#3 The Ethical Slut by Dossie Easton

MYTHS ABOUT SLUTS One of the challenges facing the ethical slut is our culture’s insistence that, simply because ‚everybody knows‘ something, it must obviously be true. We urge you to regard with great skepticism any sentence that begins “Everybody knows that…” or “Common sense tells us that…” or “Is common knowledge that…”. Often, these phrases are signposts for cultural belief systems, that may be antisexual, monogamycentrist, and/or codependent. 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. Cultural belief systems can be very deeply rooted in literature, law and archetypes, which means that shaking them from your own personal ethos can be difficult. But the first step in exploring them is, of course, recognizing them. Here, then, are some of the pervasive myths that we have heard all our lives and have come to understand are most often untrue and destructive to our relationships and our lives.

MYTH #3: SEXUAL DESIRE IS A DESTRUCTIVE FORCE This one goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden and leads to a lot of crazy-making double standards. Some religions appear to believe that women’s sexuality is evil and dangerous and exists only to lure men to their doom. From the Victorian era, we get the idea that men are hopelessly voracious and predatory when it comes to sex and women are supposed to control and civilize them by being pure, asexual and withholding – men are the gas pedal and women the brakes, which is, we think, pretty hard on the engine. Neither of these works for us.