Review: “The Ethical Slut (3rd Ed.)” by Janet W. Hardy & Dossie Easton
When a piece of media is so iconic, when it is so prolific on bookshelves across the polyamorous community, it creates an incredibly high standard that all but challenges me to find flaws. So I went into The Ethical Slut ready to go against the consensus and find the flaws no one else was willing to see. Especially since I've not been impressed with Hardy and Easton's work in the past. Could the book really be as good as everyone says?
Yes. Yes, it could. I just don’t think it’s actually about polyamory.
The classic guide to love, sex, and intimacy beyond the limits of conventional monogamy has been fully updated to reflect today's modern attitudes and the latest information on nontraditional relationships.
For 20 years The Ethical Slut has dispelled myths and showed curious readers how to maintain a successful polyamorous lifestyle through open communication, emotional honesty, and safer sex practices. The third edition of this timeless guide to communication and sex has been revised to include interviews with poly millennials (young people who have grown up without the prejudices their elders encountered regarding gender, orientation, sexuality, and relationships), tributes to poly pioneers, and new sidebars on topics such as asexuality, sex workers, and ways polys can connect and thrive.
How do you review such an iconic book as The Ethical Slut?
Well, if you're me, you go into it with the aim of giving it a really hard time. Sometimes, I can have a bit of an iconoclastic streak. When something is so popular that everyone claims it's amazing, my immediate question is whether they actually believe that or if they have fallen into the trap of telling themselves they like something simply because everyone else is saying the same thing.
Think of some examples of hugely successful TV shows. I'm not going to name them here, but I'm willing to bet you can all think of at least one show that is objectively terrible but somehow gets massive viewing numbers. It's not because it's good, but because it gets given the right primetime slot, so people watch it by default, so it gets viewer numbers, so people believe it must be good. The show isn't good; it simply develops social momentum until people have convinced themselves that it is. Why else would they continue to watch it?
That's what I was ready for with this The Ethical Slut. With everyone in the ENM community saying it's the "best book ever written", I was ready to be disappointed. Not because I want to be the hipster who knows better than everyone else, but because I don't like the idea of the source of something's popularity being popularity itself.
So, now I’ve finally read The Ethical Slut, what did I think?
Well, after going into this book actively looking for any excuse to cut it down to size, I've come to the conclusion that The Ethical Slut lives up to the hype and deserves every last shred of its reputation.
What I don't think is that it should be associated purely with polyamory.
I'm confident that The Ethical Slut is the first book the majority of people looking to explore ethical non-monogamy are recommended. And this is almost certainly a good thing. But I would argue it should be aimed not only at the non-monogamous but at anyone wanting a bit more education about sex and relationships. The subtitle for The Ethical Slut is "a practical guide to polyamory, open relationships, and other freedoms in sex and love", but I don't think I would call it a book about polyamory. I would instead focus on the "freedoms in sex and love".
Sure, it was apparently Hardy and Easton's original intention for this to be a book specifically about polyamory. But I think this is actually a weakness that I've seen in their work before. They have written a book about healthy relationships, but because their healthy relationships are polyamorous, they make the assumption that all healthy relationships must be polyamorous.
In my eyes, Hardy and Easton have created a treatise about freedom and exploration in relationships. They are not educating us about polyamory but teaching us how to look at sex and relationships from a new perspective, how to break out of the artificial shame-based restrictions society has placed on us, lose the guilt we have been taught to feel around sex and find our own truths.
And one that front, it doesn’t put a foot wrong. Hardy and Easton have decades of experience around relationships, both personal and professional. They have seen how traditional relationships don’t work because of the societal expectations and restrictions that have built up around them and learned the best ways to see through these and escape them.
Should you read The Ethical Slut if you want to learn more about polyamory?
Yes. One hundred per cent.
But what you shouldn't do is think it's only worth reading if you want to learn about polyamory. You should read The Ethical Slut because it's a foundational piece of learning how to build better relationships as a whole.
Yes, this might lead you to consider the idea of ethical non-monogamy where you hadn't done before. But even if Hardy and Easton's original intention was to educate on polyamory, I think what they've actually done is educate on sex and relationships in general, and this just happens to be through the lens of non-monogamy because this is the author's particular worldview so their options are framed by it.
But despite the authors' intentions, the core message of the book shines through the framing, creating a book that is universal in its appeal and a must for every bookshelf.
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