In my New Year’s Resolution post a year ago, and again yesterday, I mentioned “high-concept swinging” as a goal.
A couple of readers asked just what I meant by that. Sorry – I was talking to myself when I wrote it, imagining you would know exactly what I meant when what I mean isn’t at all apparent.
A lifetime or two ago (but well within the one that’s documented in this blog), T and I worked hard, with a couple of others, to bring about an evening inspired by Rachel Kramer Bussel‘s super-hot story, “Secret Service.” The story concerns a restaurant that has a back room, in which female patrons can be, um, serviced orally by an expert staff.
My friends and I (it was T and I and another couple) thought we would have a super-hot evening in which we prepared and/or catered a fancy, delicious meal for some hand-chosen guests. We imagined our guests would be blindfolded for much or all of the evening, and that, one by one, they would leave the table and be serviced orally by some combination of us. We would, we thought, give them a menu from which they could select various styles and variations of oral pleasure (would you like a thumb in your ass? your clit nibbled? your frenulum sucked?). We all had different visions of just how the evening might go – would we meet the dinner guests before hand? Would they know who was servicing them? But we were prepared to work through all that as the event approached.
To us, this was self-evidently such a manifestly good idea that we imagined we’d have takers immediately, that we’d have to beat away our suitors at the door.
No such luck.
For months – literally – we had ads running on CraigsList. They were all variations on a theme, but they basically laid out the vision I’ve described above. We got the odd interested inquiry, and even more infrequently, an interesting inquiry. But no more than two or three whom we considered serious prospects. Certainly, we’re tough customers, with high standards. But we had no idea how hard it would be to find willing co-participants.
In the end, we only really found one couple, and our collective vision for the dinner party didn’t really work with just one couple. So instead, we just fucked them.
But I haven’t let go of that fantasy, or of the fantasy of some other such highly stylized sexual encounter featuring some combination of anonymity and pre-established commonality of sexual aims.
It could be a dinner party like the one described. Or perhaps just a round-robin dinner party, where, one by one, each possible M/F couple excuses itself for 5-15 minutes. But no more.
Or maybe three couples relatively unknown to one another meet in a bar, don’t speak to one another, but (again, round-robin style) the M/F pairings silently rendez-vous in the bathrooms.
One challenge for me in bringing these fantasies to fruition is that they appeal more to me (much) more than they do to T.
The other, it seems, is that they appeal to me more than they appeal to just about anyone else in the universe.
Anyway, that’s what I meant….
And here’s Rachel Kramer Bussel, reading the story….
Can I please register my interest?? This sounds like an awesomely hot hot hot thing to do from either side i.e. be the patron or the staff.
Jake and myself sometimes find ourselves in the same situation as you. We have concepts wich to us sound really hot and some people we speak to in person agree but when you actually try to make it happen people look at their feet and shuffle away. I think the general population lacks imagination or if they have the imagination they lack the confidence or some other personal trait to make the fantasy acutally happen. Even in the vanilla world I find people really don’t engage well in concepts like fancy dress parties or imagination games with their children.
But again. I definitely think your idea is hot.
Of course you can register your interest. But, um, aren’t you kinda far away?
Yeh I did realise that when I made the offer. That is one of the downsides of the internet. Great for finding people who are interested in the same thing. They usually happen to be on the other side of the world.
Indeed. Well. If you find yourself over this side of the world, give me a heads-up!
Thank you for the explanation.
Lord knows, I’m not a fan of spontaneity but don’t you think that the level of detail necessary in planning this eventually interferes with the enjoyment (and success) of the event? My experience has been that, beyond a certain point, planning sex stuff tends to set up expectations that may or may not end up being met.
Excellent question. My answer? No. No, I don’t think so. We had a bit of a discussion, the four of us doing the original dinner party planning, on this question. Two of us wanted to vet the couples in person, to talk to them, get to know them, prior to the event. Two of us didn’t. I, actually, wanted to SEE them, but not to talk with them. So we briefly planned for T and our two friends to meet a couple while I would be the Most Interesting Man in the World, sitting at the far end of the bar, visible, identified, but not participating.
I think, in the end, that expectations COULD be a problem, but the way to manage that is to keep mystery high.
I’ve confronted a different version of this in my relationships with my distant buddies. At a certain point, in a couple of relationships, the mystery has disappeared, the attraction has become less intense. I’m always curious as to just what it is that makes that happen. I think, honestly, it’s the online equivalent of watching a boyfriend or girlfriend use the toilet (if you’re not into that), or of hearing her or him fart (if you’re not into that). It’s when the daily, non-sexual, aspects of life reach a certain critical mass in my experiences of the person. But as long as mystery is maintained, nah, I don’t worry about it.
So what you’re saying, B.E.G., is you’re not interested? 😉
Nooooo, that’s not what I’m saying. On the contrary, I think, like Gemma, it’s quite an attractive scenario you’ve outlined.
It’s simply that – for me, anyway – it’s necessary to be careful not to invest too much in a fantasy because fantasies can morph into expectations very easily. And expectations are tricky things in sexual situations.
I know people say that, but it’s (honestly) just rarely been my experience. FWIW.
I do totally agree. I did write a post about expectations sometime ago and described a sitation we were in with a very inexperienced couple. The lady of the couple came into a planned encounter with us with an entire minute by minute agenda in her mind. Problem was she didn’t really discuss it with us and as it turns out some of her ideas didn’t work with the way we operate.
You can imagine how it turned out. I think N is right, not everyone is like that and most people get the concept of ‘go with the flow’ but there is always one and I think a situation like this that looks highly planned runs the risk of attracting those types.