Category: Culture and Society

Individualism, association, and atheism


A recent post on Camels with Hammers about intellectual temptations atheists must avoid voices a lot of my thoughts better than I could. Fincke generally allies himself with the New Atheists, but often speaks out against the cruder and less thoughtful instances of New Atheist thought, in a way I really appreciate (since I’m basically in his position as well.) #6 in his list is one I’ve thought about a lot, and want to expand on somewhat here.

Atheists, on the whole, are a pretty individualistic bunch. Relative to the rest of humanity, they feel okay going against the grain, risking social pariah-hood, and rejecting customs that exist for the sole purpose of making humans feel more connected to each other. This makes sense: to adopt a position so counter to cultural norms, a person needs to have a pretty thick skin toward social disapproval. Individualism is a self-selecting quality for atheists in this day and age.

What I see happening a lot is that atheists conflate this individualistic personality trait with superior rationality. They care less about social approval and social bonding, they see that other atheists feel similarly and that people subscribing to all kinds of woo and religion care more about it, and they assume that caring about social approval and social bonding are in themselves less rational. So any time an attempt is made to incorporate community, ritual, and institutions which prioritize social bonding into an atheist frame, you get some voices pooh-poohing the attempt as worthless and meaningless and anti-rational. When someone confesses that they have difficulty leaving religion because of the inevitable social isolation, this is seen as a sign of weakness.

This point of view “I’m individualistic and rational, if you were rational you’d be individualistic too” ignores a basic fact of humanity: we are social animals. We were social animals before we were intellectual, inquisitive animals, and the rise of curiosity and higher-order intelligence did not erase that part of our nature. The social impulse is as valid a part of our humanity as the truth-seeking impulse, and to try to weed out either is to try to change the fundamental nature of humanity.

Humanity is greatly indebted to the individualists: they ask the questions no one else will ask, they think of things no one else has thought of, and they create new ways of being when no one else dares to try. But in doing this, they must also remember that they are statistical outliers: that if the rest of humanity is going to follow them, we’re going to transform the vision into something that meets our common need for connection and social order. This will always happen: this is the kind of beings we are.

I hear some individualists say, “Well, of course I understand that it’s hard to risk social rejection… I struggle with it too.” Yes indeed… individualism and the need for association are not mutually exclusive, and nearly all of us have elements of both. But what I would like more individualists to understand is that their need for association, while genuine, may be far less strong than another person’s. What, for you, was hard in the way running a marathon is hard, might for another person be hard in the way that climbing Mt. Everest is hard. We’re all calibrated differently; we all have different threshholds of need for different human necessities.

And yes, depending on social connection can be a bar to rationality. Of course it can. I’m a good example: several months after my initial deconversion, I was desperately searching for a way back into Christianity. Eventually I found a definition of “faith” I could accept, and I went with it, and continued calling myself a Christian for several years. It wasn’t until I began dating an atheist that I could call myself an atheist again, and that’s not a coincidence. I wanted back in because I was lonely. Because all the people who loved me were Christians, and I felt hopelessly cut off from them — even though they still loved me, I needed a sense of belonging. I couldn’t hack it as an atheist on my own. My need for social connection guided my intellectual investigations, and biased me towards one conclusion.

So, a need to “belong” can influence and distort rational thinking. You know what else can influence and distort rational thinking? A need to be smarter and more correct than other people… a personality trait that self-selecting atheists are overall in no shortage of. The wise, mature ones acknowledge this tendency, recognize how it can bias them, and find ways to minimize its effect. Similarly, I’ve come to acknowledge my profound need for social connection, recognize how it can bias me, and find ways to minimize its effect. One thing that doesn’t work is deciding to care less. That only leads to self-deception.

There are a lot of people who are socially dependent to a degree that cripples them, that cuts them off from acknowledging truths that would improve their lives. A LOT of people. But the way to self-improvement, for many, is not to become diehard individualists, but to become more thoughtful and choosy in the ways they form and maintain their social bonds. The diehard individualists would do well to remember this.

Having Low Standards for Attractiveness is Not a Bad Thing


Editorial Note: This post was written by Wes Fenza, long before the falling out of our previous quint household and the subsequent illumination of his abusive behavior, sexual assault of several women, and removal from the Polyamory Leadership Network and banning from at least one conference. I have left Wes’ posts  here because I don’t believe it’s meaningful to simply remove them. You cannot remove the truth by hiding it; Wes and I used to collaborate, and his thoughts will remain here, with this notice attached.

—–

 

Wes here again.  Today I want to talk about standards.  Specifically, I want to talk about standards for physical attractiveness.

Many people have expressed to be something along the lines of “I have high standards when it comes to women/men,” meaning that they don’t find many people sexually attractive.  Often, people consider this a point of pride.  I can sort of see their point.  I think it goes something like this:

only attractive people can afford to have high standards
I have high standards                                            
I am attractive

The fact that this is (obviously) a fallacious argument isn’t really the point.  The point is that having high standards makes people feel good about themselves.

I feel that having high standards in this context is a bad thing.  More than that, I consider it an unfortunate fact of life that we feel attraction on a purely physical level at all.  While this almost certainly had evolutionary advantages, these have largely evaporated in modern-day society.  Today, there is seemingly no (non-socially enforced) benefit to discriminating in our choice of romantic partner based on physical characteristics.  How a person looks has very little bearing on the things that I consider important in a relationship.

Attraction is important, but only in a circular way.  Physical attraction is only important in a relationship because people feel for each other on a physical level.  Dating someone to whom you’re not physically attracted is a bad idea because that’s a vital part of a relationship.  But it has no value in other contexts.  Physical attraction does not add value to any other part of a relationship.  To put it a different way, if one were attracted to everyone, one’s relationships would not suffer for it.

When it comes to physical characteristics, I have low standards, although they are higher than I’d like.  I wish that I was equally attracted on a physical level to everyone.  If that were the case, I would be free to make choices about romantic & sexual partners based on things that add value to a relationship, such as intelligence, kindness, emotional IQ, shared interests, and other factors which directly relate to compatibility.  These things certainly make a person more attractive to me (even on a physical level), but I still respond much more to a person’s appearance.  I consider it unfortunate that a person’s physical appearance matters to me at all, but such is life.

Physical attraction is largely biological, so I don’t know what we can do about this, but I think most agree that there is at least a component that is socially created.  If we were able to realign society’s values somehow so that physical appearance was less important, it would probably have a significant effect on this sort of thing.  Maybe?  And while I’m dreaming, I’d like a pony….*

*first one in the comments to identify the reference gets a prize

Friendship and polyamory


In my last post, I discussed how monogamy is unlikely to satisfy all of our needs.  I was aware of a few issues tangential to that, but wanted to leave them aside in the interest of keeping posts shorter.  So I will address two issues today; non-sexual friendships and our ability to satisfy needs and desires without relationships.

“The Greatest Love of all”

As I mentioned the other day, in order to have successful relationships, you need to start with yourself.  We need to find where it is possibly, and even preferable in some cases, to find ways to make ourselves happy on our own.

Surely, there will be many circumstances where there will be overlap between this self-satisfying of desires and our relationships with other people.  Our sexual needs, for example, sometimes can be answered with masturbation and sometimes will require, you know, sex with other people.  Also, there will be times when an emotional challenge can be solved by some serious thinking, reflecting, and evaluation of a situation on our own.  Other times we will need the perspective of others to help us, as often other people see things in us we cannot see.

We are not island nations, but sometimes our own domestic policy is sufficient for answering to issues of the day rather than appealing to other nations, (or whatever the UN would be in this analogy) for help.

But the essential point is that when it comes to our needs, simply looking within is a great way to go satisfy them.  Therefore, I encourage everyone to maintain a healthy relationship with the complexity inside our own heads.  I encourage self-love, without getting all hippy about it or something.  Dammit, I think I might be too late….

Polyamory as a footnote to Plato?

…or at least Platonic friendship.

Many of the needs we have in our life, complex as they are, do not require finding a sexual partner at all.  The needs which are not satisfied by our partner(s), which are not satisfied by them, do not necessitate finding another romantic or sexual partner necessarily.  Sometimes just a Platonic partner, or friend, is sufficient.

As I have written about before, polyamory does not require sex to be polyamory.  As a result of this, many people are already polyamorous even if they don’t use the term, or know the term.  Friendships outside of a relationship, especially if they are very close, are so much like what polyamorous people are doing that I often use it as an example of how poly works to people who seem confused by it’s strangeness.  It’s really not that strange.

If you are in a monogamous relationship, there will be things you want and need to do which your partner does not satisfy.  Whether that is watching sports, going shopping, or getting some drinks on a Wednesday night, our friends fulfill many of our needs which our committed, exclusive, relationship do not.

Assuming that one partner in a coupling does not interfere with their partner’s friendships, which does happen (and, I think, is due to the same jealousy which makes most people avoid polyamory), those relationships are highly rewarding, meaningful, and important to us.

Most monogamous people have arrangements just like this, and many of them, in reading this, might be confused why this has anything to do with polyamory.  “So,” the objector may say, “why would people need polyamory when we have friends, ourselves, and our one loving partner to satisfy our needs in life?” Well, if these things actually do satisfy your needs, then perhaps we don’t need to be polyamorous. Where I have the problem is that people ignore, repress, or rationalize away other needs they may have in order to maintain monogamy artificially.  My problem is when monogamy is maintained for its own sake, and not for the sake of authenticity and honesty about what we want.

That is, many people pretend like monogamy+friendship=satisfaction of all needs, when in fact it does not.

What happens when a friend of ours starts to become someone you are very attracted to? What happens when you develop feelings for a person at your gym, book club, or run into an old flame? Why should we ignore this reality, just because we have a sexual/romantic partner? And if so, why?

What’s wrong with enjoying sex, safely, consensually, and transparently with other people whether we, or they, are in a relationship?

What’s wrong with wanting your cake and having it too?

Nothing.

Pursuing every desire?

Yes, there are people out there I am sexually attracted to who I don’t pursue.  I don’t pursue every potential relationship I find, because I recognize that it sometimes there are complexities of desire which are more than I need or want, and so I don’t pursue every desire.

But sometimes the feelings are too strong, the desire to intense, to ignore.  And depending on how much time I have in my life, I will pursue sexual/romantic partners to various degrees.  Right now, my fiance and my girlfriend take up a lot of my time, so pursuing anything very involved or serious is unwise and unwanted at the moment.  That said, if I really got into someone, I would probably find time, because, well, love is worth the effort.

But finding a friend with whom I can share a sexual relationship, especially if that desire is two-way, is healthy and available to me.  It does not threaten my relationships to do so, and it brings some pleasure and joy to my life.  Why should I not want and pursue such things?

Friendships are great, whether they are Platonic or not.  We should allow ourselves to express how we feel about people without artificial censorship or repression because of some strange obsession with maintaining monogamy in our culture.  So keep up your relationships with yourselves, enjoy your friends, and allow yourselves to have the relationships with the people around you as you want, and let “normal” social expectations and pressures have minimal say in how you do so.

Desires, tentative goals, and polyamory


γνῶθι σεαυτόν (know thyself)

-Socrates

“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”

-Martin Buber

Goals are fine, but allow your destination to evolve in relation to the type of walking you like to do.  And don’t forget to experiment with many types of walking!

—

Most of us have goals for ourselves, which is good.  They give us direction, purpose, and something to use as a metric to measure success along the way.  But sometimes having a specific goal can be problematic, in that if it is too static and well-defined, what we learn along the way my fail to educate us towards re-defining our purpose based upon new information.

Monogamy is, for many people, a goal.  That is, while they may have any number of relationships of varying degrees of intimacy, they are seeking a partner with whom they can share a unique, meaningful, and long-term partnership.  The question is how to reach such a goal given how complicated people, and thus relationships, are.  In order to reach such a goal, many things need to be learned and practiced.

Having relationships throughout our lives gives us perspective on how we might improve ourselves in order to be ready to succeed in maintaining a healthy relationship when we meet the right person.  Or, at least, until we meet someone who we think might be the right person.  Most people go through a few trials before they find the right person.

But, by focusing on the goal–that of being in a meaningful, committed, exclusive relationship with a person with whom you are well matched–it is easy to be distracted from the skills one will need to reach the goal and be ready to maintain it well.   And if those skills are not taken in, then having a successful relationship of any kind is very unlikely.

The lessons that we could learn, if we are paying attention during those many trials, might seriously alter the shape of the goal we have in mind.  It might, in fact, change the very nature of that goal because those lessons may change us.

Starting with yourself

The foundation of being successful at relationships with other people is getting a good hold on your relationship with the many conflicting needs, desires, and emotional landscapes that lie within us.  We are a conglomeration of many unconscious drives, emotions, and thoughts which emerge into an illusory sense of singular identity.  Becoming comfortable with that complexity within ourselves in challenging, but essential, in communicating what we want and need.

We need to know what we want, and how important those desires are, before we can hope to effectively communicate those desires to anyone else.

Getting to know ourselves, finding out what we really want, and finding ways to satisfy these desires in healthy ways is an essential first step in relationships life.  We have to be completely and bluntly honest with ourselves, especially where our desires are in conflict with what is considered normal, expected, or even demanded by potential partners.

Why is this so important? Because they don’t go away.  Our needs and desires will stick with us, whether we repress them, seek to fulfill them in clandestine ways, or openly deal with them with people close to us.  It seems rational, therefore, to explore them openly with those close to us for the sake of our own contentment and because part of intimacy is sharing such desires with those we are close with.

Once you have a grip on yourself, ideally we should hope to find other people who have done the same thing.

The complexity of relationships: others

People are complicated.  When we meet someone who is complicated in ways that we like, we often want to learn more about them.  We probably want to find out what they learned in their own pursuit of self-understanding.  And if we think that who they are is compatible, to any sufficient degree, with what we need and want then we may pursue some sort of relationship with them.

I am forced to be vague here because the range of possibilities is vast.  I don’t know what you, or anyone else, will find in their own personal journey of self-understanding, and so I don’t know what compatibility with other people will entail.  If you find that you have a deep need and desire to be humiliated and beaten (with a safe word, obviously), then the kind of partner you will be attracted to will probably differ from another person’s need and desire to share quiet nights reading love poetry and having slow, sensual, nights of passion.  Of course, the same person might like both.

Like I said, people are complicated.

One of the complications that arises out of having feelings for someone, for most people anyway, is the feeling of possessiveness.  Intimacy makes the person with whom you are intimate feel like they are in some way part of you and your life.  The connections of shared needs, desires, and the satisfying of those things often binds you with them in wonderful ways.

For many people, this binding is conflated with exclusivity, especially in the presence of insecurity and jealousy.  Ideally, issues with jealousy and insecurity will have been dealt with in one’s pursuit of personal growth, but very often it is not.  The prevalence of opinion that jealousy is a sign of true love and intimacy is evidence for that.

The bonds we find with others through intimacy are unique, and may also be deeply important, meaningful, and irreplaceable.  But there is nothing about that intimacy which makes the possibility of intimacy with others impossible, nor does the presence of intimacy with other people make that intimacy less unique or meaningful, necessarily.

It is quite possible to have any kind of intimacy with more than one person, including sexual and romantic intimacy.  Your partner having another lover, partner, or even deeply close friend is no more threatening to your relationship with them than your insecurity and jealousy make it.  The only thing that can prevent true intimacy would be some emotional inability to be truly intimate (through fear of commitment, trust, etc), or your inability to share that intimacy (through those same insecurities and lack of trust).

 

Adjusting your goals

So, if your goal is monogamy, while going through the work to make yourself a better partner, you may miss the possibility that another goal might also fit your set of needs and desires.  The key is questioning your own biases, challenging your fears, and allowing yourself to trust yourself and your partners sufficiently to allow everyone, especially yourself, be honest, open, and pursuant of what they really want.

Love all the people you love, as you actually love them without artificially limiting or extending that love  Do not let the goals get in the way of what you really want.  You may find a plethora of people in your life with who you can have various kinds of intimacy, and a static goal—whether it be asexuality, swinging singleness, monogamy, or polyamory—may blind you to what it is that you really want.

Focus on what you want, what your partners want, and let destinations attend to themselves.  You may find yourself in a very different place than you would have reached for, had you allowed your true desires to not be defined by social expectation, fears, and lack of trust.

Why a sex strike is not a helpful response to attacks on reproductive choice


I’ve seen a couple of calls for a sex strike of some kind, in response to the many recent attempts to restrict availability of women’s reproductive choice services (both abortion and birth control). I get where they’re coming from, and I think their main argument is correct: before birth control, women and men alike had much less sexual freedom, and the further our access to it is withdrawn, the less sex people will be having. The posts I’ve seen about sex strikes are a well-meaning attempt to confront men with the reality of this consequence before it’s too late. (There could very well be calls out there employing a nastier, “they’re trying to screw us so let’s not screw them!” tone, but I haven’t encountered them yet.) The problem is that tactics like this aren’t paying close enough attention to who is pushing this legislation, who is supporting it, and how a sex strike is going to affect them.

Historically, sex strikes have been effective when the women of a single community took a strong position against actions or policies that the men of their community were embracing. That’s not what’s going on here, though. Pulling back access to reproductive choice services is not something men are doing to women: it’s something political conservatives are doing to everybody. And while political conservatives do tend to skew male, the difference is not dramatic (For an example, look at the demographics of voters in the 2006 elections.) My experience is that people tend to run in social circles with similar political beliefs, so women who vote conservative are more likely to date men who vote conservative. And how likely are women who vote conservative to participate in a sex strike? My guess is… not very likely?

A lot of conservative voters have very strong beliefs around sexual morality, believing sex should only take place in monogamous heterosexual marriages. Needless to say, a sex strike is not going to scare them: unmarried, unready-for-children people having less sex is exactly what they want. So the success of a sex strike depends on the existence of a significant population of conservative voters who are relatively neutral on sexual morality and who enjoy non-procreative sexual activity. And even if that population is large enough to affect election results, the men of that population would have to be dating / married to / hooking up with women that are politically motivated enough to engage in a sex strike. I just don’t see that as likely. I think conservative-voting, apathetic-on-social-issues men are mostly dating (etc) apathetic-on-social-issues women, who aren’t going to participate no matter how hard a strike is pushed.

So I think a sex strike is going to have a negligible effect on conservative voters, who are, after all, the ones who place and keep these politicians in power. What about the politicians themselves? Will they suddenly find themselves unable to get laid and reconsider their stance on birth control availability? Not likely. Rich and powerful men play by different rules, in sexuality as in many other things. Rich and powerful men have nothing to lose by returning to the sexual dynamics of the pre-birth-control era. Do you really think a successful politician in the 40s had a hard time getting laid? It’s the average men and women who gained from the availability of effective birth control, and it’s the average men and women who will lose as that availability is withdrawn.

It’s pretty popular these days to pooh-pooh attempts at grassroots activism on the grounds that they’re ineffective. In general, this irritates me: why discourage people from trying? But in this case I have philosophical objections as well as pragmatic objections. A sex strike encourages women to use their bodies as a bargaining chip, and haven’t we seen enough of that? It supports a “battle of the sexes” mentality, and haven’t we seen enough of that? It makes sex once again about power and control, and not about joy and connection. If I thought it was going to be an effective tactic, maybe I would think all this a worthwhile price to pay — maybe. But I don’t think it is, so I would rather see us support the right to reproductive choice by continually affirming sex as a healthy, joyful, and mutually beneficial part of human nature.

Ask the Sexologist: Recommended reading on the sources of kink


Hi Ginny,

just spotted the new post on the Brunettes…. So, figured I’d ask a simple question, which is: what books would you recommend for a layman to get acquainted with the current state of sexology/sex research? I’m prompted to ask because I’d been reading this excellent article:

http://www.xojane.com/sex/feminist-women-with-rape-fantasies

and reading the comments I came across a reference to A Billion Wicked Thoughts. Alas, even a quick check of that book & some online reviews (e.g. at Figleaf’s site) confirmed that it was pernicious dreck. So I’m left wondering what I SHOULD be reading…. In particular, I was curious about how people’s sexual identities are formed–how does one end up being “submissive” or having a particular fetish? And what about cultural differences–what does “kink” look like in other cultures? Are dom/sub, top/bottom binaries pretty much universal or do they have a more recent, specific history?

As you know, there’s a stereotype in popular culture that people who are into S/M have had damaged childhoods or were raped; I gather the BDSM community often hates this stereotype (perpetuated e.g. in the otherwise S/M-positive film Secretary). There’s probably a grain of truth to the stereotype (in my anecdotal observation, anyway) but I was wondering where to go for a more reasoned, empirical study of the topic.

best,
N
_______________

Hi N,

“Why we like what we like” sexually is one of the toughest and — if judged by my cohorts’ research interests — most intriguing questions in sexology. It’s hard to study for a number of reasons: how do you recruit a good representative sample on such a sensitive topic? How do you measure all of the possible variables, both genetic and environmental? How do you gather reliable information about subjects’ childhoods, possibly including pre-memory stages of life? And how do you get funding for a study on the origins of fetishes in our sex-negative political environment?

To have a really solid answer even to the simple question “Does childhood abuse make one more likely to develop BDSM inclinations?” you’d want to do a longitudinal study, starting with a large sample of abused and non-abused children, and follow them through life, interviewing them about their sexual interests in adulthood. I can think of half a dozen reasons such a study would be hard to pull off, just off the top of my head.

SO. I’m sorry to say that I can’t give you a definitive answer, or even point you to resources that have one: as far as I’m aware, it’s not out there yet. But there are some theories being tossed around. One book I found interesting is Arousal, by Michael J. Bader. His basic thesis is that fetishes and fantasies all have the purpose of making us feel safe enough to be sexually aroused. Based on the different insecurities and anxieties we have, some people get that feeling of safety from exhibitionist fantasies, some from submissive fantasies, etc. It’s an interesting read and a valuable theory: I wouldn’t say I’m completely sold on it, but it’s a contender.

For cross-cultural information, Exotics and Erotics, by Dwight R. Middleton, is a great overview on desires, practices, and identities across cultures. The World of Human Sexuality by Edgar Gregersen is longer and more in-depth, and very scholarly in tone, but if you can handle a little dryness in your prose it’s fascinating reading. Neither one of these have a psychological focus: they describe rather than attempt to explain. However, knowing what sexual tastes and practices are considered normal or abnormal in other cultures helps to shed light on our own.

Good job rejecting the Ogas and Gaddam book, by the way. Their work is not entirely meritless, but their research practices are really lousy. I can sort of understand the temptation to do bad research when good research is so difficult and ridden with obstacles, but there’s no excuse for giving in to it.

Let me know if you have further questions!

“Marital Zipcar”?


I don’t know how I feel about the idea, but it is basically slightly more organized partner-swapping.

In any case, the term “marital Zipcar” will likely stick with me for a while.

I think the basic idea already slapped your brain with either awesomeness or disgust (no middle ground is possible, I asset!), so the question is obviously whether it would be a concept worth discussing, as polyamorous people?

I am not sure, but it did make me think about it as swinging for poly people; as in, we have our little poly family over here, and so do you all, so let’s mix up and see who might be interested in swapping a partner or two here or there occasionally.  Rather than “monogamous swapping” (really, it’s not monogamy if there is sharing of sexual partners) among couples, it is swapping among groups of people who tend to be too busy to go out and look on their own for a little variety.

Sort of like a hybrid between polyamory and swinger communities.  Swingers tend to be couples who play with other singles or couples, polyamorous people tend to be more relationship oriented.  And, of course, some poly people do a fair amount of interconnecting between poly groups, but rarely do orgies break out (in fact, outside of specific parties which are designed to create such things, I have not seen this appear spontaneously).

So, would a “poly Zipcar” be a variation on polyamory, or would it just be swinging?

I guess the question depends on how we distinguish polyamory and swinging; as a qualitative difference or one simply of relationship versus sexual orientation.

Semantics.

In any case, one of these days Ginny and I will have to re-construct our attempt to graph the dimensions of differences between swingers and polyamorous people; it involved (if I remember correctly) at least three axes!

 

Poly 101 Lessons for life: Effective Communication


The skills we need to be successfully be polyamorous are nothing more than skills to be better people all around.  For a series on what polyamory has taught me about being a better person, I want to address how they are also important in non-poly circumstances.

One of the most essential things a person needs to do in order to successfully maintain a polyamorous set of relationships is to become better at communication.

This means not only saying what you think, communicating concerns and appreciation, and listening, but also making sure that you do these things effectively.  You need to do your best to not merely do enough, but to make sure that what it is you are communicating is understood by the hearer.  Otherwise why communicate at all?

And this goal of effective communication has obvious uses everywhere, although applying the necessary tools for such are different within relationships than they are in general. In an intimate relationship, for example, you know a fair bit (hopefully) about your interlocutor, and so this is easier than communicating with co-workers, aquaintences, or strangers.  Communicating with the public at large (like most of our readers!) is perhaps one of the hardest things to do with complete effectiveness due to our lack of familiarity with the audience and their points of view.

Obviously, we are not getting our message across...

When I compose my thoughts for a post, I have to consider the way many kinds of people will read the ideas I am trying to convey.  There are readers here who are monogamous skeptics, polyamorous spiritual-but-not-religious people, and even many people of faith who will disagree with just about everything I say.

As a result of these considerations, I have to try and make points in a way that will communicate the idea I want to be read for the largest possible audience, knowing that despite this effort many people will not quite understand my point of view no matter how clearly I try to communicate.

This problem of mis-communication has been a challenge for much of the atheist community over the last several years.  If I had known, back before the publication of The End of Faith or The God Delusion what types of challenges the small and young community would go through with issues such as new atheists/accommodationsts, privilege/minority atheists, and how many in-fighting splits would occur, perhaps we could have avoided some of the mis-communication snafus and be less divided now as a community.

Probably not, but it’s a nice thought.

In many cases I don’t think the ultimate points of disagreement which exist in the movement could be avoided, as they are endemic to the differences in people rather than mere points of confusion (accommodationism is, perhaps, a good example of this).  And in other cases, knowing how things turned out, there are people out there who might have avoided some comment, term, or line of argument had they known what would happen.  And undoubtedly some would change nothing of what they did.

And no, the attempt at constructing effective communication is not the same as accommodationism.  The goal is not to change wording to avoid offense or direct criticism for the sake of tone.  Rather, it means avoiding miscommunication of the strident and blunt points we wish to make by ensuring that the word choices we make do not get taken a completely different way than they are intended.

Because it sucks when you craft a message with the intent to make a harsh point, and have it backfire because something else was interpreted.

Consider the recent issue with the PA-Nonbelievers billboard (pictured above) which was taken to mean, by some, something very different than what it was intended to convey.  By all means, follow that link for the details of the issue, but essentially the question is whether the billboard, as it appeared (before it was vandalized after being up for one day), was racist.  And although it was not intended that way (I know quite a few of the people from PAN, and I have no indication of racism on the part of those who created the image), being that much of central Pennsylvania (Pennsyltucky, we sometimes call it) is pretty racist, the billboard could easily be mistaken for a very different intended purpose.

BTW, it’s purpose was to respond to the Year of the Bible legislation in PA by showing how immoral the Bible is, using its advocacy of slavery as the vehicle for such an observation.  It simply did not occur (I’m guessing.  I don’t know for sure) to those at PAN that it would be taken as an endorsement of slavery non-ironically.  Slavery is abhorrent (think most Christians), Christians loves their Bibles, and Bibles condone slavery.

Instead, some saw the billboard as racist, the ambiguity of the message left many people confused and irritated.

The fact that this snafu of miscommunication occurred demonstrates that the importance of effective communication is not only essential, but it is quite hard.  Just like, while having an argument with a loved one, sometimes the best-intended statement can be taken quite badly due to a different parsing of the words or even due to some semantic diversion by speaker and listener, the general public will often misunderstand what we atheist activists (or at least proponents) have to say about religion and faith.

Now, there are many sources, both online and otherwise, for learning about how to effectively communicate.  A simple Googling of the term will find you quite a bit about the many techniques and guidelines that can help, and so my outlining them for you here would be redundant.

But the general message I want to convey here to people of any persuasion is that in many cases our conversations, whether they are debates, disagreements, or shouting matches with people being wrong (on the internet or otherwise), we need to keep in mind how we are presenting our case and what pitfalls might interfere with our goals.

By all means, express your indignation for whatever idea you disagree with.  Don’t hold back your opinion, but make sure it is communicated in a way that will not be read as something that it is not.

And remember to listen.  Listening is perhaps the most important skills in effective communication, and it is clear that we need to listen to whatever feedback we receive.  In many cases, this does include keeping your eye on the general public’s views on what you will communicate about, which usually entails reading blogs of those who are theists or defenders of monogamy in many cases, for me.

That said, I want your feedback here at polyskeptic on any and all posts.  we want to know how well we are communicating with you.  If we can do a better job at communicating our point of view, we want to know how we can do so.

 

Poly date night


People do polyamory in a plethora of possible ways.

Some people rarely if ever spend time with their partners’ partners, but keep their relationships separate.  Others, like us weird people, spend a fair amount of time together.  Date night is no exception. 

So, last night I came hone from work to find Ginny hard at work on dinner.  OK, that’s not quite true.  I found Ginny at her quite disorganized desk, in a bathrobe, watching something (probably dumb) on netflix.  Same difference.

In any case, I was sent to start water boiling (I am actually quite a good cook, so this is really under-using me in the kitchen, but nonetheless it was a necessary first step).  After a few minutes, Gina and Wes arrived, earlier than Ginny expected.  Ginny then appeared from upstairs to greet all and sundry and eventually she continued with dinner prep.

Chicken parm, a bottle of red wine (drank, by Gina and I, in orca wine glasses of course!), and some conversation was enjoyed by all four of us.  We followed that with adorable cupcakes that looked like monkeys which I bought from a bake sale at work. 

Then Ginny and Wes went out for bourbon while Gina and I stayed in for a while (Bible-reading, of course) for a couple of hours before going to get a beer (or two, in my case), at the Resurrection Ale House down the street (a theme might be deduced from this…but no, we are not becoming Christians).

Chemistry, cosmology, and quantum mechanics are discussed.  What do people usually talk about at bars? Stop looking at me like that! Whatever, we are smart…or pretentious.  One of those.

Finally, after some time (space, and dimension too!) Ginny and Wes met us at the Ale House as we finished our beers.  Our re-assembling into a four-some, with various affectionate greetings seemingly went unnoticed by the others at the bar (at least it seemed that way) and then Gina and Wes went home, dropping Ginny and I off on their way by the house.

In the end, I go to bed (with a touch of the drunk from two very good ales I had with Gina) with Ginny and the morning comes early. 

This all seems so normal to me.  I imagine this would seem rather abnormal to other people.  This was a pretty typical evening with the four of us (Jessie was elsewhere last night), and it does not seem odd at all.

Polyamory really is not very radical a practice, once you get yourself past the strange non-monogamy thing.