The Ethical Slut (9 page)

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 corner some love right now.

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.

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 fairly detailed datebook or computerized 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 her 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 she 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.”

Dossie once had a very special relationship with a woman who lived across the continent with a partner. They liked to get together for entire weekends every six weeks or so, but where? Part of this book was written in a cabin in the country, where these two went for a writers’ retreat and a private place in which to get very noisy. A hotel room can be another good solution.

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 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.

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 superman who can generate erections on demand
ad infinitum,
neither of us has yet met such a man. A partner who is looking forward to conventional sexual activities with a male lover may be quite understandably disappointed to find him unavailable by virtue of having ejaculated with another partner earlier that day. And even the most multiply orgasmic of women 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? Practitioners of tantric yoga have developed ways by which many men can experience orgasm without ejaculation. These strategies are only somewhat useful for birth control and safer sex and are certainly no substitute for rubbers. But they come with a wonderful side effect: men who learn to orgasm without ejaculating are able to come many times, like women. 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 (
chapter 21
, “Sex and Pleasure,” and some of the books in the Resource Guide will help).

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 tomorrow.

When you try to decide what limits you want to the openness of your relationship, it’s not always easy to tell which fears 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—which requires a lot of self-searching and honesty. It helps to ask, “What am I afraid might happen?”

Is your partner’s fondness for his friend really going to make him fall out of love with you? What if your partner doesn’t think you’re special any more? What if your partner is so ecstatically happy that she doesn’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 or something that probably won’t happen. 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 he couldn’t get it up really just that, or is it anger or jealousy over his date last night?) can help. We’ll talk later about how to get reassurance and support when you’re afraid.

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 in order 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. Scary … and satisfying!

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.

GREAT SLUTS are made, not born. The skills you need to keep yourself and your partners happy and growing get developed through a combination of conscious effort and frequent practice. There are skills you can learn that will help start your adventure on the right foot and keep it on track.

Self-examination, in our opinion, is always a good idea—when you are journeying without a map, having a clear picture of your
internal
landscape becomes essential. Ask yourself: What do you expect from this way of living your life? What rewards can you foresee that will compensate you for doing the hard work of learning to be secure in a world of shifting relationships? Some people who have already made the journey cite benefits like sexual variety, less dependence on a single relationship, or a sense of belonging to a network of friends, lovers, and partners. The people we interviewed said things like this:

As you read this book, and hear some stories about successful sluts, you may discover special benefits for you. What are your reasons for choosing this path?

Alas, many people begin to explore open relationships because their partner is pushing them into it, or because all their friends are doing it and they don’t want to seem prudish. We ask that you get clear within yourself that you’re doing this for
you
—because it excites you, because it offers opportunities for learning and growth and fun, because you want to. Make no mistake, this can be a rocky road. If you’re navigating it for the wrong reasons, resentment can easily poison the very relationships you set out to improve.

Sexual change can be a path of reprogramming yourself, with the joyous feeling of abundant sex and love as the carrot, and the fear of deprivation, boredom, or self-loathing as the stick. Since we don’t believe that the urge toward monogamy is innate, we think you must have learned your negative sexual feelings and your insecurities
somewhere
—from your parents, from your past lovers, from your culture. What you have learned, you can obviously unlearn—or learn something new. Exploring your feelings and changing your reactions to them can be difficult, but what a feeling of power and triumph each time you succeed!