The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities by Dossie Easton

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a good example of a book which I almost certainly would never have read had it not been for an excellent review on Goodreads. I refer to the one by Trevor, whose reaction pretty much sums up my thoughts as well as I can hope to. But I would still like to take a crack at it.

Polyamory has been having a kind of cultural moment lately, and I admit that my gut reaction has been consistently negative. The whole idea struck me as naïve and foolish—maybe even a bit sordid—and I resented even being made to think about the topic. But there was a corner of my brain that was unsatisfied with this reaction. After all, I studied anthropology in college, so I knew that lifelong monogamy was hardly a human universal. (Though, in fairness, I’m also unaware of any culture that practices the free love as described in this book.) In short, it seemed merely an irrational bias of mine to react so negatively, and I decided I ought not to bow to my biases.

There does seem to be a lot of confusion regarding sex lately. While tolerance of different sexualities is probably at an all-time high, sex itself seems to be on the decline. It is well known that the birthrate in the developed world has been on the wane for decades, and this isn’t due simply to widespread access to birth control. Young people actually seem to be doing less lovemaking, though nobody quite knows why. Added to this are disturbing trends like the rise of the woman-hating “incel” community, or the disheartening phenomenon of “trad wives.” One gets the impression that traditional modes of relating are breaking down, and nobody really knows what to do.

Consensual polyamory is one proposed solution that appears to be growing in popularity—or, at least, in visibility. It promises to be a sexuality for the future, free of shame, sexism, and possessiveness—a sexuality based on purely utilitarian grounds of harmless pleasure. (As a side note, it is curious that John Stuart Mill, the apostle of utilitarianism, was a devoted monogamist. Was he really promoting “the greatest good for the greatest number” by being loyal to his wife?!) However, the notion of free love is hardly new. This book was first published in 1997, and has a great many forbears—from Alfred Kinsey and Margaret Mead, all the way back to the Adamites.

In that spirit, I wanted to go through an exercise from an early chapter of this book, which advises us to think of examples of non-monogamous people we may know of. For me, the people who spring most readily to mind are Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, whose open relationship would certainly qualify as consensual polyamory today. And, if I’m not mistaken, Bertrand Russell was an advocate of free love, though I am not sure to what extent he practiced it (besides sleeping with T.S. Eliot’s wife). Martin Heidegger had an affair with Hannah Arendt, which would make him both a polyamorist and—as Arendt was Jewish and Heidegger a member of the Nazi party—an outrageous hypocrite.

Ironically, however, the book I most often think of in this connection is Will and Ariel Durant’s massive historical series, The Story of Civilization. Will and Ariel, for their part, were models of monogamy, having married when Will was 28 and Ariel just 15, and dying one week apart. Yet one of the main takeaways from their historical writings is that seemingly no one in history (besides them) was a faithful monogamist. Kings had their mistresses, artists their muses (and lovers), and writers their brothels. Even bishops and popes were known to breed discretely (thus cheating on God Himself). And though Durant treats these sexual connections as failings or missteps, the final impression is that one has got to be very tolerant indeed if one isn’t to condemn the entire human race.

The vast majority of this behavior is admittedly non-consensual, and thus ethically dubious to say the least. Yet considering its apparent ubiquity, one is tempted to make the same argument regarding polyamory as has been made with marijuana: If everyone is already doing it, and society isn’t crumbling, then why not just change the rules and allow it? Instead of building barriers to pleasure, why not just let it rip?

The main argument leveled against polyamory (besides religious ones, which don’t concern me) is jealousy: Namely, that it is a powerful, primitive, and uncontrollable emotion, dangerous to tamper with. Judging from the local news, sexual jealousy is among the most common motivations for murder. Besides that, jealousy is the machine that drives any number of classic stories, from Odysseus viciously murdering his wife’s suitors (and the maids they slept with), to Othello choking Desdemona over a handkerchief, to Madame Bovary’s and Anna Karenina’s tragic deaths for attempting to break free from the bonds of holy matrimony. I mean, for Pete’s sake, our entire foundational theory of psychology is, thanks to Freud, based on sexual jealousy.

Perhaps because of to this cultural inheritance, many of us—myself included—are apt to think of jealousy as an implacable force, deeply rooted in our biology, that we must bow to. However, the authors of this work contest this view in their chapter on jealousy, which for me was the heart of this book.

They make many interesting points. For one, considering jealousy as an unyielding fact of our nature is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Lots of unpleasant things are deeply rooted in our collective psyche—envy, phobias, prejudices, violence—which we still try to combat. If we can do our best to overcome, say, fear of public speaking, why not try the same with jealousy?

What is more, despite just having one word for it, “jealousy” comprises several disparate things. It can involve many sorts of emotions—blinding rage, crippling anxiety, or just the sadness of loss—and include all sorts of thoughts, from blame to shame, not to mention all the religious and cultural baggage that comes along for the ride. This may seem like a banal point, but it at least allows you to get a hold of the sensation and examine its roots.

When you do, I suspect that you will find (as I do) that jealousy is a manifestation of anxiety regarding your own inadequacy—the fear of being found wanting in the most intimate sense. Such anxiety would seem obviously to be a “me problem.” The tricky thing about jealousy is that it encourages us to make it a “you problem”—to try to manage it by controlling other people. To use self-help speak, jealousy often involves a failure to “own your feelings,” putting yourself at the emotional mercy of somebody else rather than acknowledging that nobody but you can make you feel a certain way.

(There does seem to be some limits on the philosophy. If somebody stole my bicycle I would say that person was at least partially responsible for my feeling lousy.)

I admit that I found this view to be quite refreshing, since beforehand I was apt to think of jealousy as something unconquerable. It strikes me as far more productive to view it, instead, as just another one of the many emotional hang-ups we are prone to. And considering that jealousy can be an issue in even committed, monogamous relationships, I found the advice to be valuable indeed. I especially appreciated their realism. They don’t promise that we can achieve a Buddha-like detachment, immune from pangs of the heart. According to them, even “experienced sluts” occasionally suffer! All we can do is develop strategies to cope with it.

The rest of the book was surprisingly useful, too, even for prudes such as myself. Perhaps this should come as no surprise, as polyamorists almost by definition have the most experience dealing with relationships. Even when the information did not really apply to my situation, I found it to be of anthropological interest, as a window into another world. And while I’m not convinced that going to a sex-party is a “radical political act” (all the orgies in the world won’t stop the far-right!), I do think the authors’ sex-positive attitude is probably a lot healthier than how we often think about sex—as a commodity, a shameful secret, something to boast about, etc., etc.

So am I a convinced polyamorist? Unfortunately not. If there is one thing in which I vehemently disagree with the authors, it is their liking of complexity.

At various points, the authors describe in rapturous terms the forming of a sexual extended family, built up of present and former lovers into a “constellation.” Maybe this sounds appealing to some; but the thought of my ex-girlfriend going on a date with my current partner, who in turn call on an ex-boyfriend to look after their respective kids, while another ex takes a nap on the couch after making love to my roommate, who is also involved with both me and my partner—frankly, this sounds like a nightmare. The amount of time and energy it would take me to manage a single one of those relationships would utterly drain me. And the scope for drama is stupefying to contemplate.

I also don’t share the authors’ conviction that love is a boundless resource. Maybe some highly extroverted people may feel that they can fit any number of new people into their lives without having to boot out the old ones. But I know from experience that a few close friends, plus a romantic partner, is about as much as I can handle at any given moment. Love may not be limited, but time and energy certainly are; and true intimacy requires both.

But I don’t think this book can be fairly evaluated as an attempt to persuade people to be polyamorous. Rather, it is a how-to manual for those who are already on that path. And judged by that standard, I think the book could hardly be better.



View all my reviews