John Henley
BODY LANGUAGE
The entrance is discreet, dimly lit. At the foot of a nondescript modern block in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, a door opens. A well-coiffed woman in late middle age inspects the new arrivals: smart casual dress only, and sorry sir, no unaccompanied men tonight. That’ll be R300 a couple, please.
Inside, couples sit nursing cocktails, chatting with other couples and eyeing the dance floor, where a blonde in a see- through skirt is waltzing with a bronzed man in full evening dress. Other couples, beautiful and not so beautiful, join the dancers. Glances are exchanged, signals sent. A male hand reaches out to touch a female shoulder, a female finger brushes a male’s hair.
>From those signals, new couples and foursomes emerge, dance, entwine. They move back to the bar, buy drinks, talk. They define preferences and reach agreements. Then they retire.
Behind the dance floor is a narrow doorway. Through the doorway is a dark room. Sofas line the walls, punctuated by curtained alcoves. Couples, threesomes, foursomes are making love on the sofas. Others look on. An alcove curtain is twitched aside. A flashlight illuminates the couple outside; a brief once-over and they are invited in. At another alcove, a polite rejection.
All around there are moans, whispers and imprecations. The smell – of sweat, scents and bodily fluids – is indescribable.
Back outside, fully dressed again, sitting at the bar as if nothing has happened on this perfectly ordinary Friday night, two attractive twentysomething couples, strangers an hour ago, discuss the price of apartments. ”Oh damn,” says one of the women. ”I’ve left my pants in there. You wouldn’t go back and get them, chri?”
Bizarre is not the word for this place. It is a club changiste or, more vulgarly, a boite partouze: a swingers’ club. A few years ago there were 10 of them in Paris; now there are more than 50, and 200 have mushroomed in the rest of the country. According to one survey, 400 000 French men and women visit one each year.
And if they have long been the butt of nudge-nudge dinner-table jokes about bored middle-aged, middle-class couples seeking to rejuvenate their sex lives – the men all open-necked shirts and medallions, the women all bulging lycra and fishnet stocking – they are changing.
Their clientele is, apparently, far younger than it was. There are far fewer wedding rings about. The places are becoming trendy. Michel Houellebecq, the new enfant terrible of French letters, described them in detail in his novel Elementary Particles. Technikart, coolest of Paris culture mags, defined changisme as ”the ultimate end-of-millennium adventure”. Even the highbrow Nouvel Observateur and French Elle magazine have been there.
”It’s the spirit of the times,” says Pierre-Arnaud Jonard, one of an estimated 20 like-minded souls in Paris who, put off by the ”petit bourgeois” atmosphere of the clubs, organises his own swingers’ soires. They are popular among young professionals of a certain caste: strictly 19- to 35- year-olds, gay and straight, working in TV, films, advertising and photography.
”The end of the 1960s and the 1970s was liberated, but represented a very short period in … the 20th century. Then there was Aids, coinciding with 20 years of political conservatism, repression, puritanism, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. It couldn’t last for ever, and this is the result: an explosion of pent-up energy.”
These Paris clubs have names such as Le 2+2, Les Chandelles, Le Clopatre, Au Pluriel, Au Dix Bis, Chris et Manu. Most make condoms freely available at the bar, and if some allow unaccompanied men, it is only on slow, sad afternoons, and at double the standard entrance fee.
The etiquette is strict: anyone, at any time – particularly any woman – has the right to say no to any proposition, without offering any explanation. No one asks twice, and no eyebrows are raised if a couple prefer exhibitionism to changisme, or just want to sit and watch.
”Compared with a Saturday night at an ordinary club, it’s a delight,” says Delphine, a music journalist of 32 and a regular visitor to Au Pluriel. ”The first time I went it was to please a boyfriend who was keen, and I was scared, no question. But no one hassles you. You do exactly what you yourself decide you want to do.”
People partouze for various reasons. For the older ones, the traditional motive is still the most common. ”It saved our marriage,” says Klaus. ”We were bored with each other. We were both having affairs. We found each other in a new kind of complicity. It worked for us.”
The new and beautiful young crowd is different. For Daniel Weltzer-Lang, a French sociologist who has written on the subject, ”they are inventing a new sexuality … It’s as if the couple is becoming an open space where it’s possible to discover all the paths of sexuality.” Another social scientist, Michel Maffesoli, says the collective youth subconscious ”has been tapped into by a new demand for excess”.
Jonard agrees. ”Anyone can see they are out for something more than what they could get with their bodies any time they wanted. But it’s not just instant sexual gratification they’re after; it’s more about closeness, sharing, a kind of complete sensuality. If they have sex it’s fine, if they don’t it’s fine. It’s the atmosphere that counts.”
The atmosphere is not aggressive or threatening. The rules are clear; the pick- up technique is more subtle than in any Champs Elyses disco. Women say that a wave of the hand, a shake of the head, is enough to discourage unwelcome attention. It is, many say, liberating.
Of course it is also exciting. As Thierry Hardisson, a well-known French TVpresenter and frequent visitor to Les Chandelles, said recently: ”In an ordinary club, you drink your drink and watch people dancing and think about them having sex. In this kind of club, you drink your drink and watch them having sex. You start where usually you end.”
But it is also, somehow, depressing. However polite, elegant and acceptable in a fin-de-sicle France where TV, billboards and fashion stores bombard you with constant, more or less explicit, images of sex, it is a side of human nature that many would rather not see.
”It’s animal,” says Marie-Hlne, a one- time-only visitor to Le Clopatre. ”If you’re honest with yourself, you couldn’t not get turned on. It’s porn without the screen. But even watching, the experience is incredibly violent. What happened, exactly, to love?”