The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships, and Other Freedoms in Sex and Love

by Janet W. Hardy

We measure the ethics of good sluts not by the number of their partners, but by the respect and care with which they treat them.

We urge you to regard with great skepticism any sentence that begins “Everybody knows…” or “Common sense tells us…” Often, these phrases are signposts for cultural belief systems that may be antisexual, monogamy-centrist, and/or codependent.

MYTH #4: THE ONLY MORAL WAY TO HAVE SEX IS WITHIN A COMMITTED RELATIONSHIP. An old saw has it that men agree to relationships to have sex, and women agree to sex to have relationships. Believing such nonsense leads to the idea of sex as a currency exchanged for security both financial and physical, social acceptance, and the other perks traditionally granted to people who have achieved the culturally mandated state of lifelong pair-bonding. If you believe this myth, you’re likely to see sex for fun, for pleasure, for exploration—for any purpose except cementing two people together—as immoral and socially destructive.

MYTH #5: LOVING SOMEONE MAKES IT OKAY TO CONTROL THEIR BEHAVIOR. This kind of territorial reasoning is designed, we guess, to make people feel secure, but we don’t believe that anybody has the right, much less the obligation, to control the behavior of another functioning adult. Being treated according to this myth doesn’t make us feel secure—it makes us feel furious. The old “Awww, she’s jealous—she must really care about me” reasoning is symptomatic of a very disturbed set of personal boundaries that can lead to a great deal of unhappiness.

jealousy is an emotion like any other: it feels bad (sometimes very bad), but it is not intolerable. We have also found that many of the “oughta-be’s” that lead to jealousy can be unlearned, and that unlearning them is often a useful, sometimes even profoundly healing, process. Later in this book, we will spend a lot more time talking about jealousy and the strategies people employ to cope with it.

The myth tells us that sleeping with someone else is something you do to your partner, not for yourself, and is the worst thing you can possibly do to your partner. This myth leaves no room for the possibility of growthful and constructive open sexual lifestyles.

“We look at older politicians who are trying to ban abortion, restrict birth control, and outlaw sex work, and it just doesn’t make any sense to us. Our bodies are our own, and only we should get to decide what happens to our own body. We see the controlling of bodies as fundamental to capitalism and that taking the locus of control back into ourselves will help us join together to overturn patriarchy and capitalism for a more humane way of life.”

“We’ve grown up in a world where no consensual sexual or relationship behavior is considered ‘wrong.’ We’ve seen kinky, queer, and poly families on television and in the newspapers, and we want to live in a way that empowers us to try a little bit of everything, keeping what works for now and leaving ourselves open to other options in the future.”

being a slut doesn’t mean simply doing whatever you want, whenever you want, with whomever you want. Most of our criteria for ethics are quite pragmatic: Is anyone being harmed? Is there any way to avoid causing that harm? Is anyone feeling hurt? How can we support them? Are there any risks? Is everybody involved aware of those risks and doing what can be done to minimize them? On the positive side: How much fun is this? What is everybody learning from it? Is it helping someone grow? Is it helping make the world a better place? First and foremost, ethical sluts value consent.

Ethical sluts recognize the ramifications of our sexual choices. We see that our emotions, our upbringings, and the standards of our culture often conflict with our sexual desires. And we make a conscious commitment to supporting ourselves and our partners as we deal with those conflicts honestly and honorably.

Ethical sluts recognize the difference between things they can and should control and things they can’t. While we sometimes may feel jealous or territorial, we own those feelings, doing our best not to blame or control but asking for the support we need to help ourselves feel safe and cared for.

Our culture places a very high value on self-denial, which is fine when there is hard work to be done. But all too often, those who unapologetically satisfy their desire for pleasure in their utterly free time are seen as immature, disgusting, even sinful. Since we all have desires, puritanical values lead inevitably to self-loathing, hatred of our bodies and our turn-ons, and fear and guilt over our sexual urges. We see ourselves surrounded by the walking wounded—by people who have been deeply injured by fear, shame, and hatred of their own sexual selves. We believe that happy, free, guiltless connection is the cure for these wounds; we believe that sex and intimacy are vital to people’s sense of self-worth, to their belief that life is good.

People have sex because it feels very good, and then they feel good about themselves. Pleasure is a complete and worthwhile goal in and of itself: the worthiness of pleasure is one of the core values of ethical sluthood.

Love and Sex Are the End, Not the Means

We, on the other hand, think sexual pleasure can certainly contribute to love, commitment, and long-term stability, if that’s what you want. But those are hardly the only good reasons for having sex. We believe in valuing relationships for what we value in them, a seeming tautology that is wiser than it sounds. A relationship may be valuable simply because it affords pleasure to those involved; there is nothing wrong with sex for sex’s sake. Or it might involve sex as a pathway to other lovely things—intimacy, connection, companionship, even love—which in no way changes the basic goodness of the pleasurable sex.

“We believe it’s okay to have sex with anybody you love, and we believe in loving everybody.”

You Are Already Whole We believe that the fundamental sexual unit is one person; adding more people to that unit may be intimate, fun, and companionable but does not complete anybody. The only thing in this world that you can control is yourself—your own reactions, desires, and behaviors. Thus, a fundamental step in ethical sluthood is to bring your locus of control into yourself, to recognize the difference between what is yours to control and what belongs to other people. With practice, you can become able to complete yourself—that’s why we call this “integrity.” When you have built a satisfying relationship with yourself, then you have something of great worth to share with others.

Many people, in fact, find that their outside relationships can increase their intimacy with their primary partner by reducing the pressures on that relationship.

“Every orgasm is a spiritual experience. Think of a moment of perfect wholeness, of yourself in perfect unity, of expanded awareness that transcends the split between mind and body and integrates all the parts of you in ecstatic consciousness….When you bring spiritual awareness to your sexual practice, you can become directly conscious of—connected to—that divinity that always flows through you….For us, sex is already an opportunity to see God.”

We recommend that when you are in the company of the unfamiliar, you look for unfamiliar wisdom. You’ll find lots of it, and it will make you richer.

With practice, we can develop an intimacy based on warmth and mutual respect, much freer than desperation, neediness, or the blind insanity of falling in love—that’s why the relationships between “friends with benefits” are so immensely valuable. When we acknowledge the love and respect and appreciation that we share with lovers we would never marry, sexual friendships can become not only possible but preferred. So while you’re worrying that your sexual desire could cost you your best friend, the more experienced slut could be wondering why you are the only friend they’ve never fucked.

People new to polyamory 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 people, a necessary first step into the disorienting world of sluthood. However, as partnerships 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.

Alas, many people begin to explore open relationships because their partner is pushing them into it or because all their friends are doing it and they don’t want to seem prudish. We ask that you get clear within yourself that you’re doing this for you— because it excites you, because it offers opportunities for learning and growth and fun, because you want to. Make no mistake, this can be a rocky road. If you’re navigating it for the wrong reasons, resentment can easily poison the very relationships you set out to improve. Sexual change can be a path of reprogramming yourself, with abundant sex and love as the carrot and the fear of deprivation, boredom, or self-loathing as the stick. Because we don’t believe the urge toward monogamy is innate, we think you must have learned your feelings and beliefs somewhere—from your parents, from your past lovers, from your culture. What you have learned, you can obviously unlearn, and you can learn something new. Exploring your feelings and changing your reactions to them can be difficult—but what a feeling of power and triumph each time you succeed!

Here are words to live by: the enemy of shame is curiosity —the same curiosity we might have been punished for when we were two.

Use your curiosity to ask, “How did I learn this?” “What did I come to believe about myself when I was taught that touching myself ‘down there’ was shameful?” “What do I believe about myself today?” “What do I think would be a healthier belief?”

When you find yourself responding to someone else’s behavior, it can be easy to dwell on what that person has done and how terrible it is and what exactly they should do to fix it. Instead, try looking at your own feelings as a message about your internal state of being, and then decide how you want to deal with whatever’s going on. Do you want to find out more? Do you want to discuss a limit? Do you want a little time to yourself to calm down and get centered? Do you want to be heard about something? When you take responsibility, you get these choices, and more. What you are not responsible for is your lover’s emotions. You can choose to be supportive—we’re great believers in the healing power of listening—but it is not your job to fix anything. Once you understand that your lover’s emotions are not your job or your fault, you can listen and really hear without falling victim to an overwhelming need to figure out whose fault it is or to make the emotion change or go away.

All these difficult scripts are about somebody not being honest and are also about somebody having sex while avoiding intimacy and emotional connection. When you are not telling the truth, you cannot be present; when you are not present, you can’t be connected to anyone else; and when you are not connected, how can you feel anything at all?

Great flirting is about seeing; hunger to be seen is a natural human emotion, and when you show people that you’re seeing them, it’s natural for them to start seeing you. A lot of flirting is nonverbal. There’s a way of holding eye contact for just a moment longer than usual—more than a passing glance, less than an outright stare—that lets a person know that you find them worth looking at.

The best, most successful, and least obnoxious cruisers we know, of all genders and orientations, are friendly, curious folks who like most people and are interested in talking to everyone. If some of the people they talk to turn into potential relationships, so much the better.

When you find yourself worrying about how you are seen by others, remember that there is no point in pretending you are anyone except who you are. It does you no good to attract someone who thinks you are somebody else: all you get is someone who is excited about somebody who isn’t you. When you are honest, you attract the people who are interested in you, just as you most wonderfully are.

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.

Jealousy is often the mask worn by the most difficult inner conflict you have going on right now, a conflict that’s crying out to be resolved and you don’t even know it. Because it’s rooted so deeply, it can be incredibly difficult to stay conscious when jealousy peeks over the horizon: we twist and turn and writhe in our attempts not to feel it. This is when your emotions are most likely to bring you to grief—when you believe that you need to avoid feeling them at any cost.

The challenge comes in learning to establish within yourself a strong foundation of safety in your relationship that is not dependent on sexual exclusivity. This difficult work is part of the larger question of how to grasp your personal power and learn to understand and love yourself without another person to validate you. You become free to give and receive validation, not from need or obligation, but from love and caring. We suggest most strongly that you put some effort into learning to validate yourself: you’re worth it.

“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.”

New neurological studies show something really interesting: fear cannot coexist with gratitude. So if you’re feeling scared or insecure, try remembering three things you’re grateful for and see if anything shifts.

When you grow beyond your jealousy by doing the healing that your jealousy is calling on you to do, you’re also stepping out of old paradigms and familiar assumptions into the unknown, which is scary. Working to change your emotions requires that you open up, be willing to feel, flinching when necessary, becoming more conscious. Isn’t that what spirituality is, an opened and expanded consciousness? Jealousy can become your path, not only to healing old wounds but also to openheartedness—opening your heart to your lovers and to yourself as you open your relationships to fit in all the love and sex and fulfillment that truly are available to you. A final note about love: One remedy for the fear of not being loved is to remember how good it feels to love someone. If you’re feeling unloved and you want to feel better, go love someone and see what happens.

One way to avoid the trap of turning a difference into a moral argument is to look carefully at ownership: who owns what in this disagreement anyway? What is A’s investment in this particular choice, how is B feeling different about it, and what are we afraid might happen if we can’t agree? Try to get really clear on how each person feels before you even think about what you want to do.

Expect to try out some agreements and find out that they don’t work, and expect to need to change them. You will get better at this process with practice, and in time you may know your own and your partner’s needs so well that negotiating agreements will be easy. But in the beginning, while you are learning, tidiness won’t count anywhere near as much as tolerance.

Remember that there are many good ways to structure your sluttery. Structure is not what makes you safe from hard feelings—your ability to take care of yourself is what counts. So whatever structure you choose, hold it fairly loosely. Your agreements are not taking care of you; you are. Don’t get discouraged—all the successful sluts you see who seem so carefree have fought over their agreements. You too can work your way through this tangled web of assumptions and emotions and learn to love with openness and freedom.

We like to be easygoing about sex, but what people mean by “casual sex” is perhaps too dismissive. Casual sex sounds like we are supposed to be distant: don’t get too close, don’t expect too much, avoid any expression of intimacy or vulnerability. We are now hearing people refer to certain of their lovers as “friends with benefits,” an interesting concept. Why shouldn’t we share the manifold benefits of sex with our friends, making sex a natural part of the love and honor and loyalty and openheartedness that we already share? We have learned the most, and had the most fun, and made the most wonderful, rich connections, when we have welcomed each new person into our lives just as they are, without trying to force them into the picture that’s labeled “relationship” in our brains. This has been true whether we’ve been single, coupled, part of a group family, or engaged in any one of the myriad other ways of relating that creative and loving sluts can devise.

You are responsible for promoting intimacy in all your relationships. If being single means that you are committed to being coolly invulnerable in all situations, you’ll be living in a cold and distant world.

Both of us much prefer to meet our partners’ partners and make friends with them when at all possible. Sometimes they are not entirely sure that they want to be friends with us, and occasionally they’re pretty sure they’d rather not, but with patience and goodwill, most of them come around. After all, we have at least one thing in common: we both love the same person. There is no reason why our interests need be opposed to our lover’s partners’ interests. We all want to collaborate on creating a happy outcome where everybody gets respected and everybody gets their needs met and their desires fulfilled. In the long run, we are all on the same side. The experienced slut can take some initiative in reaching out to frightened partners in a gentle and openhearted way. The vulnerability of feeling jealous or nervous about each other is its own form of intimacy, and friendly feelings may be the most useful response.

The “what”—what sex actually is—is a journey into an extraordinary state of consciousness, where we tune out everything extraneous to our emotions and our senses in this very moment, travel into a realm of delicious sensation, and soak in the deep connection. This journey is a voyage of awakening, as if the nerves whose job it is to transmit feelings of delight had been lying asleep but have suddenly leapt to attention, aflame, in response to a nibble or a caress. Perhaps what we call foreplay is a way of seeing just how awake we can get—all

Getting turned on is sort of like getting high or waking up or warming up—you are transitioning from one state of consciousness to another. This takes time, and it feels good. Working to find your turn-on can feel very vulnerable—but sex with your armor on seldom satisfies.

Sexologists who study arousal tell us that turn-on depends on two things: safety and risk. You need to feel safe from harm and secure that your conditions will be met and your wants and needs honored. You also need to feel a little like being at the top of a ski jump, on the threshold of something miraculous and powerful.

Your relationship with yourself is what you bring to a relationship with another person: it is what you have to share, personally, emotionally, and sexually. A good orgasm changes your neurochemistry and nourishes your self-esteem: the sexier you are to yourself, the sexier you will be to your lovers.

Getting turned on requires a physical and mental transition into a different state of consciousness.

When right and wrong are your only options, you may believe that you can’t love more than one person or that you can’t love in different ways or that you have a finite capacity for love—that “many” must somehow be opposed to “one,” or that your only options are in love and out of love, with no allowance for different degrees or kinds of love. We would like to propose something different. Instead of fretting about what’s right or what’s wrong, try valuing whatever is in front of you without viewing anything as in opposition to any other thing. We think that if you can do this, you will discover that there are as many ways to be sexual as there are to be human, and all of them are valid, an abundance of ways to relate, to love, to express gender, to share sex, to form families, to be in the world, to be human…and none of them in any way reduces or invalidates any of the others.

Our vision of utopia has free love—in all its forms—as the foundation of our beliefs about reality, about possibility, about staying in the moment and planning the future. We believe that the freedom to love helps us see our lives as they really are, with the honesty to perceive ourselves clearly and the fluidity to let us move onward as our needs alter, as a changing and growing self with changing and growing partners in a changing and growing world. We see ethical sluthood leading us to a world where we respect and honor each individual’s boundaries more than we honor any preconceived set of rules about what their boundaries ought to be.