Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [133]
I really like you. I really like the connection we made at Flash’s, and I hope we get the chance to explore it further. So write and reveal yourself to me. What are your thoughts about sex, connection, art, nature? What are your fantasies? I really want to know. I bet you dream up some great bedtime stories.
I wish you were here—writing to you is making me nervous and I would like a cuddle. As I read over this letter trying to decide how far to go, I realize I have probably already gone too far—oh well, I always do.
Love,
Lottie
Eight months and approximately three thousand dollars’ worth of phone bills later, not to mention a few impulsive airfares, June put all her worldly goods in her truck, Lottie flew out to meet her, and they drove across the Great Divide to a sweet little house in the country, where they lived together for many happy years.
CONCLUSION
A Slut Utopia
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 twos: 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 these simpleminded either/or arguments, consider the possibility of seeing, and valuing, everything that there is, without viewing them as in opposition to one another. 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. There are lots 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 mind 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.
A Slut Manifesto
We believe that when we examine the issues that limit our relationships and our understanding of how we might be, we are essentially planning for a society that is appropriate to the way many people live today—that meets our need for change and growth while it feeds 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 don’t think it’s much of a choice when you are forbidden to choose anything else.) 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