Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [52]
PART THREE
Navigating Challenges
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Roadmaps through Jealousy
Let jealousy be your teacher. Jealousy can lead you to the very places where you most need healing. It can be your guide into your own dark side and show you the way to total self-realization. Jealousy can teach you how to live in peace with yourself and with the whole world if you let it.
—Deborah Anapol, Love without Limits
FOR MANY PEOPLE, the biggest obstacle to free love is the emotion we call jealousy.
Jealousy feels really rotten, and most of us will go to great lengths to avoid feeling it. However, your authors believe that most people take the destructive power of jealousy way too much for granted, that they give their jealousy far more power than it deserves. After many years of living free and dealing successfully with jealousy, we tend to forget that we live in a culture that considers it acceptable to divorce or even murder a sexually explorative partner who has committed the unthinkable crime of arousing jealousy in us.
Let us point out here that monogamy is not a cure for jealousy. We have all had experiences of being ferociously jealous of work that keeps our partner away or distracted from us, or our lover’s decision to cruise the Internet instead of our bodies, or Monday (and Tuesday and Wednesday) Night Football. Jealousy is not exclusive to sluts; it’s an emotion we all have to deal with.
Many people believe that sexual territoriality is a natural part of individual and social evolution. If you believe that, it’s easy to use jealousy as justification to go berserk and stop being a sane, responsible, and ethical human being. Threatened with feeling jealous, we allow our brains to turn to static with the excuse that we are acting on instinct. Your authors don’t think it matters if jealousy derives from nature or nurture or both. What matters is that we know from experience that we can change it.
Here is a story from Dossie’s life about the struggle to cope with jealousy:
My lover is late coming home. I hope she is all right—this morning she left in tears. Last night we both cried until very late. I hope she will not be too angry with me, or then again, her anger might be easier to bear than her pain. Last night I thought my heart would break from feeling her pain.
And it’s my fault, my choice, my responsibility. I am asking my lover to go through the fire for reasons most of the rest of the world consider frivolous if not downright reprehensible. I cannot, will not, be monogamous.
More than three decades ago, I left my daughter’s violent father, fighting my way out the door, bruised and pregnant, promising anything, promising I would call my parents for money, lying. After I escaped Joe, he sent me suicide threats and threatened murder—one time he set fires around the house he thought we were still in. After I left, I decided he was right—I am a slut, I want to be a slut, I will never promise monogamy again. I will never be a piece of property again, no matter how valuable that property is considered. Joe made a feminist of me—a feminist slut.
My lover is back. She brought me a flower. She still doesn’t want a hug. She feels her house has been invaded by alien energy. I was very careful to clean up, all is very tidy, dinner is ready, appeasement and placation, I’ll do anything not to feel so awful.
Why did I insist on doing this? My coauthor and I have been patiently waiting to resume this part of our relationship when my newfound and most beloved partner was ready. She has already conquered the terrors of group sex—tomorrow we will have another couple over for dinner and my birthday spanking, which she herself arranged with no egging on from me. Within the last year she has had more new sexual experiences than she’d had in the previous forty-eight years and has taken to it all like a duck to water.
Except her lover having a date with one other person. She hates feeling left out and resents