MANY PEOPLE DREAM of having an abundance of love and sex and friendship. Some believe that such a life is impossible and settle for less than they want, feeling always a little lonely, a little frustrated. Others try to achieve their dream, but are thwarted by outside social pressures or by their own emotions, and decide that such dreams must stay in the realm of fantasy. A few, though, persist and discover that being openly loving, intimate, and sexual with many people is not only possible but can be more rewarding than they ever imagined.
People have been succeeding at free love for many centuries—often quietly, without much fanfare. In this book, we will share the techniques, the skills, the ideals that have made it work for them.
So who is an ethical slut? We are. Many, many others are. Maybe you are too. If you dream of freedom, if you dream of intimacy both hot and profound, if you dream of an abundance of friends and flirtation and affection, of following your desires and seeing where they take you, you’ve already taken the first step.
From the moment you saw or heard about this book, you probably guessed that some of the terms here may not have the same meanings you’re accustomed to.
What kind of people would revel in calling themselves sluts? And why would they insist on being recognized for their ethics?
In most of the world, “slut” is a highly offensive term, used to describe a woman whose sexuality is voracious, indiscriminate, and shameful. It’s interesting to note that the analogous word “stud,” used to describe a highly sexual man, is often a term of approval and envy. If you ask about a man’s morals, you will probably hear about his honesty, loyalty, integrity, and high principles. When you ask about a woman’s morals, you are more likely to hear about whom she shares sex with, and under what conditions. We have a problem with this.
So we are proud to reclaim the word “slut” as a term of approval, even endearment. To us, a slut is a person of any gender who celebrates sexuality according to the radical proposition that sex is nice and pleasure is good for you. Sluts may choose to have solo sex or to get cozy with the Fifth Fleet. They may be heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual, radical activists or peaceful suburbanites.
As proud sluts, we believe that sex and sexual love are fundamental forces for good, activities with the potential to strengthen intimate bonds, enhance lives, open spiritual awareness, even change the world. Furthermore, we believe that every consensual sexual relationship has these potentials and that any erotic pathway, consciously chosen and mindfully followed, can be a positive, creative force in the lives of individuals and their communities.
Sluts share their sexuality the way philanthropists share their money: because they have a lot of it to share, because it makes them happy to share it, because sharing makes the world a better place. Sluts often find that the more love and sex they give away, the more they have: a loaves-and-fishes miracle in which greed and generosity go hand in hand to provide more for everybody. Imagine living in sexual abundance!
Between us, we represent a fairly large slice of the pie that is sexual diversity.
Dossie is a therapist in private practice in San Francisco, specializing in relationship issues and alternative sexualities. She has identified as lesbian for the past twenty-five years and still values her experience as both bisexual and heterosexual before that. She has always been a slut. She committed to an open sexual lifestyle in 1969 when her daughter was newborn, and taught her first workshop on unlearning jealousy in 1973. She has spent about half of her adult life living single, sort of, with families of housemates, lovers, and other intimates. She currently makes her home with her partner in the mountains north of San Francisco.
Many of you may remember Janet from the last edition of this book as Catherine A. Liszt, a pen name she used back then when her sons were still minors. Now that they’re grown and independent, she has gone back to using her real name. Janet lived as a teenaged slut in college but then essayed monogamy in a traditional heterosexual marriage for well over a decade. Since the end of that marriage, she has not considered monogamy an option for her. While most people would call her “bisexual,” she thinks of herself as gender-bent and can’t quite figure out how sexual orientation is supposed to work when you’re sometimes male and sometimes female. She’s married to a bio-guy whose gender is as flexible as hers, which is less complicated than it sounds. She makes her living as a writer, publisher, and teacher.
Together, we have been lovers, dear friends, coauthors, and coconspirators for a decade and a half, in and out of various other relationships, homes, and projects. We are both mothers of grown children, both active in the BDSM/leather/kink communities, and both creative writers (Dossie of poetry, Janet of personal essays). We think we’re an excellent example of what can happen if you don’t try to force all your relationships into the monogamous till-death-do-us-part model.
The world generally views sluts as debased, degraded, promiscuous, indiscriminate, jaded, immoral adventurers—destructive, out of control, and driven by some form of psychopathology that prevents them from entering into a healthy monogamous relationship.
Oh, yes—and definitely not ethical.
We see ourselves as people who are committed to finding a place of sanity with sex and relationships, and to freeing ourselves to enjoy sex and sexual love in as many ways as may fit for each of us. We may not always know what fits without trying it on, so we tend to be curious and adventurous. When we see someone who intrigues us, we like to feel free to respond, and, as we explore our response, to discover whatever is special about this new, fascinating person. We like relating to people and are quite gregarious, enjoying the company of different kinds of people and reveling in how our differences expand our horizons and offer us new ways to be ourselves.
Sluts tend to want a lot of things: different forms of sexual expression, different people, perhaps men, or women, or people in between, or some of each. We are curious: what would it be like to combine the energies of four or five people in one incandescent sexual encounter? What would it be like to share erotic energy with that person who has been our best friend for years and years? What would it be like to share a household with multiple friends and lovers? What would it be like to be intimate with someone who is very different from us?
Of course, each slut is unique, with virtues and faults and diverse needs and values. Some of us express different parts of ourselves with different people. Some of us love flirtation for its own sake. Some of us make an art form out of sex. Some of us find these parts of our lives so important that sluttiness is a basic part of our identity, one of the ways we define ourselves, while others drift in and out of sluttiness according to desire and circumstance.
Sluts are not necessarily sexual athletes—although many of us do train more than most. We value sex, not as a way to set records, but for the pleasure it brings us and the good times we get to share with however many wonderful people.
We love adventure. The word “adventurer” is sometimes used pejoratively, suggesting that the adventurous person is immature or inauthentic, not really willing to “grow up” and “settle down” into a presumably monogamous lifestyle. We wonder: what’s wrong with having adventures? Can’t we have adventures and still raise children, buy houses, and do the work that’s important to us? Of course we can; sluts qualify for mortgages just like everybody else. We tend to like our lives complicated, and the challenge of maintaining stable work and home lives while discovering new people and ideas is just what we need to keep us interested and engaged.
One of the most valuable things we learn from open sexual lifestyles is that our programming about love, intimacy, and sex can be rewritten. When we begin to question all the ways we have been told we ought to be, we can begin to edit and rewrite our old tapes. By breaking the rules, we both free and empower ourselves.
We hate boredom. We are people who are greedy to experience all that life has to offer and are also generous in sharing what we have to offer. We love to be the good time had by all.
In the decade-plus since we wrote the first edition of The Ethical Slut, we’ve learned a lot. Dossie, in her therapy practice, has worked with hundreds of singles, couples, and moresomes who are trying to navigate the uncharted pathways of nontraditional relationships, and she has developed new concepts and tools that have proven very helpful to them. Janet has moved out of the relationship she was in at the last time you saw her, has spent several years as a single slut, and has negotiated a relationship with a new lover who went on to become her legal spouse. We’ve also become (if we say so ourselves) better writers, both individually and together.
If you read the first edition of this book, you’ll see a lot of new material in here, and you’ll notice that the old material has been substantially rewritten and reorganized. You’ll also notice one major change—this book contains many exercises that you can use to explore your feelings and chart your progress as you read the book, either on your own or together with a partner or partners.
So, whether you’re an old friend or a new acquaintance, we’re happy to welcome you into our book, and into our slutty, happy lives.
When you sit down to write a book about sex, as we hope you one day will, you will discover that centuries of censorship have left us with very little adequate language with which to discuss the joys and occasional worries of sex. The language that we do have often carries implicit judgments: If the only polite way to talk about sexuality is in medical Latin—vulvas and pudendas, penes and testes—are only doctors allowed to talk about sex? Is sex all about disease? Meanwhile, most of the originally English words—cock and cunt, fucking, and, oh yes, slut—have been used as insults to degrade people and their sexuality and often have a hostile or coarse feel to them. Euphemisms—peepees and pussies, jade gates and mighty towers—sound as if we are embarrassed. Maybe we are.
Our approach to a sex-positive language is to reclaim the original English words and, by using them as positive descriptors, wash them clean. Hence our adoption of the word “slut.” You will also find in this book words like “fuck” and “cock” and “cunt” used, not as insults, but to mean what they actually mean.
Furthermore, cultural blind spots can show up as centrisms such as couple-centrism, heterocentrism, and eurocentrism. Nonmonogamy, extramarital sex, open relationships, all define themselves by what they aren’t, thus implying that they’re some exception to the “normal” relationships that “normal” people have.
“Polyamory” is a brave new word, coined by Morning Glory Ravenheart Zell around 1990 and currently, we are thrilled to report, included in the Oxford English Dictionary. Formed from Latin and Greek roots that translate as “loving many,” this word has been adopted by many sluts to describe their lifestyles, often abbreviated as “poly,” as in “I am a poly person.” Some use it to mean multiple committed live-in relationships, forms of group marriage; others use it as an umbrella word to cover all forms of sex and love and domesticity outside conventional monogamy. Polyamory has moved into the language so rapidly that we think maybe the language has been waiting for it for a very long time.
In this new world of sex and relationships, new terms get coined all the time to describe, or attempt to describe, the ever-changing spectrum of ways in which people arrange their lives. If, as you’re reading, you encounter a term you don’t understand, please check the Glossary in the back, where we’ve defined these terms for you.
Finally, we are doing our best to make the language in this book as pansexual and gender neutral as we can: we are writing this book for everybody. Pansexual means including everyone as a sexual being: straight, bi, lesbian, gay, transgendered, queer, old, young, disabled, perverts, male, female, questioning, in transition. The examples and quotes in this book have been drawn from throughout the huge array of lifestyles we have encountered in our combined seven decades of sluthood: there are infinite “right” ways to be sexual, and we want to affirm all of them.