Have I mentioned yet that I kind of like sex toys? Have we covered that? Yes? Oh, good.

Well, I might start reviewing toys for Babeland, one of my favorite purveyors of sex toys, soon. Notice there’s a little banner for them on my sidebar now. That’s how excited I am about this (plus the banner has a hot chick, so there’s that too).

If you like sex toy reviews, the good news is that they may be coming in a little thicker over here in the not-too-distant future. If you don’t like sex toy reviews, feel free to send me other things to review. I particularly enjoy British roadsters.

I’m not pretending I’d be visiting a swingers’ club strictly as an anthropologist, or a journalist, or to gawk at the sideshow freak adulterers, or as ambassador from Finland. It’s just that to participate in playful, no-strings sex with strangers (which I’ve never done, not even having had a single one night stand) I’d have to feel both comfortable and interested in record time. I wouldn’t rule that out, but I also wouldn’t bring an economy-sized tub of lube in anticipation. So yeah, really. I actually just want to see. Sometimes in a person’s sex life an idea presents itself that appears to have equal potential to be either hideously awkward or kind of neat, and sometimes you gamble on neat, because it’s a new experience. Barring actual trauma, the alchemy of time usually softens awkward to hilarious anyway.

One of the cool things about Laramy that I’m coming to understand more and more is that he’s very game. If I said “Hey, I’ve been thinking lately that it might be fun to try naked judo-style grappling, but in an igloo,” I’m starting to think he’d say “How do we make this happen?” and start researching how to avoid frostbite (stay tuned for the upcoming entry on how that went [you should probably know I'm lying]). Maybe it shouldn’t seem especially odd that a guy would respond with at least a tinge of interest to the prospect of going to a sex club, but his total lack of hesitation signifies a willingness of attitude that’s all too rare, in my experience. Anyway, he pulled up a listing of clubs in our state and we got down to business.

Not wild monkey sex business. Reconnoitering business.

I conspicuously didn’t say I haven’t a single anthropological bone in my body because that would’ve been a blatant lie and I never lie on the internet. Swingers as a subculture are fascinating. I want to ethnographize the shit out of them. Like most groups, they have their own little shorthand language. Of course it has many cognates in BDSM, regular sex-literate culture, and the sex industry, but some elements are idiomatic. Hard swap (two couples switching partners for full-on intercourse) vs. soft swap (switching that’s limited to oral play), for instance, is something I’ve never come across outside of swinging parlance because really, where else would you have opportunity to invoke these concepts but in (as they say) The Lifestyle? Swingers’ clubs are either on-premise or off-premise, which essentially means you can play on site or you can’t. Many of these seem to be more like Fight Club-style organizations that only exist when they’re in session rather than brick-and-mortar nightclubs. They all claim to be “upscale” and “drama-free”, and will likely repeat both these terms several times in their About Us pages and FAQs. Most will try to keep things innovative with woefully unsurprising themes: wet t-shirt contest, leather and lace, bad boys and naughty school girls, and so on. Some of them even use those wrist band sex codes of urban legend, which probably teeters on the line between whimsical and tawdry, but I think comes out on the adorable former side after all.

We waded through a lot of these clubs’ websites, and something happened to us that may happen to real anthropologists in the field: we came up against a cultural difference that seemed almost insurmountable. The website design was uniformly terrible. No. It was really, really terrible. It looked like the bastard child of 1997 and a terrible animated flash ad had thrown up all over a geocities account and then beat off to its death throes. I have no right to be, nor am I, too much of a web design snob. I don’t demand anything too marvelous when I visit a site, but I do ask that it be clean, legible, and proofread within a reasonable margin of error, or else unflattering thoughts about the author start to insinuate themselves, unbidden. I guess it’s like looking at someone’s profile on an internet dating site and noticing that the owner can’t grasp the difference between “you’re” and “apple”. Sorry about your illiteracy and all, but damned if I’m going to fuck you.

Is it because swinging is a throwback to the seventies and attracts an older crowd than I’d anticipated, and maybe they’re a little out of touch? Is it because they’re too busy having naughty school girl fun to bother to spend any time or energy on web presence? It is a mystery! The first terrible page we went to made us laugh. By the fourth the trend was becoming worrisome. When the tenth had a bad animated .gif of a woman in a sparkly bikini, it seemed like it was time to quit for the day. “Seeing a website like this makes me determined not to have sex with the person who made it,” said Laramy.
“I’m actually turned off now,” I agreed.

Swingers’ clubs: I’m not ready to give up on you. I’m still curious. I’m still hoping things will work out between us, but I need you to meet me halfway. I just want to be able to read about your toga orgy parties and masquerade balls without getting queasy. I mean, aren’t ANY of you geeks? Please say that there are geek swingers and nerd swingers and dork swingers, and maybe even a bookworm swinger or two. I know this sounds terribly xenophobic, but in this specific sense I think I really do prefer to have sex with my own kind.