Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [47]
If you are female, have intercourse with men, and could possibly be fertile, you must take active steps to ensure that you won’t get pregnant until and unless you choose to. The possibilities include birth-control pills, longer-term chemical birth control like Norplant and Depo-Provera, diaphragms and cervical caps, condoms, IUDs, sponges and foam, and tubal ligation, among others. Some women with regular menstrual cycles succeed at the rhythm method, particularly if they and their partners learn to enjoy outercourse during their fertile periods. There is a lot of good information available about the risks and reliability of all these methods; your physician, clinic, or Planned Parenthood can help you make a good choice.
For men who have intercourse with women, the choices are (unfortunately) quite limited. If you know you are unlikely to want to father children in the future, a vasectomy is minor surgery that will relieve you of a great deal of worry. If you hope to be a father someday, use those condoms—and lobby for research into better male contraception. The surgery to sterilize women is more involved: the surgeon will cauterize the fallopian tubes—this requires a hospital, and a little recovery, but nothing dreadful. Remember, you’ll still need protection from infectious diseases.
When someone gets pregnant unintentionally, this can be, to put it mildly, difficult. If everyone involved agrees that an abortion is the best choice, that can be pretty unpleasant in and of itself; if there is disagreement, it can be shattering. Until such time as science enables men to carry fetuses in their bodies, we believe that the final decision has to be the woman’s, but we sympathize deeply with the man who would like to raise a baby and whose female partner isn’t willing or able to carry it. We do think that both partners should share in the financial and emotional burden of an abortion or a pregnancy.
If one or both partners is interested in being a parent, and the woman is willing to carry the fetus to term, ethical sluthood opens up a wealth of options for parenting. Please don’t feel that the only way to be a parent is to get married and buy a house in the suburbs—perfectly marvelous children come out of shared parenting arrangements, intentional communities, group marriages, and a multitude of other ways to nurture and support a child.
Committing to Healthy Sex
You may notice that we have gone out of our way not to tell you what decisions to make about your sexual behavior. Only you can decide what risks feel acceptable to you, and we believe that letting anybody else make that decision for you virtually guarantees that you won’t follow through on your choices.
You must, however, make choices. You must choose to do your homework and learn what you need to know about risks and rewards. You must choose to do the work of saying “no” to sex that doesn’t meet your own safety criteria and of being prepared to say “yes” to sex that does: discovering you’re out of condoms at the wrong moment is a recipe for disaster. You must choose to approach your sexual behaviors in a mature, realistic, and sober manner—intoxication plays a major role in a shockingly high percentage of HIV infection and unwanted pregnancy.
You must be prepared to share your sexual decision making and history with any potential partners you encounter. If consent is at the core of ethical sluthood—and it is—your partners must be able to give informed consent to whatever risks are involved in having sex with you. You, of course, have the right to expect that same honesty from them.
You won’t like talking about this stuff, especially not with a new lover. It’s depressing and scary, definitely not erotic, and sometimes horrendously embarrassing. Allow us to reassure you: the first time is the worst.