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October 2004: PAUL SMITH’S DEVIANT’S DIARY - Getting out there and making new friends - Swinging & Dogging.
The Internet can get you into a lot of trouble. Just ask Gary Glitter. It’s being cited in more and more divorce cases as a portal for unreasonable behaviour and I’ve read a recent report claiming it’s added to a 30% increase in infidelity over the last 10 years. Friends Reunited is named-and-shamed a few times, but even scapegoats must have someone to blame. A small prize for the first reader to name the song that’s a lyric from. I’ve checked and ‘fuck-friends-reunited.com’ and .co.uk are both available to register, as are all variations of FuckFriendsReunited. Anyway, I’m not sure I believe all the facts and figures as they’ve been presented to me. I’ll just check with my girlfriend’s husband, as he’s a statistician… Oops.
As well as casual chat-room encounters there are more organised groups looking for extramarital fun ‘n’ games that have embraced the technology of the web for their own very sexy ends. If you believe all you’ve read on the subject in the papers already you’d think you couldn’t move for suburban wife-swapping couples and open-minded bi-curious folks out there, handling their mice. They must be using the Internet to contact each other because they can’t all be making Channel 5 documentaries to mate -sorry, make- new friends. Contact magazines? Get real guy! This is the 21st centaury and has been for a while now. If no longer buying copies of ‘Ladylike Connect’, one would hope these people are spending their money on condoms instead, but what else is there for them to spurge their wad on?
As well as ‘Match Makers’ lonely-hearts columns in local news papers (mine charges £1 per minute to leave a message for an advertiser and £1 per minute to collect them. But hey, placing an advert is free so that’s all right then!) and more mainstream introduction services there is an unending list of web sites for people looking for adult fun without ties. Or with ties if bondage is their (string) bag.
Adult Friend Finder.com claims to be the world’s largest Sex and Swingers personals site with over twelve million active members and it’s free to join. If you want to say ‘hello, show me your white bits’ to anyone it’ll cost you $19.95 for the ‘Silver’ membership or $29.95 for the ‘Gold’, which gets you extra benefits (highlighting, better search engine and the like) per month. Three month membership costs $35.95/$59.95 and the full year is yours for just $99.95/$149.95. For that they guarantee you… nothing. Talk about the perfect business!
For more cerebral stimulation Guardian online personals are called SoulMates and offer a classier sort of contact, charging £4.95 for 3 days, £16.95 for a month, £49.95 for 6 months and just under seventy quid for a full years unlimited e-mailing. Again this is not a full-on site but you know what your mum told you about being careful around the quiet ones. Mmmm, librarians.
Alt.com is a popular site for more fetishy/BDSM focused people and is owned by the same US firm as AFF. On the downside they use bloody annoying pop-ups. In a similar throbbing vein is Bondage.com. All of these sites offer free adverts but charge to make contact with anyone. They are highly geared-up to stop any attempts to circumvent the service by putting, “I can be reached by MyName at ‘not cold’ mail dot com” type stuff in profiles. Damn them. Then there’s Swingers clubs which neatly side-step ‘House of ill repute’ legislation by having membership Ts&Cs which clearly state that attendees are consenting adults and that any sex acts which they may perform in are conducted of their own free will…etc. Yearly membership is still around £60 and the drinks are pricey though… I believe. It looks like there’s no such thing as a cheap thrill these days, unless you still find the lingerie section in catalogues stimulating. Or is there?!
Away from the PC and out into the fresh air now. Exhibitionists and those looking for a different sort of experience have been known to go dogging. Don’t worry, no actual K9 activity is involved, but someone may sniff your arse if you ask him or her to nicely. After thoroughly researching my subject on the comprehensive Melanies-UK-Swingers.com site I knew what I needed to do.
Slightly nervously I pulled off the road (so that’s how they paint the white lines!) into the car park at Cockshoots Wood (I kid ye not) and my cars lights fell across a single lonely white van, containing a single lonely white man sitting in the dark. Naturally I parked up. I sat and waited. Perhaps a Monday night wasn’t the best choice but the reviews on several Dogging web sites said this was THE place to be in Buckinghamshire for gay and straight bow-wowing. If dogging still doesn’t mean much to you, you’ve not kept up to date with modern sexual practices or salacious stories about footballist Stan Collymore. I’ll retell the story that appears on The Mirror’s web site for those of you who missed it the first time around:
Stan claimed he visited a dogging site at Cannock Chase near his home in Staffs, after reading about the activity on the Internet. He started: “I went up there of my own free will.” One wondered just what he was talking about. I read on:
He used the name 'John', (inspired!) and was spotted talking to a M/F couple who quizzed him about the activity and asked for further information. He told them what he had read and swapped telephone numbers with them. Then he received a text from the man saying: 'My wife wants to get f****d (do you think they recognised him and meant fouled?) tonight. She's a bit nervous. Will you meet her at 8 o'clock (kick-off)?'
In Stan’s own (allegedly) words: “I've been on the Internet a lot doing research for work these last six months, where I learned there's been a phenomenon called dogging. I read all about it. Up the road from me is a big country park that is used for it. I found out what it was… Couples, exhibitionists. I originally spoke to a production company about doing it for a documentary. I went three nights ago. I have a telly in my car. (DVD player and a copy of Die SpermaSchleuder to break the ice?) Sat up there in the car park and within half an hour there was a local couple in a Range Rover. The husband wanted to see his wife with another guy. We got chatting. They then said they would be up there the next night. We exchanged mobile numbers. I went up the next night. It was fascinating (interesting choice of words). I got chatting to them. A car pulled into the space to my left. They had their interior lights on so I wound my window down and she said 'hi'. I was fully clothed. (He hadn’t got his kit off) She swung her legs out of the car towards me and I said: 'What are you up to?' They said they were new to it. I laughed and said: 'There's no hard and fast rules. I've been on the Internet loads of times. (Bloody armchair expert!) There's a code. Some couples like to be watched, some couples like to participate.’ The guy leant over and said: 'We were hoping to meet another couple.' We swapped numbers. I said: 'Good luck'. I got back in the car and said: 'There's two or three car parks on your way back. I'll show you. I put my arm out at each car park and showed them and that was it.”
That’s front-page news apparently. I think there may have been more gory details in the printed edition. Now, I don’t have an international football career to put in jeopardy by being in a car park in the middle of the night, but nor did I want to screw a stranger. Call me old fashioned. So I’d taken a copy of ETO with my Alexei Saylesque face in it and I hoped to find a playful couple to talk to me about their hobby. Pastime? Thinking about it, my dictionary defines a Sport as any game requiring specialist equipment so perhaps Dogging is a sport? Pro-Am Dogging on late-night TV could be a hit. At last, a vehicle for Anthea Turner to return to our screens!
I’d washed and Hoovered my car out - I might have been here to meet a couple who have sex with strangers but I didn’t want them to think of me as a slob - but as it turns out I’d wasted my time and efforts. After half an hour of sitting there in the dark I got bored and buggered off home.
Ashgrove Picnic site near Amersham was my next target, later in the week. I parked there for a whole hour on a Thursday night (it’s the new Friday, friends tell me. Well, I say ‘friends’. More acquaintances really) and all the action I saw was a deer running off into the woods like a startled whatsit. After a bit I got out and had a walk around looking for evidence of dogging. There were no used condoms or empty packets that I saw. No discarded notes on dogging etiquette - oh yes. There is a wrong way to masturbate while watching a couple in an intimate clinch. If you want to know what a flashed brake-light means or if an interior light left on really is an invitation, you’ll just have to visit Melanie’s extensive web site too. The only thing I did find was an empty dropped tub of Baby Wipes. Naturally disappointed, I headed on to the car park at Whiteleaf Cross (a chalk carving on the Chiltern Hills above Princes Risborough) and found nothing more than an abandoned looking Mk1 Astra with an odd coloured door. If there was any dogging going on here tonight it wasn’t with my sort of people so I came away empty-handed again.
I imagine this is both the attraction and the problem with dogging. It’s spontaneous, anonymous and, as I discovered, unreliable. I suppose it needs to be kept that way otherwise the police would just turn up at the publicised time and place and arrest everyone. The legal side of exhibitionism - or indecent exposure if you’re a Police person, solicitor or Magistrate - is clearly a dodgy area. That’s dodgy, not doggy. Technically being nude in public, if it doesn’t cause offence, isn’t an offence. The moment someone manhandles a mammary, grabs a genital or strokes a scrotal sack it’s a whole new ball game.
Call me crazy, but do you know what the second biggest name in High-Street coffee shops is? Marks and Spencer. What does this tell us? That socialising over a coffee and shopping go hand in latex glove. Have you ever stopped to think sex is not a solo activity? Well, not always. I mean it takes two to tango (or three for a birthday treat) and you could put a supermarket style card-wall up in store and charge a weekly/monthly fee for an e-mail address, disguised photo and ‘ISO’ info to appear there. At least that way any contacts made would be local and folks wouldn’t discover their ideal sexual partner lives just 20 miles south of Bismarck, North Dakota. Perhaps you shouldn’t think of your sex shop as just a retail outlet but rather as a Mecca for the sexually enlightened. Apologies to any Muslims or Bingo venue managers who are reading this. Ironic really as gambling is against Islamic law…
Just a thought; Do depressed single Doggers go to the top of a multi-story car park to toss themselves off? A last note for any purveyors or fans of Internet Porn: Visit www.PotNoodle.com for a strangely familiar, yet surreal experience.
Paul Smith is still free to a good home. Kinky Job offers to info@snapsandbytes.co.uk please.
Almost 2000 words on whole other woodland folk Dale. Hope you like them - Paul..