Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [39]
An older and wiser Dossie has since discovered a couple of limits of her own: she does not share sex with anyone that she’s not at least potentially interested in sharing sex with again, and anything worth doing is worth waiting for till the time is right. While we all make mistakes, the hallmark of a skillful slut is to learn from them and keep going.
Which brings us to revenge fucking. It is truly nasty to arrange to have sex with one person to get back at another. To arouse one person’s insecurities, jealousy, and other painful feelings on purpose is dishonorable, and to use another person as a puppet in your play is disrespectful and most often downright abusive. In psychopathology, “antisocial” is defined as behaving with flagrant disregard for the rights, and we would add feelings, of others. We prefer to relate to sociable people.
What do you do when someone in your intimate circle is not playing honestly? It helps if the people in your extended family have ways to talk about what is going on, to share experiences and feelings. If everyone is too ashamed to admit to having been misused by someone with an untrustworthy hidden agenda, then no one will have the information they need to protect themselves. There is no shame in having believed someone’s lies, and most of us at some time or other have given our trust to someone who turned out not to be worthy of it. It is possible to fool an honest person, but we hope you have enough humility to learn from your mistakes and not get fooled twice.
All these difficult scripts are about somebody not being honest and are also about somebody having sex while avoiding intimacy and emotional connection. When you are not telling the truth you cannot be present, and when you are not present you can’t be connected to anyone else, and when you are not connected how can you feel anything at all?
By treating lovers as people, and letting relationships take the shapes they want instead of the forms forced on them by the culture around them, ethical sluts can form friendships that last as sex waxes and wanes.
CHAPTER TEN
Flirting and Cruising
FLIRTING AND CRUISING are fine arts, and skills that you can learn even though few people develop them overnight.
Is there a difference between flirting and cruising? Some people think of “flirting” as what you do in environments that are not erotically oriented, and “cruising” as what you do in clubs, conferences, bars, and other places where people often seek sex partners. Or you might see flirting as a more introductory maneuver and cruising as what you do when you know for sure that you’re interested. Both involve an exchange of sexual energy in the form of eye contact, body language, smiles and warmth, and little flashes of erotic energy that can be shared long before any physical contact would be appropriate.
Sex roles can complicate both flirting and cruising. Men in this culture are taught to push, to insist, never to take “no” for an answer; women are taught to be coy, to refuse, never to offer an outright “yes.” The more polarized we get in this silly equation, the further we push one another away—with results that range from hurt feelings to date rape.
The good news, though, is that both sets of behaviors can be unlearned and that the more we unlearn them, the less there is to unlearn. When all genders feel free to answer “yes” or “no” with no concern for anything but their own desires, a truer understanding and a more positive sexuality become possible.
Dossie tells the story of a woman friend of hers back in the 1970s who decided to experiment with what was supposed to be every man’s fantasy. She sat patiently in a singles bar one night, being approached by many men, until one to whom she felt attracted came along and began to flirt. He asked if he could buy her a drink, and she asked him nicely if he would like to come back to her place and fuck. He swallowed his ice. It