The Ethical Slut (10 page)

The people we know who succeed at ethical sluthood usually have a set of skills that helps them forge their pathway cleanly, honestly, and with a minimum of unnecessary pain. Here are some of the skills we think are important.

Learning to talk clearly, and listen effectively, is critical. A technique for good listening is to listen to what your partner has to say without interrupting, and let him know you heard by telling him what you think he just said. Use this clarification technique
before
you respond with your own thoughts and feelings. In this way, you make sure you have clear understanding before you go on with your discussion. Similarly, if you’re the one talking, it’s not fair to expect your partner to read your mind—take the time and effort to be as clear and thorough in your explanation as you can, and be sure to include information about the emotions you’re feeling as well as the facts involved.

If your communications often seem to go awry, it might be a good idea to spend some time and effort learning better communication skills: many adult education facilities offer excellent communication classes for couples, and you can check our Resource Guide for further reading.

Being able to ask for and receive reassurance and support is crucial. One of Janet’s partners used to request, when Janet was off to a joyously anticipated date with one of her other lovers, “Just tell me I don’t have anything to worry about.” Janet reports that it felt very good to know that he was willing to ask for reassurance when he needed it and that he trusted her to tell the truth about her feelings. If you imagine his feelings if he were insecure and
didn’t
ask for reassurance, you can see why it’s so important to get your needs met up front.

We have all been afraid to ask, we have all failed to ask, we have all been irked with our lovers when they didn’t read our minds and offer us the reassurance we crave, we have all thought, “I shouldn’t
have
to
ask.” Let’s remember to honor the courage it takes to ask for support, to share vulnerable feelings. Let’s pat ourselves on the back when we do the things that scare us, and then let’s do them some more.

Similarly, it’s vital to be able to
give
reassurance and support, both in response to a request and on your own. If you can’t tell your partners that you love them, or give them a heartfelt compliment, or tell them what you think is so wonderful about them, it may be optimistic to assume that they’ll be able to remain secure enough to accommodate your other relationships. Our friend Carol notes, “If you’re already starved for attention, no wonder an open relationship can feel like a problem!”

Put some thought into how you can let your partners know how important they are to you. We recommend lots of hugging, touching, verbal affection, sincere flattery, little “love ya” gifts, and whatever else helps everyone feel secure and connected.

This may seem like an odd word to read in this context, but even the most outrageous slut can be, in the words of Cole Porter, “always true to you, darlin’, in my fashion.” Our friend Richard says, “A lot of people describe having sex with only one person as ‘being faithful.’ It seems to me that faithfulness has very little to do with who you have sex with.” Faithfulness is about honoring your commitments and respecting your friends and lovers, about caring for their well-being as well as your own.

If you have a primary relationship, take a look at what you can do to reinforce its primary-ness. Many people in couples have certain activities that they keep only for their life partners—particular sexual behaviors, sleepovers, terms of affection, or whatever. Look at your public behavior—are you comfortable introducing your partner to the cute number you are flirting with at a wild party? We are: we figure any cutie who would be put off by meeting our spouses will likely make trouble in the future, so it’s better if we find out now. Make agreements with your partner before the party, and then you need never
wonder if you are welcome to join a group or a conversation that your beloved is enjoying.

Pay attention, also, to how you acknowledge your nonprimary relationships. How will a partner you may never live with feel loved and secure? What rights does this partner have to your time and attention? How can you offer affection and reassurance to everyone who is important to you? Make it a point to let everyone you love know it. Make agreements with your life partner about what you will do when an outside partner needs support or has a crisis like an accident or illness. Who makes the chicken soup? How about you? (Both of your authors make great chicken soup.)

To be a happy slut, you need to know how—and when—to say no. Having a clear sense of your own limits, and respecting those limits, can keep you feeling good about yourself and help prevent those morning-after blues. Some limits may be about sexual behaviors: Would you have sex with a gender other than the one you usually do? Would you try a kind of sex you think is kinky? Limits about safer sex and birth control are obviously required; there are some things you definitely do not want to bring home with you. Some limits might be about relationship styles, such as frequency of contact or intensity of connection. We also encourage you to think about ethical dilemmas and how you’d react to them. Would you, for example, be a lover to a coupled individual whose partner didn’t know about your involvement? Would you lie to a lover? Fake an orgasm?

And then there’s the very, very important limit of “I don’t want to.” “No, thank you, I don’t feel like sex right now.” Even if it’s your anniversary. Even if you’re supposed to want to. Even if you haven’t for a long time. No excuses needed.

When you respect your own limits, others will learn to respect them too. People tend to live up to your standards when you are not afraid to set them. Only when everyone’s limits are out in the open do you become free to ask for your dearest fantasies, secure in the knowledge that if your friend doesn’t want to, he won’t. From this position we can ask for the earth and wind up getting a goodly chunk of it.

Successful sluts know that relationships don’t just happen—they take work, planning, and commitment. Few of us have so much time on our hands that we can simply have conversations, sex, recreation, family time, or even fights whenever we feel like it—mundane reality has a way of getting in the way of such important stuff. And yes, we do think fighting is important and necessary—we’ll talk more about the hows and whys in
chapter 14
, “Embracing Conflict.” If scheduling a fight seems a little bit absurd, just imagine the results of letting the tension build for several days because you
haven’t
made time to argue.

Get yourself an appointment calendar or PDA and use it (Janet used to schedule sex with her first husband, Finn, with the cryptic note “F.F.” —just in case a coworker should glance into her Day Runner). Some families of sluts have discovered complex online calendars that they can keep jointly, and thus everyone can see what everyone else is doing and make plans accordingly. Once you’ve made a commitment to spend time together for any reason, keep it—we know you’re busy, but postponing important relationship work to attend to other business does not speak well of the significance you give your relationships, does it?

And knowing your programming. As we have said before, we are all carrying around a lot of garbage in our minds about sex and gender. No one can grow up in our culture and escape picking up puritanical and inaccurate ideas about sex. Some of these beliefs are buried so deep they can drive our behavior unconsciously, without our knowing it, and cause a great deal of pain and confusion to ourselves and the people we love. All too often, in the name of these beliefs, we oppress other people, and ourselves.

These deeply held beliefs are the roots of sexism and sex-negativism, and to be a radical slut you are going to have to uproot them. To truly know yourself is to live on a constant journey of self-exploration, to learn about yourself from reading, therapy, and, best of all, talking incessantly with others who are traveling on similar paths. This hard work is well worth it because it is the way you become free to choose how you want to live and love, own your life, and become truly the author of your experience.

A basic precept of intimate communication is that each person owns her own feelings. No one “makes” you feel jealous or insecure—the person who makes you feel that way is you. No matter what the other person is doing, what you feel in response is determined inside you. Even when somebody deliberately tries to hurt you, you make a choice about how you feel. You might feel angry, or hurt, or frightened, or guilty (one of your authors was raised Catholic, so she was trained to feel guilty about astonishing stuff). The choice, not usually conscious, happens inside you.

This understanding is not as easy as it sounds. When you feel rotten, it can be hard to accept the responsibility for how you feel: wouldn’t this be easier if it were someone else’s fault? Then maybe that person could fix it, and if not, well, maybe you can go ballistic and vent a little steam and melt the whole relationship down in the process.

The problem is that when you blame someone else for how you feel, you disempower yourself from finding solutions. If this is someone else’s fault, only that person can fix it, right? So poor you can’t do anything but sit there and moan.

On the other hand, when you own your feelings, you have lots of choices. You can talk about how you feel, you can choose whether or not you want to act on these feelings (no more “the devil made me do it”), you can learn how to understand yourself better, you can comfort yourself or ask for comfort. Owning your feelings is basic to understanding the boundaries of where you end and the next person begins and the perfect first step toward self-acceptance and self-love.

As prepared as you are, as centered as you are, as stable as you are, you
are
going to trip over problems you never anticipated—we guarantee it.

Perhaps the most important step in dealing with problems is to recognize that they will happen and that it’s okay that they do. You’ll make mistakes. You’ll encounter beliefs, myths, and “buttons” you never knew you had. There will be times when you’ll feel pretty awful.

Can we tell you how to avoid feeling bad? Nope. But we think you’d forgive a friend or lover who misunderstood or made a mistake, and we hope you’ll grant yourself the same amnesty. (As Morticia Addams
says: “Don’t beat yourself up, Gomez; that’s
my
job.”) Knowing, loving, and respecting yourself is an absolute prerequisite to knowing, loving, and respecting someone else. Cut yourself some slack.

A friend of ours, when she trips over some surprisingly intense emotional response, says, philosophically, “Oh well—AFOG,” which stands, she says, for Another Fucking Opportunity for Growth. Learning from one’s mistakes isn’t fun, but it’s way better than not learning at all.

Throughout your experience—as you feel pain, ambivalence, joy—you must speak your own truth, first to yourself, and then to those around you. Silent suffering and self-deception have no place in this lifestyle. Pretending that you feel great when you’re in agony will not make you a better slut; it will make you bitterly unhappy, and it may make those who care about you even unhappier. Everybody feels bad sometimes, so you are in excellent company. And when you have the courage to be open about a vulnerable feeling, everyone around you gets permission to be open with theirs.

When you tell the truth, you discover how much you have in common with the people you care about. Honesty puts you all in an excellent position to support yourselves and each other in a life based on understanding and loving acceptance. As you dig deeper and share your discoveries, you may learn more about yourself and others than you ever knew before. Welcome that knowledge, and keep on digging for more.

MANY PEOPLE BELIEVE that to be a slut is to be indiscriminate, to not care about who you make love with, and thus to not care about yourself. They believe that we live in excessively wide open spaces, with no discrimination, no fences, no boundaries. Nothing could be further from the truth. To be an ethical slut you need to have very good boundaries that are clear, strong, flexible, and, above all, conscious.

One very successful slut we interviewed is outraged by accusations of indiscriminacy, pointing out that sluts get a great deal of opportunity to develop exquisitely sophisticated discrimination: “We actually have more boundaries than most folks because we have more points of contact,” more experience relating in very different ways to very diverse people.

It is basic to any relationship, and particularly important in open relationships, that no one can own another peron. Some of us who are kinked that way may explore kinds of power exchange that we call “ownership,” but regardless of our relationship style it is essential and incontrovertible that we each own ourselves—lock, stock, and barrel. We each have the responsibility of living our own lives, determining our individual needs, and arranging to get those needs met. We cannot
live through a partner, nor can we assume that just because we have a lover, all of our needs should automatically be satisfied. Many of us have been taught that if our lover does not meet every need, this must not be true love, our lover must be somehow inadequate, or we must be at fault—too needy or undeserving or some other sin.