Sex, Lies, and Internet. Part II
In the previous installment, I encountered the unfamiliar world of adult dating sites and decided to explore it. My first step was to place some ads on craigslist.


I wrote the first ad from the point of view of a lonely man looking to spend some quality time with the right woman--a nice, intelligent, and decent ad. The next day I posted a note from a married couple looking for a girl to have a threesome with them. Another one was from two men who also wanted a woman for a threesome, but the MFM kind—buy one, get one free. Feel free to substitute “buy” with your own verb. Finally, the last ad was from a married woman missing something in her marriage. She wanted to find a lover but craved more than sex—physical chemistry was important as well as the intellectual and spiritual connection. An suave, educated man in decent physical shape would be her dream date.

The single guy received zero replies. I posted the ad a few more times and tried varying the wording—it didn’t help.

Two hot stallions willing to please a brave lady received three replies on the first try and four on the second one. I didn’t know how “real” these women were and didn’t try to find out. Later, I found two men who also posted such ads and wrote to them. I told them about my investigation and politely asked for a number, only a number, of real-life success stories. They responded. Apparently, the guys had been doing this for many months and spent countless hours writing and posting the ads as well as following up with the replies. In all this time they had three sexual encounters—two good threesomes and one horrible one.

The married couple also received three replies, and two ladies even attached their photos. Nothing to write home about, but they could be worse. From what I gathered, the success statistics for heterosexual couples is approximately the same—if you try long and hard enough, you’ll succeed. Once or twice.

As for the last experiment, I came to regret it. Thank God I opened a separate e-mail account for all these online games. I received 203 responses in three days. Two hundred and three. Some looked like resumes: I am a graduate of Harvard/Princeton/Yale, a Marine, an officer, compete in triathlons, speak four languages, crochet, and have a PhD in oral sex. One strange gentleman wrote that he is a Navy officer, attached his full biography, and sent the whole thing from his work e-mail account, complete with the official signature containing his full name, rank, and some sort of a serial number. I am not sure whether it was a joke or the guy was looking for a way to get kicked out of the Navy.

The number of personal stories in these e-mails astounded me and the amount of pain splashed all over the screen flew off the scale. I did not respond to a single e-mail—I felt guilty. My “guides” explained I had nothing to be ashamed of—most ads from women are fakes posted for various reasons, from practical jokes to marketing campaigns. But hope dies last, and men keep responding to them in droves.

Okay, so I found the official sites useless. Let’s try something smaller, targeted to the specific population. I opened google.com and typed “swingers”. At the top of the first results page I saw three sites – swinglifestyle.com, xmatch.com, and passion.com, also known as the Adult Friend Finder, or AFF. Those were a good start. On all you can create a free profile, use the limited version of the search engine, talk to other swingers, and do many useless things like taking a test to determine your hedonism level.

I did not care for xmatch.com—way too busy and crazy for my tastes. As for passion.com, I found it annoying—they advertise free accounts with limited capabilities, but every time I clicked on a link, another page popped up asking whether I wanted to pay for the full access to the site. Only after scrolling all the way down (and it was a long way down) and clicking the “No, thanks” button, I was redirected to wherever I wanted to go in the first place. This made navigation almost impossible. I did spend some time on passion.com, but after some trial and error settled on swinglifestyle.com and did most of my research there.

***

The first thing I noted was the number of people on these sites. On swinglifestyle.com you can search for swingers within a chosen radius of your zip code. I set the radius to the smallest value possible—15 miles—and tried various zip codes from MD, MA, and NY. Free members are limited in their search capabilities—they can only see the first 500 matches, or 12-14 pages. Any time I hit the “Search” button, I saw a message on the screen informing me that I could only see the first 500 of the thousands of users returned by my search criteria.

A search for men always returns 500+ results (and I don’t know what that plus sign means, 505 or 50005), even if I only looked for guys between the ages of 30 and 32 within 15 miles of a tiny zip code in the middle of a state. Searching for couples produces similar outcomes. I never failed to receive the annoying “your results are limited ‘cause you ain’t paying” message until I searched for women. Querying for “single” women cuts the results to 70 members at the most, and for some peculiar reason at least 50 of them are likely to be African American and significantly overweight. Maybe one day somebody will conduct a sociological study to determine why obese black females flock to swinging sites, but this phenomenon was outside of my area of interest.

Any time I entered the site, regardless of the day of the week or the time of the day, thousands of people were online. And every day thousands of new people joined in (the site keeps tally of the new members). Not all the newbies are real or serious, and some people open several accounts, but still, the sheer numbers astonished me. States like Tennessee or Kentucky might have fewer swingers, but in the coastal, densely populated, “blue” states, hundreds and hundreds of swingers live on every 20-30 square miles. Cities like NY or Washington house thousands of them in any 10-15 mile radius.

Swinglifestyle.com has an interesting feature: users can place advertisements on the front page for all to see. Every time I opened the site or refreshed the page, I saw a different couple in that space. The photographs were eye-opening. Some people were beautiful, some not quite, and many not at all, but the sentiment “I would’ve never guessed” applied to all of them. Average guys and gals “next door” stared at me from the screen. The folks wrote about their love for Western movies and billiards or about their boats and gardens. All searched for “friends with benefits”, for people who “click” with them. I only saw couples on those advertisements, but never men. Once I spotted a woman though—in her 60's. Don’t ask.

I created a free profile and wrote a few generic, meaningless words about myself. I said I was mostly looking for couples (for threesomes), but would talk to the right guy. I did not attach any photographs. It was Friday evening, about 11:30 P.M. Tired and sleepy, I went straight to bed, planning to continue my research the next morning.

Kids wake me up early on the weekends, so at 7:30 A.M. on Saturday I was already in front of the computer, staring, in bewilderment, at the 43 messages in my inbox. Only two were from couples, the rest came from men. I never expected to see anything new, figuring I saw it all in those 203 e-mails received after the craigslist fiasco. Apparently, I was mistaken. It is one thing to place an ad on a relatively “official” site looking for a serious lover, and yet another to write on a swingers’ site that you enjoy ménage-a-trios.

Most men admitted they also enjoyed group sex and were ready to bring a friend or to join me in searching for couples together. For some reason, 75% of them also announced they loved oral sex and were really good at it. Half of those who wrote informed me of their penis sizes. By the way, on these sites, if you ask for a photograph, you are likely to get a torso and/or a close-up of someone’s proudly engorged genitals. If you want to see a face, ask for it specifically; your wish may or may not be granted. Within weeks, I had a collection of photographed penises of all shapes in sizes.
I answered both couples and also chose a dozen or so men—supposedly the ones with most research potential. I then wrote to all of them, saying I had too many letters in my inbox and didn’t have time for everybody, but would gladly continue our e-mail exchange.
By Saturday night I had 20-30 more e-mails, by Sunday… well, you get the picture. If I made it my goal to bed a new man every day for many months, I wouldn’t have any problem. As a matter of fact, I could do a couple a day. Some even offered me gangbangs with their friends.

As a side bonus, I finally found the answer to the question that bothered me for years: why is it that men always keep a running tally of their lovers while women rarely do? For men this is a sport of sorts, a hunt—they have to locate, pursue, and finally catch their prey. A woman, on the other hand, has to do no such thing unless she looks like a crocodile. If I wanted to have a hundred lovers, I could have easily accomplished this goal. A thousand? Sure, just give me a couple of years and lots of free time. Men who wouldn’t mind screwing a cute, sexy, and relatively young woman are aplenty. And that’s the understatement of the century. Except, why on Earth would I want to have sex with all these unfamiliar men? That’s why we pursue quality rather than quantity and don’t count the beans.
***

A week later, I met with a couple that wrote to me. The husband is a partner in one of the major DC law firms; his wife is an architect—an art director of a well-known magazine. Both are smart, cultured, and reasonably attractive. Prior to our meeting they sent me a battery of very engaging pictures: of her with other women in different positions, of him naked on a boat, of them together having sex, and so on. Mind you, I didn’t ask for any photographs.

I learned many interesting things from them. At times I had to take deep breaths to keep my composure. For example, she told me of a gangbang she had with 12 black men. Stories about sex parties where “everybody fucked everybody else” went on for at least half an hour. He relayed anecdotes about corresponding with other couples and recognizing, to their horror, his co-worker or her college friend in the attached pictures. Once, an attached photo showed their parents’ tennis partners. In such cases, they explained, you have to write back, “We are not interested, thank you very much.” The swinging world is small—too small.

Then they told me about the DP specialists. DP, for those who don’t know this wonderful term, stands for Double Penetration, with one man in your (okay, not your) vagina and the other one in the anus. Turns out, many people are fond of this adult form of entertainment and want to try it, but just can’t make it happen. Legs get in the way, the woman is uncomfortable, the suitable partners are nowhere to be found, and so on, and so forth. These two guys are well-known in the local swinger community as the aces of DP. They’ll come to your house, fu… I mean, double-penetrate you, show you the ropes, and teach the other guys, if necessary. They instructed my new acquaintances, for example, and the couple couldn’t be happier.

Here is the fascinating part. The couple has been together for over 15 years. They claim to be very happy in their marriage and look at each other with so much love, you’d think they met last week. Each of them spent considerable amount of time telling me what a wonderful person their partner is and how much they love him or her. They also repeated numerous times that they share these sexual fantasies— such “games” only bring them closer together; he enjoys watching her have sex with a small crowd of men. Also, they claim these swing parties don’t influence their outside-of-bedroom lives as spouses, parents, or professionals. Their private life remains private and doesn’t cross paths with the public one. They even offered to introduce me to a few other swinging couples—all happily married for many years. Swinger unions, they told me, are very strong as long as husband and wife do it together. On the other hand, the couples where only one spouse is “swinging” (in 95% of the cases it’s the man) while the other either doesn’t know about it or pretends not to know about it are miserable.

Swingers often compare their sex life to that of newlyweds. They distinguish between “bad” jealousy, when you feel betrayed, and “good” jealousy, where you consent to forgo sexual monogamy. For them, “good” jealousy enhances their sex life, turning every one-on-one intercourse into make-up sex. They like their sensual fireworks and avoid humdrum sex at any cost—even after 10-15 years of marriage.

90% of swingers are in stable marriages. Most are over 30 years old. The Viagra revolution introduced many 50-plus swinger couples to the circuit. The swinger clubs don’t discriminate based on age, but most swingers agree that people tend to “congregate” in their age groups.

Swingers’ clubs are also religious about safe sex—one violation and you are out. “No means NO” is also a steadfast rule, and most of the times you don’t even have to say anything—a light dismissive wave is enough. It is important to note that swinging is not only about exchanging sex partners. Some couples come to these parties just to watch (then they supposedly go home and….), others watch and then do it right there but only with each other (there are areas for those who like to be watched as well as private sections), and some allow hand touching and/or kissing by others but nothing else. Everybody has his or her own boundaries, and members know not to overstep them.


In Part III we'll talk more about swinger couples (yes, there's more!) as well as the "single" men. Stay tuned.