A quick glance at the photograph – a slightly blurry, badly framed headshot of a young woman with long, gently red hair and eyes that don’t look back at the camera – and she looks her age. Twenty-three, it says. As part of the profile she has posted on the Adult Match Maker site, she describes herself as “nerdy”. Under the sub-heading ‘Interests’ she lists “handcuffs”, “sex in public”, “naturism” and “swinging”.
She says she’s looking for casual sex but says she would prefer to meet for coffee “or something” before she meets up for anything else. This is, she writes, for two reasons:
1) “I am shy.”
2) “I have no idea whether or not you are an axe murderer and I don’t want to put myself at risk.”
In the past week, in response to my own profile placement selling myself as part of a couple seeking other couples to swing with, the details of this woman, from country Victoria, have been delivered to my email inbox – one of 27 new members who fit the specific criteria I listed as important.
I am not really who I say I am – this double life being lived for the purposes of research. On this site, though, like so many of the other similar websites, contact magazines and personal ads in suburban newspapers that allow people to advertise the intricacies of their sexual pecadillos in the hope they may find others to share some part of that experience, it is clear things aren’t always what they seem.
They make up innuendo-laden usernames – naughtygirl, hungandhandsome, tastytreat – and they list their occupations as everything from primary school teacher to office manager. They say they are married, attached, seeking discreet affairs during daytime hours only, looking for group sex, or even just one extra, usually female, to stir some spice into a “loving, long-term” relationship.
One gives her age as 39, thinks that what her husband doesn’t know “won’t hurt him” and says that older men, “about 50, with a bit of grey” are “a turn-on”.
They post photos of themselves with breasts plumped into red push-up bras and then there are others, with no photograph at all, who describe their looks as “very attractive” and their figure “cuddly”.
And they are online now. And they want me to contact them. Now.
“Let’s meet for open-minded fun.”
Tonight, on channel 9, the airing of the telemovie Wicked Love will appeal to a public fascination with sexual double lives, in its telling of what was known as the ‘body in the boot’ case – the story of Maria Korp’s 2005 murder, with its gruesome links to infidelity and the partner-sharing world of the thriving local swingers’ scene. Online recruiting of sexual partners ultimately led to Korp’s death at the hands of her husband’s mistress, Tania Herman, and now, it seems, ads detailing the sexual urges of murdered millionaire, Herman Rockefeller, have played their own part in his death – linking the businessman to a fatal detour from the leafy streets of Malvern to the car parts-strewn commission block in Hadfield and the arms of the accused killers, Mario Schembri and Bernadette Denny.
The idea that Rockefeller , whose mobile numbers have been linked to ads run under the pseudonym Andy Kingston, was involved in the ‘official’ swinging community – a community existing primarily around a collection of regular events, held in private homes or clubs on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis – has had those well-known on the scene dubious of the subsequent media attention and the portrayal of the scene as something dangerous and underground, with one well-known party organiser who gives his name as ‘Paul’ dismissing any Rockefeller connection with the organised swingers’ events he says are safe and carefully managed.
What cannot be as carefully managed, Paul says, is the actions of the many thousands who explore the world of swinging in a less formal fashion – what many perceive as the more discreet dalliances springing from the placing, or answering, of personal ads in contact magazines or through companies who make a business from online match-making.
“Calling swinging ‘underground’ is laughable,” says Lilah*. “Information about other venues is available on the internet as well as a contact magazine which is found in most sex shops. Swingers’ parties have stands at the annual Sexpo. A huge swingers’ site advertises openly on late night TV.”
Lilah is a mother of two adult children and works as a personal assistant in a small CBD office. She is also involved in running one of Melbourne’s best-known swingers’ parties. In the emotive language of the post-Rockefeller media, she understands how the headline-friendly ‘double life’ tag could just as easily apply to her.
She disagrees.
“Sex is something that most people don’t talk about to work colleagues, family and friends. It’s not socially acceptable to do so – but everyone, pretty much, has sex. They aren’t having a double life simply because they don’t talk about it. Just because some people’s sexual activities fall outside what others may do doesn’t give them a double life – it just makes them individuals,” says Lilah, 55. “Swinging is called ‘The Lifestyle’ and that’s how I see it in relation to myself and my boyfriend. It’s just a part of our life – the way we choose to live our sexual life – and we don’t see it as a ‘double life’. My take on ‘double life’ is the people who are cheating on partners. They are deliberately hiding something as opposed to just not talking about the sort of sex they have. I don’t tell my children that I’m ‘off to set up for the party’, but I also don’t tell them when I’m going out to have sex with my boyfriend.”
She’s not sure what percentage of men attending the party she helps operate are attached but knows at least a few of the regulars are.
“Quite often, when guys ring to make a booking they will openly say they are married and quip that they will have to find a reason to be out on a Saturday night,” says Lilah, whose event is one of a small group of advertised parties that allows single men to attend – setting it apart from the traditional, couples-focussed swingers’ scene. “I would say that attached guys attending parties, in general, do so without their partner’s knowledge.”
The most common reason, she says, the men give for their cheating is “that they either get no, or very little, sex at home”. With few parties allowing single men to attend, though, Lilah believes that the “vast majority” of men living sexual double lives would be doing so on a private basis, meeting couples or women one-on-one.
“Of course there is potential for a negative impact if their actions are discovered by their partners but they obviously feel the need for sex is worth the risk – and that they will be able to ‘get away with it’,” says Lilah. “ I don’t get the impression that there is much guilt attached to their actions though, especially for those who have been doing this long-term.”
Although she has seen, first-hand, this double life is not the sole domain of men, Lilah says that the number of men living this way far outstrips the women.
“Women do also seek sex outside their relationships but I would suggest that their needs are more than just sexual,” she says.
Psychologist Marcus Squirrell, 37, has spent the last few years working with clients with sexual addictions and cybersex addiction and is researching the area for his soon-to-be-completed doctoral thesis.
While the specifics of the Rockefeller case are not yet known and Squirrell is quick to point out that “engaging in any type of sexual behaviour, even if the behaviour is frequent does not mean that someone is addicted to sex”, the psychologist says that, sex addiction or not, the numbers of people living sexual double lives is growing – due to, in part, the rise of technology that has made it so accessible.
“I am firmly of the opinion that both the Internet and mobile phones significantly contribute to one’s capacity to develop sexually compulsive behaviour that otherwise would not have existed if it was not for easy access to an endless array of sexual material and other individuals who are also interested in meeting offline for sex. I also see a number of bisexual men who act out sexually with other men and lead a double life where they hide these aspects of their sexuality from their girlfriends or wives. These men frequent beats, sex-on-premises establishments and create online profiles to gain access to sexual partners,” Squirrell says. “Most of the clients I see were, at some point, leading a double life in regards to not disclosing their sexual acting out to family, friends and work colleagues. It is typically only when they get caught do they disclose any of their history.”
Director of Action Psychology, Sarah Calleja, 58, has specialised in relationship and sexual issues for 20 years and says that the combination of mobility, time, money, opportunity and technology allows “a large minority” of people to act deceitfully.
The textbook analysis, she says, details Narcissistic Personality Disorder – one of ten personality disorders defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders handbook that mental health professionals use to diagnose clients – as something people living sexual double lives are more likely to have.
As a group, Calleja says, these disorders are described as “enduring pattern[s] of inner experience and behaviour” that are sufficiently rigid and deep-seated to bring a person into repeated conflicts with his or her social and occupational environment.
“The trouble with Narcissistic personalities is that they don’t have any genuine empathy or remorse for what they do – they just leave disaster behind them,” Calleja says.
Extricating yourself from such disaster, say the experts, can be achieved but only with hard work.
Among the clients he sees at Melbourne Addiction Recovery Service, counsellor and experiential therapist, Melvyn Bowler, 68, says they fall into two categories: “those who want to stop because it is destroying their lives, and those coerced into seeing me because someone is forcing them to”.
The term ‘double life’, says Bowler, is not used in recovery circles.
“We would say the person is in ‘denial’, and has constructed a whole range of psychological and other defences to protect themselves from the painful consequences of what they are doing,” he says. “If someone is seeing me because they have been forced to, then my job is to attempt to break through their denial, and to become honest in their recovery effort. I do not always succeed. Living a double life becomes simply a part of life – second nature if you like. And some people can handle stress better than others.”
If Pete is leading a double life, he’s not hiding anything here.
It’s been just four minutes since we met in this second-storey room, with the smell of the kebab shop two doors down rising up the stairwell and the man behind the bar wearing nothing but an apron and lacy Carol-at-the-bar, with her overflowing bosom and Pete’s wife with the sleekly sexy black heels and her cigarettes, and he’s already telling me the name of his business and its website address.
He’s telling me this because we are at a swingers’ club – up here, above the suburban shopping strip, the under-populated Saturday night restaurants and the easy street parking– and he wants me to email him if I decide to come back. He’s telling me this because I have arrived here, with a female friend who I am pretending is much more, already carefully crafting my exit strategy with the story that we are two curious women, interested in the idea of all that is on offer but, for tonight, probably just here, slightly nervously, to look. And because that seems to disappoint him, he wants me to email him some warning if we plan to return another night and actually join in.
And so, he is spelling out his business name. Telling me to look it up.
For all Pete knows, my own husband could be a regular user of his products. For all Pete knows, my own profession could be linked with his somewhere down the distribution track. But if Pete does know this – if he thinks for a moment about the way his professional life might in one moment intersect with his personal – it doesn’t seem to bother him.
To him, being a swinger is comfortable, safe, secure. He nods towards a few other regulars, talks about this one, that one, by name. If he is living what some people would term a double life, then he is not living it here. Here, Pete is himself and he doesn’t seem to have anything he needs to hide.
Sure, his parents don’t know, his doctor, his neighbours, or the bloke at the petrol station where he fills up his ute. They don’t know that he comes here, to this bar where the tv plays orgy porno and the rabbit warren collection of utilitarian, purpose-built rooms out the back have bench-like beds without sheets butted up against the walls and black vinyl upholstery for easy cleaning. But it’s not like he tells them anything about his ‘regular’ sex life either, he says. There are some things you don’t need to share.
Unlike Herman Rockefeller, whose pretending about what he was led to his death and the raw shock of his family left in its wake, Pete has never lied about his relationship status (married) or age (36). But he doesn’t need to. With a wife who shares his penchant for group sex, he has never run into anyone he knows at any of the swingers’ clubs or parties he has been attending for the last couple of years but even if he did, he can’t see the problem.
“If they see you, then you’re seeing them too,” he says. “You’d be in the same boat, wouldn’t you? You’d both have the same secret.”
I have been talking to Carol and Nick – a twangy country couple just down for the weekend. They make semi-regular trips to the city to inhabit this swinging world they can’t find in their small hometown. There are a handful of advertised swingers’ events on in Melbourne tonight. One, Debauchery, is at the house of a professional organiser in the southern suburbs. One, Party Insatiable, bills itself as a gang-bang party, promising a ratio of five men to every one woman. Carol and Nick have chosen this one, open to couples, single women and just a smattering of unattached men, although they find the cooler, bar-like atmosphere – unlike the homier surrounds of the typical party where guests are directed to “dress down” into lingerie, or less, upon arrival – a little less welcoming. They haven’t heard of Herman Rockefeller and think it’s safe, even after last weekend’s experience at a different party, where Nick thinks Carol was slipped “a snow cone” (a sprinkling of amphetamine or ecstasy on top of a bong she had been offered).
“I was having a great time, apparently,” Carol says. “I can’t remember any of it but Nick looked after me. I don’t take drugs. I didn’t know what was happening but I wasn’t myself.”
We talk briefly, of romance and of poetry and how she used to read Keats when she was younger. Before Nick.
I suspect the heating has been turned up and, as Carol checks her watch – quarter to ten – the mood is following. A saggy man with a towel wrapped around his waist drips past from the spa that is bubbling somewhere down the back. It is time to leave. Despite my continual flagging of my plans, Carol and Nick seem surprised and as he kisses me goodbye on the cheek he presses just a little too closely, as if to show me what I might be missing. Carol is smiling, almost apologetically, sweet, her soft hand holding mine for too many seconds as she laughs off her husband with her country Australian drawl.
“You take your time and think,” she says. “Maybe we’ll see you next time.”
A few doors away, I eat sushi and wonder if everyone has taken their pick of those back rooms. The one that fits three; the one with the whipping frame; the one with room for eight, maybe more; the one with windows for other people to look through.
And I think of Carol and Nick – her lace, her poetry and the way they seem to love each other – and if their time chatting to me has meant they have missed out on some other grouping they weren’t taking time to make themselves part of. And I think that it’s all somehow sad but they seemed so happy. Sometimes things aren’t always what they seem.