I just finished reading
The Ethical Slut: Third Edition, A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships, and Other Freedoms in Sex and Love, by Janet W. Hardy and Dossie Easton, and I find myself having mixed feelings about it.
This title came to my attention when, as a result of a good friend of mine adding me to their Amazon Household (and so letting me use their Prime account), we realized that we could see each other's Kindle libraries. Neither of us minded the other browsing what ebooks we've purchased (and if we had, Amazon lets you disable this feature), and since I've been on a years-long push to read a wider variety of nonfiction, I elected to give this title a shot.
As the title says, this book is a guide for those who have (or want to have) relationships with multiple partners. I avoid saying "close" or "intimate" relationships because the authors make it clear that what degree of partnership you have with others can be variable, from sharing your entire life with someone to a person you get together to have a fling with every once in a while. And my parsing things like that goes to the heart of this book, which is that there are a lot of different arrangements, and ways to make such arrangements work.
In regards to this variability, the book's advice is largely what you'd expect, in that it strongly encourages communication and respect between everyone involved. It's not too hyperbolic of me to say that pretty well encapsulates most of what's here; most of the advice beyond that can be summarized as realizing what's going on with your own feelings and dealing with them accordingly.
Now, the above comes across as somewhat reductive, since the book does have some more practical strategies in mind for various issues. But given the variable nature of multi-partner relationships, most of these take the form of suggestions or examples rather than any sort of concrete advice or assurances, which might very well be for the best. As the title says, this is a guide more than any sort of how-to manual, though at times it does come perilously close to being like a self-help book, and at others fringes on sounding New Age-esque.
All of that is well and good, of course; where I found myself frowning was at the book's repeated insinuations that cultural forces, as opposed to any sort of evolutionary psychology, were solely to blame for sex-negativity. Indeed, apart from one (unsourced) assertion that "recent research" has determined that humans only began to display sexual jealousy around eight thousand years ago, when hunting-gathering was abandoned in favor of agrarian lifestyles, the book doesn't really acknowledge any sort of inherent aspect to things like jealousy or possessiveness, repeatedly talking about infants learning these things from their environment.
While I have no doubt that's true to some degree, my
recent reading of
A Billion Wicked Thoughts makes me think that the authors are (I suspect inadvertently) downplaying the degree to which these things are ingrained in us. Even the pressure to conform to social norms, presented as something to be "unlearned" in this book, came across as more simplistic (or perhaps idealistic) than
what I'd read in
Ritual.
Now, I don't particularly hold that against this book or its authors; the latter aren't scientists, and this isn't meant to be any sort of informative treatise on the nature of human sexuality. Likewise, most of the advice here is genuinely good, if perhaps somewhat aspirational. I just think that this paints an incomplete picture as to why we act the way we do, and so my expectation is that this advice won't be
quite as helpful as the authors think it is.
