Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [13]
This chapter contains some of our beliefs. You get to have beliefs of your own. What matters to us is not that you agree with us, but that you question the prevailing paradigm and decide for yourself what you believe. Exercise your judgment—isn’t exercise supposed to make you stronger? Thousands and thousands of ethical sluts are proving every day that the old “everybody knows” myths don’t have to be true.
We encourage you to explore your own realities and create your own legend, one that spurs you onward in your evolution, supports you as you grow, and reflects your pride and happiness in your newfound relationships.
CHAPTER FOUR
Slut Styles
ETHICAL SLUTHOOD is a house with a lot of rooms: it shelters everyone from happy celibates to ecstatic orgiasts and beyond. In this chapter, we’ll talk about the many styles of sluthood that have worked for us, for the people we know, and for happy sluts throughout history. Whether or not any of these scenarios fit you, we hope they will offer you some ideas about where to start your exploration, or perhaps the validation of knowing that there are others like you out there.
Relationship Pioneers
Although the phrase “ethical slut” is new—Dossie coined it in 1995—the practice is not. Cultural acceptance of practices outside monogamy has roller-coastered up and down from acceptance to stern rejection, but regardless of the opinions of church and state there have always been those who have found happiness and growth in sexual openness.
ANCIENT CULTURES
You could spend your life as a cultural anthropologist trying to describe the innumerable ways that human beings have chosen to be together sexually, romantically, and domestically—from the temple prostitutes of ancient Babylon to Mormon polygyny and far, far beyond. So, rather than trying to list them all, we just want to note that the prevailing cultural values that twenty-first-century North America inherited from Europe seem to date back to the Roman empire, and to early Christianity, which recommended monogamous marriage only for those who couldn’t manage celibacy, the ideal state. Cultures without those influences have developed all sorts of ways for people to bond—polygyny (many wives), polyandry (many husbands), group marriage, arrangements in which marriage is fundamentally a domestic business relationship and sexual dalliance takes place elsewhere, ritual group sex, and pretty much any other configuration of human hearts and genitals that you can imagine.
UTOPIAN SEXUAL COMMUNITIES
History is dotted with experiments in creating intentional sexual utopias, often with a philosophical or religious basis: if you’re curious, read up on the Oneida community of nineteenth-century Ohio; Rajneeshpuram in India from the late 1960s and Oregon in the 1980s; and Kerista in New York, Belize, and San Francisco from the early 1960s through the 1990s … to name just a few. Such communities are usually built by one leader and may falter when the leader is no longer available. However, their philosophies live on, adding new visions and practices to the mainstream culture. Many practitioners of Western tantra today, for example, can trace their practice to the teachings of Osho, the guiding spirit behind Rajneeshpuram.
ARTISTS AND FREETHINKERS
It’s easy to point to artists and writers who have built their lives around intentional exploration of alternative relationships. If you’re curious about the ways in which alternative relationships played out in times when there was even less support than there is now, you can read up on the Bloomsbury group in early twentieth-century England, and freethinkers like George Sand, H. G. Wells, Simone de Beauvoir, Alfred Kinsey, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. What we can’t know is how many nonwriters were also building the kind of sexually open lives that worked for them, because there are no records of such lives. We feel safe in supposing, though, that a significant