Dossie Easton Quotes

The real test of love is when a person—including you—can know your weaknesses, your stupidities and your smallnesses, and still love you.

One remedy for the fear of not being loved is to remember how good it feels to love someone. If you're feeling unloved and you want to feel better, go love someone, and see what happens.

the most successful long-term relationships are the ones with enough flexibility to redefine themselves over and over again through the years.

The cultural ban on having sex with your friends is an inevitable offshoot of a societal belief that the only acceptable reason to have sex is to lead to a monogamous marriagelike relationship.

It felt so wonderful that she concluded that the existence of her clitoris was proof positive that God loved her.

A lot of people describe having sex with only one person as 'being faithful'. It seems to me that faithfulness has very little to do with who you have sex with. Faithfulness is about honoring your commitments and respecting your friends and lovers, about caring for their well-being as well as your own.

GREAT SLUTS are made, not born.

One of the most valuable things we can learn from open sexual lifestyles is that our programming is changeable.

Love is not a real-world limit: the mother of nine children can love each of them as much as the mother of an only child.

Fighting is the ultimate act of intimacy. (...) Intimacy is based on shared vulnerability.

Nymphomaniac: a woamn that has more sex than you.

The problem is that when you blame someone else for how you feel, you disempower yourself from finding solutions. If this is someone else’s fault, only that person can fix it, right? So poor you can’t do anything but sit there and moan. On

The problem is that when you blame someone else for how you feel, you disempower yourself from finding solutions.

When you have built a satisfying relationship with yourself, then you have something of great worth to share with others. Abundance

To be an ethical slut you need to have very good boundaries that are clear, strong, flexible, and, above all, conscious.

The binary nature of monogamy-centrist thinking tends, we think, to cause problems: you’re either the love of my life, or you’re out of here.

When you respect your limits, other will learn to respect them too.

Only actions can be crimes. Let us repeat that one: emotions are never wrong; only actions can be wrong. Emotions are an expression of our emotional truth, and truth cannot be wrong. Nor do they need to be justified. They just need to be felt. Remember,

No one "makes" you feel jealous or insecure, the person who makes you feel that way is you. [...] when you blame someone else for how you feel, you disempower yourself.

Most of us need some support in asking for what we want. When we are involved in making agreements, we need to feel sure that the needs we reveal will not be held against us. Most of us feel pretty vulnerable in and around our emotional limits, so it’s important to recognize that these limits are valid: “I need to feel loved,” “I need to feel that I’m important to you,” “I need to know that you find me attractive,” “I need you to listen and care about me when I feel hurt.

A final note about love: One remedy for the fear of not being loved is to remember how good it feels to love someone. If you’re feeling unloved and you want to feel better, go love someone, and see what happens.

A friend of ours, when she trips over some surprisingly intense emotional response, says, philosophically, “Oh well—AFOG,” which stands, she says, for Another Fucking Opportunity for Growth.

If you believe that you can use sex to shore up your fragile self-esteem by stealing someone else's, we feel sorry for you, because this will never work to build a solid sense of self worth, and you will have to go on stealing more and more and never getting fulfilled.

When we tell our partners that we feel jealous, we are making ourselves vulnerable in a very profound way. When our partners respond with respect, listen to us, validate our feelings, support and reassure us, we feel better taken care of than we would have if no difficulty had arisen in the first place. So we strongly recommend that you and your partners give each other the profoundly bonding experience of sharing your vulnerabilities. We are all human, we are all vulnerable, and we all need validation.

When penetration is desired, the focus is on what works for the recipient: we have yet to meet a dildo that got hung up on its own needs.

Some people habitually respond to a lover’s pain and confusion with an intense desire to fix something. Fix-it messages can feel like invalidation to the person who is trying to express an emotion. “Why don’t you just do this … try that … forget about it … relax!” sends the message that the person expressing the emotion has overlooked some obvious and simple solution and is an idiot for feeling bad in the first place. Such messages are disempowering and invalidating.

A great many people do believe that to be single is to be somehow incomplete and that they need to find the other half. [...] We believe, on the other hand, that the fundamental sexual unit is one person. Adding more people to that unit may be intimate, fun and companionable, but does not complete anybody.

People often learn about starvation economies in childhood, when parents who are emotionally depleted or unavailable teach us that we must work hard to get our emotional needs met, so that if we relax our vigilance for even a moment, a mysterious someone or something may take the love we need away from us.

It is basic to any relationship, and particularly important in open relationships, that no one can own another person.

Sex that’s limited to perfunctory foreplay and then a race down the express track to orgasm is an insult to the human capacity for pleasure.

What you are not responsible for is your lover’s emotions. You can choose to be supportive—we’re great believers in the healing power of listening—but it is not your job to fix anything.

So what’s wrong with wanting attention? Isn’t there plenty? Remember about starvation economies: Don’t shortchange yourself. You do not have to be content with little dribs and drabs of comfort, attention, support, reassurance, and love. You get to have all the comfort and reassurance you want.

It’s a very good idea for everyone to learn to live single—to figure out how to get your needs met without being partnered so you don’t find yourself seeking a partner to fill needs that you could equally well fill yourself.

Once you have a handle on loving yourself, you can practice sharing that love with others. You’ve probably been taught to reserve the language of love for when you’re feeling overwhelmingly tender and passionate, and only for those who have made huge commitments to you. We recommend instead learning to recognize and acknowledge all the sweet feelings that make life worthwhile even when they don’t knock you over—and, moreover, learning to communicate those feelings to the people who inspire them.

This kind of love can be thrilling and overwhelming and sometimes a hell of a lot of fun, but it is not the only “real” kind of love, nor is it always a good basis for an ongoing relationship. Yet as George Bernard Shaw famously remarked, “When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.

Marriage today is the outcome government imposing its standards on personal relationships, legislating a one-size-fits-all mandate for how people in sexual or domestic relationships ought to run their lives.

We think that relationship structures should be designed to fit the people in them rather than people chosen to fit some abstract ideal of the perfect relationship. There’s no right or wrong way to do this as long as everyone’s having fun and getting their needs met.

Faithfulness is about honoring your commitments and respecting your friends and lovers, about caring for their well-being as well as your own. If

When you find yourself responding to someone else’s behavior, it can be easy to dwell on what that person has done and how terrible it is and what exactly they should should do to fix it. Instead, try looking at your own feelings as a true message about your internal state of being, and decide how you want to deal with whatever’s going on.

A technique for good listening is to listen to what your partner has to say without interrupting and let them know you heard them by telling them what you think they just said.

Only when we’re all willing to own our emotions, and let our lovers and friends own theirs, does anyone have the power to change and grow.

For us, when our sexual lifestyle is essential to our sense of identity, anybody who doesn't know about our kink doesn't really know us.

A ring around the finger does not cause a nerve block to the genitals.

Introducing your lovers helps prevent one of the scariest aspects of jealousy, which is the part where you imagine that your lover’s other lover is taller, thinner, smarter, sexier, and in all ways preferable to funky old you. When you meet that other person or when your lovers meet each other, they meet real people, warts and all, and so often wind up feeling safer. Introducing

When you find yourself worrying about how you are seen by others, remember that there is no point in pretending you are anyone except who you are. It does you no good to attract someone who thinks you are somebody else: all you get is someone who is excited about somebody who isn’t you. When you are honest, you attract the people who are interested in you, just as you most wonderfully are.

When you are single, you have unique opportunities to deepen that relationship with yourself, to find out who you are, and to celebrate your journey in whatever relationships you may move through as you travel through your life.

It seems to me that faithfulness has very little to do with who you have sex with.” Faithfulness is about honoring your commitments and respecting your friends and lovers, about caring for their well-being as well as your own. If

Being single offers the opportunity to spend time being purely who you are. Singles enjoy more freedom to explore, fewer obligations, and the ability to lounge around the house in a holey T-shirt, playing video games, with nobody the wiser.

We have been taught that forgiveness is a singular act to be completed in one sitting. That is not so. Forgiveness has many layers. It is also taught that forgiveness means to overlook, to act as though a thing had not occurred. This is not true either.

We believe that the fundamental sexual unit is one person; adding more people to that unit may be intimate, fun, and companionable but does not complete anybody.

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

It’s not easy being easy.

The important thing is to be aware of your needs and wants, so you can go about getting them met with full consciousness. If you pretend that you have no needs for sex, for affection, for emotional support, you are lying to yourself, and you will wind up trying to get your needs met by indirect methods that don't work very well. [...] Do not commit yourself to a lifetime of hinting and hoping

How are we to teach our children to say “no” to an abusive adult if we are not frank about what it is that they should say “no” to? When we try to keep sex secret from our kids, they are aware that something is going on, but they don’t know what. And if we leave them to get their sex information in the playground or on the street, from equally ill-informed other kids, we consign them to the jungle.

Remember, as you look at yourself, to look kindly, and also remember that you are not balancing a checkbook: anything you see that you don’t like, or that you want to change, is not a debit that you subtract from your virtues. When you learn to reflect on your strengths, it becomes easier to look at your weaknesses with acceptance and compassion. Keep your virtues at their full value and cherish them.

Once you’ve gotten comfortable with “no,” “yes” is usually easier. Try it, in all its variations: “Yes, please.” “Yes, when?” “Yes, but I have some limits I want to tell you about first.” “Yes, but I need you to talk to my partner first.” “Yes, but not tonight; how does next Tuesday look for you?” “Hell, yes!

when you own your feelings, you have lots of choices. You can talk about how you feel, you can choose whether or not you want to act on those feelings, you can learn how to understand yourself better, you can comfort yourself or ask for comfort. Owning your feelings is basic to understanding the boundaries of where you end and the next person begins and the perfect first step toward self-acceptance and self-love.

Cuando empezamos a cuestionar todas las maneras en que nos han dicho que debíamos ser, podemos empezar a editar y rescribir las grabaciones antiguas. Rompiendo las normas, a la vez nos liberamos y nos empoderamos.

You might also want to do some thinking about how much time you need to get your needs met: do you really have to stay over and have breakfast together the next day, or would an hour or two of cuddling and talk be just as nice?

Even people who consider themselves sex-positive and sexually liberated often fall into a different trap—the trap of rationalizing sex. Releasing physical tension, relieving menstrual cramps, maintaining mental health, preventing prostate problems, making babies, cementing relationships, and so on are all admirable goals, and wonderful side benefits of sex. But they are not what sex is for. People have sex because it feels very good, and then they feel good about themselves. Pleasure is a complete and worthwhile goal in and of itself: the worthiness of pleasure is one of the core values of ethical sluthood.

Empathy in BDSM presents a wonderful paradox: as tops in role, we are often called upon to present ourselves as cold, cruel and unfeeling, when in fact we are getting our rocks off on an empathy so profound that it can approach the telepathic. So we believe that, contrary to the opinions of the uninformed, consensual sadism, dominance and topping are primarily empathic activities.

Practice self-nurturing, not only to get you through hard times but to guide you into a loving relationship with yourself. When you follow through with a simple act like comforting yourself with homemade soup, bringing home a fragrant flower for your night table, or taking a sweet solitary walk in a beautiful place, then you get an experience of being kind to yourself that can answer all those questions about “what do they mean, love myself?” This question is more easily answered by doing than by thinking.

Many of us start out paralyzed by shame and embarrassment, even after we figure out that we don’t want to be embarrassed by sex. The beliefs we were taught—that our bodies, our desires, and sex are dirty and wrong—make it very hard to develop healthy sexual self-esteem.

How many times have you rejected the possibility of love because it didn’t look the way you expected it to? Perhaps some characteristic was missing you were sure you must have, some other trait was present that you never dreamed of accepting. What happens when you throw away your expectations and open your eyes to the fabulous love that is shining right in front of you, holding out its hand? Clean love is love without expectations.

Be nice to your body and then go find somebody else’s body to be nice to, and somebody will be nice to your body, too. Someone who has happily given themselves as many orgasms as they want is unlikely to approach their other relationships in a state of sexual desperation. Sexual self-sufficiency is an important slut skill that makes us far less likely to play with the wrong person just because we’re so horny. Be your own best lover.

We know from extensive experience that appearance and wealth are not predictors of good loving. We try to avoid ranking people as better or worse than each other and are unhappy with those who want to relate to our rank more than our selves. Hierarchies produce victims on the top as well as the bottom, because it is almost as alienating to be approached by too many people for the wrong reasons as it is to be approached by nobody at all.

Write this on your mirror: sexually successful people masturbate. You are not jerking or buzzing off because you are a loser, because you can’t find anyone to play with, or because you are desperate to get your rocks off. You’re making love to yourself because you deserve pleasure, and playing with yourself makes you feel good.

Cuando has construido una relación satisfactoria contigo mismo, entonces tienes algo de gran valor para compartir con los demás.

Dossie, giving a lecture on consent to about two hundred people, asked those who had never been sexually assaulted to stand up.

BDSM gives us permission to act in ways that are unacceptable in the outside world

We believe that friendship is an excellent reason to have sex, and that sex is an excellent way to maintain a friendship

Listen to your fears: they have a lot to teach you about yourself.

Jealousy may be an expression of insecurity, fear of rejection, fear of abandonment, or feeling left out, not good enough, inadequate, or awful.

If you don’t want to play tennis with me, I’ll ask somebody else, and if you don’t want to play bondage games with me, somebody else will—our relationship will not be less for it. What we share is valuable for what we share. Period.

(...) psychologist Wilhelm Reich theorized that the suppression of sexuality was essential to an authoritarian government. Without the imposition of antisexual morality, he believed, people would be free from shame and would trust their own sense of right and wrong. They would be unlikely to march to war against their wishes, or to operate death camps. Perhaps if we were raised without shame and guilt about our desires, we might be freer people in more ways than simply the sexual.

We bottom in order to go to places within ourselves and with our partners that we cannot get to without a top. To explore these spaces, we need someone to push us over the edge in the right ways, and to keep us safe while we’re out there flying.

Few of us have so much time on our hands that we can simply have conversations, sex, recreation, family time, or even fights whenever we feel like it—mundane reality has a tendency to get in the way of such important stuff. And yes, we do think fighting is important and necessary—we’ll talk more about the hows and whys in chapter 16, “Embracing Conflict.” If scheduling a fight seems a little bit absurd, just imagine the results of letting the tension build for several days because you haven’t made time to argue.

One of the most valuable things we learn from open sexual lifestyles is that our programming about love, intimacy, and sex can be rewritten. When we begin to question all the ways we have been told we ought to be, we can begin to edit and rewrite our old tapes.

If you have a partner who is struggling with reclaiming their sexuality from an ugly history of violence, we hope that you will choose to become an ally in that struggle and find the patience to support the work that needs to be done to claim a joyous sexuality.

Real-World Limits In contrast to starvation economies, some of the things we want really are limited. There are only twenty-four hours in the day, for example— so trying to find enough time to do all the wonderfully slutty things we enjoy, with all the people we care about, can be a real challenge and sometimes impossible. Time is the biggest real-world limit we encounter in trying to live and love as we like. This problem is hardly exclusive to sluts; monogamous folks also run into problems finding the time for sex, companionship, and communication.

One of the newer terms in the poly lexicon, relationship anarchy, refers to a lifestyle decision not to take one partner as a “primary” and others as “secondaries” (or any hierarchy of that kind) but instead to maintain each relationship as separate and to make as few rules as possible.

When we blame, we fail to shoulder our part of the burden; we project the responsibility for whatever is wrong onto another, usually to protect ourselves from feeling terribly guilty or anxious. When we blame, we also disempower ourselves – if it’s all your fault, then I must be impotent.

Don’t give up! Your therapist author Dossie specializes in healing old wounds for trauma survivors and is happy to announce that many people find ways to deal with their history of violation, take care of themselves when painful memories show up, succeed in reclaiming ownership of their bodies, and enjoy a free and happy sexuality.

A basic precept of intimate communication is that each person owns their own feelings. No one "makes" you feel jealous or insecure—the person who makes you feel that way is you. No matter what the other person is doing, what you feel in response is determined inside you. Even when somebody deliberately tries to hurt you, you make a choice about how you feel.

When you sit down to write a book about sex, as we hope you one day will, you will discover that centuries of censorship have left us with very little adequate language with which to discuss the joys and occasional worries of sex. The language that we do have often carries implicit judgments: If the only polite way to talk about sexuality is in medical Latin—vulvas and pudendas, penes and testes—are only doctors allowed to talk about sex? Is sex all about disease? Meanwhile, most of the originally English words—cock and cunt, fucking, and, oh yes, slut—have been used as insults to degrade people and their sexuality and often have a hostile or coarse feel to them. Euphemisms—peepees and pussies, jade gates and mighty towers—sound as if we are embarrassed. Maybe we are.

A subset of this myth is the belief that if you’re really in love, you will automatically lose all interest in others; thus, if you’re having sexual or romantic feelings toward anyone but your primary partner, you’re not really in love. This belief has cost many people a great deal of happiness through the centuries, yet is untrue to the point of absurdity: a ring around the finger does not cause a nerve block to the genitals.

All our wonderful sexual freedom is dependent on two very important conditions: freedom from sexism and freedom from rape. These changes must take place at both the individual and community levels. Prosecuting rape and child molestation is quite difficult, so our communities need to work for our own safety. We can seldom send offenders to jail, but we can uninvite them from our parties, and remove them from the other environments that we control, both online and in the physical world. (...) Much of this conflict is the consequence of our absurd cultural insistence that in sex, men should be the initiators and women the withholders. Thus, some people learn that they are supposed to be pushy and others that saying anything but no is, well, slutty. This pattern leads to “no” being heard as an invitation to push harder, with predictably disastrous results.

Our beliefs about traditional marriage date from agrarian cultures, where you made everything you ate or wore or used, where large extended families helped get this huge amount of work done so nobody starved, and where marriage was a working proposition. When we talk about “traditional family values,” this is the family we are talking about: an extended family of grandparents and aunts and cousins, an organization to accomplish the work of staying alive.

If we take a look within ourselves when shame arises, we might find the places where we block ourselves, where somehow we believe that something is very wrong with us, and no one will ever love us or choose to connect with us once they see our brokenness. So how do we create a path to recovery from any shame we learned when we were too small to understand why? Here are words to live by: the enemy of shame is curiosity —the same curiosity we might have been punished for when we were two. Curiosity that wants to be playful, to explore what feels good; curiosity that lets us wonder why our tongues get tied and our cheeks burn when the moment comes to tell a person who loves and accepts us what, precisely, we dream of doing with them. So how can we get from where we are to where we want to be, free of all that worrying and shame? Use your curiosity to ask, “How did I learn this?” “What did I come to believe about myself when I was taught that touching myself ‘down there’ was shameful?” “What do I believe about myself today?” “What do I think would be a healthier belief?

o volveré a sentir esto nunca más, es demasiado horrible, moriré, me suicidaré». Así que guardamos ese sentimiento, y el hecho que lo ocasionó, en una especie de olla que tapamos bien fuerte. Según pasan los años, cuando pasa algo que nos recuerda a lo que tenemos en la olla, que hace vibrar un poco la tapa, la apretamos más. «Tengo que mantener tapada la olla», nos decimos, quizás ni siquiera recordemos por qué. Y la presión sube y sube, no tanto por lo que está dentro de la olla como por nuestra lucha frenética para mantener la olla tapada.

Nudity is a gray area. We certainly don’t think kids are harmed by growing up in households where casual nudity is the norm. But children who have never been around nude adults may be upset if nudity is suddenly introduced into their living room. Kids can be very sensitive to issues like sexual display, and flashing is clearly a violation of boundaries. Certainly, if a child expresses discomfort with being around your or your friends’ nudity, his or her desires should be respected. And we hope it goes without saying that no child should ever be required to be nude in front of others—many children go through phases of extreme modesty as they struggle to cope with their changing bodies, and that, too, deserves scrupulous respect. What

Each person owns their own feelings. No one “makes” you feel jealous or insecure — the person who makes you feel that way is you. No matter what the other person is doing, what you feel in response is determined inside you. Even when somebody deliberately tries to hurt you, you make a choice about how you feel. You might feel angry or hurt or frightened or guilty. The choice, not usually conscious, happens inside you. Reaching this understanding is not as easy as it sounds. When you feel rotten, it can be hard to accept the responsibility for how you feel: wouldn’t this be easier if it were someone else’s fault? The problem is that when you blame someone else for how you feel, you disempower yourself. If this is someone else’s fault, only that person can fix it, right? So poor you can’t do anything but sit there and moan.

In fact, what we do in S/M is that we act as though we were giving up or taking real-world power, while retaining the ability to keep as much power as we need to feel safe, or to take no more than we feel OK about having.

We think that this thought does a nice job of expressing the tension that often happens in good S/M – the “oh-my-god-this-is-terrible-please-don’t-stop” energy that we all know and love.

nipple tug-of-war,” in which two people both put on nipple clamps with chains running from one person to the other and lean backwards so that both sets of tits get a nice steady pull, is a good example.

In any S/M exchange there is a sharing of power – the bottom lends his power to the top for the duration, the top adds power, and together they make a lot of voltage. The top gets to wield all this power, a form of extreme empowerment that is exciting, thrilling, hot, erotic, and, as we said before, very, very sexy.

Many people view almost all relationships as interactions between victims and oppressors,

Why would a person want to be beaten, humiliated, ordered around and otherwise inconvenienced so that you can feel big? Well, because bottoming is very, very sexy too. There is tremendous luxury in giving up responsibility and power to a top, in being small, possibly childlike, in having your behavior controlled, in getting nurtured while being subjected to all kinds of intense stimulations. Fear can be arousing…

Other rewards of bottoming include getting lots of attention, as well as acting out fantasies of helplessness and other forbidden emotions (needy, pathetic, dependent, guilt-ridden) that, like their toppish counterparts, would cause lots of trouble in the real world.

and isn’t embarrassment one of those hot forbidden emotions we love to play with?