It’s OK When I Do It and Other Double Standard Delusions

By Maria Padhila

A veritable epidemic of mendacity: that’s the kind of phrase I’d think I’d need to be holding a glass of neat bourbon and wearing a bra slip to pull off, but unfortunately, today, it’s a commonplace observance.

Poly Paradise at Burning Man. Photo by Eric.

We’re in the midst of the shutdown animated by a deep commitment to the principle of “When I do it, it’s OK.” The Teabagger faction says: Don’t let government have anything to do with healthcare, but when I pass a law that lets me stick a probe up your vagina, it’s OK.

Don’t scale back on White House tours, but when I shut down the National Park Service, it’s OK. Don’t use schools as a place to teach your liberal science, but when I want to hold Bible study and call it chemistry class, it’s OK.

Newt Gingrich to Pat Robertson: It’s OK for me to dump dying partners and blabber about starting a colony on Mars, but that Obama, he’s not acting “presidential.”

It goes on. And on. I’ve been hearing so much double standard talk that I decided as usual to examine my own behavior first, and decided to write this week about double standards in polyamory. So I went to Google and typed in “polyamory double standard” and up popped the Cunning Minx show on that very topic, in this very week.

I swear that is exactly how it happened. I didn’t intend to duplicate their subject matter. It just happened. And even so, it’s OK if I do it.

But back to the reals: the good part is her special guest on this episode of Poly Weekly was PepperMint, the west coast poly writer and speaker whom I’ve interviewed and quoted before and I really enjoy. (And I think people here have liked him, too; but if not, that’s OK, because if it’s OK for me, it’s OK for everyone, right? This is actually one of the poly double standard pain points, but more on that later.)

The two in this podcast discuss the cultural history of marriage and how double standards surface in monogamy. PepperMint recommends Marriage: A History by Stephanie Coontz and observes that “traditional marriage” really existed only through the 1950s and a little before and after, saying that in the image of marriage shaped then, “the man went to work, and the woman would hang around the house and use appliances,” which made me laugh, in part because I really need a new blender.

Then they look at how double standards show up in non-monogamy, and how to deal with them. Here are the takeaways and my take:

The one man / two women model that many assume is typical for polyamory is an outgrowth of the double standard. Men are expected to play around and need variety and more sex; women are supposed to be more interested in security. I’d add that his leaves out, of course, the many poly relationships that don’t follow this model, not to mention the fact that the women in the triad might have a strong relationship and even be each others’ primaries. I also think this is also borne out in the prevalence of the One Penis Principle (the OPP, yeah you know me), in which many new to poly or who want to try it lay down the law that many vaginas are fine, but only one alpha penis per poly pod, please.

The two talk about the Hot Bi Babe myth and the scenario that nearly always shows up at parties and online groups and searches: a couple is searching for their one true love (the Hot Bi Babe, who is probably busy elsewhere. Cause if she’s really bi, she’s busy). Many books are crafted with this being the dominant (not in that sense) example of a relationship. What I see and hear as frustration with “unicorn hunters” (the couples searching for the Hot Bi Babe) is really more a sense that non-monagamy is moving beyond the typical models, and it’s doing so very quickly.

So just stop with the unicorn hunting. But — what if that’s your dream? The two have a few tips: Date separately first, so you can work out all the kinks, so to speak, and practice how you’ll deal with everything from jealousy to sharing parking spaces. As you date and get to know the poly community, a relationship may form naturally and happily.

PepperMint, points out another way that double standards affect poly relationships. Some men new to poly “haven’t thought through this question: ‘Oh, so the women will be seeing other men, too?’” Oddly, they’re fine with the women seeing other women. I’ve seen this form of OK-when-I-do-it several times.

There’s another assumption that reflects the double standard: that women shouldn’t need many partners because they “can get sex anytime.” To which I would counter, yes, that’s probably true; even at my advanced age and without too much effort, I could probably get free sex (sex outside of a relationship) anytime. It just probably wouldn’t be very good sex. So why bother?

How to put the kibosh on the double standard tendency? It’s really just a matter of the community and individuals being aware, talking about it, and calling it out, the two in the podcast decide. It should be a part of the discussion in the many books, blogs and Poly 101-type publications and websites currently proliferating.

This might be easier in polyamory because, well, we’re used to talking, and talking, and talking. Hey, about that talking too much: it’s OK when we do it. But poly people might have an advantage when it comes to beating down this cultural tendency. Many of us have a preoccupation with what’s “fair.” We like to think about how things might even out.

None of us can be too hasty to call “double standard.” A relationship that might look unfair or unequal from the outside could be working just fine for the ones within it. A woman might have fewer partners than a man in the pod, and that might not be a double standard at work. It might be perfectly OK.

5 thoughts on “It’s OK When I Do It and Other Double Standard Delusions”

  2. Wow, you had me at THE SEVEN DEFINITIONS OF MONOGAMY — which was sad and tragic and awesome — but now this: “We must stop conflating desires with property rights.”

    I’ve always been troubled by the line in Breakfast at Tiffany’s when what’shisname says to Holly, “I love you! You belong to me!” But then, I’ve recently been working on Caroline Myss’s definition of root chakra, tribal belonging issues. And realizing how important it is to belong…to something. But when we are expelled from or otherwise leave our Tribe, we go to great lengths to replace that bond with affiliations that don’t have the spiritual power to hold us in place. So it seems to me that we hold on tighter & become rabid evangelicals or jealous lovers, or whatever seems to make us fit.

    To me, where I am right now, this really speaks to the fraying of that original, Tribal bond.

  3. All of this seems to me to based on very limited ideas about what constitutes ‘a relationship’, how ones meets their sexual needs/desires, and the idea that each person is allocated a specific amount of love, which they then have to work out how to distribute amongst special ‘others’, and which they then have to have sanctioned by some sort of group (family, church, peers). No mother-law-jokes if society doesn’t hold tension about whether a man is capable of loving his mother and his wife, and no need to obsess about someone else’s relationship status (which in many societies is still the measure of one’s social status).

    I was getting on really well with a guy not that long ago, and at the point where there was the unspoken ‘sexual or not sexual’ he announced ‘I don’t want to have a relationship, I just want to be friends’. Okay. If friends isn’t a relationship, then what is it? My first thought, which i kept in my head, (wasn’t as bold in those not so long ago days) ‘does that mean a shag is out of the question?’. Actually if i had said it i doubt he would have taken the question seriously, i don’t in all honesty think he would have known what i was talking about.

    Then there’s the boring stuff that is actually what as social beings grounds us social reality, and what society needs of individuals so we can all be part of something and proud of it. The individual as a self-sufficient entity despite the preaching of rational materialism is a false construct and no matter how much ‘whatever’ one consumes individuals motivated by pure self-interest (because they don’t actually understand other ways of being) do not a family, community, society, culture, nation make.

    The same ideologies that encourage people to consume other people as social products (that’s what all the marketing is about) are the ones that have no interest in community, sustainability, the true self-worth of the person, or higher anything. I don’t think it’s an accident.

    A large, very large, proportion of the human population lives to survive. Survival is still the number one priority every day. Of those of us who have the relative luxury of some sort of self-determination, a large number seem to be stuck in a permanent sort of adolescence.

    Until we understand how power and control are shared or just as likely battled over, in our most personal and intimate relationships, the idea that a new social order can be built is fanciful. If all the ‘powers of evil’ disappeared tomorrow, it wouldn’t take long to replicate exactly the same disorder we have now, because what would we build it with, except what we already know?

    I feel that we need some new ideas, or some old ideas revisited, revised and updated, about relating, about what community really is, about how we are going to raise children to think and feel differently and actually pass into an adult maturity where freedom, (perhaps liberty is a better term) is something we treasure for ourselves and for all those who make up our worlds.

    I don’t think the issue is so much whether monogamy or polyamory or any other ‘y’ is good, bad, better, or worse, but rather what we desire and expect from how we relate with each other, how we raise children, how we choose to regulate our sexual behaviours.

    Asking the question ‘what to we need or desire from how we relate with others?’ may be an interesting place to start. And why do we think so many of these areas of life are ‘entitlements’ anyway?

    Today I gave one of the staff in the supermarket a flower and told her i love her. Why? Because i do. Am i intending to have sex with her. No. I am intending to extend our way of relating beyond chats and laughter at the checkout. No. Does she add to the quality of my life experience. Yes.

  5. A lot of this stuff is really really different in practice than it is in theory. First of all, the whole concept of polyamory scares the bejesus out of most people because 1. abandonment issues and 2. most freak even at the mere notion of jealousy.

    It’s only those who have a kind of natural inoculation to jealousy and also have some desire to experiment who are cut out for exploring polyamorously. In our age of “you must fear everything, including fear itself,” that’s challenging. Poly removes the false sense of security of faux monogamy.

    As for how many boys and how many girls, etc. In the “real world,” every attractive woman I meet seems to already have a boyfriend. I am not sure how this is possible since I know so many single men. There must be this special class of decamonogamous guys who each go out with 10 women.

    In the poly world, the legend runs thus: the couple agrees to be poly, the woman wants to experiment with other men, and her boyfriend freaks out. He may have wanted the whole poly thing to begin with, but then when he realizes that someone is gonna date/fuck/whatever HIS woman…spazola.

    Then there are the various shades of “I can do it but you cannot” — which I have personally seen females do many times; men do not have a patent on this one. Men do it plenty, but they are not the only ones. Much of this stuff seems to be non gender specific, but as I have said before, imo women have a much more efficient publicity office and tend to maintain their image with greater discipline.

    I have not shared one of my favorite Planet Waves pages for a while — THE SEVEN DEFINITIONS OF MONOGAMY.

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