The Ethical Slut (8 page)

For some sluts, being single may be a temporary condition between partners, a recommended period of healing from a recent breakup, or a chosen lifestyle for the long term. Being single is a good way to get to know who you are when you are not trying to fit as the other half of somebody else; learning to live with yourself and enjoy it gives you a lot to share with a partner when you choose to have one. Single sluthood has its own joys and challenges, which is why we’re going to deal with it at much greater length later in this book.

Single people can play the field in a variety of ways. One distinguishing dimension is how separate you keep your lovers. So one form of sluttery for the single involves multiple partners who have no interaction, indeed no information, about each other; this avoids complications at the cost of limiting certain kinds of intimacy, such as opportunities for mutual support and the development of community.

Or you may choose to introduce your lovers to each other, perhaps over Sunday brunch. This may sound wild, or impossible, or like a script for disaster, but don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it. Your lovers have a lot in common—you, for example—and they may very well like each other. Introducing your lovers helps prevent one of the scariest aspects of jealousy, which is the part where you imagine that your lover’s other lover is taller, thinner, smarter, sexier, and in all ways preferable to funky old you. When you meet that other person or when your lovers meet each other, they meet real people, warts and all, and so often wind up feeling safer.

Introducing your lovers to each other also makes possible the development of a community, or an extended family of people, who are intimately connected through sexual and personal bonds. As more people connect to each other in a variety of ways, including sexual, networks
form, and something reminiscent of a clan or a tribe may evolve. Then the question of introducing your lovers can become obsolete, as they may already know each other.

If you are a single person in any open sexual lifestyle, you must pay attention to how you are getting your sexual, emotional, and social needs met. You can do this in an infinite variety of ways. The important thing is to be
aware
of your needs and wants, so you can go about getting them met with full consciousness. If you pretend that you have no needs, for sex, for affection, for emotional support, you are lying to yourself, and you will wind up trying to get your needs met by indirect methods that won’t work very well. People who do this often get called manipulative or passive-aggressive—terms, in our opinion, for people who have not figured out how to get their needs met in a straightforward manner. Do not commit yourself to a lifetime of hinting and hoping.

When you figure out what you want and ask for it, you’ll be surprised how often the answer is “yes.” Think how relieved you might feel when someone asks you for support, or a hug, or otherwise lets you know how to please him. Think of how competent and just plain good you feel when you can truly help another person, whether it’s by offering a shoulder to cry on or that just-right stimulation that leads to the perfect orgasm. Give your friends the opportunity to feel good by fulfilling you too.

There are multiple forms of open relationships for the partnered, including serial monogamy, where one’s various partners are separated in time, and the ever-popular nonconsensual nonmonogamy, otherwise known as cheating. We can think of these lifestyles as unconscious free love, but your authors feel both freer and safer when we love right out in the open.

It is axiomatic that open relationships work best when a couple takes care of each other and their relationship first, before they include others in their dynamic. So the slut couple needs to be willing to do the work we will describe later in this book to communicate well and to handle jealousy, insecurity, and territoriality with the highest consciousness. Couples need to know and communicate their boundaries, to make
and keep agreements, and to respect their own and each other’s needs. Couples also need to make sure to nourish their own connection to keep it happy, healthy, and fulfilling.

Couples can have a secondary relationship outside of the primary, or a number of lovers that don’t get ranked in any hierarchy. Relationships vary in how close or distant they are emotionally and physically, and in how much contact is involved. Some may be short-term, while others may last for years or even a lifetime; some may involve getting together twice a week, others twice a year.

Couples new to nonmonogamy tend to spend a lot of energy defining their boundaries. They usually focus more at first on what they
don’t
want their partner to do—the activities that make them feel, for some reason, unsafe or downright terrified—than on their actual desires. Setting these limits is, for many couples, a necessary first step out into the disorienting world of sluthood. However, as couples become more sophisticated at operating the boundaries of their relationship, they tend to focus more on what they
would
enjoy, and then strategize about how they can make it safe. How to create and follow this learning curve will be covered in more detail in
chapter 16
, “Opening an Existing Relationship.”

One woman of our acquaintance has a lifetime lifestyle of having two primary partners, one of each gender, with her other partners and her primaries’ other partners forming a huge network. Her relationships historically have lasted many years, through raising children and grandchildren, and her exes are still active members of her extended family.

In some open relationships, each partner seeks out other partners pretty much separately, often making agreements about who gets to cruise which club when, or taking care to avoid running into each other on the Internet or in personal ads. They may talk about their adventures with each other and occasionally introduce play partners to their live-in lovers.

Others seek out a close match with another couple so they can play, either as a foursome or by switching partners, with people they have met and chosen together. Many polyamorous couples make a fine lifestyle out of seeking relationships with couples who are most like them, who share their values and boundaries. Such pairings of pairs
can become lifelong attachments and generate both hot sex and true family interconnectedness.

People can make commitments to each other in numbers greater than two. The level of commitment may vary, as when an existing couple makes a commitment to a third partner, or even a fourth. Relationships that add, and inevitably also subtract, members over time tend to form very complex structures, with new configurations of family roles that they generally invent by trial and error. Individuals in groups that come together as a threesome or foursome may find their roles within the family developing, growing, and changing over time: the person who feels like the “mother” of the group this year might well transition to “kid” or “dad” over time, or with each different partner.

Triads allow three partners of one or both genders to form a family unit. Some people grow into triadic or quadratic families as they attain deepening involvement with one or more members who started as outside lovers. Others actively seek members for group marriages, to fulfill their ideal of the kind of family they want to live in. We have heard of people who identify as “trisexual” because they are so strongly attuned to the idea of living and loving as part of a threesome.

Balancing triads can be challenging, as in any ménage à trois there are actually three couples, A & B, B & C, and C & A, and each of these relationships will be different. In a triad, as with the siblings of a family, all the relationships will not be at the same level at the same time; we’ve heard of lengthy arguments over which member of a triad should ride in the back seat of the car. If you get hung up on forcing these relationships to be exactly the same, you may hear yourself starting to sound like a small child screaming about why your sister got the biggest piece of cake (or, in our adult world, the first orgasm). In all forms of ethical sluthood, but perhaps especially in triads, it is vital to find ways to transcend competitiveness: there’s enough of everything for everybody.

Many polyfolk like to use a hierarchical terminology to define their relationships: the people they live with in a marriage-like arrangement
are “primaries,” the people they love but don’t live with are “secondaries,” the people they enjoy spending (often sexual) time with, but aren’t necessarily in love with, are “tertiaries.”

While this terminology is pervasive, and sometimes useful as a shorthand, we have some concerns about a system that inherently ranks the importance of the people in our lives. Janet says, “E is my life partner and Dossie is my coauthor. If I’m buying a house, E’s the most important; if I’m writing a book, Dossie is. Each of them has their own place in my life—why do I have to rank them?”

“Circle” is a word we use for a set of connections between a group of people that actually might look more like a constellation, with some people near the hub and connected to several others, and others near the outside and connected to only one or two and, perhaps, part of another constellation as well. (We like the word “constellation” for this, because in a constellation, everybody gets to be a star!) These constellations may be casual or may become extended families, with provisions for raising children, making a living, taking care of the sick or aging, and purchasing property.

Dr. James Ramey, in his wonderful book
Intimate Friendships,
documented his observations that nonmonogamy tended toward the forming of what he described as kinship networks, communities bound together by the intimacies of their sexual connections, perhaps serving the same functions as villages did in a smaller world. Some of us have taken to referring to our groupings as tribes.

Circles of sexual friends are common—gay men call these friends “fuck buddies.” Such circles may be open and welcome new members, typically brought in by other members. When you are part of such a circle, new lovers of any member are potential friends and family members of your own, so the focus changes from competition and exclusivity to a sense of inclusion and welcome, often very warm indeed.

Other circles are closed, with new members welcome only by agreement with existing members. Closed circles are sometimes set up as a strategy for safety from HIV infection and other sexually transmitted conditions, and also to deal with alienation in an overpopulated world. In a closed circle, the notion is that you can play with anyone in the
circle (all of whom have made agreements about safer sex and are all perhaps of known HIV status), but you don’t have sex with anyone outside the group. Thus you get to play around with a variety of relationships and still stay in a limited field. Such lifestyles are sometimes known as “polyfidelity.”

Sluts in any kind of relationship may enjoy group sex. Environments for orgies, party houses, sex clubs, swing houses, gay men’s baths, the tubs, or the glory holes are available in many major cities in a variety of forms and cater to all sexual preferences. We will tell you all about them in their own chapter. A group sex environment may constitute a safe field of exploration for a nonmonogamous couple. They can attend parties together or separately, cruise singly or as a twosome, meet each other’s friends, and play with a variety of people, all the while maintaining whatever connection with each other they feel good about. In this way, sex outside the primary relationship is defined by the specific environment in which it happens.

Group sex environments often develop their own families, people who come regularly and get to know each other and may share other activities, like giant Thanksgiving dinners. The film
Personal Services
shows us a warm and marvelous Christmas get-together of such a family in a British house of domination.

These are just a few of the ways in which sluts have chosen to organize their lives and loves. You get to choose one, or several, or invent one of your own. Relationship structures, we think, should be designed to fit the people in them, rather than people chosen to fit some abstract ideal of the perfect relationship. There’s no right or wrong way to do this, as long as everyone’s having fun and getting their needs met.

MANY TRADITIONAL ATTITUDES about sexuality are based on the unspoken belief that there isn’t enough of
something
—love, sex, friendship, commitment—to go around. If you believe this, if you think that there’s a limited amount of what you want, it can seem very important to stake your claim to your share of it. You may believe that you have to take your share away from somebody else, since if it’s such a very good thing, someone else is probably competing with you for it (how could they!). Or you may believe that if someone else gets something, that means there must be less of it for you.

We want all of our readers to get everything they want. Here are some ideas that might help you over some of the obstacles on the path.

We call this kind of thinking “starvation economies.” People often learn about starvation economies in childhood, when parents who are emotionally depleted or unavailable teach us that we must work hard to get our emotional needs met, so that if we relax our vigilance for even a moment, a mysterious someone or something may take the love we need away from us. Some of us may even have experienced real-world
hunger (if you didn’t grab first, your brother got all the potatoes), or outright neglect, deprivation, or abuse. Or we may learn starvation economies later in life, from manipulative, withholding, or punitive lovers, spouses, or friends.

The beliefs acquired in childhood are usually deeply buried and hard to see, both in individuals and in our culture. So you may have to look carefully to see the pattern. You can see it in a small way in the kind of complaining contests some people engage in: “Boy, did I have a rotten day today.” “You think
your
day was rotten—wait till you hear about
my
day!”—as though there were a limited amount of sympathy in the world and the only way to get the amount due you was to compete for it. Or remember how you have felt looking at the last piece of a very good pie, the secret salivation that made you greedy and territorial and a “selfish” person. When is it okay to want anything? People may think that if you love Bill that means you must love Mary less, or if you’re committed to your relationship with your friend you must be less committed to your relationship with your spouse. And then how do you know if you’re Number One in a partner’s heart?