The Ethical Slut (38 page)

Eight months and approximately three thousand dollars’ worth of phone bills later, not to mention a few impulsive airfares, June put all her worldly goods in her truck, Lottie flew out to meet her, and they drove across the Great Divide to a sweet little house in the country, where they lived together for many happy years.

WELL, HERE WE ARE, at the end of our book. But before we launch you back out into the world, we want to leave you with one final concept that may help you shape your thinking as you design your own life full of whatever kinds of sex and love you want.

The world is very fond of twos: black and white, male and female, mind and body, good and bad. These pairs, we all learn, are opposed: there’s the right way and the wrong way, and our task is to do battle to defend the right and destroy the wrong. This kind of thinking dominates our courts, our politics, and our talk shows, with some crazy results: for instance, some people believe that anyone who enjoys sex outside of marriage, or a kind of marriage that’s different from theirs, must be attacking
their
marriage. Anything that is different must be opposed, must be the enemy.

When right and wrong are your only options, you may believe that you can’t love more than one person, or that you can’t love in different ways, or that you have a finite capacity for love—that “many” must somehow be opposed to “one,” or that your only options are in love and out of love, with no allowance for different degrees or kinds of love.

We would like to propose something different. Instead of these simpleminded either/or arguments, consider the possibility of seeing, and valuing, everything that there is, without viewing them as in opposition to one another. We think that if you can do this, you will discover that there are as many ways to be sexual as there are to be human, and all of them are valid. There are lots of ways to relate, to love, to express gender, to share sex, to form families, to be in the world, to be human … and none of them in any way reduces or invalidates any of the others.

When we open our mind to a world beyond opposites, we become able to see beyond unrealistic perfection and unachievable goals. We can free ourselves to be fully conscious of all the wonderful variety and diversity that there is right now in the world, right here, in the present, available to us.

Thus sluthood can become a path to transcendence, a freeing of the mind and spirit as well as the body, a way of being in the world that allows expanded awareness, spiritual growth, and love beyond imagining.

We believe that when we examine the issues that limit our relationships and our understanding of how we might be, we are essentially planning for a society that is appropriate to the way many people live today—that meets our need for change and growth while it feeds our fundamental desire for belonging and family.

We believe that monogamy will continue to thrive as it always has, a perfectly valid choice for those who truly choose it. (We don’t think it’s much of a choice when you are forbidden to choose anything else.) We want to open our vision to accommodate monogamy as well as a plethora of other options—to plan for family and social structures that have growing room, that will continue to stretch and adapt, that we can fit to our needs in the future. We believe that new forms of families are evolving now and will continue to evolve, not to supplant the nuclear family but to supplement it with an amazing abundance, a whole world of choices about sharing family and sex and love. We want to set you free to invent the society you want to live in.

Our vision of utopia has free love, in all its forms, as the foundation of our beliefs about reality, about possibility, about staying in the moment and planning the future. We believe that sexual freedom helps us to see our lives as they really are, with the honesty to perceive ourselves clearly and the fluidity to let us move onward as our needs alter, as a changing and growing self with changing and growing partners in a changing and growing world.

We see ethical sluthood leading us to a world where we respect and honor each individual’s boundaries more than we honor any preconceived set of rules about what their boundaries ought to be.

And in expanding our sexual lives, we foresee the development of an advanced sexuality, where we can become both more natural and more human. Sex really is a physical expression of a whole lot of stuff that has no physical existence: love and joy, deep emotion, intense closeness, profound connection, spiritual awareness, incredibly good feelings, sometimes even transcendent ecstasy. In our utopia, intellect is not a trap that we get stuck in, but an honored tool we use to discover and access all the parts of ourselves and give form to our experience. We free our natural selves by opening our intellects to sensual awareness of our bodies, and when we are no longer stuck in our intellects we become more like spirit: intuitive, experiencing the joy of life for the simple sake of experiencing, in communion with ourselves, with each other, and beyond.

We want everyone to be free to express love in every possible way. We want to create a world where everyone has plenty of what they need: of community, of connection, of touch and sex and love. We want our children to be raised in an expanded family, a connected village within urban alienation, where there are enough adults who love them and each other, so there is plenty of love and attention and nurturance, more than enough to go around. We want a world where the sick and aging are cared for by people who love them, where resources are shared by people who care about each other.

We dream of a world where no one is driven by desires they have no hope of fulfilling, where no one suffers from shame for their desires, or embarrassment about their dreams, where no one is starving from
lack of sex. We dream of a world where no one is limited by rules that dictate that they must be less of a person, and less of a sexual person, than they have the capacity to be.

We dream of a world where nobody gets to vote on your life choices, or who you choose to love, or how you choose to express that love, except yourself and your lovers. We dream of a time and a place where we will all be free to publicly declare our love, for whoever we love, however we love them.

And may we all look forward to a lifetime of dreams come true.

Most of the language available for us to talk about sex has built-in value judgments, just like the word “slut”—the legacy of our sex-negative history. Without language, how are we to communicate with each other and share our thoughts and feelings? Without language, we can hardly even think about sex.

New words and terminologies are coined constantly, which is a challenge for writers and sluts alike. Thus, many of the terms in this book may be unfamiliar to you and may be defined differently in different regions and communities. In this glossary we’ll define these words, and some others you may encounter in openly sexual communities, as we understand them.

BDSM: Activities in which one person controls the behavior of another, and/or puts them in bondage, and/or gives them intense sensations. BDSM derives from B/D for bondage and discipline, D/S for dominance and submission, and S/M (or SM or S&M) for sadomasochism. You may also hear it called “erotic power exchange” or just plain “SM.”

Centrist: We use terms like “heterocentrist,” “eurocentrist,” “malecentrist,” “female-centrist,” “queer-centrist,” and “couple-centrist” to draw attention to unspoken expectations about the way things “should” be. Couple-centrist beliefs, for example, are those that treat the couple as the primary unit of our culture, thus placing anyone who isn’t part of a couple outside the mainstream.

Commitment: In common usage, this word seems to mean lifetime monogamy. Obviously, we don’t use it that way in this book. To us, “commitment” means making a promise for the future and following through on
that promise—whether it’s a promise to “cleave unto you only” or to meet for a hot weekend once a year.

Drama: Those of us who have chosen to avoid the well-paved road of social expectations regarding relationships must hack our way through some fairly dense shrubbery to blaze our own pathways. This process sometimes involves misunderstandings, hurt feelings, and so on. “Drama” is a slightly pejorative term for the struggles that often accompany this process.

Faithful:
See
Fidelity.

Fidelity: Outside these pages, this term is generally used to mean having sex only with one person. However, the dictionary says fidelity is “demonstrated by continuing loyalty and support,” and that sounds about right to us.

Free love: The idea that it is possible to love and have sex with more than one person as a means of interpersonal connection as well as an idealistic sociopolitical statement—a movement that has spanned centuries, although it was most widely accepted during the 1960s.

Friend with benefits: Current parlance for someone with whom you can have sex (the “benefits” part) without the need to commit to a lifelong romantic relationship (the “friend”) part. Also known in some circles as a “fuck buddy.”

Fuck: Still the four-letter word that gets the strongest reaction (with the possible exception of “cunt”), but it seems a shame to us that such a nice activity gets used as a curse. Can mean genital sex in general, or specifically penetrative sex such as penis/vagina, penis/anus, or fisting.

Gender: The catchphrase used in gender-explorative circles is, “Your sex is what’s between your legs, your gender is what’s between your ears.” Someone who was born with female genitals and chromosomes, but prefers to interact with the world as a man (possibly using surgery and/or hormones to further that goal), is thus of the male gender. Those who prefer to occupy a place somewhere between the extremes of binary gender, or
who like to be playful with their gender presentation, are called “gender-queer,” “gender-fluid,” or “gender-bent.”

Kink: Any form of sex outside the mainstream. Often used specifically for BDSM, leather, and/or fetish play.

Leather: Another way of talking about BDSM and related behaviors. Generally in wider use in gay, lesbian, and queer circles.

Munch: A social get-together of polyfolk in a restaurant or similar location. Munches started as a way for Internet-based polyfolk to meet face to face. Munches have been established for many online communities.

Nonjudgmental: An attitude that is free of irrational or unjustifiable moralizing. “Nonjudgmental” does not mean all-accepting; it means being willing to judge an activity or relationship on the basis of how well it works for the participants and not on some external standard of absolute rightness or wrongness.

Nonmonogamy: We don’t generally use this term, because it implies that monogamy is the norm and that any other way of relating is somehow a deviation from that norm (i.e., it’s “monogamy-centrist”—see our definition of “Centrist” above).

Nymphomania:
See
Promiscuity.

Openheartedness: Greeting the world with compassion and without defensiveness; opening yourself to whatever love or connection life offers you.

Open relationship: A relationship in which the people involved have some degree of freedom to fuck and/or love people outside the relationship. Hence, an eight-person group marriage may still be either “open” or “closed.”

Orientation: Usually used to mean gay, lesbian, bisexual, or heterosexual. Many people engage in sex, romance, and/or intimacy outside the boundaries of their chosen orientation, without feeling the need to change that
orientation—it is quite possible that “orientation” has at least as much to do with culture as it does with sex.

Outercourse: Non-penetrative sex, including sex toys, mutual masturbation, phone sex, roleplaying, and such … just for fun, or as a safer-sex strategy, or both.

Pansexual: Inclusive of all genders and orientations.

Pathologize: To treat a functional sexual or relationship pattern as a disease, usually because it’s unfamiliar.

Polyamory (often shortened to “poly”): A new word that has gained a great deal of currency in recent years. We like it because, unlike “nonmonogamy,” it does not assume monogamy as a norm. On the other hand, its meaning is still a bit vague—some feel that polyamory includes all forms of sexual relationships other than monogamy, while others restrict it to committed love relationships (thereby excluding swinging, casual sexual contact, and other forms of intimacy).

Polyfidelity: A subset of polyamory in which more than two people, possibly two or more couples, form a sexually exclusive group. Sometimes used as a safer-sex strategy.

Promiscuity: One of several words used to pathologize those who like to have a lot of sex. Mainstream culture tips its hand about its underlying paradigm of sex-as-commodity when it refers to such people as “cheap.”

Public sex: Sex in an environment containing many consenting people, such as a sex party.

Queer: A recently reclaimed word, originally an insult aimed at homosexual people. In some communities this word means specifically “gay or lesbian.” However, it is used increasingly as a political/sexual self-definition by anyone who doesn’t fit neatly into mainstream sexual expectations. Often combined with a description of what makes you queer, as in “genderqueer” or “leatherqueer.”

Reclaiming: If someone uses a word about you in an attempt to insult or offend you, you can either get angry, or you can defuse the word by using it yourself so it’s no longer an insult. Words that have been reclaimed in this way include “queer,” “dyke,” “fag,” and, yes, “slut.”

Sex: Frankly, it doesn’t matter what definition
we
use; sex is whatever you and your partners think it is. Whatever you think sex is, we approve of it—because all forms of consensual sex are wonderful.

Sex addiction: The subject of heated debate in sex therapy communities, this phrase refers to compulsive sexual behavior that takes over a person’s life to the extent that it interferes with healthy functioning in relationships, work, or other aspects of life. Far too often used as a way of pathologizing happy sluts.