Dances With The Penis

I’m sure Softkiss has a face, but in my mind’s eye she is nothing but a pair of sagging breasts. I’ve chatted with Thickandsexy’s surprisingly witty vagina any number of times, and TJRawks is as engaging as a speaking penis gets.
Faces are rare in swinger chat rooms.
Only the most entrenched in the lifestyle dare to put their faces on their public ads; for the majority of online swingers, you have to romance them into revealing a pair of eyeballs. In the meantime, all you have to associate with chat room personalities are photos that would make a gynecologist blush. After awhile, you begin to imagine Daliesque images of drooping penises cheerily flipping hamburgers on the grill while breasts float in the hot tub.
The chat rooms are erotic as a harem girl’s veil; you can see the body any time you want, but only the true masters get to see the face.
I haven’t seen a whole lot of faces.
Everyone flirts like hookers online… But do people get past leering at digitized genitalia and walk into real face-to-face meetings? Hardly ever. Truth be told, most of the couples online don’t want to meet; everyone loves the idea of hooking up with strangers and having anonymous sex, but the actual act of doing so is kind of creepy. Jealous much? Worried about diseases? Maybe after we have sex, my wife and I will start nailing bunnies to your door and following you to the office, moaning, “Oh, Janice and Terry, we’re the mayo in your slut sandwich!”
Trying to fuck a novice is like trying to screw two virgins. At once.
But experienced swingers have had all the sex that they’ve wanted, so rejection comes easily to them; they’ve had it before, and they know it’ll come again. As such, talking with them is a very subtle job interview, where the slightest misstep can send your emails spiralling into the delete box. If answering swingers’ ads was ranked on return on investment, you’d have better luck fingering telephone booths for spare change.
I think the sentiment was best summed up by this ad from a Montana couple:
“What have you done? MMF threesomes, MFF threesomes, weekend-long swaps, orgies, anal bondage, public sex.
“What is your greatest fantasy? To have our emails returned promptly and politely.”
Of course, you can trade polite emails- but to take it further, eventually you have to deal with the issue of cybersex. And in that aspect, I am genetically crippled, since I am from New England.
It is a little-known fact New Englanders require Southerners to breed as a part of their lifecycle; without Georgia, all of New England would cease to mate and eventually die. You see, a good solid Connecticut party consists of twenty terrified strangers, clutching wine glasses in glum silence; we do not speak unless spoken to. So there we stand, bumping back and forth like ice cubes in a drink.
But then the Southerner comes in! And thank God! The Southerner, whether she knows people or not, is happy to talk to anyone! The Southerner flits about the room like a bee transferring pollen, inadvertently starting up relationships along the way; couples, finally introduced at last, marry immediately out of sheer gratitude. And thus more New Englanders are born.
New English childbirth includes the cutting of the cord, the presentation of the child – and, of course, the formal introduction. Without it, the parents may never address the child directly.
Okay, not really. (However, no matter what time it is in the chat room, half of them are Texans – and all of them are on speaking terms. I guess they know how to drill more than oilwells down there.)
But the fact is, many couples require a cyberseduction as a sort of personality test before you can actually meet them. It is a perfectly fair and reasonable test – and one that I will never pass. I can look at a woman and estimate with a tailor’s accuracy exactly how much chain it requires to strap her to the bed. But in cyberspace? I’m fumbling at the bra.
As God is my witness, I don’t even know when I’m being seduced – as witness this outtake from America’s Funniest Chatroom Transcripts:
<arousedfetus> So then my husband brought home five of his friends this weekend
<arousedfetus> All of them lined up to have me
<annoyedweasel> So what did you do?
<arousedfetus> I sucked them all dry like a good girl
<arousedfetus> Then later on
<arousedfetus> One of them took me up the ass while the other slammed me in my pussy
<annoyedweasel> So what was your husband doing during all of this?
Note to self: Wrong question.
<arousedfetus> Um, he was joining in
<arousedfetus> I gave him my choice of holes
<annoyedweasel> Really? Which did he choose?
<annoyedweasel> Cause it seems like I mean, he should have first choice, being your husband and all
<arousedfetus has left the session>
Upon replaying the videotape, I suppose the proper response was to place myself in the role of one of the holefillers. But the whole act has the slightly stale air of cheating about it; although no physical transaction is taking place, I’m getting a vicarious thrill off some woman who’s not my wife (and, for all I know, not a woman), while Jeannie is elsewhere.
A lot of the women in cyberspace are everything I’ve long said that women should be; they know what they like, and they’re willing to seduce you in a heartbeat because they have no hangups about sex. But still, in some part of my mind, not having either of our spouses there feels like an uncomfortably private intimacy. Does her husband know… And would be be okay if he did?
Swinging isn’t supposed to hurt anybody’s feelings.
Furthermore, a lot of women are complete inverses of arousedfetus; stung by too many men who believe “fuknow?” to be high conversation, they view cybersex as the sign of a Neanderthalish oaf – and as such, sometimes you get stung. Immediately after arousedfetus dropped me like a hot potato, I found a woman who was telling me, quite clinically, how picking up guys at bars with her husband in tow was an adrenaline shot right to the crotch. I said that hey, it was a shot to mine, too, and <mixnmatch has left the session>.
But how can you tell which is which?
How do you know if you like someone when all you can talk about is sex? Imagine only being able to discuss, say, cars with someone – and only cars. If they were filled with Sartrian ennui, they’d have to express it through carburetor comparisons.
Now imagine having to figure out whether you wanted to have a long, potentially-painful dinner from that discussion alone… And therein lies the swinger’s paradox. You want to find out if someone is potential friend without revealing enough details for them to grow needlessly attached to you – and in this strange world, sex is the only safe conversational topic.
It translates poorly. If a relationship is going to break down, it’s going to break down at the “hey, where can we meet?” stage of things, since it’s the first sign of commitment. Many couples will ask to meet you in their first email, but they’re the ones who have the least luck; much like the guy at school who’d date anybody, their indiscriminate friendliness makes everyone a little leery. But waiting too long to ask is the sign of a photo whore; strangely enough, some men exist only to seduce photos out of couples, yet refuse the real thing when it’s offered.
There are a thousand terrible things that you can be online. Any one of them gets you the boot.
So you carefully gauge your couple’s mood, wishing all along that there was a little turkey timer that popped up when they were ready – and you realize you share something both vast and insignificant with these people.
The four of you have disassociated love with sex to the point where you’re willing to allow mild acquaintances to make out with your spouse. That’s a vast philosophical difference you hold with 90% of America right there; you don’t believe that love and physicality are the same thing. Bravo!
But in the end, that boils down to, “I like fucking, and I’m going to keep doing it.” But fucking is a pasttime shared by everyone from Oral Roberts to Eddie Murphy; strip the shame and fear out of sex, and you discover something so trivial that it can’t support a relationship. It’s like driving a Mack Truck across a bridge made of toothpicks.
So you try and find common ground, but your attempts at discovery sound like you’re machinegunning them with questions. “What movies do you like? What music do you listen to? Do you believe in Adam Smith’s theory of the Invisible Hand, or do you lean towards the more intrusive play of Keynesian counter-cyclical demand management policies?”
Frustrated to extremes, you throw caution to the wind, and type the dreaded words: “Wanna meet?”
The email disappears into the void, never to be seen again.
And that’s why more of us don’t meet via email. Far better to go to a swingers’ meet somewhere – or better yet, just try to find the right kind of friends, where you can just drink too much wine and try to shag ’em. And if it doesn’t work, hey, maybe you can find a Texan.