Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [27]
Group sex environments often develop their own families, people who come regularly and get to know each other and may share other activities, like giant Thanksgiving dinners. The film Personal Services shows us a warm and marvelous Christmas get-together of such a family in a British house of domination.
These are just a few of the ways in which sluts have chosen to organize their lives and loves. You get to choose one, or several, or invent one of your own. Relationship structures, we think, should be designed to fit the people in them, rather than people chosen to fit some abstract ideal of the perfect relationship. There’s no right or wrong way to do this, as long as everyone’s having fun and getting their needs met.
PART TWO
The Practice of Sluthood
CHAPTER SEVEN
Abundance
MANY TRADITIONAL ATTITUDES about sexuality are based on the unspoken belief that there isn’t enough of something—love, sex, friendship, commitment—to go around. If you believe this, if you think that there’s a limited amount of what you want, it can seem very important to stake your claim to your share of it. You may believe that you have to take your share away from somebody else, since if it’s such a very good thing, someone else is probably competing with you for it (how could they!). Or you may believe that if someone else gets something, that means there must be less of it for you.
Getting Enough
We want all of our readers to get everything they want. Here are some ideas that might help you over some of the obstacles on the path.
STARVATION ECONOMIES
We call this kind of thinking “starvation economies.” People often learn about starvation economies in childhood, when parents who are emotionally depleted or unavailable teach us that we must work hard to get our emotional needs met, so that if we relax our vigilance for even a moment, a mysterious someone or something may take the love we need away from us. Some of us may even have experienced real-world hunger (if you didn’t grab first, your brother got all the potatoes), or outright neglect, deprivation, or abuse. Or we may learn starvation economies later in life, from manipulative, withholding, or punitive lovers, spouses, or friends.
The beliefs acquired in childhood are usually deeply buried and hard to see, both in individuals and in our culture. So you may have to look carefully to see the pattern. You can see it in a small way in the kind of complaining contests some people engage in: “Boy, did I have a rotten day today.” “You think your day was rotten—wait till you hear about my day!”—as though there were a limited amount of sympathy in the world and the only way to get the amount due you was to compete for it. Or remember how you have felt looking at the last piece of a very good pie, the secret salivation that made you greedy and territorial and a “selfish” person. When is it okay to want anything? People may think that if you love Bill that means you must love Mary less, or if you’re committed to your relationship with your friend you must be less committed to your relationship with your spouse. And then how do you know if you’re Number One in a partner’s heart?
This kind of thinking is a trap. We know, for example, that having a second child doesn’t usually mean that a parent loves the first child less and that the person who owns three pets doesn’t necessarily give any less care to any one of them than the person who owns one. But when it comes to sex, love, and romance, it’s hard for most people to believe that more for you doesn’t mean less for me, and we often behave as if desperate starvation is just around the corner if we don’t corner some