Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [88]
Making Connection
ANY MEMBER OF A SEXUAL minority faces special challenges in finding partners and friends—and, as a slut or slut-wannabe, you are most assuredly a member of a sexual minority. Polyamory is not readily understood or accepted in very many social environments. If you’re also gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or interested in a specialized area of sexuality such as cross-dressing or S/M, you are doubly or triply challenged. And yet making the connections of your dreams is not only possible but eminently achievable, as many thousands of abundantly connected sluts can happily attest.
However, we’d be the last people to tell you that it will always be easy. We’ve heard, and lived, too many sad, frustrating stories about near misses: partners who are fine with an open relationship until someone falls in love, at which point they freak out and demand monogamy; or partners who rhapsodize about sexual openness and free love in principle but fall apart when faced with the reality (Janet says these remind her of the dog who chases cars all his life, then can’t figure out what to do with one when he catches it). Some partners may become successfully polyamorous but come to a time when their needs, desires, and limits simply don’t fit together well enough—after all, sex is not the only or the most important aspect that determines the way we relate.
Yet many people do succeed in finding each other, for relationships ranging from casual to lifetime. So, how do you find friends, lovers, and potential partners who not only share your values and beliefs, but are also emotionally, intellectually, and sexually compatible with you?
Who?
A good place to start is by getting an idea of who you’re looking for. The trick in making this decision is to be neither too specific nor too vague. If your “who” list basically includes anybody who is breathing and who is willing to have sex with you, we suggest that you are perhaps broadening your field a bit too much. Even if you don’t have strong preferences about gender, age, appearance, background, or intelligence, you probably do want someone who will not lie to you, steal from you, hurt you, or exploit you: basic sanity, honesty, and respectfulness are on most of our lists. It is also perfectly fine to acknowledge those preferences that are genuinely important to you: if you prefer men to women, or people your own age to people much older or younger, nobody is going to report you to the Equal Opportunity Commission.
On the other hand, if your “who” list reads like a set of technical specifications—gender, age, weight, height, coloring, mode of dress, educational background, breast size, penis size, sexual kinks—we suspect that you may be more interested in making love to your own fantasy than you are to a real, live person. Many of us, unfortunately, are conditioned to react sexually to a rather unrealistic standard of appearance and behavior: porn queens and kings are fun to watch in the movies, but they rarely appear in our living rooms. If you expect your new honey to be gorgeous, intelligent, loving, and highly sexual all the time, you are almost certainly setting yourself up for a lifetime of disappointment—few people can achieve those standards, and nobody can maintain them twenty-four hours a day.
We can’t tell you the exact cutoff point at which a healthy preference becomes an unrealistic desire; only you can look inside yourself to do that. We do think that physical appearance, wealth, and social status have very little to do with the person behind them, and if any of those criteria appear high up on your “who” list, you may be a little bit stuck in your fantasy. Try getting to know some people who don’t meet those criteria. We have a hunch that if you get to know them and like them, you will discover that they have their own unique beauties, just waiting there for someone to notice them.
EXERCISE The Airport Game
Next time you find yourself in a public place like an airport or mall, find a place to sit where you can look at people without drawing