The Ethical Slut by Dossie Easton Read Free Book Online

feels good to them.
    And it is gay men who have established most of our understanding of safer sex. In the face of the AIDS epidemic, where many people might have retreated into sex-negativism, the gay community held its ground and continued to create environments where hot, creative, safer sex could be learned and practiced.
BISEXUALS
    Often stigmatized as “gays unwilling to relinquish heterosexual privilege” or “hets taking a walk on the wild side,” bisexuals have recently begun developing their own forceful voice and their own communities.
    Looking at the theory and practice of bisexual lifestyles offers opportunities to explore our assumptions about the nature of sexual and romantic attraction and behaviors. Some folks have had sex only with members of one gender, but know that they have within themselves the ability to connect erotically or emotionally with both genders, and thus consider themselves bisexual—while others may be actively having sex with the gender opposite their usual choice, and still consider themselves heterosexual or gay. Some bisexuals prefer one type of interaction with men and another with women, while othersconsider themselves gender-blind. Some can be sexual with either sex but romantic with only one, or vice versa. And so on, through all the spectrums of bisexual attractions and choices. Bisexuals challenge a lot of our assumptions about gender, and many bi’s can tell you what is different for them between sex with a woman and sex with a man. This interesting and privileged information can provide all of us with new stories about sex and gender.
    The increasing visibility of bisexuality has led to some challenges to traditional definitions of sexual identity. Specifically, we are having to look at the fact that our sexual attractions may say one thing about us, while our sexual behaviors say another, and our sexual identity says yet a third. Questions like these are eating away at some of the traditional boundaries we place around sexual identity, much to the dismay of purists of all orientations. Your authors, sluts that we are, enjoy this kind of fluidity and appreciate the opportunity to play as we like with whoever looks good to us without relinquishing our fundamental sexual identities.
    Janet’s path toward her current identity as a bisexual has been a confusing one: it was nearly a decade after she began having sex with women before she began to feel comfortable using the term to describe herself.
    I felt turned off by the trendiness of “bisexual chic,” and under some pressure to claim an identity that didn’t feel right to me. And at the same time, I was hearing some genuinely cruel judgments from both heterosexuals and homosexuals about bi’s.
    Add to that the difficulty I was having sorting out my own feelings—I knew my feelings toward women were different from those toward men, and I wasn’t sure what
that
meant—and things just got very confusing. As a result, it wasn’t until I knew for sure that I was capable of having both sexual and romantic feelings toward both men and women—and until I felt strong enough to claim the identity in the face of all those negative judgments—that I finally began calling myself “bisexual.”
    I look back on my life now and see that I’ve generally expressed my domestic urges toward men but that my romantic and sexual feelings are about equally likely to be inspired by a man, a woman, orsomeone in between. The bisexual community also offers more support than either straight-land or gay-land for my rather ambiguous gender presentation: some days I like to wear red lipstick and heels and other days men’s trousers and oxfords. So “bisexual” is the identity that fits me best, and where I expect to stay.
HETEROSEXUALS
    In bygone decades, there were relatively few role models for heterosexual interaction in mainstream culture: an Ozzie and Harriet household, monogamous, patriarchal, and focused on conformity and child