Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [2]
Many of you may remember Janet from the last edition of this book as Catherine A. Liszt, a pen name she used back then when her sons were still minors. Now that they’re grown and independent, she has gone back to using her real name. Janet lived as a teenaged slut in college but then essayed monogamy in a traditional heterosexual marriage for well over a decade. Since the end of that marriage, she has not considered monogamy an option for her. While most people would call her “bisexual,” she thinks of herself as gender-bent and can’t quite figure out how sexual orientation is supposed to work when you’re sometimes male and sometimes female. She’s married to a bio-guy whose gender is as flexible as hers, which is less complicated than it sounds. She makes her living as a writer, publisher, and teacher.
Together, we have been lovers, dear friends, coauthors, and coconspirators for a decade and a half, in and out of various other relationships, homes, and projects. We are both mothers of grown children, both active in the BDSM/leather/kink communities, and both creative writers (Dossie of poetry, Janet of personal essays). We think we’re an excellent example of what can happen if you don’t try to force all your relationships into the monogamous till-death-do-us-part model.
Sexual Adventurers
The world generally views sluts as debased, degraded, promiscuous, indiscriminate, jaded, immoral adventurers—destructive, out of control, and driven by some form of psychopathology that prevents them from entering into a healthy monogamous relationship.
Oh, yes—and definitely not ethical.
We see ourselves as people who are committed to finding a place of sanity with sex and relationships, and to freeing ourselves to enjoy sex and sexual love in as many ways as may fit for each of us. We may not always know what fits without trying it on, so we tend to be curious and adventurous. When we see someone who intrigues us, we like to feel free to respond, and, as we explore our response, to discover whatever is special about this new, fascinating person. We like relating to people and are quite gregarious, enjoying the company of different kinds of people and reveling in how our differences expand our horizons and offer us new ways to be ourselves.
Sluts tend to want a lot of things: different forms of sexual expression, different people, perhaps men, or women, or people in between, or some of each. We are curious: what would it be like to combine the energies of four or five people in one incandescent sexual encounter? What would it be like to share erotic energy with that person who has been our best friend for years and years? What would it be like to share a household with multiple friends and lovers? What would it be like to be intimate with someone who is very different from us?
Of course, each slut is unique, with virtues and faults and diverse needs and values. Some of us express different parts of ourselves with different people. Some of us love flirtation for its own sake. Some of us make an art form out of sex. Some of us find these parts of our lives so important that sluttiness is a basic part of our identity, one of the ways we define ourselves, while others drift in and out of sluttiness according to desire and circumstance.
Sluts are not necessarily sexual athletes—although many of us do train more than most. We value sex, not as a way to set records, but for the pleasure it brings us and the good times we get to share with however many wonderful people.
We love adventure. The word “adventurer” is sometimes used pejoratively, suggesting that the adventurous person is immature or inauthentic, not really willing to “grow up” and “settle down” into a presumably monogamous lifestyle. We wonder: what’s wrong with having adventures? Can’t we have adventures and still raise children, buy houses, and do the work that’s important to us? Of course we can; sluts qualify for mortgages