HOW TO BE AN ETHICAL SLUT by Brooke McCarthy
by Michael Meigs
"Hello, sluts!" Brooke calls out cheerfully as she strides onto the Eloise Stage at Austin's Vortex. A pleased chorus of responses greets her from the audience.
Brooke McCarthy's a vigorously happy performer, at ease in the cabaret/stand-up comic format of her show. She spiels a first-person narrative of her love life, each shift in the story marked by song. Some are mid-century standards—Peggy Lee's "Fever," and "Dancing Cheek to Cheek," Irving Berlin's 1930's composition for the elegant Fred Astaire— and others, equally well performed to recorded piano accompaniment, from later times and not immediately recognizable to a duffer like me.
Another piece unknown to me was the title key: ethical slut. As my milennial son said to his boomer father in a different context, "Yes, Dad, it's a thing." And indeed it is, cemented in modern American usage by the 1997 book The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities, by Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy, now in its third edition. They defined an ethical slut as "a person of any gender who has the courage to lead life according to the radical proposition that sex is nice and pleasure is good for you." The writers neatly reversed a term of opprobrium, turning "slut" inside out and applying it to men and to women. And, I assume, to any gender inbetween or exterior to those definitions.
Perhaps you shouldn't be misled by the How to in Brooke's title. She's not providing an instruction manual , a TED talk, or a peep show for the pruriently curious. Instead, this is a single story about the education of Brooke McCarthy. It's not terribly dissimlar from a picaresque tale. (Let me define that term, with the pedantic precision of the patriarchy: it comes from a genre of early Spanish adventure novel in which the protagonist is a pícaro, a youth without family, guardian, or strict moral principles, who sets off to explore the world.)
She provides us with stories of her own often inadvertent progress toward becoming an ethical slut. Strictly speaking, these episodes are those of a character named Brooke McCarthy, but the performer tells them with such good humor, mime, and comic timing that we suppose that they're very close to her own reality. Brooke of the story enjoys sex with her boyfriend, has an unexpected fling with someone else, then gets hot, bothered, and apologetic about it. Other infidelities occur on both sides of that base relationship on the way to breakup.
Her love life moves along. One evening after she does her stand-up routine, a pair of saddle shoes with a smooth talker attached approaches her. He's a decade or more older than she is. The perhaps inevitable occurs; she's delighted. Then, over the course of a three-year relationship, Saddle Shoes (never otherwise named) introduces her to triads (love triangles, not Chinese gangs), sex clubs, and to his wife. The couple have been married for eight years but after the first nine months or so they came to an agreement. Their open marriage allows either of them to have consensual sex with anyone else provided nothing is hidden and the non-participating spouse is informed in advance.
Brooke McCarthy does make the life of an "ethical slut" sound like fun, and the way she pokes fun at her own naïveté is endearing. Her technique lets you imagine your own surprise at encountering such situations (if you're not already a practitioner of rules-respecting hedonism). There's intoxicating appeal in the notion of an anchoring relationship that allows—no, approves of—sexual freedom.
It's not for everyone, and in fact it's probably for very few. Many of us are sufficiently insecure or sufficiently attached to an individual or to the format of conventional partnership that ethical slutism wouldn't (or didn't) work. But McCarthy's performance telling the tale hurts no one. And by obtaining our tickets to hear her in this Short Fringe Bring Your Own Venue performance, we gave her advance permission.
Making us an ethical audience—and me, an ethical reviewer!
How to Be an Ethical Slut
by Brooke McCarthy
FronteraFest
8 pm Sunday & Monday, January 29 & 30, 2023 (indoors, Eloise Stage): $15, $27, $37 (tickets for these shows only)
6:00 pm Saturday, February 4 (outdoors, Garden Stage): $15 for seats by the stage, & $10 for standing/find your own seat (tickets for this show only)
