The Ethical Slut (4 page)

Most of our criteria for ethics are quite pragmatic. Is anyone being harmed? Is there any way to avoid causing that harm? Are there any risks? Is everybody involved aware of those risks and doing what can be done to minimize them?

On the positive side: How much fun is this? What is everybody learning from it? Is it helping someone to grow? Is it helping make the world a better place?

First and foremost, ethical sluts value
consent.
When we use this word—and we will, often, throughout this book—we mean an active
collaboration for the benefit, well-being, and pleasure of all persons concerned. If someone is being coerced, bullied, blackmailed, manipulated, lied to, or ignored, what is happening is not consensual. And sex that is not consensual is not ethical—period.

Ethical sluts are
honest
—with ourselves and others. We take time with ourselves, to figure out our own emotions and motivations and to untangle them for greater clarity when necessary. Then we openly share that information with those who need it. We do our best not to let our fears and bashfulness be an obstacle to our honesty—we trust that our partners will go on respecting and loving us, warts and all.

Ethical sluts
recognize the ramifications
of our sexual choices. We see that our emotions, our upbringing, and the standards of our culture often conflict with our sexual desires. And we make a conscious commitment to supporting ourselves and our partners as we deal with those conflicts honestly and honorably.

We do not allow our sexual choices to have an unnecessary impact on those who have not consented to participate. We are
respectful
of others’ feelings, and when we aren’t sure how someone feels, we ask.

Ethical sluts recognize the difference between things they can and should control, and things they can’t. While we sometimes may feel jealous or territorial, we
own those feelings,
doing our best not to blame or control, but asking for the support we need to help ourselves feel safe and cared for.

Don’t panic—the rest of this book is about
how
you can learn to be such a fine sexy grown-up. Your authors are here to help. We wrote this book to help you become an ethical slut. Here are a few of the ideas and beliefs that have helped us get here and might help you too.

Are you having sex right now? Yes, you are, and so are we.

Perhaps you’re looking around you in bewilderment: You still have your clothing on, and maybe you’re sitting in a restaurant or a crowded bus. How could you be having sex?

We think that the question of when you’re having sex is actually sort of meaningless. Sexual energy pervades everything all the time; we inhale it into our lungs and exude it from our pores. While it’s
pretty easy to determine whether or not you’re engaging in a particular sexual activity at any given time—neither you nor we are probably having intercourse at this moment—the idea of sex as something set aside, a discrete, definable activity like driving a car, just doesn’t hold up very well.

You can compare this idea to the idea of eating, if you like. Most people would define “eating” as the actual activity of placing food in the mouth. But gourmets might spend a long time savoring the aroma and appearance of their food before actually taking a bite, so that smell and vision have become part of eating. For those who open themselves to the possibilities, every stray aroma that floats under our nostrils, the ocean breeze with its tang of oysters and seaweed, the peaty whiskeylike whiff of woodsmoke, becomes a kind of eating. And our eyes take in colors and shapes, apple red and creamy custard yellow, while our busy brains, remembering yesterday’s wonderful meal, plan another for tomorrow, and the whole world becomes our food.

Similarly, we think erotic energy is everywhere—in the deep breath that fills our lungs as we step out into a warm spring morning, in the cold water spilling over the rocks in a brook, in the creativity that drives us to paint pictures and tell stories and make music and write books, in the loving tenderness we feel toward our friends and relatives and children. In our combined half century of work as sex writers and educators, we’ve found that the more we learn about sex, the less we know about how to define it, so now we just say the truth as we know it: sex is part of everything.

Right now, we’re writing about sex, and you’re reading what we have to say about it. You’re having sex with us! Was it good for you? It sure has been for us.

More pragmatically, we have had long, intense intimate conversations that felt deeply sexual to us. And we have had intercourse that didn’t feel terribly sexual. Our best definition here is that sex is whatever the people engaging in it think it is. For some people, spanking is sex. For others, wearing a garter belt and stockings is sex. If you and anybody else involved feel sexual when you eat ice cream sundaes together, that’s sex—for you. While this may sound silly now, it’s a concept that will come in handy later in this book when we discuss making agreements about our sexual behaviors.

Dossie’s bachelor’s thesis was called “Sex Is Nice and Pleasure Is Good for You.” That idea is as radical now, in the twenty-first century, as it was back in the 1970s when Dossie first wrote it.

Our culture places a very high value on self-denial, which is fine when there is hard work to be done. But all too often, those who unapologetically satisfy their desire for pleasure in their utterly free time are seen as immature, disgusting, even sinful. Since we all have desires, puritanical values lead inevitably to self-loathing, hatred of our bodies and our turn-ons, and fear and guilt over our sexual urges.

We see ourselves surrounded by the walking wounded—by people who have been deeply injured by fear, shame, and hatred of their own sexual selves. We believe that happy, free, guiltless connection is the cure for these wounds; we believe that sexuality is vital to people’s sense of self-worth, to their belief that life is good. We have never met anyone who had low self-esteem at the moment of orgasm.

If you walk up to a randomly selected individual and propose that sex is nice and pleasure is good for you, you will probably hear a lot of spluttering, argument, and “yahbuts”—STDs, unwanted pregnancies, rape, the commodification of sexual desire, and so on. None of which changes the core idea.

There is nothing in the world so terrific that it can’t be abused if you’re determined to do so: Familial connections can be violated, sexual desire can be manipulated. Even chocolate can be abused. Abuse doesn’t change the basic wonderfulness of any of these things: the danger lies in the motivation of the abuser, not the nature of the item.

If there were no such thing as sexually transmitted disease, if nobody got pregnant unless she wanted to, if all sex were consensual and pleasurable, how would the world feel about it then? How would
you
feel? If you look deep inside yourself, you may find bits and pieces of sex-negativism, often hiding behind judgmental words like “promiscuous,” “hedonistic,” “decadent,” and “nonproductive.”

Even people who consider themselves sex positive and sexually liberated often fall into a different trap—the trap of rationalizing sex.
Releasing physical tension, relieving menstrual cramps, maintaining mental health, preventing prostate problems, making babies, cementing relationships, and so on are all admirable goals, and wonderful side benefits of sex. But they are not what sex is
for.
Sex is for pleasure, a complete and worthwhile goal in and of itself. People have sex because it feels very good, and then they feel good about themselves. The worthiness of pleasure is one of the core values of ethical sluthood.

Our monogamy-centrist culture tends to assume that the purpose and ultimate goal of all relationships—and all sex—is lifelong pair bonding, and that any relationship that falls short of that goal has failed.

We, on the other hand, think sexual pleasure can certainly contribute to love, commitment, and long-term stability, if that’s what you want. But those are hardly the only good reasons for having sex. We believe in valuing relationships for what we value in them, a seeming tautology that is wiser than it sounds.

A relationship may be valuable simply because it affords sexual pleasure to those involved; there is nothing wrong with sex for sex’s sake. Or it might involve sex as a pathway to other lovely things—intimacy, connection, companionship, even romantic love—which in no way changes the basic goodness of the pleasurable sex.

A sexual relationship may last for an hour or two. It’s still a relationship: the participants have related to one another—as sex partners, companions, lovers—for the duration of their interaction. Longevity is not a good criterion by which to judge the success or failure of a relationship.

One-night stands can be intense, life-enhancing, and fulfilling; so can lifetime love affairs. While ethical sluts may choose to have some kinds of relationships and not others, we believe that all relationships have the potential to teach us, move us, and above all give us pleasure.

Dossie remembers an interview with a young flower child back in 1967 who made the most succinct statement of ethical sluthood we’ve ever seen: “We believe it’s okay to have sex with anybody you love, and we believe in loving everybody.”

Jane Austen wrote, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” While we think Jane probably had her tongue firmly planted in her cheek, a great many people do believe that to be single is to be somehow incomplete and that they need to find their “other half.” A lot of the myths we mentioned in the previous section are based on that belief.

We believe, on the other hand, that the fundamental sexual unit is one person; adding more people to that unit may be intimate, fun, and companionable but does not complete anybody. The only thing in this world that you can control is yourself—your own reactions, desires, and behaviors. Thus, a fundamental step in ethical sluthood is to bring your locus of control into yourself, to recognize the difference between your “stuff” and other people’s; when you do this, you become able to complete yourself—that’s why we call this “integrity.”

When you have built a satisfying relationship with yourself, then you have something of great worth to share with others.

Many people believe, explicitly or implicitly, that our capacities for romantic love, intimacy, and connection are finite, that there is never enough to go around, and that if you give some to one person, you must be taking some away from another.

We call this belief a “starvation economy”; we’ll talk much more about it later. Many of us learned to think this way in childhood, from parents who had little affection or attention for us, so we learned that there is only a limited amount of love in the world and we have to fight for whatever we get, often in cutthroat competition with our brothers and sisters.

People who operate from starvation economies can become very possessive about the people, things, and ideas that matter to them. They see the whole world in that limited light, so that anything they get comes from a small pool of not-enough and must thus be taken from someone else—and, similarly, anything anyone else gets must be subtracted from them.

It is important to distinguish between starvation economies and real-world limits. Time, for example, is a real-world limit: even the most dedicated slut has only twenty-four hours every day. Love is not a real-world limit: the mother of nine children can love each of them as much as the mother of an only child.

Our belief is that the human capacity for sex and love and intimacy is far greater than most people think—possibly infinite—and that having a lot of satisfying connections simply makes it possible for you to have a lot more. Imagine what it would feel like to live in an abundance of sex and love, to feel that you had all of both that you could possibly want, free of any feelings of deprivation or neediness. Imagine how strong you would feel if you got to exercise your “love muscles” that much, and how much love you would have to give!

Is sexual adventurousness simply a way to avoid intimacy? Not ordinarily, in our experience. While it is certainly possible to misuse your outside relationships to avoid problems or intimacy with your life partner, we do not agree that this pattern is inevitable or even common. Many people, in fact, find that their outside relationships can increase their intimacy with their primary partner by reducing the pressures on that relationship and by giving them a safe place to discuss issues that may have them feeling “stuck” in the primary relationship.

This chapter contains some of our beliefs. You get to have beliefs of your own. What matters to us is not that you agree with us, but that you question the prevailing paradigm and decide for yourself what you believe. Exercise your judgment—isn’t exercise supposed to make you stronger? Thousands and thousands of ethical sluts are proving every day that the old “everybody knows” myths don’t have to be true.

We encourage you to explore your own realities and create your own legend, one that spurs you onward in your evolution, supports you as you grow, and reflects your pride and happiness in your newfound relationships.

ETHICAL SLUTHOOD is a house with a lot of rooms: it shelters everyone from happy celibates to ecstatic orgiasts and beyond. In this chapter, we’ll talk about the many styles of sluthood that have worked for us, for the people we know, and for happy sluts throughout history. Whether or not any of these scenarios fit you, we hope they will offer you some ideas about where to start your exploration, or perhaps the validation of knowing that there are others like you out there.

Although the phrase “ethical slut” is new—Dossie coined it in 1995—the practice is not. Cultural acceptance of practices outside monogamy has roller-coastered up and down from acceptance to stern rejection, but regardless of the opinions of church and state there have always been those who have found happiness and growth in sexual openness.