Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [38]
The concept of set collectors may be new to you, but we assure you that such people exist. Dossie discovered several of them when she lived with two other single mothers in a communal San Francisco household, called Liberated Ladies at Large, and learned that some people’s ideal of free love was to make sure they had sex with all three of the liberated sisters. A friend of ours once discovered that a would-be lover of hers had already had sex with her mother and her sister and was hoping to complete the set. Sex that means treating your partners as collectibles does not meet our requirements for mutual respect.
Some people approach “scoring” as if all people can be ranked on a hierarchy from the most to the least desirable and as if the way to make the most points and assure yourself of a high rank is to collect partners as high up the ladder as you can reach. People gain in rank and value in these hierarchies by being thin, young, cute, gym-toned, wealthy, and/or of high social status.
We do not believe that love is a game that you can win by scoring high on a hierarchy of shallow values. We know from extensive experience that appearance and wealth are not predictors of good loving. We try to avoid ranking people as better or worse than each other and are unhappy with those who want to relate to our rank (authors get quite a few points in the status category) more than ourselves. Hierarchies produce victims on the top as well as the bottom, since it is almost as alienating to be approached by too many people for the wrong reasons as it is to be approached by no one at all.
Someone who has a history of nonconsensual nonmonogamy may get attached to the sense of secrecy, of getting away with something. These folks may have a very hard time adapting to the idea of consensual sluthood—they’re so used to concealing their activities from their partners that they may even have built that furtive feeling into their erotic life, hooked on the adrenaline rush they get from forbidden fruit. It takes a pretty substantial leap of faith, and maybe some creative fantasizing and role-playing, for such individuals to open up their hidden places and experience the greater joy that can come from knowing that nobody is getting hurt by their fun.
People who refuse to learn to use barriers that get between people and viruses are not ethical sluts. Arguing with lovers about allowing potentially infectious sex, insisting on sex without barriers, or attempting to sneak around a lover’s limits about safer sex is, quite simply, playing dirty. Refusing to deal with the realities of viruses and bacteria because of embarrassment is unethical: a good slut speaks the truth even if blushing furiously.
Ethical sluts do not make promises they can’t keep. If you are attracted to someone who is looking for a life partnership and what you want is a lighthearted affair (or vice versa), you need to be honest about that, even if that means saying “no, thank you” to sex until your feelings for each other are more on a par. Mistakes can easily be made. Dossie made such a mistake when she was very young and stupid:
I had just broken up a long-term relationship and was pretty broken up about it myself. I went out to the coffee shops in Greenwich Village and saw my recent ex in earnest conversation with a cute young thing who was not me. I felt horribly betrayed, lost, and worthless. Just then, a young man who had been attracted to me, and for whom I had no serious feelings, came up to speak to me. It somehow seemed appropriate to go home with him and let him soothe my ruffled feathers, but I regretted it the next day when I found myself hurting his feelings and leaving him in the lurch. To further aggravate my guilt, it turned out what my ex was doing with that sweet girl was beating his bosom about how horrible he felt about breaking up with me—we wound up getting back together. I have always felt that I took advantage of the