Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [29]
Dossie once had a very special relationship with a woman who lived across the continent with a partner. They liked to get together for entire weekends every six weeks or so, but where? Part of this book was written in a cabin in the country, where these two went for a writers’ retreat and a private place in which to get very noisy. A hotel room can be another good solution.
Possessions can also be an issue. It’s only natural to want to share our stuff with the people we care about. But this urge can cause problems when possessions—money, food, art, sex toys—belong, legally or emotionally, to more than one person. If there’s any chance that someone feels a sense of possession about an item, we strongly recommend that you talk carefully with that person before you share the item with someone else. This rule is sometimes simple: you don’t let your lover polish off the carton of milk that your spouse was planning to drink for breakfast. It sometimes gets tricky, though. While you may have the technical right to give away a gift that was given to you by someone else, the wife who sees her husband’s Father’s Day tie around his lover’s neck may feel understandably miffed. Similarly, it’s a good idea to get consent about sharing an item that was made for you by a lover, or something that the two of you bought together during an intimate shopping trip on your anniversary. Many sluts, for the purposes of hygiene and/or emotional attachment, set aside certain sex toys for use with only one person: my vibrator, Harry’s dildo. Lending or giving jointly owned money without discussing it with the co-owner is, we hope it’s not necessary to say, unacceptable.
SEXUAL ECONOMIES
The “tyranny of hydraulics” is Dossie’s phrase for the biological realities that govern many aspects of sexuality. While it might be nice to think that you’re a sexual superman who can generate erections on demand ad infinitum, neither of us has yet met such a man. A partner who is looking forward to conventional sexual activities with a male lover may be quite understandably disappointed to find him unavailable by virtue of having ejaculated with another partner earlier that day. And even the most multiply orgasmic of women can’t stay turned on forever.
Such problems can often be solved by readjusting your expectations of what constitutes sex—does it really always require an erection? An orgasm? An ejaculation? Practitioners of tantric yoga have developed ways by which many men can experience orgasm without ejaculation. These strategies are only somewhat useful for birth control and safer sex and are certainly no substitute for rubbers. But they come with a wonderful side effect: men who learn to orgasm without ejaculating are able to come many times, like women. Practitioners of many other kinds of sex have developed ways in which enthusiastic sluts can give their partners one or many orgasms and enjoy a surfeit of sensual pleasures themselves, regardless of their physiological state of arousal. Erections may come and go, but the rest of the nervous system works pretty much all the time. Before you give up on polyamory because of the tyranny of hydraulics, we suggest you investigate at least some of these possibilities (chapter 21, “Sex and Pleasure,” and some of the books in the Resource Guide will help).
Remember outercourse. Remember the huge range of sexual delights that don’t have any relationship whatsoever to erections. Remember sensuality. Rediscover massage for its own sake. Share