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.
You could spend your life as a cultural anthropologist trying to describe the innumerable ways that human beings have chosen to be together sexually, romantically, and domestically—from the temple prostitutes of ancient Babylon to Mormon polygyny and far, far beyond. So, rather than trying to list them all, we just want to note that the prevailing cultural values that twenty-first-century North America inherited from Europe seem to date back to the Roman empire, and to early Christianity, which recommended monogamous marriage only for those who couldn’t manage celibacy, the ideal state. Cultures without those influences have developed all sorts of ways for people to bond—polygyny (many wives), polyandry (many husbands), group marriage, arrangements in which marriage is fundamentally a domestic business relationship and sexual dalliance takes place elsewhere, ritual group sex, and pretty much any other configuration of human hearts and genitals that you can imagine.
History is dotted with experiments in creating intentional sexual utopias, often with a philosophical or religious basis: if you’re curious, read up on the Oneida community of nineteenth-century Ohio; Rajneeshpuram in India from the late 1960s and Oregon in the 1980s; and Kerista in New York, Belize, and San Francisco from the early 1960s through the 1990s … to name just a few. Such communities are usually built by one leader and may falter when the leader is no longer available. However, their philosophies live on, adding new visions and practices to the mainstream culture. Many practitioners of Western tantra today, for example, can trace their practice to the teachings of Osho, the guiding spirit behind Rajneeshpuram.
It’s easy to point to artists and writers who have built their lives around intentional exploration of alternative relationships. If you’re curious about the ways in which alternative relationships played out in times when there was even less support than there is now, you can read up on the Bloomsbury group in early twentieth-century England, and freethinkers like George Sand, H. G. Wells, Simone de Beauvoir, Alfred Kinsey, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. What we can’t know is how many nonwriters were also building the kind of sexually open lives that worked for them, because there are no records of such lives. We feel safe in supposing, though, that a significant minority of people have always gotten their needs met through ethical multipartner living.
Dossie came of age surrounded by the utopian concepts of the 1960s, and Janet shortly afterward; both of us have been influenced greatly in our thinking and our lives by those days of radical exploration. Many ideals of that era—nonconformity, exploration of altered states of consciousness, equality of race and gender, ecological awareness, political activism, openness about sexuality, and, yes, the possibility of ethical and loving nonmonogamy—have permeated the greater culture. We very much doubt that we could have written this book or published it in the 1950s, so if you’re reading and enjoying The Ethical Slut today, thank a hippie.
Sluts come in all the various forms and styles that humans come in: men and women in all cultures, from all parts of the world, of all religions and lifestyles, rich and poor, with formal and informal education.
Most of us today live in communities of nonsluts, with only occasional or limited contact with other people who share our values: some groups hold conferences and conventions to mitigate isolation and expand their members’ intimate circles. These conferences are very important in bringing sexual undergrounds into the view of those who are looking for them and building institutions aboveground that can better support their members. Other sluts drop out of mainstream culture to some extent to live in communities composed of people whose sexuality is like their own. San Francisco’s Castro district is a good example of a modern urban “ghetto” for sexual minorities.
A slut living in mainstream, monogamy-centrist culture in the twenty-first century can learn a great deal from studying other cultures, other places, and other times: you’re not the only one in the world who has ever tried this, it can work, others have done it without harming themselves, their lovers, their kids—without, in fact, doing anything except enjoying themselves and each other.
Pioneering sexual subcultures with extensive documented and undocumented histories include communities of gay men and of lesbian women, transgender groups, bisexuals, the leather communities, the swing communities, and some spiritually defined subcultures of pagans, modern primitives, and Radical Faeries. And that’s just in the United States. Even if you don’t belong to any of these sexually oriented communities, it’s worth taking a look at them for what they can teach us about our own options as they develop ways of being sexual, ways of communicating about being sexual, and ways of living in social and family structures that are alternative to sex-negative traditions in America.
Dossie’s favorite dance club in 1970 was a remarkable miniculture of polymorphous perversity. She remembers:
The Omni, short for “omnisexual,” was a small North Beach bar whose patrons were men and women, straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and often transgendered. The sexual values were very open, from hippie free-love freaks to sex industry professionals, and most of us came there to dance like wild women and cruise like crazy.
Thanks to the large transgender faction, there was no way of pigeonholing the person you were cruising into your categories of desire. You might dance with someone you found very attractive and not know if they were chromosomally male or female. It’s difficult to get attached to preferences like lesbian or straight when you don’t know the gender of the person you are flirting with.
This may sound crazy, but the results were surprising: I patronized the Omni because it was the safest environment available to me. Because there was no way to make assumptions, people had to treat each other with respect. No one could assume what kind of interaction might interest the object of their attention, so there was nothing to do but ask. And if you were, as I was, a young woman in your twenties, to be approached with respect was a most welcome relief from straight social environments where it was customary for men to prove their manhood by coming on too strong, evidently in the belief that women who cruise in singles bars have problems with virginal shyness and don’t mean “no” when they say it. The Omni provided my first experiences with true respect.
Since we see some of the problems in attaining a free and open expression of our own individual sexuality as having to do with living in a sex-role-bound culture, we have found it useful to learn from people who have shifted the boundaries of what it means to be male or female, or what it means to choose partners of the same or opposite sex. Thinking about different ways of living and loving can help us as we consider whether we want to change anything about how we go about living as men and women, or somewhere in between.
In the lesbian community, we get to look at what happens in a world consisting almost entirely of women. For women, relationship can get confused with their sense of identity, especially since our culture in its most traditional form hardly allows women any sense of identity at all. Thus, many women act as if they would lose their entire sense of themselves without their relationship. The most common relationship sequence, as we see it magnified in the lesbian community, is the form of nonmonogamy known as serial monogamy. Often the connection to the partner of the future precedes the breakup with the partner of the past, with accompanying drama that presumably feels safer than the vast, empty, unknown, and terrifying identity void of being a woman living as a single human being.
Younger lesbians are questioning these traditions, and often that questioning includes looking into nonmonogamy as a way to form less insular relationships. Lesbian polyamory is characterized by a lot of serious thoughtfulness and attention to consensuality, and thus to tremendous openness about processing feelings, an area in which the women’s community excels.
Our lesbian sisters also have a lot to teach us about new ways of developing a woman’s role as sexual initiator. In heterosexual culture, men have been assigned the job of initiator, and men are trained to be sexually aggressive, sometimes to a fault. In the world of women who relate sexually to other women, it rapidly becomes apparent that if we all see ourselves as Sleeping Beauties waiting for Princess Charming to come along and wake us up, we also might get to wait a hundred years. Or else we need to learn to do something new—to meet the eye, touch the shoulder, move in a little closer, or just plain blurt out, “I think you’re really attractive; would you like to talk?”
Women’s style of coming on—when shyness doesn’t get in the way—tends to be forthright, with respect for consent, and is unlikely to be intrusive or pushy, as many women have had a little too much experience with being violated to want to go down that road. Women have strong concerns about safety and so tend to move slowly and announce their intentions. They may be shy in the seductive stages, and bolder once welcome has been secured. Women tend to want explicit permission for each specific act, so their communication could serve as an excellent role model for negotiated consensuality.
We would like to draw your attention to another illuminating difference about sex between women. A sexual encounter between two women rarely involves the expectation of simultaneous orgasm, as many people believe penis-vagina intercourse should, so women have become experts at taking turns. Lesbians are world-class experts on sensuality and outercourse, those wonderful forms of sexuality that do not rely on penile penetration. When penetration is desired, the focus is on what works for the recipient: we have yet to meet a dildo that got hung up on its own needs.
For those of you, female or male or gay or straight, who haven’t considered these options, think of all the fun you could have with never a worry about pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases!
The gay male community reflects some of the traditional images of male sexuality in intensified form. While some gay men are indeed interested in long-term relationships and settling down, many have set records as world-class sluts. The gay baths are the ultimate role model of friendly group sex environments and easy sexual connection for its own sake.
Dossie learned her group sex etiquette from gay men and is glad she did. We both, in fact, have always identified strongly with gay men: Dossie sees herself as a drag queen trapped in a woman’s body, and Janet calls herself a “girlfag,” a gay man who happens to have breasts and a vagina. This may not really be too surprising, since the gay male community has always modeled sluttery for the rest of us to admire and, perhaps, emulate.
Gay male sex, as a rule, starts from a presumption of equal power, without the dynamic of overpowerment and withholding that often pervades male/female interactions. Thus, men do not generally try to get consent from each other by manipulation and pressuring: connection is more commonly made by a gentle approach, meeting a gentle response, and no need to ask three times. Gay men give each other a lot of credit for being able to say no, and for meaning it when they say it—this makes coming on very simple, since you are never trying to sneak up on anybody and you are not required to be subtle. It is always okay to ask as long as it is okay for the other person to say no. This straightforward and admirably simple approach to consensuality cannot be recommended too highly.
Men in general have had less reason to fear sexual violation than their sisters. Although it is true, and terrible, that boys do get molested and men do get raped, men seem to have more confidence than women in their power to protect themselves. Men also tend to get a lot of cultural support for being sexual. So although the forbiddenness of homosexuality may give many gay men a lot of questions about being okay, or having something wrong with them, or other forms of internalized homophobia, this is most often not reflected in sexual dysfunction. Gay men as a group are really good at exploring, and finding out, what feels good to them.
And it is gay men who have established most of our understanding of safer sex. In the face of the AIDS epidemic, where many people might have retreated into sex-negativism, the gay community held its ground and continued to create environments where hot, creative, safer sex could be learned and practiced.
Often stigmatized as “gays unwilling to relinquish heterosexual privilege” or “hets taking a walk on the wild side,” bisexuals have recently begun developing their own forceful voice and their own communities.
Looking at the theory and practice of bisexual lifestyles offers opportunities to explore our assumptions about the nature of sexual and romantic attraction and behaviors. Some folks have had sex only with members of one gender, but know that they have within themselves the ability to connect erotically or emotionally with both genders, and thus consider themselves bisexual—while others may be actively having sex with the gender opposite their usual choice, and still consider themselves heterosexual or gay. Some bisexuals prefer one type of interaction with men and another with women, while others consider themselves gender-blind. Some can be sexual with either sex but romantic with only one, or vice versa. And so on, through all the spectrums of bisexual attractions and choices. Bisexuals challenge a lot of our assumptions about gender, and many bi’s can tell you what is different for them between sex with a woman and sex with a man. This interesting and privileged information can provide all of us with new stories about sex and gender.
The increasing visibility of bisexuality has led to some challenges to traditional definitions of sexual identity. Specifically, we are having to look at the fact that our sexual attractions may say one thing about us, while our sexual behaviors say another, and our sexual identity says yet a third. Questions like these are eating away at some of the traditional boundaries we place around sexual identity, much to the dismay of purists of all orientations. Your authors, sluts that we are, enjoy this kind of fluidity and appreciate the opportunity to play as we like with whoever looks good to us without relinquishing our fundamental sexual identities.
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.
I felt turned off by the trendiness of “bisexual chic,” and under some pressure to claim an identity that didn’t feel right to me. And at the same time, I was hearing some genuinely cruel judgments from both heterosexuals and homosexuals about bi’s.
Add to that the difficulty I was having sorting out my own feelings—I knew my feelings toward women were different from those toward men, and I wasn’t sure what that meant—and things just got very confusing. As a result, it wasn’t until I knew for sure that I was capable of having both sexual and romantic feelings toward both men and women—and until I felt strong enough to claim the identity in the face of all those negative judgments—that I finally began calling myself “bisexual.”
I look back on my life now and see that I’ve generally expressed my domestic urges toward men but that my romantic and sexual feelings are about equally likely to be inspired by a man, a woman, or someone in between. The bisexual community also offers more support than either straight-land or gay-land for my rather ambiguous gender presentation: some days I like to wear red lipstick and heels and other days men’s trousers and oxfords. So “bisexual” is the identity that fits me best, and where I expect to stay.
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.