Mardi Gras party

Even though I have been attending Club Pyrite for decades I had never been to one of their Mardi Gras parties. Because of the scarcity of the remaining parties and the large number of people planning to attend Jo and I attended.

It was interesting. The people attending had a lot of energy and even though we only played with each other we had a pretty good time talking with friends and throwing beads to the women flashing their breasts on the balconies.

It was a little surreal because due to recent complaints to the state liquor control board women had to be wearing pasties such that their nipples weren’t showing in the area were alcohol was being consumed. What? For decades people at the club have been on the dance floor in the same area wearing little more than shoes. This is a sex club! Who could be a member of this club and complain about exposed nipples?

I’m glad I was able to attend the last Mardi Gras party. It was fun with a strong mixture of frustration and sadness.

Sunday party desolation

Saturday night, Valentines Day, was a large party with several hundred people. Jo and I were pretty much wiped out by our volunteering and didn’t participate in the party. So Sunday night we attended for our own benefit.

There were perhaps 20 or 30 participants and no one of particular interest to us. We played with each other on “the perch” and watched some others having sex then went home.

Valentines Day marathon

Jo and I attended the Valentine’s Day party at Club Pyrite as volunteer drink servers. We arrived at 6:00 PM for the pre-event briefing. Jo had 10 tables of six people each and in a different section I had three tables of six people each. As you might imagine Jo was pretty much overwhelmed. I helped out occasionally by pouring water and once with complying with a request for a long passionate kiss from Tanya who was at one of Jo’s tables.

We were supposed to do bed monitor duty starting at 9:00 PM but the nine (!) course meal went way long and we didn’t finish with the serving of drinks until 10:00 at which time we had to start with our first shift closing duties. This entails stacking of chairs and other clean up in the dining area. It was nearly midnight when we finished and we were too tired from the stress to be interested in finding someone to play with.

I had an event to attend early the next morning about a half hour in the opposite direction from home so Jo went home alone in her car and I spent the night in the sleeping area at the club.

It has been years since I spent the entire night at the club and it was interesting to see about a third of the beds still occupied in the play area the next morning. There were a lot of cars in the parking lot too.

I also found it very interesting that the event I went to the next morning was something completely unrelated to sex and that one of the other participants was Kenny (see here for more details) who I had met at Club Pyrite many years ago.

Creating lust

This is an interesting talk on love and lust. Probably the most interesting part to me was how to create lust in a long term relationship. It starts at 10:00 minutes into the video:

Newness, surprise, mystery, and arousal producing activities are the three keys to increasing lust. Arousal isn’t just sexual arousal. Scary movies, roller coasters, etc. also produce arousal.

Sex clubs, sex parties, and playing with other couples produce all three and enhance lust in your loving long term relationship.

H/T to Justin J Lehmiller.

Coming out

The O Face Podcast  just released Episode 13: Coming Out. I left a comment there but I thought it was appropriate for a blog post as well:

I’ve been in the lifestyle for over 37 years now but for some reason I have always been a little bit reserved about coming out to friends and family even though the experiences have all been fine. My last parent recently died and I’m now at the point of I don’t care anymore. I’m not going to broadcast it on my vanilla blog or Facebook, but the extent of my openness is going to be determined by the comfort level of my girlfriend. And since she recently brought her brother to the club that is a pretty low threshold.

My two daughters “figured it out on their own” and confronted my ex-wife about our lifestyle choices. They just bluntly asked, “Are you and Dad swingers?” They just wanted to know. My ex told them yes and they said it was fine if we did that sort of thing but they would never do it.

Over the years I have come out to about a half dozen friends and co-workers with zero negative repercussions. But those were pretty carefully chosen people. I wouldn’t have come out to someone who I didn’t think was going to be receptive to the idea, so it is a biased sample.

The scariest time was when swinger friends of ours got divorced and there was a child custody battle. The woman getting divorced claimed she was forced into the lifestyle and my ex and I had to testify in court. Our kids were still at home at the time and we had concerns there might be child welfare visits to our home or something. It didn’t happen but those were some of the nightmares we had about that experience.

Number of sexual partners

Dr. Justin Lehmiller gave his blog post the title Some People’s Brains May Be “Wired” To Seek More Sex. He says:

What these results tell us is that people’s brains seem to respond to sexual imagery in very different ways. For some people (i.e., those with more partners), the brain appears to be highly sensitive to all sexual cues, whether they are mild or intense. However, for others (i.e., those with fewer partners), the threshold for sexual arousal is set much higher, meaning that it takes a strong cue to elicit a strong response. Because these differences in brain sensitivity were related to previous number of sex partners, these findings raise the provocative possibility that the way our brains are “wired” to respond to sexual cues could potentially be a key factor in explaining why some people pursue more sexual partners than others.

But I am siding with the skeptics in the comments. Especially SandraL who said:

The conclusions being drawn here seem to be making unproven assumptions about correlation and causality. Are people more likely to seek out sexual experiences because they’re more stimulated by explicit sexuality, or are people more stimulated by explicit sexual images because their brains have been primed by frequent sexual experiences in the past year?

I know there has been a fair amount of desensitization to my sexual interest over the years. I have seen and participated in so many group sex situations that it seems pretty ordinary and natural to me. This was certainly not the case when I was in my late teens.

I think more research on this topic is needed.

Quote of the week—Betty Dodson

We can be mentally excited by the prospect of sex, but in order to be physically aroused, we need up to twenty minutes (or more) of quality clitoral touching in order to be fully turned on.

That’s when vaginal walls plump up and get covered with a slippery mucous and we urgently want your penis inside us for a long slow hot deep fuck. We might even want a second lover to fill in while you’re resting. Alas, that’s the scary part of loving a sexually liberated woman. Only sexually secure men can handle this.

Betty Dodson
April 5, 2014
In Search of the Female Orgasm

Dodson frequently has some insightful things to say. But I sometimes get annoyed with her when she makes far too general of statements. This is one of those times.

I know many women become fully aroused, slippery wet, and asking for entry without 20 minutes of clitoral stimulation. I concede I have a biased sample. Dodson may be correct with a more typical woman but it certainly isn’t universal.

Female promiscuity and economic dependence

I found the article Why So Many People Care So Much About Others’ Sex Lives interesting. It referenced this study which concluded:

At the individual level, perceived female economic dependence explained significant variance in anti-promiscuity morality, even after controlling for variance explained by age, sex, religiosity, political conservatism, and the anti-promiscuity views of geographical neighbors. At the state level, median female income was strongly negatively related to anti-promiscuity morality and this relationship was fully mediated by perceived female economic dependence. These results were consistent with the view that anti-promiscuity beliefs may function to promote paternity certainty in circumstances where male parental investment is particularly important.

That would imply that people would be more likely to participate in the lifestyle when women are more likely to have their own jobs and able to support themselves. It is certainly true that nearly all of the women I know in the lifestyle have their own jobs. But I don’t know that much about women who are not in the lifestyle. It could be that most of the women I happen to know are capable of being independent.