By Maria Padhila
I tend to like men. Surprise! And at the risk of sign-ism and/or sounding like Cosmopolitan magazine, I tend to really like Capricorns. The Eeyore gloom, the way this mordant, louche sophistication combines with a stuffy, traditional integrity — that’s a shallow way to put it, but there you go. The shallow Gemini I am enjoys their contradictions. Plus, there’s the Capricorn quality my daughter, Tobi, has been able to get across even since infancy: a wickedly dry sense of humor. (If you don’t think infants have senses of humor — and very individual ones, too, some playful, some silly, some sweet and some snarky — you need to spend more time with infants.)
So the combination of man and Capricorn is part of what kept me reading Poly Guy’s blog — and made me think he’d be a good person to interview about some men-and-poly questions I’d been having. I’d ask one of my guys, but I don’t want to put them under the interrogation light just yet. Isaac, my legal husband, has actually said he’d write a guest blog sometime, but he wants to wait until I have things better established.
I had been wondering about the whole Sex At Dawn line of argument that monogamy is unnatural and not something the human animal will ever be comfortable with. If I accept that argument, I’m thinking I must also accept other ‘natural’ tendencies as well. And is ‘natural’ unreservedly something to aspire to, in any case? I don’t think monogamy is natural — at least not for me — but condoms aren’t natural, either; and both monogamy and condoms have enriched and improved many peoples’ lives and happiness for many, many years.
But I can’t really deny that as little as I like making generalizations based on gender (or even on planetary positions, the above notwithstanding), there are some aspects I see men working with, challenged by, or unconsciously acting out, types of behavior that are typically identified as ‘naturally male’. How much might behaviors such as competitiveness and territoriality make it more or less difficult for men to have polyamorous relationships?