More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Kinsey once defined a “nymphomaniac” as “someone who has more sex than you” and, scientist that he was, demonstrated his point with statistics.
Is there, we wonder, some virtue in being difficult?
Questioning “what everybody does” can be difficult and disorienting, but we have found it to be rewarding: questioning is the first step toward generating a new paradigm, your own paradigm of how you ought to be.
The thing that gets called romantic love in this culture seems to be a heady cocktail of lust and adrenaline, sparked by uncertainty, insecurity, perhaps even anger or danger. The chills up the spine that we recognize as passion are, in fact, the same physical phenomenon as hair rising up on a cat’s back and are caused by the fight-or-flight response.
An outside involvement does not have to subtract in any way from the intimacy you share with your partner unless you let it. And we sincerely hope you won’t.
On the positive side: How much fun is this? What is everybody learning from it? Is it helping someone to grow? Is it helping make the world a better place?
Ethical sluts are honest—with ourselves and others. We take time with ourselves, to figure out our own emotions and motivations and to untangle them for greater clarity when necessary. Then we openly share that information with those who need it. We do our best not to let our fears and bashfulness be an obstacle to our honesty—we trust that our partners will go on respecting and loving us, warts and all.
Our best definition here is that sex is whatever the people engaging in it think it is.
There is nothing in the world so terrific that it can’t be abused if you’re determined to do so: Familial connections can be violated, sexual desire can be manipulated. Even chocolate can be abused. Abuse doesn’t change the basic wonderfulness of any of these things: the danger lies in the motivation of the abuser, not the nature of the item.
Love is not a real-world limit: the mother of nine children can love each of them as much as the mother of an only child.
