Yes Will and didn't you look great :twisted:
Kit
xxx
Here's the article - the site won't allow a link - no photos though!!!
November 01, 2003
Swinging? It’s a bit too catchy
Sexually transmitted infections are sharply on the rise among middle-aged, middle-class people. John Naish investigates some dangerous liaisons
Mick and Eve want to watch other couples, and to be watched by couples and single guys. David and Sheila seek couples with “a larger lady (at least size 18)†for adult fun. David and Amy “want to catch up on some free loveâ€.
They are at the sharp edge of their generation’s sex revolution: not rock stars or disaffected youth but respectable middle-aged, middle-class people seeking spice and a slice of millennial liberation. This age group is sleeping around, having group sex, taking performance-enhancing drugs — and catching diseases — as never before. Like the more reckless of their younger peers, they don’t know any better.
The shift in middle-aged mores has led to huge rises in sexual infections among people aged 35 to 64: the number of gonorrhoea cases has tripled in seven years, herpes has increased by more than a third. The number of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) is rocketing in younger age groups, too, but moral shock and sex education is focused on the young. Condom culture has passed many older people by.
Middle-youth swingers are a burgeoning market. In local freesheets such as Sussex’s Friday Ad, cheap lawnmowers and second-hand Ikea tables straddle pages of classifieds offering threesomes, foursomes and moresomes, from the comparatively staid “cpl seek cpl-on-cpl fun†to the bizarre: “The Red-Eyed Scaly Freak Man is back, call this number . . . †Arranging swaps on the internet has become big business. I stopped visiting after my fifteenth site, having toured such suburban virtual fleshpots as Swinging Heaven, UKswingers, Local Swingers, Caféswingers and Keys In A Hat.
Despite the near-inexhaustible permutations of sexual experience, most ads share one thing — age. In swing-world you’re a spring chicken in your mid-thirties. In classic crimeinvestigation terms, older couples have both motive and opportunity: the lust for variety and self-fulfilment, plus a comfy house and a babysitter who won’t suspect that people that old get that kinky. Then, of course, there is Viagra and its competitors. Since March 2000, prescriptions for erection-boosting drugs have doubled, from 13,500 a month to 27,500, according to the healthcare monitor Isis Research.
Julie, 34, and David, 42, have been swinging for ten months. These company directors from Bedfordshire seek other couples or single men on the internet. “I don't know really why we started,†says Julie. “Everyone has that kind of fantasy of being with more than one person in bed. We were sitting talking about it and decided we would give it one go. We’ve never looked back. My partner and I generally meet other couples about once a fortnight.
“We have done it with couples and single males. The best time I had was being in bed with two men. We stick with people from our own age group, people in their thirties and above, which is not difficult because there are lots of us. You can’t understand what younger people are talking about.
“We don’t tell our friends or relatives. It’s a very private part of our lives and we have family commitments. Fortunately, babysitting for our four children is never a problem. We play safe or don’t play at all: that’s our hard-and-fast rule. You do get people who tell us that they don’t like using condoms, so we just say, ‘No
Not everyone is so sensible, be they swinging, sleeping around or practising that more acceptable middle-aged, middle-class pastime, serial monogamy. The latest figures from the Communicable Diseases Surveillance Centre reflect a general rise in sexually transmitted infections across all age groups but the increase in middle-aged infection is still astonishing. In 1996, men aged 16-19 had 908 notified gonorrhoea infections, while men aged 35-44 had 999. By 2002, the younger men’s infection rate had risen by 146 per cent — pretty alarming — but the older men’s was up by 206 per cent.
Overall gonorrhoea infection rates for men between 35 and 44 have risen by more than 200 per cent between 1996 and 2002. Women’s gonorrhoea infection rose 202 per cent for the 35-44 age group in the same period. While the genital herpes rate among 25 to 34-year-old men fell 7 per cent in the seven years to 2002, it rose by 46 per cent in 35 to 44-year-olds, and by 38 per cent in 45 to 64-year-olds. The younger men started from a higher figure but the older guys are catching up. In women, while the numbers are smaller, the age pattern is similar.
“The increase in middle-aged infections is part of the change in cultural mores,†says Dr Angela Robinson, a consultant in sexual health and the president of the British Association for Sexual Health and HIV. “There is much more acceptance of married couples getting separated and divorced, and though they are more likely to be looking for another partner, they may have sex with a few people on the way.
“Anecdotally, we are seeing the rise of swinging. I am aware socially that there is more sharing of partners going on among middle-aged people, particularly couples who want to spice their lives up or who are separated. What we call ‘concurrency’ — more than one sexual partner at the same time — seems to be getting more common with older
But many don’t seem to know the rules of 21st-century sex, says Dr Robinson. “Over forties who find themselves back on the market are not used to condoms. The trend for people not to practise safe sex is greater in people over 35. Unfortunately, we do not have any detailed sexual behaviour analysis for this age group but when people have more than one partner they are at much greater risk of
And that is just at home. Carolyn Driver, the chair of the British Travel Health Association, recently cautioned that swingers’ holidays leave middle-aged couples vulnerable. “I have seen couples who have come back with sexually transmitted diseases after going off to swingers’ resorts in places like Jamaica. They have gone there deliberately to swap partners.
“You also get an increasing number of apparently respectable middle-aged people of both genders who go on holiday abroad looking for sexual encounters, but they underestimate the level of risk to which they expose themselves,†says Driver, a travel-health specialist nurse. “As soon as they get a bit of sun and alcohol, they throw caution to the wind, lose their inhibitions and do things they would never do at home. But they still have the same vulnerable
Middle-aged swinging is not all about sex, far from it, maintains Paul, 34, who runs the website Local Swingers. He gets 4,000 people logging on to his site a day. “There’s a very strong social scene as well as the sex. People make friends, and couples meet up for dinner, and that’s it. They might not go any
Julie agrees: “We have met a lot of people through the LocalCouples website, but we don’t always swing with them. We have made lasting friends with people. It has done our social life the world of good. We tend to meet people in chat rooms, though we don’t always know what they look like when eventually we meet. Sometimes the chemistry just isn’t
Not everyone is so choosy. Britain’s beauty spots have seen the rise of dogging, or outdoor group sex. Again, it is an internet phenomenon, with websites announcing the next venue. It is mostly an older persons’ thing, says Richard Byrne, a senior lecturer in countryside management at Harper Adams college in Shropshire, who questioned 260 country wardens about the problem. “It seems to be mostly people in their thirties, forties and fifties. We’ve come across some OAPs. They seem generally respectable with decent cars. The men go to look at a couple and their main aim is to be invited to join in or take a
But away from the wilder fringes, one of the main problems is simple unprotected unfaithfulness. A survey in last April’s Good Housekeeping magazine questioned 500 women over 40 about their sex lives and found that 200 said they had been unfaithful to their partner, and only 80 said that they would confess.
Kaye Wellings, a professor of sexual and reproductive health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, says: “A lot of people in older age groups will have grown up in an era when the Pill was the accepted form of contraception and they regard the condom as a less reliable way of protecting themselves. The data suggest that middle-aged men are less likely to use condoms than younger
She adds that the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles from 2000 showed that 15 per cent of men and 11 per cent of women aged 35 to 44 had had a new partner in the previous 12 months. More worryingly, says Wellings, 10 per cent of men and 7 per cent of women in that age group had been sleeping with more than one partner at the same time in the previous year. “There is a significantly increased risk of getting an STI from doing
Middle-aged swingers and sexperimentalists should know better. But they don’t. And no one in officialdom plans to educate them — or even to study the perils they face. The Department of Health has funded research for the latest National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles to cover only people aged up to 45. Previously it had funded research up to age 59. There appears to be no research available into middle-aged couples’ risk-taking sexual behaviour.
Dr Robinson says the state of NHS sexually transmitted infection clinics — shabby, underfunded to the tune of £30 million and with long queues — is likely to deter middle-aged people from attending. “Instead they do nothing, their symptoms go away and they think they are cured. But they are still infectious,†she says.
STI services suffer from being lodged at the back of the NHS beauty parade, she adds. “Hospital chief executives aren’t going to lose their jobs if there are queues outside genito-urninary clinics, but they will if there are backlogs for cancer treatment. That’s the way the priorities go, but it ignores the fact that because of this we are facing a public-health
My vote is, sod what the guys at the Times think, I'm going to grow old disgracefully :twisted: :twisted: :twisted:
:x AND NOT A BLOODY MENTION FOR THE GIRLIE FREE ZONE. :x :x 
:evil: :evil: :evil:
:lol:
for jags. I will come up and see you sometime, if only I can find out where the hell you are. 
