Good Girl Gone Bad…?

My husband had always teased me about being the definitive “good girl” next door.  In fact, I naturally identified as a “good girl” for most of my life. I was certainly a rule-follower and people pleaser. Raised in a strict Christian home, my family values lifted up modesty, humility, polite communication, and being emotionally steady. In my home, we typically avoided any excessive “worldly” pursuits. Sadly, feelings such as passion and enthusiasm were frowned upon. We trusted the authorities, and never questioned our parents.  In a nutshell, I learned to repress emotions, and downplay potential pursuits, including my life-long passion for dancing. All of that would change. After many years of marriage, motherhood and playing by all the conventional rules of monogamy, I backed my way into the lifestyle in 2010. My world has been forever changed.

The Dancing “Hook”

It’s difficult to pinpoint the precise moment that my transformation started. Perhaps it was my husband’s ongoing guidance and support related to developing a more liberated mindset. Perhaps it was our photography business, which consistently included photoshoots with beautiful, sexy, (and frequently nude) women. But ultimately, my underlying love for dancing was the hook that lured me in. 

Throughout childhood, I felt intrigued by dancing but never did any formal training. At one point, I asked my parents about exploring dance, but my father dismissed my interest, saying it might be a good hobby, but I needed to focus on a “real career” like being a secretary. Thus, my dance exploration was informal, interpretive, self-taught, spontaneous, and intended for an audience of one: myself. In fact, my worst fears revolved around being the center of attention. My bashful, shy, reserved nature informed my preference to dance alone, in front of my bedroom mirror, and avoid doing anything that might shine a spotlight on me. 

Despite all the self-restraints, I felt surprisingly comfortable in liberated environments and enjoyed hanging out with the artists and musicians that my husband had always gravitated toward. Once our kids were old enough, the two of us started going out for occasional date nights. We attended sporting events, plays, movies, and concerts. Eventually, we started gravitating toward energetic dance clubs including gay clubs where I felt amazed by the energy and liberation of their late-night dance floors. I didn’t drink or explore drugs or even socialize much with the other people at the clubs. But I thrived on the dancing, the energy and the liberation. I felt like my true self on the dance floor. 

We spent several years seeking great dance club locations. It was a rainy Oregon evening when I read about a great dance vibe at a Portland swinger club called “Sesso”. Together, the two of us agreed that we would check it out. Similar to attending the gay clubs, we knew we would not engage in anything sexual. Our intent was to simply enjoy the energetic environment, and dance, and dance, and dance. 

It was 2010 and Club Sesso was located in the heart of beautiful downtown Portland, Oregon. Similar to the speakeasy of previous generations, the club was private, with no signs on the door, and no access for the general public. We arrived 30 minutes early, before the club opened, to receive a complimentary tour of the club and orientation to the etiquette expectations. The downstairs part of the building looked like a typical, upscale bar but with a dinner buffet, and a small dance floor that included a human size bird cage in the center of things. The first time I saw someone dancing in the cage, I was intrigued, but I whispered in my husband’s ear “I could never do that.” In time, that suspended bird cage became my favorite place to dance. 

For our orientation, the host took us upstairs and introduced us to the sex rooms, private spaces, group spaces, rooms with sex chair swings, and a huge orgy pit that genuinely frightened me. I thanked our beautiful guide for the tour information and quietly joked that we will never go near those rooms again. So, we headed downstairs, and back to the dance floor. Thankfully, my enthusiastic husband was genuinely content to simply “be in the environment.” Admittedly, he would have loved to dive right in to all the shenanigans immediately, but he understood that was not why we were there. In many ways, he was my exact opposite: liberated, open minded, adventurous, self-confident, and sex positive.  We met in high school when I was 15 years old. We became friends, but he never considered dating me because I was too far too conservative… In fairness to him, I was definitely not as fun as he was lol! He was an exceptionally popular student-leader and athlete. While he spent weekends enjoying high school party life, I spent my time with family and going to church events.  

Fast forward to 2010… By the time we arrived at Portland’s Club Sesso, my husband had adjusted to many years of safe living and the restrained sexuality that I felt most comfortable with. He knew me very well: my passion for dancing, my fears, and certainly my boundaries. Perhaps in some ways, he knew me even better than I knew myself in 2010. He believed that exploring the lifestyle scene could help my growth and liberation. Everyone we met seemed so friendly, and the collective sense of community was undeniable. At the start of the evening, I figured this would be our only visit to this club. By the end of that first night, I was so impressed that I started planning our next visit. 🙂

The two of us returned to Club Sesso for date nights, usually one Saturday per month, for the next year. We still focused on the dance elements but expanded to include time invested in some wonderfully supportive friendships as well. I started interacting with various new friends and chat groups online. We did NOT engage sexually with our new friends. But we felt so much appreciation for the guidance and support they provided with no strings attached. With each new visit, I felt more and more at home.

The First Breakthrough: I Kissed A Girl And I Liked It!

More than ten months after our first visit,I experienced my first breakthrough. It was a typical Saturday night at the club. We had already visited with friends during the 9 pm buffet & meet and greet. As always, we hit the dance floor as soon as they turned up the music at 10. The floor was very crowded with sexy guests by 10:30. Most people had already finished a few drinks, and the electric flirtations had me feeling the sexual energy from head to toe. People arrived in sexy outfits, but by 10:30 many of the outer clothing layers had been set aside.I remember feeling in awe of several attractive women who had the confidence to completely expose their beautiful breasts.  Other ladies wore transparent outfits that left little to the imagination. One of the older couples, a charming duo in their early 70s, pushed things to the next level when she began performing oral sex on him without leaving the dance floor. It would have created a shocking spectacle in other venues, but this was all part of the Sesso routine. 

So, we danced and flirted to the latest hit single from Usher “Dj Got Us Fallen In Love Again.” I noticed an intense stare from a new female friend we had met during our last visit. She was a beautifully curvy blonde who was already several years into her lifestyle journey. She stepped into my bubble, causing me to freeze like a deer in the headlights of an oncoming car. Like most people, she was taller than me, so she needed to bend down to bring her lips to mine, to initiate one of the softest, sensual kisses I had ever experienced. I didn’t know how to react, but I knew that I liked that feeling. I had never thought about engaging sexually with another woman. This was a new feeling: novel, exciting, and a little overwhelming. I wasn’t certain if I suddenly liked girls, or if I felt intrigued by breaking the taboo. But my life was about to begin a completely new chapter. 

From that point forward, the pace of our journey started to speed up. I was still determined to move cautiously, but we eventually shared a private room space with another couple, engaging sexually with our own partner on the same bed. Over the next few years, we evolved to embrace soft swap play with other couples. We learned how to be wildly creative with our sensuality, without sharing intercourse with others.

The Empowered Ladies of the Lifestyle: Becoming Connectors

We started hosting small pre-party gatherings, to help us meet multiple new friends prior to our club visits. We quickly learned that we enjoyed connecting our new friends to our other new friends. The group sizes started to grow: 5 couples one night, 8 couples for the next gathering. Eventually we needed banquet rooms to hold our medium size meet & greets. An exciting group momentum was clearly building. 

I decided to initiate a support group focused on several of my new female friends. We would chat online, discussing the challenges of our conventional mindsets, and how to embrace more sex-positive values. For some of us, it was exceptionally difficult to let go of the previously conditioned ideas we had carried for a lifetime. But we helped each other, and I decided to name our group the Empowered Ladies of the Lifestyle. Our favorite website, Kasidie.com included a great feature in support of thematic groups, so we officially posted our new community there. Within months, our small band of Portland friends, expanded to over 1,000 Empowered Ladies members across the nation. Suddenly, we were connected online with sex positive people from Vegas to Los Angeles to Phoenix. As part of our routine travels, we suddenly had new friends to meet from across countless locations in the Western United States. Our kids started asking, how did you meet all these new friends? My youngest son noticed that our new lady friends were “smoking hot” compared to past years, but he didn’t seem to mind.

GenieWishes Begins

By 2014, our Empowered Ladies community had become an important element of a larger evolving group: GenieWishes. Now, instead of simply gathering together for pre-party meet ups, we were hosting our own events: the “party within the party” format at established lifestyle locations such as New Horizons in Seattle, and Sea Mountain Inn near Palm Springs. Our group gathered at Plush parties, house parties in Phoenix, pub crawls in San Diego & Sacramento. All of it was non-profit during that era. We collected enough money to break even on events, and invested time in promoting lifestyle etiquette values related to safety and consent. All of our gatherings were private, exclusive and highly vetted for safety. Deep down, the two of us wanted to include EVERYONE who was interested in our group, but we developed vetting discipline to protect the safety of our group members. Overall, the GenieWishes group seemed a bit younger than most lifestyle groups we encountered. We brought in members who were sex-positive, educated, fit, professional, and discrete. But most of all, we recruited people who seemed to be beautiful on the inside, as well as the outside. Kindness and positive energy always felt very attractive to us, so we worked to surround ourselves with caring, thoughtful, uplifting people. Instead of petty back-stabbing, the ladies in our group built each other up, and encouraged each other to explore new sensual fantasies.

Taking the Plunge: From Soft to Full-Swap

By 2016, we had decided to become a full swap couple and it felt good to finally push past the intercourse barrier. We joked that we had navigated the slowest entry process in the history of the lifestyle! But we cherished our slow process and felt fortunate to have avoided the setbacks and drama experienced by some of our faster moving friends. Sure, we had made a few mistakes along the way. Like so many couples, we fell into the trap of “taking one for the team” at various times. My people pleaser tendencies made it very difficult for me to say no when my husband and 2 friends felt excited about sexual play together. At times, I went along out of obligation, rather than saying no and limiting play to the few people who I actually felt attracted to.

To further complicate this dynamic, I also felt torn between the new liberation I was feeling, and my lifelong values related to monogamy, Christianity, and sexuality. My husband seemed to integrate spirituality and ethical non-monogamy without any challenges, but for me, the struggle was real. I felt so great about promoting a cohesive community bonded by sex positive values. The dancing, the friendships, the exploration of new sexual frontiers, all of it felt so natural and free. But I also battled with deeply rooted beliefs that triggered feelings of guilt and shame.

Sexual Violation & Retreat

My internal struggles exploded into the open in the summer of 2017. The steady growth of GenieWishes had us hosting several events each month. Our group members voiced consistent support for our core values related to safety, discretion and friendships that last across time. I was proud of our group and believed that we created a party environment where women could feel safe, and truly let their hair down on the dance floor and in the bedroom. At some point, I may have let down my guard a little, feeling comfortable and safe at our events. Our kids had each suffered through a life altering set back in 2017. As parents, we felt devastated for our kids. Our focus had definitely shifted back toward supporting them. We continued with lifestyle events as helpful “escapes” from the painful challenges our family was going through. And at that very moment, I was violated for the first time at one of our parties.

 It was not a full, intercourse level rape, but it could not have felt any worse in my mind. I didn’t know how to respond. I was frozen in the moment. I did not lash out and barely even reacted at all. To make things worse, I did not inform my husband. I felt lost and confused and alone. I asked myself “How did I allow that to happen”? I kept the incident to myself, and the shame grew quickly. But that was not the end of it. At the following party, a few weeks later, it happened again. This time I exploded on the asshole who shoved his finger past my panties and into my vagina from behind. This time I told my husband, who immediately confronted him and banished him from our group. And this time…  I was done with the lifestyle. 

Everything we had built was shut down. GenieWishes was over. We decided to retire from all our lifestyle activities. If I wasn’t safe at our parties, how could we provide safety for all the other women who we cared about so deeply? We mourned the loss of a lifestyle that had brought us so much joy for more than seven years. Most of all, we felt devastated by the potential loss of so many friends. We shared our testimony with people, and the outpouring of support was unimaginable. I received so much encouragement through notes, and phone calls. Friend after friend pledged to continue with us, despite our “retirement.”

Returning Better Than Ever

Fortunately, like so many painful moments in life, time was a healer of those wounds.   We retreated for nearly a year but came back with a renewed vision and mission; first for GenieWishes and later adding Arizona Fantasy Club (AFC) as well. Our stance regarding safety was more vigilant than ever. “Consent is sexy” became more than our motto. It communicated how deeply we support sex positive liberation that is safe and empowering, especially for the ladies. We now share our safety etiquette at every phase of our events. We channeled the previous pain to inform our return. This lead us toward increased involvement with our members: including guidance and mentoring and new solutions to common challenges.

As one example, related to “taking it for the team” challenge, we returned with a new commitment to limiting our play to high quality connections. Instead of searching for elusive 4-way chemistry (an ideal we consider to be the true “unicorn” in the lifestyle) we developed a new play approach called “Non-Reciprocal Play” (NRP).  Non-Reciprocal play empowers each individual to play, or not play, at whatever level they feel good about, rather than conventional swap dynamics that tend to require equal swap dynamics between two couples. NRP requires some advanced communication, but ultimately every person only interacts with people they genuinely feel attracted to. We strive to find a good match for each person so that nobody is pressured into sex out of a sense of obligation to keep everything equal. At times, this works well with adding one or more additional friends instead of conventional two couple play. So, the play numbers may vary, but what is consistent is the commitment to taking care of every person in the play equation. Nobody ever takes one for the team. 

Upcoming publications will share some of our sexy stories in further detail. We hope that readers will find a few insights that relate to their journey each time. Overall, the lifestyle has impacted my life in a revolutionary way. As a result, it has enhanced my marriage relationship, deepened my friendships, and empowered me to find my voice as a leader through the GenieWishes & AFC community. The bashful, rule-following “good girl next door” has evolved into a new person: confident, sensual, and truly liberated. My husband likes to say that I found my “swag”!  I dance when I want, I fuck when I want, and I’m no longer chained down by the fears of judgement from others. Good girl gone bad? Perhaps. Or maybe a more accurate statement would be “Good girl reborn” … and better than ever. 🙂

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT:  So now that you know this “Good Girl’s” story, let’s go deeper together. I will be publishing my monthly series “Diary of an Empowered Genie” here at Lifestylers Magazine. From the comical to the sensual to the erotic, each story will reveal more and more sexy details. Xoxoxo!