Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [109]
So while surfing the web has brought new opportunities, tons of information, and a great many joys into the lives of contemporary sluts, it also offers unprecedented opportunities for acting out, especially during the sensitive period surrounding a breakup.
All the rules that tell us who it’s safe to confide in go triple when electronic communication is involved. If you’re in the habit of using your blog or social-networking page as your personal journal, please consider keeping a separate page—if it’s online, lock it so you’re the only one who can see it, but we actually prefer paper for this—on which you can pour out anger, blaming, grief, and all the other emotions that are important to feel but inappropriate to share with your entire online community.
As for junior-high-school behavior like making a big drama about unfriending someone on your MySpace page—well, just don’t. If it’s no longer appropriate for an individual to have access to your personal information, consider posting less personal information for a while … or, if you absolutely must, simply remove that person from your friends list, without comment to them or to anyone else. Unfriending someone so you can badmouth them behind their back is silly and rude, and they’ll probably hear about it from some mutual friend anyway. Look for safer and more constructive ways to vent your feelings.
If you look at advice columns from the early twentieth century, there is considerable judgment about the rudeness of using a typewriter (horrors!) to write a personal letter: new technologies often seem very impersonal at first, and email is no exception. The advantages and disadvantages of email are the same thing: on a computer screen you can’t use your face or body to communicate, and little smiley and frowny faces don’t really help much. Email can be very helpful in clarifying a point that feels too emotional or dangerous to communicate with your voice, but it can also come off sounding a lot harsher than you meant it, since your sympathetic smile gets lost somewhere in the ether.
WHO GETS THE FRIENDS?
One of the joyous consequences of open sexual lifestyles is that everybody tends to get interconnected in an extended family, sexual circle, or tribe. When a couple breaks up with lots of pain, then the whole circle is affected. For the people in pain, it can feel like there is no privacy. Your friends and other lovers may be full of their own ideas about who’s in the wrong. It hurts them when they feel your pain, so the entire circle may start looking for someone to blame.
Ethically speaking, the separating couple has some responsibility toward their intimate circle, and the circle has some responsibility toward the erstwhile couple. The members of the couple should refrain from trying to split the community. In other words, you don’t demand that all your friends sever whatever friendships they may have with your ex and you don’t divide your community up into those who are on your side and those who are against you by virtue of who continues to speak to your unspeakable ex.
Privacy is a touchy issue here, because no one likes the consequences of gossip run amok—but we all need a confidant to tell our troubles to, especially in hard times. Sometimes separating couples can make agreements about who it’s okay to talk about private matters with, and who we would rather not have familiarized with our dirty linen. Other times, no agreement is reached, and the chips fall where they may.
If you feel that you and your ex should not be at the same parties for a while, you need to work that out with each other and not wind up screaming at your host for having invited both of you to the same event. It is particularly unethical to call up the host of a certain party and demand that your ex be disinvited, or to threaten not to come if your ex is invited. This adds up to foisting your work off on your friends. It is your task to set your boundaries, to make agreements with your ex, and, if you find yourself feeling bad in any place where your ex is also