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Some people treat sex as a big-game hunt—trying to conquer the unwilling and unwitting victim, as though the object of their attention would never decide to share sex with them unless tricked into it. Believing that a person would have to be a fool to make love with you is often, we observe, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Using sex to shore up sagging
self-esteem by stealing someone else’s does not work to build a solid sense of self-worth, and this thief of love will have to go on stealing more and more without ever feeling fulfilled.
Such people often approach open sexual lifestyles as if keeping score. Set collectors and trophy fuckers treat their partners like prizes in a contest they have set out to win.
The concept of set collectors may be new to you, but we assure you that such people exist. A friend of ours once discovered that a would-be lover of hers had already had sex with her mother and her sister and was hoping to complete the set. Sex that means treating your partners as collectibles does not meet our requirements for mutual respect.
Some people approach “
scoring” as if all people can be ranked on a hierarchy from the most to the least desirable and the way to make the most points and assure yourself of a high rank is to collect partners as high up the ladder as you can reach. People gain in rank and value in these hierarchies by being thin, young, cute, gym-toned, wealthy, and/or of high social status.
We do not believe that love is a game that you can win by scoring high on a hierarchy of shallow values. We know from extensive experience that appearance and wealth are not predictors of good loving. We try to avoid ranking people as better or worse than each other and are unhappy with those who want to relate to our rank more than our selves. Hierarchies produce victims on the top as well as the bottom, because it is almost as alienating to be approached by too many people for the wrong reasons as it is to be approached by nobody at all.
Some who have a history of nonconsensual nonmonogamy may get attached to the sense of secrecy, of getting away with something. These folks may have a very hard time adapting to the idea of consensual sluthood—they’re so used to concealing their activities from their partners that they may even have built that furtive feeling into their erotic life, hooked on the adrenaline rush they get from forbidden fruit. It takes a pretty substantial leap of faith, and maybe some creative fantasizing and role-playing, for such individuals to open up their hidden places and experience the greater joy that can come from knowing that nobody is getting hurt by their fun.
People who refuse to learn to use barriers that get between people and viruses are not ethical sluts. They are, quite simply, playing dirty when they argue with lovers about allowing potentially infectious sex, insisting on sex without barriers, or attempting to sneak around a lover’s limits about safer sex. Refusing to deal with the realities of viruses and bacteria because of embarrassment is also
unethical: a good slut speaks the truth even if blushing furiously.
Ethical sluts do not make promises they can’t keep. If you are attracted to someone who is looking for a life partnership and what you want is a lighthearted affair (or vice versa), you need to be honest about that, even if that means saying, “No, thank you” to sex until your feelings for each other are more on a par.
Mistakes can easily be made—sometimes accidentally and sometimes when we should have predicted that someone would get hurt.
We have both made such mistakes. Now, your older and wiser authors have discovered a couple of limits of our own: we do not share sex with anyone that we’re not at least potentially interested in sharing sex with again, and we believe that anything worth doing is worth waiting for until the time is right. One hallmark of a skillful slut is to
learn from one’s mistakes and keep going. Dossie made such a mistake when she was very young and stupid:
My long-term relationship had just broken up and I was pretty broken up about it myself. I went out to the coffee shop in Greenwich Village and saw my recent ex in earnest conversation with a cute young thing who was not me. I felt horribly betrayed, lost, and worthless. Just then, a young man who had been attracted to me, and for whom I had no serious feelings, came up to speak to me. It somehow seemed appropriate to go home with him and let him soothe my ruffled feathers, but I regretted it the next day when I found myself hurting his feelings and leaving him in the lurch. To further aggravate my guilt, it turned out that what my ex was doing with that sweet girl was beating his bosom about how horrible he felt about breaking up with me—we wound up getting back together. I have always felt that I took advantage of the young man who offered me his affection, which I thoughtlessly took and then gave right back to him. It would have been kinder had I just said no.
And that brings us to
revenge fucking. It is truly nasty to arrange to have sex with one person to get back at another. To arouse one person’s insecurities, jealousy, and other painful feelings on purpose is dishonorable, and to use another person as a puppet in your play is disrespectful and often downright abusive. In psychopathology, being “antisocial” is defined as behaving with flagrant disregard for the rights, and we would add the feelings, of others. We prefer to relate to sociable people.
What do you do when someone in your intimate circle is not playing honestly? It helps if the people in your extended family have ways to talk about what is going on, to share experiences and feelings. If everyone is too ashamed to admit to having been misused by someone with an untrustworthy hidden agenda, then no one will have the information they need to protect themselves. There is no shame in having believed someone’s lies, and most of us at some time or other have given our trust to someone who turned out not to be worthy of it. It is possible to fool an honest person, but we hope you have enough humility to learn from your mistakes and not get fooled twice.
All these difficult scripts are about somebody not being honest and are also about somebody having sex while avoiding intimacy and emotional connection. When you are not telling the truth, you cannot be present; when you are not present, you can’t be connected to anyone else; and when you are not connected, how can you feel anything at all?
By treating lovers as people and letting relationships take the shapes they want instead of the forms forced on them by the culture around them, ethical sluts can form relationships that last.