Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [14]
THE LOVE GENERATION
Dossie came of age surrounded by the utopian concepts of the 1960s, and Janet shortly afterward; both of us have been influenced greatly in our thinking and our lives by those days of radical exploration. Many ideals of that era—nonconformity, exploration of altered states of consciousness, equality of race and gender, ecological awareness, political activism, openness about sexuality, and, yes, the possibility of ethical and loving nonmonogamy—have permeated the greater culture. We very much doubt that we could have written this book or published it in the 1950s, so if you’re reading and enjoying The Ethical Slut today, thank a hippie.
Sluthood Today
Sluts come in all the various forms and styles that humans come in: men and women in all cultures, from all parts of the world, of all religions and lifestyles, rich and poor, with formal and informal education.
Most of us today live in communities of nonsluts, with only occasional or limited contact with other people who share our values: some groups hold conferences and conventions to mitigate isolation and expand their members’ intimate circles. These conferences are very important in bringing sexual undergrounds into the view of those who are looking for them and building institutions aboveground that can better support their members. Other sluts drop out of mainstream culture to some extent to live in communities composed of people whose sexuality is like their own. San Francisco’s Castro district is a good example of a modern urban “ghetto” for sexual minorities.
A slut living in mainstream, monogamy-centrist culture in the twenty-first century can learn a great deal from studying other cultures, other places, and other times: you’re not the only one in the world who has ever tried this, it can work, others have done it without harming themselves, their lovers, their kids—without, in fact, doing anything except enjoying themselves and each other.
Pioneering sexual subcultures with extensive documented and undocumented histories include communities of gay men and of lesbian women, transgender groups, bisexuals, the leather communities, the swing communities, and some spiritually defined subcultures of pagans, modern primitives, and Radical Faeries. And that’s just in the United States. Even if you don’t belong to any of these sexually oriented communities, it’s worth taking a look at them for what they can teach us about our own options as they develop ways of being sexual, ways of communicating about being sexual, and ways of living in social and family structures that are alternative to sex-negative traditions in America.
Dossie’s favorite dance club in 1970 was a remarkable miniculture of polymorphous perversity. She remembers:
The Omni, short for “omnisexual,” was a small North Beach bar whose patrons were men and women, straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and often transgendered. The sexual values were very open, from hippie free-love freaks to sex industry professionals, and most of us came there to dance like wild women and cruise like crazy.
Thanks to the large transgender faction, there was no way of pigeonholing the person you were cruising into your categories of desire. You might dance with someone you found very attractive and not know if they were chromosomally male or female. It’s difficult to get attached to preferences like lesbian or straight when you don’t know the gender of the person you are flirting with.
This may sound crazy, but the results were surprising: I patronized the Omni because it was the safest environment available to me. Because there was no way to make assumptions, people had to treat each other with respect. No one could assume what kind of interaction might interest the object of their attention, so there was nothing to do but ask. And if you were, as I was, a young woman in your twenties, to be approached with respect was a most welcome relief from straight social environments where it was customary for men to prove