore a different side of one’s sexual personality or persona. It only goes to show a healthy interest in sexuality can’t be completely constrained by society. Of course, swinging is not for everyone nor should it be. It is not a journey for the faint of heart or the sexually cautious.

Before we get to my adventures, here’s a little background on me.

Let’s get this straight from the start: I am hardly a stud or a ladies man. I am tall and slender -- about 6- foot-2 and 150 pounds – with blonde hair and brown eyes. I don’t exactly look like a human praying mantis, but many of the women I have known consider me too skinny, even bony. It was worse growing up when I was taunted by schoolmates for my skinny frame. Even my some of my best friends used to call me “bones.” I worked out several times a week with weights and developed a slight muscular physique, but nothing helped.

I couldn’t get laid in high school to save my life. I was painfully shy growing up, particularly around women I found attractive. I never really knew what to say. I would get nervous and just clam up. I would rather say nothing than something stupid.

So as a teenager I discovered the joys of masturbation. I was the jack off king of Costa Mesa, California -- a slice of conservative, suburban hell located in Orange County near Newport Beach. Some call it “Reagan Country,” but it wasn’t that bad. There just wasn’t much to do. The place was once orange groves and open fields, but in the mid to late 1960s developers tapped into the growing population, specifically the flight of affluent young white families from Los Angeles, and built numerous tract homes. It was a very staid and predictable place to grow up, fitting the suburbia stereotype to a tee. They don’t call Orange County the Orange Curtain for nothing.

Despite my repressed environment, sex was not a forbidden subject in my family when I was growing up. My parents, who were raised in Utah but who are not Mormon or particularly religious, talked freely about sex as if it was just another part of life. As descendents of Greek immigrants, they had a very European way of looking at sex -- no shame, no embarrassment and no uptight hang-ups.

Our neighbors were a different story. They were for the most part uptight Catholics, who thought our parents were permissive freaks with no religion or discipline. To them, we were “heathens.” The parents of my best friend Grant forbade him to even watch the TV show “All in the Family.” They thought the controversial show might corrupt him in some way. Grant’s parents and the rest of the blue nose brigade on our block looked upon my family as a bad influence for their kids.

Not surprisingly, Grant and the other kids on my street were in awe of my parents. They couldn’t believe my father allowed me to have a subscription to Playboy at the age of 14. All of my friends (and even those who weren’t) used to make a sort of pilgrimage to my house to look at the forbidden photos of women who seemed so out of reach for us. In my room, we examined these Playboy photos as if studying artifacts from another distant but desirable civilization. It was truly our first connection to this hidden adult world. It was one of our adolescent rituals -- our first taste of forbidden fruit. Stuck in the boring teenage world of Orange County suburbia – Playboy was our escape – an erotic lifeline to something mysterious and exotic.

The same thing happened when our local pay TV service ON TVstarted offering soft porn movies. Seven or eight of us -- all horny teenagers without a clue about sex or women -- would pile into my dad’s den room to watch these forbidden films. We were fascinated and awed by these provocative depictions of erotica. They seem lame to me now, but back then it was something special. Everything in these movies was implied. No raw sex scenes. This was softcore porn. No depictions of actual penetration were displayed leaving the mystery of sex still intact and burning brighter than ever in our adolescent imaginations.

Our favorite soft porn flicks were those by director Russ Meyer. His films are funny and don’t take themselves too seriously, and he features women with big breasts that only fueled our adolescent fantasies. My favorite character in one of his movies was an attractive large breasted woman named “Lavonia.” Her adventures were sexy and funny, but what attracted me most about her was that she was a horny housewife. Fucking a horny housewife was one of my hottest adolescent fantasies. I used to jack off countless times thinking about some of the young housewives that lived in our neighborhood.

In one my favorite fantasies, I fucked a sexy older Latin woman that lived next door to us. I found out from several people in our neighborhood that when her husband was gone, she would put on a strip show. She pulled aside the drapes of a large window located at the front of her house, and slowly stripped naked for the neighbors. Unfortunately, I never caught her show. I stood out in front of her house every night for weeks after I heard about it, hoping for a glimpse, but the drapes remained closed for me.

Still, I imagined fucking her in front of the big window with the whole neighborhood watching us. In real life, we never exchanged more than several words. I was just a harmless kid who lived next door to her. I was not yet a man. I would sometimes purposely knock a baseball over into her backyard in a lame attempt to meet her, but she never took notice of me in that way. Although that didn’t put any damper on my masturbation fantasy.

Penthouse Magazine’s “Penthouse Forum” was another key source of sexual information (or misinformation?) during my teen years. The section’s lurid and risqué descriptions of wild and forbidden sexual encounters fired up my budding erotic imagination. Yet at the time, it just seem didn’t real to me. I thought it was just fake material for jacking off. I wondered who were these people who expressed their sexuality in such an uninhibited and wild manner. It was the Penthouse Forum that initially introduced me to the concept of alternative sex even though it seemed like science fiction to me at the time -- out of reach and very improbable.

Hugh Hefner, Bob Guccione and later even Larry Flynt were my real fathers when it came to my sexual education. Of course, even with access to all this sexual information as a teenager I still knew next to nothing about real women. They were as mysterious to me as creatures from another planet. Throughout my adolescence and even into my early twenties, I remained fearful to even talk to a woman. Whenever I tried, I felt awkward and foolish. I didn’t know what to say or I never seemed to say the right thing to attract them. Whenever I approached a woman I was attracted to, my heart would start beating out of control and I would break out into a cold sweat. I felt trapped by my own shyness and ignorance while my imagination was working overtime inflamed with unfulfilled sexual desires.

I fantasized and masturbated constantly during my teen years. I was admittedly a late bloomer and I was a virgin until shortly after I turned 22. I had my first sexual experience with an attractive African American woman named Shawna during my second year in college at California State University Long Beach. She was a tall, slender woman in her mid twenties with short hair, big brown eyes, large breasts and a nice round ass. It was her open and friendly attitude, and the fact she was a few years older that attracted me. She loved sex. She savored it. In a way, her openness scared me, too. She approached her sexuality with such confidence and abandon. Sex truly was an erotic journey for her.

Frankly, Shawna kind of overwhelmed me. I came in about 20 seconds when we first had sex. I felt embarrassed and admitted to her it was my first time. She smiled at me and laughed.
“Don’t worry about it, baby,” she said. “It will get better.” She was right, but ultimately I proved no match for Shawna’s sexual appetite and experience.

During our sexual encounters, Shawna had a unique way of expressing herself. When she was extremely aroused, she would start yelling, “Holy! Holy! baby....Holy! Holy! baby...oh holyyyyy holyyyyyy ......” Her holy chant would become more intense as she neared orgasm. Shawna would become lost in a reverie listening to erotic music only she could hear. When I asked her about it afterward, she just laughed and said, “when I am fucking, baby you never know what I might say.” But she always said the same thing when she was fucking. Odd, but hot, too.

Shawna was always horny wanting to fuck several times a day and I couldn’t keep up. She quickly got bored and after a few weeks, Shawna dumped me and took up with a much older and experienced lover -- one of her professors. I wonder if Shawna’s professor graded her on her curves.

I never forgot about her, though. Shawna’s fearless, open sexuality excited and inspired me. Years later I even found myself fantasizing about her when I fucked other women. Her attitude was similar to that of the swingers I would meet later on.

I knew infiltrating the mysterious and underground world of swingers was not going to be easy. I was embarking on a trip without a roadmap or compass. All I really had to go on were essentially erotic myths, rumors and fantasies. I really didn’t know what I would find. Maybe I would discover aspects about myself and my sexuality I had not previously known or even a new way to express myself sexually.

I also wondered what past writers, particularly Henry Miller and Anais Nin, would make of today’s modern conveniences of voicemail, 900 numbers, the explosion of porn, and the Internet. Would they find the same basic truths about sex, monogamy and love? Or would they be faced with an emptiness, a modern, calculated, instant gratification world of erotica featuring wall-to-wall sucking and fucking with no real sense of adventure, heart or soul? Inspired by their amazing and provocative novels and diaries, I wanted to explore the evolving nature of eroticism, sex and romance occurring in my time as they did in theirs.

Through my adventures, I was also hoping to shed some light on a thriving sexual underground in America and discover if swinging has truly gone mainstream. I can only hope I have honestly put down in my swinger’s diary what I was feeling and experiencing during my wild romp through this confused journey that we call modern sex.