The Ethical Slut

EXERCISE Why Sluthood? Why Not? Write a list of every reason you can think of that any person anywhere might want to be a slut. You can do this on your own, or with a friend or a lover. Which of these tell you what kind of slut you don’t want to be? Which of these are your very good and valid reasons?

Even people who consider themselves sex positive and sexually liberated often fall into a different trap—the trap of rationalizing sex. Releasing physical tension, relieving menstrual cramps, maintaining mental health, preventing prostate problems, making babies, cementing relationships, and so on are all admirable goals, and wonderful side benefits of sex. But they are not what sex is for. Sex is for pleasure, a complete and worthwhile goal in and of itself. People have sex because it feels very good, and then they feel good about themselves. The worthiness of pleasure is one of the core values of ethical sluthood.

Thanks to the large transgender faction, there was no way of pigeonholing the person you were cruising into your categories of desire. You might dance with someone you found very attractive and not know if they were chromosomally male or female. It’s difficult to get attached to preferences like lesbian or straight when you don’t know the gender of the person you are flirting with. This may sound crazy, but the results were surprising: I patronized the Omni because it was the safest environment available to me. Because there was no way to make assumptions, people had to treat each other with respect. No one could assume what kind of interaction might interest the object of their attention, so there was nothing to do but ask. And if you were, as I was, a young woman in your twenties, to be approached with respect was a most welcome relief from straight social environments where it was customary for men to prove their manhood by coming on too strong, evidently in the belief that women who cruise in singles bars have problems with virginal shyness and don’t mean “no” when they say it. The Omni provided my first experiences with true respect.

Couples can have a secondary relationship outside of the primary, or a number of lovers that don’t get ranked in any hierarchy. Relationships vary in how close or distant they are emotionally and physically, and in how much contact is involved. Some may be short-term, while others may last for years or even a lifetime; some may involve getting together twice a week, others twice a year.

Couples new to nonmonogamy tend to spend a lot of energy defining their boundaries. They usually focus more at first on what they don’t want their partner to do—the activities that make them feel, for some reason, unsafe or downright terrified—than on their actual desires. Setting these limits is, for many couples, a necessary first step out into the disorienting world of sluthood. However, as couples become more sophisticated at operating the boundaries of their relationship, they tend to focus more on what they would enjoy, and then strategize about how they can make it safe. How to create and follow this learning curve will be covered in more detail in chapter 16, “Opening an Existing Relationship.”

EXERCISE Fifteen Ways to Be Kind to Yourself Write a list of fifteen easy things you can do to be kind to yourself: for instance, “Go to the store and buy myself a flower” or “Soak my feet in hot water and give them a rub.” Sometimes it helps to ask yourself: “What could I do to feel a little bit safer, or better, or taken care of?” Put the items on your list on index cards. The next time you feel upset and could use a kindness, pull a card and do what it says.

Here’s a good question to ask yourself as you seek to understand your jealousy: “What are the specific images that disturb me the most?” Chances are you are already imagining along these lines, so you’re not likely to make yourself feel worse by thinking about the scary stuff on purpose.

Those disturbing images, the ones that really bother you, are not telling you what your partner is doing—you actually don’t know what your partner is doing. The images you see in your mind are the perfect reflection of your own fears. One way to come to terms with your fears is to acknowledge them: “Yes, I’m afraid of that.” You can take it even further and work through the fears by envisioning the worst possible scenario that you can imagine. Go ahead, wallow in it. Elaborate it until it becomes ridiculous. Maybe that other guy has a dick three miles long, that girl is a perfect replica of a living Barbie doll. Maybe you can laugh at your fears: that’ll take the sting out of them. Silly is the opposite of powerful, so disempower away.

When we don’t know what’s going on, few of us are able to just say “I don’t know” and stop thinking about it. We fill in the blanks, and in order to do that we make something up. What you see when you fill in the blanks has nothing to do with reality, it is a picture of your own worst fear. So now you know what you are afraid of, and nothing about what is really happening.

REMEMBER THE GOOD STUFF THAT YOU CARE ABOUT Make a list of everything you value about your relationship and put it aside for a rainy day. Be an optimist, turn your mind to the positive end of things. Value what you have and what you get from your partner: the time, attention, and love, the good stuff that fills your cup. Avoid being the pessimist who focuses on what is not there, the energy that goes somewhere else. That energy is not subtracted from what you receive; relationships are not balanced like checkbooks. So when you are feeling deprived, remember all the good stuff you get from your partnership.

Make a list of ten or more reasons why you are lucky to have this partner. Make a list of ten or more reasons why your partner is lucky to have you. Try carrying your lists around with you for a few days and adding things as they come up. Maybe you and this partner could both make lists and share them.

EXERCISE Conflict: A Freewrite Try writing for ten minutes without pausing—just write down whatever comes into your mind about these questions: How was conflict dealt with in the family you grew up in? What did people do, and what beliefs were they operating on? Did someone use alcohol to deal with tension? Who in your family was likely to initiate conflict, who avoided it to a fault? Whose job was it to placate the angry people, whose job to sweep disagreements under the carpet? Who had the job of opening up conflict? What was your job? How would you describe your style of managing conflict?

Most people, though, learned to hide for their own safety, or to fight back to protect themselves, or to become small and pathetic so that people would take pity on them. If you have any of these responses to conflict—defensiveness, rage, withdrawal, weepiness, whatever—it is certain that you developed them for a good reason.

Many people believe that fighting between partners is to be avoided at all costs, but most relationship therapists would disagree.

Fights between partners appear to be a universal experience; not many people actually enjoy them, but they seem to be necessary, a constructive element in the building of solid relationships, like the fires that make new growth possible in old forests. Only by fighting can partners struggle with their disagreements, express their most heartfelt feelings, and negotiate change and growth in their relationship.

EXERCISE Gibberish Fight This will be both silly and very satisfying. Set the timer for two minutes. Stand facing each other, a little distance apart. Express your anger simultaneously with stance and gesture: stamp your feet, wave your arms, and speak to your partner in entirely inarticulate sounds—moans, groans, sighs, growls. (If you’re not sure what we mean here, imagine Donald Duck having a tantrum.) It’s hard to describe this in words, but when you go for the drama, freed from the need to make sentences, or to figure out who’s right and who’s wrong, or even to make any sense at all, you’ll communicate your feelings very well—and then have a good laugh. This is a great way to vent and break up the tension before a more serious conversation.

Better yet, every time we succeed in spending that fifteen minutes taking care of ourselves in the kindest way we can muster, we actually physically heal our amygdalas—by growing more fibers that deliver soothing neurotransmitters—and thus increase our capacity to soothe ourselves in a crisis. So practice, practice, practice being kind to yourself.

Try speaking in sentences that begin with “I feel.” There is an enormous difference between saying “you are making me feel so bad” and “I feel so bad.” The I-message is a pure statement of feeling, and there is no accusation in it. When your lover doesn’t feel attacked and doesn’t need to feel defensive, he or she is free to listen to what you’re actually saying. Conversely, if your sentence starts with “you,” and especially with “you always,” your partner may well perceive an attack and respond defensively.

EXERCISE Feelings Dyad The purpose of this exercise is to speak about your own feelings in such a way that your partner can hear you, and to listen carefully to your partner’s feelings. Each person gets three minutes to speak while the other listens. Choose a time when you and your partner(s) can spend half an hour or forty-five minutes with no interruptions. Choose who will speak and who will listen. Set a timer for three minutes—five if you’re feeling adventurous, but no more. Remember, feelings like to be heard. So while you are listening, all you are going to say are things that indicate listening, like “Okay,” “Yes,” “I hear you,” and “I understand.”

Time Is Your Friend In some Native American cultures it is customary to wait several minutes after a person speaks before responding: it is rude and disrespectful to fail to think about what the person has said, and to speak immediately would indicate that you have simply been waiting for the speaker to be quiet so that you can then attempt to change his or her mind. We recommend taking some time before responding to any serious communication, especially when it’s important to the speaker. Maybe if you pay attention you’ll hear something new.

How do you know when you need an agreement? You can tell by listening to your emotions. If something comes up that leaves you feeling upset or angry or unheard or whatever, that’s an area in which you and your sweetie may need to discuss making an agreement. We suggest that you let go right now of the idea that you can predict every single situation that might come up in your relationship and make a rule to cover it—just forget it.

EXERCISE Eight Steps to Win-Win Conflict Resolution Take time out to ventilate anger. Select one issue to work on. Make an appointment to talk. Each person takes three minutes to state how they feel while their partner listens. Hint: Use I-statements, avoid you-messages, and consider allowing time between each person’s statement. Try as hard as you can to describe your emotions about the issue. Brainstorm. Write a list of all possible solutions, even silly ones. Edit the list. Cross out any suggestions that either person feels they could not live with. Choose a solution to try for a specific period of time—perhaps two to four weeks. Re-evaluate when that time is up.

Most people have a hard time dealing with surprises, which can feel like land mines exploding. Very few of us would be comfortable living with the possibility that our partner might go home with someone else at any time, from any party we go to, from the restaurant where we thought we were just going for a cup of coffee—no place, no time would be secure. One partner of our acquaintance was working across the country from his spouse during a time when he was first struggling to deal with his jealousy. He made an agreement to know when his partner was playing with someone else because, as he put it, “If I know when she is out with someone else, I also know when she isn’t, and then I can relax most of the time.”

A good way to start would be to sit down with your partner in a peaceful place and compare your visions of a more open future. Perhaps you could each write down a little about what your relationship would look like if it were perfect, and perfectly easy. When you compare notes you may find out that you have very different visions: one partner may want to be the Queen of Sluts at sex parties, the other may be looking for a lover who wants to go backpacking and make out on a mountainside. One of you may be yearning for zipless fucks with no obligations, the other may desire an ongoing relationship with one or two people who stay connected and join the family.

EXERCISE Hierarchy of Hard, or, How to Get from Here to There in However Many Absolutely Easy Steps Here’s an exercise about choosing the first step you want to take. Choose a very concrete goal to focus on, one about which you have some anxiety. Poly issues might include: looking at personal ads together, introducing your lovers, making a date, having a sleep-over, talking about safer sex. Choose an issue to practice with that is relatively easy for you today. Think about the steps you would have to take to get from here to there—agreements, negotiations, honesties, asking for what you want, scheduling time, finding a babysitter, and so on. Write each of these steps on an index card. If any step looks too enormous, break it down into a few steps. Sort of like teaching three-year-olds to bake cookies, make each step utterly simple before you go on to the next one. Then lay out the cards and put them in order from the easiest to the hardest, or the safest to the scariest, according to how intense it feels when you think about that step. You may get new information about yourself when you do this. Then pick up the safest, easiest card, figure out how you could take that step, and march onward! When you’ve accomplished that, and learned whatever you learned from doing it, put the card away and go to work on the next step, which is now the easiest step. Never take anything but the easiest step.

EXERCISE The Twenty-Minute Fight Make an appointment with your partner to discuss something you don’t agree on for twenty minutes. Find a good time when you can focus, and when you won’t have to do anything stressful right after—perhaps plan to watch a movie. Try this first with a small disagreement, something not terribly heated, just for practice. How do you manage to stop after twenty minutes when the discussion isn’t finished? Our most difficult disagreements are not going to be resolved in hours of talking, arguing, or yelling—maybe not even in weeks or months. Difficult issues take time to work on. So one important skill is to open up the controversy, and then figure out a way to stop and close it back down till the next time. Use good communication tools, and set the timer. When the twenty minutes are up, take a few deep breaths and let go, let go, let go of wherever you are in the argument. It is a terrifically useful skill to know how to stop. It is much safer to start talking about a controversy when you have agreed not to yell at each other till you are exhausted and go to bed in a huff. You may find that after you stop talking you will be thinking about what you said, and what your partner said, and in a day or two you may very well get some new ideas about how you feel and what might work. By the time you come together next week for Twenty-Minute Fight round two, you may surprise yourselves by how much closer to understanding or accepting each other’s positions you have come.

EXERCISE The Great Sex Story Write a story about the best sex you ever had with your life partner. Get into the details, describes the sensations: the sounds, the smells, the pounding pulse, and such. Both of you write your stories—it might be a different episode, and that’s fine—and then share them. Talk about what made it so good for you.

EXERCISE List of Dates Many couples in the hectic rush of things to do—children to raise, walls to paint, gardens to hoe, groceries to buy—find that it has been a long time since they spent time together for the purpose of having fun. Make a list of dates you could plan—beaches, brunch, dancing, games, sports, wrestling matches, that new restaurant—and figure out what you would need to do to make them happen. You and a partner or partners could make that list together, or you could each make a list. Try for at least five items. Then start scheduling. When you realize how hard that is, then you are also finding out how precious time spent with your partner truly is. An afternoon on a mountain is an important investment in your relationship.

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 attention to yourself. Then, for each person you look at, imagine: What is this person’s lover’s favorite thing about them? Do they have a strong stride, a sweet smile, bright eyes, powerful shoulders, hair that looks soft to the touch? Pretty much everybody is, or has been, loved by someone—see if you can see what makes this particular person lovable and lustworthy, even if they’re not the kind of person you’re used to seeing that way.

EXERCISE Words of Love Write one or more letters you are not going to send to one or more of your lovers telling them how you feel about them: what you love about them, how much you love them. Freewrite for ten minutes: what’s embarrassing about telling people you love them? You can decide later if you want to share any part of what you’ve written with anyone you love.

When Masters and Johnson began their research into sexual functioning in the late 1950s, they wanted to start by learning about good sex before researching sexual dysfunction—so they started by selecting 382 men and 312 women, including 276 heterosexual couples, all of whom had satisfactory sex lives. One surprising fact they uncovered was that virtually all these sexually satisfied people masturbated—regardless of whether or not they were also having partnered sex. Write this on your mirror: sexually successful people masturbate. You are not jerking or buzzing off because you are a loser, because you can’t find anyone to play with you, or because you are desperate to get your rocks off. You’re making love to yourself because you deserve pleasure, and playing with yourself makes you feel good.