By Maria Padhila
It’s all coming out.
That’s the expression that keeps coming up in my mind, over the past year. The Snowden revelations are just one example: piece after piece of information comes out, and in coming out reveals more, changes more, pushes more change. I think most of us are getting that feeling of everything happening so damn fast, of the floodgates opening. It’s a tipping point, critical mass effect — you’ve pushed and pushed for so long, and finally the door opens and your own momentum carries you stumbling halfway into the next room.
This is what has been happening with polyamory as well. It’s gone from a phenomenon only a few (such as Eric Francis) acknowledged, to a way of life with more than one TV show and a media article a week — and hundreds of bloggers like me, slogging away. In a way, the Republican/Evangelical types might be right: if you accept The Gays, then everyone else will want equal rights, too. What the hell is wrong with people?
It would be nice if there were anything like equal rights — and if the mere gesture of being able to be married in some states really made that big a difference. We all have to be really careful not to assume everything will be rosy because a few bigots sulked off looking defeated. But from a longer perspective: it has happened really, really fast. People who have never heard of such a thing in their lives now know what polyamory is and isn’t. More people are saying, “Hmm. Maybe that’s for me.” More people are saying, “Well, it’s not for me, but where’s the harm?” People are even starting to complain about being bored with articles about polyamory! To me, that’s success.
Hence Simon Broussard’s recent post in Journals of a Polyamorous Triad on “Why Social Acceptance of Polyamory is Inevitable.” He runs through a number of myths and gives some needed perspectives — marriage is about wealth transfer, and hey, folks, remember when polygamy was not only acceptable, but respectable? It’s educating reading. It concludes:
Polyamory will eventually be just as recognized and accepted as heterosexual marriage because of the continued freedom earned by women (and extensibly freedom of mankind, in general, allowing for homosexual entanglement).
What we see since the turn of the 20th century is expansion of individual liberty and freedom of expression for women, not social-constraint or a resurgence of conservatism. In Western societies, women are not chattel: they are not property to be traded or exchanged; they are free to address their own reproductive decision-making; they have their own education; they have their own wealth; they’re exposed to broader ideas about love, life, and happiness than any other time in history; they are free to make whatever choices in these affairs they wish to. Choice. To believe that society will further constrict choice, or that women will voluntarily restrain their freedoms, to me, is backwards and implausible, and certainly on the wrong side of history.
Thus Polyamory and its eventual social acceptance and recognition are inevitable.
Unless we end up in The Handmaid’s Tale — still a possibility given recent politics — I’d say his scenario is plausible.
Even the Handmaid’s Tale types sound like they’re giving up the struggle. Read this, from the spooky First Things religious politics blog; does it sound as resigned to you as it does to me?
Today, fewer and fewer people on the liberal side of questions of marriage and sexual ethics are even pretending to have moral objections to polyamorous sexual relationships or their recognition. Increasingly, the pretense is not regarded as politically necessary. “Poly” groups no longer need to be pushed into the closet in order to depict redefining marriage as a “conservative” cause; “polys” are now even welcome to march in pride parades and the like. Polyamory is swiftly becoming one more hue in the multi-colored flag. We now even have the “conservative” argument for polyamory: these are people in “loving, committed multi-partner relationships.” They have jobs and homes and mortgages and kids — just like everybody else. Moral objections to their “identity” and the sexual expression of their love is condemned as mere “prejudice.” We must, we are told, fight the “bigots” who are stigmatizing them and “harming their children.” When you have a script that works, I guess you keep using it.
CNN is about as mainstream as you get, right? Here are some passages from CNN’s non-judgmental and, indeed, quite sympathetic treatment of polyamory and polyamorists …
I want to be clear that though I’m saying it’s looking more and more likely that polyamory will be accepted, I’m not claiming a “win.” Like we’d like poly relationships to be, this acceptance is not a zero-sum game. I don’t win points that have to be surrendered by monogamous couples; my way is not better than theirs.
I hear some rumblings occasionally that polyamory being accepted is a result of us having “evolved” enough to be better people and a better society. If we were really evolved, we’d have free dental care for children or vegetables growing on every lawn, not necessarily poly acceptance. Even the first blog excerpt, which could sound like it’s saying that poly acceptance is evidence of the enlightenment of society and the advancement of women, isn’t making that kind of claim. What it’s saying is that society has evolved not so that poly can be important, but that choice itself can be important — an option just as freeing for monogamous people or asexuals as it is for poly people.
Here’s a good look at why this is a relationship issue, not a poly/mono issue, from Franklin Veaux:
There’s a danger in seeing polyamory as “more evolved” or “more enlightened.” Believing that we must be “evolved” or “spiritual” in order to have these skills is a bit of a cop-out. It excuses us for not developing them: “Well, I don’t have very good communication or conflict resolution skills, but it’s not my fault, you see — most human beings just haven’t evolved that far.”
Just like riding a bicycle, reading, or shooting pool, we develop these skills by practice. We try, we fail, we learn, we try again…and before you know it, we’re doing things that used to look like magic. In a society where nobody was taught to read, books might very well seem to be magical, and in a society where we’re taught little about relationships beyond “when you meet The One you’ll live happily ever after,” managing poly relationships can look like magic too. But they’re not. They’re skills, and the wonderful thing about skills is that we can all practice them.
Now, I’m not saying everyone is polyamorous. Far from it: different people want different things from relationships, and no one model works for everyone. But everyone can learn to be better at these skills. And they are not poly skills; they are relationship skills! Learning them will make any relationship, monogamous or polyamorous, better.
So when you hear someone talking about poly “evolution” — and sooner or later, you will — remember, you learned to read, right? Polyamory is no more evolved than literacy.
I fully believe in this kind of debunking, but that made me even more curious about a study being done to see if people who live polyamorously have something different in their genes. So to speak. You may feel all “keep your hands off my DNA” or you might have enthusiastically leapt into the 23andMe camp. If you’re the latter, you may be interested in participating in this study, which crowdsources genetic information to see if there are genetic similarities among poly people. The information says they’re looking at traits such as openness and willingness to take risks to see if there’s any matches. I bet you right now I can predict the outcome; there won’t be anything to build a pie chart out of. Because every relationship is utterly different — even when they have one or more people in common.
Thank you, DivaCarla. I appreciate your comments.
There is nothing quite like a sunrise for a source inspiration, even if it’s a bit blinding sometimes… It’s dark outside, but there is a beautiful shining sun on my laptop. Thank you for that too. 😉
Suria, all brilliant, especially this:
First, I think ‘self-centred’ needs rehab. If one is not centred in the self, then where? Where else can personal power reside?
This very self-empowerment, which is the ground of our sexuality in the first place, is threatening to entities who would control individuals.
The function of initiation is to create a person centered in the self, knowing gifts and talents, and how he or she shall use them to serve the people.
Brene Brown’s concept of “whole-heartedness” seems to apply here, and nothing fractures a heart like the emotion of jealousy.
just a few ideas…
– I think there is a world of difference between desiring to share life, aspects of life with ‘a one’ and the idea (Platonic I believe) that there is one other person out there to make happy-ever-after with. The later is I think a fairytale – but fairytales do have there purposes; it’s just that they’re different from reality, and they’re supposed to be. When look closely at the stories they contain valuable signposts about our journeying, that is before they get the Disney treatment. Heroines and heros always have some version of work to do, demons and dragons to fight, clarification of their values, traps to avoid, etc. etc. – the true hero/ine is the one who digs into their courage and keeps on keeping on.
– The number of times I have seen the scenario played out (in my experience and others around me) of ‘my jealousy is okay because it’s mine, and yours is not okay because….?’ It’s as if it is supposed to be that once we are open to emotion and feeling, our logical brains are entitled switch off. I don’t see this is an accident. In popular culture it seems that this is a ‘default’ setting for handling relationship material, and as far as I’m concerned it’s just as toxic as dioxins.
– Jealousy thrives in a culture of scarcity and is homeless in a culture of co-operation and sharing. Not because we have to share our bodies, no, but because jealousy is the scream from the innermost self that ‘there is not enough’ – an emoting of ‘I am not enough (for myself)’ projected into the world, projected on to an(other). It also thrives in a culture where self-knowledge, self-respect, self-esteem, ‘fullness of self’ are threatening to the wider society and culture and converted to some from of self-centred and selfish. First, I think ‘self-centred’ needs rehab. If one is not centred in the self, then where? Where else can personal power reside? That’s the space bit.
– Jealousy takes experiences and knowledge of the self from the past and projects them into fears of the future: and neither is a position where any personal power exists. If we really believe that we are all changing and (hopefully) growing, all the time, is there any alternative to open and honest communication in relating with others?
– One last – I think the relate stuff works better as a verb form – then we are automatically put into process mode (how are we relating? choosing to relate? and ‘not relating’ is a choice too), rather than trying to work out what this ‘relationship object’ might be.
I think that the social acceptance of polyamory is inevitable because there are so many people who are poly passing for monogamous. Yet most do not have the communication skills, emotional maturity or integrity to talk about it honestly; that is the real cheating part of cheating — not doing the growth part of the equation.
What keeps people in the closet is treating their partner like property they want to keep, through this cheating business, out of fear that their conduct won’t be acceptable. But is the unacceptable conduct the lying or the ‘extra’ relationships? There are a few possible answers to that.
Another aspect of this is the people who want the outside relationships, but they’re concerned that if they say so, and do it, their partner will also want to do that, and they fear their own jealousy. I.e., “I won’t fuck anyone else because I’m afraid you will too, and if you do I will be jealous.”
Jealousy seems to be at the core of the issue. Jealousy however is a subject with roots into another area that our culture is lagging on, which is death. Part of the entanglement is the fear of death, which translates to the fear of change and of letting go, hence a philosophy of cling at all costs, which is mistakenly called monogamy.
http://planetwaves.net/jealousy.html
It’s easy to try to throw a whole moral trip on this…but we all know it doesn’t work. The moral trip is merely part of the coverup. It didn’t work with homosexuality…it is failing (or failed forever ago) with masturbation…and it’s going to fail on relational choice and its subtopic, pleural relationships.
In truth, nearly all monogamous relationships are polyamorous to some extent (they are all set within a community and multiple affections and attractions whether ‘acted upon’ or not — action exists on many levels) and all poly relationships are monogamous to some extent (since the basic unit of communication is a dyad; all relationships are one-on-one). I cover this topic in the article The One and the Many.
http://bookofblue.com/theoneandthemany/
In many ways the debate is a ruse.
I know plenty of people who – at least in part – settle into a “girl/boy-friend” relationship because in that way, sex is immediately available and cheap.
Just sayin’.
I just finished reading Vagina, by Naomi Wolf. The book pulls together some leading edge and very new research on the neurochemistry of female orgasm and sexuality. Suggestions are very strong that women are biologically predisposed to much more agency in seeking sex and choosing sex partners, even a preference for multiple partners than we’ve been socialized to believe.
Evolutionary biology looks for how all behaviors support reproduction and successful rearing of young. Orgasm is designed to support conception for sure (ask me for details) but orgasm also influences consciousness. Sex in humans is about way more than making new babies. I maintain that baby humans is a happy byproduct of our sexuality, not the main reason.
I’ve also noticed that evolutionary biology sometimes presupposes that we humans evolved into heterosexual nuclear families as optimum reproductive unit. We know that the nuclear family is a very recent invention, and that it’s not all that successful at raising children, but very successful at raising consumers.
Let’s take a long look at who we are, where we’ve been, and explode some myths. Let’s look at sexuality and relationships with completely new eyes. And remember that sex is more than we think it is.
What we can see with brain imaging and molecular chemistry is showing that there is way more to sex and consciousness than most of us have been taught even in liberal settings.
I compare it to the way quantum science is demonstrating that some metaphysical phenomena are grounded in the way nature works. As my Native American teacher says with amusement, the quantum physicists are getting close.
Well the orgasm researchers are getting close to demonstrating the biology of human erotic potential, something systems like Tantra have known about for thousands of years.
Is this a phenomenon of the Aquarian age?
It looks to me like you’re taking the freedom to choose who we want to love and making it into an economic commodity. Who exactly is the investor, what is the asset, and if everyone were monogamous, what factors would control market value of human begins?
Yes there are options, as you put it, aluminum or gold; a prostitute or a real woman. Most people would not find those to be appealing choices. I am surprised you don’t see the extreme prejudice of your point of view.
I understand the Age of Aquarius is all about merging with the needs of humanity, in general, but I also understand that Aquarius is detached and impersonal. This isn’t the path for everyone in humanity. You’re taking something intimate and personal and making it into something public and cheap. Gold is expensive because it’s rare. Aluminum is inexpensive because it’s available to many at a cheaper price. A prostitute is valued in the same way. There is nothing wrong with what she’s doing but the fact that she’s available to anyone who wants her immediately makes her less valuable. The only thing making something special to the person who sees it as special is the fact that it’s only between them and the other person. Hence the concept of exotic and scarce goods being priced ten times higher than the cost of making them. Aquarius is built for the good of the masses but poly-amorous lifestyles are mass produced, easily available, and impersonal, so therefore, less valuable. It’s a noble notion to share what’s most precious to you with whoever decides to visit your house but, in reality, the idea of it devalues what you are offering. In the 70’s, when hippies tried to introduce it as a new way of living, communes fell apart because couples tended to band together into amorous couples and the others would accuse them of being selfish. It broke the whole commune apart and didn’t last in the long term. It’s human nature to want something precious for yourself….especially something as personal as sex. I understand the idea behind what you are attempting to propagate as “choice”; The notion of shared humanity. But not everyone is on the Aquarius path. Some of us want depth and connection with our true love. When you spread yourself over many, each gets less than when one person receives it all. In communes, people tried out the many than pair off with the one. They used it as a tool to meet other people they didn’t know…then become selfish when they got to know the one they really wanted. I think it’s just as viable to be selfish as it is to be unselfish. We are all are on different paths. Karma is specific to the individual. There’s no one solution for any of us….just options to consider.
I love the premise here — that the ‘rush’ (to not just awareness but tolerance) is on, as well as your first (or second, as it were) paragraph, which nails that feeling of speeding ahead, having finally breeched the barriers (birth-like, me’ thinks.) This topic will do better in the air and light. Well done, as always, my dear.
Re “my way is not better than your way,” that depends on what ‘your way’ is. If your way is, “I am monogamous and you must be too,” to me that’s an issue. If your way is, “I can do whatever I want and you must live up to my moral code,” that’s an issue.
If your way is you want to be with one person you embrace that I can make my choices, I see no issues there. The real issue here is not mono v poly. The real issue as I see it is who sets the terms of what is acceptable, on what basis and how did they end up in that role?
This is no small question.