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WHO IS AN ETHICAL SLUT?
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, and 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, then you’ve already taken the first step.
Why We Chose This Title
From the moment you saw or heard about this book, you probably guessed that some of the terms may not have the 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 words stud or player , used to describe a highly sexual man, are often terms 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 no sex at all or to get cozy with the Fifth Fleet. They may be heterosexual, homosexual, asexual , 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 intimate 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!
About You
Maybe you dream of maintaining several long-term sexual and intimate relationships. Maybe your dream is of a lot of friendships that may or may not include sex. Maybe the idea of genital sex holds no interest for you but you still want to form a warm, loving partnership…or two or three. Maybe you want monogamy but a kind of monogamy that you and your partner have created according to your own desires and not the blueprint handed down by the greater culture. Maybe you want to be single, connecting where and how you want without changing your fundamental independence. Maybe you want to be part of a couple that occasionally shares a bed with a mutually desirable third party or that takes a planned night away from monogamy every now and then. Maybe you dream of three-way or four-way or orgiastic connections. Maybe you cherish solitude and want to find ways to get your needs met all by yourself with the occasional help of a friend or lover.
Or maybe you want to explore different paths, to try a few things to see how they feel, to see how many kinds of relating you can fit into your busy and interesting life.
All these possibilities and a hundred more are legitimate ways of being an ethical slut. As you read this book, you’ll find that some of our ideas will be good fits for the way you want to live and others will not. Take what you want and leave the rest. As long as you and the people you care about are consenting, growing, and taking good care of yourselves and the people around you, you’re doing ethical sluthood right, so don’t let someone else’s opinions—including ours—tell you otherwise.
About Us
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 alternative sexualities, nontraditional relationships, and therapy for trauma survivors. She has identified as queer for more than thirty years, informed by the women’s and the gay men’s communities and by her years of bisexuality before that. She committed to an open sexual lifestyle in 1969 when her daughter was a 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 makes her home in the mountains north of San Francisco.
Many of you may remember Janet from the first edition of this book as Catherine A. Liszt, a pen name she used back 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 traditional monogamy in a heterosexual marriage for more than 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, and lives in Eugene, Oregon.
Together, we have been lovers, dear friends, coauthors, and coconspirators for a quarter century, in and out of various other relationships, homes, and projects. We are both parents of grown children, both active in the BDSM / leather / kink communities, and both creative writers. We think we’re a great example of what can happen if you don’t try to force all your relationships into the monogamous ’til-death-do-us-part model.
Sexual Adventurers
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 different kinds of people and reveling in how our differences expand our horizons and offer us new ways to be ourselves.
Sluts are not necessarily sexual athletes—although many of us do train more than most. Most of us 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.
“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.”
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.
What’s New in This Edition
In the eight years since the previous edition of The Ethical Slut was published, polyamory has become hugely more visible, which means that a very wide variety of people of all races, genders, orientations, and backgrounds are becoming interested in exploring the possibilities of relationships beyond culturally compelled monogamy. In this edition, we have done our best to speak to as wide a range of potential readers as we can. Hence, you’ll find that we’ve given more attention to people of color, asexual and aromantic people, people in their teens and early twenties, people of nonbinary gender, and other groups that too often receive short shrift from sex-positive communities.
A long-overdue conversation about the nature and nuance of sexual consent has also moved into the forefront of the cultural dialogue. We’ve included a new chapter on this important topic. And, just for fun, we’ve also added some short histories of the people and ideas that have helped make alternative sexuality what it is today.
The Language in This Book
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 —often have a hostile or coarse feel to them and are used as insults to degrade people and their sexuality. 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 (which we are proud to say has infiltrated the language in the form of slut walks and the rejection of slut-shaming ). 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.
We are writing this book from a sex-positive position, in the belief that we are working for a healthier and happier and safer world. We are aware, also, that for many people, sex has not been a positive thing in their lives, whether from cultural or religious shaming or from exposure to sexual violence, and sometimes because for them genital sex is not what they want.
Our fondest utopian visions are that when sex and love and intimacy are truly free, and seen as positive forces in our lives and in the world, we will be much more able to solve the problems of rape, sexual bullying, shaming, and repression. Indeed, we hope this book contributes to a world where you won’t settle for anything less than love and freedom in your sex life.
Cultural blind spots can show up as centrisms : couple-centrism, heterocentrism, eurocentrism. Nonmonogamy, extramarital sex, and 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 was coined in 1992 and is 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. It is 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. The word 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 of the book, where we’ve defined many of these terms for you. The first usage of each Glossary term is marked like this .
People often ask us why we talk so much about sex. We see sex as the elephant in the room: huge, taking up lots of space, and too seldom included in the discourse about relationships. In this book we will talk about many kinds of love and we’ll also talk about sexual expression of all of them.
Finally, we are doing our best to make the language in this book as pansexual and gender-neutral as we can: this book is for everybody. In previous editions, we switched back and forth between “he” and “she” pronouns, but in this edition, with the newly increased visibility of nonbinary lifestyles and genders, we will use the gender-neutral pronouns they , them , and their whenever possible. Pansexual means including everyone as a sexual being: straight, bi, lesbian, gay, asexual, nonbinary, trans , queer, old, young, disabled, pervert, male, female, questioning, transitioning. The examples and quotations in this book have been drawn from throughout the huge array of lifestyles we have encountered in our combined eight decades of sluthood: there are infinite “right” ways to be sexual, and we want to affirm all of them.
Poly Pioneers: Alfred Kinsey and the Kinsey Institute
Throughout this book, we’ll suggest that consensual behaviors like nonmarital sex, masturbation, homosexuality, and BDSM, still considered “sinful” and “perverted” by some, can in fact be life-enhancing and quite unexceptional ways to conduct an ethically slutty lifestyle. And if you’re not shocked to read that, you can thank Dr. Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues.
Kinsey, an Eagle Scout raised in a repressively patriarchal household, rebelled by studying insect biology rather than pursuing the engineering career dictated by his hyperreligious and autocratic father. Before he’d written a word about human sex, he was considered one of the world’s leading experts on the gall wasp, and had written two well-received monographs on the topic as well as several other texts on biology and nature.
Kinsey’s investigation into American sexual practices began when he was asked to team-teach a class on human sexuality at Indiana University. His interest was piqued when he found himself unable to answer student questions: scientific research on how people actually had sex simply didn’t exist. At about this time, the socially maladroit Kinsey began a more personal experiment: he met, fell in love with, and married the bright and tomboyish Clara McMillan (“Mac”), a graduate student in chemistry. Both Prok (a lifelong nickname, granted by his students, short for “Professor K”) and Mac were virgins at the time of their marriage, as many young couples were at the time; their difficulties in overcoming this inexperience were an additional spur to Kinsey’s determination to learn more about sex.
The completist spirit that had spurred Kinsey to collect tens of thousands of gall wasp specimens led him to spearhead an epic project: interviewing thousands of Americans of all genders, races, and classes about their sexual experiences and attitudes. He found enough sponsorship money that he was able to hire and train colleagues, who would go on to be respected sex researchers in their own right, to assist in this enormous task.
All in all, they collected more than twelve thousand enormously detailed sex histories, eight thousand from interviews by Kinsey himself. Kinsey reached out to people in lifestyles that are rarely public: minority communities, churches, small town PTAs, and many more. He campaigned for one 100 percent participation in many of these communities, to be certain that he wasn’t leaving out people who might be too shy or embarrassed to volunteer. Kinsey’s research and his conclusions are still well regarded even though statistical techniques are much more sophisticated today. All subsequent research owes a huge debt to the work of Kinsey and his team.
This cadre of researchers and their partners would be considered, in today’s terminology, a polycule or constellation. When sex is discussed openly, people typically feel much freer to act on their desires—so, unsurprisingly, both Prok and Mac were sexually involved with several of the researchers, who in turn had sex with one another’s spouses. Whatever difficulties were encountered in this arrangement—and there were several—seem to have had at least as much to do with the problem of being sexual with coworkers as they did with sexual jealousy. Kinsey’s frequently insensitive personal style was undoubtedly a factor as well. In spite of such small flare-ups, the Kinseyites remained colleagues and occasional lovers until Kinsey’s death in 1956, and members of the original crew continued at the helm of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction until 1982.
Even today, more than half a century after Kinsey’s death, he is a controversial figure. His books Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953) sold hundreds of thousands of copies and created shock waves throughout the world when his collected interviews and statistics revealed the frequency of sexual activities like masturbation, extramarital sex, and same-sex connections in both men and women.
However, this important work fell subject to the Communist witch hunts of the 1950s, which cost him his funding and his health. Still today, those who oppose our contemporary sexual freedoms cite Kinsey’s bisexuality, nonmonogamy, kink interests, and nonjudgmentalism about his interview subjects as reasons to discount his groundbreaking research.
However, the genie of sexual knowledge cannot be easily crammed back into its bottle: today’s liberated sexual mores, including the acceptance of sex before or outside marriage, homosexuality and bisexuality, BDSM, and, yes, poly, owe their existence to Dr. Kinsey’s work. Prok, Mac, and the Kinseyites are clearly among the patron saints of ethical sluthood—not just for their pioneering sex and relationship constellations, but for the work they did to bring the true variety of human sexual experience into the light.