Anecdotes From The Slutcloud

it works fine

A lot of people have opinions like:

• no man would ever seriously date a whore

• promiscuous people have relationships that fall apart

• this is setting everybody else for so much drama

• slutty people are secretly suppressing their actual hatred of the lifestyle

etc.

While r/polyamory is full of nerdy memes about getting your polycule to play DnD, r/monogamy is pretty angry at all the non-monogs. Their most upvoted posts include stuff like:

Or responses to one of my poly friend’s tweets about polyamory:

This all feels so bizarre to me. I live in a culture where none of the ‘slutty people are unhappy and failing at relationships” thing is true - or rather, not moreso than it is in non-slutty cultures. It seems like it’s hard for people to envision how a life might work where there’s a high contingent of happy, slutty people.

So to help visualize, here’s some instances from the lives of myself and people I know. Names are changed, and some details are slightly altered to preserve anonymity.

• We know a lot of each other’s fetishes. “I’ve been horny lately,” says a girlfriend of mine. “Oh,” says the girl groupchat, “I’d recommend trying to bang Mike. He’s really into this thing you’re into.” But another girl chimes in - “Actually I’m not sure, Mike is definitely into x but I think you’re actually more into y, and it might not work out. Worth trying, though!

• I’m chatting in a group of girls at a housewarming party about whether or not a mutual friend is coming. I realize with amusement that all the girls in the conversation have had sex with him.

• I’m hanging out in a group of friends, and one of them has to stick a pill into her vagina for medical reasons. Someone asks ‘can I watch’ so she says sure, pulls her pants down spreads her legs, and a whole group of us watch as she shoves a pill into her vagina.

• Two of my friends I’d describe as “frenemies who seem to have had a lot of sex compared to how much they find each other annoying”

• An escort friend of mine married one of her clients.

• My boyfriend met another girl on a dating app. He was staying at my place for a few months, so he brought her to live with me during the period that they were going to see if they wanted to try a serious relationship. I was just vaguely around the house as they had sex, talked for hours in each other’s arms, etc. We both ended up breaking up with the boyfriend and are now good friends with each other.

• I know a poly couple who’s been married decades, with 3 kids. They haven’t really done much outside dating recently because they’re too distracted with the kids - but they spent time on other relationships beforehand and I anticipate they’ll likely spend more time after once the kids stop taking up so much of their attention.

• At a nerd meetup, I noticed a guy used the phrase ‘my wife’ and ‘my partner’ in separate conversations, and figured he must be poly. I casually referenced him as poly shortly afterwards, but this freaked him out - he pulled me aside and said no, please don’t talk about this, he hadn’t ‘come out’ yet and didn’t want word of this getting back to his job or friends, he was afraid of what might happen.

• I’m hanging out with a group of friends, which includes Bob and Alice, who are married. Bob and Alice are getting ready to try to conceive a baby; they’ve moved into a group house with other soon-to-be parents for communal support, we’ve discussed birth control methods with Alice and how her sexual behavior is going to change once she enters the ‘active conception attempts’ phase.

  At one point someone mentions how big Bob’s dick is. I’ve had sex with Bob, and I agree that it’s big - I say that whenever Bob approaches at orgies, the other guys tell me ‘oh you’re in for it now’. Most of the other women there have also had sex with Bob. Alice says something about how her husband’s dick is big but she didn’t realize it was that big, and then we tease her about having high standards for dick sizes. We discuss the one other person at an orgy who had an even bigger dick - what’s his name - someone remembers. We agree that it was probably girthier but not necessarily longer.

• Two of my friends are a married couple, together for 15+ years. Their marriage is great, they have kids (no longer small), and they decided to open up their relationship, and now the husband has a girlfriend, the wife has a boyfriend. They all sometimes hang out together. And of course, the respective new boyfriend and girlfriend are people a lot of my friends have had sex with. Everybody knows this, nobody tries to hide it. I personally am either directly or a few sex partners removed from both the new girlfriend and boyfriend.

• A friend of mine is a mega slut, with bodycount in the multiple hundreds. She married a very successful guy, spent the marriage helping her husband get laid and having threesomes, and now has a few young kids.

• I’m hanging out in a group of friends and their friends and I overhear someone saying “well you guys might find this weird but I’m actually monogamous”

• Also, in general, lots of swapping stories at orgies with friends - “Carl did this thing to me - did he do it to you too?” “Omg I know Dave and I aren’t usually as compatible as you and Dave but last week he did this move I never expected”

• My boyfriend is having a girl he’s dating over. He’s mentioned he’d be interested in banging her casually in the open, and I say sure. She’s sitting on the couch with us, and he starts having sex with her in front of me (with her consent). It looks nice so I ask the girl if she’d like me to take photos of them. She says no. About ten minutes later (still in the middle of getting railed on the couch) she says “actually I changed my mind, photos would be nice”. I’m like daw ok, and I get a lot of photos of them having kinky sex. I text them to her afterwards.

• At an event, I’m chatting with a girl when I realize she’s about to go on a date with a guy that I’ve been considering going on a date with. I ask her to tell me how it goes. Afterwards she texts me how the date went and said she was sexually disappointed and anticipated I’d be disappointed too. I thank her and do not hook up with this guy.

• Some of my friends have haremchats, where the people they’re dating all coordinate with each other. I’m running a haremchat for one of my partners and will probably be planning an orgy tailored to his preferences.

• My friend found a guy she super likes. I said “He sounds great, I can’t wait to meet him.” She was like “Oh you already met him, he had sex with you at your gangbang”. They ended up getting engaged.

• My partner runs a gangbang squad called the Werewolves, a group of vetted, STI-tested, experienced men who, when summoned, will all descend upon a lady who would like to experience a gangbang. It’s a great network that sometimes women I know call upon if they need penises for any particular service.

And some direct quotes from people in the extended slutcloud:

• “I was at Susan’s garden party, sheepishly admitting to just having had sneaky sex with someone in the closet. Susan overheard and said “wait you should fuck my husband!" and went over to get him.”

• “Once I accidentally took too much g with one partner and then passed out and when I woke up I was super horny and needed to hump something, but he needed to go pee because he had been watching me breathe for an hour, so he called in his roommate so I could hump his roommates leg while I waited my partner to come back. Then he sent me home to my husband with pics and more g so my husband could enjoy. Honestly sleeping with people who live together has been super convenient and nice”

• “The fact that most of my friends are my (ex)partners or (ex)metamors, and I had to draw a diagram when I explained this all to my newest partner. I don’t seem to use dating apps any more because meeting people at sex parties seems more efficient.”

• “Me and my partner’s bf send each other cute photos of her when she’s with the other, and we coordinate on how to cheer her up or surprise her with something.”

• “Once I was sad after not getting banged enough at an orgy. My two boyfriends, trying to cheer me up, coordinated to have sex with me at the same time - even though they’re not really into mmf threesomes.”

• “Being with one partner and texting pics/videos of us having sex to another partner who is brimming with delight”

she shared this with me with everybody’s consent

• “Oh one thing I think is cute is ppl sharing tips on how to have sex with their shared partners - like I believe there exists a how to have sex with me document that I did not write but was co created by a few ppl I sleep with”

• “I started seeing someone in June that I really quite like, and discovered he hadn’t really been particularly slutty but did have slutty aspirations and immediately started to think “how/when do I start promoting him to my hot friends”

• “I met my crush Elle at an orgy in a castle in France. Years later, I invited her to my wedding dinner. At the dinner, my girlfriend announced, "hey Elle, did you know Fred has a crush on you?" She was like "no, is that true?" I admitted it was.

  A couple years later, at an orgy, we decided to start writing together, when I wrote the opening of what would become our first co-authored novel in fountain pen on her back. We've now published five novels together, with a sixth coming out in two months, and two more due next year.

• “For years I maintained a Signal group called [redacted] where people I was sleeping with would talk about topics related to dating me (and occasionally AI safety, of course)”

• “I have a shared Google photos album where my metamour and I share saucy pics of our mutual partner. It's called Butts”

Obviously not everything is perfect! We are but human, and sometimes there’s conflicts. A friend’s metamour (a partner’s partner; two girlfriends of a boyfriend are metamours with each other) recently got uncomfortable with my friend’s relationship and it caused some painful issues. I’ve had partners break up with me because they found someone else who wanted to be monogamous with them, and they picked her over me. One couple I know opened their relationship and there were some rocky months when one of them found a partner faster than the other.

Jealousy and insecurity are real! But they don’t usually manifest the way you’d think. Almost none of the list of anecdotes above caused jealousy as far as I know. Usually it pops up in different ways - like my partner just recently let me know he’d be spending time with other girls during a time I’d be visiting him on a trip. I haven’t gotten to spend as much time with him recently as I wanted, and that sense of scarcity sparked jealousy in me. I expressed this by sending him a lot of soviet era propaganda posters that I customized with relevant labels.

I don’t actually hate the other girls stealing him away, and I wasn’t trying to convince my partner to not see them, but I’ve learned that suppressing jealousy when I feel it in order to seem ‘cool’ is a terrible, unsustainable, no-good move. So I go ‘aaaaah!’ while he hugs me, acceptingly.

To have a sustainable slutcloud, you can’t be suppressing stuff. The only way you can be deeply comfortable hanging out naked with a bunch of other people with feelings for each other is to feel safe expressing the dirty, nervous, insecure parts of yourself.

I think a lot of people’s exposure to poly/slut culture is pretty bad, to people who aren’t fully immersed. For example, a few years ago I started dating a guy who said he was poly, but wasn’t really in a polyamorous culture. It was a learning curve - he kept not mentioning other dates he went on. He never lied to me, but he would just, by habit, omit referencing flirty or sexual interactions with other women. I eventually figured out that he’d had experiences dating other women who’d claimed they wanted nonmonogamy, but would get jealous (in a way that emotionally punished him) whenever he acted on the openness. So over time, he learned not to say anything. Eventually after I demonstrated enough times that I wouldn’t emotionally punish him for his behavior, he felt comfortable telling me about all the things. It was great!

But this alerted me that out there, there’s a lot of people who want open relationships, but who really don’t have the emotional skillset to handle it. In this sense, maybe monogamous people are more mature; they go ‘nope, if I had to sit around in a room with a bunch of other people who’d fucked my girlfriend, I would hate it in a way that would really disrupt my life, and if I tried to force myself into being ok with it I’d have to end up lying to myself, and I just don’t want to do that”. I think owning that about yourself is pretty cool.

But the bonobo life is possible, and I’ve seen it. Maybe it only works well for a certain subset of people who are naturally wired for low-jealousy and also have pretty good self awareness and communication abilities and self acceptance. But it can work! It’s much easier to sink into comfort with this lifestyle if you’re in a larger group of people who are good at handling it, and who you can trust to communicate sincerely about what they want. It’s amazing how much it can help your primate body instinctually calm down, to be in a safe community where casual sex with friends is a normal, bonding activity.