Swingers is one of the least sexy and most explicit podcasts I’ve ever listened to. You need to hear it too.
In the BBC Sounds podcast, award-winning journalist Catrin Nye meets Ruth O’Grady from north Wales, who signed up for swinging website FabSwingers at her husband’s request and ended up having sex with more than 100 men over 13 months, becoming what Ruth describes as a “glory hole”. The wisdom of Gisèle Pelicot – that “shame must switch sides” – has inspired her to come forward under her real name to tell her story.
Jokes about swinging and putting keys in bowls have long been in circulation, but a risque extracurricular activity from the 1970s has now segued into huge online communities. Sex parties, fantasies and websites set up specifically to serve those communities are easily available and cater to “nearly every fetish and desire.”
But what is the reality for many of the women involved? Who dictates the practices? Who actually gives consent? If you agree to a request by your partner which leads to hundreds of other subsequent encounters which you take part in, are you to blame, or are they? And can abuse be shielded behind the language of sexual preferences and proclivities?
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This is not a podcast to kink-shame. There are women and men who enjoy swinging and do so completely consensually. But as Nye and her team learn, online communities are populated mainly by men and are rife with women being coerced, trafficked and abused.
It’s incredible how much information Nye draws out of men on the site, who agree to speak to her (anonymously) about their experiences, including rapes they say they have witnessed. It reminds me of one of the details from the Pelicot case that stays with me to this day – none of the men reported the depravity they witnessed. Not a single man who saw this elderly unconscious woman being assaulted by strangers had a change of heart and went to the police.
Swingers dives deep into the nuance of consent involved in sexual exploration. The consent Ruth originally and begrudgingly gave to her now ex-
husband, Chris, ultimately led to him arranging for her to service up to four men a day. It’s a tough listen. And it gets tougher. Chris, meanwhile, refused to appear or answer the allegations.
The podcast also explores the role of policing in complaints about swinging communities, when lines are blurred. In Ruth’s case, the police claim that the fact that she arranged some of the encounters by text indicated consent and would therefore make her an unreliable witness.
Yet Freedom of Information requests submitted to all 45 UK police forces identified 329 reports mentioning FabSwingers, including allegations of rape, serious sexual offences, controlling and coercive behaviour, harassment, blackmail, stalking, and assault.
Some 26 individuals have been charged or summonsed in cases where FabSwingers was mentioned, with 23 cases ongoing. This is serious stuff, and how it is policed matters. It’s good to hear a personal hero, former chief prosecutor-turned-advocate for sexual abuse victims Nazir Afzal, reflect on the challenges around consent for the judicial system.
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Another side of swinging emerges when Catrin and her team visit a swingers’ club in Liverpool, where the clientele is more evenly split between men and women, security is present, and the establishment is run by a woman who also happens to be a dominatrix. Genuine consent is clearly a priority, as is recognising the potential for abuse. The club reminds me of Killing Kittens, an online community hosting sex parties that are all about women being in charge of their own sexual experience and their own access to exploration.
It would be easy to clutch pearls and just be shocked by the revelations in Swingers. It’s much harder to do what Nye and her team want us to – dive deeper into the nature of nuanced consent, the areas of extreme risk and the ways to help more women like Ruth O’Grady escape such situations.
We need to recognise just how many people are using these sites and clubs and to make sure services are available without judgment, without shame and without the police acting like it is still 1902. I’m grateful to Ruth O’Grady and Catrin Nye for the massive amount of bravery and effort involved in bringing this to light.
Swingers is available on BBC Sounds
