The Ethical Slut (15 page)

Remember, sex education is an issue for all parents, whatever their lifestyle. We want our kids to have good information and freedom of choice, and they are often living in neighborhoods and going to schools where many parents believe that kids should be denied all information about sex (or else they might turn out to be sluts like us).

To make matters more complicated, our culture currently is deeply divided about the entire subject of sex information and kids. Some people consider any form of sex education to be somehow dangerous. Some authorities feel that when children have “precocious” information about sex, it must mean that the child is being abused by an adult. We are, however, adamantly opposed to “abstinence-only” so-called sex education. How are we to teach our children to say “no” to an abusive adult if we are not frank about what it is that they should say “no” to? When we try to keep sex secret from our kids, they are aware that something is going on, but they don’t know what. And if we leave them to get their sex information in the playground or on the street, from
equally ill-informed other kids, we consign them to the jungle. Our kids need and deserve adult support in learning about and negotiating sexuality, as they do in all other aspects of life.

You’ll have to decide how much your kids should know about your sexual choices, such as multiple partners, same-sex partners, or alternative family structures. Our experience is that kids figure such things out quicker than you think they do but that they may not figure them out exactly right.

One word of warning: if you are living in a community that does not share your standards about sex education, your desire to educate needs to be balanced against the need for the child to learn what is and is not okay to share with the outside world. When you teach your kids, you will need to talk with them about how other people’s standards operate and about what information should and should not be shared.

There are still many places in this country where living a nontraditional sexual lifestyle is considered a justification for legally removing your children from your custody. Even when you are sure you are doing no harm, you still may need to protect your kids from Mrs. Grundy. We can’t give you concrete guidelines on this, because only you can know the atmosphere in your particular community and the personalities of your own children.

We think it’s a good idea to model physical and verbal affection for children; that’s how they learn to be affectionate adults. But you’ll have to make some decisions about the appropriate dividing line between physical affection and sexual demonstrativeness.

Do your kids get to see you hugging your partners? Kissing them? Touching them? These are all decisions we can’t make for you. You have to think them through yourself—taking into account such issues as their ages, their levels of sophistication, and their perceptions about your existing relationships—and abide by your own decisions.

Nudity is a gray area. We certainly don’t think kids are harmed by growing up in households where casual nudity is the norm. But children who have never been around nude adults may be upset if nudity is suddenly
introduced into their living room. Kids can be very sensitive to issues like sexual display, and flashing is clearly a violation of boundaries. Certainly, if a child expresses discomfort with being around your or your friends’ nudity, his or her desires should be respected. And we hope it goes without saying that no child should ever be required to be nude in front of others—many children go through phases of extreme modesty as they struggle to cope with their changing bodies, and that, too, deserves scrupulous respect.

It is illegal and immoral to allow your kids to engage in any form of sexual behavior with any adult, or to allow your partners to be sexual or seductive with your kids. Many children go through one or more sexually explorative and/or flirtatious periods in their lives—this is natural and common. But it’s important that you and your friends maintain especially good boundaries during such periods; learning polite and friendly ways of acknowledging a child’s changing needs without engaging sexually is a critical skill for ethical sluts who spend time around their own or their partners’ kids. (“Isn’t that cute? You’re getting to be such a big girl now!”) The best way to teach your child good boundaries is to be clear about your own and to respect the child’s right to grow up free from violation.

Kids’ questions about sex and relationships can often be challenging—from the five-year-old’s “But how does the seed get
to
the egg?” to the teenager’s “So how come you get to fuck anyone you want, but I have to be home by midnight?”

Here’s where the skills you’ve learned in other parts of this book can come in handy. You owe your kids honest, heartfelt responses to questions like these; this is not the time to come on all high-handed and parental. Particularly with older children and teenagers, it’s fine to let them know if you’re feeling ambivalent or embarrassed about something: they’ll know anyway, believe us. If a situation makes you angry or sad, share that, too. They may need some reassurance that your emotion isn’t their fault and some reinforcement that it’s not their job to help you feel better.

It’s also fine to test their willingness to receive information. Before you start heaping data on their heads, you can try prefacing your communication with a question like, “Do you want to know about [whatever the topic is]?” Janet remembers a conversation with her older son when he was about ten: she’d just done a “birds and bees” rap and had perhaps gotten a little carried away. At the end of her long speech, she asked him, “So, as long as we’re on this topic, is there anything else you want to know?” He replied, fervently, “Mom, you’ve already told me
much
more than I wanted to know.”

Good boundaries are important here too. While your kids are certainly entitled to express an opinion about the way you choose to run your life, they don’t get to dictate it. The flip side of this is that you owe it to them to help prevent their lives from being unduly impacted by a lifestyle they never chose. Dossie willingly agreed to maintain a discreet closet about her lesbian partner when her daughter’s junior high school friends came to visit; her daughter got to come out to her friends about her mom at her own pace. Well, nobody ever said parenthood—especially slutty parenthood—was going to be easy.

When your lovers have kids, you are involved with those kids too—one friend of ours refers to the many kids he helped his lovers raise as his “practice kids,” helping him learn parenting skills for the child of his own that came along later.

You’ll need to make decisions together about what to tell the kids about your relationships, and you need to learn what decisions are conventional in your lovers’ families. It may not matter whether younger children know or understand that some of the connections in their families are sexual and others are not. But all adults in families with children have a responsibility to make a connection with the kids we come in contact with, and to foster our own children’s connections with our friends and lovers.

Single sluts with no previous connection to children may find themselves in a position of needing to learn how to deal with children in their extended family.

Fact of life: Everyone around children will eventually need to set limits with them. There may be some challenges as you work to
reconcile your own limits with the habits and styles of a family that was working just fine before you arrived in it. Expressing your needs can be an opportunity for the kids to learn that different adults have different needs, that Jane can nap through a rousing game of Inside Tag whereas Jean needs an hour of quiet.

It may be that you find yourself disliking one of your lover’s kids. Perhaps something about this particular child pushes your buttons: they may remind you of your horrible older brother or maybe even your young self—often the things that annoy us most about someone else are the things we dislike about ourselves or our histories. Or the child may be angry at you, or dislike you, for reasons entirely beyond your control: perhaps you are “replacing” a beloved parent or other adult who has been lost to death or divorce. Whatever the reason for this problem, you are the adult here and it is your responsibility to find a way to solve it. Resolution will undoubtedly take some time, a fair amount of energy, and a great deal of patience, but we believe it will be worth it, for you and your lover and the kids.

Early in Janet’s relationship with her spouse E, there was a lot of friction between him and her young adult son, mostly over issues that will sound familiar to any stepparent: housekeeping, noise levels, courtesy. Then, she recalls, “We were visiting my mother for a few days, and the two of them were escaping the domestic whirlwind out in the back yard. E expressed sympathy about a difficult personal situation my son was encountering. They had a beer together and really talked, from the heart, for the first time—and suddenly E could see my son the way I see him, as a socially awkward young man, not always too aware of the physical realities around him, but with a huge heart and a lot to give. From that evening on, they’ve had no trouble working together on normal household stuff and have in fact become good friends.”

When you establish a positive relationship with the children in your environment, they will respond by developing a positive relationship with you. We know of ex-lovers who have maintained close friendships over many decades with children with whom they had no biological relationship. Thus are slut families built and maintained.

FOR MANY PEOPLE, the biggest obstacle to free love is the emotion we call jealousy.

Jealousy feels really rotten, and most of us will go to great lengths to avoid feeling it. However, your authors believe that most people take the destructive power of jealousy way too much for granted, that they give their jealousy far more power than it deserves. After many years of living free and dealing successfully with jealousy, we tend to forget that we live in a culture that considers it acceptable to divorce or even murder a sexually explorative partner who has committed the unthinkable crime of arousing jealousy in us.

Let us point out here that monogamy is not a cure for jealousy. We have all had experiences of being ferociously jealous of work that keeps our partner away or distracted from us, or our lover’s decision to cruise the Internet instead of our bodies, or Monday (and Tuesday
and Wednesday) Night Football. Jealousy is not exclusive to sluts; it’s an emotion we all have to deal with.

Many people believe that sexual territoriality is a natural part of individual and social evolution. If you believe that, it’s easy to use jealousy as justification to go berserk and stop being a sane, responsible, and ethical human being. Threatened with feeling jealous, we allow our brains to turn to static with the excuse that we are acting on instinct. Your authors don’t think it matters if jealousy derives from nature or nurture or both. What matters is that we know from experience that we can change it.

Here is a story from Dossie’s life about the struggle to cope with jealousy: