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business relationship and sexual dalliance takes place elsewhere, ritual group sex, and pretty much any other configuration of human hearts and genitals that you can imagine.
UTOPIAN SEXUAL COMMUNITIES
    History is dotted with experiments in creating intentional sexual utopias, often with a philosophical or religious basis: if you’re curious, read up on the Oneida community of nineteenth-century Ohio; Rajneeshpuram in India from the late 1960s and Oregon in the 1980s; and Kerista in New York, Belize, and San Francisco from the early 1960s through the 1990s … to name just a few. Such communities are usually built by one leader and may falter when the leader is no longer available. However, their philosophies live on, adding new visions and practices to the mainstream culture. Many practitioners of Western tantra today, for example, can trace their practice to the teachings of Osho, the guiding spirit behind Rajneeshpuram.
ARTISTS AND FREETHINKERS
    It’s easy to point to artists and writers who have built their lives around intentional exploration of alternative relationships. If you’re curious about the ways in which alternative relationships played out in times when there was even less support than there is now, you can read up on the Bloomsbury group in early twentieth-century England, and freethinkers like George Sand, H. G. Wells, Simone de Beauvoir, Alfred Kinsey, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. What we can’t know is how many
non
writers were also building the kind of sexually open lives that worked for them, because there are no records of such lives. We feel safe in supposing, though, that a significant minority of people have always gotten their needs met through ethical multipartner living.
THE LOVE GENERATION
    Dossie came of age surrounded by the utopian concepts of the 1960s, and Janet shortly afterward; both of us have been influenced greatly in our thinking and our lives by those days of radical exploration. Many ideals of that era—nonconformity, exploration of altered states of consciousness, equality of race and gender, ecological awareness, political activism, openness about sexuality, and, yes, the possibility of ethical and loving nonmonogamy—have permeated the greater culture. We very much doubt that we could have written this book or published it in the 1950s, so if you’re reading and enjoying
The Ethical Slut
today, thank a hippie.
Sluthood Today
    Sluts come in all the various forms and styles that humans come in: men and women in all cultures, from all parts of the world, of all religions and lifestyles, rich and poor, with formal and informal education.
    Most of us today live in communities of nonsluts, with only occasional or limited contact with other people who share our values: some groups hold conferences and conventions to mitigate isolation and expand their members’ intimate circles. These conferences are very important in bringing sexual undergrounds into the view of those who are looking for them and building institutions aboveground that can better support their members. Other sluts drop out of mainstream culture to some extent to live in communities composed of people whose sexuality is like their own. San Francisco’s Castro district is a good example of a modern urban “ghetto” for sexual minorities.
    A slut living in mainstream, monogamy-centrist culture in the twenty-first century can learn a great deal from studying other cultures, other places, and other times: you’re
not
the only one in the world who has ever tried this, it
can
work, others have done it without harming themselves, their lovers, their kids—without, in fact, doing anything except enjoying themselves and each other.
    Pioneering sexual subcultures with extensive documented and undocumented histories include communities of gay men and of lesbian women, transgender groups, bisexuals, the leather communities, the swing communities, and some spiritually defined subcultures of pagans, modern primitives, and