Dossie Easton: Ethical Slut, Topping, Bottoming, and Polyamory

Dorothy “Dossie” Easton, born February 26, 1944, is an American writer and family therapist. She has long been tied to San Francisco and later settled in West Marin, California. From 1962 she did psychotherapy and relationship counseling for people exploring non-traditional lives. Her working premise was that kink and polyamory are not illnesses by default. She tried to give them a language people could actually use. She also wrote as Scarlet Woman. She is not a scene celebrity built on porn credits. Tops, bottoms, leather households, and people who are not paired off one-to-one have used her books as a practical shelf.

In 1975 she received a B.A. from New College of California. The thesis was titled Sex is Nice and Pleasure is Good for You. In 1989 she earned an M.A. in education and counseling from the University of San Francisco, and in 1991 she became a licensed marriage and family therapist. In 1968 she worked at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic as a psychedelic crisis guide. From 1972 she worked with San Francisco Sex Information. From 1973 to 1975 she hosted a sexuality show, Get in Touch, on KPOO in San Francisco, under the name Mandy Jenkins. That radio name is not the same as her writing name, Scarlet Woman.

Janus, the organizations, and the 1969 decision

In 1974 Easton sat on the first board of the Society of Janus. She is a life member and a Hall of Fame inductee. She has also been part of The Outcasts, the Exiles, and Black Leather Wings, a radical faerie group. In 1969 she decided she would not enter a monogamous relationship again. That decision sits under the polyamory writing that came later. She has given keynotes for the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists (AASECT), the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, and the University of Hamburg, and she has taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Bryn Mawr, and the University of California, Berkeley, among other schools. Her arguments show up in Christian Klesse’s conversation in the journal Sexualities, and in Barbara Love’s edited book Feminists who Changed America, 1963–1975. In a 2023 talk she said that people who live inside limits and fear miss a great deal of what is possible.

The Greenery books with Janet W. Hardy

With Janet W. Hardy, who earlier published as Catherine A. Liszt, Easton wrote a run of Greenery Press books that dungeons and poly households still pass around. The Ethical Slut first appeared in 1997. When Someone You Love Is Kinky followed in 2000, The New Bottoming Book in 2001, The New Topping Book in 2003, and Radical Ecstasy: S/M Journeys to Transcendence in 2004. The books teach topping and bottoming as craft, treat SM as a route toward an altered, transcendent experience, and describe non-monogamy as an ethical practice rather than cheating with cleaner branding. Later editions moved to larger houses. In 2009 Celestial Arts published the second edition, The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Adventures. In 2017 Ten Speed Press published the third, The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Freedoms in Sex and Love.

Scarlet Woman, poems, and essays

Poems and essays appeared under both Scarlet Woman and Dossie Easton. Roll Me Over and Make Me a Rose and Dress Shirt are in Joan Nestle’s The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader (1992). Hold Me Down So I Can Fly is in The Second Coming: A Leatherdyke Reader (1996), edited by Patrick Califia and Robin Sweeney. Other work is in Coming to Power (1981), edited by members of Samois, the lesbian feminist BDSM group. In 1995 she published a 20-page chapbook, Scarlet Woman: poems. The essay Shadowplay: SM Journeys to Our Selves appears in Safe, Sane and Consensual, edited by Meg Barker and Darren Langdridge. Making Friends with Jealousy is in their Understanding Non-Monogamies, from Routledge. Cultural Competence with BDSM Clients and Sex and Relationships: Reflections on Living Outside the Box appeared in academic collections from Ashgate and Bloomsbury.