In 2001, a petite, middle-aged, married art critic and magazine editor named Catherine Millet shocked French society with the publication of La vie sexuelle de Catherine M.^[1] In the explicit memoir, Millet reveals—among other things—a taste for being the center of attention at sex parties and gang bangs. A lifelong exhibitionist, she becomes more daring in the company of a regular lover who offers her to anonymous men in restaurants, parks, art galleries, parking garages, a swingers’ club called Chez Aimé, and anywhere else he decides to lift her skirt and invite a stranger’s hands to wander. “In the biggest orgies in which I participated,” Millet recalls, “there could be up to about 150 people (they did not all fuck, some had come to watch), and I would take on the cocks of around a quarter or a fifth of them in all the available ways: in my hands, my mouth, my cunt and my ass.”^[2] She occasionally admits to feelings of uneasiness or hesitation before such an event or of succumbing to exhaustion afterward but nonetheless jumps in without complaint. She even catalogues her battle wounds with pride—scrapes, bruises, rashes, soreness, or stiffness in her legs “after being pinioned sometimes for four hours.”

Millet refuses, both explicitly and through her adventures, many of the sexual narratives available to contemporary women as well as taken-for-granted explanations of cause and effect in erotic life. Rather than characterize herself as damaged by a grandfather’s inappropriate touches in her youth, for example, Millet casts it as a coming-of-age experience, disconcerting but valuable. As an adult, she claims more embarrassment at being caught with crumbs on her mouth than being seen naked or having sex in public. Groups of men preparing to take her sexually, one after another, inspire in her not fear of potential violence but an appreciation for the kindness they show her. Millet also resists defining sex as either inherently repressive or revolutionary: living one’s live in a sexually open manner, as she most certainly did, does not guarantee either positive or negative experiences.^[3]

Hailed as the “most explicit book about sex ever written by a woman,” The Sexual Life of Catherine M inspired both admiration and animosity. Many critics were disturbed by Millet’s matter-of-fact, emotionally detached style, decrying the book as “boring,” “not sexy,” or “explicit without being erotic.” One reviewer, pronouncing the writing “dreary” and “dull,” suggests that for Millet, sex “is as simple as eating a bowl of soup.”^[4] It is no surprise that many readers expecting titillation are dissatisfied. The pages are filled with orgies, but also with the unappealing realities of human bodies—cellulite, “drooping guts,” “balding heads, and jowly faces.” There are bad teeth and bad smells. Every body fluid makes a cameo appearance, although something about Millet’s reactions to these close encounters with humanity calls to mind St. Catherine of Siena, drinking pus from the sores of her plague-ridden patients, instead of Lisa Sparxxx, the “world gang bang” record holder and star of Gag Factor 13.

She might, in fact, actually like the soup-eating metaphor. After all, she claims that she “never really thought about my sexuality very much” before writing the book. Fucking is “like breathing” for her. Uncomplicated. She avoids flirtation, which makes her awkward and uncomfortable, and prefers to hasten on to the main event wherever it might occur, no matter how public or proscribed: “If it were possible for the thronging crowds at a train station or the organized hordes in the Metro to accept the crudest accesses of pleasure in their midst as they accept displays of the most abject misery, I could easily undertake that sort of coupling, like an animal.”^[5] She also claims “indifference to the uses we assign our bodies,” offering every bodily orifice to the group “without hesitation or regret” and “with a totally clear conscience.”^[6] This indifference extends to her sexual partners—who might be male or female, washed or unwashed, of any height and weight, or even indistinguishable from one another, a parade of anonymous appendages. Even in her fantasies, Millet is available to all—a “vulgar fat man,” businessmen with “saggy” faces, the kitchen boys, or very old, dirty men who haven’t washed “for so long that they’ll have scabs on their skin.”^[7]

Millet takes satisfaction in having “no feelings of restraint” in the moment, in pursuing “the contrasting intermingling of experiences of pleasure, which projects us outside ourselves, and filth, which belittles us.”^[9] “You don’t have to be a great psychologist,” she admits, “to deduce from this behavior an inclination for self-abasement.” Her inclination to find “appeasement in filth” was coupled with feelings of “extraordinary” freedom:

Her indifference, in fact, is calculated transgression. After all, if one is truly indifferent to the uses to which the body is put, why repeatedly use one’s body for orgies? Why get into a taxi sent in the middle of the night to be whisked away to a gang bang? Why expend the energy to appear “tireless” or “uninhibited” in front of the throngs of people gathered around waiting for their turn? And if one “hates to feel wet anywhere other than under a shower,”^[11] why bathe in the effluvia of others—their sweat, semen, urine, or feces? Millet’s indiscriminate sexual partnering is not the spontaneous result of a loss of self or morality, as in the orgy stories of chapter 2; rather, it is deliberate and premeditated. Edging against the boundaries of personal and social acceptability is part of the erotic appeal of her adventures.

Her “open mind”^[12] in such matters, Millet believes, was partly because she “had not imagined” that her own pleasure could be the aim of a sexual encounter until around the age of thirty-five, although there is clearly more to the story. The pleasure she does experience is incidental and vicarious: “First, I had to . . . literally abandon my whole body—to sexual activity, to lose myself in it so thoroughly that I confused myself with my partner.”^[13] She becomes exhibitionist and voyeur as her erotics focus either on herself as the center of the activity or on the body “left behind” when she fantasizes her sense of self as displaced. During sex, Millet often imagines herself as less than human, taking on an “animal identity”: a “spider in a web” when surrounded by men, a “waddling duck” when being asked to walk while being penetrated from behind, and something “between a frog and those upside-down insects that beat the air with their short legs” when lying on her back on top of a man. This fantasy of animalistic indifference alternates with self-conscious transgression. Millet writes of seeing her reflection in the mirror while masturbating, of avoiding her eyes yet watching her body as others might:

Millet delights in such exposure, although it is unclear whether she has more erotic investment in her actual sexual adventures, in her “mémoire diabolique” of those adventures,^[15] or in the narratives she creates for others. She details her escapades for friends, “savoring” their disgust at specific acts or partners, evoking “dirtiness” and a “contagious ugliness.”^[16] She also enjoys her reputation. “I was seen as someone with no taboos, someone exceptionally uninhibited,” she writes, “and I had no reason not to fill this role.”^[17] Writing a memoir, of course, prolongs the pleasure of both “wallowing” in the muck and throwing handfuls of it at the crowd gathered to watch, fascinated and repulsed. As Millet indulges readers with intimate details many would rather not think of, much less expose, she once again leaves herself behind:

“Do It Like They Do on the Discovery Channel”?

In a 2006 news story shared widely on the Internet, pandas became pornography’s most significant new species of consumer. The Chiang Mai Zoo in Thailand borrowed two giant pandas from China, hoping they might mate successfully in a warmer climate. They hadn’t done so well in China. Pandas are reclusive creatures in the wild, with little experience interacting with each other. They are also notoriously poor breeders. Captivity exacerbates the situation: the already finicky pandas have fewer sexual partners to choose from, and the sedentary lifestyle makes them lazy.

Tired of watching the platonic pandas putter around their leafy habitat, showing no interest in copulating, zoo officials decided to be proactive. First, they separated the pandas, hoping that distance might kindle desire. Next, the male, Chuang Chuang, was put on a diet, as zoo officials worried that he was too portly to mate without injuring Lin Hui. Then Chuang Chuang was given a big-screen television, some low-calorie bamboo, and a stash of panda porn.^[19] The pandas’ cub, Lin Ping, was born in 2009 as a result of artificial insemination.

Still, panda porn has since been used successfully back in China, at the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, where scientists find “that the combination of porn, exercises, and the occasional ménage à trois” at least stirs up curiosity about sex for young male pandas, an important first step. Zhang Zhihe, the director of the research institute, reports that “more than 60 percent of his pandas are now capable of having sex on their own—up from just 25 percent twenty years ago.”^[20] Journalists compared the pandas’ sexual dysfunctions to those of humans—“sometimes married couples just need to add a little spice to their love lives.”^[21] The difficulties of “mating in captivity,” actually the title of an internationally popular book on monogamy,^[22] may be shared among mammals.

Zookeepers in India scrambled to find a film of chimpanzees having sex when faced with a similar situation. It wasn’t just that the primates were unimpressed with the human performances in I Dream of Jenna, but that young chimps learn the facts of life by watching adult chimps. Unfortunately, there were few other chimps to watch and very little live action in their habitat. Instead of spending all their time “eating and playing,” zookeepers hoped males that watched a chimp sex flick would show more interest in females who approached them.^[23]

Now, we cannot make too much of these stories. Who knows what wild pandas or chimps really need to get them in the mood? Perhaps zookeepers created desires for sexual imagery rather than stimulating existing desires to watch other animals having sex. Even if pandas had opposable thumbs and mirror neurons, for example, they might never develop the Qinling Mountains as the Ailuropoda melanoleuca version of “San Pornando Valley.”

How people learn about sex in modern societies is a controversial topic. Humans are social animals, not reclusive loners like pandas. But unlike chimps or their bonobo cousins, widespread norms of privacy during sex—and often, actual laws against public copulation—mean that most of us don’t learn how to have sex by watching our elders and relatives. Aside from porn, the average person knows little about what sex looks like for other people once they stumble home from the neighborhood pub. In rural areas around the world, children observe animals mating; urban parents with National Geographic on their cable lineup know that city kids show interest, too. Youthful curiosity doesn’t stop with animals. Anthropologists occasionally witness young children engaged in sexual play with each other with no adult reprimands, although this is rare in Western societies. Other times, due to close living quarters, as in cases of whole families sharing a bed, kids learn about sex inadvertently. In some societies or groups, “apprenticeships” or coming-of-age ceremonies still impart sexual knowledge to young adults; young men may still be taken to a brothel by relatives for their first sexual experience, for example.

Many American parents wish sex education could occur through osmosis; others want control over how—and what—their kids learn. Contemporary youth may learn about sex from peers, educators, pop culture, and personal experience. In some countries, such as Switzerland or the Netherlands, comprehensive sex education is offered in public schools beginning at an early age. In the United States, public sex education programs are often pressured to maintain an abstinence-based approach.

Mainstream sex education doesn’t even usually include photographs, much less action-focused instruction. Watching others have sex, however, is still a way of obtaining information—whether live or recorded, “educational” or “pornographic.” A 2009 study of fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds in England found that many admitted to learning about sex from pornography, even though they realized it might “give boys or girls false ideas about sex.”^[24] New York teenagers credit Google and YouTube as sources of both useful and “inappropriate” information about sex.^[25] ProFamilia, a German social work organization that teaches about sexuality in middle schools, found that new questions were spurred when teens educated themselves using porn. One young girl, for example, worried she was “turning into a man” because she’d found a hair growing in her armpit—she’d never seen women with underarm hair in the porn she viewed on the Internet.^[26]

In 2011, after one of his human sexuality lectures at Northwestern University in Chicago, Professor Michael Bailey allowed two guest speakers to perform a live demonstration of a female G-spot orgasm. The six hundred or so undergraduate students were informed that the demonstration was optional and would be sexually explicit; around one hundred remained. The woman took off her clothes and lay on a towel on the auditorium stage. Explaining that she had a “fetish for being watched by large crowds while having an orgasm,” she then proceeded to indulge this desire with the help of her fiancé and a sex toy.^[27] Although one student expressed surprise at how explicit the demonstration became, most supported it as educational, and none filed complaints with the university. Still, the incident became a national scandal, which Bailey realized when he received a call from Fox News. Reactions both on and off campus ranged from “troubled and disappointed” to utter panic. Bailey was rebuked for poor judgment. Clinical psychologist and sexuality expert Judy Kuriansky told Fox News that the demonstration was inappropriate, aiming at “shock value more than educational value.” While educating about sexual behavior, even “kinkiness,” is important, Kuriansky insisted, “talking about it can show you just as much.”^[28] Some critics couldn’t even explain why they believed the incident was so harmful but responded with revulsion anyway. That the guest speakers used a motorized sex toy called a “fucksaw” didn’t help Bailey’s case. Bloggers and journalists sprang on the term, reporting on “fucksaw-gate,” Northwestern’s new “minor in fucksaw sciences,” and “Professor Fucksaw.” “Fucksaw fallout” spread beyond campus: after the scandal, students on spring break from Northwestern who were supposed to build a nature trail in Hixson, Tennessee, were prevented from camping on the nearby property of the Community Baptist Church while they did so. The pastor, Clifton Roth, had stumbled onto the story, decided that God meant him to see it, and resolved not to have his church “associated with a university that would condone a live sex-toy demonstration.”^[29]

In response to the controversy, Bailey explained to the media that one of his primary research areas was sexual diversity. Previous guests in his sexuality course had been swingers, transsexuals, and convicted sex offenders.^[30] His students were consenting adults, he emphasized, not “fragile children.” Eventually, Bailey issued an apology for his decision though maintaining his stance that the demonstration had not caused harm. As he told his class: “Sticks and stones may break your bones, but watching naked people on stage doing pleasurable things will never hurt you.”

Witnessing and being witnessed in erotic activity, however, can trigger intense and ambivalent emotional responses. Group sex can have educational aspects for humans, as participants are exposed to the many ways people express or experience pleasure as well as how bodies look and move during sex. But sex education of any form is rarely just about techniques or facts—those of us who teach about sexuality grow accustomed to the predictable silences or nervous giggles of the audience. After all, long before we become interested in the mechanics of intercourse, reproduction, or motorized dildos, we’ve absorbed a great deal of critical information about sex.

The Razor’s Edge: Disgust, Shame, Guilt, and Sexuality

Disgust, shame, and guilt are the basic social emotions that Freud called “mental dams,” focusing intently on the orifices used for sex, elimination of waste, and eating. At the same time as they “dam” unconscious and potentially troublesome sexual desires, however, disgust, shame, and guilt can also be implicated in arousal.^[31]

Studying emotion across cultures, like studying privacy or other concepts, presents philosophical and methodological difficulties.^[32] While it would be impossible to do justice to the intricacies of the debates raging through the vast literature on emotion, the question of universalism versus particularity must be addressed. Although all languages have a word for “feel” and ways to describe feelings as “good” or “bad,”^[33] terms about emotion that exist in one language do not always have direct equivalents in others. Some extreme cultural constructionists or relativists argue that this proves no emotions are universal; other thinkers believe this to be an example of how cultures distinctly elaborate on human emotional experience, not that people actually feel differently. An equivalent of the German word Schadenfreude, for example, does not exist in English. Still, the regularity with which celebrities such as Britney Spears or Kim Kardashian end up on the cover of People Magazine for failed relationships or weight gain shows that Americans can “derive joy in others’ misfortunes,” regardless of whether the experience is recognized or labeled. For my purposes here, disgust, shame, and guilt are explored in terms of their mandatory, minimal meanings—that is, as abstract concepts pertaining to potential human capacities and experiences across cultures, regardless of which terms exist in a given culture’s language.^[34] Those minimal meanings, of course, are always fused with more specific cultural and personal meanings. (Many thinkers believe that shame and guilt require uniquely human capacities for symbolic self-awareness and self-reflection, although there is evidence that some animals, especially those who live closely with humans and must respond to human emotional states, may be developing these capacities.)

Disgust is a prime example of a universal human response—strong aversion involving withdrawal from a person or object—that is triggered and expressed in culturally and individually variable ways. Although humans have an innate capacity for disgust, the triggers are not necessarily instinctive, as any mother who has found her infant drawing on its body with feces can attest. Disgust can also be overcome, as the same mother then demonstrates by washing her baby. That’s Disgusting is a popular book that teaches some rules of disgust to children. Illustrations of various actions, such as sticking your hands in the jelly jar, eating hair, and pooping in the bathtub, are followed by the refrain, “That’s disgusting!” My daughter loved the book, especially when we yelled the refrain together. Unfortunately for me, she also began replicating each scenario, one by one.

Had she not gotten in trouble for doing so, however, I believe she might have found some of the results more amusing than disgusting. My responses, I was highly aware, likely shaped her future experiences of those disgust rules as either fun to break or horrifying to encounter.

Sexual contact requires “boundary crossings”—both the boundaries of the body and the boundaries of the self—that are invested with intense psychic meaning: Me. Not me. Because sex requires intimate contact between bodies, disgust rules come into play—consciously or unconsciously; culturally and individually. Genitals mark a boundary between the inside and outside of the body. Body fluids, one’s own or those of other people, are often seen as contaminating, dangerous, or powerful; contact with body fluids may be subject to a variety of taboos. A video used to teach abstinence in American schools asks teenagers to chew cheese snacks and then spit the chewed-up crackers into glasses of water. The dirty water represents body fluids that the teens then “share,” simulating sex by pouring the concoctions into one another’s glasses.^[35] Although viewers are indeed disgusted by this exercise, as are participants, the video misses an important point. Certainly, it might turn your stomach to think of someone’s spit in your mouth, much less other body fluids. This is why the cheese-snacks exercise worked in generating disgust—at least at that particular moment. This is also one of the reasons that sex can be so traumatic when used as violence. But what about your lover’s spit? Does anyone really think these young viewers were plagued by visions of soggy Cheez-Its during their next backseat Twister session?

William I. Miller, a law professor who writes on emotions and human culture, points out that a person’s tongue in your mouth “could be experienced as a pleasure or as a most repulsive and nauseating intrusion” depending on your relationship with the tongue’s owner.^[36] The thought of a stranger’s invasion of one’s bodily boundaries can cause disgust; so, too, can the touch of someone too familiar. (One therapist I know asks troubled couples to kiss—with tongue—for five minutes a day. The most common response she hears? “Yuck!”) Although disgust rules may be relaxed or overcome in certain situations, then, the fact that they exist can add to the arousal of those breaking them. When we are in love or want to have sex, Miller argues, we will do things or let things be done to us that “would trigger disgust if unprivileged, if coerced, or even if witnessed.” If one never overcomes disgust in certain situations or with particular partners, one’s sexuality may be experienced as too inhibited. If one never feels disgust over boundary transgressions, others may wonder about his or her sanity.

Miller argues that semen is perhaps the most polluting body fluid, with “the capacity to feminize and humiliate that which it touches.”^[37] A niche genre of gonzo pornography^[38] involves group sex where a “money shot”—the standard male ejaculation scene—is not the erotic conclusion. Instead, semen and other body fluids such as urine, saliva, enema fluids, or vomit from multiple actors are collected. All these fluids have the power to disgust and pollute, especially when externalized from the body (even our own saliva, for example, which we swallow hundreds of times a day, becomes disgusting once put in a glass, and most people balk at reingesting it). The scene culminates when an actor (gay male porn) or actress (heterosexual porn) either enthusiastically or reluctantly ingests the fluids. This is usually done creatively: a film in the Perverted Stories series shows a woman using the concoction on her breakfast cereal instead of milk; other films feature funnels, straws, or bowls. Fluid ingestion is viewed as a means of challenging limits, both social and psychological. The incorporation of foreign body fluids (or body fluids made “foreign” by their externalization from the body, such as spit in a glass) into one’s own body violates the integrity and the boundaries of the body onscreen but also jeopardizes the viewer vicariously. At least some of the erotic power of pornography emerges through the graphic transgression of taboos, although there are cultural and historical patterns in what is considered “hot” and individuals respond differently. In gay porn, fluid ingestion carries additional erotic meaning as visual proof of unsafe sex. In the film Fucking Crazy, bottom Max Holden retains the semen from gang bang participants in his body overnight and ingests it the next day. Some viewers find these scenes arousing; others find them disturbing.^[39]

Miller’s analysis is culturally specific, however, as the meaning of body fluids, and the taboos surrounding them, vary across time and place. An array of practices sometimes collectively referred to as “ritualized homosexuality” was reported in about 10 to 20 percent of Papua New Guinea cultures, although no longer practiced consistently today. In these societies, vaginal fluids were believed polluting—adult men would often spit after saying the word “vagina” and would try to avoid inhaling “vaginal smell”—but semen was viewed as powerful. Young boys were required to leave their mothers and transition into “men’s houses” at around ten to thirteen years of age, when they also began having sexual contact with an older male or series of older males. Semen was believed essential in order for boys to mature into men; same-sex contact was believed to build up semen in the body, while heterosexual contact was thought to deplete it. For this reason, many taboos existed on heterosexual intercourse but far fewer on same-sex activity. Among some groups, such as the Marind-anim, same-sex activities continued until marriage or the birth of a child; among other groups, same-sex practices were primarily limited to rituals and initiation ceremonies. Initiation ceremonies might involve oral sex, anal sex, masturbation, or, as found among the Kimam, collective intercourse with women, after which the semen was gathered and rubbed on the men’s bodies.^[40] Although these practices were rooted in the specific cosmology of each group, men’s sexual activities were generally kept secret from women; being witnessed by a woman potentially undermined the entire social structure by exposing the source of male strength and dominance.

Anthropologist Gil Herdt points out that these New Guinea men were not “homosexual,” even though they engaged in powerful, secret homoerotic relations; eventually, they took up exclusively heterosexual relationships.^[41] Anthropologist Deborah Elliston disagrees with Herdt that the relations can consistently be termed “homoerotic” or even erotic, arguing that “erotics and sexuality are not central—and probably not even relevant to the meanings of these practices.”^[42] Instead of “ritualized homosexuality,” Elliston uses the phrase “semen practices.”^[43] She points out that boys initially responded with “revulsion and significant fear” upon learning that initiation entailed fellatio. Initiations also unfolded within hierarchical structures of age and gender—boys are feminized and positioned as inferior to older bachelors, who are inferior to the male elders, in a transition to manhood. Although fear and revulsion arguably play roles in many societies when youth are introduced to sexuality—in the United States, for example, girls may be taught that losing their virginity will be painful, and both sexes are warned about the dangers of disease (pollution)—Elliston’s aim of sidestepping the question of homoerotic or heteroerotic motivation is important.

In societies without a concept of “essential sexual orientation”—for example, where all boys progress through age ranks first associated with same-sex and then opposite-sex activity to become “men”—the possibilities and dangers involved in contact with body fluids differ from Western scenarios. Practices such as cane swallowing, which causes vomiting, and induced nosebleeds expurgate female substances from the men’s bodies, illustrating how the categories of masculinity and femininity are seen “as permeable and subject to change through contact with other substances.”^[44] Semen and breast milk are linked in many societies with semen practices, and women were also sometimes believed to benefit from the ingestion of or contact with semen. In initiations, Sambia boys were told that breast milk is created from the transformation of semen in the mother’s body (the women, however, challenge this belief).^[45] Elliston points out that the Kaliai even have a term to designate “those liquid substances which have the capacity to create social ties”—which are semen or male substance, breast milk, and “the fluid of the green coconut.”

The plots of Perverted Stories and Fucking Crazy would surely fail in such contexts—the jeopardy experienced by viewers of consumption porn is unintelligible if the actress’s breakfast of semen-cereal is interpreted as enhancing her reproductive potential or siphoning male strength or if Max Holden’s ritualized semen ingestion is not a mark of his willingness to push the edges of sanity but a necessary part of becoming a man.

Nonetheless, fluids remain powerful, subject to taboos and implicated in the boundaries between self and other, and disgust becomes a sliding indicator of how these boundaries are conceptualized within and between groups. According to anthropologist Raymond Kelly, the Etoro of the Highlands area believed that heterosexual relations depleted male virility, but did not necessarily find women themselves to be polluting. The Kaluli, on the other hand, more rigorously enforced segregation between men and women and believed that menstrual fluid was so polluting that if a menstruating women cooked or stepped over food, those who ate it—and in particular, her husband—could fall ill and die. And while the Etoro practiced oral insemination, believing it produced strong men, they reviled Kaluli anal insemination initiation practices, which were “regarded as totally disgusting.” Not surprisingly, the Kaluli and Etoro considered themselves enemies.^[46]

Shame is a close relative of disgust and a means by which disgust rules and other social norms are taught and enforced. As social and reflexive beings, humans objectify and compare themselves with others. Anthropologist Richard Shweder suggests a minimal conceptualization of shame as “the deeply felt and highly motivating experience of the fear of being judged defective.” This might involve either a “real or anticipated loss of status, affection, or self-regard that results from knowing that one is vulnerable to the disapproving gaze or negative judgment of others.” Shame often focuses on four key evolutionary areas: sexual behavior, prosocial behavior (failures to meet obligations), conformity to rules, fashions, or traditions, and “resource competition (failure to compete competently for resources and/or being seen to lack the abilities to competently do so).”^[47] Cultures may focus more attention on any given domain, depending on other beliefs, meanings, and circumstances; the emphasis can change over time. Children learn cultural norms, such as how to respond to their bodily functions, through the attention, facial expressions, and encouragement or discipline of parents, other adults, and peers. A capacity for shame, Shweder believes, is necessary for social life, and “shame-like feelings of one sort or another are probably found everywhere in the world, at least among ‘normal’ or non-psychopathic members of human social groups.” Still, the abstract fear of being judged defective takes specific cultural and historical shapes; it would be incorrect to say: “The word for shame in the such-and-such language is X.”^[48] Shame—at least in the way that Shweder is interested in it—is not a “word” in any language; it is a universal abstract concept.

Psychiatrist Michael Lewis similarly argues that universal and relativist approaches are not antithetical when it comes to shame, although he defines shame differently, as “self blame following an important failure of the self.” Both shame and guilt are “negative feeling states meant to interrupt actions violating either internally or externally derived standards or rules,” although these standards and rules vary over time and place.^[49] As an evaluation of the self, shame is more intense than guilt, Lewis believes, so aversive, in fact, that “humans everywhere attempt to rid themselves of it” using a variety of techniques to dissipate their feelings, such as forgetting or denial, laughter, or confession. If shame is too painful for an individual to acknowledge, it may be “bypassed” or transformed into sadness or anger. If someone is shamed frequently or intensely and unable to recover, that person may exhibit the more extreme parallels of these emotions, depression or rage.^[50] Individuals may be more or less vulnerable to shame or guilt due to personality differences, the nature of their relationships, their experiences of child rearing and punishment, and their social positions (sex, social class, race, religion, ethnicity, etc.).

Psychoanalyst Joseph Lichtenberg defines shame even more broadly, as an emotion that blunts initiative and curbs excitement. He views shame as the primary dividing factor between sensual and sexual experience. Sensuality is soothing, pleasurable, unconflicted, and related to our attachments to others. Sexuality, on the other hand, arises when a child’s pleasure seeking is inhibited by caregivers; these activities then become tense and conflict laden, representing a struggle between bodily pleasure seeking and shame. Constraints and prohibitions introduced by caregivers are reinforced in various forms by authorities and institutions over the life course. Sexuality thus has an edge that sensuality does not, he writes, “and that edge is itself a stimulus” to excitement, involving elements of power and transgression.^[51] Shame, for Lichtenberg, is instrumental in creating the prohibitions and boundaries that we later find arousing; it is also a key element shaping the experience of boundary crossings as disturbing, subversive, or rebellious. Because shame is a threat to the self, the precise ways that shame interacts with sexuality depend on how the self is conceptualized in relation to others in any given belief system. Still, shame animates all expressions of human sexuality to varying degrees.

Each of these thinkers conceptualizes shame slightly differently. Shweder, for example, avoids the term “self,” a concept which some anthropologists deem ethnocentric. Lewis retains the concept of the self but argues that his definition holds even if we recognize multiple selves—shame arises in relation to the failure and blame of any of them. Lewis also provides a way to distinguish between shame and guilt, at least phenomenologically, and recognizes that when shame is unacknowledged or too intense for an individual to bear, it may be transformed into other emotions. Lichtenberg’s shame is more primal, as consciousness of a “self” is not necessary in his approach; one can observe aversive responses to the dampening of pleasure-seeking behavior in infants and toddlers. Although there are implications to choosing among these definitions, each way of theorizing shame highlights these crucial aspects: shame is experienced in relation to real or imagined others, inhibits us from violating norms, is an aversive experience, and is implicated in erotic life.

Some thinkers classify societies as either “shame” or “guilt” cultures, depending on which emotion dominates their moral systems, although such a distinction is problematic. Guilt is minimally conceptualized here as a self-reflexive acknowledgment that one’s behavior does not conform to known standards, rules, or goals. Guilt can have immediate effects, causing us to cease a given behavior, or more long-term impacts, preventing us from doing something again. Guilt can also become intertwined with arousal when we break rules. Some individuals come to feel more “turned on” when violating prohibitions. Guilt might be thought of as that voice in your head saying, “You shouldn’t be doing this,” as you either shift your actions in line with social expectations or grow more excited about doing exactly what you aren’t supposed to be doing.

A preference for relative sexual privacy can thus be widespread among humans, bolstered by our emotional capabilities for disgust, shame, and guilt, and at the same time rooted in specific beliefs. Being “caught in the act,” then, does not happen the same way, have the same meanings or repercussions, or generate the same emotional experience across contexts or individuals. In cultural contexts where nakedness is viewed as shameful, for example, preferences for sexual privacy may be related to, though not completely explained by, desires to manage bodily exposure. Nudity is not necessary for sex (just think—“lights out, under the covers”), but the human body is highly symbolic; the way one’s body is displayed and the “uses to which it is assigned” are often intense emotional matters. Just ask the stripper whose next-door neighbor has unexpectedly appeared at her stage, or consider Millet’s discomfort at being seen with crumbs on her lips but not with her lips on others’ genitals. One might feel “naked,” in the sense of being shamefully exposed, regardless of one’s state of dress. The meaning of bodily exposure also varies, depending on who is interpreting it. While a young Canadian girl may be embarrassed if a stranger catches her dressing, the experience does not necessarily shame her entire family, as it might in Afghanistan. And even though Captain Cook wrote that “these people are Naked and not ashame’d,” the Tahitians might have thought otherwise—about the nakedness, at least. What a British trader interpreted as sexual exhibitionism—a Tahitian woman who several times “unveiled all her charms” before him, even turning around several times to give him “a most convenient opportunity” to admire her—was quite possibly a display of her tattoos rather than her genitals. Tattoos were a reassurance that she was a mature adult, safe to barter with, and a sign of status.^[52]

In contemporary Western cultures, nudity has conflicting meanings. In Hellenistic traditions, nudity is revered as truthful and natural; in Hebraic traditions, being clothed is a mark of humanity.^[53] Because prohibitions on nudity can thus be figured as either necessary for civilization or as the repression of a “natural” humanity, the naked body stirs up ambivalent emotional reactions. Nudity can produce desirable feelings of exposure, as between lovers, or shameful ones, as when stripping is used as a punitive measure. Those who willingly or purposely shed their clothes in public—“streakers” or nudists, for example—are often viewed as disrupting the social order and are criminalized, pathologized, or stigmatized.

But preferences for sexual privacy are not always related to feelings about one’s exposed body. The Yanomami of Brazil, who live in shabanos, or group houses, use the word soka sokamou for crude or impolite sex. Acceptable sex occurs in relative privacy, in the rainforest or their gardens, and preferably in the morning. If a couple have sex in the shabano, they should remain quiet.^[54] While the same fear of being judged defective and suffering a social loss because of one’s inappropriate sexual behavior could be said to underlie both the Yanomami concept of soka sokamou and the American idea of “sluttiness,” the words do not mean the same thing. Rather, they are culture-specific manifestations of shameful behavior in particular contexts. “Being walked in on” or “being heard” during sex—experiences for which middle-class Americans do not have a specific word, perhaps because they are relatively infrequent^[55] —is closer to soka sokamou in terms of actual meaning. Sluttiness, on the other hand, is a negative evaluation of behavior tied to beliefs about gender and sexuality.

Disgust, shame, and guilt are never the entire story in sexuality; other emotions, experienced and interpreted within interpersonal, social, cultural, historical, political, and economic contexts, play supporting roles. Gender, class, race, age or generation, educational background, religious identification, and other social positions also influence the realm of sexuality and erotics. Part of what makes group sex so powerful even across these differences, however, is that it violates even more disgust rules, psychic boundaries, and cultural prohibitions than dyadic sex—and it does so in front of witnesses.

“Taming with the Banana”: Gang Rape and Social Hierarchies

Experiences of extreme disgust, shame, and guilt can be produced through forced sex. When disgust is not overcome by desire, transgressions of one’s bodily boundaries are not arousing but shattering. If shame spreads too far, putting the self in more jeopardy than can be sustained, the subsequent annihilation is not exciting but terrifying. Guilt can continue to punish after the fact, leading to cyclical self-blame. An exploration of violent group sex, then, provides a dramatic entrée into some of the social reasons for breaching norms of sexual privacy and the emotional impact of doing so.^[56]

Randy Thornhill, an evolutionary biologist, argues that rape evolved as a form of male reproductive behavior. Sex that looks less than consensual, or “forced copulation,” has been observed in the nonhuman world. Male scorpion flies offer females “gifts” of dead insects or saliva before mating, for example. But if the male scorpion fly arrives without a gift, he may use another strategy: he chases the unwilling female, clamps her with a “notal organ” so that she cannot resist, and mates with her. Forced copulation also occurs among some mammals and birds. Sea otters and dolphins, marine mammals with devoted human followings, have reportedly taken part in “gang rapes,” occasionally leading to the death of the female. And although mallard ducks are put forth as paragons of social monogamy, unattached males sometimes aggressively coerce females into sex. Groups of male ducks have been observed pecking at a female until she submits, occasionally killing her in the process. Female ducks have resisted forced mating over the centuries by evolving spiraling vaginas to counteract the corkscrew-shaped penises of male ducks. When an uninvited male “explosively extends” his penis—which by the way, is large enough to make him the John Holmes of the bird world—he may ejaculate into a cul-de-sac. Most forced matings, then, don’t end in fertilization, leading one writer to quip: “Clearly, it’s not size that matters, but what she lets you do with it.”^[57] In each species, different pressures have led to the evolution of forced copulation as a reproductive strategy. Thornhill believes that forced copulation in humans similarly evolved as a response to the mating strategies used by men and women. Human females are not willing to mate with any or all men; they consciously and unconsciously discriminate among potential reproductive partners. But human males have been selected to mate with as many females as possible. Because of these differential sexual adaptations, Thornhill argues, mating becomes a game. Men gain access to women by possessing physical traits that women prefer or by competing against other men for power, resources, social status, and so on. Rape, according to Thornhill, is a strategy that an “inferior” male can use when a female is not willing to mate with him or when the costs of forcing a female to copulate are low.

Simplistic evolutionary theories of rape have been soundly challenged. First, interpreting observations across species presents hurdles. Even granting that forced copulation in the animal kingdom doesn’t look enjoyable, how might one measure “consent” in waterfowl? Second, among humans, rape serves purposes far beyond reproduction. Critics point out that women who are of nonreproductive age are still raped, as are men. Some men rape their wives, with whom they may have consensual sex. Patterns and definitions of rape also vary across cultures and time periods, suggesting social and historical influences. Most importantly, when looking at rape in human populations, we must examine the meaning of the behavior, not just what is observed. Rape can be traumatizing for humans, even more so when involving multiple participants and witnesses.

Some historians argue that the assumption that rape causes psychological trauma is relatively recent. In nineteenth-century Great Britain and the United States, the legal and medical focus was on the physical pain and bodily injury of victims, for example; even when the notion of psychological trauma finally entered the picture, it took years to become mainstream.^[58] Distress can also be conceptualized differently across contexts. For example, a Western psychologist sent to Bosnia to treat rape and torture victims for PTSD was told: “We have fear in our bones.” The victims’ emphasis on “collective solidarity” and on somatic fear rather than mental distress meant that few wished to pursue individualized therapy. After electing one woman to speak for all of them, the entire group met together.^[59] Trauma is also influenced by cultural and personal definitions of rape: Is forced sex with one’s husband rape or “part of being a woman”? Is unwanted sex more or less traumatizing in a context where it is thought to be “just the way things are”? Still, the efficacy with which forced sex is used as a weapon or form of social control reveals this variability as primarily one of degree rather than substance.

My aim here is not to answer ultimate questions about forced sex in human populations. Instead, the focus is on patterns of social, psychological, and symbolic meaning and motivation that emerge across situations.

Gang rape can punish gender transgressions and establish, display, or maintain social hierarchies. The anthropological record provides several examples where gang rape was institutionalized for these purposes. Thomas Gregor’s research on the Mehinaku of Brazil is one such case. The Mehinaku historically used gang rape to punish women who dared to peek at the “sacred flutes,” instruments infused with spirits and stored in “men’s houses.” Rather than being an impulsive group assault on a woman caught eyeing the flutes, a gang rape was publicly announced and justified by the village leader. Men’s participation was expected and symbolized “the men’s loyalty to one another, and their willingness to betray the ties of affection, kinship, and economic dependence” linking them to the punished woman. A woman’s gang rape, then, is significant for the men she is related to, who may feel shamed both by her behavior and by their inability to protect her from punishment. Not every Mehinaku man took part enthusiastically; in fact, Gregor writes that some men resorted to “magical methods of inducing an erection.”^[60] (Viagra had not yet been introduced at the time of his research.) Gang rapes serve as warnings to other women who witness them or when they become public knowledge through stories told by the victim, witnesses, or perpetrators.

Among the Mundurucu, another Brazilian Indian tribe, a similar myth explains that women once controlled the “sacred trumpets” housing ancestral spirits. At that time, women were the sexual aggressors; men were sexually submissive. But because the spirits of the ancestors demanded ritual offerings of meat and because men were skilled hunters, women’s dominance was eventually overthrown. Men stole the trumpets and hid them; threats of gang rape, supposedly, kept women from attempting to regain control of the instruments and restoring themselves to power. Threats of gang rape, however, were also used in more everyday situations to control female behavior. Gang rape could be used to punish women who intruded on men’s spaces—the sexes were even separated for sleeping—or who threatened male status. A young Mundurucu woman who did not conform to gendered expectations of subservience—for example, by failing to cover her mouth when laughing, looking directly at a man, seeking the company of men, or in other ways failing to act demurely—might also risk gang rape.^[61]

Even where gang rape is institutionalized as a form of social control, however, power structures are complex. Yolanda and Robert Murphy, anthropologists who studied the Mundurucu, note that despite threats of gang rape, women rarely expressed curiosity about the sacred trumpets and “were obviously less impressed with male prowess and its props than were the men.” When talking with a female anthropologist rather than a male one, Mundurucu women did not necessarily cast themselves as inferior and were sometimes openly contemptuous of men’s rituals of separation and dominance.

Gang rape as revenge for female adultery is found in both Mehinaku and Mundurucu history, although in less institutionalized forms, and is reported elsewhere around the world. The Cheyenne of the Great Plains allowed the husband of an adulteress to “put her on the prairie,” for unmarried men to rape her. For the Omaha, also a Native American tribe, a woman’s adultery or sexual aggression could similarly be punished by gang rape and abandonment.^[64] Bukkake, a type of pornography where a woman is covered in the ejaculate of multiple men, is supposedly based on a feudal Japanese punishment for adultery. After bukkake victims were ritually covered in semen, they became literal untouchables. (This history may or may not be important to those who eroticize modern bukkake as a genre of porn or sexual practice.)

Forced sex is still meted out as punishment for infidelity today. In 2005, Kate Wood, a researcher studying in the Transkei region of South Africa, collected stories about group rape, locally referred to as “streamlining,” from young men and women involved. While some assaults were considered criminal, especially when involving weapons or resulting in injuries, other scenarios were viewed more ambiguously, as when a group of friends took advantage of a girl who was drunk or sleeping or punished a girl who had been unfaithful. One man told Wood:

The young men argued that a woman “deserved” to be raped if she had consented to at least some sexual activity, had a bad reputation, was “asking for it” through her attire or behavior, or “should have known better” than to put herself in such a situation. While many young women disagreed, they were reluctant to report streamlining because they feared that others might think they had actually done something to deserve it or that their reputations would be further damaged.^[66]

Men are also the victims of gang rape by other men (and, very rarely, women), which similarly works to punish gender transgressions and establish, display, and enforce social hierarchies. Men who do not conform to a society’s expectations of masculinity are particularly at risk. Gay men, transgendered individuals, or men not deemed masculine enough in how they dress, walk, talk, or behave risk rape and murder by homophobic gangs around the world. In 2008, European papers reported the gang rape of a Sicilian man by eight men because he wrote poetry in prison. An anti-Mafia prosecutor linked the attack to the Mafia’s emphasis on a traditional masculinity that set it apart from a liberalizing society.^[67] In US prisons, the situation for trans people is often grim, as they may be housed according to biological sex rather than gender identity, even if they have secondary sex characteristics such as breasts or facial hair that do not match their official identification.^[68] The 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry was based on the story of Brandon Teena, a transgendered man from Nebraska. When he was arrested for forging checks, a local paper reported the arrest using his birth name, Teena Renae Brandon, outing him as biologically female. Two acquaintances publicly forced him to display his genitals and raped him; they murdered him after he reported the rape.

Although sexual violence toward female military personnel is a familiar issue in the United States—women are more likely to be assaulted by fellow soldiers than killed in combat—men are also victimized. Assailants target men they believe are gay, who are young, or who are of a lesser rank in an attempt to drive them out or to intimidate them. One recruit reported being attacked by a group of soldiers who “shoved a soda bottle into his rectum, and threw him backward off an elevated platform onto the hood of a car.” He was warned that “they were going to have sex with me all the time” and that they would shoot him once they were deployed to Iraq.^[69]

Punishment for gender transgressions could be inflicted, hierarchies could be enforced, and physical submission could be compelled through other, possibly simpler means. But gang rape violates both personal and cultural boundaries, producing intense emotional responses that directly impact a victim’s sense of self. Experiences of disgust, shame, and guilt are key to this process, though not identical across cultural boundaries. Marian Tankink, an anthropologist working with refugees from South Sudan, argues that Western concepts such as trauma and posttraumatic stress are not applicable to understanding the women’s responses to sexual violence. The women she interviewed were most distraught about their “shattered social lives.” They did not necessarily feel guilty about being victimized and “their internal sense of dignity and integrity seemed not to have been irretrievably damaged.” Their reluctance to talk about their experiences was based on the need to prevent “social death” in a context where silence was valued, especially in relation to sexuality, and where daily life revolved around one’s family and community relationships.^[70] Dinka people, Tankink explains, have a “we-self” rather than a sense of self that emphasizes “I,” and they exhibit a strong identification with the values of their families and ethnic group—talking about one’s experiences thus also affects one’s broader social network.^[71] Like the Bosnian victims who wished to meet as a collective with the psychologist rather than individually, South Sudanese women, Tankink suggests, have a need for a social or community healing that is more important than an exploration of personal well-being.

Regardless of the sex of the victim, gang rape also dramatizes the victim’s lower status in relation to both each perpetrator and the group as a whole. While other punishments also physically or symbolically mark victims, the conscious and unconscious mobilization of disgust and shame for perpetrators and witnesses in addition to victims makes gang rape extremely powerful.

Blaming the Victim—Contagious Disgust, Infectious Shame

On March 6, 1983, two brothers, Daniel and Michael O’Neill, along with a friend named Bobby Silva, were driving home through the North End area of New Bedford, Massachusetts. Suddenly, they saw a girl run out of Big Dan’s Tavern and into the street, directly in front of their car. At first they thought she was naked but then realized she was wearing only a brown coat and a sock, even though it was a cold night. When they stopped to help the terrified young woman, she grabbed onto Dan’s neck “so hard that police would have to pry each of her fingers off him hours later.” The men covered her with their jackets while she told them she had been raped on a pool table in the bar, a claim they believed when they saw a few men from Big Dan’s “hastily make their way to their cars.”^[72]

The young woman was a twenty-one-year-old mother named Cheryl Araujo. The drama unfolding that night became the basis for the 1988 Hollywood film The Accused, for which Jodie Foster won an Academy Award for best actress.

The ensuing legal case was controversial. All the defendants were Portuguese immigrants, and despite the fact that Araujo was also Portuguese, local ethnic tensions in New Bedford led some people to believe the accused men were scapegoats. The O’Neill brothers received death threats from citizens who sided with the accused men but nevertheless testified on Araujo’s behalf. The “Big Dan’s case” also incited debate about the relevance of women’s sexual history, appearance, and behavior in rape accusations. Araujo was not the first—nor the last—woman to be blamed for having been raped. However, as the accuser in the first nationally televised criminal trial to receive so much attention, Araujo was subjected to scrutiny by the media and the American public. Defense attorney Frank O’Boy said the trial drew “a firestorm of publicity” from the very first day. “Tens of thousands” of protestors for both the defendants and Araujo, he remembers, marched through New Bedford and Fall River while the trial was being held. Most news stations ran short pieces on the trial; others gave it “gavel to gavel” coverage.^[73]

Though witness testimony varied, Araujo did not fit the model of an “innocent victim”—something the defense team attempted to use against her. She had gone to the tavern alone, leaving her children at home. Strike one. She bought a drink at the bar. Though she claimed to have had only one drink, one of the defendant’s lawyers alleged that her blood alcohol level was at least 0.17 when the attack occurred, almost twice the legal driving limit.^[74] Strike two. She also interacted with some of the male bar patrons. Strike three.

Accounts differed as to what occurred next. According to Araujo, she watched a group of men play pool and then was approached by two strangers. When she refused to leave with them, another man seized her from behind and carried her to the pool table. Her clothes were stripped off. Men took turns raping her as others held her down. Araujo later testified: “I could hear people laughing, cheering, yelling. . . . I was begging for help. I was pleading. I was screaming.”^[75] Defense attorneys, on the other hand, suggested she “willingly engaged in sex on the pool table with one of the suspects before the others joined in.” Despite Araujo’s testimony and the testimony of her rescuers, one of whom said he had “never seen anyone as scared as she was,”^[76] she was portrayed as “a whore” and as if she were “looking for trouble” by being out alone, at night, drinking in a tavern.

Four of the six defendants were eventually found guilty of aggravated rape. Even so, Araujo was ostracized in New Bedford and moved to Miami with her children.

Rape victims have more legal protections in the US courts since the 1980s but still find their appearance and behavior dissected in the media and by the public. More than twenty-five years after Araujo’s assault, in October 2010, newspapers reported that an eleven-year-old girl in Cleveland, Texas, was gang-raped in a dilapidated trailer. Once again, the case sparked racial tensions in a town that is half white and half African American and Hispanic. And once again, victim blaming emerged as part of the public response. The eighteen alleged assailants, who ranged from fourteen to twenty-seven years old, initially found more sympathy and support than might be expected: “These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives,” one hospital worker mused. The young girl, however, became the focus of “anger” and “vicious remarks” from community members. She was criticized for not resisting her attackers or reporting the incident to the police herself—the investigation began after a cell-phone video of the assault was given to authorities—despite her statement that the men threatened to beat her and told her she could not return home if she didn’t cooperate and even though an eleven-year-old child cannot legally consent to sexual activity. One news report insinuated that the girl courted danger through her behavior and appearance: “Residents in the neighborhood where the abandoned trailer stands—known as the Quarters—said the victim had been visiting various friends there for months. They said she dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s. She would hang out with teenage boys at a playground.” The girl was taken into custody after her parents were implied to be neglectful: “Where was her mother? What was her mother thinking?” a neighbor asked.^[77] Shortly afterward, Republican Florida state representative Kathleen Passidomo defended a Florida bill legislating “proper” student attire, suggesting that the young girl was raped because “she was dressed like a 21-year-old prostitute,” and that such a bill was warranted “so what happened in Texas doesn’t happen to our students”^[78]

As the investigation proceeded, authorities learned that the girl was raped on at least six occasions over a three-month time period. Used condoms were recovered from the trailer containing the victim’s DNA, along with that of some of the accused men; two additional suspects were eventually charged. Although one defense attorney likened the sixth-grader to a “spider” who lured unsuspecting men into her web, the first two men who went to trial received a ninety-nine-year jail sentence and life in prison without the possibility of parole, respectively. As of January 2013, thirteen of the other defendants had settled their cases with plea bargains, with seven juveniles receiving probated sentences and six adults receiving fifteen-year jail terms.^[79]

Why are victims of gang rape so often disparaged? Miller argues that disgust and its “cousin,” contempt, are emotions with intense political significance because of their role in maintaining social hierarchies. “Disgust,” he writes, “evaluates (negatively) what it touches, proclaims the meanness and inferiority of its object.” For victims, shame can be triggered by seeing themselves as an object of disgust for others. At the same time, however, the “polluting powers” of that which has been deemed low make claims to superiority vulnerable.^[80] Shame and humiliation are “the emotions that constitute our experience of being lower or lowered,” and they “exist in a rough economy with those passions which are the experience of reacting to the lowly, failed, and contaminating—disgust and contempt.”^[81] The need to disidentify with victims can trigger violence, be used to justify it, and even underlie the responses of unrelated individuals. Victims of gang rape elicit multifaceted, often unconscious fears of pollution in assailants and witnesses, fears that are defended against by seeking social and psychological distance from the one who has been lowered—the exclusion of the victim.

Photographing or videotaping sexual assaults is surprisingly common where mobile technology permits. Why would participants in a crime take and distribute visual evidence helping to identify them? Some participants do not believe a crime was committed, justifying the attack as something the victim consented to or deserved. Such documentation may also be part of the process of distancing from and excluding the victim, a process that begins with the attack but continues afterward in a variety of ways. What, exactly, runs through a teenage boy’s mind when he posts photos online of his friends gang-raping a drugged sixteen-year-old girl? In fact, in 2010 such an incident occurred at a rave party held in Pitt Meadows, a city near Vancouver. Not surprisingly, conflicting stories are told about the incident. A young woman “became separated from her friends” and was taken to a nearby field. Initial reports suggested that seven young men then raped her. Later witness statements indicate that while up to a dozen people may have watched, not all participated in the assault. Regardless of the actual number of assailants, the victim’s physical injuries were substantial and required medical attention. At least one witness documented the rape on his cell phone and uploaded photographs to Facebook. Some reports state that the victim had no memory of the events of the evening until she saw the pictures on Facebook. Other accounts suggest that someone who knew the victim saw the images on Facebook and reported them to the police.^[82]

What captured the media’s attention is that a witness took and distributed photos so casually. Why didn’t the young photographer intervene if it was an assault? Was he afraid of retaliation or becoming a victim himself? Did he realize he had done anything wrong, either by witnessing the incident or sharing the photos? Did he know the girl would be recognized or that the photos would “go viral” on the Internet? And what about the other teens who downloaded, forwarded, and commented on the Facebook photos? Were they troubled either by the rape or by their part in consuming it? Some students reported being upset after seeing the images, but others vilified the victim online and in the press, suggesting she must have been a willing participant despite her age, injuries, and intoxication.

As the drama unfolded, the victim dropped out of school due to harassment. The youth who posted the photos online, also sixteen, was initially charged with making and distributing child pornography and with distributing obscene material; when he pled guilty to the latter, he was sentenced to twelve months of probation and ordered to apologize to the victim.^[83] Several other men pictured in the photos were investigated, and an eighteen-year-old man was charged with sexual assault. When the sexual assault charges against him were dropped because of a lack of evidence, the girl and her father pleaded with witnesses to come forward. Thus far, however, any remaining witnesses have maintained a “code of silence.”

Police warned that possessing and redistributing photos of the incident is a crime. A young man who attended high school with the victim seemed less distressed about the rape than about the possibility of child porn charges being brought against students: “No one realized that at the beginning and now everyone’s freaking out,” he told a reporter.^[84]

Well, maybe not everyone. A blogger who posted his thoughts about the Pitt Meadows incident made an interesting discovery. His September 17, 2010, post received more than two thousand hits, one-fifth of his total hits ever. Yet although tempted to “pat himself on the back” for his “tremendous writing skill,” he writes, “the stats show something different.” In fact, when looking at the search terms that led people to his blog, he found that most people were looking for the actual photos and video of the incident, not for information about it. Further, many of these browsers then continued on to www.pornhub.com.^[85] Interest in this story, he believes, was less about concern over sexual violence—gang rapes happen frequently, though we hear only about a small percentage of them—and more about voyeurism.^[86]

The Pitt Meadows case raises issues about the legal culpability of bystanders. Although the patrons of Big Dan’s Tavern who cheered on Araujo’s rapists were not prosecuted, the idea that they potentially could be became the plot of The Accused. The Pitt Meadows photographer received a light sentence, but the case still sets a precedent for similar incidents where witnesses photograph or videotape sexual assaults without joining in or intervening. Participating as a witness—even as a secondhand witness who downloads or forwards photographs—can become a way of distancing from someone who has been marked inferior, aligning oneself with the more powerful side. This is part of the reason why gang rape victims often evoke scorn and hostility rather than sympathy. The escalation of violence that sometimes occurs during gang rapes can similarly be related back to these dynamics—the victim is lowered with each assault while the group becomes more cohesive, resulting in progressive dehumanization.

In some cultural settings, the ostracization of the victim extends to her entire family. On June 22, 2002, in Meerwala, a rural village in Pakistan, Mukhtaran Bibi (now known as Mukhtaran Mai) was gang-raped by four men after her twelve-year-old brother was accused of fornication with a Mastoi woman, who was from a more powerful caste.^[87] Because of the woman’s higher social status and local beliefs that justice required “an eye for an eye,” village elders punished him by ordering Mai’s rape. Tricked into thinking she was expected to publicly apologize to the offended family, Mai attended a local gathering with her father and her uncle. After she apologized and one of the elders declared the dispute settled, Mai was abducted at gunpoint and gang-raped in a nearby stable. Mai was then marched naked in front of the villagers until her father was allowed to take her home.

Instead of killing herself—as is foreseeable in such cases due to the unbearable shame associated with rape—Mai filed charges. Pursuing rape cases in the legal system is difficult in Pakistan; Mai’s illiteracy made it even more so. Police may refuse to investigate if the accused are of a higher caste than the accusers. Assailants may threaten their victims (or their families) with further violence if an attack is reported. Further, the Hudood Ordinances, Pakistani laws enacted in 1979 to punish zina, or extramarital sex, in accordance with Islam, make such cases complicated. Married Muslims can be sentenced to death by stoning, while unmarried couples can be sentenced to one hundred lashes. The maximum sentences require four eyewitnesses to the crime. Unfortunately for a woman who is raped, and even those who are gang-raped, finding four witnesses to testify on her side is difficult. If she does not succeed in proving rape, she can be punished for zina. Campaigns by international and Pakistani human rights organizations to repeal the laws have failed. Amnesty International reports that 88 percent of the women currently jailed in Pakistan are held under the Hudood Ordinances.^[88] It is not surprising, then, that the Pakistan Human Rights Commission estimates that a woman is raped every two hours in Pakistan and that a gang rape occurs every eight hours^[89] —the costs of forced copulation are low for perpetrators.

In a noteworthy turn of events, newspapers in Pakistan picked up Mai’s story, spreading it around the world. The international media attention helped her case, and the perpetrators were eventually tried in court and sentenced to death. In March 2005, however, another court overturned the convictions of five of the men and reduced the death sentence of another to life in prison on the basis of “insufficient evidence.” On April 21, 2011, the Supreme Court of Pakistan upheld the acquittals. Mai has remained in Meerwala, where she runs a school. Her notoriety grants some degree of protection—the eyes of the world are on her, at least occasionally—but also a great deal of persecution. Over nine years of court battles and publicity, she has faced continual harassment from both the government and villagers, along with recurring death threats. She now fears the acquitted men will return and harm her or her family.

Journalist Bronwyn Curran has questioned the dominant narrative surrounding the case. Although Curran admits that a crime was committed and that Mai set a precedent for women in rape prosecutions, she points out that Mai did not originally register the case herself and that the publicity surrounding the case may have both detracted from the technical aspects of data collection and warped the story in the media. She further suggests that Mai was delivered to a Mastoi man by the men in her own family, a traditional practice known as vani, or offering a woman in marriage to compensate for a crime. Curran also questions reports that Mai was raped by multiple men and paraded in front of bystanders.^[90] Other voices have raised dissenting opinions about specific “facts” in the case—discrepancies occur in dates, descriptions, number of assailants, witness testimony, and so on. Some have even accused women’s rights groups of inventing the story of a “poor tribal woman” facing violence and humiliation for their own purposes. International pressure led Pakistani president Musharraf to offer Mai a payment of 500,000 rupees within three days of the breaking story, which was an unprecedented move (about $8,300 at the time and 160 times the average monthly wage).^[91] Although Mai used the money to start her school in Meerwala, her acceptance of the payment has been used to discredit her version of events. In an interview with the Washington Post, Musharraf commented that rape accusations were a “money-making concern” in Pakistan: “A lot of people say if you want to go abroad and get a visa for Canada or citizenship and be a millionaire, get yourself raped.”^[92] He later retracted the statements, but the interview had been taped. His statements are illustrative of not just misogyny but a system of global inequality where even if Mai had been paid one million rupees and saved every penny, she could not expect to enter Canada at even the poverty level if she were to immigrate.

The lesson here is a familiar one: out of all the stories that might be told, we must always bear in mind that the stories that are told and circulated strike a chord with the audience consuming them. Who “tricked” Mai into thinking she was simply expected to apologize to the tribal council? If Mai’s own male relatives were indeed involved in transacting a secret “exchange”—a “marriage” to atone for her brother’s wrongdoing—their actions would have been illegal in contemporary Pakistan, but not unheard of. Of one thing there seems to be no doubt—Mai did not want the sex that occurred on July 22, 2002. Her case, no matter how convoluted, highlights issues around sexual violence in places where the shame of the victims extends to families, relatives, and even acquaintances.

Gang rape can be used as vigilante punishment when perpetrators are unlikely to face repercussions, and when gang rape shames not just the victim but also a wider social network. The exclusion of the victim is thus taken to a further extreme: in addition to figuring her as an outsider to the perpetrators, the violence can destroy her social ties. This is different from the victim blaming that occurs in Western countries. Mai has been photographed only in modest dress and headscarves and was never personally accused of sexual impropriety. While women everywhere experience distress after gang rape, possibly facing rejection from husbands or families, the aftermath is even more difficult for women living in societies that associate women’s chastity with family honor and future marital options. With little economic security and severe limitations on their mobility, women do not have the option of starting a new life somewhere else. Occasionally, relatives even enact vengeance by murdering a woman who has shamed the family. Some victims thus decide to live with rape as a secret rather than face the future as irrevocably marked and isolated, bringing shame and financial ruin on their families.

Gang rape, then, marks and excludes victims in multiple ways, impacting their past, present, and future social relationships. Victims, perpetrators, witnesses, and even those hearing the story have complicated conscious and unconscious emotional responses to the violence, especially as it symbolizes contagious inferiority.

“It’s Like Coming Home”: Affirmation and Belonging

Even if watching panda porn had excited Chuang Chuang enough to shuffle over to Lin Hui with amorous intentions or clarified what he was supposed to do when he got there, he probably wouldn’t have first hurled his bamboo shoot into the air and yelled excitedly, “Yes! This is what it means to be a panda!” But for humans, the process of self-reflexive comparison that keeps us in line through shame can also generate feelings of recognition and affirmation. Some thinkers argue that the links between sexuality and the sense of an inner self, or identity, stem from relatively modern Western discourses. My point in this section is not to essentialize the relationship between sexuality and identity, but instead simply to illustrate how witnessing and being witnessed in transgressive sexuality becomes meaningful to some group sex participants, some of the time.

Betty Dodson is a sex educator and artist who has taught courses on masturbation for decades. That story you heard about naked women sitting in a circle and examining their genitals with a makeup mirror? It was probably inspired by one of Betty’s “bodysex” classes, which began in her living room during the 1970s and required doing just that. Annie Sprinkle is a former porn performer turned sex guru who has taught a variety of classes on sexuality that include the audience in hands-on exploration of her body. In “Public Cervix Announcement,” Sprinkle reclines, inserts a speculum, and allows audience members to view her cervix using a flashlight. She has masturbated onstage and taught vulva massage. Carol Queen, a former sex worker and writer, has offered workshops through the sex toy store Good Vibrations and the Center for Sex and Culture in San Francisco. Barbara Carrellas, author of Urban Tantra and a well-known tantra instructor, “thinks” herself to orgasm in front of her classes using her breath and “energy.” While you might not learn how to “think-off” from watching her demonstration, there are still some things you should see.

For each of these American activists and educators, live group demonstrations do more than disseminate information—they also help combat sex-negative beliefs, banish feelings of shame and inadequacy, and nurture an acceptance of sexual variation. Similarly, in early academic work on swinging in the United States, participants reported that observing others in the nude and having intercourse was “a significant growth experience.”^[93] Some contemporary lifestylers similarly talk about group experiences as a lesson in overcoming shame about sex and the body: “The advantage of [swinging] is that it allows for sexual freedom, instead of shame and repression. Our society is ashamed of our sexuality. Swinging has allowed me to let go of that shame and really embrace my sexuality.”^[94] Both women and men, gay and straight, told me that seeing others have sex—live and up close—made them feel “normal.”

At a sex party I attended, a porn star demonstrated his nearly fail-safe method for inducing female ejaculation, or “squirting.” His girlfriend served as a responsive and patient model for the “students” until other women volunteered. Female ejaculation is a misunderstood phenomenon, and the fluid is often erroneously thought to be urine expelled from the bladder during sex. Some women find ejaculation unpleasant; for others, it offers pleasure superior to orgasms or accompanied by them. During his demonstration, couples in various states of undress ringed a queen-size bed, shifting positions to better view the action. Serious anatomical explorations, during which the instructor would actually guide someone’s fingers into a woman’s vagina to help locate and stimulate the Skene’s gland, were punctuated with moments of humor.

For the seasoned orgygoers in attendance that evening, the lesson offered an opportunity to increase their repertoire of party tricks. For women who previously felt ashamed about ejaculation, the lesson was also comforting.

In 2009, Josefine Larsen conducted interviews with young women in Rwanda about guca imyeyo, or labia elongation. The practice of stretching the labia minora, which is also reported across Africa in Uganda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, and Sudan, among other countries, was once categorized as a form of “genital mutilation” by the World Health Organization, but was dropped from this category in 2008. In Rwanda, labia elongation is relatively common, often beginning at puberty and continuing until a girl’s first menstruation. Bonds formed during this time, however, last far longer. As it is considered inappropriate for mothers and other family members to be involved, young girls turn to their peers for information and instruction on “pulling.” “Teams” of five to ten girls meet in the bushes in rural areas or at each other’s houses in urban areas to practice stretching techniques, which they learn verbally, by watching other girls, or through demonstrations on their bodies. Some girls pull daily, others only once or twice a month, attempting to obtain an ideal length of around 8 cm, or the length of a middle finger.

Labia elongation has normative aspects. Traditionally, guca imyeyo was considered “decent” because it provided coverage of the vagina during childbirth or when women were unclothed. A woman who had not elongated her labia might be disgraced or sent home when she married. Labia elongation is still believed to enhance attractiveness, but in contemporary times it is also believed to increase sexual pleasure for both men and women. The labia swell during intercourse, providing additional friction, and elongation is also believed to encourage female ejaculation, which is highly desirable during intercourse. The exchange of fluids has symbolic importance in Rwanda, especially in sexuality. Women who cannot ejaculate are considered “empty,” and compared to “hard, dry, infertile land”; there are special terms for the children of women who were unable to ejaculate, evidence of the social aspect to sexual performance.^[95] Women thus believed that labia elongation was necessary to keep a man faithful. Girls who did not pull could find themselves ostracized among their peers and rejected as marital partners. Still, Larsen argues that the practice of guca imyeyo, which was seen as part of becoming a woman, has positive effects. Guca imyeyo offers a chance to acquire social capital and respect from older relatives, but also to talk to each other about femininity, marriage, sexual health, childbirth, and pregnancy. During pulling sessions, girls become more comfortable with their genitals and more aware of their sexuality. At the beginning when they are still adjusting to the pain, for example, girls pull each other’s labia and scrutinize each other’s progress. Girls developed bonds with each other through their “intimate secret”—“We have all seen each other naked so we share something strong,” one interviewee said. Another participant claimed: “Women come together, shape each other and make a special relationship through the practice. This is special because Rwandese people normally keep secrets: we are not open. There is a certain confidence between us, sometimes it comes naturally, but whenever someone helps another with guca imyeyo this kind of relationship is made.” “Labial elongation,” Larsen argues, “is fundamental to the communal construction of female identity, eroticism and the experience of pleasure, reinforcing feelings of pride.”^[96]

Feeling affirmed in one’s sexuality can occasionally be a step toward identifying with or feeling part of a larger group. Sociologist Corie Hammers studied two Canadian lesbian/queer bathhouses, the Pussy Palace in Toronto and SheDogs in Halifax. One of the organizers of the Pussy Palace events stated: “I continue to be appalled at the amount of shame women have when it comes to their sexuality and desire. The bathhouse is a place where people can come to counter that negative social conditioning.”^[97] The Pussy Palace featured a “G-spot room,” where women learned to find and stimulate their G-spots, along with demonstrations of fisting, strap-on play, and female ejaculation.^[98] The organizers believed in creating a “safe” place—all female, with explicit and implicit rules of etiquette—where women could explore and educate themselves: “There are still so many myths and misunderstandings when it comes to the G-spot, or fisting, or S/M. We are attempting to provide accurate information, [to] allow queer women to know their bodies in a way that is genuine, real and sensual.”^[99]

For the patrons that Hammers interviewed, bathhouse events also provided a “fat-positive” and queer-friendly space: “Two butches having sex, a butch in femme lingerie giving a lap dance, and two fat and proud femmes having loud sex are there to be seen and heard.”^[100] One woman explained that the bathhouse was one of the only places where she didn’t feel judged for her appearance; attending the events, she said, “has made me feel more comfortable about my body and my sexuality, with myself and how I relate to others.”^[101] Another said: “I am seeing people like myself. Fat people, weird people. There are large women here who like themselves and are carrying themselves in a way that says, ‘Look at me, I am beautiful.’ . . . I come here feeling quite good in my skin. I also feel revitalized sexually.”^[102] Other women found the bathhouse to be a safe place to be witnessed as desiring and experiencing sexual pleasure. One interviewee, for example, found that after being watched while she had an orgasm in the sauna, she felt “alive and desirous,” finally accepted by others—and herself—after years of self-loathing.

Gay male circuit partiers express similar sentiments. One of Westhaver’s interviewees commented: “There’s a freedom in knowing that you’re a sub-group that does this; you’re unique . . . we can celebrate our uniqueness, but in a room with 5000 other people that are, you know, doing the same thing . . . there’s an excitement to that.”^[103] Although not all of the attendees participated in sexual encounters on the dance floor, many did. Encounters ranged from “playing with someone’s dick” to “a standing-up-not-quite-naked-orgy” where mutual masturbation, oral sex, and, more rarely, sexual intercourse occurred.^[104] Witnessing and being witnessed in erotic activity, regardless of how explicit, generated feelings of self-acceptance: “When you see people who are having no issues with being gay, no problem at all . . . well, you just get right into it, you just feel so good about yourself”;^[105] “I finally saw something that I could see myself being. . . . I saw what I understood to be gay, that was what I wanted, what I knew I wanted to be”; “It’s like a feeling of coming home in a way.”^[106] Another man felt “blessed” for the first time at a circuit party: “I can remember feeling proud of being gay, proud of being myself, and feeling really lucky to be who I was—like not wanting it any other way, never wanting to be straight. I’d never thought like that about myself before.”^[107] The events allowed the men to “differentiate themselves from a larger heterosexual order” as well as confirm and celebrate community: “When straight boys go out they beat the shit out of each other and trash the place. When we go out, we take our shirts off and hug each other.”^[108] One man said of having sex on the dance floor: “Well, this is what it means to be gay, I was just being gay, and I just did it.”

Not everyone feels affirmed during or after group erotic experiences (and, as we saw with gang rape scenarios, the possibility for emotional vulnerability and devastation after such exposure is one reason why group sex as violence is so effective). Some participants already feel positive about their sexuality; self-acceptance, then, is not necessarily a need fulfilled by group settings. Other individuals feel insecure after comparing themselves with others in group sex situations, possibly shamed for not responding the way they think they should. Several women told me that they disliked the emphasis on female ejaculation at some sex parties because it made them feel inadequate or pressured to participate. “Yes, I know that ‘every woman can do it,’” one woman said. “I’ve done it, I don’t want to do it again, and I don’t find it pleasurable.” Dominant standards of attractiveness are also difficult to escape. Lifestylers complain about pressure to look like “Ken and Barbie.” Circuit partiers spend hours in the gym trying to achieve “the look”—muscled with low body fat, tan, dressed (or undressed) appropriately. One man described “the look” as a celebration of masculinity: “That’s where the facial hair comes in; chest hair is coming back, the big muscle, the cock rings make your genitals protrude: everything that can epitomize male sexuality and being a man.”^[109] Other men describe “the look” as a form of competition and feel pressure to be “beefy, tough, and macho.”

Although some environments are more competitive than others, some male interviewees, both in heterosexual and gay group sex scenes, occasionally struggled with performance anxiety. Performing well sexually during group encounters was a way to display skill, dominance, and stamina. Penis size was valued and compared. Some gay men sought to impress others by the number of partners they took on or the extreme acts they engaged in when bottoming. Participants enjoyed “watching someone taking it” and challenging themselves, “How much can I take?”^[110] Male sexuality, the men believed, was “active and agentic,” “natural and primitive, wild and outrageous.”^[111] This ideal, however, could generate insecurity as well as pride or excitement.

Ugly, Tacky, and Hungry: Representations of Swingers in the Media

While researching nonmonogamy in the United States, I noticed that swingers were rarely portrayed favorably in the media. In itself, that isn’t surprising, as monogamy is a deeply held ideal (even if many people deviate in practice), and swinging challenges traditional models of marriage. But what particularly fascinated me was the repetitiveness and homogeneity of the physical descriptions. Swingers are overwhelmingly portrayed as ugly—unattractive, overweight, aging—and as tasteless—gluttonous, working class, or hopelessly out of date. At the same time, however, they are repeatedly likened to people who might just be your neighbors or coworkers.

Two documentary films, The Lifestyle (1999) and Sex with Strangers (2002), garnered reviews exhibiting this pattern. Film reviewer Stephen Holden writes: “What sort of people engage in recreational group sex on a regular basis? David Schisgall’s documentary The Lifestyle provides one answer: mostly cheerful, but paunchy, suburban couples who have either slipped into middle age or are starting to advance past it.”^[114] The film, according to Holden, is “disquieting”: “Although some may be stimulated by the movie’s fleeting glimpses of gray-haired, potbellied, cellulite-jiggling, over-60 orgiasts lustily going at it in their suburban living rooms after an evening of barbecue and California dip, many more will probably be repulsed.”^[115] Another reviewer calls The Lifestyle “the most persuasive argument for pornography in all of its unrealistic depictions of sexuality” because “watching forty and fifty-somethings participating in group sex (in between trips to the buffet table for jellied salad) is a truly bizarre and extremely non-erotic experience . . . it seems as if the filmmaker searched under every rock in the country to find the most narrow-minded individuals possible.”^[116]

In a review of Sex with Strangers, Phil Villarreal writes: “Swinging, the film makes it seem, is not a hobby that attracts the young and fit. Or intelligent.”^[117] Another reviewer laments of the characters, one of whom he describes as a “leathery lizard,” that “None of them is particularly attractive or interesting; indeed, their sexual predilection would seem to be the only thing which makes them special, and they wave their incessant horniness like a banner. One featured couple actually trolls for sex in their motor home, parked outside discos. The epithet ‘white trash’ unfortunately fully applies.”^[118] The descriptions slide into an almost visceral disgust: “James and Theresa are the most secure in their deviancy. Despite Theresa’s sagging chest and the apparently unnoticed tastelessness of James’ body piercings (think Anthony Hopkins with a southern accent and pierced ears), they’ve kept at it, bagging three, sometimes five partners in a weekend, and enjoying every minute of it.”^[119]

Journalists and bloggers get their hands dirtier by actually visiting swingers’ clubs, though all the while assuring readers that they have no real interest in participating in any sexual activity and relaying their trepidation at each step along the way. Blogger India Nicholas writes of a visit to a swingers’ club, for example:

Smoking Jacket blogger and writer Harmon Leon posed as a couple with a female friend to gain access to a swingers’ house party. On the drive, he wonders: “Will I end up having sex with someone’s wife? Will someone’s grandmother hit on me? Will images from this evening cause me to wake up screaming like a traumatized Vietnam vet?” On entry, he notices “a dank smell” and “seedy lighting.” Blogger Erin Mantz visited a swingers’ club in Maryland with the aim of confronting couples to ask, “Why do you do it?” and “How can you do it?” Because she didn’t actually talk to participants—her husband was anxious to leave before anything started happening—she instead chronicles her own apprehensive emotional state.^[121] “A bit shaky as I climbed the steps of the building,” she writes, “I braced myself for what I might find.” Although the owners looked like people she “might run into at a health club or local take-out joint,” she feels nervous as she follows them down “a well-lit but long and narrow stairway full of fear.” She imagines what she might see at the end: “Some kind of orgy? Group sex rooms in full force? Whips and chains?”

Their lack of desire, as these writers tell the tale, is justified. Attendees at swingers’ clubs and parties are repeatedly described as past their prime and, given their propensity to snack in between bouts of stomach-slapping sex, they care little about the fact that they fail to meet cultural standards of attractiveness. Such people have no right having sex, the writers imply, much less sex in public or with anyone other than their equally old and unattractive partners. Leon, for example, encounters lone men in towels, “trolling the party for fresh newbie meat” and “a skeleton-skinny old woman in her sixties, drunk out of her head,” who “tries to tantalize” him by showing him her “turquoise old-lady panties.”^[122] The orgy room, he writes, is “full of naked unattractive couples, some to the point of plain obese, with rolls of flesh one could get lost in, twisted into a variety of random sexual positions.”^[123] (Leon is a humorist, so one might expect outlandish embellishments, but his tactics are eerily similar to those found in ostensibly serious accounts.) A writer from Details magazine makes no effort to disguise his contempt for swingers at a “mandingo” party, where white women congregate to have sex with single black men:

Swingers, their attire, and their surroundings are described as “cheap” and “sleazy.” A woman from Mississippi has “an uncanny resemblance to Roseanne Barr.”^[125] Participants drink “$3 champagne” or use “beer cozies,” eat naked from buffets, and live in motor homes. A Florida sex club is described as “a pleasant snapshot from 1978,” with “turquoise walls, a red pleather couch and chair,” and “paintings that would not look out of place at your grandmother’s house.” The men have “slicked-back” hair and wear tacky jewelry like “a large dragon medallion” or “thick gold chains.”^[126] The pictures of swinger couples on websites are described as “standard hardcore amateur smut; women naked, men naked; women on men naked, all taken from a terrible angle from a Kodak that was spanking new when the Brady Bunch was still on in prime time.”^[127]

Granted, the furniture probably is “pleather”—as it should be in a public venue daring to provide couches—and not everyone who participates in the lifestyle is conventionally attractive. Swingers come in all ages, shapes, sizes, and fashion sensibilities. Let’s also grant that if someone has never before seen other real, live, nude people having sex—we’re not talking about porn performers here—it can be a shock to the senses. Bodies move in unappealing ways, and there is no director to filter what the audience sees. Real sex scenes hit a bit close to home, one writer suggests: “People who pay for the Spice channel pay to see breast implants, hard bodies and flawless sexual choreography, not stretch marks, wrinkles and other human imperfections; they’re not paying to watch themselves.”^[128]

But are swingers really more unattractive than the average person? The next time you’re standing in a grocery line, bored, try imagining everyone in view, including yourself, naked. How many shoppers are “Ken and Barbie” material? Now, mentally dress them again. What’s the group level of fashion sense? Do you prefer them clothed or unclothed? (Your response will probably have something to do with how you feel about your own naked body.) Aside from college campuses, where participants in rampant hookups are at least still young, or in those few social enclaves where the “beautiful people” congregate into later decades, most people out there having sex are probably somewhat paunchy and middle-aged, a fairly common demographic in modern America. So why even mention it—over and over and over?

Where is Catherine Millet when you need her to step out of the shadows and start gleefully flinging muck?

It doesn’t matter that these representations focus on only a small subset of people engaged in swinging. Many people refuse to burden themselves with the label of “swingers” and thus are passed by when writers seek their next sensational topic. Others escape the notice of voyeuristic journalists because they patronize private parties, invitation-only circuits, or expensive retreats instead of public sex clubs. A reporter would need more gusto to access these spaces, as well as meet the standards of attractiveness required. But these representations aren’t about facts in the first place—they are about disavowal and distancing. Not me. Even granting that sex clubs might inspire nervousness in first-time visitors, it’s not as if these writers are truly afraid of sexual assault or other types of violence. They are, instead, expressing, or catering to, a fear of contamination.

As Miller notes, some perceived vices and “moral failures” trigger disgust: “Disgust is more than just the motivator of good taste; it makes out moral matters for which we can have no compromise. Disgust signals our being appalled, signals the fact that we are paying more than lip-service; its presence lets us know we are truly in the grip of the norm whose violation we are witnessing or imagining.”^[129] Unable to denigrate swingers directly on their morality, which would seem prudish rather than liberated, these writers tell tales of a descent into the depths of a dark world full of unsavory individuals and strange practices. They bravely resist both the sexual advances and the buffets—if six pomegranate seeds enslaved Persephone, one can only imagine the penalty for chicken wings—eventually reemerging into polite society physically unscathed but psychologically unsettled. The desire, and even need, these writers have to distance themselves from swingers is palpable in their descriptions; as witnesses, they have been implicated in social transgression and are seeking escape.

If middle-aged James were only “bagging” Theresa, would they arouse such revulsion as a couple? If they were monogamous, might he instead be exhorted to “accept her changing body” and work at keeping sex hot despite culturally dominant depictions of the only desirable bodies as young, tight, and beautiful? Would her “sagging chest” have even been mentioned?

The real problem with swingers is that they transgress norms of monogamy, public nudity, and dyadic sex. Often, they do it all at once, “cheerfully.” They initiate “newbies” into deviant practices. They laughingly tell stories that make “normal” folks cringe, like about digging through a trash bag filled with used condoms looking for a lost ring.^[130] They feed each other meatballs in the kitchen before “slinking off” for a threesome. Certainly, other lovers eat together—who could forget the blindfold, cherries, and honey in the film 9 1/2 Weeks? Swingers, though, move too comfortably “from guac to cock.” They barbeque in the buff, forgetting they’re naked (with a journalist in their midst).

Naked swingers peeling shrimp become the new millennial version of the maenads, the female Dionysian celebrants whose loss of sexual self-control morphed into the desire to tear apart animals with their bare hands, devouring the raw flesh.

Well, maybe not quite that bad. But the principle is the same. Once a mental dam bursts, contamination will seep into your secret gardens. Eventually, we have a flood on our hands and no ark in sight.

Once they’ve tucked their tawdry medallions inside their shirts or swapped stripper heels for granny flats, these people might be sitting next to you at the monthly PTA meeting. Holden writes: “For the most part, [swingers] look like normal workaday folks, and could even be your neighbors.” And for all her anxiety, what does Mantz find inside the club? “Nicely dressed women.” A woman who looked “like she could have been a parent volunteer at my son’s preschool.” A women’s bathroom that “could have been the washroom at Nordstrom’s where moms say hello and commiserate with toddlers in tow,” except that “some women looked at me a little longer than, well, normal.” This scares her: “I left pretty quickly.”

Mantz and the others survive their symbolic journeys into nonmonogamous debauchery; some writers even end their pieces with measured comments about how swingers obey the rules—“no means no”—or seem “harmless” as long as they are allowed to channel their “obsession with sex” into the lifestyle. Contemporary swingers aren’t portrayed as murderous criminals, like the Bacchic worshippers of Rome; most educated readers wouldn’t buy that as fair or balanced. Still, moral lines are subtly drawn as a sense of corruption is deflected into the physical world—the swingers’ bodies, attire, and preferences.

It’s not just swingers. When English footballer Stan Collymore was caught “dogging” in 2004, he was denigrated in the press as a pervert. The headlines were relentless: “Former star in sex shame”; “Collymore: My shame over ‘dogging’ sex”; “Collymore’s arrest shame”; “Dogging shame of soccer star”; and “Collymore plea over sex shame.” Doggers were labeled “sexaholics and sociopaths,” at risk for STDs.^[131] Collymore even referred to himself as “disgusting.” But he also questioned the hypocrisy and maliciousness of his treatment by the media: “Why are some infidelities accepted and brushed swiftly under the carpet while others are judged to belong to some dangerous twilight world . . . ?”^[132] As one journalist noted, even years later Collymore hadn’t completed the usual tabloid cycle of public exposure, remorse, and redemption. Some of this is perhaps related to his personality, as Collymore seems to court controversy. But a special kind of vitriol, it seems, is reserved for people involved in consensual group sex. Had Dante known of swinging, dogging, and mandingo parties, he might have added a special ring of hell.

Yet there is an intriguing flipside to this phenomenon. Consider the response to a 1995 article, “D.C. Swings! Couples Meet for Cocktails, Hors d’Oeuvres, and Blowjobs at a Washington Restaurant,” in Washington, DC’s City Paper. The story focused on a local lifestyle group called Capitol Couples. Attendees were described as “mostly lumpy, middle-aged, white: drab men with har-har laughs wearing country-club sweaters, painted women with Jell-O breasts in plus-size garb à la Frederick’s of Hollywood.” The sex is similarly portrayed in language chosen to repel rather than titillate; the author observed “groping hands,” “dangling tongues,” and a blow job given by a woman with “frightening, pendulous breasts.”^[133] The following month, however, the City Paper reported that they hadn’t received a single complaint related to the article. Instead,

Terry Gould, a journalist who wrote The Lifestyle: A Look at the Erotic Rites of Swingers, tells a similar tale. Admittedly, when he was given the assignment of writing about a Vancouver swing club in 1989, he approached it as an “investigation into the dark world of organized sex” and then “rang the warning bell of disease and degeneracy” by writing a “scathingly condemnatory” piece. Then, he writes, “something odd happened”: “I got more telephone calls from curious readers—both male and female—than I’d had for all my articles on the Chinese mafia, Sikh terrorists, and gun-running Nazis combined.” He provides a partial transcript of a typical call:

Most of the callers, he realized, eventually asked for the phone number, and the Vancouver Circles club saw an increase in membership. Gould became suspicious that publications condemning lifestylers “were actually capitalizing on the vicarious needs of their readers.”^[135]

This wouldn’t surprise Michael Bailey, who pointed out that the live sex demonstration at Northwestern was one of the top news stories for several days, even “during a time of financial crisis, war, and global warming.” Moral outrage, agitated curiosity, or both? In addition to producing anxieties, swingers and others who transgress social norms around sexual privacy and monogamy will continue provoking interlopers, at least until those norms substantially relax. The Sexual Life of Catherine M sold millions of copies and has been translated into forty languages. Critics can say what they’d like about the artistic or masturbatory limits of Millet’s prose, but she clearly sensed the potential for disgust, shame, and guilt to fascinate and attract as well as repel.

^{1. Millet’s book was translated into English as The Sexual Life of Catherine
M in 2002.}

^{2. Millet, Catherine. The Sexual Life of Catherine M (New York: Grove Press,
2003), 10.}

^{3. Leslie Camhi, “Sex Obsession by the Numbers,” New York Times, June 22,
2002,
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/22/books/sex-obsession-by-the-numbers.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm.}

^{4. “The Sexual Life of Catherine M—Is Just Not Sexy,” The Literary Kitty
(blog), September 21, 2010,
http://literarykitty.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/the-sexual-life-of-catherine-m-is-just-not-sexy/.}

^{5. Millet, The Sexual Life of Catherine M, 54.}

^{6. Ibid., 36.}

^{7. Ibid., 34.}

^{8. Ibid., 14.}

^{9. Ibid., 142.}

^{10. Ibid.}

^{11. Ibid., 197.}

^{12. Ibid., 191.}

^{13. Ibid., 180.}

^{14. Ibid., 176.}

^{15. Jessica Berens, “The Double Life of Catherine M,” Guardian, May 19, 2002,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/may/19/biography.features.}

^{16. Millet, The Sexual Life of Catherine M, 63.}

^{17. Ibid., 23, 26.}

^{18. Ibid., 175.}

^{19. “Thai Zoo Hopes Porn Will Get Sluggish Pandas to Mate,” Fox News , March
27, 2007, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,261569,00.html.}

^{20. Clarissa Ward, “‘Panda Porn’ to Boost Male’s Sex Drive,” ABC News ,
February 15, 2010,
http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/AmazingAnimals/porn-boost-male-pandas-sex-drives/story?id=9718714.}

^{21. Brian Handwerk, “Panda Porn to Boost Mating Efforts at Thai Zoo,” National
Geographic News, November 13, 2006,
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/11/061113-panda-mate.html.}

^{22. Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (New
York: Harper Perennial, 2007).}

^{23. Rajesh Shrivana, “Zoo Keepers Go ‘Blue’ in the Face for a Chimp of the Old Block
. . .” Deccan Herald, December 25, 2011,
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/43307/zoo-keepers-go-blue-face.html.}

^{24. Dennis Campbell, “Porn: The New Sex Education,” Joe Public Blog ,
Guardian , March 30, 2009,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/joepublic+education/sexeducation.}

^{25. Alex Morris, “They Know What Boys Want,” New York Magazine , January 30,
2011, http://nymag.com/news/features/70977/.}

^{26. Nicola Abé, “Online Sex Education: Parents’ Porn Fears Exaggerated, Experts Say,”
Spiegel Online , October 14, 2011,
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/online-sex-education-parents-porn-fears-exaggerated-experts-say-a-790266-2.html.}

^{27. Jessica Bennett, “Northwestern University’s Live Sex Class,” Daily Beast ,
March 2, 2011,
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/03/03/the-story-behind-northwestern-universitys-live-sex-class.html.}

^{28. Joshua Rhett Miller, “Northwestern University Professor Defends Explicit Sex Toy
Demonstration after Class,” Fox News , March 3, 2011,
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/03/03/northwestern-university-professor-defends-explicit-sex-toy-demonstration/?cmpid=cmty_%7BlinkBack%7D_Northwestern_University_Professor_Defends_Explicit_Sex_Toy_Demonstration_After_Class.}

^{29. Stefano Esposito, “Church Nixed Helping Northwestern Students Because of Sex Toy
Flap,” Herald-News , 2011,
http://heraldnews.suntimes.com/photos/galleries/4718726-417/church-nixed-helping-northwestern-students-because-of-sex-toy-flap.html.}

^{30. Jacques Steinberg, “Extracurricular Sex Toy Lesson Draws Rebuke at Northwestern,”
New York Times , March 3, 2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/04/education/04northwestern.html?_r=2&.}

^{31. While I retain these psychoanalytic insights, I am not committed to a Freudian
view of “sexual instinct,” his model of the unconscious, or a particular story
of human development, such as the Oedipus complex. I draw on psychoanalysts from
varying traditions, self psychology to object relations theory, and primarily
from areas where their quibbles are irrelevant to my overall argument.}

^{32. The academic literature on emotion fills volumes, taking up different aspects of
emotional experience: how to define emotion and distinguish the concept from
others, such as affect or feeling; immediate emotional reactions such as facial
expressions, vocal utterances, or physiological responses; self-reported
subjective emotional experiences or descriptions; how emotions are elicited or
displayed in specific situations, contexts, and cultures; models of emotional
experience; types of emotions; and so on. Some emotions, such as embarrassment
or pride, can be observed in only some human (and occasionally animal)
populations. Emotions can be conscious or unconscious, affecting us in multiple
ways simultaneously. Many researchers believe that certain emotions can be
considered biological, or universal, such as anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness,
and surprise, although they differ as to which emotions might be included and
why. Some distinguish between primary and secondary emotions or between primary
emotional states and “self-conscious emotional states.”}

^{33. David Matsumoto and Hyi Sung Hwang, “Culture and Emotion,” Journal of
Cross-Cultural Psychology 43, no. 1 (2012): 106.}

^{34. Ibid., 94.}

^{35. Diana Jean Schemo, “Sex Education with Just One Lesson: No Sex,” New York
Times, December 28, 2000,
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/28/us/sex-education-with-just-one-lesson-no-sex.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm.}

^{36. William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1997).}

^{37. Ibid., 20.}

^{38. Some film series in this genre, which I refer to as “consumption porn,” are
Cocktails, Slap Happy, Gag Factor, Rough Sex,
and Oral Consumption.}

^{39. Tim Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 136.}

^{40. David Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality}

^{41. Gilbert Herdt, Sambia Sexual Culture: Essays from the Field (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press 1999), 18.}

^{42. Deborah A. Elliston, “‘Ritualized Homosexuality’ in Melanesia and Beyond,
American Ethnologist 22, no. 4 (1995): 862.}

^{43. Ibid., 850.}

^{44. Ibid., 858.}

^{45. Ibid., 859.}

^{46. Kelly, Raymond Case. 1993. Constructing inequality: the fabrication of a
hierarchy of virtue among the Etoro. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, p.
46 and Kelly Raymond Case. 1977. Etoro Social Structure: a study in Structural
Contradiction. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, p. 16.}

^{47. Paul Gilbert, “Evolution, Social Roles, and the Differences in Shame and Guilt,”
Social Research 70, no. 4 (2003): 1215.}

^{48. Richard Shweder, “Toward a Deep Cultural Psychology of Shame,” Social Research
70, no. 4 (2003): 1115.}

^{49. Michael Lewis, Shame: The Exposed Self (New York: Free Press, 1992),
195.}

^{50. Ibid., 162.}

^{51. Joseph D. Lichtenberg, Sensuality and Sexuality across the Divide of Shame
(New York: Routledge, 2007), 144. Although Lichtenberg hopes that lovemaking
between adults can be sensual, tender, and mutual, he also cautions that full
arousal, excitement, and orgiastic release will require prohibitions and
transgressions. Expressions of sexuality inevitably involve confrontation with a
prohibitive barrier that, while it “may be more or less intense,” “always
involves a degree of edginess and rebelliousness from infancy” (111).}

^{52. Nicholas Thomas, Cook: The Extraordinary Sea Voyages of Captain James Cook
(New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2003), 69.}

^{53. Mario Perniola, “Between Clothing and Nudity,” in Fragments for a History of
the Human Body, ed. Michel Fehrer (New York: Zone, 1989), 237–65.}

^{54. Alice Dreger, “Wanting Privacy versus Being Ashamed,” Fetishes I Don’t Get:
Thoughts on Life, Love, and Lust (blog), Psychology Today, March
6, 2011,
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fetishes-i-dont-get/201103/wanting-privacy-versus-being-ashamed.}

^{55. The phrase in flagrante delicto is occasionally used as a euphemism for
being caught naked or having sex, though in very different contexts.}

^{56. Gang rape, group rape, disciplining, streamlining, lainap, and waylaying
are terms used to refer to forced sex in different contexts; unwanted sex can
also occur with varying levels of coercion. In some situations, the individuals
involved or those interpreting the events differ about whether “rape” is the
appropriate term; when this is the case, I try to acknowledge the ambiguity
across perspectives and use the same term as those who are closest to the
experience. Thus, even though certain “ritual defloration” practices of young
girls might be considered coercive or criminal in other contexts, I use the
language found in the original source whenever possible.}

^{57. Ed Yong, “Ballistic Penises and Corkscrew Vaginas—The Sexual Battles of Ducks,”
Not Exactly Rocket Science (blog), December 22, 2009,
http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2009/12/22/ballistic-penises-and-corkscrew-vaginas-the-sexual-battles/.}

^{58. Joanna Bourke, “Sexual Violence, Bodily Pain, and Trauma: A History,” Theory,
Culture & Society 29, no. 3 (2012): 32.}

^{59. Darius Rejali, “Ordinary Betrayals: Conceptualizing Refugees Who Have Been
Tortured in the Global Village,” Human Rights Review 1, no. 4 (2000),
available at
http://academic.reed.edu/poli_sci/faculty/rejali/articles/HRRarticle.html.}

^{60. Thomas Gregor, Anxious Pleasures: The Sexual Lives of an Amazonian People
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 493.}

^{61. Yolanda Murphy and Robert Francis Murphy, Women of the Forest, 2nd ed.
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 195.}

^{62. Ibid.}

^{63. Ibid., xlvii. The Murphys also discovered that assumptions of inferiority
reversed once a woman was beyond her childbearing years; in the underlying
cosmology of Mundurucu society, older women become “sociological males,”
suggesting a more complex power structure than one based only on gender. This is
also from Women of the Forest, p. 18.}

^{64. E. Adamson Hoebel, The Cheyennes: Indians of the Great Plains (New York:
Holt, 1960), cited in Peggy R. Sanday, Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex,
Brotherhood, and Privilege on Campus (New York: New York University
Press, 1990), 100.}

^{65. Kate Wood, “Contextualizing Group Rape in Post-apartheid South Africa,”
Culture, Health, and Sexuality 7, no. 4 (2005): 309.}

^{66. Ibid., 310.}

^{67. Phoebe Ferris-Rotman, “Prison Gang Rape of Mafia ‘Poet’ Prompts Government
Response,” Pink News, August 5, 2008,
http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2008/08/05/prison-gang-rape-of-mafia-poet-prompts-government-response/.}

^{68. Tali Woodward, “Life in Hell: In California Prisons, an Unconventional Gender
Identity Can Be Like an Added Sentence,” San Francisco Bay Guardian,
March 15, 2006, http://www.sfbg.com/40/24/cover_life.html.}

^{69. Jesse Ellison, “The Military’s Secret Shame,” Newsweek, April 3, 2011,
http://www.newsweek.com/2011/04/03/the-military-s-secret-shame.html.}

^{70. Marian T. A. Tankink, “The Silence of South-Sudanese Women: Social Risks in
Talking about Experiences of Sexual Violence,” Culture, Health &
Sexuality: An International Journal for Research, Intervention and Care
15, no. 4 (2013): 400.}

^{71. Ibid., 398.}

^{72. Jay Pateakos, “Brothers Break Silence in Big Dan’s Rape Case,” Herald
News, October 25, 2009,
http://www.heraldnews.com/news/local_news/x665149028/After-26-years-brothers-break-silence.}

^{73. Charles Winokoor, “Frank O’Boy Speaks out on Big Dan’s Rape Case,” Taunton
Daily Gazette, May 28, 2009,
http://www.tauntongazette.com/news/x313662945/Frank-O-Boy-speaks-out-on-Big-Dan-s-rape-case.}

^{74. Ibid.}

^{75. Paul Edward Parker, “Juries Hear Big Dan’s Rape Case,” Bristol County
Century (Providence Journal), November 1, 1999, C1.}

^{76. Winokoor, “Frank O’Boy.”}

^{77. James C. McKinley, “Vicious Assault Shakes Texas Town,” New York Times,
March 8, 2011.}

^{78. David Edwards, “Republican Lawmaker Blames 11-Year-Old Victim of Alleged Gang
Rape,” The Raw Story, March 16, 2011,
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/03/16/republican-lawmaker-blames-11-year-old-victim-of-alleged-gang-rape/.}

^{79. Cindy Horswell, “Defendant in Cleveland Gang Rape Case Gets Life Sentence,”
Houston Chronicle, November 28, 2012,
http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Defendant-in-Cleveland-gang-rape-case-gets-life-4073766.php.}

^{80. Miller, Anatomy of Disgust, 9.}

^{81. Ibid., x.}

^{82. “Photos of Gang Rape Go Viral on Facebook,” Globe and Mail, September 16,
2010,
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/british-columbia/photos-of-gang-rape-go-viral-on-facebook/article1710072/.}

^{83. “Pitt Meadows, B.C. Gang Rape: Boy Who Posted Images of 16-Year-Old Victim
Sentenced,” Huffington Post, February 10, 2012,
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/02/10/pitt-meadows-bc-gang-rape_n_1269269.html.}

^{84. Kashmir Hill, “The Potential Financial Consequences of Sharing Gang-Rape Photos
on Facebook,” Forbes, September 17, 2010,
http://blogs.forbes.com/kashmirhill/2010/09/17/the-potential-financial-consequences-of-sharing-gang-rape-photos-on-facebook/.}

^{85. “Gang Rape 10,000,” Quantum Buddha’s Blog (blog), September 24, 2010,
http://quantumbuddha.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/gang-rape-10000/, accessed
November 2012. By February 2013, the blog entry had been deleted, although it
can still be found at
http://www.progressivebloggers.ca/2010/09/gang-rape-10000/.}

^{86. “Gang Rape 8,000,” Quantum Buddha’s Blog (blog), September 2010,
http://quantumbuddha.wordpress.com/2010/09/17/gang-rape-8000/, accessed November
2012. By February 2013, the blog entry had been deleted, although it can still
be found at http://www.progressivebloggers.ca/2010/09/gang-rape-8000/.}

^{87. Although discussed less in the media, and disputed by Bronwyn Curran, Mukhtaran
Mai’s brother Shaquoor was also reportedly sodomized by three Mastoi men just
before her attack, as punishment for the supposed caste violations.}

^{88. “Hudood Ordinances—The Crime and Punishment for Zina,” Amnesty International in
Asia & the Pacific,
http://asiapacific.amnesty.org/apro/aproweb.nsf/pages/svaw_hudoo.}

^{89. Bruce Loudon, “Pakistan Pack Rape as Reform Laws Stall,” Autstralian,
September 19, 2006,
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/pakistan-pack-rape-as-reform-laws-stall/story-e6frg6so-1111112233324.}

^{90. Bronwyn Curran, “Mukhtaran Mai: The Other Side of the Story,” News
International, April 30, 2011,
http://www.thenews.com.pk/TodaysPrintDetail.aspx?ID=44406&Cat=9.}

^{91. Caryn E. Neumann, Sexual Crime: A Reference Handbook (Santa Barbara:
ABC-CLIO, 2009), 133.}

^{92. “Outrage at Musharraf Rape Remarks,” BBC News, September 16, 2005,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4251536.stm. Musharraf also claimed that
he was misquoted: Glenn Kessler, “Musharraf Denies Rape Comments,” Washington
Post, September 19, 2005,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/18/AR2005091800554.html.}

^{93. Lynn G. Smith and James R. Smith, “Comarital Sex: The Incorporation of
Extramarital Sex into the Marriage Relationship,” in Beyond Monogamy: Recent
Studies of Sexual Alternatives in Marriage, ed. James R. Smith and Lynn
G. Smith (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 133.}

^{94. Curtis Bergstrand and Jennifer Blevins Sinski, Swinging in America: Love, Sex,
and Marriage in the 21st Century (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010), 55.}

^{95. Larsen, p. 5.}

^{96. Larsen, p. 11.}

^{97. Corie Hammers, “An Examination of Lesbian/Queer Bathhouse Culture and the Social
Organization of (Im)Personal Sex,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography
38, no. 3 (2009): 325.}

^{98. Ibid., 324.}

^{99. Ibid., 325.}

^{100. Ibid., 154.}

^{101. Ibid., 156.}

^{102. Ibid., 157.}

^{103. Russell Westhaver, “Party Boys: Identity, Community, and the Circuit” (PhD diss.,
Simon Fraser University, 2003), 105.}

^{104. Ibid., 619.}

^{105. Russell Westhaver, “Flaunting and Empowerment: Thinking about Circuit Parties,
the Body and Power,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35, no. 6
(2006): 617.}

^{106. Ibid., 636.}

^{107. Westhaver, “Party Boys,” 112.}

^{108. Westhaver, “Flaunting and Empowerment,” 618.}

^{109. Westhaver, “Party Boys,” 270.}

^{110. David McInnes, Jack Bradley, and Garrett Prestage, “The Discourse of Gay Men’s
Group Sex: The Importance of Masculinity,” Culture, Health & Sexuality:
An International Journal for Research, Intervention and Care 11, no. 6
(2009): 647.}

^{111. Ibid., 651.}

^{112. Erin Mantz, “Suburban Swingers: Beyond the Sex,” Today.com, July 29,
2008,
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/25851876/ns/today-relationships/t/suburban-swingers-beyond-sex/#.UNfESqX3AUs.}

^{113. Harmon Leon, “A Night with the California Swingers Club,” The Smoking Jacket,
December 22, 2010,
http://www.thesmokingjacket.com/humor/california-swingers-club.}

^{114. Stephen Holden, review of The Lifestyle: Group Sex in the Suburbs,
directed by David Schisgall, New York Times, March 16, 2000,
http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/179829/The-Lifestyle/overview.}

^{115. Ibid.}

^{116. Unsigned review of The Lifestyle: Group Sex in the Suburbs, directed by
David Schisgall, Nitrate Online,
www.nitrateonline.com/1999/fsiff99-3.html#Lifestyle.}

^{117. Phil Villarreal, review of Sex with Strangers, directed by Joe Gantz and
Harry Gantz, Arizona Daily Star, August 30, 2002.}

^{118. David Noh, review of Sex with Strangers, directed by Joe Gantz and Harry
Gantz, Film Journal International,
http://www.filmjournal.com/filmjournal/esearch/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000696179.}

^{119. Jed Horne, review of Sex with Strangers, directed by Joe Gantz and Harry
Gantz, Tech
Online Edition, October 8, 2002,
www-tech.mit.edu/V122/N46/Sex_with_strang.46a.html.}

^{120. India Nicholas, “Swingers Go Wild for Bill Plympton,” Willamette Week
(staff blog), October 13, 2009,
http://blogs.wweek.com/news/2009/10/13/swingers-go-wild-for-bill-plympton/.}

^{121. Mantz, “Suburban Swingers.”}

^{122. Leon, “California Swingers Club.”}

^{123. Harmon Leon, The American Dream: Walking in the Shoes of Carnies, Arms
Dealers, Immigrant Dreamers, Pot Farmers, and Christian Believers (New
York: Nation Books, 2008).}

^{124. Sanjiv Bhattacharya, “Meet the Mandingos,” Details, 2007,
http://www.details.com/sex-relationships/sex-and-other-releases/200703/meet-the-mandingos.}

^{125. Carla Meyer, review of Sex with Strangers, directed by Joe Gantz and Harry
Gantz, SFGate, February 22, 2002,
www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/02/22/DD77008.DTL.}

^{126. Michael J. Mooney, “Swinging through South Florida’s Underground Sex Clubs,”
Broward Palm Beach New Times, March 3, 2011,
http://www.browardpalmbeach.com/content/printVersion/1375004/.}

^{127. Ferrett Steinmetz, “Placing My First Swingers’ Ad,” Ferrett (blog),
www.theferrett.com.}

^{128. Unsigned review of The Lifestyle, Nitrate Online.}

^{129. Miller, Anatomy of Disgust, 194.}

^{130. Mooney, “South Florida’s Underground Sex Clubs.”}

^{131. Larissa Nolan, “Collymore Revelation Lets ‘Dogging’ out of the Kennel,” Irish
Independent, March 7, 2004,
http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/collymore-revelation-lets-dogging-out-of-the-kennel-26218546.html.}

^{132. Stan Collymore, Tackling My Demons (London: CollinsWillow, 2004), 290.}

^{133. Scott Barancik, “D.C. Swings! Couples Meet for Cocktails, Hors d’Oeuvres, and
Blowjobs at a Washington Restaurant,” Washington City Paper, December 15,
1995, http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/8031/dc-swings/.}

^{134. “Crowning Cora,” Washington City Paper, January 5, 1996,
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/9541/crowning-cora.}

^{135. Terry Gould, The Lifestyle: A Look at the Erotic Rites of Swingers
(Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1999).}

Case Study: The “Dark Orgies” of the Marind-anim

The Marind-anim live on the southern coast of New Guinea, or what was Indonesian Irian Jaya, now Papua. Today, most are Catholic or Protestant. Of their current culture, little seems to be written. Marind-anim are said to “keep to themselves.” They obtain around 97 percent of their needs from the forests, swamps, rivers, and sea—even if by design, other options would be limited. The area they inhabit is marked by lack of transportation, poor road conditions, and scarce access to medical care and educational resources. Continuing isolation from the larger market economy indicates marginalization, and disputes regularly arise over fishing and land rights.

At one point in history, the Marind-anim were known as ruthless headhunters with an occasional proclivity for cannibalism, roaming hundreds of miles to raid other Papua New Guinea groups. Since calling people “cannibals” can be as incendiary as accusing them of having orgies, the Marind-anim developed a harrowing reputation. That feasts, weddings, and dances were accompanied by group sex made matters worse, eventually exposing the group to heavy-handed colonial intervention.

Jan van Baal, a Dutch cultural anthropologist and the governor of Netherlands New Guinea from 1953 to 1958, is one of the primary ethnographers on the Marind-anim. His 1966 publication, Dema: Description and Analysis of Marind Culture, synthesizes his observations with an analysis of existing Dutch and German sources, primarily focusing on the coastal region. The book, which is 988 pages in length, describes a world that was fairly incomprehensible to those who came into contact with it and raises complex questions about the impact of European colonialism on native life.

The Dutch settlement of Merauke was established as an administrative post in 1902 to control Marind-anim headhunting raids, which had been ranging into British New Guinea and drawing complaints. Clashes in worldview were immediate. Marind-anim disliked colonial impositions of territory, and Dutch officials found even their basic assumptions about social organization challenged. Administrators had concluded that each “long drawn out series of often miserable huts, built on the low ridge high on the beach, where the vegetation of coconut palms begins” was a village. “It seemed all very simple,” Van Baal writes, “the villages stretched in one long row all along the coast, waiting as it were to have their names noted down in a register and their chiefs recognized as village chiefs.” The trouble was that there were no “village chiefs.” (Though traditional authority figures existed in Marind communities, they were not recognizable as such to the colonials.) In 1914, the administration, “disgusted with natives who had no chiefs,” finally began appointing village chiefs. Although the “villagers” were consulted during the process, “the institution never became a success,” and the chiefs continuously lacked prestige.^[1]

If the Dutch were surprised at the lack of an administrative framework and an attitude toward authority so very different from their own, one can imagine their surprise at other aspects of Marind life.

By 1905, the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart had descended on Merauke. Due to a lack of training, linguistic difficulties, and “puritan ethics,” Van Baal explained, early missionaries focused on isolated aspects of Marind culture in their writings and interventions—not surprisingly, headhunting, cannibalism, and orgies—without really understanding or contextualizing these practices. As such, they may have been deceived about the true prevalence of ritual cannibalism; some stories and myths were specifically told to throw “the uninitiated” or cultural outsiders off the scent of the real secrets underlying their rituals. Van Baal believed that early rumors about ceremonies where young women were raped by groups of male initiates and then eaten were false, for example, although he acknowledged that Indonesian hunters and traders could tell “impressive stories.” He had been “taken” himself with a trader’s tale of encountering “a woman who was pent in a cage in the forest, ostensibly for the purpose of being fattened to make a better meal.” Van Baal first surmised that the woman was menstruating but began to doubt the story entirely after conversations with Father Jan Verschueren, a missionary who had done extensive research on Marind customs and rituals.^[2] More measured reports, however—such as that the arms and legs of headhunting victims were occasionally eaten—Van Baal believed to be true. Instead of being ritualized or linked to spiritual beliefs, though, these episodes of cannibalism usually occurred among “medicine men” who believed that human flesh had magical properties or supplemented the community’s diet during difficult times.

Yet even if cannibalism was more a myth than a reality—or practiced only in hard, hungry times—other customs, such as burying elderly relatives alive when they became a burden, using cadaverous fluid in initiation rituals, or naming people after “captured skulls” (using the last word the victim uttered before being beheaded), prove the memory of the Marind-anim as one to be reckoned with from the days of colonial rule to the present. Headhunting served as a marker of manhood. Obtaining “head names” was one of the primary reasons for headhunting expeditions, although the raids also provided an opportunity for Marind-anim to kidnap children—between 10 and 20 percent of the Marind population was estimated to be of foreign origin, although kidnapped children were raised as their own.^[3] Colonial officers instituted penalties for headhunting and began confiscating the evidence—one raid yielded ninety “fresh heads.”^[4]

During his time living among the Marind, van Baal developed an appreciation for some of their cultural beliefs, gestures, and rituals but admitted to being disturbed by the “dark side” of their sexuality—men having anal intercourse with very young boys (referred to as “homosexual” intercourse by van Baal, “ritualized homosexuality” by later researchers, and “semen practices” by others), heterosexual defloration rituals and fertility ceremonies “perpetrated upon ‘very young girls’ by groups of men,” and regular extramarital “promiscuity.” An unmarried man risked being seen as a “poor wretch,” and most Marind-anim were “heterosexual,” but as with certain other Papua New Guinea groups, same-sex relations were prevalent and linked to intricate cosmological beliefs. Marind-anim believed that semen, or sperma, was the essence of life, health, and prosperity. Young boys began initiations into adulthood between seven and fourteen years of age, moving into men’s houses for up to six years, learning the Sosom myth and the symbolism of bullroarers, and engaging in anal intercourse with older men. Although most groups engaging in semen practices required the activities of the men’s houses kept secret from women, Marind-anim required women’s participation in some of the rites (even as other myths and sacred objects, such as the bullroarers, were kept hidden). Sperma was necessary for women’s fertility and was also believed to feed the fetus in the womb. Food mixed with sperma was served on special occasions. For all these purposes, sperma obtained from the vulva of a woman after copulation was preferred over that obtained from masturbation; for van Baal, this male dependence on females became a source of underlying conflict and aggression.

Van Baal defines otiv-bombari as “promiscuous sexual intercourse”—bombari meaning “ceremony,” otiv meaning “numerous” and referring to the men’s house. Otiv-bombari did not involve a general exchange of women but instead comprised a group of many men and “usually not more than one woman—sometimes two but never more than three.” Some writers classify otiv-bombari as a fertility rite, as it was practiced at age-grade ceremonies, weddings, in the years before a woman had children, and when a woman began menstruating again after childbirth. Van Baal questions this as the sole explanation, though, pointing out that the ceremony was performed at other times as well, such as after the completion of a new garden. This feast, or wambad-bombari, was classified “as a compensation for services rendered.”^[5] Ceremonies were also held to collect sperma (semen) to mix into food or rub on the body for medicinal or magical uses; sperma was even applied to plants. In these cases, a limited number of women “would have intercourse with as many men as possible, while the excreta are collected in a coconut-bowl.”^[6] Given that “wife-lending” was practiced as a form of hospitality and payment and the host of a feast was responsible for ensuring that women were sexually available, van Baal argues otiv-bombari might have been “an attraction as well as a ritual act,” sometimes serving as a form of “prostitution” and sometimes to enhance the festive character of the occasion.”^[7] The festive mood—at least for men—was also heightened by drinking a “liberal dose” of wati, made from the kava plant. Kava has narcotic properties similar to muscle relaxants and benzodiazepine; it can reduce anxiety and produce mild euphoria or “exhilaration.” Women did not usually drink wati, believing that it caused infertility.

The most common use of otiv-bombari was in the wedding ceremony. Once a couple decided to marry, the ceremony began with the bride donning a new “apron,” which attached to a string around her waist. She received gifts of food from relatives and then presented offerings to the groom’s parents, including a sago loaf to his mother “signifying that, from now on, she no longer needed to cook his meals.” At nightfall, “a few old women led the bride to a spot in the bush behind the village, where some sheets of eucalyptus bark are spread out.” She then had “intercourse with all the members of her husband’s clan or phratry, perhaps even with all the local members of his moiety.” After the ceremony, the bride was included in otiv-bombari more generally and took up residence in her husband’s mother’s house.^[8]

Previous European observers had been captivated by otiv-bombari, but van Baal identified “astounding gaps” in their knowledge of the rules participants followed—clearly, he knew enough not to believe it was a free-for-all. Van Baal claimed that the order of participants was established ahead of time; in the wedding ceremony, for example, the inmates of the husband’s men’s house went first.^[9] How women were chosen for center stage in other otiv-bombari was less clear. But just because previous observers “failed completely” in recording the rules, he warns, one should not assume that patterns of mutual obligation did not come into play. “The Marind,” he points out, quickly learned that otiv-bombari was “behaviour which the whites condemned as immoral” and “wisely managed to avoid making these [rules] a subject of discussion.”^[10] Van Baal also doubted the “physical feasibility” of stories that the bride had sex with as many as thirty to one hundred men (although some of today’s “gang bang” stars might beg to differ). He trusted the more measured accounts, which declared that “not more than five or six claimants were allowed to have access to the bride during the first night; if there were more, intercourse was resumed the following night.” Men’s same-sex anal intercourse, though embellished as “unrestricted sodomy” in some reports, was subject to many of the same rules as otiv-bombari.

We cannot infer much about individual experiences of otiv-bombari, whether pleasurable or distasteful. Reliable subjective accounts were challenging to obtain in such a setting, given colonial power relations, language barriers, and patterns of sexual segregation. But, for Marind-anim, sex was not primarily about desire or pleasure, anyway—part of the reason that van Baal disliked using the word “orgy” to describe otiv-bombari. Neither men nor women, van Baal observed, were necessarily sexually satisfied by otiv-bombari. Even if spread out over several nights, otiv-bombari could be a “traumatic” physical experience for women: “They were said to be in fairly bad shape after such a night. The next day they could hardly walk, sometimes they could only move crawling on all fours, so the women told the interviewers. On the whole, it was a burden to them. Nevertheless, several female informants confessed that they participated, not primarily because it was their husbands’ wish, but because they felt it was a necessity.”^[11] Women worried about becoming ill or infertile if they refused. While men might have received more gratification on the whole, some expressed conflicting feelings or were opposed to otiv-bombari. During the ceremonies, most men “committed the sexual act in the natural way but some had to give up and achieve emission by masturbating.” Ambivalence even arose in the term itself. Van Baal also notes that an early interpreter used the term otiv-bombari only for the wedding ceremony, designating all other promiscuous intercourse as dom-bombari; dom meant “ugly” or “bad in a moral sense.” As this use of the word dom was recorded before missionary influence had “sufficiently asserted itself to make the Marind condemn one of their most cherished customs as morally reprehensible,” van Baal interprets it as an indication that otiv-bombari was not “a pleasure rite, but an obligation” for both sexes, perhaps even reflecting men’s distaste for having sex with women.^[12] Other evidence came from their myths and religious beliefs. It is impossible to even summarize here the many detailed myths that van Baal and others collected, though it is worth noting that one of the most important and prevalent images was of a couple stuck together in copulation; there are many variations on the theme, but often the penis must be severed to free the couple and later extracted from the woman’s vagina by a stork.

The existence of extramarital sexual rites did not mean that Marind-anim took a liberal approach to sexuality in general. Premarital pregnancy was discouraged, and children born before marriage could be killed. To “avoid shame and humiliation,” a young girl who became pregnant might “try to bring about abortion by such means as leaping from a tree or being dragged over a forked tree.”^[13] Men might “lend” their wives to other men as a form of payment or hospitality, but women’s infidelity could be punished with homicide.^[14] Children were indulged in sexual play when they were very young, but such contact became subject to numerous taboos as they aged.^[15] Cultural contradictions also arose in relations between men and women. The symbolic inferiority of women did not necessarily mean overall devaluation. Van Baal argued that despite women’s heavy workloads, ritual subordination, and tendency to be beaten by their husbands, women were not simply slaves to men and readily defended themselves. Further, he noted that if a wife fulfilled her many duties, she would not be discarded for a younger women even “when her good looks fade”—“of this more decent sin, popular in many civilizations, we do not hear in Marind-anim society.”^[16]

The story of otiv-bombari takes an ironic twist with regard to fertility. Contact with Europeans had sparked several influenza epidemics and introduced venereal disease, both of which impacted the size of the population and the birthrate. When a medical study conducted in 1920 found high rates of sterility among the Marind, a “depopulation team” was sent to determine the possible causes. Around 25 percent of the Marind were found to be affected with donovanosis, or venereal granuloma, a bacterial infection that causes genital ulcers. The disease, which had been first identified in 1896 in Madras, Queensland, and New Orleans, was possibly introduced to the Marind-anim at a festival in Merauke occurring in 1905 or by the Australian laborers used to construct the outpost. Venereal granuloma was believed to be sexually transmitted and highly contagious (although van Baal observed that it spread more slowly among Marind-anim than should have been expected given their sexual practices). Venereal granuloma provided an urgent reason, officials believed, to clamp down on native promiscuity. Efforts to control infection throughout the 1920s and 1930s led to a medical campaign requiring “an almost complete change of the native patterns of life.”^[17] Authorities banned feasts and dances, along with otiv-bombari. “Model villages” were set up, requiring families to live together, as boys’ and men’s houses were also associated with sexual license. Sexual practices continued in secret, often at the urging of the elderly women, although there were fewer opportunities for Marind-anim to participate in the ceremonies that had been so central to their social life.^[18]

These measures brought venereal granuloma under control, although the birthrate remained low. Women who were not infected with venereal granuloma were also found to have high rates of infertility, and both van Baal and the depopulation team noted that precolonial Marind-anim women faced similar problems. Historically, the low birthrate was perhaps why Marind-anim obtained children by abducting them during headhunting missions or purchasing them from other tribes. Although recognizing that the evidence was correlational, the depopulation team believed that otiv-bombari played a significant role in infertility, writing that “the absence of pregnancies is probably due to chronic inflammation of the cervix uteri and chronic irritation of the female genital organs in consequence of excessive copulation.” Because of the supposed curative powers of sperma, otiv-bombari had intensified after contact with Europeans when fertility further dropped, becoming concentrated on young women having difficulty conceiving and exacerbating the problem. Van Baal tentatively agrees, pointing out that the generation born after 1913—those whom had been indoctrinated by the missionaries, educated in schools, and no longer practiced otiv-bombari—showed a decrease in sterility.^[19]

In 1937, the Roman Catholic Mission sent van Baal to Bad, a community that had recently held a sosom celebration, to crack down on participants. Van Baal had mixed feelings—the rituals were prohibited, but the legal justification for doing so was tenuous, and although homosexual promiscuity was “obnoxious” in public health terms and venereal granuloma was still present, he had long desired a more “humane policy” on native feasts. He decided this aim would be better accomplished if he did not start feuding with the mission over “sodomy,” however, and headed up the river to seek witnesses to the event and reprimand the community. In his ethnography, he recounts the trip “as an illustration of the dangers of interfering with other people’s religious life.” Although everyone in Bad must have known about the ceremony, he writes, people feigned ignorance until he threatened to reveal their secrets, including the bullroarers, to the women. “Exploding a bomb could not have had a more dramatic effect,” he writes:

Van Baal sentenced the men to fourteen days’ detention, which was not harsh enough in the eyes of his superiors but only the beginning of the calamity from the Marind-anim perspective. Afterward, everywhere he went van Baal saw “old men sitting by the side of the path, with dejected faces consulting each other on the disaster which had befallen them.” Several weeks later, they showed the women their bullroarers, because the “Big Man at Merauke knew everything.”^[20]

To fully understand otiv-bombari, we would need to dig deeper into Marind-anim history, myth, religious beliefs, political relationships with neighboring groups and colonial powers, kinship structures, and so on. It is difficult to do so, however. “Marind-anim culture,” van Baal writes, “belongs to the past.”^[21] The participants, along with most of the individuals who wrote about them, are dead (Van Baal died in 1992). By the 1940s, nearly the whole of Marind-anim life had changed. Warfare and headhunting were still forbidden and penalized harshly. Feasts remained banned, and marriages had to be registered with the administration. Living arrangements had been altered. The idea of a husband, wife, and children living under one roof may have been the most desirable model for the Dutch, but to the elder generation of Marind-anim, it was “completely immoral.”^[22] People stopped gardening and growing vegetables, as they were forbidden to engage in wambad-bombari, and the government discouraged leaving their villages. According to a report from YAPSEL, a nongovernmental development organization started in 1987 with the aim of helping contemporary Marind-anim become economically self-sufficient, a “moral depression” had developed in their communities. Later missionaries to the area reported “inertia” and “general indifference” toward almost everything in their environment, and this difficulty in “acculturating” has continued to the present day.^[23] In a 1993 report, YAPSEL argued that rebuilding a “healthy socio-cultural base” among the Marind was essential for economic change. They suggested that development workers encourage “activities in the cultural field,” such as “writing up folk tales,” reconstructing “traditional dances,” and “saving and continuing skills regarding traditional material culture (musical instruments, weaponry, plait work).”^[24]

Although otiv-bombari was suppressed over a hundred years ago, the custom remains intriguing to westerners because it presents such a contrasting view of sexuality. The Dutch regulation of Marind-anim rituals wasn’t the first campaign waged against certain forms of sexuality in the name of public health but with an underlying moral aim, nor was it the first time that contradictions in how a group conceptualized and practiced sexuality produced ironic or unintended effects.

In the years since the depopulation team’s tentative conclusion that “excessive copulation” was causing chronic irritation, a medical link was found between pelvic inflammatory disease and infertility. Even before venereal granuloma was observed in the population, anthropologist Bruce Knauft points out, Marind-anim women’s sexual practices could have caused tissue damage. In a tropical climate, even slight skin wounds can quickly become infected; vaginal tears or trauma could thus trigger a worsening chain of infection. Chronic vaginal infections could eventually lead to pelvic inflammatory disease and permanent sterility.^[25] Later research also found donovanosis to be less contagious than originally assumed—perhaps accounting for van Baal’s observation that it was not spreading “like wildfire” even though it was indeed endemic to the population. Racism, according to medical anthropologist Lawrence Hammar, led to constructions of donovanosis as a disease of persons who were poor, dark-skinned, lived in tropical areas, exhibited a lack of hygiene, and were sexually promiscuous.^[26] Thus, even though an etiologic agent was found in 1905, both Dutch and German interventions among the Marind-anim focused on “moral education of the people,” inciting them to monogamy “by building houses according to a given model and by combatting superstition and sexual excesses.”^[27] As in other colonial settings, medicine and morality intermingled such that practices already disturbing to Europeans could be controlled, even eradicated, in the “best interests” of the native population.

This official history, still frequently told, has the flair of a redemption narrative: although the campaign initiated against Marind cultural practices by the colonial administration was intrusive, even devastating, to their traditional way of life, it was ultimately justified and successful in eradicating the disease and restoring fertility—indeed, a future—to the Marind-anim. An alternate narrative, perhaps, would not deny that donovanosis was found in the population. But as infertility was a more long-standing issue, the threat was not one of rampant contagion. Interventions might still have been warranted but could have proceeded more humanely, as van Baal suggested.

Both narratives raise questions. Were the Marind-anim saved by colonial intervention, given that their population was declining? Were they on a fast track to self-destruction before the Dutch even set foot on the beaches, or to use van Baal’s words, were they already “up against a wall” because of the many contradictions in their beliefs and practices? And if the Dutch indeed “saved” them, what exactly was saved? Are folktales, “traditional dances” (minus otiv-bombari) and “plait work” enough? If bullroarers are no longer powerful symbols linked to living myth and ritual but simply “musical instruments” purchased by tourists and New Age hippies, might we not expect a level of moral depression?

What if a bacterial infection were just a bacterial infection, without a lesson in morality embedded within it? What if, instead of imposing monogamy, the colonial administration had worked imaginatively with the Marind-anim to manage the spread of bacterial infection without a sea change in social life? On the other hand, what if restrictions on otiv-bombari were welcomed by some Marind-anim? Could the practice have continued on an optional basis, or would it have lost its power and mystery in the process?

^{1. Jan van Baal, with Father J. Verschueren, MSC, Dema: Description and Analysis
of Marind Culture (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 40.}

^{2. Ibid., 540.}

^{3. Bruce M. Knauft, South Coast New Guinea Cultures:
‪History, Comparison, Dialectic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993), 157, 162.}

^{4. Baal, Dema , 709.}

^{5. Ibid., 812.}

^{6. Ibid., 549.}

^{7. Ibid., 811.}

^{8. Ibid., 162–63.}

^{9. Ibid., 808.}

^{10. Ibid., 821.}

^{11. Ibid., 815.}

^{12. Ibid., 816.}

^{13. Ibid., 155.}

^{14. Ibid., 165.}

^{15. Ibid., 141.}

^{16. Ibid., 171.}

^{17. Ibid., 25.}

^{18. Ibid., 819.}

^{19. Ibid., 27.}

^{20. Ibid., 492.}

^{21. Jan van Baal, “The Dialectics of Sex in Marind-anim Culture,” in Ritualized
Homosexuality in Melanesia , ed. Gilbert H. Herdt (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1984), 128.}

^{22. Jeroen A. Overweel, The Marind in a Changing Environment: A Study on
Social-Economic Change in Marind Society to Assist in the Formulation of a
Long Term Strategy for the Foundation for Social, Economic and Environmental
Development (YAPSEL) (Irian Jaya, Indonesia: YAPSEL, 1993), 22.}

^{23. Ibid., 28.}

^{24. Ibid., 57.}

^{25. Knauft, 165.}

^{26. Lawrence Hammar, “The Dark Side to Donovanosis: Color, Climate, Race and Racism
in American South Venereology,” Journal of Medical Humanities 18, no. 1
(1997): 29–57.}

^{27. Ibid., 33.}

From the Coolidge Effect to Cosmic Ecstasy

The “Gang Bang Girl” (Interview, Brianna)

For a few years, I was the “gang bang” girl in town.

It wasn’t like it suddenly happened one day—voila! But it also wasn’t something I pursued, a lifelong fantasy or anything like that. A number of forces just came together at a particular time and place. I was getting divorced. I was working too hard, supporting myself and my soon-to-be-ex-husband. I was restless. I wanted adventure. And I really needed sex. There hadn’t been much sex during my marriage.

One night, a married man I was having an affair with shared a fantasy he had of me getting gang-banged by five guys. A gang bang hadn’t ever occurred to me as exciting before that, but he planted the seeds of curiosity. Okay, that sounds interesting. I started looking at websites that were used for hooking up and fantasizing about anonymous partners. One night, I hooked up with a random guy and then went home and wrote my boyfriend about it, thinking it would turn him on. But it didn’t. He got very upset. After he calmed down, though, he asked me to do it again—this time with a girl. So I did. He got upset again.

That relationship didn’t last.

By the time I met Sam, I was ready to have my sexual boundaries pushed, and he was the perfect person to do it—he hosted sex parties and fetish events, was in an open relationship, and had an intellectual side that appealed to me. Beyond that, our physical chemistry was intense. We had anal sex the first night we were together, in a dirty public bathroom. Our sex life heated up over the next several weeks. I became his submissive. He took me to his fetish parties and introduced me to people in the scene. I let him flog me while everyone watched. Alone the next day, I examined my bruises, fascinated and proud. One night, Sam asked me whether I would be willing to be tied down for a gang bang at one of his parties. I surprised myself by saying yes.

I’ve always been very sexual. I remember masturbating at four years old! By twenty-seven, I was a crazy mess of hormones. I even masturbated at work, at my desk or in the restroom. But there were other things going on besides hormones at the time I agreed to be the gang bang girl. The divorce was getting difficult, and I wanted a sexual outlet without all the emotional drama. See, I’m like a guy in that I am very good—or was very good then—at separating sex and emotion. At nineteen, I was raped in college by someone I knew, and the experience affected me deeply. During the rape, I remember feeling ashamed that I had no control over my body. At one point, I was in so much pain, emotional and physical, that I just went limp. But then, during that moment of surrender, something fantastic happened. Suddenly, I wasn’t in my body anymore. The rest of my rape was like something happening on TV—I watched it happening but didn’t feel any anything. After that experience, I learned how to switch off my feelings to protect the parts of me that could be hurt. There was a negative side to having this ability to shut down in that I had trouble connecting emotionally with men. But there was also a positive side—it was a liberating experience to be a young woman who could detach during sex and focus on the pure physicality of it. I was free to explore. In a strange way, that was a gift.

Though I had buried some of my desire for sexual adventure during my marriage, it was bubbling to the surface again

Then there was my relationship with Sam. I trusted him. He’s very good at getting people to open up and feel safe. He seemed to know exactly what I needed. If he was with me, I could push myself further than I’d ever imagined.

My first gang bang was held in a warehouse where Sam staged underground fetish events. Some of his parties were held at nightclubs, but the more extreme events were held at private spots so that sex was allowed. People brought their own alcohol, and there were security guards stationed at the door. There was going to be a bukkake girl that night, too, and I would be tied between her legs. The guys would fuck me until they were ready, then they would cum on her. Being used by the men at the party would be an extension of being Sam’s slave, a role I had been feeling more comfortable with after each experience.

I remember getting ready that night before the party. After spending years in an unhappy marriage, I was thankful to be in my own apartment even though there were dead roaches in every room. It was probably the most decrepit place I’d ever lived, but it was mine. In the tiny bathroom, with rotting tile and an iron-stained sink, I showered and did my hair. Then, while sitting on the floor because I had no furniture, I applied heavy Goth makeup. I put on black thigh-high boots, a sheer black dress, and a leather slave collar.

And then, just like that, I walked out of my apartment and into an adventure.

When I got into the elevator, a boy of about six years old got on with me. He looked up at me with a surprised look. “Are you from England?” he asked.

I laughed. “No, I’m from here,” I said, smiling at him. I hoped he wouldn’t notice that my dress was see-through.

“You’re really pretty,” he said.

I smiled again and bolted from the elevator when the doors slid open.

Feeling exposed, I quickly hailed a cab. The exact party location was difficult to find, and the driver eventually dropped me off a few blocks from the building. I began walking, wondering why Sam hadn’t picked me up. Who lets a girl walk alone to a gang bang? I remember some of the people on the street looking at me as I passed. One girl chastised her boyfriend for staring at me. I could hear her yelling at him as I moved away. Finally, I saw a sign with the code word written on it and an arrow pointing down a long, deserted alley. This was the place.

My high-heeled boots clicked loudly on the uneven pavement. It was very dark and looked like a dead end. I continued on, and there was a turn, marked with another sign. I was relieved to see several men standing outside a door. One of the security guards recognized me from Sam’s other parties. “No cover charge for her,” he said.

There were only a few people in the room. Sam was at the bar. He hugged me and told me to take off my dress. He fastened a dog collar around my neck and attached a leash, which I found arousing. As he led me around the room, he sometimes allowed people to look at me or touch me. They always asked his permission first. At one point, I gave Sam a blow job while a young girl fingered me. “The party has started,” I heard someone say.

More guests arrived. Finally, Sam led me upstairs. Some red velvet benches had been arranged to form a small bed in the center of the room. Other benches were spaced around the outer walls so that other people could play. There were mats on the floor, and the room was lit with candles.

Sam introduced me to the bukkake girl and then tied me between her legs in a kneeling position. He made sure we were both comfortable. There was a basket of condoms nearby. I asked Sam to blindfold me, too, because I didn’t want to see the men.

The bukkake girl asked me, “Are you making them wear condoms?”

“Yes, of course.”

“You’ll dry out,” she warned.

I felt a moment of apprehension. What had I gotten myself into? Was I going to be okay? I reminded myself that Sam wouldn’t let me be hurt. I didn’t have to do anything but have my experience.

Any remaining hesitation dissolved when the first fingers began exploring my pussy. I couldn’t see anything, but I didn’t need to.

What happened next? Two hours of constant orgasm.

While some men fucked me, others stuck their cocks in my mouth or felt my breasts. Someone fucked my ass, and I guessed it was Sam. When he was finished, another man tried to put his cock in my pussy. As I was getting sore, I pulled away from him instinctively, but I heard Sam say, “Don’t let her get away with that.” The man grabbed my hips and pulled me onto him. More men followed.

I was surprised at the intensity of my physical response. I’m loud when I orgasm, and the orgasms just kept coming. The young girl I’d been playing with at the beginning of the night joked with me to be quiet, but it was impossible. But the men were even more surprised. I could hear them talking sometimes. After he’d been with me, a man would say, “I think she liked it.” You know—he heard me have an amazing orgasm! But then, he’d hang around the party and hear me continue to have orgasms with more and more men. It was obvious that one man couldn’t have satisfied me, and I think I deflated a lot of egos that night.

But I wasn’t interested in boosting their egos, anyway. One man fucked me roughly and kept asking me to call him by his name. “What’s my name? What’s my name?” Finally, I replied, with disdain, “I didn’t come here to know your name.” He shut up. I had slipped into my alter ego, a woman who could do any crazy sexual thing she wanted and say anything to men.

It was my party.

After two hours, Sam cut it off. I probably would have kept going.

He untied me, and I fell onto one of the mats on the floor. My hands were numb from being tied. I was overwhelmed.

After everyone left, Sam fucked me again, hard, in the bathroom. Then, I stumbled home alone like I was drunk, even though I hadn’t even had any alcohol. My entire body tingled. I sat on the floor of my crappy apartment watching the sun rise over the city, a half-naked, roughed-up girl in smeared Goth makeup. My emotions were swirling. All at once, I was empty but fulfilled, desperate but hopeful, fearful but safe. Strangely, I also felt serene. I knew that even though my future was uncertain, I was moving forward from a place in my life that had become toxic to me. I might not be able to see what was at the end of the next dark alley, but I would be okay. I held the keys to my own future.

I e-mailed Sam the next day and asked how many men I had taken on. He told me he had counted twenty. Twenty. And to think the fantasy had started with five men.

After that night, everyone knew who I was in the scene. It was my name they remembered.

I continued doing parties for about two years. Sometimes, I would select the men from pictures they e-mailed to Sam. Sometimes, I let Sam choose. It was all sex, no emotion or attachment—except to Sam. But things slowly shifted. I began drinking. I hadn’t needed to drink or do drugs at the beginning. My relationship with Sam was changing. I reached a point where I was no longer getting anything I wanted out of the parties. Not the intense relationship with him. Not the satisfaction of being indestructible. Not even the orgasms I wanted.

So I just stopped going. Everyone remembers me—still—but they respect that I’ve gone in a different direction.

My sex drive is still probably higher than most women’s, but I’ve stopped having detached sex. I’ve stopped drinking completely. Part of my recovery requires understanding my motivations and learning how to connect with someone sexually and emotionally. I’ve learned that part of my desire to use men for my own pleasure and then discard them stemmed from a desire to hurt them.

But I have no regrets. The rape was awful, but the detachment that followed allowed me to have experiences that most women wouldn’t be able to have. And being the gang bang girl—well, it’s part of who I was and it made me who I am today. I’ve moved on, and you won’t find me having those kinds of adventures anymore. I’ve learned a lot since then about myself.

But it’s part of my story.

Confess that you have group sex regularly—or that you did a stint as the local gang bang girl but have now moved on—and you’ll likely find yourself embroiled in pop-psychological conversations about your underlying motivations, relationship history, and level of self-esteem. Perhaps to avoid assumptions that one must be psychologically “damaged” or deficient to engage in transgressive sexual behavior, some participants focus on arousal or pleasure when queried about the appeal of group sex. As one man told me: “I’m not searching for some amazing high or spiritual awakening, just a little pleasure. Looking for the peak of Everest or the depths of the Marianas Trench makes one miss the land at sea level. Sex is fun. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. A lot of folks we know just like to have fun and think sex is fun. Sort of like eating a piece of chocolate because it tastes good.”

But although group sex can, for some people, stir high levels of sexual arousal or satisfaction, it is never just about pleasure. Perhaps, someday, if sexual experimentation becomes a common occurrence—like trying new foods or sports—we might allow our explanations to rest there. Given the intensity of the boundary crossings discussed in chapter 4, however, it is unlikely. The tendency, unfortunately, is to concoct tidy explanations for—and judgments about—multilayered experiences.

A cigar is a cigar. But what makes a cigar appropriate after the birth of a son? Can a cigar aficionado detect a difference between a Montecristo and a San Cristobal? What happened to the days when velvet smoking jackets were donned after dinner so that the men could enjoy cigars while the “ladies” retired for a quick nap? (That nap sounds fantastic.) What does it mean when a woman smokes a cigar? What is at stake in debates over FDA regulation of cigars—or, when is a cigar more like a cigarette, a “tobacco product” that can be regulated in the name of public health? And what about the other uses to which cigars might be put, from live sex shows in Amsterdam to the oval office in DC?

As with the proverbial onion, there are many layers to peel.

The “Coolidge Effect,” Sperm Competition, and the Shaky Bridge

The Coolidge Effect

[D]uring a visit to a large chicken farm, the president fell somewhat behind his wife. As the story goes: Mrs. Coolidge, observing the vigor with which one particularly prominent rooster covered hen after hen, asked the guide to make certain that the President take note of the rooster’s behavior. When President Coolidge got to the hen yard, the rooster was pointed out and his exploits recounted by the guide, who added that Mrs. Coolidge had requested that the President be made aware of the rooster’s prowess. The President reflected for a moment and replied, “Tell Mrs. Coolidge that there is more than one hen.”^[1]

Group sex fantasies, such as “gang bang,” “sandwich filling,” or “airtight” play on the idea of being overwhelmed by the experience—visual stimulation, tactile sensations, sounds, scents, possibilities, and pleasure (or power). Beyond the sensory aspects, there are other conscious and unconscious reasons that group sex is arousing, in fantasy or reality.

Habituation, or the “Coolidge effect,” refers to the loss of sexual interest in individuals with whom one has previously engaged in sexual behavior. So don’t feel bad if you’re “too tired” for sex with your regular partner—it happens to rats, cats, rabbits, and goats. Even Lymnaea stagnalis, the hermaphroditic pond snail, is reluctant to mate as a male with any female more than once.^[2]

Habituation in animals can be studied in the lab, and when it comes to sexual behavior, we know a lot about rats. There are important differences between rats and humans—for example, rats are limited lovers in terms of creativity, sticking to vaginal penetration and genital licking, and the males vigorously pursue novelty, free of guilt or economic constraints. But rats make good lab subjects because they like to mate and they are responsive to conditioning; that is, they can be convinced to mate preferentially with females through manipulations of sexual pleasure. Male rats have thus been copulating, ejaculating, and copulating again in the name of science for years, occasionally to the point of physical deterioration (exhaustion or death). They have been observed, timed, and videotaped. In the quest for sex, male rats have run mazes, sprinted across electrified grids, and climbed rickety towers. Novelty, researchers have found, grants many mammals a reward—a pleasurable dopamine dump in the brain. Repeated copulations with the same female result in less dopamine being released; the rat also takes longer to ejaculate each time. Familiarity thus breeds habituation, at least, if not contempt: even when male rats appear exhausted after mating, they are easily aroused again if presented with a new female.^[3] Being confronted with a strange male rat—a competitor—can arouse a male again, as can copulating with a different female before returning to the original one.

Laboratory studies of habituation in humans are kinder—universities frown upon “physical deterioration” in human research subjects. Human studies are also more limited in design, as human females would never consent to the things that female rats must bear in silence. Still, both men and women exhibit habituation effects when exposed to the same segment of an erotic film, the same erotic image, or a repeated erotic fantasy.^[4] Naturalistic studies—such as monogamous marriage—reveal similar trends toward habituation. Many people who have been in a long-term relationship, for example, can identify at least somewhat with stories of the “seven-year itch,” and marriage counselors are besieged with couples seeking cures for a lack of sexual desire in one or both partners. What precisely this means varies, depending on who is complaining, but sexual frequency, sexual satisfaction, and sexual desire often wane for both men and women in relationships over time.^[5]

Habituation plays a role in this decline. Human brains, after all, also reward novelty with dopamine releases. Both rats and humans display individual differences in how the reward centers of the brain are wired, however. Whether due to genetic, situational, or historical factors, some creatures seek these types of rewards more enthusiastically, have a stronger response to the chemicals released, or have more difficulty walking away when they should—be it a rat who should turn his back on the lever in his cage before he collapses in exhaustion but presses it again because doing so has produced a new female in the past, or a man who should check his watch, note that it is 5:00 a.m., and decide to forgo the cocaine on the nightstand and the hookers in his bed. The chemical underpinnings of a drive for novelty are well documented, although we cannot necessarily predict or explain behavior on this basis alone.

Some therapists believe habituation is also an emotional process whereby we cease to appreciate our partners as separate entities; the closeness of everyday life eventually hinders desire. If spouses increase their levels of “differentiation”^[6] —developing individual interests or tackling their emotional weaknesses and unhealthy dependencies, for example—desire may spark again. A perusal of the self-help section of a bookstore might leave you thinking the situation can be remedied with better communication, frequent vacations, or a trip to Victoria’s Secret. But although complicated physiological and psychological interactions make some individuals more likely to pursue the chemical cocktail produced by sex and novelty, one thing is relatively certain for most people: seeing one’s long-term partner in a Miraculous Bra and thong, no matter how rare, might be more exciting than the usual flannel nightgown but will not be as electrifying as exploring sex with a new lover. Like rats, though, humans can become aroused by competition. For some couples, infidelity reignites passion even if it also causes emotional distress. Whether this is due to chemical surges, psychological distance, or a combination of factors is less important than the fact that nonmonogamy can produce both anxiety and arousal. Knowing that someone else saw that bra and panty set might be surprisingly provocative.

Group sex offers visual novelty and the possibility of competition, regardless of the extent of actual physical contact. “What do I enjoy?” an Australian gay man responded when asked about the large commercial sex events he attended. “Well, the sight of a hundred men naked, and having damn good sex. The energy, the camaraderie, and the pure visuals.”^[7] A circuit party attendee said that he feels “completely overwhelmed” at events: “My first party was like ‘wow.’ . . . This, to me, is my sexual revolution—to see all those guys doing those dirty things—that’s exciting.”^[8] Other men prized the “voyeuristic aspects” of group sex, of “watching someone take it,” or the exhibitionistic pleasure of being watched themselves. One man explained that group sex was “about fulfilling my little boy fantasy to be a porn star. . . . It’s about playing the role, and maybe that’s why it’s about the numbers . . . its more sort of a performance act.”^[9] Group sex also offers physical novelty, as participants have access to multiple potential, possibly consecutive, partners. “Just the number of guys” available led some interviewees to claim that group sex was more adventurous, exciting, and “primitive” than dyadic sex.

In 1999 and 2000, sociologists Curtis Bergstrand and Jennifer Sinski studied more than a thousand self-identified swingers in the United States. They suggest that swinging “may be one creative solution to the problem of habituation—it provides sexual variety, adventure, and the opportunity to live out one’s fantasies as a couple without secrecy and deceit.”^[10] Their respondents agreed: “It allows us to experience variety without cheating”; “Could we survive our marriage without variety, yes. It’s a lot more fun this way though.”^[11] Many lifestyle couples derive pleasure from watching their spouse desiring and being desired by others in addition to their own experiences: “When your spouse sees others turned on by you and vice versa, they begin to see you once again in the light they once saw you. As a beautiful and desirable human being”; “I love to see her at her highest sexual arousal, it takes me there.”^[12] Another study found that twenty-six of thirty middle-aged lifestyle couples had sex at least twice a week; a 2010 study of the general population only found 16 to 26 percent doing so. The researchers suggest that the swinging rejuvenates marriages by activating “mild jealousies and related insecurities” in each partner that made the partners want to “sexually repossess” each other. As one woman said, “You see others wanting your man and you want him, too.”^[13]

Novelty can extend to routines and practices. One couple I interviewed, Candace and Claude, began swinging after more than thirty years of marriage. Candace claimed that her boredom with their sex life boiled over into a confrontation: “I said, if we ever have sex one more Friday night at 11 o’clock at night, and that Friday morning you say, ‘Oh boy, guess what today is?’ you’re not going to get any more. Ever.” They began to experiment, attending lifestyle parties and visiting sex clubs. In the process, they discovered a renewed passion for each other—“If he comes home on a Friday night, I may not have on very many clothes. We may have lots of candles lit, music playing . . . we never did anything like that when we were monogamous.” They became “more adventuresome” sexually because of experiences with outside partners, incorporating anal sex and light BDSM into their repertoire. While lifestyle couples might also take more adult vacations or buy more new underwear than “vanilla” couples, the erotic charge of potential new lovers—regardless of how far things actually progress in any given situation—contributes to a sense of adventure.

The Coolidge effect, however, is only one of the layers we need to explore. Despite their love of novelty, rats do not have group sex. Rats might copulate in front of each other—or, more likely, in front of overtired graduate students with stopwatches—but they do not “swing.” And while hermaphroditic pond snails do indeed rack up more inseminations in groups than singly (and also when their aquariums are clean, for reasons we can’t go into here), one couldn’t exactly say they throw “sex parties.” The appeal of group sex for humans is far more complex than a desire for novelty, then, even if this desire plays a supporting role.

Sperm Competition

Environmental stimuli can trigger unconscious and involuntary responses. Using a plethysmograph—a device that fits around the penis and measures the swelling or a probe inserted into the vagina to measure genital blood flow—psychologist Meredith Chivers has assessed arousal in both men and women. In one study, subjects watched short film clips—bonobos having sex, heterosexual sex, male and female homosexual sex, a man masturbating, a woman masturbating, a man walking naked, and a naked woman exercising—while their physiological responses were recorded. They also indicated how aroused they felt on a computer. Straight men reported subjective arousal during the sex scenes involving women, especially the lesbian sex scene. This matched their physiological measurements. Heterosexual women claimed to be most turned on during the heterosexual scene, even though, according to the vaginal probe, they responded genitally to all the scenes. This doesn’t mean that women want to have sex with bonobos or get naked during spin class but that there is a split between subjective and physiological arousal for women.^[14] Such a split could be related to the fact that women’s genital cues are not as obvious as men’s erections^[15] or that women could have negative feelings about pornography that overrode their genital sensations in the experiment. There might also be evolutionary reasons for men and women’s different response patterns. Women are believed to have higher reproductive costs (nine months of pregnancy, followed by nursing and child rearing). If women were highly aware of or motivated by sexual arousal, this might cloud mating decisions. Women’s involuntary physiological responses to so many different sexual cues—from bonobos to naked joggers—could also prompt lubrication of the vaginal canal, which, in turn, may prevent injury should forced sex occur.^[16]

Although men seem better at pinpointing when they are aroused in the laboratory, group sex provides an interesting example of how men also experience involuntary or unconscious physiological responses to environmental stimuli.

“Group sex” has advantages for some creatures reproducing through external fertilization. Horseshoe crabs, a journalist jokes, “host the longest-running beach party the world has ever known,” ready to get “freak-nasty at a shore near you.”^[17] A single male crab can potentially fertilize all of the eggs laid by the female and attaches himself to her during the process. Due to intense competition, however, occasionally more than a dozen males cling to the female as she lays her eggs in the sand. According to paternity analyses, the initial male has the best shot at fertilization, but satellite males still manage to fertilize about 40 percent of the eggs.

But what about when fertilization occurs internally, as with humans? For years, the belief that women were naturally monogamous—and men were not—influenced theories about mating strategies and adaptations. Men’s sexual jealousy and widespread attempts to control women’s sexuality have been suggested as strategies to prevent their mate from being impregnated by another man. From a perspective that prioritizes men’s need to win and guard their mates, why a man would find it arousing to see his partner with another lover or participate in a gang bang is somewhat of a mystery. But what if women in ancestral environments were also nonmonogamous? Multiple matings, some researchers suggest, could increase a woman’s chances of viable offspring by providing more opportunities to access resources controlled by males and potentially diversify the paternal care her offspring obtain. Sperm competition suggests an element of postcopulatory struggle in mating—the possibility that sperm from more than one male compete internally in the female’s reproductive tract for egg fertilizations.

Some researchers believe that existing evidence supports theories of sperm competition in humans. Although sperm competition looks different across species, anatomical, physiological, and psychological adaptations to sperm competition in humans have been proposed.^[18] In species with more intense sperm competition, for example, males have larger testes. Human testis size falls between that of gorillas, where female “promiscuity” is rare, and chimpanzees, where females engage in multiple matings, suggesting intermediate levels of promiscuity in our evolutionary past. (“Promiscuity” in the context of this literature should not be taken to have the same negative implications as in everyday usage.) The length and shape of the human penis could be related to the need to displace rival sperm in a woman’s vagina, and some researchers even suggest that a man’s rapid loss of erection after copulation prevents him from inadvertently removing his own semen. The intensity of male sexual jealousy can serve as evidence not just of an evolutionary history of female infidelity but also of sperm competition. Despite jealousy, many men experience acute sexual arousal in situations of potential sperm competition and report stronger orgasms—this increased arousal could have an adaptive quality if it motivated men to copulate and displace rival sperm. Some evidence also suggests that males unconsciously adjust the number of sperm or the quality of sperm ejaculated depending on how much risk there is that their partner has recently had another lover.^[19] In a 2005 study, men viewed a randomly allocated set of sexually explicit images—images of either three females or two males and a female—and provided semen samples. Subjects who viewed the images of sperm competition (two males and a female) had higher proportions of motile sperm in their ejaculates.^[20]

If theories of sperm competition are accurate, they point to a partial ultimate-level explanation for why humans engage in multiple matings, of which group sex would be one example. If unconsciously sensing a competitor affects the composition of a man’s ejaculate, it makes sense that actually observing a competitor in the act would also have an impact. (If mice, owls, beetles, horseshoe crabs, and stickleback fish engage in sperm competition, why shouldn’t we?)^[21]

“Hotwife” enthusiasts, men who enjoy vicariously experiencing or watching a female partner with other male lovers, report high levels of arousal from their experiences. David Ley, a clinical psychologist who began studying the “hotwife lifestyle” in 2005, argues that, as with most instances of nontraditional sexualities, therapists tend to see people in such relationships as “inherently dysfunctional” and their desires as “emerging from deep-seated psychopathology and personality disturbance.”^[22] But this is not necessarily the most productive way of understanding this behavior, according to Ley. Hotwife couples are creating fantasies—the wives are not actually cheating, and sometimes cuckoldry isn’t even part of the game. The sexual encounters take a variety of forms, from the man only hearing about his partner’s adventures, to watching either openly or secretly, to participating in the scene. Many of Ley’s interviewees sought extramarital encounters independently of each other; group encounters were not mandatory. Yet an interest in these outside activities is central to the erotics of the relationship. One man kept a diary of his wife’s exploits and how many men she’d been with, for example.^[23] Such couples, Ley writes, may be “co-opting” sperm competition to fan the flames of relationships “long past the time when they might have normally subsided into a comfortable, quiet love where sex is nice, but not necessary.”^[24]

Evolutionary theories are difficult to prove (though psychoanalytic theories are equally tough to substantiate), and despite a growing number of studies exploring sperm competition in humans, many researchers still consider the idea speculative. It is tough to design scientific studies to answer questions that are overdetermined in so many ways, and experimental designs are limited when you can’t actually ask people to have sex in the lab while you watch or take notes. Asking people to explain why they became aroused in a particular situation or by a specific cue is possible, but the problem is that people don’t always know. Sometimes they do not even know they are aroused, as we saw in Chivers’s study, or the arousal surfaces later in another encounter or fantasy. Historical examples might be provocative but are ultimately incomplete. The Marind-anim practice of otiv-bombari—where multiple men had sex with a woman in quick succession—has been offered as an example of sperm competition in humans. Marind-anim even believed that otiv-bombari was necessary for enhancing women’s fertility and should be repeated throughout a woman’s life. Because Dutch colonial officers suppressed the practice more than a hundred years ago, researchers missed their opportunity to ask Marind-anim men to ejaculate into a cup so that their motile sperm could be measured. The fact that otiv-bombari might have actually contributed to sterility in the women does not invalidate sperm competition as an underlying evolutionary impetus for the practice. Still, questions arise—why were situations involving sperm competition elevated in some cultures and denigrated in others? Even among the Marind-anim, why was otiv-bombari celebrated but female infidelity punishable by death? Clearly, many other factors intervened.

Turning to the Internet as a naturalistic study of sexual preferences presents problems as well. Writers Ogas and Gaddam point out an asymmetry in the sex of participants in gang bang pornography, for example—there are far more depictions of multiple males having sex with a single female than vice versa. About the website PornHub, they write:

There are dozens of “mega-gang bang” videos featuring more than one hundred guys having sex with a single woman. In contrast, there are no videos featuring a guy having sex with more than a dozen women. . . . (Of course, this might also say something about how much easier it is to round up one hundred guys to be in porn than it is to find one hundred willing girls, especially considering that the guys would be willing to do it for free. But if you’re a straight male, ask yourself—would you pay to see one guy have sex with a hundred women?)^[25]

Ogas and Gaddam also suggest that the significance of black men in gay and straight porn is related to their association with dominance and that sperm competition also hypothetically fuels viewer pleasure in gay male gang bang films. The more dominant a potential rival, they argue, “the stronger the sperm competition cue and the more intense the arousal, perhaps because dominant males tend to ejaculate more vigorously than submissive males.”^[26] But does the proliferation of porn websites such as “Gang Bang Arena,” “Orgy World Girls,” and “Russian Orgy” support the idea that sperm competition underlies the appeal of group sex, as they suggest?^[27] Or might the explosion in such sites be driven as much by the fact that few people want to actually own a copy of 10 Man Cum Slam and display it in their DVD rack or are more likely to pay for scenarios they don’t experience in everyday life?

Despite unanswered questions, sperm competition has spread as a folk explanation for nonmonogamous and stigmatized forms of sexuality. Advice columnist Dan Savage, for example, takes a turn at therapeutic evolutionary psychology, suggesting that a wife whose husband shows no sexual interest in her might open her relationship: “Maybe knowing that you’re having sex with other dudes—or just knowing that you can have sex with other dudes—will cause your husband to develop a bad case of sperm-competition syndrome (Google it), and the husband will be inspired, fucking you three times a week instead of his fist.”^[28] In The Lifestyle (1999), journalist Terry Gould uses sperm competition to explain why lifestyle couples report increased sexual desire for each other as a consequence of swinging. He writes: “If we look at all lifestylers in this biological way—from the inside out—we can at least begin to comprehend why they do what they do and the reasons they say it gives them pleasure.” Instead of declaring the lifestyle “abnormal,” he proposes that swinging creatively combines

the programmed urge of both males and females to promote or fight sperm wars in females, the casual female bisexuality and group sex so prevalent in our close relatives the bonobos, and the voyeuristic pleasures of males who—as assured of their partner’s emotional fidelity as their partner is of theirs—know how to enjoy the reaction of their bodies to spousal “infidelity.”^[29]

Gould coined the phrase “sperm competition syndrome” to explain the intense orgasms experienced by male swingers.^[30]

Discussions of sperm competition appear regularly in lifestyle forums, often similarly to defend men’s participation (although commonly appearing alongside spurious statistics and explanations stretched a bit thin): “If sperm competition syndrome has been triggered, the man will have an orgasm 3 times stronger than usual, his pelvic thrusts will be 3 times as hard when he next has sex with his partner. And he will want to immediately. . . . The desire has nothing to do with a man’s masculinity, sexuality, or psychology. It is primal, plain and simple.”^[31] Sperm competition appears as an explanation for sexual behavior in hotwife forums as well. As a man expresses it in more mainstream verbiage:

Men cum and need a rest. Women cum, and they’re ready for more! It’s because men compete to fuck women, women fuck as many guys as possible to get the best chance of getting good sperm. Group sex is hard-wired into humans. Guys have a refractory period, a time to recover, from orgasms. While they rest, another guy takes his turn. This also stimulates the resting man to want to get back into the action again. It also produces more intense orgasms for the guys. His balls want to pump cum into the woman’s cum-filled vagina. Isn’t Nature wonderful?^[32]

A woman similarly asserts:

In the cuckold relationship you openly become involved with another man, and [your husband] knows it! His primal sperm competition reaction will kick-in, resulting in a sex drive in overdrive, and increased sperm and testosterone production as soon as he is back in your presence. He will pursue you and even dote over you obsessively upon your return. That’s why husbands in the cuckold lifestyle are more attentive to their wives than men in traditional marriages.^[33]

As another blogger “scientifically” describes hotwifing:

The two of you (you and your wife) become sub-serviant to him. What a stud he is! The fact that you have been conquered by this superior male makes your wife want him all the more. He has now come between the two of you and has stolen your mate. He’s also made you like it! Watching or listening to them make love or smelling and tasting the aftermath of their sexual encounters causes your sperm competition reaction to make loads of sperm, and starts to demand a quick release, and that’s what gives you guys “the thrill” of being cuckolded. Of course all of this is chemical-biological, and has no effect on intellect.^[34]

For individuals whose erotics clash with the classic story of “natural” human sexuality, the theory of sperm competition provides a measure of reassurance.

Sperm competition, though, even if it plays an underlying role in any of these practices, can’t be the whole story. After all, if sperm competition is such a significant source of arousal, why don’t more people avail themselves of the pleasures it promises? Why do some men, in some places, pursue sperm competition scenarios while others avoid them at all costs? And for those who do find sperm competition arousing, why would one man prefer the egalitarianism of swinging while another eroticizes a hotwife scenario, sitting on the sidelines watching his partner’s sexual encounters, occasionally humiliated or temporarily frustrated?

Taxi Cab Confessions (Interview, Madeline)

My boyfriend was married and high profile. We would sneak away sometimes, for a few nights, although we never had enough time together and the time we did have could be stressful logistically. We were always worried about getting caught, so we spent a lot of time sequestered in nice hotels, ordering room service, and having as much sex as we could, just the two of us. Even when we did venture out, we were careful to pick the right restaurants and make sure he wasn’t recognized.

One night we started fooling around in the cab on the way to one of our clandestine dinner dates. I was wearing a loose, sexy dress. At one point, my lover lifted my dress to reveal my breasts, and said to the driver, “Hey, isn’t she hot?” The driver glanced back, first turning his head and then again using the rearview mirror. He seemed unsure of how to react, but nodded. My lover pressed the issue. “Really . . . Look at her breasts. She’s so beautiful. Don’t you want to touch them?” Then, a minute or two later, he offered again, “You should touch them. Here. Give me your hand.”

The cabbie finally reached back, and my lover guided his hand to my nipples. “Pinch them,” he instructed. “I pinch them, bite them, treat them like they are mine. That’s how she likes it.” The man did as my lover suggested and pinched my nipples roughly. The two of them touched my breasts together, while my lover also kissed me and put his fingers between my legs. He dropped us at the restaurant, but we were so turned on we barely made it through dinner. All we wanted to do was go back to our hotel and fuck.

It became part of our routine to involve our driver, even though it meant that we couldn’t use the nicest car companies—we were sure the drivers gossiped about us and didn’t want to risk it. I would wear clothes that were easy to take off, lift up, or pull aside. “Look at her body,” my boyfriend would say, undressing me during the ride. “She’s beautiful and I know you want to touch her. She wants you to, so it’s okay.”

One night, my boyfriend stripped off my clothes and the three of us made a scene on the drive. At each stoplight, I could see people staring at us from their cars. The windows steamed up, but it wasn’t hard to tell what was going on. It was a long ride back to our hotel. We made out for a while, and then we had sex while the driver watched us, sometimes reaching back to touch me. My boyfriend pulled my hair while the driver played with my breasts. Afterwards, the driver dropped my lover off at the hotel first—we couldn’t risk walking in together. Then he circled the block while I picked my clothing up off the dirty floor of the car and got dressed alone. We were silent.

When I got up to the hotel room where my lover was waiting, we had crazy sex.

If I were alone, thinking about a random cab driver touching me would freak me out. But with my lover there, it became the hottest experience I’ve ever had. I knew I was his, and it was his decision to share me. He got off on having these strangers want what he had. I was proud that he thought of me that way. But for me, the driver was also a source of reassurance. I’d been in love before, though never as in love as I was with this man. But while my friends could fall in love, post pictures on Facebook, talk about their boyfriends, and go to parties with their guys, my whole relationship was a secret. Here I was, in the most intense relationship of my life, and it was a fucking secret. Of course, I wanted the whole world to know. But I was willing to settle for the cab drivers. One after another.

Once, we had sex during a theatrical production of Macbeth. It was the kind of performance where the audience moves around and interacts with the actors, following them through the different rooms. The staff sometimes separated you from the people you arrived with to make the experience more intense, and that was what happened to my boyfriend and me. They sent me out first into a spooky five-story building with dozens of rooms. I remember my high heels sticking in the floorboards of the old house as I wandered around, always looking for him. I was uneasy and couldn’t concentrate.

Finally, I found him and he took my hand. We saw more of the performance, moving through a bedroom scene, a hotel room, and an insane asylum. In that area of the building, I noticed a padded cell. When the actors and audience members moved on, my lover and I slipped into the cell and locked the door. There was a small slit in the door and he opened it. Then, he pushed me up against the wall and started kissing me. He lifted up my dress. I was wearing thigh-high stockings because I’d gotten used to dressing for our public performances. I undid his pants and pulled out his cock. Just before he entered me, he said, “Someone’s watching.”

My heart started beating faster. We had our audience. I couldn’t see much of the man watching us, just his eyes and a bit of his face. He looked young, maybe in his twenties, with a bit of stubble. As we had sex, I kept looking over at the man outside the door. He kept watching. Finally, my lover came inside of me, pulling out slowly so that his cum ran down my leg.

We waited until the man outside left, but it wasn’t more than a moment; he seemed to know our show was over. Then we opened the latch and snuck back out to the real performance, still in progress. I wondered if I would recognize the man who had watched us. Every male face had potential—was that him? I know my boyfriend was more turned on by flaunting me, but I loved having an audience, even of one, to validate our passion, our relationship.

The Shaky Bridge, Sensation Seeking, and Sexual Adventurers

In the fourteenth season of The Bachelor—a “reality show” where a man dates twenty-five preselected women, hoping to propose marriage to one at the end—bachelor Jake Pavelka chose a tall blonde named Vienna for his first “one-on-one date.” Their helicopter ride through the San Gabriel Mountains included a landing on a bridge, where the two acrophobes would bungee jump in tandem. Even though Jake planned the date as a test—“I need to know that I have somebody there that I can rely on and draw strength from if needed”—he had second thoughts about jumping as he peered down at the river below. Vienna, also pale and scared at first, soon comforted Jake and helped him stand up on the ledge. “Don’t look,” she warned. After taking a 120-foot plunge (screaming all the way), the two clung together in their harnesses, upside down and swaying over the river. Still “terrified,” Jake kissed her and was stunned by the intensity. “My first kiss with Vienna is unlike any kiss I’ve ever had in thirty-one years,” he said afterward. Vienna gushed that kissing Jake was “amazing,” that the “whole world stopped,” and that the jump was “a memory that the two of us will share forever.”

Vienna was the last girl standing that season, receiving both the final rose and Jake’s marriage proposal. Although the couple split a few months later, they undoubtedly do still share the memory of that fateful bungee jump.

Producers didn’t wait until season fourteen to pull this trick out of their hats—previous contestants zip-lined, rock climbed, and dived with sharks. Sexual arousal, after all, can be heightened by risky situations. Under stressful or anxiety-provoking conditions, the adrenal glands produce cortisol, epinephrine, an amphetamine-like stimulant, and norepinephrine, which elevates blood pressure and speeds up the heart rate. After even a “moderate biochemical emergency,” people may experience amplified “feelings of physical prowess and personal competence, often associated with strong sensations of pleasure.”^[35] This “stress drunkenness” may also be accompanied by lightheadedness and a loss of inhibitions. Even more importantly, people experiencing these effects can misattribute their true cause. In the mid-1970s, a pair of social psychologists designed the now famous “shaky bridge” study. An attractive woman—a confederate who was part of the project—approached a male subject as he walked alone over either a low, stable bridge or a shaky suspension bridge. She asked each man to take a TAT, or thematic apperception test, and then gave him her phone number to call if he had questions about the study. The TAT is similar to the Rorschach test, requiring subjects to write a narrative about an ambiguous picture, which is then analyzed for each subject’s projections. Men who had been approached by the woman on the shaky bridge wrote more sexual or romantic narratives than those who met her on the stable bridge. They were also more likely to call her.^[36] Subjects believed their emotions were triggered by attraction to the woman rather than their fear of heights or the unstable bridge. Similar misattributions have been reported when arousal was created in male research subjects through exercise or hearing a violent description of a murder. Even when long-term partners participated in arousal-generating activities, they reported increased love and satisfaction.^[37]

As reality TV producers understand so well, when we feel stress-drunk, we may not distinguish between the person we’re looking at and the fact that we just jumped out of an airplane into a crocodile-infested lagoon. And if we’ve already peed our pants in fear that day—or feared we were going to—we might be more willing to strip naked and have sex with a stranger. On television. (There are limits, of course. While there may be a “baby boom” nine months after a disaster strikes, it will likely be the result of traditional couplings rather than the spontaneous, indiscriminate orgies of literature or film.)

But there is more to the equation: if we initially risked becoming a crocodile snack out of fear that twenty-four other women are being kissed more ardently than we are, we might believe we are passionately in love—and even say “yes” to the bachelor’s proposal at the end of the season—only to realize that our attraction to him falls flat without the rivalry.

People handle stress differently, of course, responding to situations with varying levels of arousal. Some individuals do consistently seek more stimulation than others, and some are more likely to seek that stimulation through sexuality. Sensation seeking is a personality trait “defined by the seeking of varied, novel, complex, and intense sensations and experiences, and the willingness to take physical, social, legal, and financial risks for the sake of such experience.” High and low sensation seekers, some researchers believe, may actually be equipped with “different evolved biological strategies for processing novel or intense stimulation.”^[38] Preliminary findings suggest that genetic influences on the dopamine system, which is involved in reward and motivation, impact novelty and sensation seeking. Variation in the dopamine receptors D2 and D4, especially the minor alleles, appears related to differential human reproductive and sexual behavior. The presence of the 7-repeat allele (7R+) in the dopamine receptor D4 gene, for example, makes individuals exhibit a higher reactivity to dopaminergic rewards and is associated with higher propensities for risk taking of various sorts, from gambling to substance abuse. Some scientists believe that this polymorphism might have been positively selected for between forty and fifty thousand years ago, as it is found at higher frequencies in populations that have migrated farther—an orientation toward novelty and sensation seeking would have been adaptive in dynamic social environments or changing ecological landscapes.^[39]

Other biological correlates—neurotransmitters, enzymes, and hormones—also play complex roles in this process; testosterone levels have been correlated with susceptibility to boredom in young men, for example. Individuals may thus not only desire higher levels of stimulation but actually perceive risk differently: high sensation seekers, for example, “have differing responses of the sympathetic nervous system, which affects the behavioral-inhibition system leading to less fear, anxiety, and stress.” Because “high sensation seekers do not view the environment as threatening and leading to negative consequences,” they tend to engage in activities that others view as dangerous and seek out peer groups with similar outlooks on the world.^[40]

Not surprisingly, men tend to score higher on sensation-seeking scales than women; younger people usually score higher than older people. But while sensation seekers desire to increase their stimulation, they do not necessarily court physical danger. The four subcomponents of sensation seeking—thrill and adventure seeking, experience seeking, disinhibition, and boredom susceptibility—illustrate this diversity.^[41] Sensation seekers can choose activities that are risky, such as drug use, gambling, or “varying sexual experiences.” They can also choose nonrisky outlets, “such as occupations, music, travel, art, media, and sports.” Firefighters, race car drivers, and US Navy divers, for example, are often sensation seekers with an elevated desire for thrill and adventure and an acceptance of risk. Other occupations are stimulating enough to draw high sensation seekers without being risky, such as rape crisis counseling, journalism, or surgery.^[42] “Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll” is more than a cliché among high sensation seekers, who have been found to choose more “arousing” music (rock over classical), be prone to using drugs or alcohol, have more sexual partners, hold more permissive sexual attitudes, and engage in riskier sexual behavior than low sensation seekers.^[43]

Had you volunteered for a study on sensation seeking in 1974, you would have been asked to rank how true statements like the following were for you: “I enjoy the company of real swingers” or “I would like to make friends in some of the ‘far-out’ groups like artists or ‘hippies.’” Twenty years later, researchers updated the scale—revising the statement about “swingers,” for example, to “I like wild and uninhibited parties”—and focused sections of it more specifically on sexual behavior. This newer Sexual Sensation Seeking Scale has been found to predict HIV-risk behavior in gay men and sexual permissiveness in college students.

Sexual adventurism is a concept derived from sensation seeking more generally and refers to a tendency toward a high number of partners, high sexual frequency and duration, unprotected anal intercourse (UAI), group sex, “esoteric” sex practices (BDSM, fisting, anal fingering or rimming, the use of sex toys, etc.), membership in particular groups (or “subcultures”), and the use of sex clubs. Sexual adventurism is usually used in reference to urban gay male subcultures, but there are other sexual enclaves that attract an edgy, experimental, sensation-seeking crowd, some of which are discussed in this book. Sexually adventurous “subcultures” are “geared to the maximization of sexual pleasure,” often “having as much to do with modes of socializing and ‘partying’ (such as frequently attending dance parties) as with sexual behavior.”^[44] “Intensive sex partying,” or ISP, is another way to refer to linked behaviors—frequent partying and unsafe sex, multiple partners, specific drug combinations, and sexual experimentation—that does not rely on assumptions that people do these things only within “subcultures” or at public venues rather than in domestic spaces. Neither does ISP assume or imply that everyone who goes to circuit parties or uses bathhouses engages in sexual adventurism.^[45] Not all gay men, lifestylers, or others who seek group sex in combination with other types of stimulation do so “frequently” or fit the definition of “intensive sex partying.” “Most gay men,” researchers stress, “probably live far more mundane lives than might be suggested by the literature.”^[46]

Sensation seeking, sexual adventurism, and ISP are frequently viewed as negative tendencies that increase people’s risk of addiction, illness, or death. Unfortunately, studies meant to be value-neutral can reflect the assumptions of researchers. Take the category of “esoteric” sexual practices. As Australian researchers Jonathan Bollen and David McInnes point out, “It may only be from the perspective of the ordinary, the normal, or the regular that fisting is regarded as ‘adventurous,’ ‘heavy,’ or ‘extreme.’” Their informants, gay men who self-identified as being “into adventurous sex,” were motivated “by an erotics of unpredictability,” an openness to exploration, experimentation, and improvisation. As these men understood it, sexual adventurism was a way of describing their overall approach to sexual activity rather than a way to categorize or hierarchically rank sexual activities. One man, for example, described fisting as “the most boring experience on earth.”^[47]

A focus on negative consequences has often overshadowed the positive aspects of seeking sensation, novelty, or adventure in a modern world. Sensation seeking may play a role in keeping people happy and healthy over their life span, researchers argue.^[48] Many wealthy and powerful individuals have been exposed over the years as being involved in sexually “adventurous” activities. While they might have a stronger drive for novelty or sensation seeking (and perhaps this is part of what helps them become wealthy or powerful), it could also be that power and money provides opportunities to indulge in activities many others would find desirable if they had the resources. Given entrenched notions of sexual risk in Western culture, it is often difficult to accept that sex can be a realm of positive exploration. On the other hand, sexual excitement draws on unconscious sources of inspiration and gains steam from prohibitions and emotional ambivalence. Distinctions between positive and negative may thus be too simplistic.

Adventures in Cosmic Ecstasy

Group sex can be a route to experiencing a transcendent state, sometimes termed a “high” and sometimes pronounced as spiritual or sacred. Psychologist Abraham Maslow analyzes peak experiences as “moments of highest happiness and fulfillment” potentially including love, “parental experience, the mystic, oceanic or nature experience, the aesthetic perception, the creative moment, the therapeutic or intellectual insight, the orgasmic experience, certain forms of athletic fulfillment, etc.”^[49] These experiences are self-justifying and self-validating; even pain becomes worthwhile in the quest to attain such states, which may also be characterized by “complete, though momentary, loss of fear, anxiety, inhibition, defense and control, a giving up of renunciation, delay and restraint.”^[50] Peak experiences can also involve feelings of both separateness and belonging: “the greatest attainment of identity, autonomy, or selfhood is itself simultaneously a transcending of itself, a going beyond and above selfhood. The person can then become relatively egoless.”^[51] Many writers in psychology, aesthetics, and religion suggest that peak experiences are intrinsically valuable, “so valuable,” in fact, “that they make life worth while by their occasional occurrence.”^[52]

Some individuals and religions refuse the pleasures of the body or sexuality as a poor substitute for the ecstasy of the divine, or they go further to deem sex sinful. Still other traditions locate religious elements within particular bodily experiences, believing in the promise, or hope, that sex can deliver more than temporary pleasure. Certain unions are blessed as sacred. Lovers might be seen as mirroring godly wholeness or as embracing the divine in each other. Sexual desire and pleasure can be pathways to accessing “the Source.” Like trance and death, sex is a physiological experience that takes on complex meanings and cultural forms. Trance is sometimes referred to as “‘half death’ or ‘little death’” and can involve actual orgasm;^[53] “near-death experiences” have reportedly been triggered by orgasm. Words such as “bliss,” “passion,” and “ecstasy” are used to describe both sex and spirituality in various languages. The French phrase la petite mort can refer to orgasm, spiritual experiences of transcendence, or inner feelings of loss. Some individuals describe sex as spiritual, although the descriptions vary by tradition: to varying degrees and frequency, people recount “feelings of oneness with the universe during orgasm”; out-of-body experiences; weeping with joy; feeling “enveloped with a loving light,” “touching souls,” and encountering “universal healing energy.”

Mythical orgies—and occasionally real ones—are viewed as potentially amplifying these experiences. Powerfully transcendent experiences, some theorists believe, can also potentially lead to orgiastic expression, as the “intensity of religious sentiment” becomes an “expression of collective desire.” According to French sociologist Michael Maffesoli, an orgy is not reducible to sexual activity: “Eros cements and structures sociality; it leads the individual to transcend itself and to lose itself in an ensemble more vast.”^[54] Maffesoli’s argument is reminiscent of Eliade’s, where the breakdown of social order into chaos during the orgy and the loss of individual selves into the multitude are regenerative of civilization. Not surprisingly, many of Maffesoli’s examples of orgies are drawn from Eliade, who drew from Frazer, and so on. As discussed throughout this book, many such reports of sexualized worship are historically unsubstantiated, exaggerated, or possibly fallacious. Nevertheless, links between spiritual experience and group erotics persist across time and place.

Painful experiences and rituals can also induce altered forms of consciousness, which sometimes generate experiences of spiritual communion. Once an individual has gone through a period of pain, endorphins—“natural opiates”—are released in the brain. Athletes have long chased endorphin highs; BDSM players do similarly. Altered states of consciousness vary in intensity, and experiences are given different meanings across contexts (“runner’s high,” “subspace,” “oneness,” etc.), but people attaining such states report similar effects, such as the disappearance of pain, a loss of sense of self, and feelings of deep connection. Anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse argues that “traumatic ritual ordeals feature in all the world’s religions, at least as locally or regionally distinctive traditions rather than universal features.”^[55] From the Native American sun dance, where dancers pierced their chests with hooks, attached ropes, and then suspended themselves until the skin ripped away, to the self-flagellation of monks, and from religious fasting to firewalking, people have pursued transcendent experiences through physical trials. Some initiation ceremonies cause extreme pain or instill extreme fear in participants through severe deprivation, violence, genital cutting or other bodily modifications (circumcision in men or women, penile subincision where the uretha is slit lengthwise, “penis bleeding”), and so on.

Peter Allison Larkin spent more than a decade immersed in the Roman Catholic Church; he also earned a master’s degree in theology. After he retired from religious life, he changed his name to Christopher Larkin, made a film about being gay, traveled the world, and began exploring tantric sexuality. He renamed himself yet again as Purusha Androgyne Larkin and in 1981 published a book called The Divine Androgyne according to Purusha. Although detractors of the work termed it an “extended, egotistical essay on fist-fucking,” Purusha preferred to think of it as a description of his “adventures in cosmic erotic ecstasy and androgyne body consciousness.”^[56] Purusha described pouring his early homoerotic desires into the church—“I fell in love with this man Jesus and that a man could live on the earth like he did.” Eventually, he grew restless with trying to sublimate his erotic energy, left the church, and developed a new theology based on the body, sexuality, and love. Androgynes, he alleged, were beings that had reconciled dualities in their own bodies, achieving an inner equilibrium and sense of wholeness; this could be accomplished through certain erotic practices. Believing that “ninety-nine percent of all the people in this country are not only touch-starved, they’re ecstasy-starved,” Purusha proposed that every man and woman should have “one full, intense orgasm per day by sexually love worshipping themselves, and others, without guilt.” Doing so would “transform our species and change the course of evolution,” leading to a deeper fulfillment of human potential. “Awe” and ecstasy were meant to be experienced daily.^[57] “Fist-fucking” and piercing, for Purusha, were advanced forms of practice, producing transcendent experiences. Fisting is described as beautiful, profound, “mind-blowing,” and like “being fucked by the whole universe.” “The extreme sensations of pleasure or pain, or especially the combination of both together,” Purusha claimed, concentrates the mind and “unifies the consciousness in a way that leads in the direction of what is called the mystical state, or ecstatic states of consciousness.” These states, he argued, are called by different terms even if they are ultimately similar—satori in Zen, samadhi in tantric Indian traditions, or Maslow’s “peak experiences.” The pain sometimes involved in achieving these mystical states could be distinguished from the “hurting, degrading, and abusing” that could occur when people approached BDSM without first clearing their “negative conditioning.”^[58]

“Sacred kink” and “spiritual BDSM” take various forms today, using different language and practices ranging from a focus on appropriating primal or tribal characteristics to the recovery of suppressed religious doctrines. Entering, or producing, a space of altered consciousness is for BDSM players what orgasm is to “vanillas”—that is, an experience that is valued, sought, and remembered though not always attained. Players claim that their intense physical and emotional ordeals produce a “natural high.” Throughout the literature on BDSM, players report experiences of euphoria, hyperreality, dissociation (out-of-body-experiences), spiritual transcendence, emotional release, “flow,” and energetic connection with others in the scene. During the high phase, sometimes referred to as “subspace” or “headspace,”^[59] players may no longer experience pain or be aware of their surroundings. After coming down, however, some players may feel confused, disoriented, and disconnected; occasionally, they may be unable to communicate or even feel temporarily paralyzed.

Explicitly connecting this kind of BDSM experience to transcendence is extremely important in some enclaves and negligible in others. Pat Califia argues:

The impulse to get tied to a bench and flogged for two hours until you are flying out there with adrenaline and endorphins is no different than the impulse to snort a line of coke, or swallow a hit of MDA, and be someplace else. It’s about looking for transcendence, it’s about getting past fear, it’s about being able to make a deep heart connection with other people that is not cluttered by all of this critical self-talk and self-consciousness that normally pollutes our experience of the world.^[60]

In Leatherfolk, an edited collection focusing on the spiritual elements of BDSM, several practitioners recall early quests for transcendence, often sounding a lot like sensation seekers who had not yet settled on an outlet: “I craved the excitement of life. I was searching. Searching for something—the highest highs, the biggest thrills—yet never finding it”; “I was always restless. . . . I started the long journey toward what we’re all looking for, which is liberation.”^[61] They found their answers, at least temporarily, in “cosmic” or spiritual ecstasy, although we cannot overlook the importance of context in this process—it is not an accident that mid-twentieth-century San Francisco figures prominently in their journeys (this is discussed in more depth later in the book).

BDSM play thus makes use of timeless human capacities—both physiological and psychological—but in a manner that is resolutely cultural and historical. As Gayle Rubin writes:

I do not see how one can talk about fetishism, or sadomasochism, without thinking about the production of rubber, the techniques and gear used for controlling and riding horses, the high polished gleam of military footwear, the history of silk stockings, the cold authoritative qualities of medical equipment, or the allure of motorcycles and the elusive liberties of leaving the city for the open road. For that matter, how can we think of fetishism without the impact of cities, of certain streets and parks, of red-light districts and “cheap amusements,” or the seductions of department store counters, piled high with desirable and glamorous goods . . . ? To me, fetishism raises all sorts of issues concerning shifts in the manufacture of objects, the historical and social specificities of control and skin and etiquette, or ambiguously experienced body invasions and minutely graduated hierarchies.^[62]

Simple comparisons of modern Western practices to tribal rites, then, are problematic. The processes involved in producing the experiences are real; the explanations given for such practices by rooting them in particular histories are sometimes mythical. Experiences are interpreted in light of historical data, fantasy, and contemporary discourses of sexuality and spirituality. Contemporary “suspension” enthusiasts, for example, sometimes recreate the sun dance ceremony but have elaborated on the idea through group “pulling” sessions, where people pierce their flesh with hooks, attach ropes, and then fasten the ropes to other individuals or objects, using each other’s weight as resistance to collectively intensify their experience. Further, during altered states produced by trance or ritual, on drugs, or when having sex, people usually do what they’ve learned to do and what other people around them do. Dancers become “possessed” by the appropriate spirits. Modern college coeds trip and watch television; Timothy Leary’s followers tripped and spoke to God. American lifestylers generally do not profess love to their outside partners before sex; tantric practitioners remind each other of love and divine connection as the basis of sexual union. What people consciously believe they are doing is also important—those undergoing physical trials to attain a spiritual experience might not like the thought that what they are doing is no different from people who want to “get tied to a bench and flogged for two hours,” as Califia suggests. Supposedly, some members of the controversial Roman Catholic sect Opus Dei engage in “corporal mortification.” But is wearing a cilice (a spiked bracelet around the thigh) or engaging in “the discipline” (self-flagellation, occasionally with razors or pins in the whip) best understood as sexual or religious? Could it possibly be both or perhaps depend on the occasion, person, or level of analysis? Justifying an activity as spiritual rather than sexual can elevate it in the eyes of nonparticipants, who might be primed to interpret it as deviant or hedonistic. But even the same activity can mean multiple things on different occasions. Andy, a participant in “flesh-pulling” rituals, explains: “For some people, it’s a spiritual thing, for some people it’s for shits and giggles.” Some events were sexual for Andy—“It’s great to come [orgasm] with the hooks in”—but others could be “very mellow and spiritual . . . it all depends on the participants.”^[63]

Sex remains sacred for some Western tantric practitioners, who use sexual practices to heighten spiritual experience and divine connection. At the mention of tantra, many people think of Sting, the rock musician who supposedly claimed that his mastery of tantric sex meant that he could perform sexually for seven hours straight. Or five hours, or twenty-four hours, depending on the article one reads. His wife, Trudie Styler, has attempted to bust the myth, but given its persistence for more than twenty years, Sting is unlikely to be dethroned anytime soon. (Of course, there are worse reputations to have.)

Religious scholar Hugh Urban suggests that tantra serves as a “Rorschach test or psychological mirror of the changing moral and sexual attitudes of the last two hundred years.”^[64] Tantra has a quasi-mythical history, traced back either to the Indus Valley’s ancient matriarchal civilization that practiced goddess worship and fertility cults or to an inner core of Vedic teachings that were suppressed in modern contexts.^[65] Early European missionary accounts referred to “the so-called Tantra religion,” where “nudity is worshipped in Bacchanalian orgies which cannot be described.” Sound familiar? While scandalous representations of tantra appeared in both Victorian novels and Indian popular literature, other Western and Indian authors attempted to squelch such sexualized images, presenting tantra as a “noble and orthodox tradition.”^[66] More recently, Urban argues, Western cultures have seen a neoromantic celebration of tantra, imagining it as an “engine of political change,” a path of “social defiance” to society’s religious restrictions, and a symbol of “sexual pleasure, sexual liberation, and political freedom.”^[67] Pop tantra, or what some scholars somewhat condescendingly term “California tantra,” doesn’t usually focus on a guru, involve extensive meditative practice, or prescribe traditional rules of conduct. But it does emphasize female equality and the physical and spiritual benefits of sexual pleasure, features which have made it attractive to people beyond those considered “new age.”

Issues of historical authenticity aside, tantra classes and workshops have sprung up around the United States and elsewhere. Not every tantra class involves nudity or sex. Some practitioners would dislike tantra’s inclusion in a book about group sex, preferring a focus on other facets of their spiritual traditions—asanas or yoga techniques, mantras, mandalas, meditation, and other practices. But in some teachings on sacred sexuality, solo or group sexual practices have an educational purpose. Students are given instruction on how to generate, balance, and harness sexual energy in their body and interactions. Some practitioners focus primarily on techniques such as breathing, yoni massage, or the prevention of ejaculation, while others more systematically link those techniques to spirituality. My experience with tantra is limited, and in the few workshops I attended, we merely paired off in dyads, gazed into each other’s eyes, practiced breathing, and occasionally massaged a stranger (while clothed). Trying to experience the humanity in each individual, respect the person’s unique gifts and wounds, and respond with love was a worthwhile exercise, however; attempting to be comfortable both giving and receiving pleasure from a stranger—even the PG-rated kind—is actually quite difficult for many people.

Sasha and Janet Kira Lessin run Club Tantra in Hawaii, an event that blends the instructional aspects of coached tantra with the erotic environment of a play party. The teachers at Club Tantra focus on honesty, respect, and the process of setting and honoring boundaries. Through control of one’s sexual energy, expansive feelings of love, and the mastery of special techniques, the limits of the individual body are ideally transcended in favor of ecstatic merging. People of all sexual orientations and relationship types are welcomed, making it more inclusive than many venues, and the opportunity to immediately practice their skills probably appeals to students who have been shelling out thousands of dollars for instruction at the School of Tantra, also run by the Lessins.^[68]

Like other cosmic orgiasts, Janet Kira Lessin links particular sexual practices to the possible achievement of satori, or divine understanding. Double penetration, for example, can allow a practitioner to

open your inner stargate, touch the face of God and remember your source. As you embrace two or even three magic wands, the lingams (as we call penises) with your most sensitive inner sensual shrines, you feel ecstasy, get total personal and transpersonal recall. You drop concepts of physics, science and religion and instead zoom, as your multidimensional self, through space and time. You and the beloveds entering you merge with divinity, source of all inchoate forms. Home, you experience everything everyone told you as illusion and, at the same time, truth.^[69]

For Lessin, “group synergy, tantric lovemaking, polyamorous merging and multiple penetration” can all be used to achieve altered—higher—states of consciousness that can fundamentally change the world: “Together we stop war, pollution, overpopulation, disease and hunger.”^[70]

Physical experiences, especially those that are highly stimulating, can produce altered states of consciousness. Whether such states are interpreted as sacred or mundane, however, depends on many factors, and privileging specific practices—whether fisting, flesh pulling, or double penetration—with an essential role in achieving these states is problematic. After all, Purusha might experience fisting as “mind blowing,” but what does it mean when someone else regards it as “the most boring experience on earth”?

“I’m Cautious Now . . .” (Interview, Michelle)

Stan and I picked out the man who would join us in bed. I liked that Jack was bisexual, because Stan will sometimes be with a man also. We got together three times, and each time I was more turned on. I had a no kissing rule, and Jack was respectful of my boundaries.

The first night, we were all in front of the fireplace and Stan intentionally left the room. Jack massaged my back, and it started feeling sexual. After we started fooling around, Stan came back and joined us. The second time was playful. I was reading The Guide to Getting It On, so I’d try the hand job techniques on both of them at once. They would tell me which moves they liked best.

The third time was when I sat on top of Jack having sex. I remember that because I hadn’t done that before with him. Stan remembers working with compersion^[71] while he watched from the couch. I never had an orgasm, but was turned on. Then Jack and Stan played with the BDSM equipment and I participated a little, tickling Jack’s penis with my hair. I was a gentle addition. Following that, still in the dungeon, Jack had intercourse with me and ejaculated. Stan said, “I like sloppy seconds.” I use condoms with them both, so it wasn’t really “sloppy,” but Stan liked the idea. I was on my back and Stan got on top. I was less into it at that point but knew I could say yes or no. I didn’t say no. So we had sex. While Stan was inside me, Jack manipulated my clit. I remember saying they were turning me on. Then it ended.

Later that evening, I went to shower before bed. In the shower, I had this sudden feeling of wanting to wash Jack’s touch off me. I remember scrubbing my neck—he had kissed me on the neck—and then I got this image in my mind of a raped woman washing herself off in the shower. I thought, this is what a raped woman looks like. I detached, seeing myself as a woman who wanted to be washed clean. But why? Was I someone who had done things she didn’t want to do? I hadn’t said no and was mostly turned on. But at that moment I realized something happened to me that I didn’t feel good about, even if I hadn’t been hurt or violated. I said, I’m not doing this anymore until I figure it out.

I talked with Stan about my feelings but didn’t tell Jack right away. He wasn’t a close friend. Eventually, I just told him I didn’t want to experiment again.

I’m still confused about my reaction. Maybe it was cognitive dissonance. “Michelle doesn’t do those things”—have sex with two men—but there I was, getting turned on. Maybe I was afraid of becoming someone I don’t think of myself as. If I define myself as monogamous, how do I feel if someone is turning me on and it’s not Stan? I also don’t like the image of myself lying on my back and having two people over me. I was married for twenty years, and the last ten years were platonic. One day I had intercourse with my husband, and I remember it was an effort. I still have this image of him on top of me, with me knowing I’m not turned on, feeling like I’m giving my body away. Maybe I overreact when I’m not turned on now, or maybe it’s that image of having someone above me. It wasn’t like sex wasn’t good with my husband. I usually had orgasms during intercourse and didn’t even know that was unusual for many women. But I’ve never forgotten that experience, and it was the last time we had sex.

Stan really likes threesomes, but I’m cautious now. I didn’t like how threesomes all revolved around me. We had a threesome with a woman who was bisexual, but things went too quickly for me. When that happens, I shut down but feel pressure because it’s my fault everything stops. After each experience we had, I thought, “I don’t need to do that again.” Not, “I need to do that differently.” Just, “Okay, that’s it.” We’ve gone to swing parties and I can have sex with just Stan in a group situation. I have a mild exhibitionist side. But if he’s going to have sex with someone else, it’s better for him to leave me at home. When he had his orgy party a few months ago, I was uncomfortable. It’s easier for me to think of him fucking someone else than to see him having a connection.

But strangely, threesomes come up in my fantasies when I masturbate. There are two frequent scenes that I visualize. One is a scene with two Russian brothers. I have a connection with one but the other has never been with a woman. So the first asks me, “Do you mind if my brother watches?” I let him watch and then the brother fucks me. There’s another version of this where one has a finger in me and I’m giving the other one a blow job. The other fantasy is based on an experience I had watching a woman at a party who was with two men. She was lying on her stomach. One man was having sex with her from behind and the other guy was in her mouth. They moved her back and forth. It’s not like I picture myself in there between the men. It’s her. But I use the memory to get off.

Psychotherapist Jack Morin surveyed 351 people about their most memorable erotic encounters and favorite sexual fantasies. Expanding on Maslow’s theory of peak experiences—intensely joyful or exciting moments in an individual’s life—Morin used the narratives he collected to delve into the erotic mind, which he believed was key to understanding human needs and potentials. Unlike other peak experiences, however, he found that “in peak sex the erotic impulse frequently strays far from our ideals,” revealing “our idiosyncrasies, conflicts, and unresolved emotional wounds.”^[72] Morin’s “erotic equation” is relatively straightforward: attraction + obstacles = excitement. “Although sexual desire and arousal can be stimulated by all sorts of people and situations,” he writes, “your most passionate responses spring from the interaction of competing forces.”^[73] The obstacles could be a partner’s unavailability or inappropriateness, distance (physical, emotional, or geographic), uncertainty about the future, or taboos. Secret sexual encounters are notoriously exciting, for example, and specific sexual acts may be more or less acceptable across time and place—and correspondingly more or less exciting.

Because each individual’s history is unique, different obstacles heighten arousal for each of us—at least up to a point. Morin argues that there are “four cornerstones of eroticism,” or existential sources of obstacles: longing and anticipation, violating prohibitions, searching for power, and overcoming ambivalence. While a peak erotic experience does not require that these cornerstones be present, many such encounters will include at least one, and sometimes more, because they are “extremely effective arousal intensifiers.”^[74]

People tend to be aware of the positive emotions “energizing” their peak sexual experiences—love, tenderness, or affection. But the “unexpected aphrodisiacs”—anxiety or fear, guilt, shame, hostility, anger, and vulnerability—also intensify arousal, though most successfully in low doses or controlled situations.^[75] The best time to flirt with someone, for example, according to “pick-up artists,” is when the person is feeling slightly insecure. The Art of Seduction suggests techniques drawing on the sexually arousing nature of anxiety: for example, send “mixed signals” to confuse the “victim,” create “triangles” so that the victim must compete for you, stir up feelings of inadequacy in the victim, generate suspense about what you will do next, and mix kindness and cruelty to heighten the erotic charge (“The lower the lows you create, the greater the highs”).^[76] Potential lovers who make us work for their attention often seem more exciting than those who throw themselves at our feet (or even those who are just nice to us). While we may not all want to scheme to such an extent, it is wise to keep in mind why our hearts beat faster in some scenarios than in others.

Arousal depends, in part, on an intricate psychological dance between safety and danger. While actually being caught licking someone’s genitals might be too shameful to bear, almost being caught could be wildly exciting. For someone like Millet, being witnessed, either literally or figuratively through narrative, is a source of pleasure or arousal. Until it isn’t. As a memory, a story told to others, or a scene revisited under controlled conditions, a sexual experience can transform over time from traumatic to arousing or vice versa. This does not necessarily mean that anyone who was raped will be “healed” by organizing her own gang bangs. But it does point to the complexity of emotional experience involved in erotics. We may not all have dramatic events in our history that directly impact our sexuality, but we can be fairly certain that our idiosyncrasies, conflicts, and unresolved emotional wounds will eventually turn up in our erotic life. As Brianna’s story illustrates, group sex can also be physically challenging or overwhelming. To truly understand any particular individual’s motivations requires traversing a vast territory of fluid meaning.

Morin found fantasies involving multiple partners to be the most frequent scenarios reported by his respondents; fantasies about anonymous partners ranked second.^[77] Given social prohibitions on nudity and multiperson sex, the intricate negotiations required, and preexisting folklore highlighting the explosive potential of orgies, group sex easily rests on the “cornerstones” that Morin discusses. When we add in potential emotional experiences that generate ambivalence, we have enough obstacles for a four-hundred-meter hurdle course. It is not surprising that swingers are more likely to describe their lives as “exciting” than the general population.^[78] One woman described her first orgy as “a fantastic adventure.”^[79] Hotwife scenarios, dogging, and other sexual adventures, can generate arousal for the individuals who crave them on numerous levels—whether through the experience of novelty, social and interpersonal risk, the emotional stress of competition, jealousy, shame, overcoming prohibitions, or all of the above, depending on the person.

But what makes someone choose an orgy over a safari?

And how do they decide which kind of orgy to go to?

^{1. Elaine Hatfield, A New Look at Love (Lanham: University Press of
America, 2002), 75.}

^{2. Joris M. Koene and Andries Ter Maat, “Coolidge Effect in Pond Snails: Male
Motivation in a Simultaneous Hermaphrodite,” BMC Evolutionary Biology 7
(2007): 212.}

^{3. Hatfield, A New Look at Love, 75.}

^{4. James G. Pfaus, “Revisiting the Concept of Sexual Motivation,” Annual Review
of Sex Research 10 (1999): 120.}

^{5. Dietrich Klusmann, “Sexual Motivation and the Duration of Partnership,”
Archives of Sexual Behavior 31, no. 3 (2002): 275–87.}

^{6. David Schnarch, Passionate Marriage: Love, Sex, and Intimacy in Emotionally
Committed Relationships (New York: Henry Holt, 1997).}

^{7. Garrett Prestage et al., TOMS: Three or More Study (Sydney,
Australia: National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research, University
of New South Wales, 2008), 23.}

^{8. Russell Westhaver, “Flaunting and Empowerment: Thinking about Circuit Parties,
the Body and Power,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35, no. 6
(2006): 630.}

^{9. David McInnes, Jack Bradley, and Garrett Prestage, “The Discourse of Gay Men’s
Group Sex: The Importance of Masculinity,” Culture, Health & Sexuality: An
International Journal for Research, Intervention and Care 11, no. 6
(2009): 647.}

^{10. Curtis Bergstrand, Nancy Schrepf, and Jennifer Williams-Sinski, “Civilization and
Sexual Discontent: Monogamy and the Problem of Surplus Repression” (unpublished
manuscript, December 1, 2003), Bellarmine University.}

^{11. Curtis Bergstrand and Jennifer Blevins Sinski, Swinging in America: Love, Sex,
and Marriage in the 21st Century (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010), 32.}

^{12. Ibid., 75–76.}

^{13. William Jankowiak and Laura Mixson, “‘I Have His Heart, Swinging Is Just Sex’:
The Ritualization of Sex and the Rejuvenation of the Love Bond in an American
Spouse Exchange Community,” in Intimacies: Love and Sex across Cultures,
ed. William R. Jankowiak (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 260. Also,
NSSHB (2010) “Sexual Behavior in the United States: Results From a National
Probability Sample of Men and Women Ages 14-94.” www.kinseyinstitute.org/resources/faq.html#frequency.}

^{14. Daniel Bergner, “What Do Women Want?” New York Times Magazine, January 22,
2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/magazine/25desire-t.html?pagewanted=all.}

^{15. Men can feel aroused without erections, however, or experience penile response
that does not match their psychological state.}

^{16. Bergner, “What Do Women Want?”}

^{17. Andy Campbell, “Horseshoe Crab Mating Ritual Is the Oldest Beach Orgy,” Weird
News (blog), Huffington Post, May 11, 2012,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/11/horseshoe-crab-orgy_n_1509445.html.}

^{18. Todd Shackelford and Aaron T. Goetz, “Psychological and Physiological Adaptations
to Sperm Competition in Humans,” Review of General Psychology 9, no. 3
(2005): 228–48.}

^{19. Ibid.}

^{20. Sarah J. Kilgallon and Leigh W Simmons, “Image Content Influences Men’s Semen
Quality,” Biology Letters 1, no. 3 (2005): 253–55.}

^{21. Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World’s Largest
Experiment Reveals about Human Desire (New York: Dutton, 2011).}

^{22. David J. Ley, Insatiable Wives:Women Who Stray and the Men Who
Love Them (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), xii.}

^{23. Ibid., 51.}

^{24. David J. Ley, “Is Kinky Sex Good for Your Marriage?” Women Who Stray
(blog), Psychology Today, June 22, 2010,
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/women-who-stray/201006/is-kinky-sex-good-your-marriage.}

^{25. Ogas and Gaddam, A Billion Wicked Thoughts.}

^{26. Ibid.}

^{27. Ibid.}

^{28. Dan Savage, “Husband Has No Interest in Hot Wife,” Savage Love,
Creative Loafing Charlotte, March 24, 2009,
http://clclt.com/charlotte/husband-has-no-interest-in-hot-wife/Content?oid=2152344.}

^{29. Terry Gould, The Lifestyle: A Look at the Erotic Rites of Swingers
(Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1999), 214.}

^{30. Ibid.}

^{31. Bigg Texx, May 27, 2012 (3:03 a.m.), comment on DoMyWife (forum),
http://www.domywife.com/forum/general-discussion/10884-hot-wife-swinging-polyamory-candaulism-compersion.html.}

^{32. Mr. Fun, February 25, 2009 (9:32 a.m.), comment on “Rivals Spur Men to
Produce Better Sperm,” Hot Wife Allie (blog),
http://www.hotwivesonline.com/2005/06/09/rivals-spur-men-to-produce-better-sperm/.}

^{33. “Did You Ever Wonder Why You Just Needed to Fuck That Good Looking Guy?” I
Play & He Waits (blog),
http://iplayhewaits.blogspot.com/p/did-you-ever-wonder-why-you-just-needed.html?zx=f8645986ab54e251.}

^{34. Quoted in Cuckoldress Roxanne, “The Science of Cuckolding,” A Cuckoldress
World (blog), December 20, 2004, http://www.xtcforums.com/main.php?page=cuckoldscientificexplanation.}

^{35. Harvey Milkman and Stanley G. Sunderworth, Craving for Ecstasy and Natural
Highs: A Positive Approach to Mood Alteration (Los Angeles: Sage, 2009),
153.}

^{36. Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron, “Some Evidence for Heightened Sexual Attraction
under Conditions of High Anxiety,” Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology 30, no. 4 (1974): 510–17.}

^{37. Gary Lewandowski and Arthur Aron, “Distinguishing Arousal from Novelty and
Challenge in Initial Romantic Attraction between Strangers,” Social Behavior
and Personality 32, no. 4 (2004): 361–72.}

^{38. Jonathan W. Roberti, “A Review of Behavioral and Biological Correlates of
Sensation Seeking,” Journal of Research in Personality 38 (2004): 268;
Marvin Zuckerman, “The Psychophysiology of Sensation Seeking,” Journal of
Personality 58, no. 1 (1990): 313–45.}

^{39. Dan T. A. Eisenberg, Benjamin Campbell, James MacKillop, Meera Modi, David Dang,
J. Koji Lum, and David S. Wilson, “Polymorphisms in the Dopamine D4 and D2
Receptor Genes and Reproductive and Sexual Behaviors,” Evolutionary
Psychology 5, no. 4 (2007): 696–715.}

^{40. Roberti, “Correlates of Sensation Seeking,” 269.}

^{41. Ibid., 256.}

^{42. Ibid., 262.}

^{43. Ibid., 266.}

^{44. G. Prestage et al., “Use of Illicit Drugs among Gay Men Living with HIV in
Sydney,” AIDS 21, Suppl. 1 (2007): S53.}

^{45. Michael Hurley and Garrett Prestage, “Intensive Sex Partying Amongst Gay Men in
Sydney,” Culture, Health & Sexuality: An International Journal for
Research, Intervention and Care 11, no. 6 (2009): 598.}

^{46. Ibid., 601.}

^{47. Jonathan Bollen and David McInnes, “Time, Relations and Learning in Gay Men’s
Experiences of Adventurous Sex,” Social Semiotics 14, no. 1 (2004):
25.}

^{48. John Tierney, “What’s New? Exuberance for Novelty Has Benefits,” New York
Times, February 3, 2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/science/novelty-seeking-neophilia-can-be-a-predictor-of-well-being.html?_r=1&emc=eta1.}

^{49. Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being (New York: Van Nostrand,
1968), 73.}

^{50. Ibid., 94.}

^{51. Ibid., 105.}

^{52. Ibid., 80.}

^{53. I. M. Lewis, “Trance, Possession, Shamanism, and Sex,” Anthropology of
Consciousness 14, no. 1 (2003): 31.}

^{54. Michel Maffesoli, The Shadow of Dionysus: A Contribution to the Sociology of
the Orgy, trans. Cindy Linse and Mary Kristina Palmquist (Albany: SUNY
Press, 1993), 64.}

^{55. Harvey Whitehouse, “Terror,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and
Emotion, ed. John Corrigan (New York: Oxford).}

^{56. Mark Thompson, ed., Leatherfolk:
Radical Sex, People, Politics, and Practice (Boston: Alyson Publications,
1991), 285.}

^{57. Ibid., 292.}

^{58. Ibid., 289.}

^{59. Kal Cobalt, “The Path of Pain: Spiritual BDSM,” Kal Cobalt’s Blog (blog),
http://www.realitysandwich.com/path_pain_spiritual_bdsm.}

^{60. Bill Brent, “Interview with Pat Califia by Bill Brent,” Black Sheets
15 (1999), 30, cited in Patrick Moore, Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the
Abandoned History of Radical Sexuality (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004),
57.}

^{61. Mark Thompson, ed., Leatherfolk
: Radical Sex, People, Politics, and Practice (Boston: Alyson
Publications, 1991), 269, 287.}

^{62. Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler, “Sexual Traffic,” Differences: A Journal of
Feminist Cultural Studies 6, no. 2/3 (1994): 78.}

^{63. Alicia D. Horton, “Flesh Hook Pulling: Motivations and Meaning-Making from the
‘Body Side’ of Life,” Deviant Behavior 34, no. 2 (2013): 120.}

^{64. Hugh Urban, “The Beast with Two Backs: Aleister Crowley, Sex Magic and the
Exhaustion of Modernity,” Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions
7, no. 3 (2004): 7.}

^{65. Ibid., 24.}

^{66. Ibid., 22.}

^{67. Ibid., 105.}

^{68. “Club Tantra,” School of Tantra,
http://www.schooloftantra.net/ClubTantra/ClubTantra2.htm.}

^{69. Janet Kira Lessin, “Double Penetration: A Path to Enlightenment,” Club
Tantra,
http://clubtantra.org/2012/11/04/double-penetration-a-path-to-enlightenment/.}

^{70. Ibid.}

^{71. “Compersion” is a term used by polyamorists to describe feelings of
happiness upon seeing a partner experience joy, happiness, or
pleasure, sexual or otherwise. Compersion is sometimes put forth as
the opposite of jealousy; other times, it is conceptualized as a
state that can be achieved through reflection.}

^{72. Jack Morin, The Erotic Mind: Unlocking the Inner Source of Sexual Passion and
Fulfillment (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 22.}

^{73. Ibid., 50.}

^{74. Ibid., 107.}

^{75. Ibid., 135.}

^{76. Robert Greene, The Art of Seduction (New York: Penguin, 2001).}

^{77. Morin, The Erotic Mind, 43.}

^{78. “Is life exciting or dull?” GSS: 45.7 percent “exciting”; 54.4 percent “pretty
routine or dull.” Swingers: 75.9 percent “exciting”; 23.8 percent “pretty
routine or dull.” Bergstrand and Sinski, Swinging in America, 57.}

^{79. Ibid., 52.}

Chapter 6

Games People Play

Group Sex as Experimentation, Adventure, and Play

The Orgy Dome (Interview, Zach)

One of Burning Man’s most valued concepts is “gifting,” the giving of things to others just because one can and with no expectation of receiving something in return. The “orgy dome” was intended to be our “gift” to other Burners—a safe space for people who were already in the lifestyle, or into swinging, to play. Somewhere along the way, our camp also decided it would be great to introduce interested newbies to open sexuality—safely and without judgment—what we call being “sexually social.” Now, the “orgy dome” is open to experienced lifestyle couples, curious couples, and even some who are sharing camping space and just don’t have anywhere else to go. We are mostly visited by heterosexual couples, but we do get gay and lesbian couples occasionally (and combined groups we call “moresomes”). They are welcome, although there are other camps dedicated to those groups. One year, a girl wanted to celebrate her birthday with a gang bang—we were going to allow single men that day, but it didn’t end up happening. Singles aren’t usually allowed, but they still try to get in. We’ve even had obviously straight guys try to get in by pretending they are a gay couple. “Okay, kiss each other,” I’ll say, and that’s usually the end of that.

Campmates share “greeter” duties, where we go over the rules with visitors or watch the door to make sure that only couples or moresomes enter and leave together. We answer questions and warn people who break the rules. Unfortunately, sometimes we have to eject them. So what are the rules? No shoes inside. Leave your dusty backpacks or coats in the cubbies. Couples enter and leave together, and no gawkers (unless specifically asked to watch—we do have exhibitionists). The most important rule is to ask before you touch anyone, and if they don’t actually say “yes,” they don’t mean “yes.” Use a towel when you have sex, and clean up after yourselves. We provide towels, condoms, and lube. It’s tough enough to keep things clean in the desert, but we change the sheets, empty the trash, and stock clean towels. It takes a lot of work to keep everything going, and people are very thankful. I’ve received some very special playa gifts over the years.

After people listen to the orientation, they can go inside. It’s a double zip-door both for privacy and to keep out the dust, so we request that they unzip the first door of the tent, step inside, zip it back up, and then unzip the second door. Inside, we have seven air conditioners. There is at least one massage table (sometimes more) and a small room with a sex swing that gets used quite a bit. There is a larger room for group play.

Occasionally, a couple will go inside and be back out in just a few minutes. There’s a bit of a “sensory overload” issue sometimes—they need to think about it, or they aren’t sure if an orgy or public play is right for them. That’s fine. It might not be right for them. But I love it when a new couple comes just to check it out, and then disappear inside for an hour or more. They come out flushed, exhilarated, dazed, and very, very happy.

A few years ago, I had a small group of cocky drunken frat boys who stopped by. I couldn’t let them in, of course, but it was very dusty, so they were hanging out in the overflow area, trying to decide where they were going to go next. Well, about twenty minutes before they arrived, a gorgeous young girl had gone inside the dome with her boyfriend. She was very enthusiastic and we could all hear her enjoying herself. The guys could only imagine what was going on inside—they hadn’t been inside the tent, and they hadn’t seen the girl.

All of a sudden, the tent unzips and she steps out, naked. Beautiful.

“I need another cock,” she said. She looked around, noticed one of the frat boys, pointed, and said, “How about you?”

He looked like he was going to pass out. “Uh, I can’t,” he stammered. She asked a few more of them. None had the nerve to take her up on the offer. All of their bravado was gone. Eventually, she just shook her head and stepped back inside, zipping the tent behind her.

I laughed. “In twenty years,” I told them, “you’re going to look back on this moment and really regret it.”

But at Burning Man, a lot of people are out of their comfort zone. They’re suddenly in an environment of “radical self-expression” and it’s intense. Long-term Burners are there with their peer groups, so it’s easy to forget what it was like their first time. Newcomers are often overwhelmed. They might sit next to a swinger at work every day and have no idea. But at Burning Man, people are free to be themselves. Suddenly, newcomers see things they’ve only heard or fantasized about. The first day or two, some people end up sitting in their tent saying, “Holy shit. I don’t think I can go out there again.” But by the third or fourth day, they’re feeling more comfortable. Obviously, being out there in the desert is not just about sex, although sex makes a lot of people uncomfortable, so there’s sex to grapple with. Being out there is about a lot of things we aren’t supposed to do or be in the everyday world.

Burning Man: A Movable Feast for the Sexual Traveler

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—Advertisement for the Orgy Dome

“In all known cultures and civilizations,” anthropologist I. M. Lewis argues,

we find essentially two, at first sight contradictory processes which induce trance. One involves sensory deprivation—trauma, stress, illness, isolation, fasting, and deliberate physical mortification as in many mystical religious traditions. The other equally common stimulus involves sensory overloading—with musical and other sonic bombardment (especially monotonous drumming), strobe lighting effects, the ingestion of hallucinogenic drugs, and more mundane procedures like over-breathing and even strenuous exercise such as jogging (which has been shown experimentally to increase endorphin levels).^[1]

Trance, for Lewis, is a term referring to altered states of consciousness ranging from dissociation to religious ecstasy, meditation to peak experiences.

At the Burning Man festival, which takes place in a high-altitude desert basin too bleak to support natural plant or animal life, both of these trance-inducing processes occur simultaneously. The harsh physical environment—hot during the day and cold at night; frequent dust storms; a lack of physical features other than the distant mountains and the desert floor; and the inability to access everyday comforts—becomes the setting for a new landscape created to indulge and engulf the senses. Loud, continuous electronic music, elaborate costuming or nudity, performance art and installation art, and a novel set of cultural expectations (embraced to different extents by participants) appear within a new arrangement of time and space. Somehow, it becomes almost impossible to arrive somewhere “on time,” although time also gains new meaning with a twenty-four-hour clock. Some people find it easier to sleep during the heat of the day and venture out at night. Others find it impossible to sleep at all. Navigating through the dusty city becomes easier with experience, although it is challenging for newcomers. “The Man,” in the center of the playa, becomes the primary reference point; the streets that encircle him form a wheel, marked around the circumference by the numbers on a clock (2:00, 2:30, 3:00, etc.) and outward by the letters of the alphabet, with “A” being closer to “the Man” than “L.” Transportation is limited to bikes or feet, or an occasional art car. (The problem with art cars, however, is that you’re quite literally “along for the ride” and might end up miles from your camp.) Contact with the outside world is difficult—the drive from Reno is about three hours, and with traffic on the two-lane country roads and lengthy backups at the front gates, it is rare for someone to leave the festival and return. Many years, cell phones do not work, making communication difficult. Being on the playa is described as similar to being on Mars, the moon, or “another planet.” Substances are not necessary in order to experience an altered state of consciousness in such an environment, although some participants add drugs into the mix.

Burning Man had its origins in San Francisco, and a hippie ethos filters through even its more mainstream contingencies. The event is quintessentially American in principle and practice, although participants hail from around the world. As Matt Wray writes:

There are all sorts here, a living breathin’ encyclopedia of subcultures: Desert survivalists, urban primitives, artists, rocketeers, hippies, Deadheads, queers, pyromaniacs, cybernauts, musicians, ranters, eco-freaks, acidheads, breeders, punks, gun lovers, dancers, S/M and bondage enthusiasts, nudists, refugees from the men’s movement, anarchists, ravers, transgender types, and New Age spiritualists.^[2]

The emphasis on radical self-expression occasionally becomes another source of conformity: most participants respect the informal ban on visible corporate logos on their clothing or gear, but it is impossible to bike a block without seeing colorful tutus, Native American headdresses, or men wearing utility kilts, for example. Still, for most people, such adornment is far from everyday attire, and you might also encounter naked people painted head to toe in metallic colors, hundreds of partiers wearing bunny ears (probably participating in the “Million Bunny March”), or a guy wearing a disco ball that fits over his entire head. After a few days, you’ll barely glance at the topless girl dancing along the Esplanade with a parasol, but a guy in a Tommy Bahama Hawaiian shirt will stop you in your tracks: Why is he wearing that? What does it mean?

Another treasured value of the event is a focus on individual and community meaning-making. Rather than proclaiming what the event itself or any particular work of art stands for, the organizers and contributors have long privileged the possibility of diverse and even contradictory interpretations. Even the meaning of “the Man” himself is left up to individual participants to discern. For some, the ritual burning of “the Man” is a somber event; for others, it is celebratory. Participants are expected to make meaning out of their experience, and they usually do. Ideally, participants also remain free to “have their experience” without the imposition of others’ judgments, rules, or expectations. Each year a temple is constructed on the playa, to be burned on Sunday night. The temple is a nondenominational and participatory space—people pray, write on the walls, contribute items for the bonfire, do yoga inside, and even spend the night there. One of my most vivid memories is of watching the sun rise over the desert with people who had gathered on top of the temple. Except for the mourners, some of whom were being embraced by their companions, everyone was nearly silent and still. Some people meditated; others slept or were lost in their thoughts. A couple cuddled next to me, sharing a heavy jacket. As the sun peeked over the horizon, we rose as a group. We were teary-eyed, tired, and chilled. People began solemnly hugging their neighbors; some raised their arms to the warming sun. Someone began to sing “Amazing Grace.” At that moment, a giant boat floated past the temple, blaring music so loud that it completely drowned out the singing. Ravers danced on the roof of the vehicle and people sprawled across every surface, hanging off the railings and dangling their legs over the wheel hubs.

They waved.

We waved.

Opinions on what actually happens “out there in the desert” range from condemnation to glorification. Critics have described it as “a 192-hour drug orgy,” “a dance orgy,” an “aural orgy,” and even “a 24/7 bacchanal of booze, drugs, nudity, S&M, public sex, and bad art.”^[3] One man told the press that Burning Man wasn’t about art at all, but “really about sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll—a lot of sex.”^[4] (I’m still wondering where he heard the “rock ’n’ roll.”) Supporters champion the possibility of personal growth and social transformation as the experiences and values of Burning Man trickle back into the everyday lives of participants. As an academic writer claims: “Burning Man does more than merely offer a means of escape—it offers the means to perform alternatives, and to enact a different social reality that may have practical implications.”^[5] Participants do not necessarily have a unified vision of that alternative social reality, however. Over the years, the more radical factions at Burning Man have warred with the “ravers” over the focus on partying rather than community or political change. Contradictions flourish. For every person extolling the virtues of desert tribal ritual, someone is fixated on global cyberculture. The “barter” and “gift” economy is fascinating to people used to whipping out their credit cards at every turn, and the media often underscores the fact that money only exchanges hands during the event for the purchase of ice or coffee at Center Camp. On the other hand, a lot of money goes into preparations for Burning Man, from renting RVs to purchasing tickets, tents, supplies, and enough fresh water to survive a week in the desert. Some of the more extravagant camps—which “gift” everything from meals to art cars to TEDx talks to mainstream DJs spinning on high-quality sound systems—are funded by entrepreneurs, bankers, and CEOs.

But what about the sex?

In addition to the “orgy dome,” there are other opportunities for sexual experimentation, many of which transgress norms of privacy and decorum. The “safer sex” camp offers free lube and condoms, and the Bureau of Erotic Discourse (BED) holds discussions on sexual negotiation. One camp sponsors a “human carcass wash,” where visitors are bathed and felt up at the same time by their launderers—after agreeing on boundaries. (Even individuals who aren’t into group gropes may find themselves tempted to trade suds for fondling after a few days in the dust.) Several camps provide dungeons and BDSM equipment. You can find erotic rope bondage, pony play, and discreet places for men who are closeted or curious to play with other men. You might happen upon a game of naked Twister, a game of naked wet Twister, a topless disco, or a “petting zoo.” Many workshops and demonstrations are sexually themed—rather than being sequestered away from passersby, these can occur right along the main streets. A friend of mine, biking through Black Rock City one afternoon, noticed a large group of people gathered at a camp. When he investigated, he saw a woman penetrating a man using a strap-on while the man explained his sensations and answered questions. In 2012, workshops were offered on double penetration, cunnilingus, and fellatio. If you’re interested in sex toys, you can try out the Orgasmatron, Orgasamator, or the Spank-O-Matic, or even sit on the vibrating handles of my friend Kevin’s Daiquiri Wacker, a blender mounted on a golf cart and driven by a gas-powered motor. (At the very least, you’ll end up with a margarita, which is nothing to complain about in hundred-degree heat.)

Not all erotic activity is organized. Some art installations are strictly off-limits for sexual activity; others seem designed to invite it. In the wee hours of the morning, the many “chill domes” provided by camps—usually carpeted and furnished with pillows or mattresses—occasionally shelter couples having sex, “cuddle puddles,” and smaller, impromptu group sex scenes. But given that public sex is illegal, and the law is enforced by the Bureau of Land Management and Nevada police, larger sex parties follow norms of spatial segmentation and interaction as you’d find at other public sex venues, where entry is controlled, rules are posted or explained, and the explicit nature of activities is progressive rather than “in your face.”

Despite the variety of erotic entertainments, many regulars see the focus on sex in media accounts as misguided. Not everyone is there for sex, and the conditions aren’t ideal—unless you eroticize dust, the taste and smell of baby wipes, or performing in front of a crowd. Continually asking for directions to an “orgy camp” marks one as a newbie quicker than wearing Nike sneakers. As a blog writer points out: “Tourists at Burning Man can all be recognized by their distinct, annoying, and fucktard behavior; generally they tend to be males (of any age but most often 19–22 year old frat boys or 50–60 year old men in $500,000 RVs) who come to Burning Man expecting an orgy of hot chicks undulating naked and ready to fuck on a moment’s notice. If this is your reason for attending Burning Man, do yourself a favor and go to Lake Havasu instead.”^[6] Blogger Jay Michaelson writes that although there are some “naked people running around on drugs,” the event is far more diverse than the media representations of it: “For every NPRAOD, I’d guess there are two people wishing they had the courage to do so, one person playing the violin on a sofabed in the middle of a desert, two people cooking pumpkin ravioli, and another person writing the name of her beloved on the wooden walls of the Temple.” “If it’s just a big party,” Michaelson asks, “why is there a temple in the middle of it?”

For many of those devoted to Burning Man, sex and erotic experience simply plays a supporting role in a week that is really about a more ineffable experience—“a lot of something that can’t be grasped,” like trying “to describe color to a blind person.” The event produces altered states of consciousness and feelings of liberation, freedom, and authenticity; sex is associated with these same experiences in American culture. For some participants, the experience is one of spiritual transcendence. As Michaelson suggests, “peak experiences such as those encouraged at Burning Man give a glimpse of the ultimate, the infinite.” Although Burning Man doesn’t provide this for everyone, it does so for enough people to attract fifty to sixty thousand each year and to have persisted for over twenty years, serving as an annual pilgrimage for many participants.

As with other liminal spaces or “temporary zones of altered reality,” such a setting is conducive to sexual experimentation, even if not every participant chooses to do so. Unlike everyday life, commitment is not required for experimentation in such an environment—temporary, relatively anonymous, removed from everyday roles, norms, expectations, and comforts, and shaped within a set of cultural values supporting individual exploration and expression. A focus just on the sex, however, misses a great deal of how, and why, adults play.

Let’s look at another experimentation zone—the world of the Internet.

Group Sex and the Single Avatar

Second Life is a virtual three-dimensional world where human users interact as avatars, both visually onscreen and through chat, instant message, and voice technologies. Second Life has had up to twenty-nine million sign ups since its inception in 2003; around five hundred thousand users log in each week. Although Linden Labs created the platform for Second Life, the world is actually driven by user-created content, which means that individual users can build objects or produce animations, retaining their copyrights.^[7]

As with other Internet forums where control over content is ceded to the masses—say, Craigslist or YouTube—sex was inevitable. Philip Rosedale, the head of Linden Labs, allowed users to create sexual content in Second Life, even though other virtual worlds at the time restricted it: “We believed that freedom was fundamental to the environment and freedom is not something you can split hairs on. Second Life, like the Internet, is open to all, and what people want to do there is their own decision.”^[8] Controversy was also inevitable. During its peak years, Second Life sparked concerns: Would people begin spending all of their time at their computers and cease pursuing real relationships? And would the accessibility, anonymity, and instant gratification available online spur users to ever-greater sexual depravity? In the mid 2000s, Linden Labs created adult areas requiring age verification for admittance and banned certain activities, such as “ageplay,” or sex where an avatar appears as a child. Since then, a decade has passed; panics have arisen around the sexualized use of other technologies (sexting, anyone?). Some gamers dismiss Second Life as a relic. Other virtual worlds have since sprung into existence, some of which are more exclusively focused on sex. Red Light Center, for example, is an adults only, “multiuser reality” site. In addition to experimenting with sexuality, Red Light Center users can smoke marijuana or take magic mushrooms—the game is modeled after the red-light district in Amsterdam—and visual changes associated with each substance appear onscreen.

Still, Second Life remains the prototype for virtual sociality and provides an interesting environment in which to study sexual fantasy and adventure. In many ways, Second Life has become a lot like “Real Life” (referred to by users as SL and RL). Because users sell the content they create, SL revolves around the marketplace. The local currency, the “linden,” has a fluctuating exchange rate, hovering around $300L to $1 USD in 2011. But lindens add up: SL profits have reportedly made some RL millionaires.^[9] And similar to RL, how an avatar looks and what it owns—from sneakers to real estate—becomes a way of claiming identity, displaying status, and making connections. Users initially choose their avatars from eleven standard models. Rather quickly, however, new “residents” usually refine their look by purchasing clothes, changing hairstyles, and customizing their bodies with everything from realistic “skins” to elaborate wings, horns, or tails. Supporting a shopping habit requires lindens, so residents go to work. They earn, save, and spend. They make friends, fall in love, get married, have children, cheat, and get divorced. And, of course, they have sex (usually after buying genitals, which aren’t included with the basic model).

Given the creativity of erotic entrepreneurs, SL users can experiment with BDSM, sex work, orgies, and anonymous hookups in dark alleys. Some residents have sex at home; others retire to relatively private areas such as “skyboxes,” tall objects where other avatars can’t easily view what’s happening at the top. Purchasing a “full sim,” or a large chunk of land, allows one to hide one’s virtual erotic activities more completely—it won’t even show up on the map to those who aren’t invited in—but can cost about $1,200 to create and around $200 a month in upkeep.^[10] Some residents form private clubs, using membership dues to support these expenses. Many users, however, want public sex. After all, you can hide away in your own bedroom in RL, shades drawn and lights out, so why not try something different online?

Misty Crimsonlay is an avatar that has parlayed her erotic exploits into a series of self-help books and memoirs available for purchase with “real” USD, such as A Slutty Day in Second Life, Second Life: How to Get Laid—Fast! and Second Life: Dirty Lesbian Sex. She even publishes Second Life—Sex Guide 2011 and, of course, Second Life—Hot Orgies.^[11] “Sometimes I like to watch,” she writes in Hot Orgies, “sometimes I join in.” The following threesome scene, presented as it might look in Second Life chat, involves Misty, a shemale named Julia, and a lesbian named Alice:

SecondLifeNowPlaying:

Dip It Low

Christina Milian

Misty: oh yes with your pussy in my face

Misty: hmmmmm.

Alice: lick it baby

Misty: and Julia’s fingers exploring

Misty: hmmmm

Alice: looks lovely

Misty: oh god yes

Misty: push down on me honey

Misty: smother my face

Misty: smother me with your pussy and rub it over me

Alice: your glasses are a bit sharp sweety

Alice: lol.^[12]

An ethnographer at heart, I wasn’t satisfied with reading Hot Orgies. I had questions: What were people looking for in Second Life, and how did they find it? What does virtual sex actually look like?

There was one good way to find out. I signed up, chose my avatar—a blonde woman in a red tartan skirt and turtleneck—and headed straight for the adult territories. Teleporting and flying, which is the best way to explore SL, were easy. I’m a natural, I thought. I had high hopes for my expedition.

But after thirty minutes of teleporting to deserted islands, I felt more like an archaeologist wandering the ruins of Pompeii than Margaret Cyber-Mead. I understood why some residents sought advice from Misty. Where was everyone? How was I going to get laid—fast? Just as in RL, you need a partner (or three) for group sex.

Finally, I found a crowded club called the “Dirty Bar.” Residents sprawled across couches and chairs; some chatted in groups. Many were already in various stages of undress. A few female residents gave lap dances, while others whirled around poles. I approached a brunette woman in a purple raver outfit, thinking I’d ask her where she bought her leg warmers and maybe seduce her in the process. For some reason, choosing a woman for my first online sexual experience felt safer, even though I reminded myself that she might not really be a woman. But it didn’t matter, anyway. Raver Girl had clearly come to the Dirty Bar for something or someone specific, and it wasn’t me. She teleported. Perhaps she knew I was an SL virgin by my outfit. Also, like a typical newbie, I was making mistakes. Flying over vast waterways and uninhabited islands might have been effortless, but maneuvering around other avatars was more challenging. I bumped into walls and spun in circles. I peed on the floor. How was I supposed to know that would happen if I clicked on the rug? When I tried to sit down in a chair, my schoolgirl avatar instead mounted a mechanical sheep from behind. (Whoever created the animal, in addition to a warped sense of humor, had the foresight to design it to look as if it were constructed with nuts and bolts. Bestiality is scandalous even in SL.)

The sheep began bleating and circling the club, picking up speed. Panicked, I frantically searched for a way to disengage. In the main chat box, unfolding on the left side of my screen, residents mocked me:

Xxxx: it’s okay everyone humps the sheep at some point

Yyyy: she should borrow my strap on . . . or buy one

Zzzz: second day in second life, wait until tomorrow

Yyyy: baaaaaaaaa

I tried to ignore them. Finally, I noticed a button on my control box that read, “STAND.” I clicked it. My avatar, thankfully, returned to her upright position, and the mechanical sheep resumed a grazing posture.

How embarrassing.

Who cares? I’m a blonde standard model here. Nobody knows me.

Still, I teleported—fast. Perhaps it would be best to spread myself thin until I learned the ropes.

As I quickly figured out, one needs to pay close attention to the cursor. The round objects appearing on the computer screen are “poseballs.” When clicked with the mouse, poseballs can make your avatar sit in a chair, kiss, or lie down on a pool table with her legs spread. You can become a “Waiting Prostitute” or position yourself for “Public Use.” In BDSM clubs, poseballs were politely balanced: “Dom” or “Sub,” “Give” or “Get,” “Rape” or “Get Raped,” “Pee” or “Get Peed On.” Sometimes, though, poseballs are clustered so close together that it is hard to tell exactly what will happen—just like that, you end up humping a sheep. Residents can also purchase furniture, such as a bed or table, with built-in scripts for more complex options, although I wouldn’t say they create a seamless fantasy.

Along my high-tech trek, I found places to congregate for Goreans, who practice master/slave relationships based on a series of science-fiction novels, and special islands for “furries,” who anthropomorphize animals (only some of whom extend this interest into sex). I visited gay and lesbian communities, dungeons, orgy rooms, and sex clubs with names such as “Bukkake Bliss” or “Orgy in the Forest.” Destinations such as “Public Disgrace” cater to residents interested in more extreme activities such as “rough sex, forced sex, swingers, prey, bukkake, slut, rape.” (I found the appearance of “swingers” in the description to be curious and didn’t run across any avatar couples on my visits.) On Orgy Island, couples had sex in a sandbox in every conceivable position; one man was break-dancing over a woman lying flat on her back. In Bukkake Bliss, a group of men stroked their penises while a naked woman did yoga poses in a bathtub, rhythmically opening and closing her mouth. A few female avatars gave blow jobs, and dozens of strippers whirled around poles. In fact, I saw so many strippers that I wondered whether more people came to SL to strip than to have sex.

Some of the more exclusive sex areas, I learned, can cost a pretty linden to enter, as can the costumes and equipment that mark you as a “real player.” As in RL, garnering attention is part of the game when you’re seeking sex. And when it comes to genitals, you get what you pay for—so unless you’re satisfied with looking like a Ken doll or with the “free penis” sometimes offered as an incentive to visit a less trafficked sex club, you should invest wisely.

Hours passed. I was still a virgin. Just like in RL, everyone seemed to be waiting for someone else to make the first move. It was going to have to be me.

Am I really nervous about having sex as a computer graphic?

I teleported back to the Dirty Bar—hey, they know me there—and strode in confidently, avoiding my ovine friend. No chickening out. Catching sight of a muscled blonde resident who had obviously spent big bucks on his penis, I approached him and clicked the poseball that read, “Suck.” My avatar dropped to her knees. After a few seconds, I clicked “Stand” and wandered off. Well, that was easy. Next up—threesome. I clicked on another poseball, and my avatar sprawled on the ground. Within minutes, a naked man with a long demon tail and tattoos on his arms positioned himself above me. Another naked man soon joined us, but as he hadn’t claimed even a free penis, his humping movements above my head looked bizarre. I decided it counted anyway.

But how long should one have avatar sex? How does an encounter culminate without any physical cues? Pondering this issue, I waited about two minutes before moving on. Another mistake, as my tattooed partner twice turned his back on me when he saw me again in the club that evening. Later, I realized I had inadvertently ignored his attempts to chat privately with me: “nice ass, fuck, this is so good.” Unsure of how I would have responded, I still grasped how rude my behavior had been. Communication. That’s how you know what to do next. And, of course, that’s where newbies make the most mistakes.

Eventually, two male avatars took me under their wing, demonstrating how the scripts worked on one of the beds. They contorted my avatar into a rapid string of sex positions that made me once again wonder if computer programmers have a fetish for Ashtanga yoga. And once again, I found, SL starts to look rather like RL. Sure, an RL man can become a busty redhead with a skunk tail, elf ears, and latex gloves in SL. But the overall menu is fairly familiar. I rarely saw an overweight avatar. No one buys a small penis. Residents have oral, anal, and vaginal sex. They flip-flop top to bottom and have sex standing, sitting, and lying down. They masturbate, sometimes as a way to get attention in sex clubs. They tie each other up on pool tables and get kinky with whips and chains. But I didn’t come across anything unexpected, and even the “alien captors” I encountered aimed their lasers and examination probes at predictable bodily regions on their hostages. (Sure, some residents had sex with unicorns, or as unicorns, but somehow that didn’t seem like bestiality.) More residents seek “tops” than are interested in topping others, judging by the number of slaves tied patiently at “Public Use” stations or wandering around with signs reading “waiting for master.” Violence makes an appearance even though users can be banned from areas if they do not respect the rules. Communities form, developing their own norms and expectations, and there is no escaping social hierarchy. In the crowded sex clubs, a few users dominated the public chat, usually those with the best outfits or the most knowledge about SL (some of whom would call out other residents for mistakes). In both talk and appearance, there was jostling for attention and status.

Avatars may be infinitely flexible, but players are only willing to stretch so far.

SL sex carries fewer risks than RL sex, as there are no STDs, pregnancies, stigmas, or physical dangers. You can hire an escort without worrying about your picture showing up on the evening news. Other barriers to sexual experimentation are also lowered: disgust rules don’t hold as powerfully when it comes to computer graphics, and shame organizes social interaction to a lesser degree. In an uncomfortable situation, one simply teleports, never to return again—or to return as a giant, fire-breathing demon. On the other hand, SL sex occupies an intriguing borderland between real and virtual worlds. As anthropologist Tom Boellstorff writes in Coming of Age in Second Life: “Clearly a murder in Second Life was a representation of a murder; no actual-world person was harmed. But sex in Second Life, even forms of BDSM or edgeplay, were forms of sexual expression for many residents, leading to orgasm and even to long-term relationships.”^[13] Technologies are being developed that will make sex even more realistic. The Sinulator, a wireless female vibrator, can be controlled over the Internet. The Real Touch is a device that envelopes the penis, plugs into the USB port of a computer, and synchronizes with pornography being viewed—or, perhaps, with an encounter on Domina Island. (It even maintains an internal temperature of around 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.) SL sex can have RL effects beyond orgasm as well, especially if an RL spouse interprets avatar sex as real infidelity and files for divorce.^[14] Users sometimes refer to “sex in virtual worlds” rather than “virtual sex” to highlight these complexities. Some users also claim that “emotional bonds are as strong in Second Life as they are in the physical world,” and that “cybersex can be as meaningful, intense, and erotic as physical sex.”^[15]

Reality is always bolstered by fantasies—how we perceive ourselves and others, how we interpret events, and how we manifest our goals and dreams all involve subjective elements as well as external objects, events, relationships, and meanings. But are the boundaries so blurred in SL that real lives are destroyed, as some commentators warned? And is there a domino effect, where people are swept away into sexual deviance by their online explorations?

When psychologists explored people’s understandings of the relationship between their online and “real-life” sexuality, psychological and physical satisfaction between the two domains—RL and SL—seemed unrelated; most people hadn’t “crossed over” from SL to RL with a partner or experienced a reduction in real-life sexual activity because of their online escapades. In fact, users reported that SL had positive effects on their RL sex lives.^[16] SL is indeed used for sexual experimentation, though. In one study, for example, survey participants reported that they did not necessarily know where to go or how to seek partners offline for the practices they were interested in exploring. So while these users claimed to present themselves as the same gender, race, class, and age in SL as RL, they used SL to experiment with relationships and sexual practices. Group sex, bondage/BDSM, observing others, and costume play—practices included on the survey—are stigmatized in RL but “maintain a flamboyant virtual presence” in SL.^[17] Most users expressing interest in these activities did not have RL experience, but nearly all of them had SL experience. Still, concerns about such experimentation initiating a slide into depravity are probably misguided. Another study of 217 people with SL avatars found the prevalence of “atypical” sexual practices to be fairly consistent with their prevalence in RL. Although many participants had experimented “at least once” with certain activities in SL—for example, 56 percent had been with a same-sex partner and 43 percent had tried group sex, which is higher than in RL—this did not necessarily mean they regularly engaged in these practices. While 48 percent of respondents reported engaging frequently in oral sex in SL, only 9 percent reported frequently having group sex. Participants in Second Life engaged in both common and experimental sexual practices at a “faster pace and with a larger number of partners than in real life,” but their virtual sexuality was not exactly “filled with rampant illegal and transgressive sexual practices.” Further, researchers found that a great deal of sexual involvement still unfolded in longer-term relationships and that most Second Life users do not “consider sex and sexual experience to be among their primary activities in the virtual world.”^[18] While popular print and online journalism have “often portrayed the Second Life BDSM, Gorean, hentai, furry, and ageplay subcommunities as sexual and even predatory in nature, Second Life residents’ perceptions of these communities may differ substantially.”^[19]

Even in the most extreme places I visited, like “Fuck Hall,” advertised as “forced rape orgy,” most residents were chatting. Users wanted to socialize, share fantasies, and connect. It made sense, at least to me: Without the human element, it’s just naked cartoons.

Outsiders tend to see sex and nothing but sex. But even communities based around sexual interests and practices are never just about sex.

Living the Life (Interview, Clayton)

When we got our opportunity to be on a reality show, it came fast.

Some friends run a lifestyle website and had signed up to do a series on swinging with Playboy TV. They said the producers were already done casting but encouraged us to submit our information anyway. ‘You’d be perfect,’ they told me. So I wrote up a blurb about my wife and me and e-mailed it. Within an hour, someone from Playboy had e-mailed me back—they wanted a conference call that night.

Damn, I thought—I haven’t even talked to Kristen yet!

So I went home and we talked. “What do you think?” I asked her. “Do you want to pursue it?” We’ve been together over twenty years. We communicate well and discussed our concerns. We grew up in Utah, in staunch LDS families. We haven’t been active in the church for a while but knew there might be challenges and some fallout if we put ourselves on TV. But we decided that the worst thing that could happen was that the truth about us came out. That can be a good thing.

A few days later, we were on a plane to meet the casting agent. They wanted us to film for every episode, but with kids and work we were already busy. We ended up filming seven out of ten episodes of season 1. We interested the agent because we are an attractive couple, but we’re also average, normal people. We work. We love being outdoors, playing sports. We’re family oriented. That’s part of what challenges people who don’t know anything about the lifestyle—they think just freaks get involved, and that’s not the case at all. Kristen and I wanted to portray swinging in a real light, not what you see in Real Sex or some of the other shows.

Swing was produced by people who worked on Survivor, but instead of a bug-infested island, we were sent to a mansion in California. Along with our friends, we were the “residents,” the regular couples. They brought in a new couple every three days for a new episode. The show was unscripted, but they had games and activities planned to make things happen because that was the end goal. Or they would set up a dramatic situation to drive forward. They also asked us a lot of questions on film. You’d be talking for hours upon hours, sometimes two days, but then they’d condense it down into two or three speaking segments. They took care of us: our food was catered, and they had plenty of alcohol to keep things flowing. I’m torn on alcohol when it comes to the lifestyle in general. Sometimes it’s okay for people to loosen up, but when it becomes a crutch to play, it’s a problem for me. You shouldn’t need to be drunk. For us, life is about experiencing as much as possible. Why numb your senses? One new couple had a big blowup on the show, and when the crew interviewed us, we said this happens when you get too drunk. You can’t communicate what you want.

How they chose to edit it was frustrating. I complained to the crew that I thought the editing was misleading, and they said that every person on a reality show says that same thing. One day, Scott and Nicoletta were joking about a party in the past where I’d shown them how fast I could make a girl squirt. Well, the newbie couple started asking questions, and we were explaining how it worked. I wouldn’t brag about something like that—this was in the context of a conversation. But, of course, they edited it so it sounded like my opening line to this couple was about how skilled I am at making someone squirt. That night, I made several of the girls from the house ejaculate; girls were saying, “See if you can do it to me.” But not everything made it on tape for any episode. They definitely missed some chemistry. In fact, some of the sexual things that happened off camera would have made for the best footage.

We had already been in the lifestyle for seven years. Being on the show created a bit of pressure. They weren’t forcing us to have sex with anyone, but we knew we’re on their dime, we’re here to do a job. We wanted to make things happen. Fortunately, we connected with some of the people and had some fun times. Was it tough having sex on camera? There were awkward moments, I’ll admit. Once, I was getting a blow job, and when I opened my eyes, there was a big fuzzy boom mike in my face. That’s weird. My wife had a similar experience. There was a play scene, and then suddenly we had twenty-five minutes to shower and get ready for the next activity. She showered with another woman to save time, but then the camera crew came in. So, Kristen and the woman thought they should do something sexier than wash their hair. They started lathering each other up and getting into it, and then they realize there’s a microphone right there in the shower with them. They’re trying to hurry but also trying to make it sexy, and there’s a film crew crammed into the bathroom.

If you’ve been in group play, you know that funny things happen. Someone falls off the bed or someone laughs or makes a stupid face. But the crew wasn’t used to any of this. They weren’t from the porn industry. They constantly made jokes to keep things light and not get turned on. Once, we were all having sex and the cameraman tripped. We all just stopped and laughed, but he was distraught. Sometimes we found it distracting that they had to keep joking at the wrong times but then couldn’t laugh naturally when something was funny in the moment. But we understood that they just had no experience.

Some scenes affected everyone. Once, Kristen and a few girls ended up on the bed, just the girls. It was hot. It was one of those moments where you’re like, “Wow, this is what the lifestyle is about. . . . This heat, this passion.” But this time there’s a producer and his assistant there, watching, trying not to feel awkward. At one point, he asked his assistant, “This is hot, right?” And she said, “Oh my God, yes.”

We brought our own camera and interviewed the crew members, which was interesting. They had started the project with their own prejudices about swingers, about what kind of people we would be. We overturned some of those stereotypes. They said, “We don’t know how you’ve done it but most people would kill to have this life.” It was validating for Kristen and me.

I work for myself, so I wasn’t worried about my job when the show aired. Kristen and I also thought, if people see us in the show and want to say something to us, they have to admit that they watch it. They have some explaining to do also! Some of my brother’s friends told him that I was on the show. They also confronted me. Some of them said, “Are you crazy?” But then they’d add, “You’re a lucky man. I wish my wife was into that. That looks like so much fun.” A few friends subscribed to Playboy TV just so they could watch us. They’d text me during each episode. My brother, though, still won’t bring it up with me. We’ve never talked about it, even though I know he knows.

Our life has changed a bit. Sometimes, we can tell people recognize us, maybe at a gas station or restaurant, but they don’t want to say anything. It’s not the kind of thing you’d bring up to someone, especially in Utah! Maybe in Vegas, but not here. There’s a local nightclub here where a lot of lifestyle couples go. When we go, we’re recognized. That’s weird for us, because we don’t really think of ourselves as celebrities. Seeing our episodes is like watching home videos for me. But when people find out or recognize us, they want to take pictures with us. If we go to big lifestyle parties, we go to meet new people. But now instead of talking to us because they want to play, people talk to us because we’re on television. Since being on the show, we’ve become more protective, often playing with our group of close-knit friends.

Kristen and I were religious when we were first married. I tend to ask a lot of questions about life, maybe even overthink things. As we’ve journeyed through the lifestyle I’ve changed dramatically from what I was fifteen years ago. My religion told me that if someone was gay, I should treat him differently from other people. But there are gay people in my life that I know and love and it isn’t worth it to me to believe something like that. I don’t believe what my religion told me about marriage, either.

When we left the church, we had to decide on our own rules, so we came up with honesty. That’s the most important thing to us. For the lifestyle, though, Kristen and I don’t have a lot of rules. We explored it together from the very beginning and are very invested in each other’s happiness, whatever form that takes. Let’s say we’re at a party and she has no one paying attention to her and I’ve got tons of girls around me—well, it’s not like that ever really happens [laughs]. But if she was miserable, then I’d do something else. If she’s having fun watching me, or if we have friends around and she isn’t feeling lonely, we just let each other pursue the moment. A perfect night is where we’re both happy, even if we maybe just flirted with someone else and then went home together. We don’t have expectations—we could go out for drinks with a couple and nothing could happen except for good conversation. Or we could have sex that lasts for six hours. Either way, it can be a great night. We want to wait for chemistry; we don’t want anyone to force it. People who keep doing that will eventually be pushed away. It isn’t fun anymore. So maybe people get into the lifestyle for the sex. That’s what its about, right? We think, I’m married, and this gives me an opportunity to still have sexual variety. But the reasons we stay? The friendship. Meeting people from all different walks of life. The acceptance. The openness and honesty.

For me, this is also about a philosophy of life. Whatever you do, whatever you say, that should be where your heart is. Live the life you believe in. Don’t make excuses when your behaviors don’t match up to your beliefs.

We have two kids together; our oldest just turned thirteen, and our youngest is nine. We’ve tried to raise our kids with an overwhelming sense of honesty. That doesn’t mean being blunt about our sex lives. We’ve had some friends we’re so close to that they’re an extension of the family. But when someone questions me on what I tell my kids, I ask, “Well, what do you tell your kids?” Some things, your kids don’t want to know. At sixteen, they don’t want to think about their parents having sex! But by the time they’re twenty-five, or when they’re dealing with relationship issues of their own, maybe they’ll want to talk. Maybe they’ll even say, “You were on a TV show? Are you crazy?” And then we’ll explain why we did it, and why we made the choices we’ve made. We would never claim that our way of life is for everybody. But we will answer questions honestly. What if, when I try to teach my daughters to be smart with sexual choices, they say, “Well, you’re a swinger, Dad. You can’t teach me about morality.” I’d point out that I might be a swinger, but I am still living an ethical life. When I have sex, I’m protecting myself, I’m making good choices, and I’m living authentically. When it comes to raising kids, you know, there are some absolutely horrible parents. They don’t have sex with anyone but their spouse—I’ll give them that. But they’re abusive. They’re neglectful. The truth is that how you have sex doesn’t say anything about how you raise your kids. Parenting is parenting.

When people think about gay people or swingers, they think about the sex first. They don’t think about what that person does for a living, or what kind of car they drive, or anything but what kind of sex they have. But what if you approached every person that way, imagining the sex? What if your first thought on meeting someone was, “I wonder how this person has sex?” It would seem ridiculous. It is ridiculous. Yes, we are swingers. We have sex with other people sometimes, though not with everyone we meet.

But there’s a lot more to us than that.

Group Sex as Play

Some play golf or tennis, I swing, it’s my hobby, outlet, job. It may not be for everyone but most can’t say WHY. It isn’t natural? It just isn’t done? Well, it is a step out of the ordinary and that is another appeal for me. I’m no Thoreau but I don’t fancy living a life of quiet desperation. This works for me, can’t speak for others.^[20]

You meet people who have had different sexual experiences who give you different tastes of different things. And you know, this friend of mine calls [it] porn education and it can be when you see other people experiencing different things. . . . And you know, do I want to try this, do I want to try that. And I am adventurous. I do like to try different things. . . . I do like different sexual adventures. And there’d be a lot more I’d like to go on.^[21]

All orgies are not created equal.

In her research on straight-identified men who solicit sexualized encounters with other men on Craigslist, sociologist Jane Ward acknowledges the temptation to see them as “closeted” gay men. After all, if not for frequent references to beer, straight pornography, and aggresive sex with women, wouldn’t these just be guys who like to have sex with guys? Well, maybe not. Beyond the same-sex activity, Ward argues, there are actually few similarities to “queer” culture in these men’s hypermasculine and misogynist worlds. They describe themselves as “buzzed, horny, checking out porn,” or suggest getting together to “fuck the hell out of my hot blow-up doll” or have “a bi/str8 dude circle jerk”—“a group of masculine dudes just sitting around stroking, watching a game, drinking some brews, jerking, showing off, swapping college stories, maybe playing a drinking game and see what comes up.”^[22] These guys aren’t likely to be marching in a pride festival or responding to surveys aimed at “gay” men.

In other words: the beer, porn, and misogyny matter.

People who do the same thing can do it in vastly different ways.

Multiple sources of satisfaction must be considered when thinking about why participants are drawn to particular scenes or practices—and especially why they choose to stay and play, if they do. Group sex is organized spatially and socially to minimize risk, conflict, and stress, as explored in chapter 3. Although the specifics vary across communities, rules and expectations allow participants to experiment in situations where safety and danger are balanced. But there is more to consider, such as sexual styles, consumption preferences, aesthetics, ethics, beliefs about gender and sexuality, and understandings about why one participates in alternative sexual communities.

The lifestyle, for example, does not appeal to everyone. Some researchers argue that couples usually begin swinging in their late thirties after establishing careers and starting families; when these pressures are eased, people can focus on sexual fulfillment, and swinging presents a “nonthreatening” option for exploration.^[23] Many twenty-something couples that I spoke with at lifestyle events, however, had a different perspective. They had already experimented sexually and were now contemplating their future relationships. Many desired to marry, for example, but imagined that they would experience difficulties being faithful over their life span; they wondered whether consensual nonmonogamy might provide an answer. But the reasons couples choose the lifestyle out of all the possible sexual outlets —and stick with it, if they do—are not reducible to sexual practices. In study after study, regardless of age, lifestylers highlight the importance of the friendships they develop as much as the sexual aspects of their experiences. Some of this may be an attempt to legitimize practices that are stigmatized and misunderstood—who can argue with friendship? But swinging is more appealing to some people than others. One group sex aficionado I spoke with disliked the lifestyle, for example, because of the extended socializing it involved; he preferred to use Craigslist, where one had fewer obligations to sex partners. Most lifestylers enjoy socializing as couples. Women claim to appreciate the atmosphere of female camaraderie rather than competitiveness, as well as the lack of male aggression. Women who are attracted to “femme” women may find the lifestyle appealing, as “girl-girl” play is commonplace (in fact, so prevalent that “straight” women can feel the need to explain themselves). In theory, lifestylers believe in female sexual equality and tolerance of sexual differences. Lifestylers also generally prize emotional monogamy and take steps to ensure that negative emotions like fear or jealousy are experienced in low doses, such as requiring same-room play, unanimous consent, or public demonstrations of commitment. As one woman said of swinging, “It’s exciting but not emotionally dangerous.”^[24] (Individuals who are unable to “separate sex and love” may find themselves uncomfortable or unwelcome in some lifestyle communities.) Some participants enjoy being able to rebel in a safe environment. A woman quoted in Bergstrand and Sinski said, “If I feel like having sex with four men in a row I know I can because my boyfriend is sitting beside me and won’t let anything happen.”^[25]

There are differences among lifestylers, of course. During the 1970s, the couples that escaped to Sandstone Retreat, hoping to change society through their beliefs and sexual practices, were different from the celebrity sex partiers at the Playboy Mansion. Researchers at the time distinguished between urban versus rural groups or “utopian” versus “recreational” attitudes.^[26] Contemporary lifestylers differ in their sexual proclivities (such as “hard” versus “soft” swap or focus on girl-girl play), substance use (alcohol only or club drugs such as Ecstasy), musical taste (rock ’n’ roll versus house/techno), social class or spending practices (partying at a Holiday Inn versus in a Vegas megahotel suite), play space preferences (on-premises sex clubs versus off-premises events, where participants host their own after-parties), or attitudes toward inclusiveness (open versus invitation-only events). Although the topic of differences between polyamorists and swingers can inflame an Internet forum for weeks—and in the end, a practice-based distinction can always be deconstructed—there are unique sexual styles, consumption practices, and aesthetics associated with the lifestyle.

If there weren’t, the jokes wouldn’t be so funny: “You might be a swinger if . . . you forget that some people still have pubic hair”; “you know which of your bikinis looks best in black light”; “you have over 100,000 frequent flyer miles on Air Jamaica”; “your friends know what kind of condom you prefer”; “you spent twice as long on your online profile as you did on your resume”; “all the men bring their wives to your bachelor party”; and so on.^[27]

The same might be said of other alternative sexual enclaves—while sex is part of the appeal, it is rarely the only aspect considered. Group sex events can be segregated by sexual orientation or relationship status—gay, pansexual, bisexual, heterosexual, couples, singles. There are play parties catering to polyamorists or tantra practitioners. Sex parties can be based on the activities allowed, such as “sixty-nine” or “all anal.” Some events, such as “Jack and Jill off,” “safe sex,” or “unsafe sex” parties, promote or reject discourses of sexual safety. Parties may be organized by theme, such as “dark party” or “slave auction.” The Center for Sex Positive Culture in Seattle offers different options throughout the week: “Monday Madness” for weekday enthusiasts, “Asylum” for BDSM medical play, “Crowbar” for “the transmasculine community,” and “(cat)FIGHT,” featuring female wrestling. Some events are organized by what you wear, or don’t: “Buff London,” for example, is a weekly naked play party for gay men held at a nightclub; the same club also hosts “Hardplay” for men who are “into skinhead, army, leather, rubber or industrial.” Xplore Sydney is a festival featuring “deep play” and ritual; the dress code is “Fetish—Hyper Sexy—Deviant.” Myth Party, in New York City, sponsors “kinky,” queer-friendly parties that are “a throwback to the anything-goes 70s”; the last event, according to the MythParty website, “boasted a human piñata (it’s what you think it is), a pee-play section, unicorn activities, and a Dexter scene in which participants were drenched in fake blood.” In New York City, one might also attend the “Nubian Party,” for African American or Latino men only, the “Milk Chocolate Party,” for mixed-race guests, or the “Sticky Rice” party, for “young, hot, lean, in-shape Asian guys between 18–35.”

Race, class, and age shape constellations of sexual practice, leisure, and consumption, as well as the social and political reception of alternative sexual practices. Exclusivity and upscaling are part of the appeal for some sex partiers who want to socialize within their own age group, social class, or ideal of attractiveness. A 2011 article on sex parties in New York City proclaimed: “The mega swinger clubs are dead. These artsy sex parties are where the young people are.” Many of these participants balk at the term “swinger,” not just because of the stereotypes discussed in chapter 3, but also due to an often erroneous belief that swingers do not exercise choice in their sexual partners. Given that the younger crowd is not necessarily married or even coupled up in committed relationships, heterosexual sex partying is a broader phenomenon than just “the lifestyle.” Chemistry, in New York City, is a members-only event described as “a leader of the new crop of young, hip sex parties in the city.” Attendees are still down for group sex, according to a journalist who attended:

Upstairs the floor is covered with futons, and a thin, exotically dressed woman advertises tantric massages in the corner. The first person to get naked is a tall, strikingly handsome man in his early thirties who buys a rubdown. Watching him, two people undress and fall onto the futons, getting into rough and fast missionary sex. Waves of couples and threesomes follow, with some of the 15-odd people upstairs watching and gauging how they could get involved.^[28]

Circuit parties are held around the globe, usually in metropolitan areas and sometimes coinciding with gay pride events. Attendees are primarily young and fit men with enough disposable income to travel. As with some of the more commercialized lifestyle events, there is a focus on a “party culture” involving travel, electronic music, costumes and themes, appearance, and an ideal of acceptance toward sexual diversity and recreational sex. (Although I’ve never seen a gay male couple at a lifestyle event, I have known lifestylers who traveled to circuit parties.)

There are play parties for senior citizens and play parties with age limits (such as “under thirty”). Carol Queen, a sexologist, writer, and activist who founded the Center of Sex and Culture in San Francisco, suggests that discomfort with older people having sex, especially at public play parties, is related to fears of aging and mortality. As BDSM is a highly skilled practice, older practitioners may find themselves most welcome at these events.

In BDSM play, inequalities are often explicitly eroticized. Anthropologist Richard Martin writes of visiting a German BDSM play space where rooms were themed for different types of fetishes: a clinic for medical play, a classroom, a torture chamber, a stable for pony play, a jail, and a confessional. Each of these spaces, he argues, draws “on everyday configurations of power and authority that underpin relations in a society that is officially egalitarian and experientially asymmetric.”^[29] But inequalities can be eroticized in less explicit ways as well. “Mandingo parties,” or gang bangs featuring black men and white women, are influenced by a history of racial and gender inequalities, regardless of whether power is discussed by participants. In the United States, long-standing myths about black men’s greater sexual prowess, larger penises, masculinity, and athleticism, along with a history of racial violence, fuel the erotics of a mandingo party. The hypersexuality of black men is not limited to the United States, of course; for example, one finds blackness/whiteness eroticized in Germany as well, although playing out in terms of local histories and politics.

Sex, Drugs, and Rodents

“Deadheads,” orgies, and acid. Quaaludes and 1970s swingers. “Poppers,” fisting, and gay men. Youthful ravers, “puppy piles,” and Ecstasy. (Wati and otiv-bombari?) Why do particular substances become associated with specific groups and forms of sexuality?

People oriented toward sex as “play” manipulate aspects of their environment to elaborate on and intensify their overall experience, taking a future orientation toward the kinds of sex and socializing they prefer. Occasionally, this includes altering consciousness through substances. Substances supposedly possessing aphrodisiac properties have long been the source of myth, from raw oysters to Spanish fly. Although the existence of true aphrodisiacs is debated, some substances do impact human sexuality more than others, either through prosexual effects, such as increasing arousal or intensifying stimulation, or inhibiting response. Substances can be natural or manufactured and work in a variety of ways on the human brain or body; the impact of any substance on human behavior and experience, however, is also shaped by individual and contextual factors.

“Party and play” (PNP) originally referred to sex while using crystal methamphetamine, although the phrase is now used more broadly to indicate sex under the influence of illegal substances. In the contemporary sex party scene, whether gay or straight, some participants use “club drugs”—MDMA/Ecstasy (E), ketamine (K), crystal meth, or GHB (G). These illicit substances may be combined with each other and with legal substances such as Viagra, Adderall, or alcohol. Group sex participants occasionally use other substances as well, depending on the context, such as hallucinogens or opiates. “Crack” cocaine is associated with hypersexual behavior and the disinhibition of users, but I do not consider it here because it is rare in “party and play” (or perhaps so stigmatized that I did not encounter references to it).

Recreational drug use triggers moralizing responses. But although drug use of any sort is accompanied by risks, whether a substance is legal or illegal depends on many factors, only some of which are related to its dangers. Legality varies by country, time period, and political, legal, and economic factors. Alcohol is currently legal in the United States, although it was illegal during Prohibition and remains illegal in some countries. GHB and Ecstasy were once legal in the United States and the United Kingdom but have become controlled substances. Legal drugs are used for “partying,” often in combination with other substances. Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra have all seen incredible success in legal markets; all also have vigorous black markets. Teenagers have added Ambien to their list of party favors—sometimes it’s easier to steal pills out of the home medicine cabinet than to find someone selling LSD when you’re in the mood for hallucinations or out-of-body experiences.

Some substances and their users are stigmatized while others are normalized. Crystal meth is viewed as one of the worst street drugs in the United States, for example, while Adderall is regularly consumed on college campuses for both productivity and recreation. While there are differences—methamphetamine is more powerful than amphetamines like Adderall because it travels more quickly across the blood-brain barrier—both are nonetheless powerful stimulants. Patients taking prescription Adderall, or even legal methamphetamine in the form of Desoxyn, can be certain that other dangerous chemicals have not been added during the preparation process; prescribed dosage levels are designed to prevent dependency. Still, Adderall can be crushed and snorted, producing euphoria; misuse can lead to addiction, psychosis, and death. Crystal meth can be used at low dosage levels to enhance work or school performance.^[30] Addiction, researchers point out, “is not an inevitable consequence of the mere self-administration of a potentially addictive drug,” even a drug with a nasty reputation like crystal meth; even though “a large number of people experiment with potentially addictive drugs at some time, few develop an addiction.”^[31] Using too much of any substance can cause physical, emotional, and social problems; what constitutes “too much” varies across individuals, contexts, and substances.

Rather than labeling drugs “good” or “bad,” then, let’s focus on the fact that some humans throughout history have indulged in substances and practices (collective trance, rituals, carnivalesque inversion) to purposely alter everyday consciousness. Yes, people occasionally do things under the influence of drugs they wouldn’t normally do—that’s disinhibition. Just ask the flight attendant on your next overnight jaunt about the crazy things passengers do on Ambien—like eat all of the first-class dinners, urinate in the aisle, or have sex with the stranger in 4F. (Many airlines now suggest testing your sleep medications before flying.) As the literature on drunkenness shows, people also do things that they think they will do on that substance. But if substances were used only for their disinhibiting properties, any substance would do, and this is clearly not the case. In addition to tuning out that little voice saying “no,” both legal and illegal drugs help people do things they want to do. People snort cocaine to stay up late, smoke pot to feel relaxed, or take MDMA to dance or have more intimate sex. Or they take Adderall to pass biology, Vicodin to get through holidays, and Viagra for “date night.”

What we know, or think we know, about sex and drugs is shaped by dominant modes of thinking about sexuality. Unfortunately, the discourse of risk has permeated sex research such that it is difficult to fund studies of drug use that are not linked to HIV prevention, violence, or addiction. Urban gay men using crystal meth and barebacking at circuit parties have been studied for years as a “high-risk” group for HIV infection. We know far less, however, about gay men using crystal meth or amyl nitrates who do not have unprotected sex or about straight couples experimenting with GHB or ketamine at sex parties. Some groups are also easier to pinpoint for research. You’re more likely to find studies on impoverished users of crack than on cocaine users who run Fortune 500 companies. And, as universities are disinclined to allow experiments where participants get high and have sex, researchers are limited to observing in naturalistic settings, surveying partygoers or others using public spaces where sex and drugs are linked, or interviewing people willing to talk openly about their drug use and sex lives.

Which brings us to sex, drugs, and—rodents again.

Rats are popular in laboratory research in this area because the physiology of erections and ejaculations in male rats is similar enough to that in humans to enable researchers to make predictions about the effects of certain drugs. Male rats have been given stimulants, such as cocaine and methamphetamine, and “downers,” such as alcohol, MDMA, or other depressants, in experimental situations. Patterns of rat behavior under the influence of some substances parallel the patterns of human behavior. Some rats are more prone to substance abuse, just as some people are. When allowed to self-administer amphetamines, for example, rats who did so were high sensation or novelty seekers. (As rats couldn’t be asked whether they enjoyed “wild and uninhibited parties,” they were instead observed exploring a “novel environment.” Rats doing so most thoroughly or with the highest levels of locomotor reactivity were considered “high responders” or sensation seekers.)^[32] Rats given alcohol attempt to mount unreceptive females, even when “trained” not to,^[33] and rats initially exhibit heightened sexual arousal on cocaine but develop a tolerance for it.^[34] Similarly, infrequent human users of cocaine report spontaneous erections, increased sexual arousal, and intensified orgasms, while heavy users find their sexual functioning impaired.^[35] Rats prefer sex while on crystal meth to sex without it, based on their tendency to revisit places where they received the drug. They also exhibit compulsive sexual behavior after taking meth, despite “learned negative consequences,” which in this study was a form of “conditioned sex aversion” involving lithium chloride injections to cause “visceral illness,”^[36] a procedure somewhat more cruel than asking teenagers to share masticated cheese snacks to discourage sex. Either way, rats that paired sex and meth, even only once, were less likely to be swayed from their goal—more sex—by stomach cramps. Human users report that crystal meth actually enhances sexual pleasure as well as influencing sexual compulsivity and inhibition, a finding that appears supported in rats. Like sexual novelty, methamphetamine triggers the release of dopamine in the brain, a “reward” that can be highly motivating.

MDMA inhibits copulation in male rats; it is sometimes called “the cuddle drug” because it produces similar effects in humans. In one study, however, rats given MDMA were then exposed to loud “techno” music, which stimulates the noradrenergic system and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis more than slower music does. Researchers suggested that music activates regions of the brain implicated in reward and emotion, potentially producing intense pleasure responses; these chemical reactions could offset the dampening of desire associated with MDMA.^[37] Ravers preferring the beats of Swedish House Mafia to the lyrical music of Taylor Swift will not be surprised that rats listening to “techno” while on MDMA were more likely to ejaculate than rats who had been given the drug without the dance music, nor will anyone who has attended a dance event and then been swept along to an “after-party” (or “after-after-party”). In fact, as MDMA is often combined with stimulants to intensify its effects, and stimulants tend to last longer than the “roll” of MDMA, one finds the likelihood of sexual activity to rise as dawn approaches (or noon, depending on the dose)—as long as the music plays on.

Since the 1990s, crystal methamphetamine has become increasingly popular in North American urban gay subcultures revolving around “sex based sociality,” or “casual and group sexual interactions in bathhouses, public parks and sex parties.” Crystal meth, researchers argue, enhances both sexual performance and sociality in situations requiring “high libido, sexual adventurism, self-confidence, focus, endurance, reduced discrimination in partner choice, and pain reduction.”^[38] Interviews with gay men in Manhattan exemplified this “elective affinity” between crystal meth and the social context: “I would meet a succession of people . . . and have sex with them, over and over again . . . without ejaculation”; “you can go on for days”; “I become very lustful”; “I feel indestructible.” Several men described feeling “like a different person.” An interviewee explained: “I can have sex with a group more easily—even if I am not attracted to some of the people in the group . . . so like if there is only two people in the room that I am really turned on to but there is two other people there, and you know, and they want me to take on all four of them, then I can and I am willing to.”^[39] Whether they sought such encounters weekly, monthly, or more rarely, respondents targeted crystal meth intake “in anticipation of intensive sexual interactions.”^[40] These men were not junkies or addicts; they planned, controlled, and perfected their usage. Some users experienced negative effects, such as sexual compulsivity, increased proclivity to participate in risky behaviors, and other psychological and behavioral changes that lasted even when the drug itself wore off. Nonetheless, because crystal meth helped them “participate more fully, and with more pleasure” in their sociosexual milieu, it gained a “therapeutic status similar to that of Viagra and other state sanctioned medicinal products.”^[41] Without a thorough understanding of the pleasurable or positive effects of a drug, researchers argue, interventions are unlikely to succeed.

Another study of 198 gay or bisexual male sex partiers from New York City found that they purposely chose and mixed club drugs to enhance their sexual experiences. If they wanted to feel social, witty, and outgoing, for example, they took coke, G, meth, or E. Men who bottomed found ketamine to be numbing and relaxing, but less social. All of the club drugs, interviewees claimed, lowered their sexual standards, although for different reasons. Ecstasy increased sensual feelings and receptivity to touch, even from partners the men wouldn’t find attractive otherwise; some men even reported feeling temporarily “in love” with their sexual partners. But if the men wanted “animalistic” sex, without any emotional ties? Meth, GHB, and cocaine made them “aggressively” and “voraciously” sexual: “I felt like I was devouring him, he was devouring me, almost violent”; “I just become an animal . . . go crazy”; “sexually, [cocaine] lets me step out of myself and do things I wouldn’t do if I was level-headed . . . some of the kinky stuff.”^[42] Dosage mattered: just enough cocaine, for example, produced elation while too much caused anxiety and paranoia. Interestingly, the sexual peaks of cocaine, Ecstasy, and crystal meth occurred as users were “coming down”; for ketamine and GHB, the sexual peaks coincided with the drug’s peak. The men were aware of these complexities, strategically timing their sexual encounters and combining drugs (such as meth and Viagra) for optimum performance.

The “Three or More Study” (TOMS) included over 1,200 Australian men who had group sex with other men in Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne in 2007 and 2008. Participants were generally well-educated, urban professionals, often identifying as gay, who used both personal networks and the Internet to find group sex partners. The men sought group sex out of desires for intensity and connection as well as to live out sexual fantasies.^[43] Like the New Yorkers, they planned ahead for events and targeted their drug use; the anticipation itself generated pleasure. Amyl nitrates were reportedly used most frequently at the men’s most recent group sexual experience, followed by Ecstasy, crystal meth, marijuana, and GHB (many of these were combined with performance-enhancing drugs such as Viagra). Again, like the New York sample, the TOMS partiers found drug use made them more interested in multiple, casual partners; drugs could “heighten the senses,” allow them to “play longer,” “stay hard,” or “be fucked,” or make them feel powerful and “less inhibited.” One interviewee claimed that drugs made group sex “more animalistic”: “It makes it dirtier; it makes it more thrilling, you know?”

Despite the widespread assumption that drugs primarily cause disinhibition, then, directly leading users to engage in risky sex, the picture is more complicated in both rats and humans. Whether a given rat experiences prosexual effects depends on physiological characteristics (such as its baseline sexual response and hormonal status), whether the drug is given “acutely” or “chronically,” whether the rat has “learned” to be inhibited in particular situations,^[44] and even what kind of music is piped into his cage. When thinking about sex and recreational drug use in humans, we need to consider the psychological and biological characteristics of users and the properties, dosage, and effects of the drug, along with a host of additional factors. The environment is important: is the setting safe and comfortable to administer the drug, ride out its effects, and engage in the types of sexual encounters sought? Amyl nitrates, for example, produce a euphoric rush lasting around two minutes and relax the sphincter muscles, useful for a quickie in a public park, especially if one fears being interrupted. Ketamine, however, is less ideal in a dangerous environment as it produces a dreamy, uncoordinated state; it is also easy to “k-hole” with an incorrect dose, briefly losing motor functioning. We must consider the available auditory or visual stimulation: What type of music is played? What kind of lighting is used? Don’t expect to drop two tabs of Ecstasy in silence and under fluorescent lights and have a religious experience. The physical and relational needs of participants play a role: Do participants want “animalistic” or “sensual” sex? Do they intend to delay ejaculation or relax quickly into certain types of play? Do individuals need to overcome feelings of shame or fears of rejection? Do they want to bond with sex partners or remain emotionally detached? What types of social interactions are expected—extended flirtations or brief or nonverbal encounters, as one might expect in a bathhouse? Men and women may combine party drugs differently to maximize their experiences. Because most recreational group sex events rely on a cooperative, consensual atmosphere, overindulgence that results in miscommunication is discouraged. Finally, historical, political, economic, and cultural factors influence which substances are used, by whom, and toward what ends: cost, availability, the layers of meaning given to a particular drug at a point in time, people’s expectations of its effects, and so on.

Whether any of these combinations of sex, drugs, and other practices generates identities or communities depends on even more factors. There is no essential connection between group sex and drug use. Drug use appears less in the literature on dogging, for example, perhaps because of the reliance on motor vehicles. Many BDSM events are substance-free, given an emphasis on safety and consent. Most people in every enclave probably do not use drugs, or they stick to alcohol. Not even everyone who enjoys circuit parties or raves uses drugs to enhance the experiences. These examples of sex partying, however, show how combinations of social, psychological, and physiological stimuli can coalesce. As sensation seekers in general prefer the company of others like themselves, and as both sexual activity and drug use provide intense stimulation, it makes sense that distinct enclaves develop. The types of substances preferred in such enclaves, rather than being random, are those that enhance participants’ experiences. LSD, psilocybin, or benzodiazepines rarely appear in the literature on gay male sexual subcultures, for example; while these substances may enhance sexual activity for certain individuals, there is less affinity between their effects and the desired goals of most participants. People don’t take drugs with the aim of shivering in a gutter or compulsively seeking anonymous sex in subways—although such negative consequences arise for some users. And while drugs can be taken to escape unpleasant memories, circumstances, or feelings, drugs can also be used to enhance emotional states or attain peak experiences, sexual and otherwise.

As one male circuit partier described his first experience: “It was like bliss.”^[45]

Smells Like Teen Corruption

Ecstasy tabs. Cheating. MDMA mixed into brownies. Girls kissing girls. Messed-up parents. Drug dealing. Revenge sex. Wrist slashing. Car crashes after driving while intoxicated. Fistfights. And, of course, parties.

There’s a lot of drama, but it’s the parties that make the British television series Skins so compelling—and infamous.

The boys in the series are skinny, often shirtless, and somewhat androgynous. The girls are also skinny. They all love getting high. Instead of having pillow fights at all-girl sleepovers, they do drugs and go to raves. They go to house parties, invited or not, leaving destruction in their wake. They fool around, forming drugged-up twosomes, threesomes, foursomes, and moresomes. When boys and girls collapse together, limbs entangled and exhausted at the end of another party, they perfectly illustrate the phrase “puppy pile.”

The teenagers in the controversial series use partying to make connections, escape their troubles, fight boredom, and rebel against their parents and society. Nothing new there. Teens have been experimenting with sex and drugs for as long as “teenagers” have existed—that is, in societies where kids are no longer initiated into adulthood at puberty and given adult roles and responsibilities. This period of delayed production (in the workforce) and reproduction is often a time of experimentation with both sexuality and consumption. Teens might even form the largest group of sensation seekers. Although the nihilism associated with teen cultures may take different forms across countries or times periods, teenage angst and adventure has also long been a form of entertainment, from 90210 in the United States or Amigas y Rivales in Mexico to Casi Angeles in Argentina or Heartbreak High in Australia.

Skins supposedly inspired French teens to begin throwing parties themed after the series, called Le Skins. Some Le Skins parties are underground, with locations revealed only at the last minute like the early “rave” parties; others occur in private homes. In early 2010, Claudine Doury, a French photographer whose artistic work focuses on adolescence, was allowed a glimpse inside a Le Skins party held in a Parisian suburb. “This young guy’s parents had gone away,” Doury explained, “and he invited three or four hundred people on Facebook to a party in his house.” The house had been carefully prepared to avoid damage, and a changing area was set up for guests. Attendees ranged in age from sixteen to twenty. A security guard had even been hired to manage the party, which cost twenty euros to enter (discounted to ten euros if partiers brought their own alcohol). The guard had the additional responsibility of directing amorous teens to the garden when they became sexual.

The teens call themselves “skinners” and trade the childlike aesthetic of the raver scene with its plush animal backpacks, furry leg warmers, and blinking pacifiers, for a more ragged “electro-trash” look, sort of like “Sid and Nancy do E instead of heroin.” Doury’s photographs focus on the bodies of the partygoers rather than their faces—girls in filmy dresses or nothing but bras and booty shorts, bare-chested young men in low-slung jeans. Some partiers have “Skins” or “Le Skins” painted on their bodies in graffiti-style lettering while others sport ripped hose, fishnet shirts, and boots or don masks in an assortment of styles, from Venetian to Mexican lucha libre. One young woman wears a gas mask; several young men appear in clown masks, paying homage to the show. Many of the teens in the photographs are in the early stages of embrace. “It was very practical,” Doury said of the attire. “They know what to wear so they are not completely naked but so they can touch each other.”

Themes of sexual exploration and social liberation emerge as justifications for the parties, recycled across time, nation, and neighborhoods. “It’s completely free,” Doury explains; the guideline was “no limits, no limits.”^[46] One of the young men she spoke with, Flavien, twenty, said: “We let ourselves go here, because there are too many restrictions for the youth.” Sarah, also twenty, pondered: “It already existed in ’68 with the hippies, maybe during repressive periods we turn to free sex.”^[47] The teens talk about sexual abandon, and some clearly indulge in intoxicants in the photos, although Doury makes it all sound rather orderly: “Delighted young men ask a girl if they can kiss her, and she usually says yes. If things progress, they head to the garden, where bodies sprawl across the grass.” Some teens downplay Le Skins parties, claiming a few parties get wild but the rest are relatively tame, nothing out of the ordinary.

The parties are not limited to France, having spread to the United States and even back to the United Kingdom.^[48] Commercial Le Skins parties are now held in nightclubs, rented event spaces, and even on a boat on the Seine; events may feature known DJs or bands and extravagant light shows. IDs are checked, sponsors and promoters scoop up entry fees, and there is less on-premises sex.

Supposedly, the party thrown by seventeen-year-old Rachael Bell from Durham, England, while her parents and siblings were on vacation, had a Skins theme—“trash the house.” Rachael claims to have invited only sixty of her closest friends and that a hacker on her Myspace page was responsible for enticing uninvited teens to drive from as far away as London for the party. The number of skinners who turned out ended up being somewhere between two hundred and three hundred. Although Rachael and her friends tried to prevent party crashers from entering, “they just started climbing through the window.” In hindsight, Rachael probably wishes she had picked a more benign theme—“toga,” perhaps—because guests took this one literally. Elaine Bell, Rachael’s distraught mother, described her house as “raped”: “partygoers had stubbed cigarettes out on carpets, ransacked rooms, urinated on her wedding dress, scrawled on walls and broken light fittings by swinging on them.”^[49] In addition to this “orgy of destruction,” a partygoer described “yobs having sex in every room in front of all to see.”^[50] Rachael was questioned after the party and reprimanded by police; she eventually reconciled with her horrified parents after fleeing to a friend’s house for a few nights. The Bell family sought temporary housing while waiting for repairs to the estimated £20,000 of damage to the home. While the party got a lot of attention, the media focus was more on the wreckage than on youthful eroticism or revolution.

But there is another layer to the story that was circulated. Rachael was a middle-class girl living in a “respectable” neighborhood. She was supposed to be home studying for her “A-levels,” the standardized tests taken to qualify for university entry. The party crashers, on the other hand, were described as “hoodlums” or “yobs,” a British slang term for thuggish, sometimes violent, working-class boys (and occasionally girls). The degradation of Rachael’s family home and the emotional scars it caused—“it was devastating, just devasting,” her mother told the press—was newsworthy not only because teens experimented with sex and “drug-fueled mayhem,” but because the social order was breached when they did so. Further, the breach occurred through the misuse of social networking sites, a concern about technological change corrupting youth that arises repetitively in stories of this sort around the world.

In 2007, the Pokémones of Chile became the focus of a media blitz. The Pokémones were described as an “urban tribe,” although unlike hippies, punks, or Goths, they were considered one of the first such tribes of the Internet age. Supposedly inspired by the children’s game Pokémon with its cute, colorful cartoon creatures, participants adopted an androgynous style. Both boys and girls sported anime T-shirts, piercings, dyed and spiked hair with bangs, and black eyeliner. “It’s basically a fashion thing,” a young man told reporters. “A Pokémone has a certain style and does ponceo.” Ponceo, according to the pivotal report that appeared in Newsweek, was the term for the partying and sexual experimentation they engaged in, usually in public parks around Chile and primarily focused on oral sex with multiple consecutive partners or in groups. Heterosexual, same-sex—participants claim it is equal opportunity. “Ponceo is about having fun,” a girl says.^[51] Some of the parties are for those eighteen and under; the young age of participants is perhaps why their alcohol-free dance parties take place in the afternoons rather than late at night.^[52]

Part of Pokémone style involves embracing technology, as the teens use social media websites and blogs to flirt, share information about events, and display evidence of their adventures. Though Pokémones use Facebook and MSN Messenger, like millions of other teenagers around the world, they really like Fotolog, a photo-sharing website. Chile had 4.8 million Fotolog accounts in 2008, more than 60 percent of which were held by twelve- to seventeen-year-olds. Teens who use Fotolog strategically, posting risqué party pictures that capture the attention of their peers and elicit the most comments, can become “the most popular users.” This distinction then sometimes offers them an opportunity to attend ponceo parties as VIPs.^[53]

Like the French teens attending Le Skins parties, Pokémones show off their bodies and trigger accusations of promiscuity and nihilism from journalists writing about them. Also like the Le Skins teens, they occasionally wax philosophical, though not necessarily political: “This is about being alive,” a fourteen-year-old girl explained to a reporter. “It is about dancing, laughing, changing the words of the songs to something dirty.” Well, she admitted, it’s also “about making out with other boys.” The youth do not support a common cause. “We’re not for anything, but we’re not against anything either—well, except our parents being mad at us for being Pokémones,” a sixteen-year-old girl said. Not standing for anything might mean less disillusionment down the road, but it doesn’t engender longevity; the Pokémones tribe was already pronounced dying by 2009.

Despite the apathy and disappearance of Pokémones, some commentators still insist that the movement had political connotations in a country where over half of the population is Catholic. The premarital erotic explorations of Pokémones—whether oral sex or just group gropes and kissing—are clearly in opposition to the conservative religious mores and traditional norms of their country and parents. Pokémones also represented emerging consumerist tendencies—sex partners are tallied (“This time I had seven partners”) just like products purchased (“This week I bought two T-shirts and a webcam . . . and a new tongue ring”).^[54] The androgynous Pokémones generally came from the lower and middle classes and were seen as opposing pelolais, another youth group made up of girls who “dress fashionably,” have long, often blonde hair with no bangs (quite important to both the kids and the journalists scrutinizing Facebook and Fotolog images), are from wealthy families, and attend private schools.^[55] But in comparison with masculinized flaites—low-status, sometimes delinquent or criminal youth who adopt styles of music and fashion associated with hip-hop or rap—Pokémones claimed more respectability and spending power.

Media representations, of course, are motivated. This version of the Pokémones—sexually liberated, defiant, consumerist, technologically astute, and middle class—is certainly the one that spread across the Internet. As with many sensationalist pieces on group sex, one “news” story resurfaces on multiple websites and blogs, reworked with more blatant, attention-grabbing language each time: “rebellious teens,” for example, become “Chile’s Bisexual, Orgy-Having Pokémones.” Some critics suggest that the Newsweek journalist who initially broke the story in the United States misunderstood the term ponceo—it translates as “kissing,” they insist, not “oral sex.” In a 2008 New York Times article on Pokémones, poncea is defined as “making out” and ponceo is “the one who pairs off the most.” Other writers claim that ponceo is primarily “simulated sex” occurring at dance parties; this is certainly the case at the more organized events held in nightclubs rather than parks, where security guards monitor participants’ behavior.

Some accounts of teen sex parties are urban legends. Sneaky Pete’s interracial sex bashes of the 1950s may fall into that category. But surely, some kids “do ponceo”—and if they didn’t before the news flash, they probably are now. Or maybe they’re having “rainbow parties,” playing “Two Minutes in the Closet,” “Seven Minutes in Heaven,” “Dark Shark,” or other teen games organized around group erotic explorations. Maybe they are wearing “shag bands,” color-coded jelly bracelets that supposedly signal a willingness to engage in certain sexual activities.

“Everything starts with the kiss,” a fourteen-year-old Pokémone girl said.^[56]

Are teens more sexually active nowadays than in the past? It is impossible, or at least irresponsible, to generalize—if only because of the complexity of the question. Only a few generations ago in the United States, and still today in some places around the world, “teens” were actually married, child-rearing adults. And while we can’t disregard the fact that social and technological changes do indeed contribute to an increasingly mediated, sexualized culture, we should also realize that many times, media attention to a phenomenon can tell us more about our collective anxieties—as a society, as parents—than about objective dangers. Parents worry a lot about pedophilic strangers lurking on the Internet, for instance, even though kids are much more likely to be sexually abused by someone they know.

Even when media accounts are factually accurate, there are still reasons to look at how stories are told, by whom, and to what ends. As with tales of crazed Bacchus worshippers, Mau Mau rebels, or snacking Texas swingers, a focus on transgressive sexuality elides the inequalities, fears, and politics lying under the surface. Sexual leisure practices do indeed develop in combination with other styles of consumption and in relation to social categories such as race, class, and gender, for reasons that are both practical (the use of public parks, cars, or other people’s homes when youth do not have private space to retreat to) and political (such as the Pokémones’ inclination for sexual experimentation rather than outright delinquent behavior when rebelling against traditional authority). Tendencies to sensationalize the sexual practices of certain groups of teens, especially those who can be identified because they adopt a certain look, often stem from conflicting intergenerational anxieties. Parents, apprehensive about technological or social change, wonder about the potentially new and insidious dangers their children face, whether in the form of racial diversity, “rock ’n’ roll,” imported television shows, or social networking (Facebook, Fotolog, Myspace). Is it easier for today’s youth to be lured away from their path, corrupted by the permeability of social boundaries and the visibility and accessibility of other social worlds? Stories about Le Skins parties and Pokémones are told and retold because they cater to the audience’s fears. Such stories can also be a way that parents and other adults reassure themselves—“Whew, it’s not my kid, she doesn’t wear bangs . . .”—or reaffirm social distinctions that are being questioned or challenged by social developments. Youth, worried about how to forge meaningful, independent lives, find sexual exploration to be cheap, accessible, and readily interpreted as rebellion—whether they become part of an identified “phenonmenon” or not.

Annabel Chong’s Shallow Grave

In 1991, four years before Annabel Chong starred in The World’s Biggest Gang Bang, a porn film in which she engaged in 251 sex acts in ten hours,^[57] she was a victim of gang rape in the basement of a London apartment building. At that time she was still Grace Quek, a young girl from the Philippines on a scholarship at King’s College in London, where she was studying law. She was drunk and feeling adventurous, so she agreed to have sex with a man she met in an alleyway. She quickly realized that other men were present. The details of what happened next are “blurry,” but she remembers “being forced to give them blow jobs” and being watched by a twelve-year-old boy who was encouraged by the others to join in. Suddenly, it “clicked” that she should try to escape; when she screamed, the boys ran. She was then rescued, half-naked, by a family who lived in the building.

After the rape, Quek dropped out of law school and began studying art and gender studies at University of Southern California. At age twenty-one, she took the name Annabel Chong and started appearing in porn films, where she became known for her intellect, sense of humor, and hard-core work such as anal sex and gang bangs—I Can’t Believe I Did the Whole Team and All I Want for Christmas Is a Gang Bang were some of her earlier titles. In 1998, as The World’s Biggest Gang Bang gained notoriety, I heard Chong speak at an Adult Video News event in Los Angeles. She was petite, almost fragile looking, but her vulnerability was worn like a challenge. Onstage, she quipped, “I like to have sex the way I like to shop for groceries. In bulk.”

Chong recalls laughing when she first heard the idea for The World’s Biggest Gang Bang. But after being reminded of the story of Messalina, the Roman empress who challenged a prostitute to a contest of having the greatest number of sexual partners in a day, she became inspired and accepted the job. “Female sexuality is as aggressive as male sexuality. I wanted to take on the role of the stud,” she explained. “The more [partners], the better.”^[58] Though Chong received criticism from industry people at the time, her film sparked a trend in pornography that has lasted more than a decade. Her record was overturned within a year when Jasmine St. Clair took on three hundred men in twenty-four hours; St. Clair’s accomplishment was also quickly surpassed. Chong was amused at the female competitiveness sparked by gang bangs. “It’s usually the men who are bragging,” she said, “and now women are doing it. . . . It’s slightly subversive.”^[59]

Subversive was what she’d had in mind.

She reflected on the experience of filming The World’s Biggest Gang Bang for an interview at Nerve.com:

I guess the only word I could use to describe the event is that it was completely surreal. It was really bizarre watching so many naked men, nervous naked men in one place at the same time. In a very sick sort of way, it was kind of erotic, but I emphasize in a very sick sort of way. On the whole, I think I am glad I didn’t sleep through the entire event. Because I went into it for the experience and if I slept through it, it would be kind of a waste, wouldn’t it? I heard stories about girls who did it after me—how some of them were on Valium or just lying there looking bored. By falling asleep I mean just mentally switching off.

The gang bang was like “running a marathon”:

You get the down time, you get the up time. It’s very much the same physical process when you’re on a roll and it’s not painful, it’s actually really enjoyable. Then it gets to the down time when it’s not going at all and you just have to get yourself through that period and hit a good pace and then it’s up time again. Yeah, there was pain. It was definitely a physical strain, I mean, not like vaginal pain but just general strain: my knees, my shoulders. And it’s psychological too because I’m claustrophobic, so sometimes I would start to hyperventilate and we’d stop for me to take a breather, have some cold water.^[60]

During the filming, security guards were stationed near Chong to remind the men to wear condoms and keep them from becoming aggressive. But most of the men were anxious, Chong realized, more concerned with being able to perform at all than with showing off or trying to dominate her.

In 1999, Chong became the subject of a documentary by Gough Lewis, Sex: The Annabel Chong Story. The conclusion of the documentary shows Chong revisiting the scene of her gang rape in London. For Lewis and many who saw the film, her participation in The World’s Biggest Gang Bang was directly related to the assault, a way to work through the emotional aftermath and regain a sense of control over her body. Chong, however, resists embracing a straightforward link. At times, she claims that the gang bang, and her work in porn more generally, is an artistic, feminist statement about sexuality; other times, she attributes her decision to work in porn to a desire to be paid for sex because she was already promiscuous or to an “ego trip”—“All these guys . . . wanting to have sex with me.”^[61] In one of the more powerful scenes of the documentary, when questioned about whether she fears being infected with HIV, Chong declares sex “worth dying for.” Then, as she comes into contact with movie producers, talk show hosts, and even her fans, she is treated like a throwaway, a joke. Sure, she might be willing to die for sex—but she seems destined to first be ground up for entertainment.

In her many interviews and appearances, including Lewis’s film, Chong exposed layers of contradiction and revealed an intriguing complexity often denied those in the public eye. Some reviewers saw this as evidence that she was a psychological wreck: “sometimes like a defiant little girl seeking to shock with frank talk, sometimes an overwrought punk as she puffs on a cigarette, sometimes a lost soul, sometimes a would-be artist creating life as a work of outrage, feminism and politics, or openly self-destructive as she cuts her arm repeatedly with a knife.”^[62] Critics dismissed her feminist aims as misguided or failed: How could a feminist appear so confused and clueless about her own degradation? She might be waxing articulately about empowerment and freedom, but as the film reveals, she was never even paid in full for The World’s Biggest Gang Bang. Even Chong seemed surprised by the disjunction between her beliefs and the way she appeared onscreen. “Was I really that depressed?” she asked after seeing Lewis’s film. “Was I that vulnerable? But maybe I was.”^[63]

But was this complexity actually evidence of Chong’s instability? Even though we don’t all expose our inner pandemonium to the world or challenge ourselves to explore our personal life stories through transgression like Chong, aren’t we all a mix of “messy” selves, sometimes feeling on top of the world and other times hiding under the covers? Couldn’t any of us proclaim ourselves willing to die for a cause but still appear vulnerable as we charge into battle? Perhaps. Motivations and emotions are rarely simple. We can be empowered by the same things that wound us. What makes us feel strong one moment can later make us crumble. Our past is reinterpreted after new experiences. One of the biggest fallacies associated with feminism is that empowerment or freedom is inherent in any particular act, whether having casual sex, shaving one’s legs, stripping, or becoming a CEO. It is, in fact, the feminist interpretations we make of these choices that matter. But we are constantly asked to impose singular meanings on our experiences, especially when it comes to sex—an ill-fated attempt to produce order out of inevitable chaos.

Many things are left out of such tidy stories. “I think on a subconscious level,” Chong later said, “in retrospect, maybe there is an element of trying to take back control in the gang bang, but it’s not something I was thinking about before the event.” She also pointed out that her experiences after the rape in the legal system and National Health Service counseling systems were “incredibly dehumanizing”^[64] —this part of the story, however, is often ignored in lieu of a neater cause-and-effect explanation focusing on the gang rape. Her journey in porn, she reflected, was also motivated by her desire to leave Singapore behind: “It’s the idea of how far I can run away from home.”^[65] Further complexities arise due to outside circumstances—had she profited from the gang bang as much as promised or as much as the producers, would she appear more in control of her sexuality?

And is control what sex is necessarily about anyway?

Certainly, in the past few decades, sex has increasingly been framed in terms of control or power struggles—whether between men and women, nature and culture, desire and morality, health and pathology, or the perversity of the West and the repression of the rest. Power is indeed an important aspect of sexuality, and sexual exchanges always unfold within power relations. But sex is also a realm of play and experimentation. Creativity. People long to be transported. Overwhelmed. Entertained. Sometimes, people want to become someone different or try something different.

“If we ever have sex one more Friday night at 11 o’clock . . .”

Adventure, play, and exploration, like other facets of social life, cannot be removed from the social, cultural, political, and economic contexts that shape their meanings and position the individuals involved. Sexual adventure is gendered, for example: men are often expected to explore sexually more than women, although men and women have different opportunities available to them in actually doing so (this can vary by place and time, sexual identity, types of partners sought, etc.). Men and women also face distinct hazards and obstacles, personally and culturally. Still, with many other choices in life, we allow ourselves to experiment. We might try golf and find it boring or decide skydiving is too dangerous. But sex is often treated differently from other types of experimentation. In the contemporary United States, the sex you have is supposed to reflect your deepest, essential self. When a woman pursues transgressive sex, it is usually interpreted as even more problematic than when a man does, as either motivated by psychological weakness or damage or leading to it, or both.

Anthropologist Gayle Rubin argues that sex is “burdened with an excess of significance” in European and American history: for example, “although people can be intolerant, silly, or pushy about what constitutes proper diet, differences in menu rarely provoke the kinds of rage, anxiety, and sheer terror that routinely accompany differences in erotic taste.”^[66] Many theorists point to Christianity as a source of this sex negativity, although religion should not be used as a simple scapegoat. Throughout history and around the world, one can find non-Christian cultures with beliefs about sexuality that might be called sex negative. Further, in Christianity and other religions restricting sexual activity to particular partners or acts, sex is actually given deep meaning—its significance is not excessive or negative to believers. Secular individuals often retain such beliefs without the personal benefit of religious meaning behind them because the beliefs persist more widely in their social milieu. However, even if we lived in a society that ceased judging so many sexual desires as sinful or unhealthy and penalizing or stigmatizing individuals who deviate from a narrow range of accepted behaviors, we would likely not escape the fact that sexual excitement draws strength from power differentials, prohibitions, and contradictions. Our early relationships with (powerful) caregivers influence our ability to handle the tensions involved in attachment, such as that between dependence and independence. Although we continue to grow and change in the relationships that follow, desire can spark out of obstacles, conflicts, ambiguities, and even wounds. The crossing of boundaries—between inside and outside, self and other—gives rise to complicated emotions. Erotic life is messy and will remain so.

At the same time, though, while it may be true for all of us that unconscious tensions, needs, or wants surface in sexuality, the intensity of such intrusions varies. Some people are tormented for years by the same unwanted desires; others feel relatively undisturbed or find their desires and fantasies changing over time. Conflicts are resolved and wounds are healed. Or they aren’t, but we move on anyway. Sometimes, change is dramatic or traumatic—a new psychic injury or preoccupation, perhaps, takes precedence in feeding our erotic life. Other times, change is unremarkable, just a shrug of the shoulders when something no longer turns you on.

In 2003, Annabel Chong retired from porn. She no longer gives interviews on her experiences in the industry. Her website now reads: “Where’s Annabel? Annabel is dead, and is now replaced full time by her Evil Doppelganger, who is incredibly bored with the entire concept of Annabel, and would prefer to do something different for a change. From her shallow grave, Annabel would like to thank her fans for all their love and support all these years, and to let them know that she will never forget them.”^[67]

The young woman who once famously and tearfully declared sex worth dying for decided to do “something different.” According to some reports, she’s running real marathons these days and working as a web designer.

^{1. I. M. Lewis, “Trance, Possession, Shamanism, and Sex,” Anthropology of
Consciousness 14, no. 1 (2003): 24.}

^{2. Matt Wray, “Burning Man and the Rituals of Capitalism,” Bad Subjects
21 (1995), http://bad.eserver.org/issues/1995/21/wray.html.}

^{3. Tim Wayne, “Burning Man Review,” Tim Wayne (blog),
http://blog.hisnameistimmy.com/burning-man-our-review/12.}

^{4. Larry Harvey, “Jiffy Lube 2001,” Burning Man,
http://www.burningman.com/blackrockcity_yearround/jrs/extras/jiffylube.html.}

^{5. Jeremy Hockett, “Participant Observation and the Study of Self: Burning Man as
Ethnographic Experience,” In After Burn: Reflections on Burning Man, ed.
Lee M Gilmore and Mark Van Proyen (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
2005), 69.}

^{6. “Down n Dirty First Timers Guide to Burning Man,” Festival A Go-Go (blog),
April 28, 2010, http://festivalagogo.com/?p=412.}

^{7. “Second Life Grid Survey—Economic Metrics,” available at
http://www.gridsurvey.com/economy.php.}

^{8. Mike Wagner, “Sex in Second Life,” Information Week, May 26, 2007,
http://www.informationweek.com/news/199701944?cid=email.}

^{9. Anshe Chung Studios, “Anshe Chung Becomes First Virtual World Millionaire,” news
release, November 26 2006, http://www.anshechung.com/include/press/press_release251106.html.}

^{10. “State of Sex: Second Life,” MMOrgy (blog), October 13, 2005,
www.mmorgy.com/2005/10/state_of_sex_second_life_1.php.}

^{11. User profile for Misty Crimsonlay, Smashwords,
www.smashwords.com/profile/view/mistyc.}

^{12. Misty Crimsonlay, Second Life—Hot Orgies (Amazon Digital Services,
2011), Kindle edition.}

^{13. Tom Boellstorff, Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the
Virtually Human (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 165.}

^{14. “Revealed: The ‘Other Woman’ in Second Life Divorce . . . Who’s Now Engaged to
the Web Cheat She’s Never Met,” Mail Online, November 14, 2008,
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1085412/Revealed-The-woman-Second-Life-divorce--whos-engaged-web-cheat-shes-met.html.}

^{15. Ashley John Craft, “Love 2.0: A Quantitative Exploration of Sex and Relationships
in the Virtual World Second Life,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 41, no. 4
(2012): 943.}

^{16. Richard L. Gilbert, Monique A. Gonzalez, and Nora A. Murphy, “Sexuality in the 3D
Internet and Its Relationship to Real-Life Sexuality,” Psychology &
Sexuality 2, no. 2 (2011): 119.}

^{17. Craft, “Love 2.0,” 946.}

^{18. Gilbert, Gonzalez, and Murphy,“Sexuality in the 3D Internet,” 118.}

^{19. Craft, “Love 2.0,” 944.}

^{20. Male swinger, quoted in Curtis Bergstrand and Jennifer Blevins Sinski,
Swinging in America: Love, Sex, and Marriage in the 21st Century
(Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010), 6.}

^{21. Jonathan Bollen and David McInnes, “Time, Relations and Learning in Gay Men’s
Experiences of Adventurous Sex,” Social Semiotics 14, no. 1 (2004):
21.}

^{22. Jane Ward, “Dude-Sex: White Masculinities and ‘Authentic’ Heterosexuality among
Dudes Who Have Sex with Dudes,” Sexualities 11, no. 4 (2008): 420.}

^{23. Bergstrand and Sinski, Swinging in America.}

^{24. Ibid., 56.}

^{25. Ibid., 36.}

^{26. George C. O’Neill and Nena O’Neill, “Patterns in Group Sexual Activity,”
Journal of Sex Research 6, no. 2 (1970): 101–12; C. Symonds, “Pilot
Study of the Peripheral Behavior of Sexual Mate Swappers” (master’s thesis,
University of California, Riverside, 1968).}

^{27. “100 Signs You May Be a Swinger,” Kasidie,
http://www.kasidie.com/static/magazine/humor/100signs.html.}

^{28. Rachel R. White, “Sex Parties,” Time Out New York, September 28, 2011,
http://www.timeout.com/newyork/clubs-nightlife/sex-parties.}

^{29. Richard Martin, “Powerful Exchanges: Ritual and Subjectivity in Berlin’s BDSM
Scene” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2011), 46.}

^{30. Daniel H. Lende, Terri Leonard, Claire E. Sterk, and Kirk Elifson, “Functional
Methamphetamine Use: The Insider’s Perspective,” Addiction Research &
Theory 15, no. 5 (2007): 465–77.}

^{31. Hans S. Crombag and Terry E. Robinson, “Drugs, Environment, Brain, and Behavior,”
Current Directions in Psychological Science 13, no. 3 (2004):
110.}

^{32. Jonathan W. Roberti, “A Review of Behavioral and Biological Correlates of
Sensation Seeking,” Journal of Research in Personality 38 (2004):
270.}

^{33. James Pfaus and John Pinel, “Alcohol Inhibits and Disinhibits Sexual Behavior in
the Male Rat,” Psychobiology 17, no. 2 (1989): 195–201.}

^{34. James G. Pfaus et al., “Inhibitory and Disinhibitory Effects of Psychomotor
Stimulants and Depressants on the Sexual Behavior of Male and Female Rats,”
Hormones and Behavior 58, no. 1 (2010): 163–76.}

^{35. Ibid., 163.}

^{36. Karla S. Frohmader et al., “Effects of Methamphetamine on Sexual Performance and
Compulsive Sex Behavior in Male Rats,” Psychopharmacology 212, no. 1
(2010): 93–104.}

^{37. R. Cagiano et al., “Effects on Rat Sexual Behaviour of Acute MDMA (Ecstasy) Alone
or in Combination with Loud Music,” European Review for Medical and
Pharmacological Sciences 12 (2008): 291.}

^{38. Adam Isaiah Green and Perry N Halkitis, “Crystal Methamphetamine and Sexual
Sociality in an Urban Gay Subculture: An Elective Affinity,” Culture, Health
& Sexuality: An International Journal for Research, Intervention and
Care 8, no. 4 (2006): 329.}

^{39. Ibid., 323–24.}

^{40. Ibid., 329.}

^{41. Ibid., 325.}

^{42. Joseph J. Palamar et al., “A Qualitative Descriptive Study of Perceived Sexual
Effects of Club Drug Use in Gay and Bisexual Men,” Psychology & Sexuality
ifirst (2012): 10, 12.}

^{43. Garrett Prestage et al., TOMS: Three or More Study (Sydney,
Australia: National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research, University
of New South Wales, 2008), 23.}

^{44. Pfaus et al., “Inhibitory and Disinhibitory Effects,” 163–76.}

^{45. Russell Westhaver, “Party Boys: Identity, Community, and the Circuit” (PhD diss.,
Simon Fraser University, 2003), 172.}

^{46. Holly Williams, “Teen Spirit: The ‘Skins’ Sensation Sweeping France,”
Indepdendent, July 31, 2010,
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/features/teen-spirit-the-skins-sensation-sweeping-france-2037470.html.}

^{47. Claudine Doury, “France, Skins Parties, 2010,” VU’ l’agence,
www.agencevu.com.}

^{48. The American version of Skins, which appeared on MTV in 2011, drew
criticism as child pornography because the actors were under eighteen years old
and the plotlines were heavily sexualized. The show was canceled after the first
season, according to network representatives, because it “didn’t connect with a
US audience as much as we had hoped.” Still, as a theme, Skins has emerged in
the party scene.}

^{49. Stewart Payne, “Police Arrest MySpace Party Girl,” Telegraph, April 13,
2007,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1548483/Police-arrest-MySpace-party-girl.html.}

^{50. Nick Craven, “What Really Happened at the Myspace Party from Hell,” Mail
Online, April 21, 2007,
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-449819/What-REALLY-happened-Myspace-party-hell.html.}

^{51. Ashley Steinberg, “Rebels without Cause,” Newsweek, March 17, 2008,
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2008/03/17/rebels-without-cause.html.}

^{52. “Kissing-Crazy ‘Pokemon’ Teens Shock Chilean Society,” Agence France-Presse,
August 19, 2008,
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5g8_oJjFpw4GepEhegk6MXX9DZ41A.}

^{53. Alexei Barrionuevo, “In Tangle of Young Lips, a Sex Rebellion in Chile,” New
York Times, September 12, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/world/americas/13chile.html?_r=0.}

^{54. Steinberg, “Rebels without Cause.”}

^{55. Andrea González Recabarren, “Tribus urbanas: Pokemones y peloláis . . . ¿Cuánto
sabes de ellos?” Universia, January 16, 2008,
http://noticias.universia.cl/vida-universitaria/noticia/2008/01/16/314616/tribus-urbanas-pokemones-pelolais-sabes.html.}

^{56. Barrionuevo, “Sex Rebellion in Chile,” 2008.}

^{57. Seventy men were in attendance; many took multiple turns.}

^{58. Soyon Im, “Sex: The Annabel Chong Story,” Seattle Weekly, July 26, 2000,
http://www.seattleweekly.com/2000-07-26/film/sex-the-annabel-chong-story/.}

^{59. Amy Goodman, “Voice: An Interview with Annabel Chong,” Nerve.com, June 22, 1999,
http://www.nerve.com/dispatches/goodman/chong.}

^{60. Ibid.}

^{61. Chun (2000). www.asianweek.com/2000_05_04/ae_annabelchong.html.}

^{62. Lawrence Van Gelder, review of Sex: The Annabel Chong Story, New York
Times, February 11, 2000,
http://partners.nytimes.com/library/film/021100sex-film-review.html.}

^{63. Robin Askew, “Annabel Chong: Sex: The Annabel Chong Story,” Spike
Magazine, October 1, 2000,
http://www.spikemagazine.com/1000annabelchong.php.}

^{64. Ibid.}

^{65. Goodman (1999). “Attitudes to Marriage.”}

^{66. Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of
Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed.
Carole S. Vance (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 267–319.}

^{67. Annabel Chong’s website, www.annabelchong.com (accessed September 2012). As of
March 2013, the website was no longer operative.}

Disgust, Shame, and Guilt

“Une mémoire diabolique”