The Ethical Slut (3 page)

When psychological studies of human behavior came into vogue in the late nineteenth century, Krafft-Ebing and Freud attempted to create more tolerance by theorizing that sluts are not bad but sick, suffering from psychopathology that is not their fault, since their neurosis derives from having their sexuality warped by their parents during their toilet training. So, they said, we should no longer burn sluts at the stake but instead send them to mental hospitals to be cured, in an environment that permits no sexual expression at all, healthy or otherwise.

During your authors’ childhood and adolescence in the early 1960s, it was common practice to certify and incarcerate adolescents for “treatment” of the “illness” of being sexual, especially if they were gay or lesbian, or female and in danger of damaging their market value as virgins. This sort of thing still takes place more often than you might think. More recently we hear about sex addicts, avoidance of intimacy, commitment-phobia, and attachment disorders. These terms were created to describe genuine problems, but they are far too often used as weapons in a moral war against all sexual freedom.

The whole idea of sex addiction is a controversial one: many people feel that the word “addiction” is not well suited to discussing behavioral issues like sex. However, everybody seems to agree that substituting sex for fulfillment of other needs—to allay anxiety, for instance, or bolster sagging self-esteem—represents a problem.

Only you can decide whether your sexual behaviors have become compulsive and whether you wish to change them. Some people try to validate their sexual attractiveness over and over, using sex as constant reassurance because they do not see themselves as inherently attractive or lovable. Sex can be used as a substitute for connection. Sex can be the only coin valuable enough to attract attention and approval.

Some twelve-step groups and therapists who subscribe to the addiction model may try to tell you that anything but the most conservative of sexual behaviors is wrong, or unhealthy, or “into your addiction”; we encourage you to trust your own beliefs and find yourself a supportive environment. Sexual Compulsives Anonymous and Sex Addicts Anonymous encourage you to define the healthy sex life you want for yourself. If your goal is monogamy, that’s fine, and if your goal is to stop seeking sex in the place of friendship, or any other behavior pattern that you wish to resculpt, that’s fine too. We do not believe that successfully recovering sex addicts have to be monogamous unless they want to be.

Is there, we wonder, some virtue in being difficult?

One of the challenges facing the ethical slut is our culture’s insistence that, simply because “everybody knows” something, it must obviously be true. We urge you to regard with great skepticism any sentence that begins “Everybody knows that …” or “Common sense tells us that …” or “It’s common knowledge that …” Often, these phrases are signposts for cultural belief systems that may be antisexual, monogamy-centrist, and/or codependent. Questioning “what everybody does” can be difficult and disorienting, but we have found it to be rewarding: questioning is the first step toward generating a new paradigm, your own paradigm of how you ought to be.

Cultural belief systems can be very deeply rooted in literature, law, and archetypes, which means that shaking them from your own personal ethos can be difficult. But the first step in exploring them is, of course, recognizing them. Here, then, are some of the pervasive myths
that we have heard all our lives and have come to understand are most often untrue and destructive to our relationships and our lives.

Lifetime monogamy as an ideal is a relatively new concept in human history and makes us unique among primates. There is nothing that can be achieved within a long-term monogamous relationship that cannot be achieved without one. Business partnership, deep attachment, stable parenting, personal growth, care and companionship in old age are all well within the abilities of the slut.

People who believe this myth may feel that something is wrong with them if they aren’t in a committed twosome—if they prefer to remain free agents, if they discover themselves loving more than one person at a time, if they have tried one or more traditional relationships that didn’t work out. Instead of questioning the myth, they question themselves: Am I incomplete? Where is my other half? The myth teaches them that they are not good enough in and of themselves. Often people develop a very unrealistic view of couplehood—Mr. or Ms. Right will automatically solve all their problems, fill all the gaps, make their lives complete.

A subset of this myth is the belief that if you’re really in love, you will automatically lose all interest in others; thus, if you’re having sexual or romantic feelings toward anyone but your partner, you’re not really in love. This belief has cost many people a great deal of happiness through the centuries yet is untrue to the point of absurdity: a ring around the finger does not cause a nerve block to the genitals.

And, we must ask, if monogamy is the only acceptable option, the only true form of love, than are these agreements genuinely consensual? We have many friends who have chosen to be monogamous, and we applaud them. But how many people in our society consciously make that choice?

Look at the lyrics of popular songs, or read some classical poetry: the phrases we choose to describe romantic love don’t really sound all that
pleasant. Crazy in love, love hurts, obsession, heartbreak … these are all descriptions of mental or physical illness.

The thing that gets called romantic love in this culture seems to be a heady cocktail of lust and adrenaline, sparked by uncertainty, insecurity, perhaps even anger or danger. The chills up the spine that we recognize as passion are, in fact, the same physical phenomenon as hair rising up on a cat’s back and are caused by the fight-or-flight response.

This kind of love can be thrilling and overwhelming and sometimes a hell of a lot of fun, but it is not the only “real” kind of love, nor is it always a good basis for an ongoing relationship. Yet as George Bernard Shaw famously remarked, “When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.”

This one goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden and leads to a lot of crazy-making double standards. Some religions appear to believe that women’s sexuality is evil and dangerous, and exists only to lure men to their doom. From the Victorian era, we get the idea that men are hopelessly voracious and predatory when it comes to sex, and women are supposed to control and civilize them by being pure, asexual, and withholding—men are the gas pedal and women the brakes, which is, we think, pretty hard on the engine. Neither of these works for us.

Many people also believe that unashamed sexual desire, particularly desire for more than one person, inevitably destroys the family—yet we suspect that far more families have been destroyed by bitter divorces over adultery than have ever been disturbed by ethical consensual nonmonogamy.

This kind of territorial reasoning is designed, we guess, to make people feel secure, but we don’t believe that anybody has the right, much less the obligation, to control the behavior of another functioning adult.
Being treated according to this myth doesn’t make us feel secure, it makes us feel furious. The old “awww, she’s jealous—she must really care about me” reasoning, or the scene in which the girl falls in love with the boy when he punches out a rival suitor, are symptomatic of a very disturbed set of personal boundaries that can lead to a great deal of unhappiness.

This myth also leads to the belief, so often promulgated in Hollywood films and popular literature, that sleeping with someone else is something you do
to
your partner, not
for
yourself, and is, moreover, the very worst thing you can do to someone. For many years, in New York State, adultery was the only legally acceptable grounds for divorce, leaving those who had unfortunately married batterers or drunks in a very difficult position. And the legal punishment for “cheating” could be to lose one’s job, home, money, and kids, because of the wounding to the “betrayed” partner—that is, if you got caught. So one was supposed to cheat in secrecy to protect one’s partner’s dignity and keep the family together.

Jealousy is, without a doubt, a very common experience, so much so that a person who doesn’t experience jealousy is looked at as a bit odd, or in denial. But often a situation that would cause intense jealousy for one person can be no big deal for another. Some people get jealous when their honey takes a sip out of someone else’s Coke, others happily watch their beloved wave bye-bye for a month of amorous sporting with a friend at the far end of the country.

Some people also believe that jealousy is such a shattering emotion that they have no choice but to succumb to it. People who believe this often believe that any form of nonmonogamy
should
be nonconsensual and completely secret, in order to protect the “betrayed” partner from having to feel such an impossibly difficult emotion.

On the contrary, we have found that jealousy is an emotion like any other: it feels bad (sometimes very bad), but it is not intolerable. We have also found that many of the “oughta-be’s” that lead to jealousy can be unlearned and that unlearning them is often a useful process. Later in this book, we will spend a lot more time talking about jealousy
and the strategies many people have successfully employed to cope with it.

Most marriage counselors, and certain popular TV psychologists, believe when a member of an otherwise happy couple has an “affair,” this must be a symptom of unresolved conflict or unfulfilled needs that should be dealt with in the primary relationship. Of course, this is occasionally true, but not nearly as often as many “relationship gurus” would like us to believe. Moreover, this myth leaves no room for the possibility of growthful and constructive open sexual lifestyles.

It is cruel and insensitive to interpret an affair as a symptom of sickness in the relationship, as it leaves “cheated-on” partners—who may already be feeling insecure—to wonder what is wrong with them. Meanwhile, “cheating” partners get told that they are only trying to get back at their primary partners and don’t really want, need, or even like their lovers.

Many people have sex outside their primary relationships for reasons that have nothing to do with any inadequacy in their partner or in the relationship. The new relationship may simply be a natural extension of an emotional and/or physical attraction to someone besides the primary partner. Or perhaps this outside relationship allows a particular kind of intimacy that the primary partner doesn’t even want (such as kinky sex or going to football games) and thus constitutes a solution for an otherwise insoluble conflict. Or perhaps it meets other needs—like a need for uncomplicated physical sex without the trappings of relationship, or for sex with someone of a gender other than one’s partner’s, or for sex at a time when it is otherwise not available (during travel or a partner’s illness, for example).

An outside involvement does not have to subtract in any way from the intimacy you share with your partner unless you let it. And we sincerely hope you won’t.

Hollywood tells us that “love means never having to say you’re sorry,” and we, fools that we are, believe it. This myth has it that if you’re
really in love with someone, you never have to argue, disagree, communicate, negotiate, or do any other kind of work. It also tells us that love means we automatically get turned on by our beloved and that we never have to lift a finger or make any effort to deliberately kindle passion. Those who believe this myth may find themselves feeling that their love has failed every time they need to schedule a discussion or to have a courteous (or not-so-courteous) disagreement. They may also believe that any sexual behavior that doesn’t fit their criteria for “normal” sex—from fantasies to vibrators—is “artificial” and indicates that something is lacking in the quality of their love.

So in this slightly disorienting world of sluthood, in which everything your mom, your minister, your spouse, and your television ever told you is probably wrong, how do you find new beliefs that support your new lifestyle? Letting go of old paradigms can leave you in a scary emptiness, your stomach churning as if you were in free fall. You don’t need the old myths, but what will you have instead? We encourage you to seek your own truths on your way to slutty bliss, but just in case you could use a hint or two, here are some of the ones that have worked well for us.

WE ARE ETHICAL PEOPLE, ethical sluts. It is very important to us to treat people well and to do our best not to hurt anyone. Our ethics come from our own sense of rightness, and from the empathy and love we hold for those around us. It is not okay to hurt another person because then we hurt too, and we don’t feel good about ourselves.

Ethical slutdom can be a challenging path: we don’t have a polyamorous Miss Manners telling us how to do our thing courteously and respectfully, so we have to make it up as we go along. However, we’re sure you’ve figured out by now that to us, being a slut doesn’t mean simply doing whatever you want, whenever you want, with whomever you want.