Friday, December 23, 2005

Let's talk about sex, baby...

A fellow blogger over at Dodosville has commented on the Supreme Court's recent decision to legalize "swing clubs".
So have a lot of other people, writing in to Sun Media from all over the land. Here's one such, a woman named Jacqueline Verville, with whom the Sun agreed quite heartily:

Re "Swing shift," (Dec.22): That the Supreme Court of Canada could approve this perverted smut is unconscionable. Just because twosomes, threesomes and moresomes (by dum-twodumsomes) are occuring inside an enclosed space with consenting adults, doesn't justify it in the least.
If it did, then crack dens and gay bathhouses should also be given the same legal affirmation. It's bad enough that we already have legalized casinos and strip clubs in this country.
Swingers' clubs will only compound matters to make Canada sink even lower in the mud than it already has. Before we know it, prostitution, pimping and drug dealing will be legalized also.

Aside from the morality standpoint, the legalization of swingers' clubs will open a Pandora's box for increased STDs, which the taxpayers will be forced to pay for in terms of health care.
We all know that condoms are not 100% effective in preventing AIDs and other such diseases, so to engage in an activity that carries a potentially terminal disease, is nothing short of insane.
Why do these couples bother to get married if they're going to swap partners for someone else, whenever the mood strikes?
These swingers should buy each other a blow-up doll for Christmas and call it a night.


Well, Jacqueline, how do you really feel?

Here's how I feel. First, a bit of personal background.

I'm a very loving person. I've been that way all my life. I'm pretty touchy-feely as guys go. Unlike most men, I have real trouble differentiating sex from love. Of course, historically, I've never had trouble 'making love out of nothing at all', as Air Supply had it.

For many years, I kind of toyed with the idea that I might (could? should?) be polyamorous. That's a coined word from Latin and Greek roots meaning "loving many". After all, I reasoned to myself, I love my friends. I don't love Anne any less for loving Janet...or even George, for that matter. It all brought to mind the question George Carlin once asked when told "give my love to Dave!"...

What form should the love take?

I truly believed (and still do) that love is the only thing you have more of the more you give it away. In the abstract it all sounds so idealistic, doesn't it?
Unfortunately, this is not an abstract world, and having polyamorous tendencies can land you in a world of hurt if you mismanage them. Which I did. Quite spectacularly. In the end, it seemed pretty obvious to me that I was at heart a monogamous person, much as I admired those who had made "poly" work for them.
Same with swinging, which is basically polyamory with the emotional content toned way down or removed entirely: "just sex", as it were. Caveat: I have absolutely no experience with swinging or couple-swapping outside my rather powerful imagination, so I don't really know the thoughts that go through swingers' heads. Their big heads, anyway. But I've read quite a few articles on "the lifestyle". There's one constant that comes up in every one of them. It's always expressed by a woman (because, I guess, nobody would believe a man saying it) and it always looks something like this:

"Swinging makes our marriage stronger".

Of course, this is very quickly, and just as invariably, followed with a warning that swinging isn't for everyone and you need to talk out your feelings on it before you ever set foot in a club. But for these people, it evidently works.
The other point that's almost always made in these articles is that swinging does not equal cheating. It's all done right up front, with no secrets and no double lives. If it's totally okay with all parties involved, who the hell am I to say it's wrong?

I myself could never do it. Well, I could, I suppose, but it would likely lead in short order to falling in love with somebody and my marriage is worth more to me than any (or any amount of) sex with any (or any number of) partners.

But the Supreme Court didn't rule that in order to stay married, I had to start swinging, now, did it? It merely ruled that sex clubs, being consensual and behind closed doors, did not do any demonstrable harm. It's merely an extension of Trudeau's famous edict that "the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation".

The mind goggles at what Jacqueline deems unconscionable. Legalized casinos. Strip clubs. I'd like to know how she was forced through the doors of either type of establishment. I further find myself cringing when she invokes the slippery slope of "prostitution, pimping and drug dealing"...because I think that'd be a fun slope to toboggan down, with very positive results for this country.
Prostitution should be legalized, regulated, and taxed. You can't remove it--it is, after all, "the world's oldest profession"--so you might as well make it as safe as possible for its practitioners and clients alike. And you'd have the additional side effect of drastically reducing the incidence of rape.
Soft drugs should be legalized, regulated, and taxed. You can't remove them--they've tried and failed many, many times before--so you might as well make them as safe as possible for their users and let the government reap the profit. And you'd have the additional side effect of drastically reducing grow ops and their sordid corollaries.
As for Jacqueline's coupling of gay bath-houses with crack dens (there's a lovely double-entendre there, but I think she meant the drug crack), it's spurious in the extreme. Crack kills. AIDS aside, sex doesn't.

Of course, she then brings up AIDS in the guise of other STDs and shivers at the cost to our health care system. To which I say 'pshaw'. While there are always exceptions, swingers tend to be very clean in their sexual habits. I know, to Jacqueline, more than one partner automatically dictates otherwise...but it ain't the case. Having sex with sixty partners who are all free of disease is no dirtier than being with only one or none at all. And unless Jacqueline is totally chaste, has never smoked or drank, has avoided all junk food, and has never done anything stupid ever in her life, she's in no position to cast aspersion. (Jacqueline--if you really are this virtuous, how do you stand living here on earth? And for the love of God, have you never had FUN?)

Why do swingers get married, Jacqueline? I'm quite frankly shocked you'd ask the question. The answer is simple: marriage is about a lot more than sex. (Isn't yours?) Swingers get married for the same reasons other couples do...to build a life together. Their lives simply include a form of leisure you don't understand and therefore can't condone.

And that's how I feel about that.





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