Dorothy "Dossie" Easton (born February 26, 1944), who has also written under the name Scarlet Woman, is an American author and family therapist associated with San Francisco and later West Marin, California. She is one of the most cited educators at the crossroads of BDSM, polyamory, and sex-positive therapy—the co-author of The Ethical Slut and of Greenery Press standards such as The New Topping Book and The New Bottoming Book. For kink readers she is not a scene celebrity built on porn credits; she is the therapist-writer who helped give leather, bottoms, tops, and non-monogamy a practical, compassionate vocabulary that dungeons and poly households still quote decades later.
Education, free clinic, radio, and Society of Janus
Easton is a nonfiction author and poet. She has been a plenary or keynote speaker at many conferences, including conferences of the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists (AASECT), the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, and the University of Hamburg. She has given presentations at many colleges and universities, including University of California, Santa Cruz; Bryn Mawr College; University of California, Berkeley; Mills College; Pomona College; and San Francisco State University. Her B.A. is from New College of California (1975); her M.A. in Education and Counseling is from the University of San Francisco (1989); she became a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in 1991 through USF. Her bachelor’s thesis was titled Sex is Nice and Pleasure is Good for You. She worked at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic Psych Annex in 1968 as a psychedelic crisis guide, and she worked with San Francisco Sex Information for several years beginning in 1972. She had a radio show on sexuality on KPOO San Francisco from 1973 to 1975 called "Get in Touch," as Mandy Jenkins. She has worked in battered women’s centers and mental health clinics in Santa Cruz, Sunnyvale, and San Francisco. She was a member of the first board of directors of the Society of Janus in 1974 and is a life member. She is an inductee of the Society of Janus Hall of Fame. She also is or has been a member of other well-known BDSM organizations such as The Outcasts, Exiles, and Black Leather Wings, a radical faerie group. Since 1962 she has provided authentic, compassionate, and respectful psychotherapy and relationship counseling for individuals exploring non-traditional lifestyles—an unusually long professional arc of taking kink and poly clients seriously rather than pathologizing them by default.
Polyamory decision and public philosophy
In 1969 Easton made the decision never to enter into a monogamous relationship again. Her books have been cited as fundamental to the polyamory movement. In a 2023 talk on love, sex, polyamory, and kink, Easton said that those people who live in a world of limitations and fears are missing out on so much that is possible. The statement emphasizes that there is more to life than what can be perceived inside fear and self-imposed limits, and it encourages people to challenge those fears and embrace personal expansion. She is polyamorous and lives in West Marin, California. Interview and secondary literature includes Christian Klesse’s conversation in Sexualities (Vol. 9 No. 5, December 2006, special issue on polyamory), "The Trials and Tribulations of being a ‘Slut’—Ethical, Psychological, and Political Thoughts on Polyamory" (pp. 643–650), and Barbara Love’s edited volume Feminists who Changed America, 1963–1975 (University of Illinois Press, 2006).
Nonfiction books with Janet W. Hardy / Catherine A. Liszt
With Janet W. Hardy (who also published earlier as Catherine A. Liszt), Easton wrote the core Greenery shelf many dungeons and poly households still recommend. Titles include Radical Ecstasy: S/M Journeys to Transcendence (San Francisco: Greenery Press, 2004); The New Topping Book (Greenery Press, 2003, ISBN 1-890159-36-0); The New Bottoming Book (Greenery Press, 2001, ISBN 1-890159-35-2); When Someone You Love Is Kinky (Greenery Press, 2000, ISBN 1-890159-23-9); and The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities (Greenery Press, 1997, ISBN 1-890159-01-8 / 978-1-890159-01-6, OCLC 37969365). Later editions of The Ethical Slut expanded the brand for a wider mainstream press: the second edition, The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Adventures (Celestial Arts, 2009, ISBN 1-587613-37-9 / 978-1-587613-37-1), and the third, The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Freedoms in Sex and Love (Ten Speed Press, 2017, ISBN 978-0-399-57966-0). Those books cover topping and bottoming craft, coming out as kinky to loved ones, SM as transcendence, and non-monogamy as ethical practice rather than cheating with better branding—exactly the toolkit therapists and scene educators still hand to newcomers.
Poetry as Scarlet Woman and later essays
Poems under the names Scarlet Woman and Dossie Easton appear in works edited by Patrick Califia, Joan Nestle (The Persistent Desire), and Lesléa Newman (The Femme Mystique). Specific credits include Scarlet Woman’s "Roll Me Over and Make Me a Rose" and "Dress Shirt" in Nestle’s The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader (Alyson Publications, 1992, pp. 351–352); "Hold Me Down So I Can Fly" in Califia and Robin Sweeney’s The Second Coming: A Leatherdyke Reader (Alyson, 1996, pp. 101–103); and work in Coming to Power, edited by members of Samois, the lesbian/feminist BDSM organization (Alyson, 1981). A chapbook, Scarlet Woman: poems (20 pp.), appeared in 1995. Articles include "Shadowplay: SM Journeys to Our Selves" in Safe, Sane and Consensual, eds. Meg Barker and Darren Langdridge (UK, 2007); "Making Friends with Jealousy" in Understanding Non-Monogamies, eds. Barker and Langdridge (Routledge, 2010); "Cultural Competence with BDSM Clients" in Counseling Ideologies, Queer Challenges to Heteronormativity, ed. Lyndsey Moon (Ashgate, 2010); and "Sex and Relationships: Reflections on Living Outside the Box" in Families – Beyond the Nuclear Ideal, eds. Daniela Cutas and Sarah Chan (Bloomsbury, 2012). For BDSMWild readers, Dossie Easton is the long game of feminist leather and poly ethics: Society of Janus at the founding, Scarlet Woman poems in butch-femme and leatherdyke anthologies, therapy for people who will not shrink their desire to fit a nuclear script, and shelf-standard books that still teach tops, bottoms, and ethical sluts how to hurt, love, negotiate, and stay human about jealousy without apology.
