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MYTHS AND REALITIES
Those who set off down the path of exploring new kinds of relationships and new lifestyles often find themselves blocked by beliefs—both their own and those of others—about the way society should be, the way relationships should be, and the way people should be. These beliefs are deeply rooted and far too often unexamined.
We have all been taught that one way of relating—lifelong monogamous heterosexual marriage—is the only right way. We are told that monogamy is “normal” and “natural”; if our desires do not fit into that constraint, we are morally deficient, psychologically disturbed, and going against nature.
Many of us feel instinctively that something is wrong with this picture. But how can you dig up and examine a belief that you don’t even know you hold? The ideal of lifelong monogamy as the only proper goal for relationships is so deeply buried in our culture that it’s almost invisible: we operate on these beliefs without even knowing we believe them. They’re under our feet all the time, the foundation for our assumptions, our values, our desires, our myths, our expectations. We don’t notice them until we trip over them.
Where did these beliefs get started? Often, they evolved to meet conditions that no longer exist.
Our beliefs about traditional marriage date from agrarian cultures, where you made everything you ate or wore or used, where large extended families helped get this huge amount of work done so nobody starved, and where marriage was a working proposition. When we talk about “ traditional family values,” this is the family we are talking about: an extended family of grandparents and aunts and cousins, an organization structured to accomplish the work of staying alive. We see large families functioning in traditional ways in America today, often in cultures recently transplanted from other countries, or as a basic support system among economically vulnerable urban or rural populations.
Controlling sexual behavior didn’t seem to be that important outside the propertied classes until the Industrial Revolution, which launched a whole new era of sex- negativity, perhaps because of the rising middle class and the limited space for children in urban cultures. Doctors and ministers in the late eighteenth century began to claim that masturbation was unhealthy and sinful, that this most innocent of sexual outlets was dangerous to society—male circumcision became commonplace in this era in an effort to discourage masturbation. Any desire for sex, even with yourself, had become a shameful secret.
But human nature will win out. We are horny creatures, and the more sexually repressive a culture becomes, the more outrageous its covert sexual thoughts and behaviors will become, as any fan of Victorian porn can attest.
In his lectures to young communists in Germany during the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, psychologist Wilhelm Reich theorized that the suppression of sexuality was essential to an authoritarian government. Without the imposition of antisexual morality, he believed, people would be free from shame and would trust their own sense of right and wrong. They would be unlikely to march to war against their wishes or to operate death camps.
The nuclear family, which consists of parents and children relatively isolated from the extended family, is a relic of the twentieth-century middle class. Children no longer work on the farm or in the family business; they are raised almost like pets. Marriage today is no longer essential for survival. Now we marry in pursuit of comfort, security, sex, intimacy, and emotional connection. The increase in divorce, so deplored by today’s religious right, may simply reflect the economic reality that today most of us can afford to leave relationships in which we are not happy; no one will starve. And still modern puritans attempt to enforce the nuclear family and monogamous marriage by teaching sexual shame.
We believe that the current set of “oughta-be’s,” and any other set, are cultural artifacts rather than natural laws. Indeed, nature is wondrously diverse, offering us infinite possibilities. We would like to live in a culture that respects the choices made by sluts as highly as we respect the couple celebrating their fiftieth anniversary. (And, come to think of it, what makes us assume that such a couple is monogamous anyway?)
We are paving new roads across new territory. We have no culturally approved scripts for open sexual lifestyles; we need to write our own. To write your own script requires a lot of effort, and a lot of honesty, and is the kind of hard work that brings many rewards. You may find the right way for you and three years from now decide you want to live a different way—and that’s fine. You write the script, you get to make the choices, and you get to change your mind, too.
“We have no culturally approved scripts for open sexual lifestyles; we need to write our own.”
EXERCISE: SLUTS WE KNOW AND LOVE
Make a list of all the people you can think of who are not monogamous, including public figures; characters from TV, movies, books; and so on. How do you feel about each of them? What can you learn, positive or negative? What do they tell you about what kind of slut you do and don’t want to be?
Judgments about Sluts
As you try to figure out your own path, you may encounter a lot of harsh judgments about the ways different people live. We’re sure you don’t need us to tell you that the world does not, for the most part, honor sluthood or think well of those of us who are sexually explorative.
You will probably find some of these judgments in your own brain, burrowed in deeper than you ever realized. We believe that they say a lot more about the culture that promotes them than they do about any actual person, including you.
“PROMISCUOUS”
This means we enjoy too many sexual partners. We’ve also been called “indiscriminate” in our sexuality, which we resent: we can always tell our lovers apart.
We do not believe that there is such a thing as too much sex, except perhaps on certain happy occasions when our options exceed our abilities. Nor do we believe that the ethics we are talking about have anything to do with moderation or abstinence. Kinsey once defined a “nymphomaniac” as “someone who has more sex than you” and, scientist that he was, demonstrated his point with statistics.
Is having less sex somehow more virtuous than having more? We think not. We measure the ethics of good sluts not by the number of their partners, but by the respect and care with which they treat them.
“AMORAL”
Our culture also tells us that sluts are evil, uncaring, amoral, and destructive, seeking to steal something—virtue, money, self-esteem—from their partners. In some ways, this archetype is based on the idea that sex is a commodity, a coin you trade for something else—stability, children, a wedding ring—and that any other transaction constitutes being cheated and betrayed.
We have rarely observed any Jezebels or Casanovas in our community, but perhaps it is not very satisfying for a thief to steal what is freely given. We do not worry about being robbed of our sexual value by the people we share pleasure with.
“SINFUL”
Some people base their sense of ethics on what they’ve learned is okay or not okay according to God or their church or their parents or their culture. They believe that being good consists of obedience to laws set down by a power greater than themselves.
Religion, we think, has a great deal to offer to many people, including the comfort of faith and the security of community. But believing that God doesn’t like sex is like believing that God doesn’t like you. Because of this belief, a tremendous number of people carry great shame for their own perfectly natural sexual desires and activities.
We prefer the beliefs of a woman we met, a devoted churchgoer in a fundamentalist faith. She told us that when she was about five years old, she discovered the joys of masturbation in the back seat of the family car, tucked under a warm blanket on a long trip. It felt so wonderful that she concluded that the existence of her clitoris was proof positive that God loved her.
“PATHOLOGICAL”
When psychological studies of human behavior came into vogue in the late nineteenth century, Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Dr. Sigmund Freud attempted to create more tolerance by theorizing that sluts are not bad but sick, suffering from psychopathology that is not their fault, because their neurosis derives from having their sexuality warped by their parents during their toilet training. So, they said, we should no longer burn sluts at the stake but instead send them to mental hospitals to be cured in an environment that permits no sexual expression at all.
During your authors’ childhood and adolescence in the early 1960s, it was common practice to certify and incarcerate adolescents for “treatment” of the “illness” of being sexual—especially if they were gay or lesbian, gender-dysphoric and thus challenging cultural norms of gender, and/or female and in danger of damaging their market value as virgins. (Think about the cultural assumptions that underlie one insult thrown at women who like to have a lot of sex: “cheap.” In other words, female sexuality is a commodity and, like all commodities, is made more valuable by its rarity—so a woman who shares sex widely is reducing her own market value.) This sort of thing still takes place more often than you might think. More recently we hear about sex addicts, avoidance of intimacy, commitment-phobia, and attachment disorders. Pathologizing explorative sexual behavior is far too often used as a weapon in a moral war against all sexual freedom.
The whole idea of sex addiction is a controversial one—many people feel that the word addiction is not well suited to discussing behavioral issues like sex. However, everybody seems to agree that substituting sex for fulfillment of other needs—to allay anxiety, for instance, or bolster sagging self-esteem—represents a problem.
Only you can decide whether your sexual behaviors have become compulsive and whether you wish to change them. Some people try to validate their sexual attractiveness over and over, using sex as constant reassurance because they do not see themselves as innately attractive or lovable. Sex can feel like, and even be, the only coin valuable enough to attract attention and approval.
Some groups and therapists who subscribe to the addiction model may try to tell you that anything but the most conservative of sexual behaviors is wrong or unhealthy or a symptom of addiction or disease. We encourage you to trust your own beliefs and find yourself a supportive environment. Some twelve-step groups encourage you to define the healthy sex life you want for yourself. If your goal is monogamy, that’s fine, and if your goal is to stop seeking sex in the place of friendship, or any other behavior pattern that you wish to resculpt, that’s fine too. We do not believe that successfully recovering sex addicts have to be monogamous unless they want to be.
“EASY”
Is there, we wonder, some virtue in being difficult?
Myths about Sluts
One of the challenges facing the ethical slut is our culture’s insistence that, simply because “everybody knows” something, it must obviously be true. We urge you to regard with great skepticism any sentence that begins “Everybody knows…” or “Common sense tells us…” Often, these phrases are signposts for cultural belief systems that may be antisexual, monogamy-centrist, and/or codependent. Questioning what “everybody knows” can be difficult and disorienting, but we have found it to be rewarding: questioning is the first step toward generating a new paradigm, your own paradigm of how you ought to be.
Cultural belief systems can be very deeply rooted in literature, law, and archetypes, which means that shaking them from your own personal ethos can be difficult. But the first step in exploring them is, of course, recognizing them. Here, then, are some of the pervasive myths that we have heard all our lives and have come to understand are most often untrue and destructive to our relationships and our lives.
MYTH #1: LONG-TERM MONOGAMOUS RELATIONSHIPS ARE THE ONLY REAL RELATIONSHIPS.
Lifetime monogamy as an ideal is a relatively new concept in human history and makes us unique among primates. There is nothing that can be achieved within a long-term monogamous relationship that cannot be achieved without one. Business partnership, deep attachment, stable parenting, personal growth, and care and companionship in old age are all well within the abilities of the slut.
People who believe this myth may feel that something is wrong with them if they aren’t in a committed twosome. If they prefer to remain free agents, if they discover themselves loving more than one person at a time, if they have tried one or more traditional relationships that didn’t work out…instead of questioning the myth, they question themselves: Am I incomplete? Where is my other half? The myth teaches them that they are not good enough in and of themselves. Often people develop a very unrealistic view of couplehood—Mr., Ms., or Mx. Right will automatically solve all their problems, fill all the gaps, and make their lives complete.
A subset of this myth is the belief that if you’re really in love, you will automatically lose all interest in others; thus, if you’re having sexual or romantic feelings toward anyone but your primary partner, you’re not really in love. This belief has cost many people a great deal of happiness through the centuries, yet is untrue to the point of absurdity: a ring around the finger does not cause a nerve block to the genitals.
And, we must ask, if monogamy is the only acceptable option, the only true form of love, than are these agreements genuinely consensual? If you believe that you have no other choice, we believe that you lack the agency that underlies informed consent. We have many friends who have chosen to be monogamous, and we applaud them. But how many people in our society consciously make that choice?
MYTH #2: ROMANTIC LOVE IS THE ONLY REAL LOVE.
Look at the lyrics of popular songs or read some classical poetry: the phrases we choose to describe romantic love don’t really sound all that pleasant. “Crazy in love,” “love hurts,” “obsession,” “heartbreak”…these are all descriptions of mental or physical illness.
The feeling that gets called romantic love in this culture seems to be a heady cocktail of lust and adrenaline, sparked by uncertainty, insecurity, perhaps even anger or danger. The chills up the spine that we recognize as passion are, in fact, the same physical phenomenon as hair rising up on a cat’s back, caused by the fight-or-flight response.
This kind of love can be thrilling and overwhelming and sometimes a hell of a lot of fun, but it is not the only “real” kind of love, nor is it always a good basis for an ongoing relationship.
MYTH #3: SEXUAL DESIRE IS A DESTRUCTIVE FORCE.
This one goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden and leads to a lot of crazy-making double standards. Some religions preach that women’s sexuality is evil and dangerous and exists only to lure men to their doom. From the Victorian era, we get the idea that men are hopelessly voracious and predatory when it comes to sex, and women are supposed to control and civilize them by being pure, asexual, and withholding—men are the gas pedal and women the brakes, which is, we think, pretty hard on the engine. Neither of these ideas works for us.
Many people also believe that unashamed sexual desire, particularly desire for more than one person, inevitably destroys the family—yet we suspect that far more families have been destroyed by bitter divorces over cheating than have ever been disturbed by ethical consensual nonmonogamy.
We prefer to listen to our desires with an open mind and then make choices about how we act.
MYTH #4: THE ONLY MORAL WAY TO HAVE SEX IS WITHIN A COMMITTED RELATIONSHIP.
An old saw has it that men agree to relationships to have sex, and women agree to sex to have relationships. Believing such nonsense leads to the idea of sex as a currency exchanged for security both financial and physical, social acceptance, and the other perks traditionally granted to people who have achieved the culturally mandated state of lifelong pair-bonding. If you believe this myth, you’re likely to see sex for fun, for pleasure, for exploration—for any purpose except cementing two people together—as immoral and socially destructive.
MYTH #5: LOVING SOMEONE MAKES IT OKAY TO CONTROL THEIR BEHAVIOR.
This kind of territorial reasoning is designed, we guess, to make people feel secure, but we don’t believe that anybody has the right, much less the obligation, to control the behavior of another functioning adult. Being treated according to this myth doesn’t make us feel secure—it makes us feel furious. The old “Awww, she’s jealous—she must really care about me” reasoning is symptomatic of a very disturbed set of personal boundaries that can lead to a great deal of unhappiness.
MYTH #6: JEALOUSY IS INEVITABLE AND IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERCOME.
Jealousy is, without a doubt, a very common experience, so much so that a person who doesn’t experience jealousy is looked at as a bit odd or in denial. But often a situation that would cause intense jealousy for one person can be no big deal for another. Some people get jealous when their honey takes a sip out of someone else’s Coke, while others happily watch their beloved wave bye-bye for a month of amorous sporting with a friend at the far end of the country.
Some people also believe that jealousy is such a shattering emotion that they have no choice but to succumb to it. People who believe this often believe that any form of nonmonogamy should be nonconsensual and completely secret, in order to protect the “betrayed” partner from having to feel such an impossibly difficult emotion.
On the contrary, we have found that jealousy is an emotion like any other: it feels bad (sometimes very bad), but it is not intolerable. We have also found that many of the “oughta-be’s” that lead to jealousy can be unlearned, and that unlearning them is often a useful, sometimes even profoundly healing, process. Later in this book, we will spend a lot more time talking about jealousy and the strategies people employ to cope with it.
MYTH #7: OUTSIDE INVOLVEMENTS REDUCE INTIMACY IN THE PRIMARY RELATIONSHIP.
Most marriage counselors, and certain popular TV psychologists, believe that when a member of an otherwise happy couple has an “affair,” this must be a symptom of unresolved conflict or unfulfilled needs that should be dealt with in the primary relationship. This is occasionally true, but not nearly as often as many “relationship gurus” would like us to believe. The myth tells us that sleeping with someone else is something you do to your partner, not for yourself, and is the worst thing you can possibly do to your partner. This myth leaves no room for the possibility of growthful and constructive open sexual lifestyles.
It is cruel and insensitive to interpret an affair as a symptom of sickness in the relationship, as it leaves “cheated-on” partners—who may already be feeling insecure—wondering what is wrong with them. Meanwhile, “cheating” partners get told that they are only trying to get back at their primary partners and don’t really want, need, or even like their lovers.
Many people have sex outside their primary relationships for reasons that have nothing to do with any inadequacy in their partner or in the relationship. The new relationship may simply be a natural extension of an emotional and/or physical attraction to someone besides the primary partner. Or perhaps this outside relationship allows a particular kind of connection that the primary partner doesn’t even want (such as kinky sex or going to football games) and thus constitutes a solution for an otherwise intractable conflict. Or perhaps it meets other needs—like a need for uncomplicated physical sex without the trappings of relationship or for sex with someone of a gender other than one’s partner’s or for sex at a time when it is otherwise not available (during travel or a partner’s illness, for example).
An outside involvement does not have to subtract in any way from the intimacy you share with your partner unless you let it. And we sincerely hope you won’t.
MYTH #8: LOVE CONQUERS ALL.
Hollywood tells us that “love means never having to say you’re sorry,” and we, fools that we are, believe it. This myth has it that if you’re really in love with someone, you never have to argue, disagree, communicate, negotiate, or do any other kind of work. It also tells us that love means we automatically get turned on by our beloved and that we never have to lift a finger or make any effort to deliberately kindle passion. Those who believe this myth may find themselves feeling that their love has failed every time they need to schedule a discussion or have a courteous (or not-so-courteous) disagreement. They may also believe that any sexual behavior that doesn’t fit their criteria for “normal” sex—from fantasies to vibrators—is “artificial” and indicates that something is lacking in the quality of their love.
“We encourage you to seek your own truths on your way to slutty bliss.”
Steps to a Freer Paradigm
So in this slightly disorienting world of sluthood, in which everything your mom, your minister, your spouse, and your television ever told you is probably wrong, how do you find new beliefs that support your new lifestyle? Letting go of old paradigms can leave you in a scary emptiness, your stomach churning as if you were in free fall. You don’t need the old myths, but what will you have instead? We encourage you to seek your own truths on your way to slutty bliss, but just in case you could use a hint or two, the next chapter will contain some of the ones that have worked well for us.
Sluthood: The Next Generation
We are aware that some of the readers of this twentieth-anniversary edition are younger than the book they’re perusing. Moreover, some of this new generation of ethical sluts are the children, or even grandchildren, of people who have been experimenting with alternative sexual and relationship styles for decades.
When we talk to folks in their teens and twenties about their sexuality and how it differs from that of previous generations, they cite some issues that we are happy to hear:
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 “Consent is a language, and our generation speaks it fluently. Because we speak more openly about issues of abuse and trauma—both in our personal past and our cultural past—we’re more aware of triggers and how they work (aided by recent years’ improved scientific understanding of the neurophysiology of trauma). We tend to err on the side of caution, choosing to be careful about not impinging on others’ triggers.”
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 “We’re much more open to gender fluidity and experimentation with gender. Because we’re not too into binary gender, there’s also a lot of blurring around the idea of sexual orientation, and the old definitions are morphing into a general category of ‘ queer ness.’ ”
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 “ Ecosex is the new paradigm for many people our age: taking the Earth as our powerful lover and treating her huge energies with gentleness and respect.”
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 “We’re more aware of issues of intersectionality, the ways that different categories of historical oppression affect one another. We see many traditional ways of approaching oppression as potentially problematic: for example, traditional feminism and traditional gay liberation may not recognize the issues of people of color. We’re also much more sensitive to issues of cultural appropriation.”
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 “Because we’re a post- AIDS generation, we’ve decentered penile penetration as ‘real’ sex and are interested in developing our skills in outercourse and other low-risk behaviors. On the other hand, we look at the generation that lived through AIDS, and it seems that their lives were deepened and made more spiritual by that awful struggle. We haven’t had to deal with anything like that, and it makes us very different.”
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 “We look at older politicians who are trying to ban abortion, restrict birth control, and outlaw sex work, and it just doesn’t make any sense to us. Our bodies are our own, and only we should get to decide what happens to our own body. We see the controlling of bodies as fundamental to capitalism and that taking the locus of control back into ourselves will help us join together to overturn patriarchy and capitalism for a more humane way of life.”
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 “We’ve grown up in a world where no consensual sexual or relationship behavior is considered ‘wrong.’ We’ve seen kinky , queer, and poly families on television and in the newspapers, and we want to live in a way that empowers us to try a little bit of everything, keeping what works for now and leaving ourselves open to other options in the future.”
Your authors are thrilled to anticipate the brave new world that will be created by this new generation of explorative and self-aware people.