CONCLUSION
Well, here we are, at the end of our book. But before we launch you back out into the world, we want to leave you with one final concept that may help you shape your thinking as you design your own life full of whatever kinds of sex and love you want.
From Two to Many
The world is very fond of binaries: black and white, male and female, mind and body, good and bad. These pairs, we all learn, are opposed: there’s the right way and the
wrong way, and our task is to do battle to defend the right and destroy the wrong. This kind of thinking dominates our courts, our politics, and our talk shows, with some crazy results: for instance, some people
believe that anyone who enjoys sex outside of marriage, or a kind of marriage that’s different from theirs, must be attacking their
marriage. Anything that is different must be opposed, must be the enemy.
When right and wrong are your only options, you may believe that you can’t love more than one person or that you can’t love in different ways or that you have a finite capacity for love—that “many” must somehow be opposed to “one,” or that your only options are in love and out of love, with no allowance for different degrees or kinds of love.
We would like to propose something different. Instead of fretting
about what’s right or what’s wrong, try valuing whatever is in front of
you without viewing anything as in opposition to any other thing. We think that if you can do this, you will discover that there are as many ways to be sexual as there are to be human, and all of them are valid, an abundance of ways to relate, to love, to express gender, to share sex, to form families, to be in the world, to be human…and none of them in any way reduces or invalidates any of the others.
When we open our minds to a world beyond opposites, we become able to see beyond unrealistic perfection and unachievable goals. We can free ourselves to be fully conscious of all the wonderful variety and diversity that there is right now in the world, right here, in the present, available to us.
Thus sluthood can become a path to transcendence: a freeing of the mind and spirit as well as the body, a way of being in the world that allows expanded awareness, spiritual growth, and love beyond imagining.
“Sluthood can become a path to transcendence, a freeing of the mind and spirit as well as the body.”
A Slut
Manifesto
By examining the issues that limit our relationships and our understanding of how we might be, we are planning for a society that is appropriate to the way many people live today—one that meets our need for change and growth while feeding our fundamental desire for belonging and family.
We believe that monogamy will continue to thrive as it always has, a perfectly valid choice for those who truly choose it. We want to open our vision to accommodate monogamy as well as a plethora of other options—to plan for family and social structures that have growing room, that will continue to stretch and adapt, that we can fit to our needs in the
future. We believe that
new forms of families are evolving now and will continue to evolve, not to replace the nuclear family but to supplement it with new possibilities: a whole world of choices about sharing family and sex and love. We want to set you free to invent the society you want to live in.
Our vision of utopia has free love—in all its forms—as the foundation of our beliefs about reality, about possibility, about staying in the moment and planning the future. We believe that the freedom to love
helps us see our lives as they really are, with the honesty to perceive ourselves clearly and the fluidity to let us move onward as our needs alter, as a changing and growing self with changing and growing partners in a changing and growing world.
We see ethical sluthood leading us to a world where we respect and honor each individual’s boundaries more than we honor any preconceived set of rules about what their boundaries ought to be.
And in expanding our sexual lives, we foresee the development of an advanced sexuality where we can become both more natural and more human. Sex and intimacy really are physical expressions of a whole lot of stuff that otherwise has no physical existence: love and joy, deep emotion, intense closeness, profound connection, spiritual awareness, incredibly good feelings, sometimes even transcendent ecstasy. In our utopia, intellect is not a trap that we get stuck in, but an honored tool we use to give form to our experience. We free our natural selves by opening our intellects to sensual awareness of our bodies, and when we are no longer stuck in our intellects, we can become free to welcome spirit: intuitive, experiencing the joy of life for the simple sake of experiencing, in communion with ourselves, with each other, and beyond.
Our Favorite Fantasy:
Abundance in Sex and Love
We want everyone to be free to express love in every possible way. We want to create a world where everyone has plenty of what they need: of community, of connection, of touch and sex and love. We want our children to be raised in an expanded family, a connected village within contemporary alienation, where there are enough adults who love them and each other, so there is plenty of love and attention and nurturance—more than enough to go around. We want a world where the sick and aging are cared for by people who love them, where resources are shared by people who care about each other.
We dream of a world where no one is driven by desires they have no hope of fulfilling, where no one suffers from shame for their desires or embarrassment about their dreams, where no one is starving from lack of love or sex. We dream of a world where no one is limited by
rules that dictate that they must be less of a person than they have the capacity to be.
We dream of a world where nobody gets to vote on your life choices or who you choose to love or how you choose to express that love, except yourself and your lovers. We dream of a time and a place where we will all be free to publicly declare our love, for whomever we love, however we love them.
And may we all look forward to a lifetime of dreams come true.