The Ethical Slut (11 page)

If you were brought up to believe that your relationship would provide your other, or (shudder) better, half, or that your destiny is to submerge your identity in a relationship, you will probably have to put some attention into learning about your own boundaries. Boundaries are invariably in the plural because none of them hold still for long and all of them are individual. They are how we understand where I end and you begin, where we meet and how we are separate as individuals. You need to figure out where your limits are, what constitutes comfortable distance or closeness between yourself and others in various situations, and particularly the ways in which you and your lovers are different and individual and unique.

It is axiomatic in communication between intimates that, as we’ve already discussed, each person owns his or her own emotions, and each person is responsible for dealing with those emotions. Understanding this is the first step to claiming something very precious—your own emotions. And when you grasp your emotions, you have something unbelievably valuable to bring to your relationships.

When you find yourself responding to someone else’s behavior, it can be easy to dwell on what that person has done and how terrible it
is and what exactly they should should do to fix it. Instead, try looking at your own feelings as a true message about your internal state of being, and decide how you want to deal with whatever’s going on. Do you want to find out more? Do you want to discuss a limit? Do you want a little time to yourself to calm down and get centered? Do you want to be heard about something? When you take responsibility, you get these choices, and more.

What you are
not
responsible for is your lover’s emotions. You can choose to be supportive—we’re great believers in the healing power of listening—but it is not your job to fix anything. Once you understand that your lover’s emotions are not your job or your fault, you can listen and really hear, without falling victim to an overwhelming need to figure out whose fault it is or to make the emotion change or go away.

Some people habitually respond to a lover’s pain and confusion with an intense desire to fix something. Fix-it messages can feel like invalidation to the person who is trying to express an emotion. “Why don’t you just do this … try that … forget about it … relax!” sends the message that the person expressing the emotion has overlooked some obvious and simple solution and is an idiot for feeling bad in the first place. Such messages are disempowering and invalidating.

Being responsible for your emotions doesn’t mean that you have to conquer all your difficult feelings bare-knuckled and solo. You can ask for the help you need—reassurance, validation, a shoulder to cry on, an ear to vent in, a brain to brainstorm with—from friends, lovers, and/or a good therapist. And you, in turn, will do your best to make yourself available when your friends and lovers need this kind of help from you … right?

Learning to operate our emotional system consciously may require changing some old habits and can feel very shaky, sort of like learning to ride a bicycle. Weird, embarrassing … you’ll probably fall down a few times, but if you pick yourself up and keep going, eventually you get the feel of it. And once you get your balance, you’ll never forget.

Relationships also have boundaries. The agreements that free-loving singles, couples, and families make with respect for each other’s feelings constitute the boundaries of their relationship. In an open
sexual community, it is important to deal with each relationship within its own boundaries. For example, you figure out your limits with your partner before you go to the sex party, you don’t use your mistress to diss your wife, and decisions are made with input from everybody affected by them and not behind anybody’s back.

Communities based on sex and intimacy work best when everybody has respect for everybody’s relationships, which includes not only lovers but also children and families of origin and neighbors and exes and so on. Such communities can evolve into highly connected family systems when everyone is conscious of and caring about boundaries.

Be willing to learn from your mistakes. Boundaries can get tricky at times, so we hope you give yourself lots of slack to explore. Expect to learn by trial and error, and expect to make plenty of errors. Forgive yourself for anything that doesn’t work out the way you hoped it would. Remember, you can’t learn from your errors if you always have to be right!

One place where people often get confused is differentiating between the honest sharing of feelings and dumping. Dumping means using others as your garbage pit, spewing your problematic stuff all over them and leaving it there. Dumping usually carries the expectation that the dumpee will do something about the problem, even if it’s simply to take on the burden of worrying so that the dumper can stop. Usually you can avoid dumping by making it totally clear that your need to share your emotional state carries no obligation for your listener: “I don’t like your having a date with Paula tonight,” followed by a heavy and pregnant silence, carries an entirely different weight than “I’m feeling insecure about your date with Paula tonight, but I want you to go ahead and have it. Are you okay with listening to some of my fears? Can we talk a bit about ways that I might be able to feel a little safer?”

Another trick to watch out for is projection. No, not the kind you find at the movies on Saturday night! Projection is when you use another person as a screen to run your movie on. You see your fantasy and miss the real person. You imagine you know this person’s thoughts,
when in fact you are thinking about your fears. Maybe you imagine that they will respond the same way your parents did—“I know you’ll reject me if I don’t make a lot of money,” “You’ll never respect me if I show you my sadness.” Every one of us learned our expectations of how people will react to us from our parents. Or you might be projecting your expectations, projections that your lovers—who are not mind readers—can never live up to: “You’re supposed to take care of me!” “Whaddaya mean, you’re not horny? I’m horny!”

When you make a commitment to own your own stuff, you can stop projecting and see the people you love clearly, in all their glory. When you find yourself thinking blameful thoughts about your partner, you might ask yourself: “What do I own here?” What you see inside might be something like “Wow, I sound just like my father when he was angry,” or “I feel the way I did when I was eight and used to hide in the closet when I was upset.” Then you might go to your lover and share how whatever was going on woke up some old tapes of yours, and you can brainstorm what you want to do about that. When you work together to own your stuff, each of you, then your partner can support you in exploring your emotions and, more important, learn to stop projecting on you as well. Then you need never again feel like a puppet in somebody else’s show.

You may find yourself playing out different roles, indeed feeling like a somewhat different person, with different partners. With one partner you might feel young and vulnerable and protected; with another, you are earth mother. With one lover you might feel careful and solid and safe, with another you might be dashing and reckless. These boundaries may seem unfamiliar or confusing when we don’t have much experience with living in multiple relationships.

Janet got a wonderful feeling of acceptance for all her parts at a party:

One of the things people get out of multiple relationships is the chance to be all of their various selves. When two people meet, they relate where they intersect, where they have complementary roles in similar scripts. So, being different things to different lovers, we might find ourselves having different boundaries, limits, and relationship styles in different circumstances.

Your own internal variety might manifest in many ways. For instance, you might be calm and centered when Lover A is angry, but Lover B’s irritability is distressing to you—it “pushes your buttons,” perhaps reminding you of a past lover or a punitive parent. Here is an opportunity to take charge of your buttons. When your buttons are your own, it becomes much easier to figure out what your limits need to be with Lover B, and to understand that they may be altogether different from your limits with Lover A.

Forget about fairness. Ethical sluttery does not mean that all things come out equal. Different relationships have different boundaries, different limits, and different potentials. So if your lover has found someone that she can share a certain activity with, and you would like to share that with her too, the question is not “Why don’t you do that with me?” but “That sounds interesting, how do you suppose we could make that work for us?”

This is how one woman we interviewed put it:

My open sexual lifestyle gives me personal freedom, independence, and responsibility in a way that being an exclusive couple doesn’t. Because I’m responsible, every day, for my needs being met (or not), and for creating and maintaining the relationships in my life, I can take nothing for granted. Every person I meet has the potential for whatever it is that’s right between me and that person, regardless of how my relationships are with anybody else. And so this lifestyle gives me a very concrete feeling of individuality that I re-create every day. I feel more like a grown-up, adult, responsible person when I know that my life, all of it—who I fuck, who I relate to, how I relate to them—is all my choice. I promised my partner that I would share my life with him, and that implies to me that I have a life to share—a complete life. And it’s clear to me that he’s here because he wants to be, wherever “here” is. We are with each other, every day, because we really want to be. Our choices are real.

SOME PEOPLE TREAT SEX as a big-game hunt—trying to conquer the unwilling and unwitting victim, as though the object of their attention would never decide to share sex with them unless tricked into it. Believing that a person would have to be a fool to make love with you is often, we observe, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Someone who tries to use sex to shore up sagging self-esteem by stealing someone else’s is a pitiable object: this strategy does not work to build a solid sense of self-worth, and this poor starving individual will have to go on stealing more and more and never getting fulfilled. We hope that such people play the thief of love in some other social circles than our own.

Such people often approach open sexual lifestyles as if keeping score. Set collectors and trophy fuckers treat their partners like prizes in a contest they have set out to win—only what happens after the prize is collected? Is it time to go after the next one?

The concept of set collectors may be new to you, but we assure you that such people exist. Dossie discovered several of them when she lived with two other single mothers in a communal San Francisco household, called Liberated Ladies at Large, and learned that some people’s ideal of free love was to make sure they had sex with all three of the liberated sisters. A friend of ours once discovered that a would-be lover of hers had already had sex with her mother and her sister and was hoping to
complete the set. Sex that means treating your partners as collectibles does not meet our requirements for mutual respect.

Some people approach “scoring” as if all people can be ranked on a hierarchy from the most to the least desirable and as if the way to make the most points and assure yourself of a high rank is to collect partners as high up the ladder as you can reach. People gain in rank and value in these hierarchies by being thin, young, cute, gym-toned, wealthy, and/or of high social status.

We do not believe that love is a game that you can win by scoring high on a hierarchy of shallow values. We know from extensive experience that appearance and wealth are not predictors of good loving. We try to avoid ranking people as better or worse than each other and are unhappy with those who want to relate to our rank (authors get quite a few points in the status category) more than ourselves. Hierarchies produce victims on the top as well as the bottom, since it is almost as alienating to be approached by too many people for the wrong reasons as it is to be approached by no one at all.

Someone who has a history of nonconsensual nonmonogamy may get attached to the sense of secrecy, of getting away with something. These folks may have a very hard time adapting to the idea of consensual sluthood—they’re so used to concealing their activities from their partners that they may even have built that furtive feeling into their erotic life, hooked on the adrenaline rush they get from forbidden fruit. It takes a pretty substantial leap of faith, and maybe some creative fantasizing and role-playing, for such individuals to open up their hidden places and experience the greater joy that can come from knowing that nobody is getting hurt by their fun.