The most in my own I’ve ever felt sexually has been at a swing club, at least until I found NSFW/ENM Twitter. Good clubs set out a few ground rules that make it feel very safe to be overtly sexual there as a woman. That’s the baseline. But a general ethos in swinging is that the women are in charge. That’s not in a power dynamics way, although that’s often okay, too. Rather it’s a “what she says goes. Period.” No means no and “discussion” to the contrary is generally not received well. Women are able to walk around fully owning their sexuality, often dressed in ways that make them feel beautiful and sexy and desirable, knowing that, at least for these few hours, they are safe in that.
Yes, there are always the exceptions. Those will be addressed, I’m sure, in another post. That’s not what this one is about, though.
How did I get from sitting in the pew worrying about going to hell for thinking Johnny was a hunk to being comfortable in a sex club? It was a journey that was not without its trials, that’s for sure.
I married young. Too young. We were fresh out of undergraduate school, I was the first real girlfriend he’d ever had, and he was only the second penetrative sex partner I’d had. We truly did not know what we were doing, and we had no business getting married at such a pivotal point in our lives. Maybe that works for some folks, but it didn’t for us. We grew up in the aforementioned small town, and we went to a small, conservative undergraduate school – there was no room for experimentation.
For example, I had known, once, that I was bisexual, but I locked that part of me tightly away in a closet when I was so involved in the Catholic Church. By the time I left the Church and was addressing some of those cobwebbed corners, I had been married a couple years. He had also missed out on experimentation, so we began talking about how to fix that.
There’s a break here for a story I’m still not entirely ready to tell. Let me leave you with the understanding that lines were crossed and we had to have some difficult discussions. They didn’t always go well. But what came out of it was that we were interested in something about having relationships and/or sex with other people. We didn’t really have the words or tools to talk about it, though, so we started digging. I’m not always convinced that the Internet was a good idea, but through it we were able to find those notable texts “Sex at Dawn” and “The Ethical Slut.”
We also joined Meetup, where we found our local poly community. We began going together to meetups in our area, or close to it, where we started meeting like minded people. We both went on a handful of dates with others, sometimes together, usually separately. Then I decided life was far too simple, so I’d go to law school.
As law school will tend to do, it chewed up my marriage and spit it out. We never got to fully embrace polyamory together as a couple because we divorced about a year, year and a half after we began exploring.
But during law school I met a handsome man who, at first glance, was the beacon of appropriate behavior. As I began to know him, though, I realized that he had a very naughty side – one that would ultimately lead me to an upper bunk in a swing club, making eye contact with another man while he fucked a beautiful woman five feet below me and my own fiancé worked his magic on me.