People with dramatically fun sex lives are underrepresented in the larger culture, and Mark & Christy Kidd’s A Modern Marriage: A Memoir is an antidote; let us start with a pornographic quote in media res at a sex party: “Isabelle was also being fucked doggie-style by a man behind her. With the passion injected into her by the other man, she was sucking Mark’s cock. It was aggressive and hard, and Mark was rolling his head in pleasure. Isabelle was obviously not one of those women who felt obligated to do a blow job; she was someone who truly loved it.”

Whatever censoriousness Christy might’ve harbored is gone. Instead of jealousy she admirably feels admiration. She feels pleasure. The descriptions of mutual pleasure kept us reading and will keep you reading.

As couple number one kept going, the man from couple two started softly stroking the arm of the woman from couple one. She responded by allowing him to keep stroking, and eventually by stroking his hand back. That was all the man in couple number two needed. He almost imperceptibly shifted his hips so his crotch was within reaching distance of the woman and, sure enough, in a few seconds she moved her hand to his dick and started lightly feathering it with her fingers, even as she was being fucked by her man. Emboldened or excited by this, the woman in couple number two started feeling the man in couple number one. Everyone was getting more and more into it. It was all very … good-natured. And generous. Instead of the usual proprieties of exclusion that defined most private sex acts, this one felt giving. In the most literal sense, they shared themselves and each other.

The word “crotch” is a mistake here, but ignore it and the scene works. “Generous” describes our experience: while so much of sexuality is about guarding, limiting, stopping, and policing, the sex party goers we’ve met have a sense of limitless possibility and little fear that we’ve not found in most sexual circumstances. That attitude is one we wish more people had and that makes us feel giddy after sex parties. Sharing is literal and figurative at them. Like digital goods, sex is not totally exclusionary, and one person having sex at one point doesn’t stop another person from having it at the same or another point. In economic and legal jargon sex is non-rivalrous, if we choose to make it so.

Christy & Mark feel more tightly connected post-experience, as we are told many times:

Even though Mark was having his separate experience, he and I were so intimately bonded that I could tell what it was like for him, and I’m certain he could tell what it was like for me. It was almost like we were making love to each other, through other people. We were both in heaven.

If their experience is heavenly, why don’t more couples try? Don’t we want heavenly experiences on earth? Group sex is not hard to find for those who have considered finding it.

Jealousy is the most obvious barrier, along with fear, and other parts of the dark side. Regarding Christy & Mark specifically, we can say they have greater empathy than most couples, though they also witness their share of swapping couples disintegrate. But it’s hard to say how many couples would’ve disintegrated without sex parties or swapping; most couplings don’t end in death, regardless of the wedding vows most feel free to disregard with impunity.

Swapping is at least a willing alteration of the traditional vows rather than a discarding of them. The Protestant age is the age of the individual’s interpretation in defiance of lofty authorities; the Kidds don’t point this out, but their own interpretation is of a piece with a line of Western thinking that goes back at least to Martin Luther and that pervades our society. Everything is up for negotiation. Including pleasure. They negotiate pleasure into their relationship, when for a surprisingly large number of people marriage sucks it out and replaces it with the vacuum of boredom.

Group sex and partner swapping rarely if ever “fixes” already broken relationships. Neither do babies. Broken relationships can only be repaired by the effort of the partners involved in them. Couples who go into group sex thinking they’ll get over jealousy or affairs or whatever are likely to not find what they’re seeking. Christy & Mark hit the emotional complexities that many if not most couples encounter.

There is a strong girl-on-girl ethos in sex parties. Christy writes from the first-person perspective:

I had been developing a real taste for beautiful women, and I saw that about 90 percent of other women were into each other, as well.

That comma between “other” and “as well” is misplaced. And we get this: “You didn’t always know who was touching whom in a menagerie o f people. That’s what makes it so much better than a threesome. It’s like sensual chaos, and the usual injunctions didn’t apply.” They don’t, and that’s hot.

There are other revelations. On average group sex people are more into health than the average population. Don’t be surprised if you hear conversations about the evils of carbohydrates and the joys of the squat. Marathoners are overrepresented. Seeing other people fuck also creates a rapid bond that it would take a lot of coffee and shopping dates to reach. Being able to speak of anything can be good or bad, but the rapid plunge into a special bond can be harrowing for some. We’ve seen couples flee sex parties. It happens. Pleasure can be painful.

The bad news, however, is that “A Modern Marriage” is not nearly as well written as Toni Bentley’s The Surrender or Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden (the latter is amazingly available for free as Kindle book). Both are erotic winners; even a non-erotic memoir like Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club is far better written. A journalist who goes by the pseudonym named “Timothy Flapp” is responsible for the freshman-year writing errors.

Read it instead for the book’s information value and some hot passages, rather than for its aesthetics. Try to excuse the references to Mark as a “wild boar,” or the moments when Christy indulges her inner fifteen-year-old girl by saying “OMG” or “Eww, shiver time.” That the memoir was published at all, regardless of quality, is amazing to us. Still, we encourage you to forgive the authors for saying that “Enrique was a stocky Latin guy from Venezuela, so testosterone fueled he was like a silverback gorilla who deserved a harem of his own.” The authors have probably not thought through what comparing Enrique to a gorilla implies, either in term of violence or in terms of racially insensitive commentary. The word “Mandingo” doesn’t appear but wouldn’t be out of place in a world of lazy stereotyping and neuro-nonsense (the phrase “accountant brains” is odious too).

Maybe we’ll write a better memoir one day, and include voluminous dirty pictures. For now we’re firmly in the closet. Sorry. We’re avatars for fun sex to our friends in real life and you strangers on the Internet, but we can’t yet publicly merge those identities. Too bad. It’s a shame to read a somewhat good book and think, we can do it better.

We approve of pervs and encourage perivness in our readers, but there’s no reason to sacrifice style in the process of getting wet or hard. Nonetheless that has happened here. You should still read it. The book is surprisingly short, at just 277 small pages of widely spaced text, and not terribly analytical, but it may become one of those books that’s widely and silently passed from member to member of the secret society that is becoming less secret thanks to the Internet.

This conversation is Exhibit A.