Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [17]
Janet’s path toward her current identity as a bisexual has been a confusing one: it was nearly a decade after she began having sex with women before she began to feel comfortable using the term to describe herself.
I felt turned off by the trendiness of “bisexual chic,” and under some pressure to claim an identity that didn’t feel right to me. And at the same time, I was hearing some genuinely cruel judgments from both heterosexuals and homosexuals about bi’s.
Add to that the difficulty I was having sorting out my own feelings—I knew my feelings toward women were different from those toward men, and I wasn’t sure what that meant—and things just got very confusing. As a result, it wasn’t until I knew for sure that I was capable of having both sexual and romantic feelings toward both men and women—and until I felt strong enough to claim the identity in the face of all those negative judgments—that I finally began calling myself “bisexual.”
I look back on my life now and see that I’ve generally expressed my domestic urges toward men but that my romantic and sexual feelings are about equally likely to be inspired by a man, a woman, or someone in between. The bisexual community also offers more support than either straight-land or gay-land for my rather ambiguous gender presentation: some days I like to wear red lipstick and heels and other days men’s trousers and oxfords. So “bisexual” is the identity that fits me best, and where I expect to stay.
HETEROSEXUALS
In bygone decades, there were relatively few role models for heterosexual interaction in mainstream culture: an Ozzie and Harriet household, monogamous, patriarchal, and focused on conformity and child rearing, was presented to us all as our sexual and romantic ideal. Your authors are very glad to have outlived this era.
Modern heterosexuality offers a plethora of options for happy sluthood, from long-term “vee” triads, where two partners are both sexual with one “hub” partner but not with each other, to orgiastic recreational sex, with lots of possibilities in between, including open relationships, secondary partners, poly pods, and intimately extended families we sometimes call “constellations.”
In the past, nonmonogamous heterosexual interactions were called “wife-swapping,” a term with a built-in sexist bias that we find offensive. Today, heterosexuals seeking no-strings sex outside a primary relationship often seek out the swing community. These groups are well worth looking at for what they have to teach us about how heterosexual men and women can interact outside the confines of the “shoulds” of mainstream, monogamous culture.
Swinging is a broad term that gets used to define a wide variety of interactions, ranging from long-term two-couple sexual pairings through the wildest of Saturday-night puppy-pile orgies. Swingers tend to be heterosexual; although female bisexuality is relatively common, male bisexuality is often frowned upon. They are most often coupled, and are often more mainstream in their politics, lifestyles, and personal values than other kinds of sluts. Some swing communities confine themselves explicitly to sexual interactions and discourage emotional connections outside primary couples, while others encourage all forms of romantic and sexual partnering.
Swinging has offered many a heterosexual woman her first opportunity to explore greedy and guilt-free sexuality—in fact, we often hear of women who attend their first swing party very reluctantly, their second one hesitantly, and their subsequent ones avidly. We also like the sophistication with which many swing communities have evolved patterns of symbols and behavior to communicate sexual interest without intrusiveness (one now-defunct local swing club used to have a fascinating code of opening doors and windows to communicate, variously,