Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [19]
SEX WORKERS
Despite what you might have learned from the TV or the tabloids, sex workers really are not all desperate drug addicts, debased women, or predatory gold diggers. Many healthy and happy women and men work in the sex industry, doing essential and positive work healing the wounds inflicted by our sex-negative culture. We know them as friends, lovers, colleagues, writers, therapists, and educators, as well as performers and artists. These folks have a great deal to teach us about boundaries, limit-setting, communication, sexual negotiation, and ways to achieve growth, connection, and fulfillment outside a traditional monogamous relationship. Do not imagine that connections between sex workers and clients are necessarily cold, impersonal, or degrading, or that only losers frequent prostitutes. Many client/prostitute relationships become a source of tremendous connection, warmth, and affection for both parties, and last many years. Practitioners of the world’s oldest profession offer all of us the wisdom of the ages about understanding, accepting, and fulfilling our desires: these are the real sex experts.
Cultural Diversity
While we are looking at sexual diversity, let’s remember that we live in a multicultural society, and that every culture in our world, every subculture, every ethnic culture, has its own ways of creating relationship, connecting in sex, and building families. All of those ways are valid and valuable.
One of the great joys of living as a slut is the opportunity to make intimate connections with people whose background is very different from your own. When you do that, you will find yourself tripping, with some embarrassment, over a lot of differences, the way Dossie and her friends from Japan used to trip over each other in doorways: in Japan, men go through the door first. Getting used to differences can feel awkward, but every time it happens you’ve learned something new about how people go about being human.
Maybe something that you learn will be just the thing you’ve been looking for that was lacking in your own culture. Dossie came from a small town in New England that had tried, with little success, to pound her into the form of a nice, respectable young lady. When she got to New York City, she discovered cultures in which strong women were accepted and respected: she got to have chutzpah. Talk about opening up a whole realm of possibilities!
Boundaries in communication, connection, and relationship vary from culture to culture. Personal distance differs enormously—they say you can recognize the European-American at a Latin American cocktail party: he’s the one who is frantically backing away from everyone who wants to talk to him because they keep stepping too close. Volume varies too: some cultures value being subdued and quiet, others are dramatically expressive and, well, loud.
We recommend that you look for these differences and suspend your judgments. Is that person who seems too loud actually able to be more expressive than you? Does that quiet person notice more? What’s the intelligence of a person who hasn’t read a lot of books but understands how your car, or your computer, works? Who are these unbelievably self-confident people who make sexual propositions openly and enthusiastically and get really confused when you accuse them of coming on too strong? Maybe they have some ways of making connection that you could learn from.
It is sad, indeed tragic, that so many of our sexual communities fail to welcome people from the whole world of cultures, of races, of genders, of sexualities. When you look at the people around you and dismiss them—or, worse yet, assume you know all there is to know about them—because of their skin color, gender, way of speaking, mode of dress, religion, or country of origin,