Swingers are rule-breakers, does that make swinging bad?

Well, you know, swingers are rule breakers. – Apparently, I’m a very naughty girl then. – Right, swinging has a bad rap. – Because we are hurting the institution. – Swingers are not the best with consent. – Additional partner. – Additional partners, three additional partners. – Whatever.

Hi, I’m Ed. – And I’m Phoebe.

And this is Swinger University, and we are not in the studio, and I’ve said that for the last three episodes, but if it’s not obvious, this is not the studio. Today’s episode is a little bit different. We’ve talked about this bits and pieces. We had an episode a long time ago, good bapples, bad apples, but we wanted to get back into this because it keeps coming up. And we’re talking about swingers are rule breakers. We heard this recently in a post that somebody had made. We were like, “Well, you know, swingers are rule breakers.” We wanted to talk about that a little bit. Everyone knows that swingers are rule breakers, right? Or are they? Should we break rules? And which rules are made to be broken? (laughing) Did you see the fish jump?

If you spot it, put a comment in the video that you saw a fish. – Yeah, this is a video where you’re going to have to identify all the things that are in the video other than us too. – Right. I started thinking about this in terms of like rule breaking and swingers. And we all joke about it a little bit, but there’s a reality to this. And that is ethical non-monogamy breaks a lot of rules. So by very nature. – We are the ultimate rule breakers. – Right. So let’s talk about the big picture one. So you’ve got monogamy versus non-monogamy, swinging and polyamory, right? And whether you like it or not, ethical non-monogamy is a giant umbrella and swinging and poly and all the variations in between the two, they all fit under this umbrella. And the opposite side of that is monogamy. We’re all breaking that rule. It’s a taboo and we’re all in it because that’s what we’ve committed to is to be non-monogamous. The fact that if you’re a married couple and you’re having sex with other people, guess what? That’s adultery. So we’re breaking that rule too, but it’s by choice and it’s a mutual agreed. We’re consenting adults. We went into this together. I’m not coercing her. She’s not coercing me. This is it. This is by choice. So what two consenting adults decide to do, whether it’s by themselves or with other people. – Who the fuck else cares? – Right? And honestly, that breaks some rules because some people are like, well, you shouldn’t do that.

According to whose rules? – Right, who are you hurting? That’s our position on this. – Yeah, I’m not hurting anybody. – And which kind of leads into the whole thing, which is sex is fun. And if it’s fun and consensual and recreational, and not just for procreation, why can’t it be a good thing? Like, why can’t it? – We are hurting the institution, the religious institution. So we’re eroding the religious institution and the rules of that, which erodes society, which means as rule breakers, we don’t conform, which means we are now like nonconformists, which they can’t control and that’s scary. – Right, because if I decide to have hot dogs for dinner at my house, that prevents you from having hamburgers at your house or does it? I don’t think it does. – I don’t think it does. – So there you go. That’s the whole thing about taboo. And by its very nature, we’re all kind of breaking that rule. Let’s talk about some rules should be broken. There are a number of people out in the world who find things like, and here’s some naughty ones, masturbation, casual sex, premarital sex as being extremely taboo.

Yeah, still today. – For a lot of other people, not that big a deal. And I get it, if that’s the way you wanna believe and that’s what you stand by, then absolutely, please do because we’re not telling you what you should or shouldn’t do. – No. – And as an adult, I’m allowed to choose to do what I want to do as long as it’s legal and it’s not hurting anybody. So those are rules that we choose to break. We choose to masturbate and have sex out of wedlock and have sex with other people. And that’s okay for us. Doesn’t have to be okay for you. That’s absolutely okay. Here’s another one. This one’s your favorite. – Oh, oh, you know, sex is naughty. Apparently, I’m a very naughty girl then. – Right. There are a number of people who think that that is just not okay. And honestly, if that’s what you’re into, that’s okay to break that rule. That rule, the rule that you’re not supposed to be able to do that. Now, if someone doesn’t want to do that, then that’s okay for them to have that rule too. And you shouldn’t break that rule. – Right.

This is a good one. I’m gonna, I wanna speak to this one because there’s, there’s a segment of the population that believes that a woman using a marital aid, for those who don’t know, a dildo or a vibrator or any kind of sex toy, actually diminishes their masculinity. – Yeah. – I personally don’t feel that way. And I’m happy. Whatever makes her make those great noises that she makes, I’m all for it. So whether it’s a little mechanical device run on rechargeable batteries or alkaline, I don’t care because it makes her happy and that makes me happy. So- – And I get to put on a show or you get to see a show and I get to have fun in a different way. – What’s not to like about that? We are breaking that rule absolutely all the time. I’m happy to break the macho man rule because I seem to be enjoying it quite a bit and she’s not complaining about it either. – And variety is the spice of that. – And here’s the thing. If it helps her to achieve orgasm for those men who haven’t realized it yet, women don’t always orgasm with PIV sex or penis in vagina sex. Sometimes it requires a little bit of outside stimulation, fingers, toys, you name it. And that’s okay. – Additional partner. – Additional partners, three additional partners, whatever. Anything that helps someone achieve what their goal is for sex. And it’s not once again hurting anyone or illegal. Although sex toys ironically are illegal in some places and they’re trying to bring that illegality back. So if you live in a state where they’re trying to do that and you are against that, either move or vote them out because you know what? This is okay to do. There’s nothing wrong with having a vibrator in your nightstand and using it. This is a fun one. We like this one. – Sex in front of others. – It’s fun. – It’s a lot of fun. – It’s a lot of fun. And a lot of people would be very offended by that. That’s supposed to happen in your bedroom, in the privacy of your own home with the windows drawn and the lights off and the sheets and all of that. – And the special like cloth cover with a little– – Oh, with a hole in it, yeah. So having sex in public all out in the open with the lights on in crazy positions beyond missionary, you know, it’s okay. It’s a lot of fun. And that’s a great rule. We love breaking that particular rule. – We are making fun of a little, I will say, of people that do subscribe to that. – We do. – A lot of people do have sex in the dark with the sheet and the hole. – And some of that’s self-confidence and we’re not making fun of the people who have self-confidence issues or anything, but– – It doesn’t have to be a rule. Now, if it’s your religion and those are the things that you need to subscribe to in order to conform to that religion, one, you’re probably not looking at this podcast. – Or if you are, welcome aboard and come on over to the dark side because apparently we have– – And two, by all being subscribed to that, if that is how you want to live your life. You have the right to do that and– – It may be better for you that way. You may enjoy it more that way. And that’s okay. If that’s the way that you enjoy it, absolutely. It’s not hurting anybody. And what you do in the privacy of your house is absolutely okay. We choose to break that rule though. (laughing) – Because of the rules.

But let’s talk about the rules that shouldn’t be broken. – Uh-oh. – No, let’s get serious now. And this is where some swingers get in trouble and create a bad name for themselves. And this first one, consent. Absolutely, we admit it, swingers are not the best with consent. Not so much in terms of violating people’s consent, although that does happen. It’s more about not having good enough conversations about what consent means to that partner and actually having a consent conversation at the beginning. – Not having the best consent.

Yeah, there’s a lot of assumptions that get made in the lifestyle. And we would love to see that changed. We’re looking forward to helping to educate the community a little bit more about that. And you know what? Consent can actually be sexy. Having a conversation ahead of time about what you want to do with somebody and having them agree to it is kind of hot. – For example, here is a very subtle example of non-consent that happens all the time. I may be on the bed with another woman. She may be giving Ed a blowjob and her mister decides it’s okay to come up behind me and touch me because all three of me and his misses are touching. She’s touching you. I didn’t say I wanted to be touched. Did he ask to touch me? No. Did I want to be touched? No, I didn’t. I didn’t want any touching at that point. I wanted to do the touching because that’s what I wanted to do at that point. And if he had asked me, I would have said, thank you for asking that now. I’m really enjoying what I’m doing with your wife. – Right.

But I didn’t at the time and I wish I had. So over time, those little tiny breaks of consent start to build up and over time you start to think, wow, I mean, I’m not having great experiences or you know what, that experience was okay but it was kind of shitty because of this one thing or I wish I really would have been able to do this and express myself this way. But it got truncated because somebody else kind of came in and yucked my yum because I was enjoying this thing with somebody else. – Right, and that’s a good one of many examples of how, you know, consent gets a little iffy sometimes in the swing lifestyle. Now, the other one and this kind of segues into this next one, which is boundaries. So there are two sets of boundaries. There’s boundaries that you have agreed to with your partner and there are boundaries that you have with your new partners, whoever they are. Those rules shouldn’t be broken unless you have a renegotiation in the middle of an event and we’ve had that happen where we were rules upfront, decided we weren’t gonna do X or Y and then in the middle of it, we both look at each other and go, hmm, I’m kind of thinking we wanna change this boundary for tonight. And as long as it’s not a coercion and as long as everybody’s in agreement and it’s not like you aren’t able to consent to that because you’ve maybe had too much to drink or you’ve consumed something that lowers your inhibitions and you probably shouldn’t be breaking those kinds of boundaries, it’s perfectly fine. – Give me an example of a boundary. – A boundary, so the no kissing rule or you’ve decided that no anal with partners or you’ve decided that no single ladies for the night, that it’s all couples only, that’s our boundary for that night. – Yeah, so would you agree that even if a boundary isn’t spoken, it can be broken. For example, if you’re having sex with somebody and they decide to use their hand on your throat and perform, what is that called? – Asphyxiation. – Right, asphyxiation. Even though it wasn’t discussed as part of consent, wouldn’t you agree that that could be a boundary that’s broken even though it wasn’t discussed? Because there’s an assumption made that that’s a bit more, not extreme but– – It’s outside the normal realm of play. – Correct, which requires more conversation. – Yeah, and I would actually classify that more as a breaking of consent because they didn’t actually ask for your consent to perform that particular act. But yeah, that could have been a boundary in your mind but unless it’s communicated, which gets us back to the consent thing, it’s better not to say, I don’t do this and I don’t do that and I don’t do that. It’s much easier to say, I want this, this and this. Now you have a menu of play options that you can play with and anything that’s not on that menu, you gotta ask for additional consent because you were not granted it. – You may not even know a particular kink exists until you get with that partner and they think it’s okay and they perform that all the time and think they wanna do it on you and you’re like, I didn’t know what to say no to this because I didn’t even know this thing existed. – Right, which is also an excellent segue to our next item, which is kink contracts should never be broken. So in the kink community, there’s a, sometimes a written contract written up at the very beginning before play even starts. The two parties or whoever’s involved in that scene agree ahead of time to minuscule details exactly what’s going to go on and how it’s gonna go on. Now it doesn’t sound very spontaneous and it doesn’t sound very sexy, but you know exactly what you’re signing up for and in the kink community, especially when you’re talking about some pretty heavy impact play or others, like you can go beyond impact play, it’s very important to not break those things, especially when you start getting into things like consensual non-consent. Absolutely, you need an agreement up front and that is not okay to break. – But I will say talking about those things up front, that is a form of turn on for a lot of people. – Oh yeah. – Because you’re mentally discussing and communicating what you desire and expressing that and being able to express that is exciting and I do get that. – Oh yeah, absolutely. Talking to a potential play partner saying, “I’d love to do this to you and this and this.” It’s kind of a verbal agreement ahead of time, not a full contract, but if I had a woman come up to me and say, “I wanna do these three things to you,” I’d have been like, “Okay, please do. Where should I sit? Lie down, whatever.” The other one that you will never wanna violate are the rules of an event. – Yes. – You’re at a house party, they’ve got signs up that say, “Don’t go in here.” You’re at a house party and they say, “Don’t do X, Y, and Z in the backyard.”

Don’t leave beer cans or cigarette butts on the neighbor’s lawn or sidewalk as you leave. – Right. – Keep the noise down in the neighborhood. – Every event will have a specific set of rules and it is imperative, imperative that we follow those rules. Why? If you like the party and you want it to happen again, don’t piss the hosts off because they may go, “You know what? Screw these people.” They can’t follow rules and they broke all my shit or something bad happened or my neighbors hate me now. And guess what? We can’t have parties anymore. I don’t think you want that. You wanna be able to go back to that party, especially if you’re having such a good time that you decide that you wanna break some rules. So don’t break rules at events. (laughs) And this kind of gets us to the meat of the thing. And this is where we kind of, I alluded to this at the beginning, but I wanna talk about it a little bit more. And that’s that swinging has a bad rap. There are a number of podcasts who, I’m not gonna mention them. Nope, not gonna do it. Absolutely not stepping in that pile of, anyway, that are 100% convinced that swinging is a negative thing. It is a terrible term. And I don’t know if it’s that they have a disagreement with the term or that they just don’t wanna be associated with people who maybe do some of the things that we talked about in terms of like breaking rules and maybe not being the best within consent. I feel that that’s an overgeneralization because I would say the vast majority of people who we know who follow that club name of Swinger and don’t necessarily rely on something like ethical non-monogamy as the fallback term to describe what they do, which by the way, swinging is still ethical non-monogamy. If you’re not being ethical about it, you’re not really swinging, you’re just cheating. And that’s one of the rules that we also don’t break. We didn’t even get into that. But if you’re cheating, you’re not having an agreement with your partner, that’s not swinging. That’s just being a douchebag. So don’t be a douchebag. Swinging has gotten a bad rap because of some of the consent issues that we’ve talked about. And because there are a few individuals who do bad things and kind of make a bad name for us. But that’s not everybody. As a matter of fact, that’s not even the majority. That’s not even a large minority. It’s a really small segment of at least the people that we’ve hung out with. And we’ve been doing this for 11 years, Sacramento, Colorado, Florida, cruise ships, which is an international crowd, three of those. Hedonism, which is also an international crowd and they came from all over. Canadian swingers, oh, Costa Rica. We’ve been to multiple events down in Costa Rica with people from all over the world. And honestly, I can’t think of anybody on there, maybe a handful of people at any of the events that we’ve ever been at that broke any of these rules. It just doesn’t happen that much, which is why I think that either as a whole, we need to give the term swinger a break and stop kind of lumping even the bad people who are not being good swingers with the vast majority of people who are being good swingers and blacklisting all of us. That’s not fair. That’s like saying just because somebody cheats and they were polyamorous, that polyamory is a bad thing. That would be a stupid statement. That wouldn’t make any sense whatsoever. Nor would I say that the institution of marriage and monogamy is broken and bad and no one should do it because people cheat. Yeah, some people cheat. That doesn’t make marriage or monogamy broken. It’s just maybe not what we do. But that’s a whole other thing.

Ed’s on a rant. – I’m on my rant. That was my rant for the episode because I think swinging gets a bad rap for bad reasons. I don’t think that the reasons why swinging is a bad thing have anything to do with the community. I think it has to do with a couple individuals and their bad behavior. And I don’t associate with those people. And I certainly, if I had seen that at an event, might speak up and tell them, what are you doing? – There’s also what’s also happening more recently in our community probably in the last three to five years is that some of the party hosts will invite just anybody. They’re not swingers. So single males or anyone basically who knocks on their door, they’ll let in and it’s kind of like a Tinder event basically. So they don’t subscribe to the foundation that we all subscribe to as swingers, which is just this open loving sense of community with deep respect. And what comes from that is able to have good sexual experiences and play and be light and fun and enjoy kinks and have forms of intimacy with one another that are outside of our normal relationships or our main partner relationships, not normal, but our main partner relationships. And so it’s kind of diffusing the community because those individuals are being accepted in for profit. They’re not really swingers and they don’t really know the rules and no one’s educating them. They just take their money and they come in. – Exactly, exactly, exactly. Swinging is a lot of fun. If you can’t tell, we have a lot of fun doing it. Hardly because of the taboo nature of the lifestyle. But there are some rules that we need to be better at following so that we can all continue to enjoy the rest of the rule breaking with each other. Thanks for tuning in. We appreciate you watching our channel and listening in. If you’re listening in on the podcast, thank you. Thank you very much. We appreciate you. Don’t forget your homework. Tell a friend about our podcast. So the next time you heard an event, tell one, two, three people. Tell all the couples about Swinger University and how much fun you enjoy listening to our stories and the great positive message that we have about the swinging lifestyle. You can also leave us a voicemail at 916-538-0482. Love to hear your stories. And if you give us permission, we’d love to have your audio in the show. Cause that would be a lot of fun. – It would be a lot. – Even if it’s just something dirty. We can put that on the podcast and maybe not on YouTube. Hey. Or you can reach out to us at swingeryuniversity.com. You can email us. You can comment on all of our posts. You can look up our vacations and our cool merch. Cause we also have t-shirts on there too that I’ve designed. And yeah, or just stop in and say hi.

Just swing on through.

So, as we say, keep learning, keep growing and keep it sexy. (upbeat music)