Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [134]
Our vision of utopia has free love, in all its forms, as the foundation of our beliefs about reality, about possibility, about staying in the moment and planning the future. We believe that sexual freedom helps us to see our lives as they really are, with the honesty to perceive ourselves clearly and the fluidity to let us move onward as our needs alter, as a changing and growing self with changing and growing partners in a changing and growing world.
We see ethical sluthood leading us to a world where we respect and honor each individual’s boundaries more than we honor any preconceived set of rules about what their boundaries ought to be.
And in expanding our sexual lives, we foresee the development of an advanced sexuality, where we can become both more natural and more human. Sex really is a physical expression of a whole lot of stuff that has no physical existence: love and joy, deep emotion, intense closeness, profound connection, spiritual awareness, incredibly good feelings, sometimes even transcendent ecstasy. In our utopia, intellect is not a trap that we get stuck in, but an honored tool we use to discover and access all the parts of ourselves and give form to our experience. We free our natural selves by opening our intellects to sensual awareness of our bodies, and when we are no longer stuck in our intellects we become more like spirit: intuitive, experiencing the joy of life for the simple sake of experiencing, in communion with ourselves, with each other, and beyond.
Our Favorite Sex Fantasy: Abundance
We want everyone to be free to express love in every possible way. We want to create a world where everyone has plenty of what they need: of community, of connection, of touch and sex and love. We want our children to be raised in an expanded family, a connected village within urban alienation, where there are enough adults who love them and each other, so there is plenty of love and attention and nurturance, more than enough to go around. We want a world where the sick and aging are cared for by people who love them, where resources are shared by people who care about each other.
We dream of a world where no one is driven by desires they have no hope of fulfilling, where no one suffers from shame for their desires, or embarrassment about their dreams, where no one is starving from lack of sex. We dream of a world where no one is limited by rules that dictate that they must be less of a person, and less of a sexual person, than they have the capacity to be.
We dream of a world where nobody gets to vote on your life choices, or who you choose to love, or how you choose to express that love, except yourself and your lovers. We dream of a time and a place where we will all be free to publicly declare our love, for whoever we love, however we love them.
And may we all look forward to a lifetime of dreams come true.
A Slut’s Glossary
Most of the language available for us to talk about sex has built-in value judgments, just like the word “slut”—the legacy of our sex-negative history. Without language, how are we to communicate with each other and share our thoughts and feelings? Without language, we can hardly even think about sex.
New words and terminologies are coined constantly, which is a challenge for writers and sluts alike. Thus, many of the terms in this book may be unfamiliar to you and may be defined differently in different regions and communities. In this glossary we’ll define these words, and some others you may encounter in openly sexual communities, as we understand them.
BDSM: Activities in which one person controls the behavior of another, and/or puts them in bondage, and/or gives them intense sensations. BDSM derives from B/D for bondage