{"id":128,"date":"2006-03-23T16:55:36","date_gmt":"2006-03-24T00:55:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/2006\/03\/23\/the-ethical-slut\/"},"modified":"2015-10-09T13:25:39","modified_gmt":"2015-10-09T21:25:39","slug":"the-ethical-slut","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/2006\/03\/23\/the-ethical-slut\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ethical Slut"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Book Review: The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities by Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt<br \/>\nThis eloquent book is mostly fun to read. It provides a good alternative to the standard view of sluts: &#8220;A slut shares his sexuality the way a philanthropist shares her money&#8221;.<br \/>\nBut much of the book seems designed mainly to reassure sluts that they aren&#8217;t alone and shouldn&#8217;t be ashamed of themselves. I didn&#8217;t get much out of those parts.<br \/>\nThey say a number of things that don&#8217;t seem quite right, such as defining consent to refer only to &#8220;active collaboration&#8221;, or suggesting that people schedule fights (a rather strange way of describing how to ensure communication).<br \/>\nTheir claims about how desirable polyamory is seem exaggerated. One of their more appropriate analogies is &#8220;having a second child doesn&#8217;t usually mean that a parent loves the first child less&#8221;. The people who think parents have an unlimited supply of love but love between spouses is a zero-sum game appear to be hypocrites, but I suspect the first child doesn&#8217;t fare as well as the optimistic view suggests.<br \/>\nI think a more instructive analogy would be supply side economics. The zero-sum thinking that leads some people to think that tax cuts\/polyamory simply shift a fixed amount of wealth\/love assume an unrealistically static human nature that overlooks the ability of people to be more creative when constraints on income\/love are weakened, and that can easily make the average person better off. But there will be plenty of shifting of income\/love that makes it hard to predict which individuals will be better off.<br \/>\nLest my comments be interpreted as being overly critical of polyamory, I should mention that this book was recommended to me by a very polyamorous <a href=\"http:\/\/stoneself.livejournal.com\">boyfriend<\/a> (who has by his example taught me more than a book like this could), not to help with our relationship, but to help me look for an additional boyfriend. Our relationship is sufficiently atypical that I&#8217;m still wondering how well a typical polyamorous relationship works.<br \/>\nPeople interested in this subject might also get something out of <b>Polyamory: The New Love Without Limits : Secrets of Sustainable Intimate Relationships<\/b> by Deborah M. Anapol, which is written more carefully but in a less entertaining style.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Book Review: The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities by Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt This eloquent book is mostly fun to read. It provides a good alternative to the standard view of sluts: &#8220;A slut shares his sexuality the way a philanthropist shares her money&#8221;. But much of the book seems designed [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22],"tags":[142,93],"class_list":["post-128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-polyamory","tag-relationships"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p80O1l-24","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":444,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128\/revisions\/444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}