Author: ShaunPhilly

Human, gamer, philosopher, godlike being, atheist, nonmonogamous, pariah, contrarian by nature, probably occasionally right human who writes nonsense to very few people. Some people come here only to downvote my posts. That seems sort of ridiculous, right?

Is polyamory better for humanity? Let’s find out!


I am well aware that there are people within the polyamory world for whom the idea that polyamory is better than monogamy is quite annoying.  To say that polyamory is somehow objectively better, from their point of view, is to miss the varieties of human experience.  How can anyone be so arrogant, parochial, or unobservant to not notice that many people are quite happy being monogamous?  How can such people not see that not everyone wants to or can be polyamorous?

I have a feeling that some people who read this blog, or who know me, think my opinion is that polyamorous people are better than non-poly people.  But before I address that question directly, allow me to make an important distinction that may help avoid conflating two different sets of views which are related to the question, and which may be creating confusion as to what is being claimed by some “arrogant” polyamorous people.

(Not that anyone has ever called me arrogant…)

There are probably people out there who will make the claim that poly people are better than monogamous people.  One can trip them up by pointing to quite mature, happy, awesome monogamous people and compare them to people who are polyamorous but aren’t as respectable.  There are many out there who are doing polyamory—well, they are really just doing relationships and personal growth—in unhealthy ways.  Such people who will want to maintain some form of this claim of superiority will step back and make some bell-curve restatement; something like people who are polyamorous are generally better than monogamous people, but there are exceptions (of course).

This line of argument is pretty fruitless, as there is no research I know of that could support this (or the opposite) claim.  We don’t have agreed-upon criteria for better or worse, necessarily (although we could come up with some), and even if we did have such criteria, we don’t have the data to apply to such.  The conversation about whether poly people are better, equivalent, or worse than monos leads us [nowhere practically useful], in my opinion.  We are left with individual judgments about other people based upon our experience, which is subject to personal biases and criteria, which is not particularly helpful in general claims about superiority.  Thus, to make general claims about whether poly or mono people are better is quite difficult, even if one where to identify some rubric for talking about such a general claim.  So while there may be aspects of polyamory which are superior, whether the people themselves are is a separate question.

These (I hope uncontroversial) observations lead many people to the conclusion that we cannot create an objective criteria for judging the relative superiority of polyamory and monoamory (rather than monogamy because we are not necessarily talking about marriage, since -gamy means marriage).  But, further, it leads many people to the conclusion that the whole enterprise of judging the general merits of polyamory in relation to relationship exclusivity is not only fruitless or complicated, but simply wrong-headed; poly people are not better than mono people, they just have chosen what works for them, just like many monogamous/monoamorous people.  And, the argument goes, since we all have to make our own choices about how to live, and since we have different desires and experiences, we cannot judge whether one relationship philosophy is better than the other.

However, polyamory is not sufficiently culturally disseminated, as an idea, to say that the vast majority of people have actually chosen monoamory.  There is simply no way to rationally claim that there is a real choice between mono and poly styles of relationships for most people.  There are too many acculturated ideologies, fears, and assumptions about how sexuality and relationships work to say that there is a level field of competition in the mind of people exposed to polyamory to make the claim that mono people have really chosen their relationship styles with appropriate consideration.

The question is what would happen is the vast majority of people really understood what this choice entailed.  If most people understood what polyamory was about—including the importance of honesty, communication, the desire to deal with jealousies in mature ways, etc—would most people still choose and be happy with monogamy?  We simply have no good way of knowing the answer to this question.  I may have my (biased, even if educated) guess, but I have little to no evidence to support those views.  I think it is an interesting thing to think about.  I think the discussion will draw out our assumptions about human nature, human sexuality, and how we think about relationships.  But we can only get so far with that conversation, and it will be based upon a fair amount of supposition.

So, keeping that in mind, I want to sketch out a project.  I begin with the assumption that there is meaning to the idea that there are better ways to be as human beings; there are attributes, behavior-patterns, and worldviews which are better at creating happiness, well-being, and quality of life.  There is meaning to the idea that there is an objective, rationally-based, metric for how to think about how to be human better, and we may not be far from defining what those things may be.

I think such a metric must be evidenced-based (that is, skeptical).  I believe that while personal taste is a factor, we cannot retreat to pure relativism where we merely get to decide, on a whim, what is best for us.  I think that sometimes we are wrong about what is best for us, and that we often need to appeal to something larger than us (a community, an idea, etc) to figure out if what we have chosen, while not terrible or overtly bad, may not actually what will make us happiest and most fulfilled. I think that there is always room for improvement in our lives, and we need to perpetually question our assumptions and worldview.

I agree with the idea that morality, even absent a god or cosmic purpose, is in some way objective and definable and that morality has a lot to say about how we could live in order to be happier, fulfilled, and live more authentically.  I believe that honesty, attention, and authenticity are high values that we all should try and incorporate in our lives.  And I think that we need to be prepared to both challenge and be challenged, and if we do so we can transcend the cultural idea that criticism and judgment are bad things.

So, what if we were to try and come up with a metric for what is more rational and better behavior for people in terms of leading to more happiness and fulfillment?  Would it turn out that polyamory is the option which would be better for most people?

The rub for me is that I think there are objective facts which can help us make such judgments, but that how we rule on such questions will depend on too many unknown factors.  I am willing to admit that it may end up being the case that monoamory is objectively better for most people.  The point is that I think that this is a real issue that can really be tested, not something merely subject to personal taste or mere choice—especially given that most people don’t know enough about polyamory to effectively choose it.

I think there may be ways to objectively judge if polyamory is or is not better for people, even if I cannot fully define such a project right now.

So, rather than ask if polyamorous people are better than monoamorous people, the question should be whether polyamory is better than monoamory for people given that currently-monoamorous people are indeed fine people in most cases and that they are currently generally content with their choice.  The implication is not that monogamous people are doing anything wrong, are unhappy, or any such thing.  The question is whether polyamory fits better with human desires, behavior patterns, etc. and will serve as a more objectively practical relationship style in terms of providing humanity with a better way to think about love, sex, and well-being.

I make such a distinction because I perceive that when I make a claim like “polyamory is better than monogamy” I think people interpret this to mean that I think I’m better than monogamous people because I’m polyamorous (or even that I’m polyamorous because I’m better, in case anyone has forgotten about that fracas).  No, I think I’m better than some people because I’m better than some people.  I’m worse than others because I’m worse than others.  My being polyamorous is, in part, a result of some of the attributes that I like about myself—I’m honest with my desires, I seek to live authentically, and I seek to challenge myself to perpetually grow as a person.  I just happen to be convinced that polyamory is a wonderful way to be human and that it fits very well with what I observe as human inclinations  and follows along nicely with efforts to be a better person in general.  And if some (or many) people end up being accidentally happy as monoamorous, then so long as they are not suppressing anyone’s desires to do so, I have no quarrel.

In the future, I will want to sketch out the criteria about how we might pursue such a question as whether polyamory is actually objectively better than monoamory, but for now I want to make it clear that this is not a competition about what people are better than other people (although that can be a fun game too, I suppose), but rather what relationships behaviors are better for groups of humans.

Some further thoughts on the distinction between orientation and polyamory.


So, I read the comments on reddit.  I know, I know, comments are the realm of trolls and other unpleasant beings, but when we post things there, I’m curious what people have to say.

Wes tends to get a number of comments there (I wish they would just comment here, but alas…), and his last post is no exception.

Click on over if you want to read the comments there at reddit, as some of them are not terrible, but what I want to highlight was my latest reply to one commenter, which I think is worth posting on its own.

The issue is whether polyamory can be thought of as a choice or not.  Many people feel like polyamory is an orientation; they feel compelled to be polyamorous (to not be exclusively sexual/romantic).  This was my comment:

Of course, my opinion may differ from that of Wes (the author of the OP, but we both write for that blog), but I can address some of this.

I think that the hard distinction between choice and orientation is not the best model to use here, and I don’t think Wes meant it as a digital relationship. My post, which is linked to in his, claims that the orientation part comes in either being interested in intimacy (sexual, emotional, etc) with varying kinds and quantities of people. Who, and how many, people you are interested in maintaining relationships with is not something you choose, and can be described as an orientation.

But you have some choice about how to act on your inclinations. So, you can choose to have a mono relationship and cheat (or not), stay single and sleep around (or not), maintain multiple relationships with sexual contact with many people (or not), etc. The distinction is between the inclination, the desire, and the deciding how to act on it. For people who want to live authentically, the desire leads to an act (done ethically), and so they don’t really see the distinction because it flows so naturally.

I get that for many people what distinguishes poly from mono is the inclusion of sexuality in relationships. I get that some people simply cannot imagine being exclusively sexual with one person. I get that it feels like an orientation. It feels that way to me too. But when I examine the idea of what polyamory is, I have to recognize that there is a difference between my inclination (my ability to love many people, including sexually) and my acting on it. Polyamory is not coterminous with the desire (the orientation) itself, but is an expression of that desire.

The desire is the orientation. The distinction here is that when I willingly enter into relationships with people to express this desire; that’s polyamory. Now in some ways this is not really a choice; we feel compelled to do so, but it is an act, based upon a related orientation.

That feeling of being oriented towards sexuality, emotional intimacy, etc with many people, the thing that makes being mono seem impossible, is not the polyamory part per se. The polyamory comes in when we decide, or are compelled, to act of our inclinations openly, transparently, etc.

I think that Wes agrees with this distinction, and whether he does or not, I think the distinction is important.  I am not sure that people who “reddit” always read closely enough to pick up such ideas.

Which is why I think it should be skimmit.com….

 

 

Polyamory and being Honesty-Oriented


Yesterday, Alex wrote a post about polyamory and orientation.  The issue here is whether we can think about polyamory as an orientation, sort of like how we think of homosexuality, heterosexuality, or bisexuality as orientations.  I wanted to add my thoughts of the topic today.

Alex brought up the issue of distinguishing between who we are and what we do.  My understanding of this distinction is that “who we are” deals with our set of non-chosen  desires, inclinations, and preferences.  We do not choose who we are attracted to, although it is rather common for people to hide certain types of attractions due to social, often religious, pressures.

We can choose what to do about these desires.*  We can be attracted to someone, and not act on it.  We can not be attracted to someone, and act as if we were.  We can choose to live a life of homosexuality even if we were not attracted to the same gender.  We can choose to live a heterosexual life even if we actually desire same-gender relationships.  The question is why would anyone do so? Why would we act contrary to our deep desires, and so often do this when it comes to our sexuality?

Some value, in such cases, would have to supersede that of requiting desires.  It might be some religious rule, a sense of shame due to a social bias against our non-chosen preferences, etc.  For a person to reject, suppress, or ignore–to put oneself in the closet!–their true inclinations, strong social or psychological motivations must be present.

 

The Privilege of Normal

The privilege of being heterosexual, cis, and monogamous allow such people to navigate the dating world with little to no interference.  Such people might get annoyed by old-fashioned ideas about marriage, sex, etc, but most of our culture has accepted that a boy and a girl will get to sexin’ when they want to., and think it healthy when they pair off and move towards exclusivity and possibly consider marriage and family.

So, when people start to feel desires which don’t fit that mold they start to experience some cognitive dissonance.  The normal worldview is held to be the moral ideal and is defended by family, media (especially most romantic comedies and in many children’s love stories), and often by our partners who are often living in the same cultural expectations.  And so we make sacrifices, because that is what we are supposed to do.

Because that is the way relationships are supposed to work.

And of course what is normal has shifted.  Homosexual relationships have, for many of us educated and especially liberal folk, become part of the normal narrative.  So, the people on top of the cake might be two men or two women, but there are still two of them and there is no ambiguity about whether they are actually men or women.  Like I said; normal.

Even still, LGBT activists and allies still have work to do to help our society improve when it comes to how non-heterosexual people find their way to be who they are.  The LGBT community knows one set of directions this story goes.  So often, a gay or lesbian people (and let’s not forget the bisexuals out there–I have a feeling they are more numerous than most people think)  get involved in relationships, get married, etc to find themselves unhappy.  The dream they were promised never came to fruition.  Too many stories exist of people finally coming to grips with their sexuality in their 40’s, 50′. or later.

Too many stories of people living in the closet for too long for no good reason.

And in the last 10 years the atheist community has adopted the language to talk about people who have hidden their lack of belief in whatever their local mythology is.  And more people are coming out as atheists now than ever before.  It is a good sign for the future of atheism, towards the goal of making being an atheist no issue at all.

So, what about polyamory? Yes, there is some effort to get people to come out of the closet, but this is about getting people who are already living polyamorously to let people around them know; to take the social risk to be out about it.  I support this, but what I’m addressing here is a different issue, and one which many polyamorous people will certainly disagree with me about.

I think that most people are closeted potential polyamorous people.

 

The Poly Closet

I think that polyamory is the rational “lovestyle” for many people, possibly most people, because many people are attracted to, interested in, etc more than one person.  And most people could, if they chose to do the work, maintain a relationship with people in more than the restrictive ways than what mono-normativity allows.

As I said in my comment yesterday:

…yes! I am attracted to, and capable of loving more than one person. So of course I am polyamorously oriented. So are most people. I’m just aware of it and honest about it. Most of the rest of our culture has managed to run away and hide from this reality, and have created an artificially restrictive model for ideal relationships. I simply discovered the absurdity of that model and ditched it. Others have failed to do so, thus far.

I think this is a good start, but I think I want to tweak this a little.  Because we are distinguishing between our innate desires and our choices, I will continue that distinction below.

Being oriented towards being non-monogamous is not always going to lead to actively seeking out poly relationships.  Polyamorous relationships are hard (as are all relationships), and the choice to be honest with what we want and pursue those desires responsibly is one with many potential social consequences.

Being polyamorous involves actively choosing and pursuing the non-monogamous desires that we, as human beings, really do have..  In the same way that people simply are attracted to who they are attracted to (thus they don’t choose what they want to pursue a certain person, regardless of whether they actually pursue such a thing), many people actually are attracted to more than one person, interested in a deeply close relationship with more than one person, and capable of the communication it would take to do so successfully.

Many, if not most (if not the vast majority of people), are inclined towards loving or at least having sex with more than one person.  Social pressure, insecurity, and fear get in the way of pursuing such in too many cases, or even of thinking about it in the first place, but the inclinations are there.  If it wasn’t, cheating would rarely happen and jealousy would not be such an issue that it would end relationships.  The prominence of cheating tells us that we are actually interested, and jealousy tells us that not only do we know this, but feel like we actively have to be concerned about it.

But cheating and jealousy change their colors in the context of polyamory.  They are still possible and real, but they become different animals; All sexual contact outside one relationship is not automatically cheating and jealousy becomes a challenge to deal with, not merely submit to.  Trust and personal challenges to mature emotionally in the context of pursuing what you really want; what any healthy relationship requires, and what polyamory has taught many people.

And the more people who do so openly, the better it will be for future poly people.

 

Honesty-Oriented

I feel it is important here to distinguish between the desire for non-monogamy, and the ideal goal of transparent, mature, and responsible relationship maintenance.  Just like we have the responsibility to act on our desires in other areas with maturity and openness, we have the responsibility to treat all of our relationships with the utmost level of honesty, respect, and appropriate transparency, whether we are monogamous or not.

The only rational conclusion I can draw from the facts is that people are oriented towards non-monogamy.  That is, if we are honest with ourselves, we will see that what we really want doesn’t match up with the social ideal of monogamy.  So those of us who are polyamorous, at least those of us doing it in healthy, transparent, ways are honesty-oriented.

Now, whether most people can and will move towards polyamory—that is responsibly pursuing our sexual and romantic desires for multiple people—is a different question.  So far, most people have not been able to escape the acculturation which trains us to seek exclusivity, monogamy, and thus to ignore what we really desire in the name of an ideology .  They can often be happy, rationalize reasons to ignore other desires, and will find defenses for their monogamy.  Theists do the same thing all the time in the face of atheism.

Truth is not a deep value in our culture; at best, it’s a superficial value, paraded out occasionally but which holds no real power.  To actually seek truth, you have to be willing to knock down walls, question basic assumptions, and (as Nietzsche implores of us) to philosophize with a hammer.  But we don’t often, as a society, do so.

Some of this can be blamed on religion, but not all of it.  Religion, after all, is but one carrier of the problem, which is that of power, property, and fear.  Whether we frame it in terms of patriarchy, economics, politics, or religious control over people’s desires and actions (and all of these frames contain some part of the puzzle), monogamy is about ideology manipulating our natural desires.  It is about making what we really want seem wrong, impractical, or even subversive.

Because whether we are total sex sluts, asexual, or somewhere in between, the vast majority of us actually have and maintain relationships with more than one person.  We are capable of liking, loving, and fucking many people in a variety of ways, but for some reason we set sexuality, romance, etc aside for one person, even if only ideally.  The fact that we keep getting pulled towards the absurd ideal of monogamy, even while being single and young, is the ideology that does not jibe with the direction our desires are pulling us.

Being single and young is the exception, not the rule.  Being sexually open, promiscuous, and exploring our sexuality is what we do before we are ready to settle down and be real adults.

This idea needs to be trashed.  People need to realize they are in a closet, one they may not even see of as a closet.  The social expectation of exclusivity and monogamy is a set of walls around our sexuality, painted as an ideal and mature way to think about relationships.  Many of us have found the door, knocked over the walls, or invited other people in (the analogy could be seen in many ways, I suppose), and we are seen as destructive, rebellious, and possibly immoral.

All it takes is to ask a simple question; why is monogamy good?

Not “why is monogamy bad?” because it isn’t necessarily bad.  But why is is good? Why is it the ideal? Why is it the goal? why is it more mature?

The burden of proof lies with the apologist for monogamy.  If you can meet it, then congratulations, you can go live your life happily monogamous and I will have no quarrel with you; I will wish you well and hope that your partner agrees with you, otherwise you may be artificially limiting their sexuality.

So, monogamists, I am happy that you are happy (if you are happy).  But others have a different orientation towards truth, honesty, and transparency about our desires; we have the ability to love each as we actually love them without consideration of monogamous social expectations. We no longer have a need for an artificial goal of exclusivity, as we can allow our true desires to be shared without shame.

Non-monogamy is an orientation based upon honesty, and more people share it with me than many think.

It’s time for more honesty-oriented living, don’t you think?

 

—-

*I am leaving aside the issue of contra-causal free will here.  I mean this in the sense that even if our will is not free, there is a subjective distinction between the preferences we feel and the cognitive processes which analyzes and “chooses” what to do about them.

Misanthropy and Stockholm Syndrome


So, I am sometimes a bit misanthropic.  I want to like people, but they so-often disappoint me.  I try and give people the opportunity to impress me, and will give some benefit of my doubts about their ability to do so, but I have a streak within me which is pretty pessimistic.

Not always though.  Some days I really, genuinely, like people.  Even the stupid and oblivious ones.

So, today I was thinking about the nature of socialized behavior; etiquette, social politeness, etc.  You know, those largely non-articulated rules about how we interact, behave in public or at parties, etc.  To begin with, I grant that such socialized rules are important for both pragmatic and moral reasons (which is not to say those two things are not related; they are).  They are not all stupid or harmful, but I think there is always room for improvement and I think there are ways we can either request or demand that such such socialization needs to be pushed one way or another.  Not that anyone has to agree or comply, but that maybe they should at least consider the criticism.

Wes and I have both discussed tangential issues to this in recent days, and as you, dear reader, can see I believe that the line between acceptable and unacceptable social behavior needs to be adjusted somewhat.  Our expectations about how to interact and think about things such as sex, religion, and honesty (you know, the fun stuff) should be re-examined.  Religion needs to be fair game for criticism rather than given special status and treated with kid gloves; sex needs to be though of as less dirty, wrong, or guilt-inducing and thought of as a fun activity between consenting adults; and we need to be more honest, openly, with what we want/think and how we express ourselves.

So, what if we were to think of culture–those sets of rules, languages, and shared mythologies–as a sort of psychological captor? We are, from a sociological and anthropological point of view, held hostage by our socialization.  I don’t want to draw the analogy too closely, because it will come apart at the seams at some point, but I think that there is a comparison to be drawn between being stuck somewhere as a hostage and being stuck, psychologically, in our cultural milieu.

We did not choose our culture.  We did not choose the family we were brought up in, the religion (or lack thereof) we were raised within, and we did not choose the values which we acculturated into.  Whether those things are good or not, the fact is that to some degree our personality, opinions, and the ways we interact are not of our choosing.  And it is possible that they are irrational or harmful.

(And, if in fact in free will is an illusion, none of it is chosen.  I will leave this issue aside in this post and assume, for the sake of exploration of an idea, that we have some measure of choice.  If we don’t, it doesn’t matter anyway.)

But despite the fact that we (as in, our culture generally), usually, do not choose our values and behavior rules, we often defend them.  This is true for most people, I think.  And while there may be some amount of cultural transcendence which is possible, especially through exposure to other cultures and ideas (which gives us perspective to compare ideas, even if not wholly objectively), we are perpetually stuck in our own subjectivity.

My concern is with a phenomenon which I have observed for many years now, especially as I studied anthropology, religion, and sexuality.  We defend expected social behavior, almost without realizing we are doing it or that there may be another way to think about such things.  In our culture, there are values about “respecting” people’s beliefs, not challenging or criticizing personal ideas, and lying (sometimes “framing,” which is not always bad) to protect people’s sensitivities.  Now, in some cases, these values may be rational, but as I have seen them practiced by many well-meaning people they are often mere survival mechanisms for bad ideas.

If your goal is to be rational and skeptical, you should have a value of truth.  You should want to find out if your ideas are likely to be true, and have little compunction about challenging whether other people’s ideas might be true.  But our culture does not value truth in this way; we are taught to be respectful of people’s beliefs, we are taught that white lies are preferable, and we are taught about “good” things like faith, monogamy, and that sex is dirty and only appropriate under certain restrictive circumstances; namely monogamy.

Our culture defends these ideas like an abused lover defends her abuser.  They are not all bad, they really care about us, and they are good for us because we are so broken, incapable, etc.  And when people hear about atheism, polyamory, and sex-positivity they often exhibit signs of fear, insecurity, or guilt and then hide behind them and defend them.  They defend their cultural conditioning which holds them captive, defending that culture as moral, civil, or even as comfortable.

Our culture needs to start being more comfortable with discomfort.

Criticism is not uncivil.

Thoughts?

Shifting the standards of communication


I said this in a comment to my last post:

The standard social rules, as I understand them, privilege a worldview of monogamy, heterosexuality, and a stance leaning towards sex-negativity. I would like the standards to shift towards polyamory, pansexuality (or at least bisexuality), and sex-positivity. How far should the standards shift? I don’t know. That’s the discussion I want to have (Generally, not necessarily here and with you. Unless that conversation interests you).

This, I think summarizes my primary issue with the whole harassment policy/sex-positivity issue I have been talking about recently.

The way we communicate in this culture has been devised, probably organically, in a world of  conservative sexuality; hetero-monogamo-sexnegativity.  That is, the rules about how we flirt, express our desires, arose in a world where you had to first determine if the object of your desire is single, interested in your gender, etc.

In an ideal world, it should not matter.  If a person directly and respectfully expresses interest, it should not matter if they are married, monogamous, and like only people of not-your-gender.  It should not matter if they are asexual.  They can simply say that they are not interested, and the world simply moves on.

Granted, it is tiring having to say no many times (just like its tiring explaining what “atheism” and “Polyamory” are many times), but it is better than not expressing what we really want, clearly and unambiguously.  That’s my view.

If we get used to directness, it will eventually becomes as natural to us as our current standard of indirectness and politeness.  As Nietzsche said;

that may be a strange and insane task, but it is a task

Harassment and sex-positivity


So, Wes put this post up about how honesty is hard a couple of days ago. And, as usual, people seem to get pissed off about what Wes says.  No news there.  It’s one of the things I like about Wes; while I don’t always agree with him, he does not sugar coat his opinions.  He has strong and often unpopular opinions and he does not veil them, and I find this attribute respectable.

Speaking of which, a commenter of that post embedded this video, which I shall put here because it is quite good, and creates a language to talk about communication in this context:

Speaking of comments; since Wes linked to a post by Jadehawk in his post, Jadehawk has subsequently posted a response to Wes.  I read it today, and my impression is that emotions are getting in the way of clear communication and understanding (it happens), and I posted this comment (currently awaiting moderation):

Jadehawk,

I think that there is a bit of misunderstanding occurring here.  I know Wes fairly well, and I think you may be misunderstanding the message intended in his post.  I cannot speak for him, but being around him frequently and sharing more than a few opinions with him, I can say that your representation of him here is at least partially in error.  Libertarian? lol….

In my view, lack of clear communication is indeed a form of dishonesty.  What seems clear to a communicator is not necessarily clear to the listener.  And while I personally try to be generous with interpretation, sometimes a follow-up direct question is relevant to make sure I am getting the intended message.  I didn’t see you asking for clarification above where ambiguities in language could have led to you understanding Wes’ intentions better.  I saw you running with less-than-ideal interpretations.  I don’t think you did so intentionally.

It is not a lack of impulse control that is at issue here, as I see it.  What is at issue here is that we need to be honest with ourselves with what we actually want, and if we are going to seek a desire that involves another person, we need to be unambiguous about it. That is, once we have decided that this is not a time to reign in an impulse we have (assuming, indeed, that we have free will), we need to be direct about it because veiling our intentions is a form of lying, even if it a common and socially accepted form of lying.  The question is whether this socially accepted form of lying is something we, as rational, skeptical, people, should perpetuate or not.  I think the answer is no, and you may or may not agree with me. That is a discussion worth having.

So, I think we all need to be direct and honest, to not veil our interest, and to learn (as a society) to get used to hearing and answering that honesty (Have you sen The Invention of Lying?).  And while this does not have to include cold hitting on, it may include that.  And I agree that a conference about atheism/skepticism is not be the best place for such cold approaches, if that is indeed what a person wants there is nothing disrespectful about doing it.  It just is unlikely to succeed, so a smart person may put off, temporally, that expressed desire  That is, they do not pretend to have another goal, they just might put off communicating it until introductions and other conversational things are established.  I personally would not coldly approach someone for sex, as my desires do include to get to know someone a bit better before asking for such a thing, but I certainly would not think less of a person for doing otherwise than what I personally want.  I find such directness refreshing, mature, and very respectable.

Some people’s boundaries exist elsewhere.  Some people WANT or even DEMAND direct and blunt questions, and others want some issues to be rarely if ever addressed.  The issue of whose boundaries we accept as the default is not so easy as you seem to argue above.  Why defer to a lower threshold of boundaries, which infringe on those with higher thresholds?  A case needs to be made for that (And I accept that such an argument may exist.  I just have not seen one I find convincing).

The issue is this.  There is a real tension between the important issue of harassment by disrespectful people and sex positivity.  The reason this tension exists is that there is a continuum that stretched from assault on one extreme and enthusiastic consent on the other.  In the middle are things like harassment, being extremely annoying, being amusingly annoying, finding the proposition interesting but not compelling, considering the proposition seriously, accepting it, etc.  The line between unwanted attention and wanted attention will differ, greatly, for different people.

For example, a person coming up to me and putting their arm around me, telling me they think I’m cute, and inviting me to their room for sex crosses no line for me.  It does not matter their gender (I’m heterosexual and male), attractiveness, etc.  I will either say no, perhaps (and discuss what we’re into to see if we’re compatible), perhaps some other time, or “yes! let me get my stuff and I’ll be right with you.”  (Yes, yes, I have privilege which makes this situation non-threatening to me, but I know many women who feel the same way).  For other people, this situation would be harassment.  That’s a problem.

Because leaving out extreme examples, there will be cases where what I find acceptable is considered unacceptable by others.  Clear, unambiguous, blunt questions and answers are the only way to be sure.  And because of our social values of politeness, this is, indeed, hard.

But I am not Wes, so I cannot speak for him.

And, indeed, I am not Wes.  I imagine that he would have a different answer than I would, and we may ultimately disagree about this issue. Disagreement is not bad, however.

My major concern here is that in this larger discussion about how to implement harassment policies (and I think that the OpenSF policies Greta linked to there are quite good), we may possibly run into a real tension between harassment and healthy sexuality.  For example, in the G+ hangout video from a few days ago, the question was raised about whether speakers at conferences should be encouraged or even barred from having sexual relationships with attendees:

You don’t have to watch he whole video, but you should if you are interested in this topic.  The relevant bit starts around 53:10 of the video, where Dan Finke raises the issue about Jen McCreight’s suggestion about having speakers be “out of bounds” (Dan’s wording) for sexual activity at conferences.  Watch the conversation for yourself, and you will see that some people agree with this suggestion.  I agree with Rebecca Watson’s view, that there should be no barrier between any adults at conferences about sexual activity, while others (namely PZ himself), seem to agree with Jen.

This demonstrates, for me, that there is a real tension in this conversation about where the practical and possibly ideal line between harassment and appropriate sexuality in the skeptical/atheist community exists.  This conversation is not just about dealing with harassment–although that issue is the primary and essential issue which needs to be addressed.  But this conversation is also about the line between appropriate and inappropriate sexual activity even where harassment does not exist, and we need to admit that this is part of the issue.

Do I have any certain answers? No.  Do I think that this discussion will lead towards a de-sexualization of conferences? No.  Do I think there will be continued issues about where the line between inappropriate/appropriate sexual activity is? Yes. Do I think sex negativity and sex positivity are relevant issues to discuss in relation to the larger issues? Yes.

Harassment needs to be dealt with unambiguously, swiftly, and as openly as possible without unnecessarily naming specific people.  If and when we successfully deal with implementing harassment policies, there should be more conversation about the problem of sexual activity, appropriate times and places for it, and the issue of differing boundaries and how to deal with them.

I think that the skeptic.atheist community is full of smart and capable people, but  I also think that our culture is rife with ideas about communication which are compatible with conservative (or at least out-dated) modes of sexuality.  We need to think about how the relationship between how we communicate and how we think about relationships affects us.  The conservative hetero-monogamous model of sex is steeped in polite, veiled communication which is quickly becoming obsolete, and I don’t think the atheist/skeptic community is fully aware of this.

One of the first things I learned about how to be polyamorous (which is true even if you are not), is that you need to communicate your needs and desires directly, and that you need to be able to say yes or no clearly, according to your desires. We need to practice saying no, saying yes, and asking for and hearing what is wanted.

Saying “no” can be hard for some people.  Saying “yes” can be hard for others.  Asking for a clear yes or no is hard for most people.  We need to get over this value of ambiguity as a society if we are to grow up, whether we are privileged or not.

As I keep saying, the atheist/skeptic community has a lot to learn from the polyamory community.

 

 

 

Ideas and beliefs do not deserve respect


There is a discussion going on all over the internet about civility and belief.  There is a demand that people’s beliefs, ideas, and opinions be respected.  That idea is fundamentally wrong, and we need to get over it.

Ideas stand or fall on their own merits.  If they are respectable ideas, they will withstand any mockery, criticism, or down-right disrespect we can throw at them.  If they are not respectable, then we, as mature adults, need to be able to handle that.

Our ideas are not held for purely rational reasons.  I don’t care how intelligent you are, how well you have thought out your ideas, or even if you are Vulcan.  Our ideas are based upon emotional values that we have, which are beyond our control, and then we rationalize those opinions after the fact.  In many cases, those opinions can be rationally and skeptically justified, but it is not how we originally form most ideas.

If you care about the truth, then you should be able to mock your own ideas and hear mockery with the ability to remain rational. This is not to say that people will not be emotional in such cases, but that we all need to practice hearing mockery by challenging our own ideas so it does not make rationality impossible in the face of such criticism. The truth will attend to itself, whether we respect it or not.

If you don’t care about the truth, then why do you care if others respect your beliefs? If you don’t care about the truth, then you don’t respect your beliefs.  So why should anyone else?

We all, as adults, need to maintain a safe distance from our beliefs.  We should not make them sacred, protect them from criticism, or demand that people respect them.  To demand that ideas remain protected in such ways, we are telling people that we are less concerned with truth than with our comfort.  We are declaring that we don’t care if our ideas are true.  And, again, if truth doesn’t matter than other people’s respect is irrelevant.

This, above, is the essence of new atheism.  This is the essence to the new movement lead by people such as Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, and others who have been called “strident,” disrespectful, or unsophisticated.  Rather than defend them, I think we need to recognize that the charge is loaded with assumptions which need to be smashed open, criticized, and mocked.  The truth is that our various bad ideas, whether religious, political, or spiritual in nature, have survived because of the unwarranted demand for respect.

This bubble we create around our personal beliefs has become sacrosanct in the postmodern west.  It is certainly tied to modern liberalism, and certainly it is the weakest part of liberalism from where I stand (and I identify as a liberal).  We need to stop demanding respect for ideas until those ideas have survived skeptical analysis.

We need to distinguish between respect for ideas, legal protection of maintaining ideas, and people.  The first, that of ideas themselves, never deserves automatic respect; that respect must be earned by surviving criticisms both harsh and gentle.  Legal protection of ideas and of people do deserve respect, as we all have the right to our ideas and our ability to articulate them.

We just don’t deserve respect for those ideas automatically.  And by demanding it, we betray that we know that the idea might not survive criticism.

Criticism is not uncivil.