The Ethical Slut (2 page)

Of course, each slut is unique, with virtues and faults and diverse needs and values. Some of us express different parts of ourselves with different people. Some of us love flirtation for its own sake. Some of us make an art form out of sex. Some of us find these parts of our lives so important that sluttiness is a basic part of our identity, one of the ways we define ourselves, while others drift in and out of sluttiness according to desire and circumstance.

Sluts are not necessarily sexual athletes—although many of us do train more than most. We value sex, not as a way to set records, but for the pleasure it brings us and the good times we get to share with however many wonderful people.

We love adventure. The word “adventurer” is sometimes used pejoratively, suggesting that the adventurous person is immature or inauthentic, not really willing to “grow up” and “settle down” into a presumably monogamous lifestyle. We wonder: what’s wrong with having adventures? Can’t we have adventures and still raise children, buy houses, and do the work that’s important to us? Of course we can; sluts qualify for mortgages just like everybody else. We tend to like our lives complicated, and the challenge of maintaining stable work and home lives while discovering new people and ideas is just what we need to keep us interested and engaged.

One of the most valuable things we learn from open sexual lifestyles is that our programming about love, intimacy, and sex can be rewritten. When we begin to question all the ways we have been told we ought
to be, we can begin to edit and rewrite our old tapes. By breaking the rules, we both free and empower ourselves.

We hate boredom. We are people who are greedy to experience all that life has to offer and are also generous in sharing what we have to offer. We love to be the good time had by all.

In the decade-plus since we wrote the first edition of
The Ethical Slut,
we’ve learned a lot. Dossie, in her therapy practice, has worked with hundreds of singles, couples, and moresomes who are trying to navigate the uncharted pathways of nontraditional relationships, and she has developed new concepts and tools that have proven very helpful to them. Janet has moved out of the relationship she was in at the last time you saw her, has spent several years as a single slut, and has negotiated a relationship with a new lover who went on to become her legal spouse. We’ve also become (if we say so ourselves) better writers, both individually and together.

If you read the first edition of this book, you’ll see a lot of new material in here, and you’ll notice that the old material has been substantially rewritten and reorganized. You’ll also notice one major change—this book contains many exercises that you can use to explore your feelings and chart your progress as you read the book, either on your own or together with a partner or partners.

So, whether you’re an old friend or a new acquaintance, we’re happy to welcome you into our book, and into our slutty, happy lives.

When you sit down to write a book about sex, as we hope you one day will, you will discover that centuries of censorship have left us with very little adequate language with which to discuss the joys and occasional worries of sex. The language that we do have often carries implicit judgments: If the only polite way to talk about sexuality is in medical Latin—vulvas and pudendas, penes and testes—are only doctors allowed to talk about sex? Is sex all about disease? Meanwhile, most of the originally English words—cock and cunt, fucking, and, oh yes, slut—have been used as insults to degrade people and their sexuality and often have a hostile or coarse feel to them. Euphemisms—peepees
and pussies, jade gates and mighty towers—sound as if we are embarrassed. Maybe we are.

Our approach to a sex-positive language is to reclaim the original English words and, by using them as positive descriptors, wash them clean. Hence our adoption of the word “slut.” You will also find in this book words like “fuck” and “cock” and “cunt” used, not as insults, but to mean what they actually mean.

Furthermore, cultural blind spots can show up as centrisms such as couple-centrism, heterocentrism, and eurocentrism. Nonmonogamy, extramarital sex, open relationships, all define themselves by what they
aren’t,
thus implying that they’re some exception to the “normal” relationships that “normal” people have.

“Polyamory” is a brave new word, coined by Morning Glory Ravenheart Zell around 1990 and currently, we are thrilled to report, included in the
Oxford English Dictionary.
Formed from Latin and Greek roots that translate as “loving many,” this word has been adopted by many sluts to describe their lifestyles, often abbreviated as “poly,” as in “I am a poly person.” Some use it to mean multiple committed live-in relationships, forms of group marriage; others use it as an umbrella word to cover all forms of sex and love and domesticity outside conventional monogamy.
Polyamory
has moved into the language so rapidly that we think maybe the language has been waiting for it for a very long time.

In this new world of sex and relationships, new terms get coined all the time to describe, or attempt to describe, the ever-changing spectrum of ways in which people arrange their lives. If, as you’re reading, you encounter a term you don’t understand, please check the Glossary in the back, where we’ve defined these terms for you.

Finally, we are doing our best to make the language in this book as pansexual and gender neutral as we can: we are writing this book for everybody. Pansexual means including everyone as a sexual being: straight, bi, lesbian, gay, transgendered, queer, old, young, disabled, perverts, male, female, questioning, in transition. The examples and quotes in this book have been drawn from throughout the huge array of lifestyles we have encountered in our combined seven decades of sluthood: there are infinite “right” ways to be sexual, and we want to affirm all of them.

THOSE WHO SET OFF down the path of exploring new kinds of relationships and new lifestyles often find themselves blocked by beliefs—about the way society should be, the way relationships should be, the way people should be—that are both deeply rooted and unexamined.

We have all been taught that one way of relating—lifelong monogamous heterosexual marriage—is the only right way. We are told that monogamy is “normal” and “natural”; if our desires do not fit into that constraint, we are morally deficient, psychologically disturbed, and going against nature.

Many of us feel instinctively that something is wrong with this picture. But how can you dig up and examine a belief that you don’t even know you hold? The ideal of lifelong monogamy as the only proper goal for relationships is so deeply buried in our culture that it’s almost invisible: we operate on these beliefs without even knowing we believe them. They’re under our feet all the time, the foundation for our assumptions, our values, our desires, our myths, our expectations. We don’t notice them until we trip over them.

Where did these beliefs get started? Often, they evolved to meet conditions that no longer exist.

Our beliefs about traditional marriage date from agrarian cultures, where you made everything you ate or wore or used, where large extended families helped get this huge amount of work done so nobody starved, and where marriage was a working proposition. When we talk about “traditional family values,” this is the family we are talking about: an extended family of grandparents and aunts and cousins, an organization to accomplish the work of staying alive. We see large families functioning in traditional ways in America today, often in cultures recently transplanted from other countries, or as a basic support system among economically vulnerable urban or rural populations.

Curiously, controlling sexual behavior didn’t seem to be that important outside the propertied classes until the Industrial Revolution, which launched a whole new era of sex-negativity, perhaps because of the rising middle class and the limited space for children in urban cultures. Doctors and ministers in the late eighteenth century began to claim that masturbation was unhealthy and sinful, that this most innocent of sexual outlets was dangerous to society—nineteenth-century childrearing manuals show devices to prevent babies from touching their genitals in their sleep. So any desire for sex, even with yourself, became a shameful secret.

But human nature will win out. We are horny creatures, and the more sexually repressive a culture becomes, the more outrageous its covert sexual thoughts and behaviors will become, as any fan of Victorian porn can attest.

In his lectures to young communists in Germany during the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, psychologist Wilhelm Reich theorized that the suppression of sexuality was essential to an authoritarian government. Without the imposition of antisexual morality, he believed, people would be free from shame and would trust their own sense of right and wrong. They would be unlikely to march to war against their wishes, or to operate death camps. Perhaps if we were raised without shame and guilt about our desires, we might be freer people in more ways than simply the sexual.

The nuclear family, which consists of parents and children relatively isolated from the extended family, is a relic of the twentieth-century middle class. Children no longer work on the farm or in the family
business; they are raised almost like pets. Modern marriage is no longer essential for survival. Now we marry in pursuit of comfort, security, sex, intimacy, and emotional connection. The increase in divorce, so deplored by today’s religious right, may simply reflect the economic reality that today most of us can afford to leave relationships in which we are not happy; nobody will starve.

And still modern puritans, perhaps not yet ready to deal with the frightening prospect of truly free sexual and romantic choice, attempt to enforce the nuclear family and monogamous marriage by teaching sexual shame.

We believe that the current set of “oughta-be’s,” and any other set, are cultural artifacts. We believe that Nature is wondrously diverse, offering us infinite possibilities. We would like to live in a culture that respects the choices made by sluts as highly as we respect the couple celebrating their fiftieth anniversary. (And, come to think of it, what makes us assume that such a couple is monogamous anyway?)

We are paving new roads across new territory. We have no culturally approved scripts for open sexual lifestyles; we need to write our own. To write your own script requires a lot of effort, and a lot of honesty, and is the kind of hard work that brings many rewards. You may find the right way for you, and three years from now decide you want to live a different way—and that’s fine. You write the script, you get to make the choices, and you get to change your mind, too.

As you try to figure out your own path, you may encounter a lot of harsh judgments about the ways different people live. We’re sure you don’t need us to tell you that the world does not, for the most part, honor sluthood, or think well of those of us who are sexually explorative.

You will probably find some of these judgments in your own brain, burrowed in deeper than you ever realized. We believe that they say a lot more about the culture that promotes them than they do about any actual person, including you.

This means we enjoy too many sexual partners. We’ve also been called “indiscriminate” in our sexuality, which we resent: we can always tell our lovers apart.

We do not believe that there is such a thing as too much sex, except perhaps on certain happy occasions when our options exceed our abilities. Nor do we believe that the ethics we are talking about here have anything to do with moderation or abstinence. Kinsey once defined a “nymphomaniac” as “someone who has more sex than you” and, scientist that he was, demonstrated his point with statistics.

Is having less sex somehow more virtuous than having more? We think not. We measure the ethics of good sluts not by the number of their partners, but by the respect and care with which they treat them.

Our culture also tells us that sluts are evil, uncaring, amoral, and destructive: Jezebel, Casanova, Don Juan. The mythological evil slut is grasping and manipulative, seeking to steal something—virtue, money, self-esteem—from his partners. In some ways, this archetype is based on the idea that sex is a commodity, a coin you trade for something else—stability, children, a wedding ring—and that any other transaction constitutes being cheated and betrayed.

We have rarely observed any Jezebels or Casanovas in our community, but perhaps it is not very satisfying for a thief to steal what is freely given. We do not worry about being robbed of our sexual value by the people we share pleasure with.

Some people base their sense of ethics on what they’ve been told that God, or their church, or their parents, or their culture, believes to be okay or not okay. They believe that being good consists of obedience to laws set down by a power greater than themselves.

Religion, we think, has a great deal to offer to many people—the comfort of faith and the security of community among them. But believing that God doesn’t like sex, as many religions seem to, is like believing that God doesn’t like you. Because of this belief, a tremendous number of people carry great shame for their own perfectly natural sexual desires and activities.

We prefer the beliefs of a woman we met, a devoted churchgoer in a fundamentalist faith. She told us that when she was about five years old, she discovered the joys of masturbation in the back seat of the family car, tucked under a warm blanket on a long trip. It felt so wonderful that she concluded that the existence of her clitoris was proof positive that God loved her.