Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [44]
When you treat everybody involved with respect, affection, and intimacy, you can reap very special rewards—anything from a warm happy fling to a long-term multiperson relationship.
FOR EVERYONE
The best, most successful, and least obnoxious cruisers we know, of all orientations, are friendly, curious folks who like most people and are interested in talking to everyone. If some of the people they talk to turn into potential relationships, so much the better.
When you find yourself worrying about how you are seen by others, remember that there is no point in pretending you are anyone except who you are. It does you no good to attract someone who thinks you are somebody else: all you get is someone who is excited about somebody who isn’t you. When you are honest, you attract the people who are interested in you, just as you most wonderfully are.
A good conversationalist is usually a successful cruiser and more often than not a skilled partner as well—because the give-and-take of good conversation and sensitivity to nonverbal cues are also important skills for the fulfilling relationships to come.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Keeping Sex Safe
THE TERM “SAFE SEX,” later amended to “safer sex,” was coined to talk about how we can design sex to minimize the risk of HIV transmission … but sex has never been altogether safe. Both your authors grew up in an era when an unwanted pregnancy meant a life-endangering illegal abortion. It’s been only a few decades since more reliable birth control became available, and only a few before that since antibiotics began curing illness, insanity, and death caused by sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) like syphilis and gonorrhea. Herpes is still incurable, and we still have only limited answers to cervical cancer from human papilloma virus. No matter what your orientation, your practices, or your risk factors, in today’s environment, careless sex can kill—which means that you have to protect yourself and your partners.
Given that sex is never completely safe, ethical sluts put time, effort, and commitment into getting as much sex as they want at the least risk possible. Dedicated sluts have developed a plethora of risk-reduction strategies that can minimize the chances of infection and/or unwanted pregnancy.
Please research the safer-sex protocols that apply to your life and plan to protect yourself and your lover from HIV, herpes, hepatitis, gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia, shigella, human papilloma virus, cervical cancer, unwanted pregnancy, and a host of other nasties. Medical research and recommendations are beyond the scope of this volume, but at the end of the book we have listed some Internet resources that are kept more up-to-date than is possible here.
We don’t think you need to cover every portion of your anatomy with latex before you touch another human being. The goal for most of us is risk reduction, sort of like defensive driving on the freeway. Yes, a drunk could kill at any time while you are cruising down the highway, and most of us take our best shot at safety and go on driving. There are ways to have hot satisfying sex without performing the erotic equivalent of skydiving with a faulty parachute. Here are some that we, and sluts we know, have used successfully.
Barriers: The Rubber Fence
Utterly basic technique: put something impenetrable between you and the virus. Today, many people decide to follow their sexual urges to far-out places by being scrupulous about the use of latex or polyurethane barriers. We hope you don’t need us to explain this to you at this point in history, but careful use of barriers includes condoms for vaginal sex, anal sex, and fellatio; gloves for masturbation of a male or female partner or for insertion of fingers or hands into vaginas or anuses; and dental dams or plastic wrap for cunnilingus or analingus.
Gloves or condoms make it easy to keep any sex toy that