Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [12]
One-night stands can be intense, life-enhancing, and fulfilling; so can lifetime love affairs. While ethical sluts may choose to have some kinds of relationships and not others, we believe that all relationships have the potential to teach us, move us, and above all give us pleasure.
Dossie remembers an interview with a young flower child back in 1967 who made the most succinct statement of ethical sluthood we’ve ever seen: “We believe it’s okay to have sex with anybody you love, and we believe in loving everybody.”
You Are Already Whole
Jane Austen wrote, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” While we think Jane probably had her tongue firmly planted in her cheek, a great many people do believe that to be single is to be somehow incomplete and that they need to find their “other half.” A lot of the myths we mentioned in the previous section are based on that belief.
We believe, on the other hand, that the fundamental sexual unit is one person; adding more people to that unit may be intimate, fun, and companionable but does not complete anybody. The only thing in this world that you can control is yourself—your own reactions, desires, and behaviors. Thus, a fundamental step in ethical sluthood is to bring your locus of control into yourself, to recognize the difference between your “stuff” and other people’s; when you do this, you become able to complete yourself—that’s why we call this “integrity.”
When you have built a satisfying relationship with yourself, then you have something of great worth to share with others.
Abundance Is Entirely Available
Many people believe, explicitly or implicitly, that our capacities for romantic love, intimacy, and connection are finite, that there is never enough to go around, and that if you give some to one person, you must be taking some away from another.
We call this belief a “starvation economy”; we’ll talk much more about it later. Many of us learned to think this way in childhood, from parents who had little affection or attention for us, so we learned that there is only a limited amount of love in the world and we have to fight for whatever we get, often in cutthroat competition with our brothers and sisters.
People who operate from starvation economies can become very possessive about the people, things, and ideas that matter to them. They see the whole world in that limited light, so that anything they get comes from a small pool of not-enough and must thus be taken from someone else—and, similarly, anything anyone else gets must be subtracted from them.
It is important to distinguish between starvation economies and real-world limits. Time, for example, is a real-world limit: even the most dedicated slut has only twenty-four hours every day. Love is not a real-world limit: the mother of nine children can love each of them as much as the mother of an only child.
Our belief is that the human capacity for sex and love and intimacy is far greater than most people think—possibly infinite—and that having a lot of satisfying connections simply makes it possible for you to have a lot more. Imagine what it would feel like to live in an abundance of sex and love, to feel that you had all of both that you could possibly want, free of any feelings of deprivation or neediness. Imagine how strong you would feel if you got to exercise your “love muscles” that much, and how much love you would have to give!
Openness Can Be the Solution, Not the Problem
Is sexual adventurousness simply a way to avoid intimacy? Not ordinarily, in our experience. While it is certainly possible to misuse your outside relationships to avoid problems or intimacy with your life partner, we do not agree that this pattern is inevitable or even common. Many people, in fact, find that their outside relationships can increase their intimacy with their primary partner by reducing the pressures