Poly demographic survey in the UK

Over at Polytical, there is a summary and discussion of a recent small, anonymous, survey of polyamorous people which may be interesting to people who are interested in such things.

UK Poly Mailing List Demographic Survey Results

I was interested to see that the largest segment of them were atheist/agnostic/humanist. Granted, it is the UK and not The US, but I like to see poly people who are also atheist/agnostic/humanist.

The overwhelming majority of people were white; 92%. This seems about on par with, if not slightly above, the demographics of the UK in general (at least from the census from 2001, which may be out of date). I would be interested to see the comparative demographics of polyamorous people in the US compared to the general population. My guess is that the percentage of white people in the poly community would be higher than the general population. That because while I don’t think polyamory is privileged, it is definitely easier to be polyamorous when you have privilege.

And, unfortunately, privilege and race often co-mingle. It’s part of why I care about social justice, and thus support the whole atheism+ thing.

In any case, take a look at the survey results if you like, and let me know if you see more similar surveys in other parts of the world.

Three Parents?

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.

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The UK’s Nuffield Council on Bioethics has recently approved a controversial fertility treatment requiring three genetic parents:

scientists are hoping to see it used as a therapy to eliminate rare mitochondrial diseases. Mitochondria function as powerpacks that can be found in virtually every human cell, and just like the nucleus, they also contain DNA. Unfortunately, inherited defects in this mitochondrial DNA affects approximately 1 in 5,000 births, leading to severe or even fatal results.

Researchers speculate that a way to overcome this problem is to take two eggs, one from the mother and one from a donor. The nucleus of the donor egg is removed, leaving the mitochondria intact and replaced by the mother’s nucleus. The resulting embryo has properly functioning mitochondria from the donor — resulting in a potentially healthy baby, albeit one with three parents.

This research is in its infancy, and right now is only meant to be used to prevent mitochondrial disease, but it’s not hard to see how further research in this area would be of great interest to poly parents. Using this procedure, the resulting baby would have only .1% of its genetic material from the donor parent, but even so, having just a bit of a child’s genetic material be from them could mean the world to some parents.

Predictably, the procedure is already getting pushback from natural-law advocates:

“Just as Frankenstein’s creation was produced by sticking together bits from many different bodies, it seems that there is no grotesquerie, no violation of the norms of nature or human culture at which scientists and their bioethical helpers will balk.

“The proposed techniques are both unnecessary, and highly dangerous in the medium term, since they set a precedent for allowing the creation of genetically modified designer babies.”

He argued that such techniques would affect many generations and crossed “what is normally considered the most important ethical line in the prevention of a new eugenics” and this was “precisely how slippery slopes get created”.

The fact that arguments like this are taken seriously is the likely reason why we won’t see this sort of procedure available to three-parent households in anything resembling the near future. Still, as a member of a poly V, and one which intends on raising children together, this is certainly an interesting development.

Poly Identification Buttons!

Found via Reddit, but here’s the link for the picture.

I don’t know if any places near me have these, but I think these are awesome. If anyone in the Philadelphia area sees these, let us know!

That is all.

Is polyamory a social justice issue?

In reading about this new Atheist+ issue generated by Jen and others around her (especially Greta), I have seen various social issues included in the list of causes that people want to support. Women’s issues, POC issues, trans issues, LGBT issues, neuro-atypicality issues, etc have been enumerated, for good reason, but I have seen no mention of issues related to polyamory.
So here is my question; am I being irrational in thinking that polyamory should be included in such lists, or are many people behind in not including this as a social justice issue?

As a quick note for those that don’t know; I live in a house with 4 other polyamorous people. One is my wife, another my girlfriend, and the other two are my girlfriend’s husband and his girlfriend. So these questions are not merely academic for me; they are real questions with potential serious significance.

There are real-world fears around being polyamorous. Coming out at poly has consequences similar to coming out as gay, for example. Parental rights can get complicated with polyamorous families. Visitation and end-of-life rights, afforded to legal spouses, becomes problematic when you have more than one serious long-term partner. In short, all of the rights that one gets as a spouse cannot easily be extended to other partners, which can create problems.

The foundation of this problem is the cultural lack of familiarity with what polyamory is about. We are not the same as swingers (although there are often overlaps). We do experience some forms of social discrimination, stereotyping, etc. I have been told that I have chosen this lifestyle, but I cannot choose how many people I love any more than I can choose what genders I love. I have discussed my view on the issue of choice, or orientation, in terms of polyamory here, but I will briefly sum it up in saying that I do not choose my desires and my feelings, but I can choose to act on them or not.

And why would I repress my actual desires? Would I do so for the sake of cultural norms which make no sense? No.

I am not aware of large scale cultural campaigns to react against polyamory comparable to reactions against ‘the gay agenda’. There are not common stories of poly people being beaten, fired, or killed. There is a persistent social stigma against it, and it is presented as the conclusion of the slippery-slope for things like gay marriage (” if you allow anyone to marry, the next thing that will happen is 3 people getting married!” The horror!), and there are the many legal issues briefly mentioned above.

And I will briefly mention that advocating for polyamorous rights and protected status in society is made more complicated in context with polygamy and its relationship to fundamentalist Mormons, Islam, and the patterns of abuse against women, and young girls, in those communities. So it is a complicated issue, but I do think it is a social justice issue.

I think that we need to keep that in mind during these discussions about adding social justice issues to our atheist activism.

Third wave atheism or the ‘new skepticism’?

edit: I saw Jen’s follow-up post as well. I like this image best:

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A couple of days ago (I’ve been moving and such), Jen wrote this post on her blog about how the atheist community has been a “boy’s club” and how we need to help progress towards a “third wave” of atheism. The key part is this:

I don’t want good causes like secularism and skepticism to die because they’re infested with people who see issues of equality as mission drift. I want Deep Rifts. I want to be able to truthfully say that I feel safe in this movement. I want the misogynists, racists, homophobes, transphobes, and downright trolls out of the movement for the same reason I wouldn’t invite them over for dinner or to play Mario Kart: because they’re not good people. We throw up billboards claiming we’re Good Without God, but how are we proving that as a movement? Litter clean-ups and blood drives can only say so much when you’re simultaneously threatening your fellow activists with rape and death.

It’s time for a new wave of atheism, just like there were different waves of feminism. I’d argue that it’s already happened before. The “first wave” of atheism were the traditional philosophers, freethinkers, and academics. Then came the second wave of “New Atheists” like Dawkins and Hitchens, whose trademark was their unabashed public criticism of religion. Now it’s time for a third wave – a wave that isn’t just a bunch of “middle-class, white, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied men” patting themselves on the back for debunking homeopathy for the 983258th time or thinking up yet another great zinger to use against Young Earth Creationists. It’s time for a wave that cares about how religion affects everyone and that applies skepticism to everything, including social issues like sexism, racism, politics, poverty, and crime. We can criticize religion and irrational thinking just as unabashedly and just as publicly, but we need to stop exempting ourselves from that criticism.

Yes, I agree. We, in the blogosphere have been talking a lot about “new” (or “gnu”) atheism, but in the same way that a Jr. leads to a III, we can have the future of the skeptic/atheist movement be a third wave where we include all of the various effects that religion, theological thinking, and non-skepticism generally affects our lives.

In short, we need to transcend mere atheism and move onto application of skepticism to all aspects of culture, beliefs, and actions. We need a new skepticism.

I have been trying to do just that for years at this blog. I saw the kinds of arguments that people had about god, religion, and things like science, and saw parallels between how we think about monogamy and polyamory. I saw unskeptical thinking leading people towards conservative views about sex and relationships, and I began to draw those lines using what I had seen in the skeptical community since I ran into it a decade ago.

In the years that I have run this blog (and after subsequently adding some new writers), I have broadened my focus to include questions of orientation, gender, and have even wrote about my own neuro-atypicality. Yes, I still focus on atheism and polyamory most of the time, but that is because these are the subjects I know best. I look to people like Ginny (my lovely wife) to write about gender, trans, sexology issues (when she’s not burdened by grad school work, that is). And Wes and Gina do their things, whether controversy or convulsions of laughter.

In doing this, I have come to a fairly progressive perspective, which I suppose is no surprise to anyone who knows me. I support LGBT rights, including the right to marry, raise children, etc. I support people who are simply trying to live their lives with political and legal freedom afforded to them not according to theological concerns, but by rational and empirical arguments based on fairness and compassion.

But most importantly, I support the freedom of speech and thought, without which the freedom to act would be parochial and hindered. As Keenan Malik recently said,

Whatever one’s beliefs, secular or religious, there should be complete freedom to express them, short of inciting violence or other forms of physical harm to others. Whatever one’s beliefs, secular or religious, there should be freedom to assemble to promote them. And whatever one’s beliefs, secular or religious, there should be freedom to act upon those beliefs, so long as in so doing one neither physically harms another individual without their consent nor transgresses that individual’s rights in the public sphere. These should be the fundamental principles by which we judge the permissibility of any belief or act, whether religious or secular.

(H/T Greg Mayer over at WEIT)

I support maintaining a skeptical community that fights for the truth, is aware of concepts like privilege and how it influences or worldviews, and which perpetually self-improves by allowing for criticism and dissent, when dissent is warranted.

To conclude, I agree with Jen that we need a third wave of atheism. And whether we think of it as an atheist movement, a skeptical movement, or a social justice movement led by skeptics and atheists, the important thing is that we must keep challenging ourselves to understand more, listen better, and remember that religion and non-skeptical thinking has effects which may not be immediately obvious to us, with our perspective. Religion effects different groups in different ways, and so we need to be inclusive in order to progress towards the goal.

The goal of making ourselves, as activists, obsolete.

PolySkeptic Compound!

I grew up in Philadelphia. I love Philadelphia. For college and grad school, I was not far away, and I visited often. I love being in and near major cities, for many reasons. It has something to do with easy access to culture and more tolerant and accepting people. In other words, you can get away with being weird easier.

A few years ago I was involved with a woman (she-who-shall-not-be-named…oh fuck it, her name was Seana), who got a job in Atlanta. The relationship was going well, and at the time I was not working and decided to take the risk of moving to Atlanta with her. ‘Risk’ being the operative word. Turns out that she was an evil monster worthy of fantasy-lore, and I ended up not with her anymore. I think that’s for the best.

But while down there, after having my heart yanked out, stomped on, and then rebuilt in order to smack it around with a badminton racket (some people have strange kinks), I met Ginny, and luckily she didn’t like badminton that much. So we started dating and her academic pursuits led her to the Philadelphia area and thus I eventually moved back to Philadelphia and have lived here for the last year-and-a-half or so.

Until now.

Now, I live in New Jersey (which is totes better than that old Jersey, from what I hear). And this has been the source of epic teasing–of me, by me–because we Philadelphians are raised to make fun of New Jersey. It’s the perfect set-up for self deprecating humor, really. Also, it’s Philly tradition or someshit. I think it has something to do with people waiting in lines at Geno’s or Pat’s at 3:30 AM being generally stupid while figuring out how to order a cheesesteak.

Naturally, we assume they are all from New Jersey.

Well, look at me now! I’m living in New Jersey. Granted, I’m only a PATCO ride from Philly, but I’m almost in another universe, really.

I kid, I kid…and then some years later I goad. Wow, that was a really terrible and spontaneous attempt at a pun which probably fails in text. Oh well, it’s typed now and there is nothing I can do about it anymore, so I will have to live with it. And so will you.

It’s actually sort of awesome because my life now has the soundtrack written by the collaboration of the various love-babies of Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi.

So, why “PolySKeptic Compound”? Well, it’s because now all of us polyskeptic writers (at least, those of us that survived the great PolySkeptic wars…see here, here, here, and here for example) now live under one roof! And if Jessie would actually accept my invitation to contribute, we could have the whole house involved! A blog orgy…or something.

OK, maybe not “orgy.” Polyamory is not all about the sex, right? Think of it as an orgy of fun. Not that orgies aren’t fun…. You know, never mind! I don’t want to hear your anticipated groans of disapproval at my terrible humor. No orgies then, goddammit! Also, there is no god. Probably. And if there is a god, then it’s a total dickwad.

OK, so back to the point. We are living in the same house now. I got rid of a lot of books for the move but I still have a lot of them around me. There’s also a lamp shaped like a guitar. And cats. Cats are assholes, BTW. I like them and all, but they scratch at your door early in the morning. And it’s hard to get them into the microwave.

Like, really hard.
So, now that I’m living in The Jerz, perhaps we’ll start making videos and call it “Jersey? Sure!” in which we shall make baby Jesus cry with our orgies of fun-but-not-as-fun-as-sex-orgies-fun. Also, no Snooki. It’s funny because it sort of sounds like I said “no nookie.” Really, it’s funny. Also, I’m working on my abs so I can be “The Circumstance” and be world famous for something other than my hilarious jokes and intimidating intelligence.

Gina is laughing. That’s all that matters.

The rest of you can eat a bag of dicks.

With a spoon.

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So, this is what happens when I wake up at 7:30 in the morning….

But, in all seriousness now, I’m quite happy to be here, and I look forward to my new life in New Jersey. Hell, beer is cheaper here.

Latest Celebrity Cheating Scandal That Could Have Been Solved by Nonmonogamy

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In case anyone cares, Kristen Stewart (the vapid lump of clay from those bag-of-shit Twilight movies) cheated on her husband. Or boyfriend or something. Then apologized. Yawn. I only bring it up because this article brought up a good point:

What struck me about actress Kristen Stewart’s public apology for her infidelity wasn’t that it was a rare case of a famous female doing so — although that is notable. Nor was it the fact that celebrities are expected to issue public apologies about the most intimate aspects of their romantic and sexual lives – which is also remarkable. Instead, it was the language she used to explain the affair. She described it as a “momentary indiscretion,” which called up a host of post-affair cliches: “I made a mistake,” “It just happened,” “I wasn’t thinking,” “It was a lapse in judgment” – and so on….

“The chance to feel in love, to feel expanded in some way, to feel understood or intimate with another person, or to be sexual with another person, are powerful pulls for many people,” she says. But those pulls are harder to explain to the cheated partner. “Because of societal stigma around cheating and affairs, it’s also difficult for many people to say things out loud, and sometimes even to themselves, such as ‘I just really desired that person.’”

This is a really good point. The article also points out that cheating is very common, and is often due to the feelings described in the above quote. Those of us familiar with nonmonogamy are very familiar with those types of feelings. The difference is that we do say those things out loud, to ourselves and to our partners.

It’s sad that nonmonogamy is not accepted enough for it to be mentioned in an article of this type. It seems a glaringly obvious omission to anyone familiar with the idea. The assumption of monogamy is so strong that a person can say “it’s… difficult for many people to say things out loud” without suggesting that maybe a person ought to say things out loud, and have a conversation with hir partner about how best to handle each other’s feelings. The article makes it sound like feeling desire for someone outside of a relationship is an unsolvable situation. We know that it’s not.

How to Become a Secure Person according to Franklin Veaux

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Franklin Veaux (everyone’s favorite poly writer/activist) on How to Become a Secure Person:

I’ve talked to a lot of people who say things like “Oh, i could never be polyamorous; I’m just a jealous person”–as if being a jealous person were some matter of genetics, something over which we all have no control, like being born with blond hair or…well, no, people actually think they have more control over their hair color than over their own conceptions about themselves, which is interesting.

Let’s say you went to a piano concert. Would you say that the pianist up on the stage was “just a good pianist,” as if that’s all there was to it? Hell, no–and if you did, she’d likely punch you. You get to be a good pianist by long, hard practice. A good pianist is made, not born.

The same is true of being a secure person–or an insecure person. People are accomplished at being insecure because they practice being insecure. They practice diligently, every day, for years; it’s no wonder they’re good at it.

As with most of Veaux’s writing that I’ve seen, this post is excellent.

Someone on the Internet Is Wrong!

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Brazen Bunny has a rundown of the worst relationship internet memes. My favorite:

Read the whole thing for a good laugh. Worst. Wisdom. Ever.

Scarcity Value and Monogamy

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If you are polyamorous, you’re no doubt familiar with the argument that polyamory “cheapens” love and/or sex. That is, if you love multiple people, your love is somehow less valuable than if you only loved one person. From an economic perspective, this makes a certain sort of sense. It’s basic economics that the lower the supply of any given product, the higher the value. In order to increase the value of a product, sellers sometimes try to artificially create scarcity. This is most famously done with diamonds, and it is also the justification for many intellectual property rights, such as patent and copyright. Think about it: if anyone could make an iPhone, supply would dramatically increase, and the price would plummet. The government grants a patent (i.e. a temporary monopoly) in order to allow the creator to control the supply, thereby driving up the price, and allowing the creator to recoup its R&D cost.

Under this theory, if your love* is reserved for a single person, your love becomes an extremely scarce resource, and thus its value increases. By making a monogamous commitment, you are pledging to restrict your love only for a single person, thereby making your love more valuable. The person receiving your love in this transaction receives a much more valuable resource than zie had before, and will be understandably upset if you break your promise in the future. From this perspective it makes perfect sense that married men are more attractive than unmarried men – as demand increases, so does value.

Dave Chappelle understands this, in the context of sex:

Relevant quote starts at 49:37

If pussy was a stock, it would be plummeting right now because you flooded the market with it, you’re giving it away too easy. I’m just being truthful. I’m just talking. It would plummet. You’d be watching the news, “today, pussy plummeted again on the nasdaq.” …This is the practical application of what I’m talkin’ about.

Polyamory is a threat to this transactional view. If, as we keep insisting, loving or having sex with more than one person at a time does nothing to cheapen the value of love or sex, then the above analysis must be wrong.

The main reason why the economic model doesn’t work for me is that my love is not a commodity**. To me, love is a self-replicating resource. Love is something that a person can give and give, and never run out. I’m delighted that polyamorous community has chosen, as its symbol, the infinity heart. To me, the infinity heart encapsulates the polyamorous challenge to the economic model. Our*** view is that polyamory cannot decrease the value of love, because love is infinite.

The other way the economic model fails is that love’s value is not determined by the market. Love (at least in my experience) cannot be bought or sold, and thus the market value of any individual’s love is irrelevant. The economic analysis is only useful in determining the market value of a product, not its intrinsic value or it’s value to any individual. The value of a person’s love, to me, bears no relation to its value to others.

Granted, it’s certainly an ego boost to receive the favor of someone highly discriminating, but I attempt to resist this impulse, as it relies on the economic model. I view it as similar to resisting jealousy. It’s a way to attempt to align my emotions with my rational understanding of the world and with my view of what the ideal person would feel.

I don’t see any other justification for how poly could “cheapen” love and/or sex. Do you?
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*thoughout this post, the word “love” is used to refer to romantic love.

** sex sometimes is a commodity, and I have no problem with that. Sex work is a big industry. I’ve never participated in it myself, but I certainly haven’t ruled it out, especially if I visit Amsterdam again. However, sex is not usually a commodity for me, so the analysis of love mostly applies to sex as well.

*** this is my view and the view of many poly people that I know, though not all, and it is not meant to speak for everyone in the poly community. Many poly people still place artificial limits on the love they are allowed to feel, or reserve other things only for the primary relationship to keep it “special.”