Suburban Subversions: Swingers and the Sexual Revolution

This article discusses how the 1965 Supreme Court Griswold v. Connecticut decision, which narrowly defined marital privacy to include only monogamous and reproductive sex, contextualizes depictions of suburban swingers. Focusing on narratives of swingers in John Updike’s Couples and Rick Moody’s novel The Ice Storm, issues of privacy and surveillance complicate and problematize marital sexuality, making swinging difficult to sustain. The confluence of restrictive legal and liberal cultural discourses and their influence on marital relationships are depicted in the texts examined in this article, which offer insight into the problem of marital privacy. Updike’s novel Couples depicts swinging as a revolutionary act: in one sense, swinging upends the post war, conservative marital structure, and in another, it results in a “revolution,” a circuit back to where the couples began. This article then turns to Rick Moody’s 1994 novel The Ice Storm, which offers a retrospective look at suburban sexual excess and the negative impact this behavior had on the children of the privileged suburban enclave. The confluence of different legal, social, and cultural pressures on married couples to maintain normative sexual behavior cannot be overcome in these texts.