Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [48]
On a cheerier note, getting good at talking about sex has some very nice rewards, once you get through blushing. Chatting about the fun stuff is a turn-on and the best way to get exactly what you want in the way of pleasure. Then you can learn what your partner gets excited about, which will make you the best of all possible lovers.
We, and most of the people we know, make fairly conservative choices about what health risks we take in our sexuality. We know from experience that it is quite possible to have exciting, satisfying, fabulously slutty sex without lying awake nights worrying afterward. And isn’t that the kind of sex we all want to have?
CHAPTER TWELVE
Childrearing
IF YOU’RE RAISING KIDS today, you have it a little bit easier than sluts of yesteryear—images of families in books and television aren’t quite as limited to Leave It to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet as they were in our childhoods. Still, even though divorce and single parenting are now acceptable topics, our culture is slow to catch up to the other realities of our lives: media images of multipartner relationships, same-sex relationships, and other nontraditional constellations are still rare.
Yet kids take to these relationships quite readily, perhaps more so than to the traditional nuclear family: children have grown up in villages and tribes for most of human history. Janet remembers having some of her first desires for group living during vacations with her then-husband’s expansive extended family: she noticed that her kids, surrounded by loving adults with plenty of time on their hands, were happier, more docile, and less fragmented than she’d ever seen them. During her kids’ teen years, she lived in a group household and watched her sons adapt quite readily to the comings and goings of a disparate group of adults—one of whom was almost always free to answer a question, troubleshoot a computer program, experiment with a recipe, or play a game.
The single parent ethical slut can check out a number of creative options for maintaining a fulfilling sex life while being a responsible parent. When Dossie was sharing a house with two other single mothers, one of her lovers used to babysit all the kids so all three mothers had a chance to go out dancing together. A friend of ours used to babysit for her younger sister and the kids next door so that her parents could mess around with the next-door neighbors. Dossie never actually lived as a single parent, whether or not she was partnered, during her daughter’s childhood; there was always a troupe of friendly people living in sprawling houses, city and country.
We have never had problems creating consistency and security for our children in a sexually interconnected extended family. While you might assume that inclusive relationships might generate massive inconsistency, our experience is just the opposite. Our connections tend to form sprawling extended families that have plenty of energy to welcome all the children, and the children readily learn their way around the tribe.
Some shifts in the population are inevitable, but in our experience children take that kind of mobility for granted and perhaps develop a flexibility that might serve them well later in life. If we prepare them for a life where any change at all is seen as a disaster, how will they manage? Better, perhaps, to learn that loss may be difficult, but we do get through it, pick up the pieces, and go on with our lives. One way parents can