The Ethical Slut (14 page)

You may wish to restrict certain kinds of sex—often vaginal and/or anal intercourse, which place the participants at highest risk for disease transmission—to your primary relationship. Any time when you are actively trying to make a baby, you might not want to engage in potentially reproductive activities with all and sundry.

If barriers were infallible, fluid bonding would be a nearly perfect strategy; unfortunately, they are not. Some diseases live on the pubic mound, perineum, outer labia, or scrotum, which latex can’t cover. Pinhole leaks can allow virus to creep through, although this happens less often than antisex crusaders would have you believe. Condoms can break or come off during sex. If you are fluid-bonded and experience a condom failure, you and your partner will have to decide together whether to begin again with HIV testing and six months of barrier usage or to risk the possibility that one of you has been infected and could infect the other. If there is any possibility of an unwanted pregnancy, talk together about the morning-after pill.

Another risk reduction strategy is simply to eliminate some forms of sexual expression from your repertoire. Many people have chosen to forgo forms of sex that involve putting mouths or penises into or near assholes, feeling that the particularly high risks of this form of play are not worth its reward. Others have decided not to engage in any form of penetration with an organic penis. We have never heard of a dildo or a butt plug coming down with an infection.

If all this winds up sounding like no sex at all, please consult a good book about sex—there are hundreds of ways to share really hot sex that don’t involve somebody squirting inside somebody else.

Every decision you make requires that you balance your own desires against your assessment of the risks. Remember when you’re making your decisions that desire is powerful and important and that there’s no point in making rules you can’t live with. One friend of ours points out that safer sex can be like dieting—“I can be really good during the week, but then I binge on the weekends.” On the positive side, expanding your range of hot sexual expression by learning new and exciting ways to have sex can leave you both safe and satisfied.

Simply hoping for the best, or denying that you’re at risk, or pretending that diseases and unwanted pregnancies only happen to other people is
not
an acceptable strategy. If you don’t have the honesty and courage to face the genuine risks of your sexual behaviors, you certainly don’t have what it takes to be an ethical slut, and we question whether you should be having sex at all.

We are shocked and worried by the levels of denial we see among some sexual communities, who would like to believe that because new treatments have slowed down the progress of HIV that the cure has been found. People are still dying. If your lifestyle seems to make you unlikely to get exposed to HIV, you are still at risk for herpes, hepatitis, HPV, and a host of other diseases. Kinsey’s statistics from back in the 1940s indicated that slightly more than half of relationships that are theoretically monogamous in fact involve sexual contact with outside partners. Get educated, friend, and take care of yourself.

We think it’s essential for ethical sluts to get tested for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases on a regular schedule. How frequently depends on the risk factors in your life. Ask your doctor, clinic, or Planned Parenthood office, and follow their advice.

While most STDs are preventable only with barriers and care, recently developed vaccinations can protect you against several potentially deadly forms of hepatitis and, if you aren’t already infected, human papilloma virus. If you engage in nonmonogamous anal or vaginal play, these are a
very
good idea; they are expensive, but cheaper than
getting sick. You’ll still need barriers against all the rest of the microscopic nasties.

Mother Nature is called that for a reason—sometimes it seems like she wants everybody to be a parent. Even when you utterly
know
that you don’t want to get pregnant this time, some deeper urge can easily lead you to forget a pill or count the days wrong. Birth control involves tricking the busy little eggs and sperm into not doing their jobs and tricking your own instincts into letting you do the trick right.

Birth control technology is, alas, far from perfect: reliable, reversible, easy, side-effect-free contraception is still a dream. Unwanted pregnancies need no longer be the life-shattering tragedies of yesteryear, but they are still awful, and we hope that none of you ever has to have one.

If you are female, have intercourse with men, and could possibly be fertile, you must take active steps to ensure that you won’t get pregnant until and unless you choose to. The possibilities include birth-control pills, longer-term chemical birth control like Norplant and Depo-Provera, diaphragms and cervical caps, condoms, IUDs, sponges and foam, and tubal ligation, among others. Some women with regular menstrual cycles succeed at the rhythm method, particularly if they and their partners learn to enjoy outercourse during their fertile periods. There is a lot of good information available about the risks and reliability of all these methods; your physician, clinic, or Planned Parenthood can help you make a good choice.

For men who have intercourse with women, the choices are (unfortunately) quite limited. If you know you are unlikely to want to father children in the future, a vasectomy is minor surgery that will relieve you of a great deal of worry. If you hope to be a father someday, use those condoms—and lobby for research into better male contraception. The surgery to sterilize women is more involved: the surgeon will cauterize the fallopian tubes—this requires a hospital, and a little recovery, but nothing dreadful. Remember, you’ll still need protection from infectious diseases.

When someone gets pregnant unintentionally, this can be, to put it mildly, difficult. If everyone involved agrees that an abortion is the
best choice, that can be pretty unpleasant in and of itself; if there is disagreement, it can be shattering. Until such time as science enables men to carry fetuses in their bodies, we believe that the final decision has to be the woman’s, but we sympathize deeply with the man who would like to raise a baby and whose female partner isn’t willing or able to carry it. We do think that both partners should share in the financial and emotional burden of an abortion or a pregnancy.

If one or both partners is interested in being a parent, and the woman is willing to carry the fetus to term, ethical sluthood opens up a wealth of options for parenting. Please don’t feel that the only way to be a parent is to get married and buy a house in the suburbs—perfectly marvelous children come out of shared parenting arrangements, intentional communities, group marriages, and a multitude of other ways to nurture and support a child.

You may notice that we have gone out of our way
not
to tell you what decisions to make about your sexual behavior. Only you can decide what risks feel acceptable to you, and we believe that letting anybody else make that decision for you virtually guarantees that you won’t follow through on your choices.

You must, however,
make
choices. You must choose to do your homework and learn what you need to know about risks and rewards. You must choose to do the work of saying “no” to sex that doesn’t meet your own safety criteria and of being prepared to say “yes” to sex that does: discovering you’re out of condoms at the wrong moment is a recipe for disaster. You must choose to approach your sexual behaviors in a mature, realistic, and
sober
manner—intoxication plays a major role in a shockingly high percentage of HIV infection and unwanted pregnancy.

You must be prepared to share your sexual decision making and history with any potential partners you encounter. If consent is at the core of ethical sluthood—and it is—your partners must be able to give informed consent to whatever risks are involved in having sex with you. You, of course, have the right to expect that same honesty from them.

You won’t like talking about this stuff, especially not with a new lover. It’s depressing and scary, definitely not erotic, and sometimes horrendously embarrassing. Allow us to reassure you: the first time is the worst. Practice makes perfect, and after you’ve been over all these ugly and lethal possibilities a few times, you will become less sensitive and learn to deal with what you need to with ease and grace. Many people avoid the discussion on a first date by agreeing upon the safest possible practices for this encounter, then negotiating more specifically later on. If you know you have a risk condition, like active herpes, silence becomes less of an option; you need to invite your lovers to collaborate with you in avoiding infection, and they have a right to enough information to make her own choices.

On a cheerier note, getting good at talking about sex has some very nice rewards, once you get through blushing. Chatting about the fun stuff is a turn-on and the best way to get exactly what you want in the way of pleasure. Then you can learn what your partner gets excited about, which will make you the best of all possible lovers.

We, and most of the people we know, make fairly conservative choices about what health risks we take in our sexuality. We know from experience that it is quite possible to have exciting, satisfying, fabulously slutty sex without lying awake nights worrying afterward. And isn’t that the kind of sex we all want to have?

IF YOU’RE RAISING KIDS today, you have it a little bit easier than sluts of yesteryear—images of families in books and television aren’t quite as limited to
Leave It to Beaver
and
Ozzie and Harriet
as they were in our childhoods. Still, even though divorce and single parenting are now acceptable topics, our culture is slow to catch up to the other realities of our lives: media images of multipartner relationships, same-sex relationships, and other nontraditional constellations are still rare.

Yet kids take to these relationships quite readily, perhaps more so than to the traditional nuclear family: children have grown up in villages and tribes for most of human history. Janet remembers having some of her first desires for group living during vacations with her then-husband’s expansive extended family: she noticed that her kids, surrounded by loving adults with plenty of time on their hands, were happier, more docile, and less fragmented than she’d ever seen them. During her kids’ teen years, she lived in a group household and watched her sons adapt quite readily to the comings and goings of a disparate group of adults—one of whom was almost always free to answer a question, troubleshoot a computer program, experiment with a recipe, or play a game.

The single parent ethical slut can check out a number of creative options for maintaining a fulfilling sex life while being a responsible
parent. When Dossie was sharing a house with two other single mothers, one of her lovers used to babysit all the kids so all three mothers had a chance to go out dancing together. A friend of ours used to babysit for her younger sister and the kids next door so that her parents could mess around with the next-door neighbors. Dossie never actually lived as a single parent, whether or not she was partnered, during her daughter’s childhood; there was always a troupe of friendly people living in sprawling houses, city and country.

We have never had problems creating consistency and security for our children in a sexually interconnected extended family. While you might assume that inclusive relationships might generate massive inconsistency, our experience is just the opposite. Our connections tend to form sprawling extended families that have plenty of energy to welcome all the children, and the children readily learn their way around the tribe.

Some shifts in the population are inevitable, but in our experience children take that kind of mobility for granted and perhaps develop a flexibility that might serve them well later in life. If we prepare them for a life where any change at all is seen as a disaster, how will they manage? Better, perhaps, to learn that loss may be difficult, but we do get through it, pick up the pieces, and go on with our lives. One way parents can offer consistency to children is to role model healthy adaptation to change. Another good form of consistency is to be honest with yourself and with your children—when you live your life in integrity, everyone can count on you to be exactly who you, wonderfully, are.

The binary nature of monogamy-centrist thinking tends, we think, to cause problems: you’re either the love of my life, or you’re out of here. Both of us have found that opening our lives to other kinds of connections also opens our children’s lives. For example, a former lover of Janet’s has not been sexually involved with her for quite a while but has become a sort of surrogate uncle and best friend to one of her sons and is still a loved member of her household—as she writes this, he is asleep on a futon on her living room floor.

Still, many parents have a great deal of difficulty bridging the gap between responsible parenting and inclusive relationships. Questions about what and how much to tell your kids, how to prepare them for difficult questions in the outside world, and how to help them relate to
the new people who arrive and depart in their lives can be challenging for any mom or dad.

As you’ve surmised, we think an abundance of relationships can be highly beneficial to family life and that children gain in role models, attention, and support in the polyamorous extended family. Clearly, children should not be included in adult sexual behavior, and many adults who have been wounded by sexual abuse as children can testify to the damages. Education, however, is not abuse, and children need enough information to make sense out of what the adults are doing, so they can grow up to their own healthy understanding of sexuality.

All parents must make their own decisions about what kind of sexual information their children should have at any given age. For the health and well-being of the child, a balance must be struck between offering too much information, which might seem scary or overwhelming, and too little, which might leave the child with the message that naked bodies and sexual arousal are so dangerous and embarrassing that it’s not allowed to even talk about them. We don’t want to terrify the kids, and we don’t want them to come into their own adult sexual lives with the belief that sex is dirty and shameful.