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Artwork for Swingers

Swingers

BBC Radio Wales

#20 in Society & Culture this week

Swingers tells the story of Ruth - a woman who joined a Swinging website and ended up having degrading sex with strangers more than 100 times.   Ruth thinks she is not alone, that there are women all over the UK like her and so she decided to tell her story, using her full identity, to investigative journalist Catrin Nye. 

Ruth says that she never wanted to join the swingers website - but did it to please her husband who had been slowly persuading her for more than a decade to try swinging. She ended up having sex with strangers in lay-bys and filming it for her husband. She ended up pregnant by a stranger and giving oral sex to another man while bleeding from an abortion.    In this podcast Catrin pieces together Ruth’s story and asks what it tells us about sexual consent, pressure in relationships, and the swinger community. She digs deep into the online world of Fab Swingers - the website Ruth and her husband used. Catrin discovers countless crimes across the UK linked to the swinging website and speaks to a man who admits to having sex with women who he thinks were pushed into it.   She considers the police response to Ruth, the law and whether swinging can be a cover for abuse.    This is a story told in full honesty. It’s the trickiest investigation of Catrin’s career, but one she also feels must be told.

Play
  • 7 episodes
  • Avg 24 min
  • English
  • June 16 · 25 min

    6. Black Mirror

    A disturbing TV episode helps Ruth see her own life differently.

  • June 16 · 31 min

    5. The Messages

    Catrin examines WhatsApp messages to get a deeper understanding of the relationship.

  • June 16 · 32 min

    4. The Club

    Catrin visits one of the UK’s best-known swingers clubs.

  • June 16 · 23 min

    3. The Boiling Frog

    As Ruth’s life became smaller, she says the pressure to swing grew.

  • June 16 · 27 min

    1. Fab

    Ruth says she was pressured by her husband into having sex with strangers.

Showing 1–7 of 7 episodes