The Ethical Slut 2nd Edition (Pt 8): An Interview with Dossie Easton
Part 8 in this 90-minute interview with the legendary Dossie Easton, therapist and co-author of the book The Ethical Slut, now in it’s 2nd Edition! Full interview with audience Q&A available @ www.ReidAboutSex.com as well!
Reid: So, you’ve been approached by two dykes who would like you to donate sperm. One of them, their preferences that you do it the old fashion way. The papadyke is a little bit uneasy about this and so advise us on what to do.
Dossie: Whatever stresses existed in the relationship now after the baby is one day will be multiplied by an order of magnitude at least. Having a baby is a really hard work. After the first six weeks without enough sleep, you begin to realize that you are not a perfect human being and you are not going to be a perfect parent. That’s just how the world is designed. We all got born like that, we all manage to survive. That’s something to really think about. The other thing is I strongly, strongly suggest that if you decide to do this, first of all, you do need to work on figuring out on how to get agreement with everybody. Because if you are present and if you engender the child in the old fashion way, legally, there’s no way your rights as a father will be taking away from you. Unless, there’s something really awful. What?
Audience 4: If I sign papers that papadyke can adapt as soon as it’s born then it’s legally…
Dossie: Not forever. There’s a big bias. And if it’s known that you’re the biological father. The only way that you can make that something that will absolutely stick on court, in you for instance where the love of child can change your mind and you stay connected to this child, the only way they can make that, it’s a weird thing that you go through to make it stick is that you have to do artificial insemination and you have a doctor there. Because if you do artificial insemination and you hand the sperm to the mother, the respective mother, that’s not good enough. It has to pass through a doctor’s hands.
Reid: It’s almost like you have to leave the money on the night table and you can’t give it to that person. So, do you have to leave the sperm on the night table or give it to the doctor?
Dossie: We’re looking into this since my partner who’s thinking of having a child and we’re trying to figure out what the laws look like these days. It’s really complicated and that you need a lawyer. You also need to give yourselves enough time and really work through wherever you want to work through about what it is going to be look like. It’s not unethical to do by any means but one of the things you’ll realize is that the 3 of you will be taking step in to the unknown. Babies are powerfully, powerfully lovable but before my daughter was born somebody told me that babies are like jaguars. If they weren’t so cute nobody would put up with them. Babies are really amazing. The energy of a new born baby, I used to call my daughter a little Buddha. This perfect undifferentiated consciousness before they can even focus their eyes. It’s astounding traveling with a little baby. Just astounding. That’s very powerful and you need to know really clearly what you want to do before you get there because when you get there, it’s kind of unknown. You won’t know what it is that you might want. You want to keep you options open. It’s probably a good idea to make sure that the three of you have pretty strong agreement. There’s no reason why three people can’t raise a baby and there’s no reason why you all couldn’t make a contract to give three people rights and a baby, I mean…
Audience 4: Actually, I’m planning to waive my fatherhood rights, really. It’s their baby.
Dossie: Okay. But as I said, legally, that doesn’t hold if you do it in an old fashion way. So, get a lawyer. That’s my biggest advice. It’s going to be a fancy legal contract.
Reid: And you were want to makes four which works for the whole polyamory of it. Other questions? Yes.
Audience 5: Talking about kids, what do you see in kids raised in polyamorous families? Like what you’ve said, so much of our view formed by family and raised… What about the second generation?
Reid: Now that we’ve got plenty of people, certainly they probably in your circle or you might get to work with them. Poly families are now having kids and the kids are raised. Any thoughts or observations?
Dossie: Well, I always look at the kids that I co-parented, about 13 kids, 9 of them while they were 2. If I had any bad karma from previous life I want to tell you what’s cleaned up now when I did my time. I know a lot of those kids and everyone goes to the birthday parties. We all get together, I can recognize them. They are 40 something and I can still recognize them and they recognize me. It’s amazing. Babies are like puppies. They can handle a lot of people. You know, how you need a puppy and you play with the puppy and you go away and you come back a few months later and the puppy seems to remember you? Babies are like that. They are designed to grow up in villages with about 40 people. They are not designed to be raised by their biological mother and father in farming communities and had to gather a communities able body to tell it’s work. Babies are raised by older children and by elders who are too frail to do the hard physical work in keeping life going. Babies were never raised in nuclear families and any natural environment. That’s not what we were evolved to do.
So we form villages and the young children would just fit right in. They had no trouble figuring out what adult is good for what, who would like to play ball, who would read the story and who would get them candy and whatever it’s supposed to. They work all this stuff real fast. They like it, they thrived because they have a lot of attention, activity stuff going on all the time. It was not being alone in the house with mom, getting tired and bored, wants to talk to another adult [inaudible 00:06:38]. One point, I got little isolated when my daughter was a baby and I actually let some Jehovah’s Witnesses in to the house and the kids are fine.
Audience 4: What kind of partnerships have they’ve grown up into?
Dossie: All kinds of different ones. They did something we didn’t predict. The teenagers were somewhere around ages 13, 14 might pick another adult in the community. Sometimes, one of their parent’s exes. As a mentor of confidant at the time, you know, they’d rather do anything and ask their parents for advice, right? The kids seem to have a variety of choices. Some of them have chosen a monogamous lifestyles, some of them have chosen non-monogamous lifestyles. Some of them are very straight bi. They’re all over the map. And that tells me that we did it right because the kids evidently have freedom to choose how they want to be. If they are choosing to be monogamous, them they are doing that because that’s what they want and not because they think it’s what they have to do. If they are choosing to be heterosexual they are doing that because that’s what they want not because they think that all the other options are somehow [inaudible 00:07:52]. And so, these kids are just amazing. They are all wonderful. They are all smart kids and pretty well-socialized too. Used to deal with people. I like them.
Reid: Other questions? Yes.