Virtual Symposium On “Odd Then, Fantastic Now”: American Swinging Rose Through The Military's Ranks - une publication de blog par humorlife

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22/3/2015 12h55

Virtual Symposium On “Odd Then, Fantastic Now”: American Swinging Rose Through The Military's Ranks

This blog entry is part of the sixth virtual symposium, an informal collection of bloggers who – purely for the hell of it – voted on a single topic (Odd Then, Fantastic Now: How attitudes toward specific aspects of sex change between youth and maturity) and agreed, on or about March 22, to post their interpretations of that topic. A continually updated list of participants can be found here: Participants List For The Sixth Virtual Symposium Odd Then, Fantastic Now

Most readers will likely be surprised to learn that modern swinging in America, perhaps one of the most libertine, if not liberal, activities citizens can engage in, came up through the conservative armed forces.

Terry Gould. whose book The Lifestyle: A Look at the Erotic Rites of Swingers is considered a seminal work on swinging, told the web site Kasidie that “If you look at warrior cultures from way back throughout human history, you'll find that there's a large degree of spouse sharing. The reason there is because the warriors that get killed left their widows behind.”

Okay, but how did swinging “from way back throughout human history” emerge in America? According to the Kasidie interview, which ran under the headline “A vanilla’s experience of the swinger lifestyle,” swinging took root among U.S. Air Force pilots.

“In World War II, the United States & Canadian Air-force had all these bases across North America, training pilots to go overseas. These were officers usually the rank of captain or up, fairly well paid, and they usually brought their wives to live on the bases,” Gould told Kasidie.

“So you have this society of Air Force pilots living on the bases with their wives around them,” Gould continued. “These pilots had a very high death rate -- higher than the death-rate of the other armed services. 1/3 got killed in combat so there were a lot of widows left. So swinging was going on all over these bases. These pilot[s] were exceptional men. The Air Force chose the best of the best, and their wives were exceptional too. So you have these good looking guys and their beautiful wives who are risk takers. So when the survivors came back home after World War II, they moved to the suburbs but they still kept at it, and still kept sharing wives.”

(Side note on something odd then, and drummed out of the corps now: The terms “wife swapping” and “wife sharing” aren’t used much in the swinging community these days. First off, the term smacks of wives as chattel to be passed around. Should have been icky then, but those were different times… thankfully. Second, there are a lot of solo swingers. No spouses at all are swapped, or shared. Gould is historically accurate in his terminology, however.

Another side note: The bit about handsome pilots and beautiful wives sounds a little too Tom Cruise/Meg Ryan for me. I would have thought pilots were chosen based on their ability to, y’know, fly planes, not on their high school yearbook photos.)

Gould is aware that the lifestyle is about more than men getting their rocks off, however. As Gould told Kasidie, “The swinger subculture is basically set up as a conservative institution. The misconception of the lifestyle by the straight world is that it's just a vehicle for men to have sex with other women while their wives come along. But that's not what it's about at all. If it were about that, it would not have grown by such leaps & bounds over the last 20 years, penetrating all ends of the continent and Europe and Australia and doubling and tripling in numbers.”

How did swinging survive World War II, when assumedly there wasn’t as much need for the men of U.S. warrior clans to protect their women? According to Gould, a former pilot named Leidy began traveling around the country, passing lists around to his buddies of willing couples.

“That list was passed around to upper middle class, suburban, married people and that's basically where it stayed for the next 50 years,” Gould said. “That's why you see a lot of clean-cut people with healthy attitudes and above average intelligence in the lifestyle, because that cohort stayed the same right from its origins right after World War II.”

That trend is probably democratizing – or at least reverting to the mean, especially as more and more people embrace the lifestyle. People who don’t have healthy attitudes, who are of average intelligence, and who aren’t clean cut swing… in short, American swingers have begun looking more and more like Americans.

Let’s give Gould the final word on what’s odd then but fantastic now, specifically in terms of how morals have been reshaped. “Morals are fashion, they change all the time. In the 1950s it was immoral to have oral sex. Now it's promoted between married people. It's considered a perfectly moral act now. It used to be immoral for a woman to look directly into a man's eyes. Morals will always change.”

Stop in, read, and offer comments at my "swinging as seen in the media" blog, "Confessions of a Lifestyle Man" humorlife, which is also the home of the monthly virtual symposium. New post: The Virtual Symposium Returns Lets Pick A Topic

jadesmith69 55F

505 messages
22/3/2015 7h24

well now i understand why when i first was introduced into the lifestyle Colorado springs was touted as the most active lifestyle community...
there are three military bases there...
so i guess that war really did shape this country and even has far reaching effects into my life and choices today...
love it when i learn something... today is becoming a day of days for learning...

Lets Create together. http://passion.com/blog/jadesmith69
we can fantasize forever.
J

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