Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [23]
Some people are celibate, but not by choice: people who are incarcerated, ill or disabled, geographically isolated, socially unskilled, or underage may have trouble finding partners for consensual sex. Others are celibate simply because they do not, for whatever reason, feel like being sociable or sexual for a while, or perhaps for good.
We do not see “celibate slut” or “asexual slut” as in any way a contradiction in terms. There are infinite ways of relating to other people—romantically, intimately, domestically, and more—and if you’ve opened your life and heart to as many of those ways as possible, you’re one of us.
Platonic Relationships, aka Friendships
One friend of ours drives us nuts by moaning, “I don’t have a relationship … just all these friends!” We have news for him, and for you: friendship is a relationship, an important one that offers tremendous opportunities for the things we need most out of our relationships: intimacy, companionship, support in times of trouble, and more.
We are amused by sluthood-skeptics, often straight women, who are appalled by the idea of loving more than one person … and who nonetheless have a best friend, someone with whom they share their deepest secrets, who may in fact be as important a part of their lives as their spouse or lover. If you have a lover and a best friend who are not the same person, you’re already practicing many of the skills of sluthood as you manage each of their needs for intimacy, time, and affection.
Friendly Sex
If one of those good, intimate friends becomes your lover … what then? Will it ruin the friendship? Will it lead to something more, something that threatens another part of your life? These are the concerns of many people encountering the possibilities of friendly sex for the first time.
The cultural ban on having sex with your friends is an inevitable offshoot of a societal belief that the only acceptable reason to have sex is to lead to a monogamous marriagelike relationship. We believe, on the other hand, that friendship is an excellent reason to have sex and that sex is an excellent way to maintain a friendship.
But monogamy-centrist culture affects us all. In single life, we can observe the Land of One-Night Stands, in which you go home with a pick-up and share some hot sex, then the next morning you look at each other and decide if the relationship has life-partner potential. If not, you leave, with much embarrassment, and the unspoken rule is that you will never be comfortable with that weighed-in-the-balance- and-found-wanting person again. Sex as audition is detrimental to people and to relationships. It happens because most people have no script for sexual intimacy in the midrange between complete stranger and total commitment.
How do you learn to share intimacy without falling in love? We would propose that we do love our friends, and particularly those we share sex with: these individuals are our family, often more permanent in our lives than marriages. With practice, we can develop an intimacy based on warmth and mutual respect, much freer than desperation, neediness, or the blind insanity of falling in love—that’s why the relationships between “friends with benefits” are so immensely valuable. When we acknowledge the love and respect and appreciation that we share with lovers we would never marry, sexual friendships can become not only possible but preferred. So while you’re worrying that your sexual desire could cost you your best friend, the more experienced slut could be wondering why you are the only friend she has never fucked.
Dossie, when she was first a feminist, vowed to remain unpartnered for five years to find out who she might be when she was not trying to be somebody’s “old lady.” She had many wonderful relationships during those years, a rainbow of intimacies, including the sharing of childrearing and households and fixing