{"id":72043,"date":"2013-11-23T14:00:26","date_gmt":"2013-11-23T19:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=72043"},"modified":"2013-11-22T15:54:59","modified_gmt":"2013-11-22T20:54:59","slug":"poly-advancing-faster-than-people-can-write-about-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/polyamory\/poly-advancing-faster-than-people-can-write-about-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Poly Advancing Faster than People Can Write About It"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Maria Padhila<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s all coming out.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s 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\u2019s a tipping point, critical mass effect — you\u2019ve pushed and pushed for so long, and finally the door opens and your own momentum carries you stumbling halfway into the next room.<\/p>\n

\"Poly
Poly Paradise at Burning Man. Photo by Eric.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This is what has been happening with polyamory as well. It\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n

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\u2019t. More people are saying, “Hmm. Maybe that\u2019s for me.” More people are saying, “Well, it\u2019s not for me, but where\u2019s the harm?” People are even starting to complain about being bored with articles about polyamory! To me, that\u2019s success.<\/p>\n

Hence Simon Broussard\u2019s recent post in Journals of a Polyamorous Triad on \u201cWhy Social Acceptance of Polyamory is Inevitable.\u201d 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\u2019s educating reading. It concludes:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Thus Polyamory and its eventual social acceptance and recognition are inevitable.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Unless we end up in The Handmaid\u2019s Tale<\/em> — still a possibility given recent politics — I\u2019d say his scenario is plausible. <\/p>\n

Even the Handmaid\u2019s Tale types sound like they\u2019re giving up the struggle. Read this, from the spooky First Things<\/a> religious politics blog; does it sound as resigned to you as it does to me?<\/p>\n

\nToday, 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. \u201cPoly\u201d groups no longer need to be pushed into the closet in order to depict redefining marriage as a \u201cconservative\u201d cause; \u201cpolys\u201d 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 \u201cconservative\u201d argument for polyamory: these are people in \u201cloving, committed multi-partner relationships.\u201d They have jobs and homes and mortgages and kids — just like everybody else. Moral objections to their “identity\u201d and the sexual expression of their love is condemned as mere \u201cprejudice.\u201d We must, we are told, fight the \u201cbigots\u201d who are stigmatizing them and \u201charming their children.\u201d When you have a script that works, I guess you keep using it.<\/p>\n

CNN is about as mainstream as you get, right? Here are some passages from CNN\u2019s non-judgmental and, indeed, quite sympathetic treatment of polyamory and polyamorists …<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I want to be clear that though I\u2019m saying it\u2019s looking more and more likely that polyamory will be accepted, I\u2019m not claiming a \u201cwin.\u201d Like we\u2019d like poly relationships to be, this acceptance is not a zero-sum game. I don\u2019t win points that have to be surrendered by monogamous couples; my way is not better than theirs. <\/p>\n

I hear some rumblings occasionally that polyamory being accepted is a result of us having \u201cevolved\u201d enough to be better people and a better society. If we were really evolved, we\u2019d 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\u2019s saying that poly acceptance is evidence of the enlightenment of society and the advancement of women, isn\u2019t making that kind of claim. What it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a good look at why this is a relationship issue, not a poly\/mono issue, from Franklin Veaux<\/a>:<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a danger in seeing polyamory as \u201cmore evolved\u201d or \u201cmore enlightened.\u201d Believing that we must be \u201cevolved\u201d or \u201cspiritual\u201d in order to have these skills is a bit of a cop-out. It excuses us for not developing them: \u201cWell, I don\u2019t have very good communication or conflict resolution skills, but it\u2019s not my fault, you see — most human beings just haven\u2019t evolved that far.\u201d<\/p>\n

Just like riding a bicycle, reading, or shooting pool, we develop these skills by practice. We try, we fail, we learn, we try again\u2026and before you know it, we\u2019re 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\u2019re taught little about relationships beyond \u201cwhen you meet The One you\u2019ll live happily ever after,\u201d managing poly relationships can look like magic too. But they\u2019re not. They\u2019re skills, and the wonderful thing about skills is that we can all practice them.<\/p>\n

Now, I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n

So when you hear someone talking about poly \u201cevolution\u201d — and sooner or later, you will — remember, you learned to read, right? Polyamory is no more evolved than literacy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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 \u201ckeep your hands off my DNA\u201d or you might have enthusiastically leapt into the 23andMe camp. If you\u2019re the latter, you may be interested in participating in this study<\/a>, which crowdsources genetic information to see if there are genetic similarities among poly people. The information says they\u2019re looking at traits such as openness and willingness to take risks to see if there\u2019s any matches. I bet you right now I can predict the outcome; there won\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Maria Padhila It\u2019s all coming out. That\u2019s 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 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7221,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[207],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72043"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7221"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72043\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}