Only a relatively small number of swingers are ready to tell their friends, family and colleagues about their lifestyle. As swinging is private for most of us, we do not expect to suffer discrimination for it. But we do and it has a negatve effect on how we live our lives as sexual adventurers.

The law is deeply ingrained with the supposition that female sexuality needs to be restrained. Thus, for example, anywhere that two or more couples go for sexual intercourse is a 'brothel' (brothels are illegal). Contrary to common sense, the women concerned do not need to be prostitutes. 

Two women involved in group sex also creates a 'brothel'. Not only do they not need to be prostitutes. They do not even need to have penetrative sex. Just being lewd is enough.

Although these laws appear to ban most swinging activity, they have never been used against swingers. But they are used against organisers of swinging and other non-gay sexual events.

The 1980s and 1990s saw a number of prosecutions and threatened prosecutions of fetish club, swinging club and S&M organisers, mainly under the Disorderly Houses Act 1751 (a measure against brothels and no, the date is not a misprint).

Most recently in 1998 a swingers club owner in Pembrokeshire was fined £2000 for keeping a brothel and living off immoral earnings (the traditional charge against pimps). Nothing but ordinary swinging activity had taken place and there was no suggestion of actual prostitution. The club was closed.

Occasional prosecutions like these make it impossible for companies and entrepreneurs to raise and invest money in decent swingers clubs. The chance is too great that they will eventually be prosecuted and lose their investment.

This is why British swinging is a fourth rate cottage industry with unlicensed and sometimes shabby underground clubs instead of the large and modern sector of the leisure industry that caters for swingers in France and the Low Countries. Compare for example Paris, with around 40 first rate swingers clubs many with their own restaurants, with London where there are none. 

                                                                                                                                      

Discrimination against swingers is evident not just from law and from international comparison. It becomes more obvious when our situation is contrasted with gays.

After victimising gays  cruelly for centuries, the law and the police are now punctilious about not interfering in their lifestyle. There are many gay bars, clubs and sex clubs and sex regularly occurs in all of them. But because women are involved the same authorities do not yet allow the same freedom to swingers. For example, the Sexual Offences Act 2003 legalised group sex for gays but not for heterosexuals.

This state of affairs contravenes the UK's human rights obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights and the Human Rights Act 1998.