The Ethical Slut (25 page)

Both men and women can develop some resistance to sex, either from fear of not doing it well themselves or from disappointment in not getting their needs or their dreams fulfilled. Once any part of sex has become difficult, if it isn’t discussed and dealt with, resentments can build up. Responding to resistance by getting so pushy that you’re ignoring your partner’s signals to knock it off is definitely not an answer. Sweeping someone off their feet when they don’t want you to only works in movies. Avoid treating your partner as a resource for getting your rocks off: just because you got married does not mean you have a right to demand sex whenever you want it. What you can do is invite your partner to collaborate with you on a meander through the garden of earthly delights and discover what pleases both of you.

It is very rare that both partners have exactly the same desire for sex—that would be like insisting that you and your partner should have identical patterns of tidiness. To get through times when one partner is hungry for sex and the other is starving for sleep, a positive attitude toward masturbation is an utter plus. Sex with yourself doesn’t mean you’re a failure, it means that you enjoy yourself; it can
make your relationship a lot easier, especially when you don’t have to hide it. One of your authors regularly goes to sleep with her partner curled up around her beating off while she reads herself to sleep with a good novel, both of them getting drowsy in their favorite way and all warm and cuddly.

So your first slut skill in keeping it hot is to talk to each other about the practical aspects of what works for each of you and scheme together to overcome any problems. Knowledge is the most powerful aphrodisiac.

Some couples develop a groove, a satisfying script for sex that reliably works for both of them. Experimenting with new sensations in your sex life doesn’t mean giving up your groove, but rather adding some new tricks to your excellent repertoire. What’s already a good thing will remain good, and you will return to it again and again like a well that has very sweet water.

If the groove has become a rut, if it feels like a chore, if it is a source of repeated disappointment, it’s time to talk about expanding your options. Now might be a good time to do the “Yes, No, Maybe” exercise in
chapter 21
, “Sex and Pleasure,” being sure to include things that you’ve never tried but might like to. Looking at your partner’s list may be a mite shocking for starters—“I never knew you hated that!”—but after you recover from any surprises, you get to start into the future with a lot of really useful information about what works for both of you.

Compare your patterns of desire, and particularly look at the spectrum from brief encounters to production numbers. Do you like to have
friendly, warm, cuddly sex on weeknights? Swift rocket trips surging to release? Do you dream of ecstatic journeys that could take up most of Saturday and maybe some of Sunday morning? Good sex travels the range from what Dossie calls “bread and butter” sex, the nourishing part of every meal, to fancy desserts that take enchanting hours to concoct. Production numbers obviously can’t happen every day, but luckily you don’t have to choose—you can have some of each.

Start by setting aside some time for pleasure—this may be harder than you think, but it’s very important. Waiting until the kids are in bed, the emails are answered, the chat lists have been checked, and you’ve watched the evening news and clucked over the terrible state of the world is a recipe for disappointment. Schedule it the way you’d schedule anything else that’s important to you, at a time when you’re most likely to have plenty of energy for it, and stick to your schedule whenever possible.

Turn-on is not the same thing as hard-on. Turn-on is about getting into the mood, about getting ready to focus on sensual and eventually sexual sensation.

Too many of us believe that turn-on is something that happens to us like the weather. Here’s an affirmation for you: “I know my turn-on is in here somewhere, and I can figure out how to find it.”

Turn-ons may be visual, verbal, or sensual; they may rely on touch, sound, smell, or the sensations of muscles stretching and flexing. There are a thousand and more ways to get turned on. Make a list of your favorite turn-ons—not how you like to get off, but how you like to get started. Getting turned on is sort of like getting high, or waking up, or warming up—you are transitioning from one state of consciousness to another. This takes time, and it feels good.

Sexologists who study arousal tell us that turn-on depends on two things: safety and risk. You need to feel safe from harm, and secure that your conditions will be met and your wants and needs honored. You also need to feel a little like being at the top of a ski jump, on the threshold of something miraculous and powerful. New relationships can be very hot because there is still a lot of riskiness, but mature relationships need to seek out ways to take a little risk, to step beyond the comfortable and the familiar into something new and a little challenging.

Looking for your turn-on on can be a lot like looking for ways you can nourish your relationship. Here’s a list of some possibilities that you might find useful.

• Dress up, clean up, wake up.
  
• Prepare your environment—fancy sheets, candles, music.
  
• Allow plenty of time—start your date three hours early, out somewhere.
  
• Go to the sex store.
  
• Talk about your fantasies (go ahead, blush).
  
• Play an erotic board game.
  
• Massage gently with favorite oils, nice and slow … maybe with a blindfold on one of you … or both of you.
  
• Get silly.
  
• Neck in the car like teenagers.
  
• Hold each other while you cry.
  
• Make a dinner and eat it with your fingers.
  
• Eat some very good chocolates and taste each other’s lips.
  
• Read an erotic book together—out loud.
  
• Watch a movie you both find sexy.
  
• Go together to a strip club.
  
• Go to the hot tub spa and soak.
  
• Go anywhere in Nature and make out.
  
• Make your dates special any way you can.
  

There’s a reason why dates usually include dinner: dinner, whether out or in, is a great place to connect, to talk, to get caught up, and then maybe plot an adventure. Going out to dinner gives you time to dress up sexy, which is much more fun than washing dishes.

Remember when you are on a date and when you’re not—some people don’t like being felt up while they’re washing the dishes. (Others do, of course, so you have to communicate about this too.)

When you get to the bed, being equally turned on is not a requirement; you can both get there with a little time and cheerful cooperation. The more ready person can help the other person catch up. Try out what sex therapists call “nondemand pleasuring,” which adds up to anything you know your partner likes, without pushing them further. Try an experiment where you agree that one partner will set out to arouse the other in the way the receptive partner chooses—with no obligations, and no blame if it doesn’t work.

Whatever you choose to try, please try something. You have to do something different if you want a different outcome.

None of this works every time. Simply making the effort is progress, even when one particular attempt doesn’t pan out. Setting aside time with the intention to hunt for your turn-on is the best way to start, and if you set out to get sexy and you don’t get all the way there, you can still enjoy the journey.

Consult your “Yes” lists and scheme together for a brief encounter on a weeknight. Schedule a time when you can have a twelve-hour date—yes, twelve whole hours—without being interrupted. Go out to dinner, to a beach, hiking—whatever you like. Come home, shower the sweat off together, light the candles, and see what happens next.

ANY MEMBER OF A SEXUAL minority faces special challenges in finding partners and friends—and, as a slut or slut-wannabe, you are most assuredly a member of a sexual minority. Polyamory is not readily understood or accepted in very many social environments. If you’re also gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or interested in a specialized area of sexuality such as cross-dressing or S/M, you are doubly or triply challenged. And yet making the connections of your dreams is not only possible but eminently achievable, as many thousands of abundantly connected sluts can happily attest.

However, we’d be the last people to tell you that it will always be easy. We’ve heard, and lived, too many sad, frustrating stories about near misses: partners who are fine with an open relationship until someone falls in love, at which point they freak out and demand monogamy; or partners who rhapsodize about sexual openness and free love in principle but fall apart when faced with the reality (Janet says these remind her of the dog who chases cars all his life, then can’t figure out what to do with one when he catches it). Some partners may become successfully polyamorous but come to a time when their needs, desires, and limits simply don’t fit together well enough—after all, sex is not the only or the most important aspect that determines the way we relate.

Yet many people
do
succeed in finding each other, for relationships ranging from casual to lifetime. So, how do you find friends, lovers, and potential partners who not only share your values and beliefs, but are also emotionally, intellectually, and sexually compatible with you?

A good place to start is by getting an idea of
who
you’re looking for. The trick in making this decision is to be neither too specific nor too vague. If your “who” list basically includes anybody who is breathing and who is willing to have sex with you, we suggest that you are perhaps broadening your field a bit too much. Even if you don’t have strong preferences about gender, age, appearance, background, or intelligence, you probably do want someone who will not lie to you, steal from you, hurt you, or exploit you: basic sanity, honesty, and respectfulness are on most of our lists. It is also perfectly fine to acknowledge those preferences that are genuinely important to you: if you prefer men to women, or people your own age to people much older or younger, nobody is going to report you to the Equal Opportunity Commission.

On the other hand, if your “who” list reads like a set of technical specifications—gender, age, weight, height, coloring, mode of dress, educational background, breast size, penis size, sexual kinks—we suspect that you may be more interested in making love to your own fantasy than you are to a real, live person. Many of us, unfortunately, are conditioned to react sexually to a rather unrealistic standard of appearance and behavior: porn queens and kings are fun to watch in the movies, but they rarely appear in our living rooms. If you expect your new honey to be gorgeous, intelligent, loving, and highly sexual all the time, you are almost certainly setting yourself up for a lifetime of disappointment—few people can achieve those standards, and nobody can maintain them twenty-four hours a day.

We can’t tell you the exact cutoff point at which a healthy preference becomes an unrealistic desire; only you can look inside yourself to do that. We do think that physical appearance, wealth, and social status have very little to do with the person behind them, and if any of those criteria appear high up on your “who” list, you may be a little bit stuck in your fantasy. Try getting to know some people who
don’t
meet those criteria. We have a hunch that if you get to know them and
like them, you will discover that they have their own unique beauties, just waiting there for someone to notice them.