8

ABUNDANCE

Many traditional attitudes about sexuality are based on the unspoken belief that there isn’t enough of something —love, sex, friendship, commitment—to go around. If you believe this, if you think that there’s a limited amount of what you want, it can seem very important to stake your claim to your share of it. You may believe that you have to take your share away from somebody else, because if it’s such a very good thing, someone else is probably competing with you for it. Or you may believe that if someone else gets something, that means there must be less of it for you.

We want all of our readers to get everything they want. Here are some ideas that might help you over some of the obstacles on the path.

Starvation Economies

People often learn about starvation economies in childhood, when experiences with parents who are emotionally depleted or otherwise unavailable teach us that we must work hard to get our emotional needs met. We learn that if we relax our vigilance for even a moment, a mysterious someone or something may take the love we need away from us. Some of us may even have experienced real-world hunger—having to compete for the food that keeps us alive—or outright neglect, deprivation, or abuse. Or we may learn starvation economies later in life, from manipulative, withholding, or punitive lovers, spouses, or friends.

The beliefs acquired in childhood are usually deeply buried and hard to see, both in individuals and in our culture. So you may have to look carefully to see the pattern. When is it okay to want anything? People may think that if you love Bill that means you must love Mary less, or if you’re committed to your relationship with your friend, you must be less committed to your relationship with your spouse. And then how do you know if you’re number one in a partner’s heart?

This kind of thinking is a trap. We know, for example, that having a second child doesn’t usually mean that a parent loves the first child less, and that the person who owns three pets doesn’t necessarily give any less care to any one of them than the person who owns one. But when it comes to sex, love, and romance, it’s hard for most people to believe that more for you doesn’t mean less for me, and we often behave as if desperate starvation is just around the corner if we don’t stockpile some love right now.

Letting Go

Getting over past fears of starvation can be one of the biggest challenges of ethical sluthood. It requires an enormous leap of faith: you have to let go of some of what feels like yours, trusting that it will be replaced in abundance by a generous world. You need to get clear that you deserve love and nurturance and warmth and sex. If the world hasn’t been all that generous to you in the past, this may be very difficult.

Unfortunately, we can’t promise you that the world will be generous to you. We think it will, that if you loosen your possessive grip on the love that’s already yours, you’ll get more from the person who loves you and maybe from some other people, too. It certainly has worked for us. But, especially in the beginning, letting go of starvation economies can feel a lot like flying on a trapeze: you have to let go of the security you already have, trusting that at the end of the leap, there will always be something else to catch you.

Is there a safety net for this kind of daredevilry? Well, yes, but it’s going to require another leap of faith…because the safety net is you: your self-reliance, your self-nurturing, your ability to spend time in your own company. If being alone seems unbearable to you, the courage required to relinquish what’s “yours” may be impossible to summon.

On the other hand, what an incredibly free feeling it is to realize that there is enough love, sex, commitment, support, and nurturing to go around! Janet used to spend the nights when her partner was out with someone else by securing a date with one of her other lovers so she wouldn’t have to be alone. Now, she says, “I know that option is there for me if I want it, but much more often, I choose to spend that time in my own company, enjoying the opportunity for solitary self-indulgence.” Knowing that the world offers plenty of companionship, she feels safe enough to not need that reassurance.

Real-World Limits

In contrast to starvation economies, some of the things we want really are limited. There are only twenty-four hours in the day, for example— so trying to find enough time to do all the wonderfully slutty things we enjoy, with all the people we care about, can be a real challenge and sometimes impossible.

Time is the biggest real-world limit we encounter in trying to live and love as we like. This problem is hardly exclusive to sluts; monogamous folks also run into problems finding the time for sex, companionship, and communication.

Careful planning can help—if you don’t already keep a shared datebook or online calendar, now is a good time to start. Respecting one another’s realities, and staying flexible, is important. Crises happen: a sick child, a work emergency, or even another partner who needs companionship and reassurance during a particularly bad time. You might also want to do some thinking about how much time you need to get your needs met: do you really have to stay over and have breakfast together the next day, or would an hour or two of cuddling and talk be just as nice?

However you work out your schedule, remember that everybody concerned needs to know about it, and that may include more people than you are used to thinking about. A friend of ours, having failed to inform his wife’s lover about an engagement that affected their schedule, moaned: “I know I told someone .”

Don’t forget to schedule time to relate to your partner and play with your kids. And don’t leave yourself out: many busy sluts find it important to schedule alone time for rest and replenishment. Janet, when she lived in a Grand Central Station–like group household, had an arrangement with her girlfriend that she could occasionally use the girlfriend’s house for solitary retreats—a rare and precious gift—when the girlfriend was out of town.

Space is another real-world limit for many people. Few of us are fortunate enough to live in multiroom mansions with rooms dedicated exclusively to sex. If you’re in your bedroom with your friend and your live-in partner is sleepy and wants to go to bed, you’ve got a problem. Crashing on a narrow couch in one’s own apartment while one’s partner disports with someone else in one’s bed may be beyond the limits of even the most advanced slut. When you share your bedroom or other play space with a partner or lover(s), we suggest making clear agreements well in advance of any date and sticking strictly to them. This problem may be solved by separate bedrooms or personal spaces if you can afford them. One couple we interviewed said, “Having separate bedrooms is a nonnegotiable need for us; we wouldn’t be able to maintain this lifestyle without them.”

Possessions can also be an issue. It’s only natural to want to share our stuff with the people we care about. But this urge can cause problems when possessions—money, food, art, sex toys—belong, legally or emotionally, to more than one person. If there’s any chance that someone feels a sense of possession about an item, we strongly recommend that you talk carefully with that person before you share the item with someone else. This rule is sometimes simple: you don’t let your lover polish off the carton of milk that your spouse was planning to drink for breakfast. It sometimes gets tricky, though. While you may have the technical right to give away a gift that was given to you by someone else, the wife who sees her husband’s Father’s Day tie around his lover’s neck may feel understandably miffed. Similarly, it’s a good idea to get consent about sharing an item that was made for you by a lover or is something that the two of you bought together during an intimate shopping trip on your anniversary. Many sluts, for the purposes of hygiene and/or emotional attachment, set aside certain sex toys for use with only one person: my vibrator, Harry’s dildo. Lending or giving jointly owned money without discussing it with the co-owner is, we hope it’s not necessary to say, unacceptable.

Sexual Economies

The “tyranny of hydraulics” is Dossie’s phrase for the biological realities that govern many aspects of sexuality. While it might be nice to think that you’re a sexual superhero who can generate erections on demand ad infinitum , neither of us has yet met such a person. A partner who is looking forward to conventional sexual activities with a lover may be quite understandably disappointed to find them unavailable by virtue of having ejaculated with another partner earlier that day. And even the most multiply orgasmic of us can’t stay turned on forever.

Such problems can often be solved by readjusting your expectations of what constitutes sex—does it really always require an erection, an orgasm, an ejaculation? If partner A reaches orgasm before partner B, is there any reason why lovely stimulations can’t continue until partner B comes to their happy ending?

Practitioners of tantric yoga have developed ways by which many penis owners can experience orgasm without ejaculation. These strategies are only somewhat useful for birth control and safer sex and are certainly no substitute for condoms. But they come with a wonderful side effect: those who learn to orgasm without ejaculating may conquer their refractory period, becoming able to come many times. Practitioners of many other kinds of sex have developed ways in which enthusiastic sluts can give their partners one or many orgasms and enjoy a surfeit of sensual pleasures themselves, regardless of their physiological state of arousal. Erections may come and go, but the rest of the nervous system works pretty much all the time. Before you give up on polyamory because of the tyranny of hydraulics, we suggest you investigate at least some of these possibilities (take a look at chapter 23, “Sex and Pleasure,” and some of the books in Further Reading).

Remember outercourse. Remember the huge range of sexual delights that don’t have any relationship whatsoever to erections. Remember sensuality. Rediscover massage for its own sake. Share a fabulously smutty conversation about what you’d like to do to each other.

“Erections may come and go, but the rest of the nervous system works pretty much all the time.”

Are You Really Going to Starve?

When you try to decide what limits you want to the openness of your relationship, it’s not always easy to tell which are based on reality and which on fear or illusion. First, you have to pinpoint the areas in your life where you feel insecure, where you perceive the possibility of deprivation—a task that requires a lot of self-searching and honesty. It helps to ask, “What am I afraid might happen?”

Is your partner’s fondness for their friend really going to make them fall out of love with you? What if your partner doesn’t think you’re special anymore? What if your partner is so ecstatically happy that they don’t need you? Why would your partner ever want you, anyway? These are some of the horrible little thoughts that pop up in our minds when we’re scared of starving.

You need to decide whether the thing you fear is actually possible. Then you need to choose what you want to do about it. Frequent check-ins, good communication to keep you aware of whether anyone’s feeling deprived or overextended, and lots of internal reality checks (is your disappointment that they can’t get it up really just that, or is it anger or jealousy over their date last night?) can help. We’ll talk later about how to get reassurance and support when you’re afraid.

Limits Can Stretch

Sometimes, you just have to try it and see. The old chestnut, “If you love something, let it go” is sentimental, but more than a kernel of truth lies at its core. In the same way that dieters are sometimes counseled to let themselves get hungry to see what that feels like and learn that they can survive the feeling, you may need to let yourself feel deprived, simply to prove to yourself that feeling deprived isn’t the end of the world. Sometimes letting go of one pleasure opens your eyes to another that was there from the start; sometimes a new one comes along; sometimes you find out you don’t need it all that much right now anyway. We can’t tell you what letting go will feel like; all we can do is assure you that you will learn something from it.

Learning new things takes time, so give yourself plenty. It can be useful to get clear with what you are working on learning right now—like how to feel safe and sexy and special when your partner is out on a date—and promise yourself you will learn the next thing, well, next. Every change, small or large, is accomplished one step at a time, so work on this step today, and you’ll be ready for the next one tomorrow or maybe next week—working on today’s step is how you get ready for tomorrow.

Poly Pioneers: The Oneida Community

John Humphrey Noyes was a Protestant preacher in rural Vermont in the 1840s when he discovered a connection between sex and spirituality. Noyes felt terrible about wanting sex after his wife had suffered through four dangerous pregnancies culminating in stillbirths, so he experimented with sex that could not result in pregnancy. He discovered that men, by slowing down the sexual act and possibly applying pressure to the perineum, could learn to have orgasms without ejaculating. This practice made possible multiple orgasms for men, and, to his surprise, intensified the orgasmic experience to the level of religious ecstasy.

Noyes embraced this expanded sexual practice as sacrament, preaching that the sexual organs were “the medium of the noblest worship of God.” (Many religious groups around the world have explored similar philosophies, creating a substantial body of books, websites, and workshops available to the erotic explorer. If you’re curious, point your favorite search engine to terms like tantra , healing tao , and qodoushka .)

Noyes and his congregation soon developed a free love community that lasted in its purest form for more than thirty years. To escape judgmental neighbors, the congregation acquired land in rural New York, in the town of Oneida, where they eventually built a nintey-three-bedroom mansion and established businesses to support their community, including the still-functioning Oneida Community Silverware.

Oneida sought to live free of acquisitiveness and possessiveness. Exclusive relationships were discouraged, and Oneidans worked to avoid what they called “sticky love”—by which they meant romance or falling in love—in favor of communal love.

The community evolved an ethos of women’s rights that was very advanced for its era. Efforts were made to ensure equality in work between men and women; women cut their hair short and wore knee-length dresses with bloomers, giving them freedom of movement; women were active participants in choosing sexual partners and were sent off to colleges and law schools and medical schools. Children were raised communally from about eighteen months of age to accustom them to a communal life, discourage excessive attachment between children and parents, and free the women to explore whatever work or learning inspired them.

Unfortunately, Oneida was not immune to the nineteenth-century fad of eugenics. Noyes jumped on the bandwagon, determining that his community was the best possible place to breed supermen and superwomen and began to control in great detail who should propagate with whom. Guess who Noyes thought had the best genes? He had many descendants with many different mothers.

Eventually, Noyes was forced to flee to Canada, fearing prosecution under the Comstock Laws that criminalized even writing about birth control as obscenity. In the absence of Noyes’s missionary zeal, the community continued for a while, mutually supportive but much less communal—getting married more often, building private houses for couples and families on the communal land, and so on. Eventually it looked a lot more like a nice small town than a commune.

The mansion still stands as a museum.