The Ethical Slut Revisited: Why I Am No Longer an Ethical Slut

I read about The Ethical Slut by Dossie Eaton and Catherine Listz in either Time Out or New York Magazine in 2008. I ripped it out of the magazine and put it in my back jeans pocket to give to the man I was seeing who I was in love with and who was in love with me and in love with someone else—his girlfriend.

The Ethical Slut discusses how to live an active life with multiple, concurrent sexual relationships in a fair and honest way. Discussion topics include how to deal with the practical difficulties and opportunities in finding and keeping partners, maintaining relationships with others, and strategies for personal growth. The article was a personal essay, recommending The Ethical Slut and explaining that it is possible, and maybe even healthier, to be in love with more than one person at the same time.

The man and I went out to dinner that night. It was July and we went to an Italian place in the West Village called The Flower Room. I had a red tank top on. He had a red t-shirt on. We sat at an outdoor table that had red roses on it. “Is this too romantic?” I asked him and he laughed. We drank glasses of red wine and I probably got a salad and he got pasta. Through the apartment windows above the restaurant “Waterloo Sunset” by The Kinks started to play.

I handed him the article across the little table and he looked at me like he wanted to fuck my brains out.

**

Neither of us bought the book, though for three years we talked about how we were going to. Sometimes he’d bring up the article, when he was manic and stoned and excited and in love with me: “I love that article you gave me!” Like I was a fucking genius godsend or something. Or when we talked about how fucked up our situation was, he’d run his hands up and down my torso, grab my tits or my ass and say, “Yeah, well, I just think about that article you gave me.”

**

He and his girlfriend had been sharing an apartment in the East Village for almost three years at that point. After I’d been with him for a year, I was officially and openly obsessed with her—dreaming of her most nights and writing about her most days. When I asked him to tell her about me, he complied. She accepted this fact. Five months later when she was offered a job in Washington D.C. she left. He moved to another apartment, four blocks away.

**

One morning, the following July, he and I got into a nasty argument. I’d reached my arm down between the bed and wall looking for my underwear only to pull up someone else’s. From Target. Size Small. Light blue with a pink bow. He made us breakfast: spicy eggs and vegetables, and I shit my brains out because of the underwear and the spice. I remember sitting on the couch in my camouflage shorts while he cleaned the kitchen.

“I had a date with a girl last night and I was embarrassed to tell you,” he said.

“Did you even read The Ethical Slut?” I asked, knowing fully that he did not.

“Nooooooooo, did you?” Knowing fully that I did not.

“Noooo.”

We were speaking in snotty five-year-old tones. We spoke like siblings in the back of a car on a long road trip. It was almost funny.

And here’s the thing: we really loved each other. Still do. We were kindred spirits. Still are. We wrote each other love letters. On rolls of receipt paper, on typewriters overseas. We don’t shut up around each other. We don’t sit down. We’re explosive.

But I am not here to talk about my love for him.

**

Orgies, or whatever you want to call them—we had them. The first one was at his apartment in the East Village. His best friend and younger brother were there and I brought my best friend. We did cocaine and kissed and showered and drank rum and danced around in headdresses. I gave his friend a blowjob while he fucked me from behind. My friend gave him a blowjob. It made us closer. We fell asleep in the pre-dawn completely loving each other, spent, with his cat at our feet.

The second orgy was at a hotel, involving the same people minus his brother. We brought a piñata, dressed in different outfits, and tape-recorded ourselves fucking for hours.

**

Before I moved to the West Coast I ordered The Ethical Slut while I was drinking at a small beer and bookstore. I moved before it came in. Two months later my best friend drove across country to visit me and she brought it. When she left a few weeks later, I read it. The book was well written with original anecdotes and an inviting tone. I loved it. I thought I was anew. I could do anything. It kept me up at night. I could feel myself getting smarter. I was fine. I would never get jealous again. I could have polygamous relationships for my whole life. I was lucky. I texted him from my bed about the new things I was learning, how I was healed now. He couldn’t wait to borrow it.

The authors define the term slut as “a person of any gender who has the courage to lead life according to the radical proposition that sex is nice and pleasure is good for you.”

Courage. An underrated attribute. An elusive term. We all want to consider ourselves courageous.

Ethical.

When you are in a non-conventional relationship, and you love the person you are in it with, and the sex is to die for, it’s easy to lose yourself. It’s easy to confuse drowning with floating. I thought I was better than other people—my heart was stronger, my independence was stronger, my passion was stronger. My relationship was stronger because it could exist without co-dependence and without mundane domesticity. Neither of which I am good at. You dilute your thoughts and think that other people don’t understand. But really, you are the one that does not understand that you are hurting yourself. Until you do.

**

My friend Sarah visited me in the Northwest and got really into The Ethical Slut. I told her to take it back to New York with her. At the time she was in a domestic and violent relationship and often had rough sex and exciting fantasies. After reading the book, she admitted that she had always been turned on by the idea of her boyfriend getting head from other girls. The book made her feel like this was normal. She could do it.

**

I visited New York and the man came to see me. We spent two days together at a hotel. On Sunday night before he left, he reminded me that he wanted to borrow The Ethical Slut. He put it on the side of the motorcycle with our leftover Wild Turkey whiskey and rode away.

One of the reasons I loved him so much is because has a heart bigger than his head. He is sincere and earnest and scarily childlike. He says things like, “My most Buddhist moments are in bed.” He is writing a manuscript about every girl he has had a sexual encounter with. He remembers every detail. He loves them all. He explains he wants a little red wagon to put them all in and pull behind him. His working title is I Don’t Like To Let Go.

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

That is pretty much the theme of his life.

**

I flew back to the West Coast. A few weeks passed and then one evening I saw three missed calls from him. He left me a voicemail. “Hey, I started The Ethical Slut, and I had to call you. You’re right—it’s amazing.” I called him back and he was on another plane. He read parts aloud to me and told me he wanted to get out of the relationship he was in. “I will never enter another relationship that inhibits the one between you and me. The relationship I’m in will end like all the others. You and I could still be standing.” We stayed on the phone from seven at night to seven in the morning.

Of course, we had another argument, via email, a day later. Just now, I typed “The Ethical Slut” into my gmail search engine and there were seventeen search results. The first one I clicked on was an email from him saying, “You’re so stuck in this traditional idea of relationships. Jesus, you’re the one that gave me The Ethical Slut.”

These things come back to haunt you. In truth, I was never stuck in the idea of traditional relationships. Until he wouldn’t let me have one.

**

Nothing changed. Nada, niente, at all. Four years. We cried a lot. We made love a lot. Last December after we’d had yet another crash landing, I called my friend while I was crying and walking the streets of New York aimlessly. “Chloe, you guys spent three years being shady for dopamine.” It’s never been better said. We were cheaters, liars; we were addicted to a feeling we’d created. There was not one ethical thing about it. It was the opposite of ethical. Self-help books don’t save lives. Go figure.

**

Our relationship ended up breaking both of our hearts. The last things said were:

“We’re a mess. We’ve always been a mess. But I still love you and I still think we’re going to have our chance. But I’m not asking you to wait, or to do anything. I’ll come find you.”

The part of me that loves him saw the romance in this. Saw the romance in his motorcycle zooming up to my apartment where we would embrace and he would give me my book back and we would have landed. We would be home. But the part of me that that wants to love myself, the part of me that cried in bars and in my mother’s bed and his bed and the part of me that had to deal with my anxious desperate depression and the part of me that couldn’t let go for years is the part of me that responded:

“Don’t. Don’t ever.”

We had our chance.

**

He still has the book. And frankly, I have no desire to own The Ethical Slut or the man that wants to be an Ethical Slut, in my life. I don’t want to be an Ethical Slut. I want to be an Ethical Person. I will say this: As much as I love the idea, as much as I think it is a wonderful book, I don’t think being an Ethical Slut is possible. At least not for him. At least not for me. At least not in New York City. Maybe in San Francisco.

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