Quotes from Dossie Easton

We each have the responsibility of living our own lives, determining our individual needs, and arranging to get those needs met. We cannot live through a partner, nor can we assume that just because we have a lover, all our needs should automatically be satisfied.

More pragmatically, we have had long, intense intimate conversations that felt deeply sexual to us. And we have had intercourse that didn't feel terribly sexual.

A good fight starts with the understanding that in order for a fight to be successful, both people have to win.

If you think someone is ridiculous for finding you attractive, we worry about your self-esteem.

Once you have a handle on loving yourself, you can practice sharing that love with others.

Let jealousy be your teacher. Jealousy can lead you to the very places where you most need healing.

When you own your feelings, you have lots of choices.

A flowerchild in a 1967 interview made the most succinct description of ethical sluthood we've ever seen : "We believe it's okay to have sex with anybody you love... and we believe in loving everybody. You are already whole.".

You get to have beliefs of your own. What matters is not that you agree with us but that you question the prevailing paradigm and decide for yourself what you believe.

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.

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. By breaking the rules, we both free and empower ourselves.

We are paving new roads across new territory. We have no culturally approved scripts for open sexual lifestyles; we need to write our own. To write your own script requires a lot of effort, and a lot of honesty, and is the kind of hard work that brings many rewards. You may find the right way for you and three years from now decide you want to live a different way—and that's fine. You write the script, you get to make the choices, and you get to change your mind, too.

centuries of censorship have left us with very little adequate language with which to discuss the joys and occasional worries of sex.

Here are words to live by: the enemy of shame is curiosity

when sex and love and intimacy are truly free, and seen as positive forces in our lives and in the world, we will be much more able to solve the problems of rape, sexual bullying, shaming, and repression.

Most of us have been struck dumb by the scariest communication task of all—asking for what we want.

Be good to yourself and remember that the most important part of love is not loving someone's beauty and strength and virtue. The real test of love is when someone sees our weaknesses, our stupidities, and our smallnesses, and still loves us. This unconditional love is what we want from our lovers, and we should expect no less from ourselves

I'm into S/M" is a turnoff to a lot of people who have mistaken ideas about what that means

Make it a point to let everyone you love know it.

Forbidden emotions sent to the deep freeze commonly include pathos, anger, shame, terror, villainy and victimhood. Starting to sound familiar? So our thesis is that it just might be that our kinky desires, the drives that lead us to enact our dark and dangerous fairy tales, may very well be the longing to reunite with a part of ourselves that we have lost in the Shadow.

The word adventurer is sometimes used pejoratively, suggesting that the adventurous person is immature or inauthentic, not really willing to "grow up" and "settle down" into a presumably monogamous lifestyle. We wonder: What's wrong with having adventures? Can't we have adventures and still raise children, buy houses, and do the work that's important to us? Of course we can; sluts qualify for mortgages just like everybody else.

EASY" Is there, we wonder, some virtue in being difficult?

People are attracted to playing in their shadows because it is very hot, intriguing, sexy. Please don't think that we are robots doomed to reenact the dysfunctions of our childhoods over and over without release, but rather that we seek out opportunities to struggle with these conflicts so that we have a chance to make the story come out differently. If we let these desires drive us without our awareness, they may manifest in destructive ways.

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.