THE TERM “SAFE SEX,” later amended to “safer sex,” was coined to talk about how we can design sex to minimize the risk of HIV transmission … but sex has never been altogether safe. Both your authors grew up in an era when an unwanted pregnancy meant a life-endangering illegal abortion. It’s been only a few decades since more reliable birth control became available, and only a few before that since antibiotics began curing illness, insanity, and death caused by sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) like syphilis and gonorrhea. Herpes is still incurable, and we still have only limited answers to cervical cancer from human papilloma virus. No matter what your orientation, your practices, or your risk factors, in today’s environment, careless sex can kill—which means that you have to protect yourself and your partners.
Given that sex is never completely safe, ethical sluts put time, effort, and commitment into getting as much sex as they want at the least risk possible. Dedicated sluts have developed a plethora of risk-reduction strategies that can minimize the chances of infection and/or unwanted pregnancy.
Please research the safer-sex protocols that apply to your life and plan to protect yourself and your lover from HIV, herpes, hepatitis, gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia, shigella, human papilloma virus, cervical cancer, unwanted pregnancy, and a host of other nasties. Medical research and recommendations are beyond the scope of this volume, but at the end of the book we have listed some Internet resources that are kept more up-to-date than is possible here.
We don’t think you need to cover every portion of your anatomy with latex before you touch another human being. The goal for most of us is risk reduction, sort of like defensive driving on the freeway. Yes, a drunk could kill at any time while you are cruising down the highway, and most of us take our best shot at safety and go on driving. There are ways to have hot satisfying sex without performing the erotic equivalent of skydiving with a faulty parachute. Here are some that we, and sluts we know, have used successfully.
Utterly basic technique: put something impenetrable between you and the virus. Today, many people decide to follow their sexual urges to far-out places by being scrupulous about the use of latex or polyurethane barriers. We hope you don’t need us to explain this to you at this point in history, but careful use of barriers includes condoms for vaginal sex, anal sex, and fellatio; gloves for masturbation of a male or female partner or for insertion of fingers or hands into vaginas or anuses; and dental dams or plastic wrap for cunnilingus or analingus.
Gloves or condoms make it easy to keep any sex toy that will be used by more than one person nice and clean and bug free. Clean your toys thoroughly after each use, sterilize if you can, and let them rest, clean and dry (most of the bad bugs cannot live long without moisture). If there are toys that you really want to use on each of you within the same little bit of time, we suggest you buy two or more of them.
The use of a good water-based lubricant can do wonders to make latexed sex more pleasurable for both or all partners. Along with smoothing out the friction of rubber on mucous membranes, a single drop of lube inside a condom increases the transmission of warmth from one person to another, which feels nice and—well—hot. For tips on how to use barriers in a pleasure-enhancing manner, check out chapter 21, “Sex and Pleasure,” and some of the books in the Resource Guide. And if you’re not completely comfortable using any of these barriers, practice! Gentlemen can masturbate with a condom (or two, or three) until it comes easy. We have heard of one dedicated fellow who managed to put on eighteen condoms at once—he said the tight squeeze felt really good. And why not get a little playful with your rubber?
If you are inexperienced with condoms and plastic wrap, give yourself some space to learn. Get playful, spill some lube, and roll around in it; invent creative ways to wrap body parts in plastic wrap and then find out what interesting new things you can feel. Plastic wrap doubles nicely as a risk reduction barrier and a bondage toy, and it comes in colors. Explore the taste and feel of your safer-sex equipment, and check lubricants on tender places for allergic reactions—not fun to discover when you are all excited only now it itches inside and you have to go wash that stuff out right now. Pay attention to the sensual qualities: fine latex is wonderfully silky, and the best lubricants feel like liquid velvet.
We want you to have fun and make wise choices: we need all the readers we can get, so we don’t want to lose you.
EXERCISE Practice Makes Perfect
For a man: Commit to masturbating with a condom on at least once every three or four times you masturbate, until you feel like you have that skill down perfectly.
For anyone who has sex with men: Buy a large box of condoms—the cheap kind are OK for this—and practice putting them on bananas, cucumbers, or dildos, in as sexy a way as you can … first with your hand, then with your mouth. Use up the whole box.
For everyone: Make a list of ways you can get off with little or no risk of fluid transmission.
One popular safer-sex strategy used by some couples is called “fluid bonding” or “fluid monogamy.” The couple agrees that they are safe to play with each other with no barriers, and to use condoms and rubber gloves very conscientiously with all their other partners. Both of us have made such agreements with life partners. To do this kind of agreement, both (or all) partners get thoroughly tested for HIV and other diseases. You might have to wait six months to be sure, since HIV antibodies don’t reliably show up in the bloodstream for some months after the individual is infected. Once you’re both sure you’re healthy, you’re free to practice unprotected sex with one another and to use barriers with your other lovers. Be sure you’re in clear agreement about which sexual acts are safe enough to do without a barrier and which ones require a barrier; to reach such an agreement, everyone involved will have to do some homework on the risk levels of various activities and decide together what level of risk is acceptable to you. Don’t forget to factor in information from everybody’s individual sex histories.
You may wish to restrict certain kinds of sex—often vaginal and/or anal intercourse, which place the participants at highest risk for disease transmission—to your primary relationship. Any time when you are actively trying to make a baby, you might not want to engage in potentially reproductive activities with all and sundry.
If barriers were infallible, fluid bonding would be a nearly perfect strategy; unfortunately, they are not. Some diseases live on the pubic mound, perineum, outer labia, or scrotum, which latex can’t cover. Pinhole leaks can allow virus to creep through, although this happens less often than antisex crusaders would have you believe. Condoms can break or come off during sex. If you are fluid-bonded and experience a condom failure, you and your partner will have to decide together whether to begin again with HIV testing and six months of barrier usage or to risk the possibility that one of you has been infected and could infect the other. If there is any possibility of an unwanted pregnancy, talk together about the morning-after pill.
Another risk reduction strategy is simply to eliminate some forms of sexual expression from your repertoire. Many people have chosen to forgo forms of sex that involve putting mouths or penises into or near assholes, feeling that the particularly high risks of this form of play are not worth its reward. Others have decided not to engage in any form of penetration with an organic penis. We have never heard of a dildo or a butt plug coming down with an infection.
If all this winds up sounding like no sex at all, please consult a good book about sex—there are hundreds of ways to share really hot sex that don’t involve somebody squirting inside somebody else.
Every decision you make requires that you balance your own desires against your assessment of the risks. Remember when you’re making your decisions that desire is powerful and important and that there’s no point in making rules you can’t live with. One friend of ours points out that safer sex can be like dieting—“I can be really good during the week, but then I binge on the weekends.” On the positive side, expanding your range of hot sexual expression by learning new and exciting ways to have sex can leave you both safe and satisfied.
Simply hoping for the best, or denying that you’re at risk, or pretending that diseases and unwanted pregnancies only happen to other people is not an acceptable strategy. If you don’t have the honesty and courage to face the genuine risks of your sexual behaviors, you certainly don’t have what it takes to be an ethical slut, and we question whether you should be having sex at all.
We are shocked and worried by the levels of denial we see among some sexual communities, who would like to believe that because new treatments have slowed down the progress of HIV that the cure has been found. People are still dying. If your lifestyle seems to make you unlikely to get exposed to HIV, you are still at risk for herpes, hepatitis, HPV, and a host of other diseases. Kinsey’s statistics from back in the 1940s indicated that slightly more than half of relationships that are theoretically monogamous in fact involve sexual contact with outside partners. Get educated, friend, and take care of yourself.
We think it’s essential for ethical sluts to get tested for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases on a regular schedule. How frequently depends on the risk factors in your life. Ask your doctor, clinic, or Planned Parenthood office, and follow their advice.
While most STDs are preventable only with barriers and care, recently developed vaccinations can protect you against several potentially deadly forms of hepatitis and, if you aren’t already infected, human papilloma virus. If you engage in nonmonogamous anal or vaginal play, these are a very good idea; they are expensive, but cheaper than getting sick. You’ll still need barriers against all the rest of the microscopic nasties.
Mother Nature is called that for a reason—sometimes it seems like she wants everybody to be a parent. Even when you utterly know that you don’t want to get pregnant this time, some deeper urge can easily lead you to forget a pill or count the days wrong. Birth control involves tricking the busy little eggs and sperm into not doing their jobs and tricking your own instincts into letting you do the trick right.
Birth control technology is, alas, far from perfect: reliable, reversible, easy, side-effect-free contraception is still a dream. Unwanted pregnancies need no longer be the life-shattering tragedies of yesteryear, but they are still awful, and we hope that none of you ever has to have one.
If you are female, have intercourse with men, and could possibly be fertile, you must take active steps to ensure that you won’t get pregnant until and unless you choose to. The possibilities include birth-control pills, longer-term chemical birth control like Norplant and Depo-Provera, diaphragms and cervical caps, condoms, IUDs, sponges and foam, and tubal ligation, among others. Some women with regular menstrual cycles succeed at the rhythm method, particularly if they and their partners learn to enjoy outercourse during their fertile periods. There is a lot of good information available about the risks and reliability of all these methods; your physician, clinic, or Planned Parenthood can help you make a good choice.
For men who have intercourse with women, the choices are (unfortunately) quite limited. If you know you are unlikely to want to father children in the future, a vasectomy is minor surgery that will relieve you of a great deal of worry. If you hope to be a father someday, use those condoms—and lobby for research into better male contraception. The surgery to sterilize women is more involved: the surgeon will cauterize the fallopian tubes—this requires a hospital, and a little recovery, but nothing dreadful. Remember, you’ll still need protection from infectious diseases.
When someone gets pregnant unintentionally, this can be, to put it mildly, difficult. If everyone involved agrees that an abortion is the best choice, that can be pretty unpleasant in and of itself; if there is disagreement, it can be shattering. Until such time as science enables men to carry fetuses in their bodies, we believe that the final decision has to be the woman’s, but we sympathize deeply with the man who would like to raise a baby and whose female partner isn’t willing or able to carry it. We do think that both partners should share in the financial and emotional burden of an abortion or a pregnancy.
If one or both partners is interested in being a parent, and the woman is willing to carry the fetus to term, ethical sluthood opens up a wealth of options for parenting. Please don’t feel that the only way to be a parent is to get married and buy a house in the suburbs—perfectly marvelous children come out of shared parenting arrangements, intentional communities, group marriages, and a multitude of other ways to nurture and support a child.
You may notice that we have gone out of our way not to tell you what decisions to make about your sexual behavior. Only you can decide what risks feel acceptable to you, and we believe that letting anybody else make that decision for you virtually guarantees that you won’t follow through on your choices.
You must, however, make choices. You must choose to do your homework and learn what you need to know about risks and rewards. You must choose to do the work of saying “no” to sex that doesn’t meet your own safety criteria and of being prepared to say “yes” to sex that does: discovering you’re out of condoms at the wrong moment is a recipe for disaster. You must choose to approach your sexual behaviors in a mature, realistic, and sober manner—intoxication plays a major role in a shockingly high percentage of HIV infection and unwanted pregnancy.
You must be prepared to share your sexual decision making and history with any potential partners you encounter. If consent is at the core of ethical sluthood—and it is—your partners must be able to give informed consent to whatever risks are involved in having sex with you. You, of course, have the right to expect that same honesty from them.
You won’t like talking about this stuff, especially not with a new lover. It’s depressing and scary, definitely not erotic, and sometimes horrendously embarrassing. Allow us to reassure you: the first time is the worst. Practice makes perfect, and after you’ve been over all these ugly and lethal possibilities a few times, you will become less sensitive and learn to deal with what you need to with ease and grace. Many people avoid the discussion on a first date by agreeing upon the safest possible practices for this encounter, then negotiating more specifically later on. If you know you have a risk condition, like active herpes, silence becomes less of an option; you need to invite your lovers to collaborate with you in avoiding infection, and they have a right to enough information to make her own choices.
On a cheerier note, getting good at talking about sex has some very nice rewards, once you get through blushing. Chatting about the fun stuff is a turn-on and the best way to get exactly what you want in the way of pleasure. Then you can learn what your partner gets excited about, which will make you the best of all possible lovers.
We, and most of the people we know, make fairly conservative choices about what health risks we take in our sexuality. We know from experience that it is quite possible to have exciting, satisfying, fabulously slutty sex without lying awake nights worrying afterward. And isn’t that the kind of sex we all want to have?