Found this via reddit, but here is the direct link.
Privilege has been all over the place as a discussion topic in the atheist community since Elevatorgate, but I have not seen too much about it in poly discussions. I do suspect that monogamous privilege is a real thing, but the extent of it is not something I have spent a lot of time thinking about.
Thoughts?
One of the most cited reasons that people are not polyamorous, even if they are not against the idea in principle, is that they simply could not do it. They are too jealous.
But jealousy is not a sufficient reason to not be polyamorous. Not being polyamorous for this reason is simply a way to avoid dealing with the problem of jealousy.
Ever listen to love songs on the radio? Ever watch a sappy romantic comedy where the blunt end of the joke is the presence of competition or possessiveness? The lamenting lyrics of wanting someone’s girl, seeing someone beautiful on the train but she was with another man, or sappy words about how someone belongs to someone else is so ubiquitous that not even us polyamorous people always notice it. But it is pretty ubiquitous.
Jealousy, whether in the form of competition, possessiveness, or destruction of property is a part of our culture. It is, indeed, part of the mythology of love in our culture. I use the term myth here because if possessiveness or jealousy are anywhere near the core of love, something is wrong.
But it often is near the core of love in our culture. Our culture’s use of love, expectations of relationships, and folk wisdom about how to respond to jealousy are pretty unattractive. It is not surprising that this is the case, especially given that the Bible (which is a part of the foundation of our Western culture) seems to condone this behavior in the book of Exodus.
20:3 Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
and it gets better two verses later!
20:5 Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;
20:6 And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.
[emphasis mine]
See, god loves us, but if we were to cast a casual glance to some other god, he would smite us. And we’d deserve it, of course! How could we be so slutty….
The problem is that people don’t see jealousy as a bad thing. As the picture at the top of this post shows, there is an idea in our culture that jealousy is somehow an indication that the love is real, rather than imitation love or whatever. I have been told before that if I don’t mind my girlfriend sleeping with other men, I don’t really love her. Such people say that when I meet someone who I really love, I would not want to share her.
I suppose I don’t love either of you, Ginny and Gina. Sorry….
Bullshit! That idea is patently absurd. I love both of them and I don’t see how bowing to any jealous or possessive feelings I may have is someone more real than recognizing that they are both intelligent, talented, and beautiful people who anyone could love. How is it rational to love someone (or some thing) and not expect other people to love them too? And what right do I have to claim possession to a person just because I love them? That is the implication, right; I love them, and anyone else who does is competition.
Of course, for many of us anyway, jealousy still occurs. Sometimes it’s mere envy, but sometimes it’s not. But what do we do about it? Do we address the object of our jealousy or do we address the fact that jealousy is damaging to relationships and love in general? Most resources I have seen seem to emphasize that the feeling is probably unwarranted; that what we fear is not happening and we need to stop being so suspicious. But when you share your lovers, the thing you feel jealous about is happening! The question is whether you should feel bad about that.
Obviously, if you are agreeing to non-monogamy with your partner(s), you have no justification to be angry about it happening, even if you do feel jealous from time to time. In such circumstances, your project should be to find ways to rid yourself of those types of reactions so that your good feelings for those people are not tainted by unpleasant experiences of feeling possessive or insecure as a result. Eventually, you may grow to like the idea of sharing (some call this compersion. I hate that term. It’s still better than frubble), and jealousy may be nothing but an unpleasant memory or a curiosity for reflaction on human nature.
Monogamous people may have reasons to be angry if their partners have romantic or sexual relationships with other people (since this was not agreed upon, by definition), but the jeaousy is still something they should try and transcend. Jealousy does not stop it from happening, and if it is not happening it causes unnecessary anxiety. It is a sign of lack of trust, security, and can only act to drive people apart, rather than help in any way.
Therefore, there is no excuse for tolerating jealousy, even if one is monogamous.
Even if you choose a lifestyle of sexual exclusivity, your partner will probably love someone else. They will probably find other people sexually and/or romantically attractive, they will have fantasies about those people, and ultimately they will probably want more than you are able to give. If you decide to structure your relationship such that neither of you will pursue anything beyond friendship with others, so be it, but this will not eliminate the existence and problem of jealousy.
It will just avoid the problem by treating the symptom rather than the underlying cause.
The love you have for someone is because of who they are, and should not be dependent upon who else loves them or who else they love. So, for someone to say that they could not be polyamorous because they are too jealous, what they seem to be saying is that they do not want to deal with the reality of human needs, desires, or the possibility that they may not be able to satisfy every need a person has.
Jealousy is not a reason not to be polyamorous; it is a reason to consider not being in a relationship with anyone. Jealousy does not go away just because you are not sharing, it just isn’t challenged when we are not sharing. It’s sort of like teaching children how to share toys; if you just keep them all separate and let them play with their toys separately, the problem never arises. But when you put children together, they fight over toys. Separating them does not alleviate the problem, it only avoids it.
Similarly, separating everyone out with monogamous pairings does not make jealousy go away, it just tries to create a dynamic where it ideally is never relevant. It is an unrealistic expectation and is rarely possible. So why try?
Only because it avoids the problem most of the time. From a practical point of view, it is easier to not deal with hard problems. But this is short-term thinking, and does not lead to us growing up to emotional adulthood. Jealousy is one of the many aspects to human behavior which we need to address as a species, and too often it is shelved in the name of practicality.
We can do better than that.
Yesterday a Facebook group to which I belong posted an article claiming that Republican senators were moving to pass a bill outlawing tampons, because hindering the menstrual flow is against God’s plan for women. I saw the article, immediately went, “Um, what?” and clicked through to the website, Free Post Press. I had never heard of this before and had no clue that it was ultimately a satirical site like The Onion.
To my credit, I was quite suspicious of it because the article contained no sources and there was no “About Us” section on the site to give me a clue as to what these people were about.
Less to my credit, I went onto Facebook to chastise liberals for writing up “news” stories and then having no evidence to back it up. As I said, we need all the help we can get and putting up terrible stories without sources makes us look bad and encourages the spreading of misinformation.
Yes, yes. I know you’re laughing at me. Go ahead and get it out of your system.
Jeez, I didn’t think it was that stupid.
OK. CAN I TALK NOW?
Thank you.
Well, looking back at it now, it was pretty obvious that the site was humorous. But at first glance, it came across to me like a Liberal Ranting and Raving site with a humorous edge. Don’t worry…I admitted my idiocy as soon as someone pointed it out. Even though I did that, several people immediately shared the article from my link as truth. I did what damage control I could. Ooooooops!
However, my gullibility in this regard ultimately amused me for two big reasons. (A) The insanity described in the article seemed perfectly plausible to me. (B) The fact that a brightly colored Liberal website would jump at the chance to spread unsubstantiated claims seemed equally plausible.
Ginny pointed out that having not been raised as a hard core conservative or fundamentalist Christian, my filter for true Batshit Conservative Ideology® vs. false batshit conservative ideology (accept NO IMITATIONS!) is not refined. From the outside, it all sounds the same. She was raised in that type of environment and called bullshit immediately.
When I was a kid, I really trusted adults and responded well to authority. I didn’t particularly like anyone in my own age group. My contemporaries made me uncomfortable and I generally thought they were all full of crap…which was likely quite accurate as we were kids. I believed what the adults around me told me. I was young and impressionable. Most of the adults that I encountered were unconventional people with unconventional ideas. They always believed that there was more going on than what was being presented and taught me to question everything…everything mainstream anyway. I suppose I was raised in a somewhat hard core liberal environment. I took from it a few good things I think. I learned to question everything on television, for instance.
But I also initially was raised to believe that liberals thought something shady was going on, it was and it was just as bad as you think…if not worse.
As I got older, my scientific mind began to develop. While learning about how to do research in school, the idea of needing evidence to back up claims was hammered into my head. And it wasn’t just “find one source somewhere that supports your claim,” but actually, “find several sources that concur”. At the same time, I started to realize that much like my contemporaries; a lot of the adults in my life were also full of crap. I found myself listening to them and thinking, “Where on Earth are you getting this from?” I began questioning everything, even if someone I thought was “cool and interesting” said it.
I was a kid in the 80’s and early 90’s. This was, of course, prior to the internet being as ubiquitous as it is now. When I was doing research assignments, I had to rely on Encyclopedia Brittanica and hard copy books at the library. With the advent of the internet, suddenly all information was available and pretty accessible. This, as we all know, means that really reputable sources can be easily accessed…and that whack jobs have equal access to the etherwaves to spew their theories. For every intelligent, well researched article discussing important issues of our day, there are 10 (probably more) articles written by some idiot who has completely missed the point.
We are living in bizarre times. Conservatives are currently very easy to hate, mock and be terrified of. When you read about the laws they are really trying to pass and the opinions that people really have, anything absurd and Orwellian sounds possible. There is just so much bad legislation being brought out and not dismissed by nearly a large enough margin, that the momentum of this makes it seem like we’re seconds away from living in a place we don’t recognize anymore.
But then you take a deep breath and realize that the type of government that we have does offer some hope. There really are still a bunch of checks and balances and we are lucky enough to be able to fight for our rights and that it would be relatively difficult for us to wake up in the morning to a Fascist dictatorship…right? Something something George Washington something something Dress Up Like Indians and Dump Tea in the River blah blah blah.
So yes, we liberally minded people have reason to be a little uneasy about the current state of affairs and I fear that the coming election is going to be ugly. Not in the “Obama will lose” kind of way, but just in a “this is what the face and heart of our country looks like” kind of way.
But on the flipside, I see a lot of crap get posted on my Facebook page and I see a lot of people get absolutely up in arms about things that haven’t been proven. I see countless articles that are written to terrify you, as a liberal. The chemical, pharmaceutical, oil, what have you industry is in cahoots with the government to kill you.
And, you know, I don’t trust any of them either because there’s evidence that some of these claims are true. I know this because I read a lot of blogs that will terrify you and every time something is claimed, there is a source with a direct quote to prove it. There is a link to the actual wording of a bill going up for vote. But a lot of the articles just make outrageous scary statements and then have no source to back it up. So if you’re going to say something that is going to scare the shit out of people, BACK IT THE FUCK UP. The purpose of writing about these things is to educate the public, right? RIGHT?!? So if you really want to give us a reason to reject a product, give us a bunch of evidence to convince us. Don’t be paranoid. Don’t fear simply for fear’s sake. KEEP THINKING. Fear is the mind killer, after all.
So yeah, I got totally duped by a satirical article. You can fool some of the people some of the time and all that rot. But I think people’s reactions to it showed how crazed some of us are becoming as November 2012 approaches. The mere suggestion that Republicans might be trying to do something truly insane sends up into a tizzy. Sure, my tizzy was about the lack of source citations, but I believed that this could be true.
If you pay attention and keep thinking critically about the things that are unfolding before us, worry not, for there is plenty to be angry about. It’s not like if you read an article and take a deep breath and verify its contents that you will suddenly be serene. But it is important to keep our wits about us because I think that’s the closest thing to kryptonite we have against all of it. If we waste our energy freaking out about every What If and Possibly True, we’ll have nothing left to fight against the stuff that really is happening.
I debated if I was going to start this off with a long discussions of the important ideals the Care Bears taught us. That would have likely turned into a discussion about My Little Pony and Rainbow Bright…and then, as I dated myself as an obvious child of the 80’s, I would wait to see how long it would take for my audience to either stop reading or barf, and really, is that what Polyskeptic is about? Room exiting barf inspirations? I don’t think that’s in the mission statement.
Instead, let’s just get to the point: I’m going to talk about apathy. See what I did there? There’s no Apathy Bear, sillies. Could you imagine? Apathy Bear would be such a downer…even more of a downer than Grumpy Bear (or whatever he was called…the blue one with the rain cloud on his stomach…stylish and totes goth)…to the rest of the group. They’d all yell “CARE BEAR STARE!” and Apathy Bear would look at them, raise an eyebrow and say, “Whatevs” and the evil whatever (Old Man Jenkins? No…that’s Scooby Doo) would win. Thanks a lot, Apathy Bear.
Oh lord, I’m writing about them anyway aren’t I…DAMN IT! OK, I’ll stop. Onto useful content!
Last night as Wes, Jessie and I were coming home from a lovely little bar in Old City, Wes and I were debating about various topics relevant to reason and religion and such and Jessie said that she thought she had gotten on the Express Train to not giving a crap. She was raised Catholic. Catholic turned to nondenominational Christian and then at some point she just gave the whole thing up and went right to, what she calls, Apathy-ism. Later she would explain that she doesn’t even want to label herself as an atheist because it is still having a definitive label about you in relationship to a god and that she simply has no interest in living life from a theistic point of view, even if it is one of non-belief. Basically, she has completely rejected religion and god in every way possible. (This is a lot of paraphrasing, so Jessie can feel free to correct me if I got anything wrong!)
When she first said it, I said that I didn’t want to be on that Express Train. But then I realized that I had already been there and come back from it. As I mentioned before, non-belief was a matter of course for most of my life. It was second nature. It was easy to continue a secular lifestyle because I was very lucky to have gone to school in the Philadelphia public school system…
Never thought you’d see anyone type that, did you?
I went to a really excellent school, but that’s beside the point. Religion did not make any kind of appearance EVER in my daily activities. Well, there was this one time when I was in elementary school and this very strange man came in to be a substitute teacher. He asked us all to draw a picture of what we thought God looked like. As a 7 year old, I felt that this was royally OUT. I remember having a general sense of “That is not supposed to be talked about here…and besides, God doesn’t look like anything because…I don’t think there really is one…” and then I drew a picture of the solar system. I don’t remember what other people drew, but I do remember a lot of people looking confused about the assignment. I recall being a little upset about it, but luckily that was a rather isolated event. Something like that would never infiltrate my elementary or highschool education again. In highschool I had a biology teacher who was all about evolution and genetics. We had to read The Double Helix for class. He didn’t mention Creationism…EVER…because it was a science class. Looking back, I wonder if there were any students whose parents were up in arms about that. There never seemed to be any issue. No one yearned for “the other side of the story” to be told.
My point here is that I was apathetic about religion and other people’s views because they didn’t touch my life particularly. I think I had developed the attitude “Whatever you want to believe is fine” because I didn’t particularly think that there was anything harmful about that…because I didn’t really think anyone believed it anyway. I was sheltered and felt safe in assuming that I was living in a secular society that only showed its religion around Christmas and Easter. So, I was apathetic because I didn’t think there was any particular debate.
Then, after I figured out that there was a pretty big fucking debate, I became apathetic because it was just too difficult for me to engage anyone about it. I have historically been a non-confrontational person, but not because I actually thought that everyone’s views were worthy of respect, but because I just hated having people upset with me and was scared of putting my neck out there. The few times I participated in a discussion about religion, I ended up just conceding because clearly it was way more important to the religious person to be right. That was generally my point of view in any argument about a hot button issue. I didn’t feel equipped to engage. I didn’t feel that I knew enough. When someone would confuse me with a bad argument, I didn’t assume it was a bad argument. I assumed that I was too stupid to be in the debate in the first place. I mistook passion for knowledge and logic. Conflict has often made me uncomfortable just being around it so I adopted the opinion that everyone should just shut up about it…not because it didn’t matter, but because listening to it drove me crazy. When someone of faith was questioned in front of me, it undeniably would result in personal attacks from the theist to the atheist and proclamations that these were their beliefs and no one gets to question them. Something something that’s what Hitler did something something else. I would want to scream “YOU ARE WRONG” but was too cowardly to do so. To enter the fray would be to become an enemy of sorts and I just wasn’t comfortable with that. So I decided not to care. “Well, I guess that’s fine…”
I struggled with apathy with a lot of things. I didn’t want to officially proclaim which side I was on with various issues because I didn’t want to alienate people from me. I mean, I have always been pro-choice, pro-civil rights for all, regardless of race, gender, creed (yes, creed…I might not value your creed, but I don’t think you should not be able to get married or get a job or vote or whatever else just because of it), or sexual orientation, pro-social programs to help the poor and otherwise disenfranchised, etc., but I never wanted to talk about it. I didn’t want to fight about it…because I thought that everyone I knew basically agreed with this stuff and I didn’t think any of it was being particularly threatened. An America where progress was moving toward attainment of all these things was the America I assumed I was in.
Then the World Trade Center was attacked and I hoped against all hope that we as a country would not be idiots about it, that we wouldn’t simply retaliate and wrap ourselves in American Flags and cry about our freedom…well, we all know how that turned out. When I turned 22, the war started and I found myself caring quite a bit. I didn’t want to…but I couldn’t help it. My apathy about that eroded and I started getting in people’s faces about theirs. I alienated some people from me, and that’s ok.
In the last couple of years I have found that my apathy about everything else has begun to erode too…pretty drastically. I don’t find it easy to stay quiet anymore. I don’t respond well to blatant spreading of misinformation, fear mongering, obvious displays of privilege (when the person displaying them is completely unaware of it), and simple unapologetic (often willful) ignorance. I fully admit that I am ignorant about a lot of things, that I don’t know very much about a vast array of topics…but I want to learn. I want to understand. And I will call people on things when I disagree.
This process of learning to care again has been amazing and also sometimes depressing. My eyes are open; I am receptive to seeing more…but sometimes when you start to really see things, disappointment is quick to follow. But in the end, I would rather care and be aware and sometimes completely and utterly irate than to spare myself that anger and be unaware of the truth in things. The apathy that used to keep me isolated and friendly, even with people who I really didn’t need to have around (fo’ realz), was making me feel dead to the world. Now I feel alive, if not sometimes completely crazed about the state of the world I am living in. I’ll take it for now.
Jessie is really only apathetic about the god stuff. She cares quite a bit about a lot of important things. I can understand not wanting to give a shit about god after having it beaten into your head for years and years. I certainly don’t begrudge her that. She knows considerably more about that existence than I do (hence my continuing ignorance throughout my teens and early twenties). My life would look very different if I ever had to monumentally reject something that definitive in my life. Her comments last night just got me thinking about how much I do want to care…about everything…about how I think I do want to make a difference.
And what the fuck was I doing in my twenties? Yeesh. Well, for me, the thirties seem to be the new twenties, so let’s get living!
Skepticism, Properly Applied 