Dossie Easton is standing on the porch of her cottage tucked in the trees. “Over here,” she shouts — useful instruction, as the redwoods of western Marin, California, occlude just about everything.
Easton, now 79, is a psychotherapist and the co-author, with Janet W. Hardy, of The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships and Other Freedoms in Sex and Love. The book, known as the poly bible, is sort of a cross between Joy of Cooking, Our Bodies, Ourselves, and The Official Preppy Handbook — part instruction manual, part physical guide, part totem of a growing subculture. It’s sold hundreds of thousands of copies since the first of its three editions was published in 1997. “Who would think,” Easton asks, “you could fund your retirement with a book about being a slut?”
Over the years, Easton has been a single slut, a partnered slut, a slut mom, a slut educator, a top slut, a bottom slut, a slut therapist who quit the party scene in 1991 so as to not create awkward run-ins with clients. (She specializes in treating people in the poly and queer communities.) She’s a slut who had vertebrae fused in her back and now worries about accessing her own pleasure through a backdrop of banal pain. She’s a slut who is not as slutty as she once was but not fully retired, either. She has a new lover coming to visit in February, the same month she turns 80.
Easton lives alone and her kitchen is the magic hippie haven you want it to be: prints of mushrooms on the walls, a cabinet full of tea, dreamy black-and-white photographs of her daughter, now in her mid-50s, when she was a free-range gay-commune-dwelling child. A wooden bookholder rests astride Easton’s claw-foot bathtub. Her living room is filled with shrines: feathers, rocks, candles, and alters to goddesses, including Mercy and Severity. Last year, Easton tells me, she fell and shattered her elbow. Would I mind cutting these apples and that persimmon for us to snack on with the “slightly interesting” local cheese? She moves slowly, carefully. The years of exuberant physicality are gone. She would like to be well enough to hike in the lush mountains around her home again.
“Would you mind slicing the bread?”
She is adept at asking for what she wants.
How to love without possessing? How to free yourself of shame? How to find liberation, transcendence, even community through the body? These are the questions that have animated Easton’s life. She grew up in Andover, Massachusetts, because her German and Scottish immigrant parents thought it would be good to live by the prep school. As a young woman, she was scared of sex. She tells me, “I had a great deal of trouble losing my virginity because I would get very panicky at the moment of truth, as it were,” from all the anxiety around intercourse created by cultural norms that had lodged in her brain. She dropped out of Bryn Mawr at age 18 and moved to New York. There, she found kindred souls accessing their pleasure, exploring many different kinds of sex and many different lovers. (“I did a very bad job of turning myself into a nice young lady from New England.”) Still, she entered a monogamous relationship with a man. During the Summer of Love — 1967 — they moved to California. The following year he developed schizophrenia and became violent and paranoid. He threatened to kill Easton and burned all her clothes. At 24, terrified and pregnant, she left him.
On an acid trip in 1969, after her daughter was born, Easton had an epiphany: Sexual liberation — practicing it, educating others about it — was her life’s work. She vowed never to be monogamous again. “I could not figure out how it was ever going to benefit me in any way to be some guy’s territory,” she tells me. “It was too dangerous.” She realized we had a right to enjoy sex — we all had a right to enjoy sex — with whomever we pleased as long as we treated everyone involved well. This, for Easton, like many others, was explicitly linked to feminism. She came out as bisexual. Who would she be if she wasn’t “trying to behave like a wife,” if she instead was “working to complete myself as a human being on an individual basis, not by being someone else’s other half.”
She raised her daughter in a community of gay men in the Santa Cruz Mountains; she had a gay male “nesting partner” for eight years. She hosted a sex-education radio show. She attended lots of “play parties,” where she appreciated the nascent techies. (Curiosity about how things work made them good lovers; they “bothered to learn about what they were doing.”) She grew interested in BDSM — its exquisite vulnerability and endorphins. She met Hardy after Hardy, who had a male partner at the time, volunteered to play the bottom at a BDSM teach-in Easton was holding at the Society of Janus. The two then wrote together The Topping Book and The Bottoming Book. Not long after, the hosts of a Mensa conference in Monterey, California, invited Easton and Hardy to give a presentation. The two women, onstage, “flirted in role” and did “a mock negotiation in role,” talking “about whips and chains, the kind of stuff that terrifies folks.” Later that evening, they heard a woman say, “Did you see that? They were planning sex, and her husband was sitting right there!” Easton said to Hardy, “I think we need to write another book.”
Easton hoped, in The Ethical Slut, people would find not just a lexicon, not just a way to start dismantling the boxes in your brain, but a community. “Nothing builds intimacy like shared vulnerability, right?” she says. “And what could be more vulnerable than taking all your clothes off at a party?” You also learn “if you look around that everybody looks gorgeous when they’re having an orgasm. Awkward positions and waving the feet in the air, making outrageous noises, screaming, grimacing faces, and they look great.”
On Easton’s bookshelf is The Ethical Slut’s cultural and literary genealogy. Kinsey. Kate Millet. Lonnie Barbach. Esther Perel. (Easton admits to title-envy of Mating in Captivity.) The Intimate Enemy. Masters and Johnson. “Cassell’s Encyclopedia of Queer Myth, Symbol, and Spirit — this one was a real page-turner for me,” she says.
“This one is the most interesting of the terrible books” — Sexual Surrender in Women, published by Benjamin Morse in 1962. “I read it when I was 19. Oh my God, she masturbates. And with her clitoris, too — how could she?!”
The resurgence of interest in polyamory is a nice but low-key factor in Easton’s life. She’s already been living in the poly universe. Among Easton’s favorite ideas in The Ethical Slut is that relationships, like water, seek their own natural level, if we let them flow. Her own life has run an organic course. “People used to say, ‘But aren’t you afraid of dying alone?’ I’m 80 and I’m single right now.”
This is the fear: You trade stability for freedom in your youth. What happens later? “I’ve actually lived with a partner in this house,” Easton tells me. “We had a terrible breakup. The last year of our relationship” — 2009 — “was very ugly and unpleasant.” Easton was 38 years older than her partner. She insisted, after her lover moved out, that they meet for dinner or a movie once a month “just to stay civilized.” Then, about ten years ago, Easton’s ex, a woman, said to her, “I’m planning a ritual. I’d like your help.” The ex had decided to have a baby on her own, and she wanted to gather her community for support. Everyone sent a piece of cloth. Her ex’s mother sewed them into a chuppah. Easton joined her ex, and her ex’s two current lovers, at the birthing classes — “We made an interesting presentation,” Easton says — and at the births of her two sons. “They were just here visiting. They call me Grandma Dossie. They’re my fairy grandsons.”