Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [3]
One of the most valuable things we learn from open sexual lifestyles is that our programming about love, intimacy, and sex can be rewritten. When we begin to question all the ways we have been told we ought to be, we can begin to edit and rewrite our old tapes. By breaking the rules, we both free and empower ourselves.
We hate boredom. We are people who are greedy to experience all that life has to offer and are also generous in sharing what we have to offer. We love to be the good time had by all.
What’s New Here
In the decade-plus since we wrote the first edition of The Ethical Slut, we’ve learned a lot. Dossie, in her therapy practice, has worked with hundreds of singles, couples, and moresomes who are trying to navigate the uncharted pathways of nontraditional relationships, and she has developed new concepts and tools that have proven very helpful to them. Janet has moved out of the relationship she was in at the last time you saw her, has spent several years as a single slut, and has negotiated a relationship with a new lover who went on to become her legal spouse. We’ve also become (if we say so ourselves) better writers, both individually and together.
If you read the first edition of this book, you’ll see a lot of new material in here, and you’ll notice that the old material has been substantially rewritten and reorganized. You’ll also notice one major change—this book contains many exercises that you can use to explore your feelings and chart your progress as you read the book, either on your own or together with a partner or partners.
So, whether you’re an old friend or a new acquaintance, we’re happy to welcome you into our book, and into our slutty, happy lives.
The Language in This Book
When you sit down to write a book about sex, as we hope you one day will, you will discover that centuries of censorship have left us with very little adequate language with which to discuss the joys and occasional worries of sex. The language that we do have often carries implicit judgments: If the only polite way to talk about sexuality is in medical Latin—vulvas and pudendas, penes and testes—are only doctors allowed to talk about sex? Is sex all about disease? Meanwhile, most of the originally English words—cock and cunt, fucking, and, oh yes, slut—have been used as insults to degrade people and their sexuality and often have a hostile or coarse feel to them. Euphemisms—peepees and pussies, jade gates and mighty towers—sound as if we are embarrassed. Maybe we are.
Our approach to a sex-positive language is to reclaim the original English words and, by using them as positive descriptors, wash them clean. Hence our adoption of the word “slut.” You will also find in this book words like “fuck” and “cock” and “cunt” used, not as insults, but to mean what they actually mean.
Furthermore, cultural blind spots can show up as centrisms such as couple-centrism, heterocentrism, and eurocentrism. Nonmonogamy, extramarital sex, open relationships, all define themselves by what they aren’t, thus implying that they’re some exception to the “normal” relationships that “normal” people have.
“Polyamory” is a brave new word, coined by Morning Glory Ravenheart Zell around 1990 and currently, we are thrilled to report, included in the Oxford English Dictionary. Formed from Latin and Greek roots that translate as “loving many,” this word has been adopted by many sluts to describe their lifestyles, often abbreviated as “poly,” as in “I am a poly person.” Some use it to mean multiple committed live-in relationships, forms of group marriage; others use it as an umbrella word to cover all forms of sex and love and domesticity outside conventional monogamy. Polyamory has moved into the language so rapidly that we think maybe the language has been waiting for it for a very long time.
In this new world of sex and relationships,