When Ruth O'Grady reluctantly joined a swinging website, having been persuaded by her husband, she says, she told him she would never have sex in a car with a stranger. However, within months she was doing exactly that, and filming it to send to him. She says she had sex with strangers more than 100 times through the website, over an 18-month period. Ruth says she is traumatised and continues to suffer flashbacks.
Ha, angling for sympathy for her own actions, and to think a woman threw herself in front of a racehorse for this woman to plead weakness at the first opportunity.
She first approached us three years ago and now, after careful consideration, has decided to tell her story using her full name. She wants it to be a warning to other women. She feels anger towards her former husband, Chris, but she also blames the UK's biggest swinging website. It gave him access to hundreds of men, she says, who he could ask to have sex with her.
Of course she does, after all big tech is the villain in every story these days.
For eight months, prompted by Ruth's story, the BBC has been investigating the UK's swinging scene. Some people told us they take part because they genuinely want to, but we found this is not always the case.
Oh how I long for the days when journalists ‘made their excuses and left’!
Within months, she was having sex with multiple men a week, Ruth says, sometimes as many as four in a day. She did arrange some of the meetings herself, she says, and would appear enthusiastic about swinging, but she now says this was something she never truly wanted to do.
Sounds like a rationalisation to me.
Ruth says the encounters took an horrific toll. She contracted sexually transmitted infections, she got pregnant, and while recovering from an abortion she says Chris arranged for someone to have oral sex with her. "I realised [Chris] really doesn't care about my body or the pain I was going through," Ruth says.
Chris was investigated by the police under coercive control and other laws after Ruth made a report, but no charges followed. Police pointed to instances in the couple's WhatsApp messages where Ruth had appeared enthusiastic about swinging.
Hoist by her own petard, oh dear!
Ruth's story raises a central question: how and why can people appear to agree, even enthusiastically, to sex they do not want? Consent can be complicated, an expert tells us. "It's quite possible for people to appear to consent to sex they don't want," says Prof Nicola Gavey, from the University of Auckland, who has researched unwanted sex since the 1980s.
What a job! I wonder if anyone vets his hard drive?
