“Two huge floors all for you!! Dungeons too!!”
That’s an ad for the Power Exchange Mixed Sex Club in San Francisco, one of hundreds of such clubs from Los Angeles to Tokyo to London to Chicago.
Despite their ubiquity — just type “sex clubs” into Google and 3,470,000 hits come up — these clubs exist in a world that’s largely obscured unless something such as the allegations in the Jack and Jeri Ryan divorce papers provides a peek behind the curtain.
“In this country, it’s estimated that between 10 to 25 percent of the population has visited sex clubs,” said Jessica Lippman, a clinical psychologist in Chicago. “It’s an exhibitionism and voyeurism experience, a kick I suppose, but it falls apart if one of the couple doesn’t consent.”
Dan Savage, author of the 2002 book “Skipping Towards Gomorrah” about contemporary vice in the middle class, said, “If her charges are true, and he kept insisting she try it when she didn’t want to, then he’s a cad. But on the kink-o-meter these days, the actual activity is pretty much a bore.
“Spicing up your sex life with new adventures is now often suggested by such mainstream counselors as Dr. Ruth, let alone crazy types like me.”
Lippman was asked if a psychologist would likely recommend a visit to a sex club to revive a troubled marriage.
“No,” she said.
The sex club demimonde is made up of many nations — swinging, swapping, bondage and so forth. The most common of these is swinging, defined on one Web site as “bringing couples together for sex.”
Jeri Ryan claimed — and Jack Ryan denies — that he took her to sex clubs in New York, New Orleans and Paris. At the Paris club, her filing states, “People were having sex everywhere. I cried. I was physically ill.”
In New York, she said, he made her visit two clubs in one day. The first of those had “mattresses in cubicles,” and she refused to go in. The second she described as “a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling.”
She said her husband wanted her to have sex with him while another couple watched and that she refused.
“It’s called `soft swinging,'” said Sue Gould, who runs Club Adventure, a sex club meeting monthly in hotels across a three-state area including one in Northbrook. She was speaking of having sex with your partner in front of others, the activity alluded to in the Ryan papers. She said soft swinging is an increasingly popular subset of swinging.
“Nowadays, people are worried about HIV and STDs, so they stick with their partner,” she said, noting that soft swinging has been a growing trend since at least the early 1990s. “Probably 70 percent of the people in my club do soft swinging,” she said.
What statistics show
University of Chicago sociologist Edward Laumann, head of a research team that has extensively surveyed sex issues, said that when asked about sex in front of others, 5.3 percent of men said they found it “very appealing,” as opposed to 1.5 percent of women. In his national study of Americans 18 to 59, 4.1 percent of men found sex with a stranger “very appealing,” while only 0.9 percent of women agreed.
“By and large,” Laumann said, “women are not interested in anonymous sex but in sex that is part of a relationship.”
Savage said he thought the allure of soft swinging “is a more extreme version of the high some men get in simply showing off their beautiful wives. For those with an exhibitionistic streak, it’s not enough to just have her on your arm. It’s the desire to have people watch the actual deed.”
Stephen, of Private Affairs in DeKalb, another sex club operator who did not want his last name in the paper, said, “Voyeurism is a big part of the lifestyle. You get couples who want to watch, and you get couples who want to be watched. We have rooms with doors that lock. We have rooms with no door, and we have rooms with windows.”
Lippman was asked if the huge interest in the Ryan allegations was, itself, a form of voyeurism. “That’s exactly what it is,” she said. “People can look at it with the safety of watching from behind the newspaper.”
Though none of the clubs the Ryans allegedly visited was identified, one might well have been the Hellfire, which, for three decades, occupied a basement space in Manhattan’s far West Side.
“You’ll always find voyeurs and exhibitionists,” Hellfire owner Lenny Waller said. “You can’t have one without the other, and if you wanted to be private, you’d stay home.”
Under New York law, oral sex and intercourse have been illegal in such places since 1985, a response to the AIDS crisis of the early ’80s. The law shuttered New York’s most famous swingers club, Plato’s Retreat. The Hellfire shut down in 2001, and the scene there now has shifted more to sex parties arranged over the Internet and held in a different location each time to avoid being shut down by the police.
“Clubs are very old school,” said Abby Ehmann, publisher of a guide to adult entertainment in New York. “People are looking for new experiences. They don’t necessarily want to just come in, take off their clothes and flop down. They’re people who don’t mind having a cocktail or dancing a little bit.”
Ehmann also organizes fetish and sex parties, often in loft spaces. “You could have a bar mitzvah there or a sex party,” she said.
Dawn and her husband of 23 years, Dave, who, for family reasons, declined to give a last name, have run Couples Choice, a swingers club in Country Club Hills for the past 16 1/2 years. She said the devices in a New York club described in the Ryan divorce papers didn’t sound like what is typical in the Midwest.
“Our couples are not into that kind of stuff,” she said. “They just enjoy sharing partners.”
The club meets the last Friday of the month and every Saturday night, when as many as 60 couples attend.
“We get business people, doctors, lawyers, police officers,” she said. “You dance, have a drink, play a game of pool and maybe take it further. It’s a place to meet and maybe continue something beyond that. It’s like a dance social.”
Different in Midwest
A Los Angeles magazine story published in 1999, the same year the Ryan papers were filed and sealed, talks about sex club parties held in local mansions that were up for sale and unoccupied. But in the Midwest, expectations of the level of sex club glamor shown in the movie “Eyes Wide Shut” are unlikely to be met.
A woman who asked not to be identified has, with her husband, run a swingers club in DuPage County for the past five years and has been in “the lifestyle” for seven; she described a typical meeting her club holds in a hotel:
“Most times, if you walked in, it would look like it’s just a party. The women are just dressed more risque. It’s about 20 couples, paying $50 a person. It runs from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. It’s a special venue for couples to meet. If they so choose, they can get a room or exchange e-mails.”
If a couple never have been to a swinging party, they are required to attend a three-hour orientation session, held one Saturday night a month from 8 to 11. There are videos and speakers about safe sex.
“It’s non-play,” she said, “and a good way to get a view of the lifestyle.”
And then she had to hang up. She had errands to run at the mall. Her husband already had left for Vitamin World.
