British Swinging — The Lifestyle the Tabloids Got Wrong
Britain has a complicated relationship with its own sexuality. A country that produced the Profumo Affair, invented the expression "not in front of the children," and managed to make even the word "saucy" sound apologetic is also, quietly and without much fuss, home to one of the largest and most active swinger communities in the world. The tabloids have never quite known what to do with this fact. The Daily Mail disapproves. The Sun is titillated. The Guardian writes 3,000 words about consent culture and forgets to mention that people are actually having a good time. None of them are particularly close to the truth. The truth is that British swinging is ordinary in the best possible sense of that word. The people doing it are not libertines or deviants or the cast of a Channel 4 documentary in animal masks. They are couples in their thirties and forties from Nottingham and Bristol and Manchester who have decided, together and deliberately, that the conventional ...
