Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [37]
At one point I attended a party where both my life partner and my “daddy” were in attendance. From across the room, I saw the two of them chatting, and I headed over to say hi. As I drew closer, my partner held his arm out invitingly and called, “Hey, hon, come over here and hang out with your dad and your boyfriend for a while.” The feeling of acceptance, and the warmth of knowing the two men accepted and honored each other’s role in my life, was amazing.
One of the things people get out of multiple relationships is the chance to be all of their various selves. When two people meet, they relate where they intersect, where they have complementary roles in similar scripts. So, being different things to different lovers, we might find ourselves having different boundaries, limits, and relationship styles in different circumstances.
Your own internal variety might manifest in many ways. For instance, you might be calm and centered when Lover A is angry, but Lover B’s irritability is distressing to you—it “pushes your buttons,” perhaps reminding you of a past lover or a punitive parent. Here is an opportunity to take charge of your buttons. When your buttons are your own, it becomes much easier to figure out what your limits need to be with Lover B, and to understand that they may be altogether different from your limits with Lover A.
Forget about fairness. Ethical sluttery does not mean that all things come out equal. Different relationships have different boundaries, different limits, and different potentials. So if your lover has found someone that she can share a certain activity with, and you would like to share that with her too, the question is not “Why don’t you do that with me?” but “That sounds interesting, how do you suppose we could make that work for us?”
This is how one woman we interviewed put it:
My open sexual lifestyle gives me personal freedom, independence, and responsibility in a way that being an exclusive couple doesn’t. Because I’m responsible, every day, for my needs being met (or not), and for creating and maintaining the relationships in my life, I can take nothing for granted. Every person I meet has the potential for whatever it is that’s right between me and that person, regardless of how my relationships are with anybody else. And so this lifestyle gives me a very concrete feeling of individuality that I re-create every day. I feel more like a grown-up, adult, responsible person when I know that my life, all of it—who I fuck, who I relate to, how I relate to them—is all my choice. I promised my partner that I would share my life with him, and that implies to me that I have a life to share—a complete life. And it’s clear to me that he’s here because he wants to be, wherever “here” is. We are with each other, every day, because we really want to be. Our choices are real.
INTERLUDE
The Unethical Slut (A Rant)
SOME PEOPLE TREAT SEX as a big-game hunt—trying to conquer the unwilling and unwitting victim, as though the object of their attention would never decide to share sex with them unless tricked into it. Believing that a person would have to be a fool to make love with you is often, we observe, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Someone who tries to use sex to shore up sagging self-esteem by stealing someone else’s is a pitiable object: this strategy does not work to build a solid sense of self-worth, and this poor starving individual will have to go on stealing more and more and never getting fulfilled. We hope that such people play the thief of love in some other social circles than our own.
Such people often approach open sexual lifestyles as if keeping score. Set collectors and trophy fuckers treat their partners