The Ethical Slut (6 page)

Janet’s path toward her current identity as a bisexual has been a confusing one: it was nearly a decade after she began having sex with women before she began to feel comfortable using the term to describe herself.

In bygone decades, there were relatively few role models for heterosexual interaction in mainstream culture: an Ozzie and Harriet household, monogamous, patriarchal, and focused on conformity and child rearing, was presented to us all as our sexual and romantic ideal. Your authors are very glad to have outlived this era.

Modern heterosexuality offers a plethora of options for happy sluthood, from long-term “vee” triads, where two partners are both sexual with one “hub” partner but not with each other, to orgiastic recreational sex, with lots of possibilities in between, including open relationships, secondary partners, poly pods, and intimately extended families we sometimes call “constellations.”

In the past, nonmonogamous heterosexual interactions were called “wife-swapping,” a term with a built-in sexist bias that we find offensive. Today, heterosexuals seeking no-strings sex outside a primary relationship often seek out the swing community. These groups are well worth looking at for what they have to teach us about how heterosexual men and women can interact outside the confines of the “shoulds” of mainstream, monogamous culture.

Swinging is a broad term that gets used to define a wide variety of interactions, ranging from long-term two-couple sexual pairings through the wildest of Saturday-night puppy-pile orgies. Swingers tend to be heterosexual; although female bisexuality is relatively common, male bisexuality is often frowned upon. They are most often coupled, and are often more mainstream in their politics, lifestyles, and personal values than other kinds of sluts. Some swing communities confine themselves explicitly to sexual interactions and discourage emotional connections outside primary couples, while others encourage all forms of romantic and sexual partnering.

Swinging has offered many a heterosexual woman her first opportunity to explore greedy and guilt-free sexuality—in fact, we often hear
of women who attend their first swing party very reluctantly, their second one hesitantly, and their subsequent ones avidly. We also like the sophistication with which many swing communities have evolved patterns of symbols and behavior to communicate sexual interest without intrusiveness (one now-defunct local swing club used to have a fascinating code of opening doors and windows to communicate, variously, “Keep away,” “Look but don’t touch,” or “Come on in and join us”).

Transgendered people form a variety of communities, all of which have much to teach to those who are interested in transcending their gender-role programming. Dossie, in the early years of her feminism, found friends and lovers among male-to-female transsexuals who became her wonderful role models for how to be female, indeed often ultra-feminine, and still be assertive and powerful.

What we can all learn from transgendered people is that gender is malleable. From people who take hormones to express male or female gender, we learn about how some behaviors and emotional states may be hormone related. People who have lived parts of their lives in both gender modes, physiologically and culturally, have a great deal to teach us about what changes according to hormones, and what does not, and what gender characteristics remain a matter of choice no matter what your endocrine system says. Genderqueer people—those who choose to live their lives somewhere between the usual gender roles—are softening the boundaries of gender and demonstrating what life without binary gender might look like.

If you think this doesn’t apply to you, that you are certain of your gender and that it’s immutable, please consider that a great many people are born with characteristics of both genders: depending on whose definition you use, anywhere from two to seventeen babies out of a thousand are born with chromosomes and/or genitalia that place them somewhere between the extremes of the gender continuum. We’re not generally aware of these people in our midst because their appearance is usually surgically altered early in life, but it appears that Mother (Father?) Nature doesn’t believe in only two genders, and neither do your authors. And a great many people whose genitals and chromosomes
are all lined up with biological norms nonetheless feel strongly that they would live more happily and appropriately when presenting as a different gender than the one the doctor assigned to them at birth; you may have such people among your friends and family without knowing it unless they choose to tell you.

Transsexuals can tell us a lot about how differently other people treat you when they see you as a man, or as a woman. Perforce, transgendered people become experts at living in a very hostile world. It takes a strong-minded person to stand up to our culture’s rigidity about “real men” and “real women.” No other sexual minority is more likely to suffer direct physical oppression in the form of queer-bashing. It was mostly transgendered people, butch women and drag queens, who rebelled against police brutality in the famous Stonewall riots of 1969 that initiated the Gay Liberation movement. Transgendered people can teach us a lot about the determination to be free.

Celibacy is not the only sexual practice of the spiritually inclined. Early examples of religious communities based on nonmonogamy included the Mormon church, the Oneida community, the practices of
maithuna
and
karezza
in tantric yoga, and the temple whores of the early Mediterranean goddess worshipers. Tantra as we know it today is actually a Westernized form of classical tantric practice taught in workshops in most major cities and in many excellent books and videos. Other classical spiritual/sexual traditions have been updated for Western consumption in practices like Healing Tao and Quodoushka. Pagans and Radical Faeries come together for festivals and gatherings to celebrate ancient sexual rites such as Beltane, or make up their own rituals that are appropriate to current lifestyles, like the open sexuality of Faerie gatherings or the more subtle eroticism of sacred dance and drumming.

These practitioners understand that sex is connected to the spiritual. As we said in an earlier book, “Every orgasm is a spiritual experience. Think of a moment of perfect wholeness, of yourself in perfect unity, of expanded awareness that transcends the split between mind and body and integrates all the parts of you in ecstatic consciousness.… When you bring spiritual awareness to your sexual practice, you can become
directly conscious of—connected to—that divinity that always flows through you.… For us, sex is already an opportunity to see god.”

Despite what you might have learned from the TV or the tabloids, sex workers really are not all desperate drug addicts, debased women, or predatory gold diggers. Many healthy and happy women and men work in the sex industry, doing essential and positive work healing the wounds inflicted by our sex-negative culture. We know them as friends, lovers, colleagues, writers, therapists, and educators, as well as performers and artists. These folks have a great deal to teach us about boundaries, limit-setting, communication, sexual negotiation, and ways to achieve growth, connection, and fulfillment outside a traditional monogamous relationship. Do not imagine that connections between sex workers and clients are necessarily cold, impersonal, or degrading, or that only losers frequent prostitutes. Many client/prostitute relationships become a source of tremendous connection, warmth, and affection for both parties, and last many years. Practitioners of the world’s oldest profession offer all of us the wisdom of the ages about understanding, accepting, and fulfilling our desires: these are the real sex experts.

While we are looking at sexual diversity, let’s remember that we live in a multicultural society, and that every culture in our world, every subculture, every ethnic culture, has its own ways of creating relationship, connecting in sex, and building families. All of those ways are valid and valuable.

One of the great joys of living as a slut is the opportunity to make intimate connections with people whose background is very different from your own. When you do that, you will find yourself tripping, with some embarrassment, over a lot of differences, the way Dossie and her friends from Japan used to trip over each other in doorways: in Japan, men go through the door first. Getting used to differences can feel awkward, but every time it happens you’ve learned something new about how people go about being human.

Maybe something that you learn will be just the thing you’ve been looking for that was lacking in your own culture. Dossie came from a
small town in New England that had tried, with little success, to pound her into the form of a nice, respectable young lady. When she got to New York City, she discovered cultures in which strong women were accepted and respected: she got to have chutzpah. Talk about opening up a whole realm of possibilities!

Boundaries in communication, connection, and relationship vary from culture to culture. Personal distance differs enormously—they say you can recognize the European-American at a Latin American cocktail party: he’s the one who is frantically backing away from everyone who wants to talk to him because they keep stepping too close. Volume varies too: some cultures value being subdued and quiet, others are dramatically expressive and, well, loud.

We recommend that you look for these differences and suspend your judgments. Is that person who seems too loud actually able to be more expressive than you? Does that quiet person notice more? What’s the intelligence of a person who hasn’t read a lot of books but understands how your car, or your computer, works? Who are these unbelievably self-confident people who make sexual propositions openly and enthusiastically and get really confused when you accuse them of coming on too strong? Maybe they have some ways of making connection that you could learn from.

It is sad, indeed tragic, that so many of our sexual communities fail to welcome people from the whole world of cultures, of races, of genders, of sexualities. When you look at the people around you and dismiss them—or, worse yet, assume you know all there is to know about them—because of their skin color, gender, way of speaking, mode of dress, religion, or country of origin, you’ll never get to hear any of the new and fascinating things that those people might have to say. Our friend Jaymes says, “I believe that every person you connect with on this planet has some sort of a message to give you. If you cut yourself off from whatever kind of relationship wants to form with that person, you’re failing to pick up your messages” … and what a shame that would be!

When we are attracted to someone who comes from a background different from our own, and we fail to take that difference into account, then we will mess up what could have been a great connection. We think learning about cultures different from our own helps us to learn
to think outside of our boxes and that celebrating diversity can hugely expand our range of choices about our own lives.

We recommend, when you are in the company of the unfamiliar, that you look for unfamiliar wisdom. You’ll find lots of it, and it will make you richer.

If thinking about all this makes you kind of nervous, we are not surprised. What you are experiencing is how threatening it feels when the customary boundaries you take for granted, and believe apply to all social and sexual situations, are very different from what you are used to. There are no universally accepted boundaries of gender or attraction among consenting adults, and the limits of sexual exploration are not handed down on stone tablets by some higher authority.

When you look at people who meet your standards of happiness and success without buying into the world’s standards of lifetime heterosexual monogamous pair-bonding, you begin to see how such things can be possible for you too—even if these people aren’t doing it the same way you want to. Recognizing other sexual cultures offers an opportunity to become aware of your own preconceptions and uncertainties. Listen to your fears: they have a lot to teach you about yourself.

Think of Dossie’s old dance club, The Omni. Not knowing what’s what can feel scary—but think of it as a chance to scrap all your preconceptions and start from scratch. It’s only by recognizing all the possibilities out there that you can truly choose the ones that work for you. Then you can be free to figure where you want the boundaries in your life, what your personal limits are, and if you ever want to expand those limits.

Learning and establishing your own boundaries is a great opportunity and a serious responsibility. Accomplishing this amazing task will set you free to explore beyond your wildest dreams.