Relationship Anarchy and a Culture of Consent

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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Over the past few months, I’ve become much more comfortable identifying as a relationship anarchist. For those who missed my last post on the topic, relationship anarchy is a relationship style that abandons the concepts of having rules or obligations. Basically, my relationship philosophy is that everyone should do whatever they want as much of the time as possible.

When I tell this to people, the most common response is something along the lines of “that sounds awful!” Not necessarily that it *is* awful, but just the phrasing tends to jar people. The idea that people should do whatever they want seems completely foreign and borderline abhorrent to a very large number of people.

I got into an argument on Facebook the other day about whether it’s rude to be using your smartphone while you’re out with someone socially. My policy is that social interactions should be entirely consensual, so if Person A longer wants to engage with Person B, they should stop engaging and do what they want (my friend Miri has a similar view). This is apparently a hugely controversial position. People seemed to view a social invitation as a form of contract, whereby if Person A agrees to spend time with Person B socially, they’ve promised to pay attention to Person B for the duration of the event. If Person A stops being interested in paying attention to Person B, then (the argument goes) Person A should suggest a conversation topic or activity that will allow them to continue paying attention to Person B. The other seemingly acceptable solution was for Person A to tell Person B that they are no longer interested in the conversation, giving Person B an opportunity to suggest a more interesting conversation topic or activity.

The problem with both of those solutions is that it creates an obligation on the part of Person A to continue paying attention to Person B, even though Person A doesn’t want to do so. These solutions only make sense if the goal is to continue the social interaction. People were completely opposed to the idea that simply ending the social interaction (without additional steps), either temporarily or completely, was an acceptable option.

One of the reasons why people are so threatened by the idea of other people doing what they want is that we don’t live in a culture of consent:

A consent culture is one in which the prevailing narrative of sex–in fact, of human interaction–is centered around mutual consent. It is a culture with an abhorrence of forcing anyone into anything, a respect for the absolute necessity of bodily autonomy, a culture that believes that a person is always the best judge of their own wants and needs.

Consent culture is meant as a rejection of rape culture, but it covers so much more than rape prevention. Cliff Pervocracy advocates:

I don’t want to limit it to sex. A consent culture is one in which mutual consent is part of social life as well. Don’t want to talk to someone? You don’t have to. Don’t want a hug? That’s okay, no hug then. Don’t want to try the fish? That’s fine. (As someone with weird food aversions, I have a special hatred for “just taste a little!”) Don’t want to be tickled or noogied? Then it’s not funny to chase you down and do it anyway.

This is the part that tends to give people the most trouble. Boundary-pushing is shockingly acceptable in our culture, as are “etiquette rules,” (cell phone use being just one example) that encourage people to do things that they don’t want to do for the sake of meeting other people’s expectations.

Relationship anarchy, at least in theory, does away with all of that. When there are no rules or preexisting structures, and everyone is encouraged to do what they want, then nobody is pressured into doing anything. RA is, of course, not a panacea. Communicating desires and/or expectations (hugely important things to do!) can still often be interpreted as the application of social pressure to meet such desires or expectations,* so even people who claim to have no rules should take special care that they aren’t created de facto relationship rules, and that all parties understand that there’s a difference between communicating a desire and insisting (or even asking) a partner to meet that desire.

The poly community likes to endlessly debate about the appropriateness of partners having rules and making agreements. My view is that having any sort of control over one another’s choices is contrary to the goal of building a culture of consent (important: that doesn’t mean that there’s no good reason to do it). In a culture of consent, people would be encourage to do whatever they want in relationships. That doesn’t mean that there would be no consequences for their behavior, but it does mean that situations would not be intentionally constructed to discourage people from doing what they want.

As I seemingly repeat ad nauseum, rules and agreements only matter if one or both parties wants to break them. If nobody ever wants to break the agreement, the agreement is not necessary. By making the agreement, you’re planning for what happens in the event that at least one partner wants to break the agreement,** and you’re deciding that, in that case, that partner should stick to what you’ve agreed. In the culture I wish we had, such things would be viewed with great suspicion, if not outright hostility.

The scary part about consent culture is the same thing as the scary part about atheism. Namely – if there are no rules and nobody is pressuring people to behave a certain way, people will do awful things! Atheists generally have no trouble shrugging off this criticism, most often pointing out that they have no desire to do awful things, and if fear of god is the only thing preventing people from committing atrocities, then we are truly in trouble. I would make the same argument with respect to relationships. If people are permitted to do whatever they want, free from pressure or coercion, what would truly be different? If you’re in a relationship, consider this question: what is it that your partner wants to do that would be so awful if they did it? For those who are not, do you really want to be in a relationship with a person who would mistreat you if not for the social pressure put on them? I certainly don’t.

In a culture truly based on consent, wouldn’t all relationships be anarchic?***

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*Franklin Veaux has some very good examples regarding the difference between communicating expectations/desires and making rules.

** Seemingly, some people make the puzzling decision to use agreements and rules as a way of communicating mutual expectations/desires. I advocate against doing so, as I think it’s important to maintain a distinction between the two ideas. However, if your rules are simply meant as a way to communicate, and not to actually encourage/pressure anyone to do (or refrain from doing) anything, this paragraph does not apply to your rules.

*** Other than those explicitly and consensually based on BDSM or other forms of control which, if done ethically, are completely at-will and can be changed at any time with no penalty.

How Sherlock surprised me in season 3

I’ve just finished watching Sherlock season 3… yay for another lengthy wait before the next season. For those who haven’t watched it yet, I won’t be spoiling any major events or revelations, but I will be discussing character dynamics quite a bit. Read at your own risk.

Ever since I heard they’d cast Mary Morstan, I was anxious about how they’d handle a serious love interest for John. All Sherlock stories rest on the love between Holmes and Watson to some extent, but the current BBC series it is the overt and unquestionable core of the show. The clever deductions, the rise and fall of public opinion, the tension between Sherlock’s narcissism (I contend that he is much more a narcissist than a sociopath) and his chosen life of fighting evil… all of these are secondary thematic players to the mutual love and mutual need between John and Sherlock. (I have no stake in the shipping vs. non-shipping game. I don’t care if you want to interpret their love as homoerotic, homoromantic, or just platonic devotion, and everything I’m going to write here works just fine however you like to spin it.)

Because the John/Sherlock relationship is so much more essential to this adaptation than to many others, the presence of a Mary Morstan was much more dangerous to it. I was honestly surprised they included her character… if you’re writing a love story about two characters, why bring a third in? Nobody in the audience would take her seriously as a rival for John’s affections, nor would they tolerate her if she was. I was prepared for, at best, a passive background figure who we’d only see in the corners of John’s life with Sherlock, and at worst, a source of irritating tension who everybody couldn’t wait to get rid of. A Mary who fought Sherlock for her place in John’s life, who complained about his being out late and fretted about the danger he put himself in, would have been a disaster. All of those concerns would be completely justified, but because they interfere with the relationship that we, the audience, really care about, that kind of Mary Morstan could only have been unlikeable.

Instead, the writers did what I didn’t expect: they gave us the nearest thing to a poly relationship I’ve seen on mainstream TV. Within hours of Sherlock’s return, John, Sherlock, and Mary have slid into what is essentially a quite functional polyamorous V. It’s Mary who sets the tone: she gets what Sherlock means to John. It’s clear from her reaction when she realizes who Sherlock is that she’s seen all of John’s grief and all of his love for his dead friend. It would be understandable if she’d become threatened and territorial, but instead she sees an opportunity for the man she loves to be happy, and she goes for it. She positions herself very clearly as an ally to their relationship.

And it’s her doing this that allows Sherlock to do the same. He’s not mature enough to make the same move on his own, and if Mary had positioned herself as a rival in a zero-sum game for John’s affection, he would have fallen to her level. Instead, he rises, and puts as much work into supporting her relationship with John as she does into supporting his. For me, it was an almost unbelievable level of character development, but I’m willing to buy that the Moriarty affair was humbling enough to effect a bit of genuine growth (his behavior toward Mycroft and others in this season bears that out as well.)

For a really good metamour relationship, both people have to truly value the good things the other brings to their mutual love’s life. They have to be willing to step aside at times to let the other relationship flourish, and to advocate for the health of the other relationship whenever necessary. It helps if they like each other, too, as Sherlock and Mary clearly do. So many little dynamics were familiar to me, like the back-channel communication for and about the mutual partner.

Again, you don’t have to put a sexual or romantic interpretation to John/Sherlock for this to work: plenty of stories involve bitter rivalry and jealousy between a best friend and a lover. In today’s culture, it is just assumed that only one person can be The Most Important, and that everyone close to a central character must be vying for the position. I can count on my fingers the number of movies or TV shows where the characters are allowed to rise above that, to go beyond open competition and even beyond silent insecurity, and to actively support the important relationships of those close to them. To act from the position of, “This person makes the person I love happy, and therefore, I want them in our lives as much as possible.” Sherlock, John, and Mary are all deeply damaged people, but they get this one thing stunningly, incredibly right.

Some Stupid Stuff that has Happened to Me in the Last Few Months

“Oh, well, I’m just waiting for my opportunity to spritz Gina with this hose!” he quipped.

I raised an eyebrow, looked straight at him, and then continued what I was doing.

“Gina? You’re really dour.”

“Dour…” I said. My eyebrow had not descended from its skeptical position.

“Dour!”

“I’m dour?”

“Yes!”

“I’m not 85, if that’s what you’re saying. Also, get the hell out of my lab, thanks.”

“You don’t have to be old to be dour.”

I walked away, smirking to myself because I, like, read blogs and live life as a woman in America, and of course my inability to find this dude funny labels me as a dour woman.

I suppose this guy has been building the Dour Case for a while now. He’s been working here for a few months and has consistently given me a reason to not want to talk to him or find him funny.
Things this dude has said to me:

– Oh, you’ve only be married for 2 years? Have you got him trained yet?
– 2 years, huh? He’s probably still crawling at your feet, heh heh. That’ll change.
– “I think that the world has only gotten better for women. Not men. What do you think, Gina?” “It’s about damn time?” “What??? What would your husband say to that?” “He’d agree.” “Oh man, you DO have him trained.”
– You can cook? Oh, your husband is a lucky man.

This doesn’t even include the time he saw my shelf of knick knacks in my cubical and, upon seeing the geisha doll that was given to me by a supplier, asked me, “What, are you some kind of closet Chinese person?” I don’t really know what that means and decided against saying something like, “No, but I’m totes a communist.” That would have riled him up, for sure!

But yeah, I’m pretty dour. I’m so fucking serious all the time! Why can’t I just accept that this jackass is trying to build a rapport with me based on sexist assumptions and mindless joshing?!?

Several years ago, we all had to go to a sensitivity seminar. The HR person talked a bit about not hitting on coworkers and such, but the video we had to watch was pretty much all about not making fun or making assumptions about Asians. It was the weirdest thing ever. Apparently everyone in the video office kept asking this Asian man what he thought of the new kung fu moving that came out and he was PISSED. Given what I learned at the seminar, I totally could have reported the dude for getting on my case for being a closet Chinese person. MISSED OPPORTUNITY.

Anyway, a day before this guy made the “the world is getting better only for women comment”, I had a ridiculous phone call with a different coworker that left me so revolted and feeling oddly violated that I wrote him a direct email about how we don’t have a familiar relationship and that if he can’t speak to me professionally, then he shouldn’t speak to me. It was one of the best emails I’ve ever written and it cited everything he said. I copied HR.

I got called into HR the next day to go over the events that I very clearly and concisely outlined in my email. Before getting into the nitty gritty, I was reprimanded for writing to him directly because it was too aggressive and confrontational. I said that I understood what she was saying, but that I meant to be assertive and confrontational because I’ve been putting up with this garbage for almost 10 years here. “Yeah, but you shouldn’t.” Um…sure. I will never do it again?

After the meeting I came back wanting to hurt people and was informed about how the world is getting better for women and not men. I nearly turned to violence but cursed instead.
A week later I had a follow up meeting with the HR person about the other employee’s side of the story. He claimed he hadn’t said any of the things that I said he did (even though I wrote the email 5 minutes after our conversation). Why would I make up statements like this:
– Man, you have a nice, pretty voice. Nothing like the mean, mean person you were to me before.
– Ah, you must have your husband trained…or chained up in the basement. Har har har.

And some other stuff.

What is it with dudes thinking that women have their men trained? Why is this an ever present trope? In explaining to the HR person why I find this nauseating, I cited that Wes and I have a pretty egalitarian relationship.

“What? I’m sorry…what does egalitarian mean?”

“…equal.”

“Oh, well good for you. I don’t believe that relationships can be equal, but great.

So, um, yeah, that’s just a smattering of why I haven’t been writing much lately. There’s a lot going on. But I thought I would dip my toe back in with a semi-coherent piece about being a woman with a boy career.

And today I get called dour for finding some dude unimpressive in his choice of humor. Sure. The thing is that now that I have reported something, I know that it is worth it to report things? So…watch the fuck out. 33 year old Gina is a little more bad ass than 23 year old Gina.

Like, a lot more.

Transitions

This blog has been quiet for a while. The podcast has also been quiet. There have been reasons for this, most of which don’t need to be spelled out here. Some explanation, however, is relevant to readers, assuming you have not forgotten about us.

Back in 2012, Ginny and I got married. Our living situation was not ideal, our financial situation not great, but our relationships with a few people was such that we were given the opportunity to share space, as well as a blog, with some people that were integral to our lives. So we packed up and moved to Collingswood, NJ.

I was optimistic, at the time. We knew there were risks in melding lives in this way, and we all knew it could not work out. But like all relationships, you sometimes have to gamble for the sake of it working out. I’ve gambled in such ways in the past and not had it work out, but my view on life is perpetual self-improvement and not giving up, because I don’t want to resign myself to cynicism. I want to make things work, when possible, and I hate giving up because things get hard.

But that isn’t enough. Everyone in a relationship has to have the same interest in working through problems for a relationship to have a chance at working. And even if everyone does want it to work, sometimes there are too many differences for it to succeed. So, despite my initial optimism and our attempts to meld a new home, this gamble will not work out. At least for now.

Polyskeptic.com isn’t going anywhere, however. PolyskeptiCast has been hanging silently for a while and I hope it returns, but I am unsure about its future. For now, some transitions are upcoming.

To start, I will be wearing glasses from now on. I just got a new prescription, and two new pairs, that I will be receiving within a week. Ginny and I will be moving out of the PolySkeptic compound in coming months, and moving back to Philadelphia. I will admit, I am looking forward to being back in the city, but I hate giving up on all of this. It feels like resigning. It feels like running away. It feels like losing family. But it’s quite clear that moving forward as things are is impossible, and my feelings of resigning and giving up are not shared, so move on we must.

The details are not necessary to you all. I will say that most of my silence on the blog has been due to the fact that the subjects I wanted to write about being too close to home. I don’t mind writing about my own shortcomings and struggles for growth, but when the issues I have extend beyond my own issues, and are not about our culture in general, my moral compass gains my attention and I tend to remain quiet. In coming months, that may change, as I try and sort through and articulate what I can learn from all of this, but for now I am reticent because I’m too stuck in the middle of everything to be even remotely unbiased.

I will also say that Gina and I will be staying together, hopefully indefinitely. I love her very much, we both enjoy each other thoroughly, and we intend to work through the difficulties to come to maintain committed to each other. It will be difficult, in term of maintaining our relationship, to not share space in the way we have over the last year plus, but I realize that it is necessary. We have not seen her voice here recently on the blog, for her own reasons, but I hope to continue to read her hilarious and insightful posts here in the future and long down the road.

If Wes wishes to keep writing (and I hope he will), then he will. His perspective on the world is very different from mine, and I don’t wish this space to be an echo-chamber for my views on the world, and so I hope to see more of his posts start to appear in the future. Also, if Jessie, who has been invited to write but has not so far done so, desires to add her voice to the blog then I will look forward to read what she has to say. And perhaps as time moves on I will add new writers (as I have in the past, which didn’t work out). That is to be seen.

To sum up, our living arrangements and intimacy will change (as Wes might say, it’s not an ending, it’s a change in our relationship as a group), but I intend to keep moving forward with the blog, hopefully improved with some time. There are tensions here, and plenty of responsibility to be shared for those tensions, but I hope that in time those tensions will be resolved with new circumstances.

That’s the thing about family. Sometimes you love them, sometimes you hate them, and sometimes you really cannot live with them. But even when you hate them and can’t live with them, you love them. I don’t know what the future will hold for us all, but I hope that it gets better, and in the long run this will look like a mere stain on an otherwise really comfortable sweater. Because the winters of life are cold and often dark, and the people around us keep us warm, even if they might be imperfect.

Brighter Than Today

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Yesterday was the winter solstice. While the solstice has significance in many religions, it has always been a powerful secular symbol to me. The solstice is literally the darkest day of the year. While a powerful metaphor in itself, darkness and cold have real consequences. There is seasonal affective disorder, the cold prevents me from doing a lot of my favorite outdoor activities, and there are even links between emotional warmth and physical warmth.

Winter is also a dark time in other ways. December is prime breakup season. The winter holidays are a stressful time for many people. The new year is often a source of disappointment as we inventory our goals from the previous year and realize how short we’ve fallen. There is often family drama. For atheists, this time of year can be especially isolating as overt displays of religion reach an all-time high, especially among those who have religious families.

The solstice has meaning before me because it means that, though the world is wreathed in maximum darkness, every day for the next six months will be slightly, imperceptibly, but undeniably brighter. It means that every day is the brightest it’s been since December 21st. It means that we have 365 full days before the world is ever this dark again. To me, the solstice marks the turning point from things getting worse to things getting better.

Last weekend, I attended Brighter Than Today: A Secular Solstice in New York City. It was a celebration of secular values through music and storytelling. While I had some criticisms of the event, I truly enjoyed being able to spend the solstice with a group of like-minded people (including my partners and some of my favorite people from the community) celebrating secular values like togetherness, hope, and beauty. I recommend that anyone who can make it next year, do so.

I want to wish everyone a happy solstice, and to remind you that no matter what, tomorrow will be brighter than today.

Regression towards the mean (a rant)

All cultures have traditions, values, means of communication, etc. All of these, and more, help define meaning and appropriate behavior for the group of people that interact with that culture. It sets values for moral behavior, words for communication, and expectations to evaluate your decisions and circumstances against. It gives you a set of standards to compare how well you’re doing in your process of personal growth. Culture creates a filter through which we define what is good personal growth. The problem is that sometimes cultures are bad standards for such things.

What do you do when the values, expectations, and even the very language your culture uses seem, well, wrong? Not all of them, necessarily. Really, it just takes one value or tradition to create this problem, and I am not sure it is a problem which will ever go away. We may perpetually, as a species, be evolving and progressing our cultures towards various ideals, assuming we don’t kill each other first. I’m rarely optimistic. So, given that, it seems rational to assume that those working for social justice, of all flavors, are the people we should be paying more attention to as members of culture. But we don’t, because the path of least resistance is easier. It’s totally understandable, right? Well, it’s certainly human. As if that’s sufficient reason to do something in itself.

(Just another reason I’m a misanthropist and not a fan of humanism; I don’t want humanity to be our example or our standard, I want the ubermensch to be the standard. I want to transcend mere humanity towards something perpetually better, culturally. No, not a trans-humanistic future of perfect cuber beings or even Cybermen, but a perpetually improving set of cultures.).

Well, in such cases where we find ourselves dissatisfied with our cultural environment, we have little choice but accept it or to (hopefully) find some other people who feel the same way and create your own sub-culture where we will often have to hide some behaviors so that the normals can go around feeling comfortable with their quaint little lives, unchallenged and sometimes even unaware that challenge is even an option. And if we, rebels and other hooligans, happen to encroach on their territory (which is everywhere, seemingly), we have to apologize and slink back into our little holes, lest they get offended and have feelings they don’t want to deal with. Examples? Christian privilege in the Christmas wars, for starters, but also the fear that many polyamorous people have in being discovered by employers, family, etc because of the effect of cultural norms on our legal and practical rights.

And, sometimes, you meet one of these friendly normals who seem to think your little hole in the culture is sort of fascinating and interesting. They sort of like some of what you have to say, or they have a friend who also has a similar hole and they want to be liberal, open-minded, and accepting but they don’t really feel it deep down the way we do so it always feels like they are merely patronizing. Because they are patronizing, even if it is also partially genuine (I’ll be clear; sometimes it is actually genuine). They will occasionally visit your little hole, play around for a while in that hole, but they are not prepared to live their. In some cases, a person might spend time with the weird people because a friend likes the weird thing or because their partner is weird as well, and they feel like they should be supportive even if they don’t really get it. I mean, sometimes they do get it, but sometimes not. Either way, they are not invested in your little cultural oddity, and most of their thinking and feeling is still tied to the mainstream culture in which they live most of their lives.

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As we grow up, the things that are meaningful to us are tied to the culture in which we live. And for most people, that is the mainstream culture. Generations of people have common cultural items to use as stand-ins for more universal human commonalities, and we latch onto those things. For many people it is the church they went to, but it could also be the love of popular TV shows, music, or hobbies. And this is all fine. The problem is when the things we value and have fond associations with are a part of the problem. I’ll use a personal example.

When I was in graduate school, I made friends with a fellow graduate student who was the member of a fraternity. He was very active and loved this fraternity, and he spoke well of it. Through our friendship, I became fascinated with the ideals and the experience of this group of brothers, and because I valued him and the ideals proposed by the fraternity I decided to join. I had hoped to meet other people who shared certain values with me and to become part of a group that seemed actually worth-while, rather than the ones I had seen elsewhere. It was against my general nature of not being the type who joined things like this; I never went to church (willingly), I have never been enamored by any particular political party, and I had some prejudices about fraternities.

Upon joining, I slowly but inevitably saw the private, secret rituals of the fraternity as well as how my new ‘brothers’ really were, and things started to sour. I learned, quickly, that the role of the fraternity was exactly like the role of church for most mainstream and normal people. While in the ritual times and spaces, people tend to be solemn, respectful, and even reflective. But as soon as they leave, the ideals (for most of them), go by the wayside. Then I saw that people were sort of douchebags, just like everywhere else. On top of that, the ideal that the fraternity upheld were available without the fraternity; just like with religion. There was no need to join the fraternity, because I could have the ideals without that particular group of people.

One example always sticks with me. I had some interaction with the prytanis (president) of the chapter at Drexel University a while ago, during my early days as a volunteer, and it was like talking to any self-serving, arrogant, and self-important douchebag I have ever had the displeasure of talking with. The values of the organization do not tend to filter down to the members. So it is with such things. This, and other things I learned during my brief activity (you are a brother for life, after all), showed me that no matter how good the ideals of a community, or culture, are, those ideals won’t translate. You don’t have to be a member to share the ideals, and if you do become a member you won’t necessarily meet better people. Unfortunately, this truth carries through to all of my experiences with groups of all kinds, including the atheist community. I have many friends in the atheist community, but it is full of many douchebags as well. The Polyamorous community is a little better.

So, it’s even worse when even the ideals of a community, group, or culture are not, well, ideal. Take the ideals of love and romance in our culture to start with. Most people associate love with concepts of possessiveness and jealousy as a positive sign of love being ‘real’. But those are the ideals of love and romance in our culture in general, whether we like it or not. It might be changing slowly, but that’s where it seems to be for most people. Those of us who are polyamorous tend to recognize that those values are broken, and see love as expansive and less limiting (it’s not actually infinite, because nothing is.). But from the point of view of someone steeped in mainstream culture, we poly people often look like we’re crazy, or at least playing with fire (which is also fun). We are, after all, intentionally breaking the expectations of the culture they live in and value. I mean, it’s one thing to cheat, but at least the normal monogamously-inclined cheater has the ideal of exclusivity, possessiveness, and jealousy…I mean, true love and romance…as a goal. At least those cheaters are (generally) trying to do things right, but they keep messing it up because they are human. But to throw away those ideals and love 2 or more people? That’s just nuts.

So when those hangers-on, those people who are, intellectually and theoretically, accepting of us rebels and hooligans (you know, because they are open-minded, liberated people); those people who hang around because they have friends who are also weird; those who hang around because the person they are dating wants to be part of it, even if they are unsure about it. When those people start to really face the hard parts of being an adult and dealing with the real complexities of attraction, jealousy, envy, time-management, trust, etc what do they do? Well, they tend to regress towards the cultural expectations. The average. The ‘mean’.

Monogamy as an expected ideal, as it is in our culture, is not a healthy value to defend and to default towards. I recognize that some people will be truly happy and fulfilled in monogamous situations, but as a default this ideal is broken when held against the shape of human desires, capabilities, and actual behavior. When you have millions of people nourished with in a set of values around love, relationships, and sex which imply the expectations of monogamy, their emotions and thus their opinions latch onto those ideals. Subsequently, due to various cognitive biases and imperfections, they are offended by opposing values which may actually be superior (either generally or for them specifically). So when some of those people are exposed to polyamory, even if they are willing to accept or even try it, their emotions are still tied to the ideals of love, relationships, and sexuality which make polyamory seem wrong, impractical, or “not for me.”

Let’s use another example, not from myself but based, in part, on someone I have known all of my life.

If someone grows up going to church, loving the music, the community, etc, they will attach emotional significance to much of the tradition and ritual. They have emotional bonds to the sounds, smells, architecture, etc. For someone like this, being in their religious space brings to mind good feelings, memories, etc which cannot be replaced, but which are valued by them whether they would choose to value them or not. If they start to disbelieve in any or all of the doctrines of the church, those feelings don’t go away. So even if they leave the church, they seek out some sort of substitute, or create atheist churches (*gag*). And from time to time, they will think about and miss what they left. Their emotions bond to such sounds, smells, images etc which they formed in those places while they developed as people. And sometimes, especially if they experience trauma, hard time, etc, they go back. They regress.

The same thing often happens to people who are interested in, or try, polyamory. It gets hard, their emotions–which were tied with ideas about love and security which are antithetical to being polyamorous–pull them towards the cultural norm. It’s the path of least resistance, after all, to appear normal. it’s even easier to actually just be normal. Polyamory is not normal (and it may never be). The normal alternatives, whether monogamy, serial monogamy, or even swinging (which is, let’s be honest, just couples who like to fuck other people sometimes, and not a real challenge to the fundamental norms of couple-based relationships) requires less personal struggle and work, it’s easier to explain to co-workers and family, and it does not force you to grow. Growing is hard, fitting in is easier.

And we as sensitive, caring, and mature people, are supposed to sympathize with their struggle when they regress in such ways. We are supposed to allow them to go the path they want with our blessings and support, because their life is theirs. Well, sure it is, but that does not mean that the decision to regress towards the norm is not often based on some fear, unwillingness to be challenged, and even cowardice. That does not mean we have to actually agree with them. Also, it does not mean we have to respect their decision. We are supposed to not challenge them when shit gets hard for them because shit is already hard for them, I understand. We are supposed to be patient (and some patience is fair to ask for, but their must be a limit). We are supposed to not rock the boat. We are supposed to behave ourselves. we are supposed to know our place. Our place is not to question the norm. Most people will defend their norms all day and all night because it is comfortable, and they will do it with a smile and get offended when you find them ridiculous, because they are so conditioned to see it as right even if it might not be.

They are so easily offended, those open-minded, liberated, progressive normal people. Not to mention the conservatives; they are a whole different problem. But the liberal-minded mainstream normal people who find us weird people so interesting to hear stories about on NPR or have representative friends to make them seem interesting…. They are very often, to this weird person anyway, quite amusing and interesting. They are like the Unitarians from the point of view of radical new atheism; not the source of the problem, but not really helping either. They are just sort of boring, trite, and uninspiring. They just sort of blend into the background of the culture, which we already (hopefully) agree is not ideal.

And we are supposed to respect them and their lives.

That’s another part of the values of our mainstream culture. That is the quiet, brilliant lore of mainstream inoffensiveness. That is what feeds and keeps alive what is wrong with mainstream culture. Where privilege of all kind lives, it is guarded by the desire to be polite, because being polite is nice and it won’t offend your grandmother or the neighbors. Where injustice lives, so does the smiling, ubiquitous face of “it’s just how people are” and “live and let live.” Where cowardice, fear, and conservative tendencies live, so do the values of tradition and “just fitting in”. And so when shit gets hard, it’s easier to just fall back into the tendencies of the lazy and cowardly culture that we live among and within. When shit happens, it’s easy to just blend into the background pattern of normal culture, and appear as just another person who feels more evolved and liberated because you had this time in college (or whenever) when you tried that weird thing, but it wasn’t for you. Or perhaps you have some weird friends who are interesting to invite to parties and amaze the other normals with how many interesting people you know. Don’t I look all open-minded now? Aren’t I a mature and responsible adult? Aren’t I interesting?

Not necessarily.

So this is where I regress to being (a little) mean. I don’t respect the majority of our culture or its values. I don’t want to be nice or to sympathize beyond a reasonable level of time to allow you to get used to the culture shock you have when you run into weird people or radical ideas. I’m willing to allow you some time to calm from your privilege or parochialistic shock, but then I expect you to actually grow up a little or go away where I don’t have to tolerate the inoffensiveness you reek of. And, unfortunately, most will go away and regress to their mean. That’s fine, my world is better without you anyway, but I will be disappointed because this reaction is so common. I’m not going to be nice to you just because you have some emotional attachments to being normal and unchallenged, and you would rather run away or hide behind wanting to fit in or not offend your co-workers or your family for the sake of something that scares you to think about doing.

I’m sympathetic to emotional difficulty when it’s warranted, but the common emotional attachments to a set of values affixed to a broken and stupid culture are not sufficient warrant after a while. If you are exposed and given time to adjust to the weird alternative to the norm, and you don’t adjust, then I’m no longer sympathetic. You have time, especially if you have the time to read blogs like this, to think about the nature of our culture and your relationship with it, so do it already and stop being boring. If you don’t do that work now, then I hope that if you eventually figure out that the (for example) monogamous marriage which you willingly enter, but later find yourself stuck in, was the result of unrealistic expectations about relationships which you learned from our culture, then you will be willing to do the work. I also hope that you will then be willing to start re-thinking your values and your attachment to the dominant cultural values.

I hope you figure that out before all of that, and I hope that our experiences and insights as (polyamorous, atheist, social justice activist, etc) people, while not perfect (I’m certainly far from it) might be more than mere interest from afar. Because for many people out there, the weird stuff around them is just a way to play with ideas while not really questioning your very basic values and assumptions in any meaningful way. Weird sub-cultures and counter-cultures are a sort of cultural clothing that makes our culture look interesting to those living in it, when it is not interesting in itself. In short, I’m not impressed by your emotional freak out because you are more comfortable with what is normal than with doing the real work to challenge your cultural conventions and assumptions. I’ll be impressed when the freak out happens when you are genuinely trying to adjust to the fact that the dominant culture inculcated so much crap into you and you are trying to change those ideas for better ones, actively, painfully, and most of the time.

I am no longer impressed by the values, methods of solution, or rules of a culture–any culture–which is fundamentally broken as our mainstream Western culture is. And if you don’t think this mainstream Western culture is broken in many ways, then you might be part part of the problem.

Learning and growing

Sometimes shit gets real. We all make mistakes, we have people hurt us, and we become emotional and life gets hard. Welcome to Earth. Hopefully, we have people close to us who we trust and who trust us despite the fact that mistakes will be made. Because mistakes will be made. But what do we do about it?

First, don’t be defensive and don’t beat yourself more than is proportionate.

Start with the assumption that you did something wrong to cause the situation you are currently debugging. Also, start with the assumption that your super powers for mayhem are not so vast that other people don’t have any responsibility for the circumstances before you, and that you are not completely to blame. There are some people out there who blame themselves first, and some who blame others first. In both cases, intelligent people can rationalize their tendency, and we all need to be aware of that. Otherwise, some people take too much blame, while others will deny theirs (or, more likely, forget about it later). The truth is important, and we sometimes need to force ourselves to adopt a more objective perspective in order to see around our own biases and faults.

Other people can help us do that, so listen to them. That leads me to the next piece of advice.

Actively listen. I don’t mean to merely stop talking, but actively listen rather than defensively react. I mean shut off your defensive rationalization powers for a little while and accept that what people say might be worth trying to internalize. The people that know you, love you, and are willing to talk to you when shit gets real are not trying to fuck with your head. If they are saying that it’s not all your fault, it probably isn’t all your fault (or all your responsibility). If they are saying you are at fault, figure out why and what you are going to do about it (insofar as it is your responsibility).

When we are emotional, we are not ideally rational. We sometimes think we are rational in such cases, especially if we are repressing some tough emotions, but that is a lie our brain tells us when it’s in defense mode. Insecurity and fear create firewalls and other mechanisms to protect your operating system of a mind in order to (in effect) maintain the part of you that is fucking up. Our intelligence can too easily be used to conserve the things about us we would ideally like to change. Realize that, and then keep it in mind for when you plan on upgrading your software.

In other words, don’t let yourself slip back into your standard behavior, since that is likely part of the cause. When the battle or war is over, we don’t necessarily go home and keep on keeping on, because that might have been part of what started the fighting. You absolutely must realize that our normal, every-day behavior is probably the cause of some future tension, because it is bothering or hurting someone else. And if you don’t think or care about this, then your fault compounds the longer you ignore this. This leads me to another piece of advice.

Try and identify the cause of the mistake. All too often, we address the symptoms of the problem, rather that honestly deal with the underlying cause. All too often, the cause is fear, insecurity, and related daemons. And when the smoke clears, and those feelings are not banging on the door, we forget that they still exist, quietly, under the surface. If, like me, you spent years learning to meditate and to be always aware of the daemons running under most of your daily noise (as much as possible, anyway), you will know that those daemons are always nearby and are just waiting to be called into action by circumstances; triggers. If you have not done that work, you may be completely oblivious to your own daemons. But I guarantee you that other people close to you are aware of them, and probably know some of your triggers (to avoid them, mostly to keep you from freaking out and making shit get get).

Triggers can be just about anything. They can be a tone of voice, a smell, a word, a type of social interaction, etc. For me, it is things like lack of consideration of my time and space (especially by people close to me). It is also being restrained for no reason. What do you mean I can’t be critical of religion? Fuck you and your gods! What do you mean I can’t love more than one person and manage a relationship with them? Fuck you and your monogamy! What do you mean I can’t rob that bank? Fuck you and your laws!

OK, maybe not so much that last one. Morality, after all, is superior to even my own personal desire for bank-robbing. For me, the rank of considerations are: 1) Morality 2) interpersonal considerations (things like consent, preferences of people around me as well as my own) and 3) law. And really, I only care about the law insofar as it is a legislation of morality. The reason I don’t go through red lights has much more to do with concerns for efficiency and considerations for safety than it has to do with the fact that it’s a moving violation. If there were no fine, I would still not do it in the vast majority of cases.

—

Our emotions, whether marinated in fear or whatever else, are responsible for more of our behavior than even the most intelligent and rational of us realize. We are never fully (or perhaps even mostly) free from emotional influence. In my case (having Borderline Personality Disorder), the effects are more severe and worrisome, but that only means that I deal with it all the time rather than only occasionally. Most of us have the capability of losing our shit and making (and often rationalizing) bad decisions.

What is important is not merely sliding by and going back to normal after things calm down. We need to remember that the daemon is still running under everything, and it’s only a matter of time before it launches an attack on our executive functions again. So, after you have dealt with the symptoms, go back and dig deep into yourself and figure out the nature of the cause. Be willing to give up your habits of behavior, even your deepest preferences, because they might be the causes. You might have to change drastically, especially if you don’t want to.

I am not the same man I was 10 years ago. I have made mistakes which have alienated me from people I loved in the past, and I spent the time to make huge changes in my ability to communicate, deal with difficult feelings, etc. And there is still much more for me to do. I will never stop evolving and changing based on what I learn, especially from my mistakes. But I had to first learn that it was possible that everything I believed was wrong. I had to start, like a skeptic, to question even my own deepest values. I had to be willing to, as Nietzsche called it, be an archaeologist of my own soul, and dig out artifacts that were not mine so much as they were influencing the culture of my own mind in ways I didn’t like or fully understand.

It would have been much easier to remain the selfish, manipulative, and rationalizing person I sometimes was while younger (not always, mind you). I could have kept moving down another path of growth (or lack of growth) and subsequently turned into a man I would not have been happy being, but who also would have been more acceptable to our culture (because I would have been ‘monogamous’ and otherwise mainstream). In our culture, it is easier to be a manipulative cheater than responsibly polyamorous. It is more acceptable to be defensive and “respectful” of religion, rationalizing the cognitive dissonances so many people carry, than to be an honest critic.

It is easier to not grow, than to do the real work of growth. Because not doing real personal work towards growing is so common in our culture that it often looks like it is a value of our culture, rather than a plague. Because we are so good at pretending to grow and change while only doing enough to pass, that we end up stagnating. For real growth, we need to sometimes dig deeper than we are comfortable doing, and challenge every aspect of our behavior and beliefs. We can’t hide behind excuses. We have to do it openly, and make ourselves vulnerable.

All too often we don’t do this–myself included!–all because of fear and insecurity. We call it protecting ourselves or something like that, but it’s just an excuse, a rationalization, because it’s scary. No shit it’s scary.

So, let’s be scared together, rather than be scared separately.

Just because….

This is appropriate here for the obvious reasons.

Why knot – Breaking the Silence of Monogamy (upcoming documentary)

I was contacted by Dhruv Dhawan from Film-Real about a documentary entitled Why knot, which has a page at indiegogo, where they are trying to raise funds to complete the project.

As the indiegogo page says,

This film’s objective is not to advocate for or against monogamy, but to break the silence and provoke thoughts on an issue which affects so many relationships and families today.

Our vision is to empower relationships and to encourage communication within, hoping that one day, infidelity and the containment of our desires may only be a remnant of human history.

which I think is a good conversation for humans to be having. Much like religion, monogamy often gets a free pass in our culture, and it seems that pass is also present in other cultures (being that this is a project originates in India).

From the email:

The director is an acclaimed filmmaker (http://www.film-real.com) who has been researching this film for 5 years and shooting for the past 2. Dhruv completed his BA in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University and is currently pursuing a Masters in Film Production at the University of British Columbia. Through his latest film, WHYKNOT, Dhruv aims to break the silence on monogamy and question whether we as humans can resolve conflicts between our instincts and our morals.

Why Knot is a journey through the intellectual and emotional landscape of monogamy which features prominent scientists in the field and members from Dhruv’s personal sphere. During the production of the film we had the privilege to interview and research several polyamorous individuals and communities and take into account their insights and opinions. We would love to hear what you think/feel about the film trailer, so do spare us 4 minutes and give it a watch! Go on, Why Knot 🙂

Here is the trailer:

It looks interesting and promising, and I hope it gets fully funded. If you want to and are able to contribute to the project, head on over and do so now.

When polyamory isn’t an option, is cheating an option?

Nearly a year ago, Wes wrote this post on the blog about whether it is permissible, morally, to accept an offer of sex from someone in a monogamous relationship. I was not in agreement with him when I read it, but my disagreement was based on a moral foundation I know Wes does not accept (primarily Kantian), so I didn’t argue since it would have turned into a meta-argument. I find his logic sound, I just found the basic assumptions to be lacking somewhat. I carry different moral foundations that the argument presented in that post, and so I realized that it would turn into a conversation about meta-ethics and moral foundation theory, rather than about the question at hand.

Over the last year I have thought about this issue a little, and I have come to agree with his argument, Kantian counter-positions or not, but only in some cases. I agree that the point of harm is the decision to cheat, and that acting on it only adds the potential harm of STDs or pregnancy (if precautions against such things are not taken, of course). The emotional harm was already done, and it is this point where the other person should focus their attention on why they care if their partners wants other sex/romantic partners, and possibly accept polyamory as another option.

My reason for refusing the proposition of sex from a monogamous person, morally, has to do with what Wes Said in his post:

the fact that someone is a cheater raises all kinds of concerns about that person’s trustworthiness, character, compassion, and decency. I have absolutely no problem with categorically turning down cheaters for those reasons.

I think that everyone should have a negative response to such a proposition if the person asking is untrustworthy. I think that a decent person would not even want to sleep with someone in a situation where you can’t trust their character, personality, etc. I have trouble finding it possible to both be a decent person and wanting to say yes to such a person. But if an untrustworthy person is still appealing to you, then I suppose you can do whatever you like, even if I don’t think it’s the right decision. I would not will that maxim to be universal law, but I can’t make decisions for other people either.

However, not everyone who requests, or at least wants, to have sex with someone besides their committed and supposedly exclusive partner (married or not) is untrustworthy or a bad person. Sometimes, they have good reasons to want and request such a thing.

Why am I writing about this now? Well, because I had a long conversation with a long-time friend today that both depressed and angered me. It spoke to all the reasons why I advocate for non-monogamy, especially where it rubs against traditional and conservative (patriarchal) notions of marriage, relationships, and commitment. I’m writing about this because this friend of mine needs and wants romantic, emotional, and sexual intimacy in her life, and is not getting it.

The occasional 2 minutes is not enough.

My friend, who will obviously remain anonymous, divulged to me today that she has been unhappy with many aspects of her marriage for a while. Sex happens perhaps every month or two, and lasts just about long enough for her husband to be done. The old squirt and snooze.

Now, she has talked to him about her lack of satisfaction with this amount of physical intimacy, and he had insisted that things are “OK” and that he’s just not going to change. He’s happy, he’s not going to change, and with her not being able to support herself right now (she’s a house-mom), leaving is not much of an option. She’s stuck in a situation where she is unhappy, stuck at home most of the time, and wants more from life. He’s not going to give it to her apparently, and her transparently finding it elsewhere is not a realistic option. Polyamory is not an option.

She does not want to hurt him, she does not want to put the kids in a situation of going through a potential divorce (her parents were divorced, which was hard on her growing up), and her kids are fairly young. But she is also seriously considering accepting what she knows are open offers to receive some level of emotional, sexual, and possibly romantic intimacy from other people she knows. She’s thinking about the possibility of cheating.

I want to tell her to do it. I want to tell her to find the happiness she wants, even if it means cheating. Her situation, with a selfish and un-giving husband, is a situation where the chains of monogamy are most clear to me. This type of situation is why Ashley Madison exists. My friend would benefit from polyamory (ideally, if she wanted that), but that is not an option she can count on happening with any level of probability. She wants real intimacy, and cannot get it because of this traditional definition of marriage which keeps too many people (both men and women) in unhappy situations, which lead to cheating.

Eventually she will likely leave him (that’s my guess) when she is able to be economically independent. Whether she would be better off doing now, I cannot say. I’m leaning towards yes, but I don’t have to deal with all of the consequences of that decision. But for now, she remains unhappy, unfulfilled, and there is a world out there full of people who would love her more and give her some of what she desires.

And I know there are many people like her out there.

—

Is cheating sometimes the only option?

So, what is she supposed to do? She has the option to cheat, if she wants it. She has said that she has people who only need her “yes” to get at least some of her desires fulfilled. She could do so in a way that would almost certainly not be found out. She could do so with people she knows and trusts. Does she have a better option?

Is it better to live with this lack of fulfillment while not breaking her marriage vows and possibly exposing her family to harm, or is it better to take the risk of having an affair and possibly having a secret boyfriend? In her place, I would be very tempted to take the risk and have some happiness, rather than live unhappily. Of course I don’t have to make that choice, which is why polyamory is the shiznit.

I would not want to live a life of quiet desperation. I would not want to hurt someone I loved, but in this situation that love seems to be mostly one way (I’m assuming she still loves him, and his actions clearly indicate he does not love her; at least not well). I would want to broach the subject of polyamory with my partner, and if that didn’t work I would be very tempted to leave and/or cheat, if I were in a similar situation.

So, what would I suggest she do?

You are probably guessing that I would advise that she try to have a serious conversation with her husband about some sort of non-monogamous arrangement. And ideally, I think she should do that. But then I think that if she does that, he will suddenly look differently at her going out on a Saturday night to see friends. He might, in fact, insist that she not do so. That would make any cheating harder to pull off, even if she didn’t accept his (hypotheitical) insistence of not going out anymore, because he would be curious and prying if he suspected she wanted to do so. So, given that, is it not only easier pragmatically, but in terms of her ability to find some happiness, just to cheat?

He seems to think that things are fine. He’s happy getting his rocks off every several weeks, but she wants more and she could get away with doing so. Probably. So, in this situation, is it better to cheat?

In a world where polyamory is more mainstream, no it would not be better. We, however, are not going to get to that world any time soon. And yes, the idealist in me wants her to take a stand for her desires openly, and demand that he make a better effort to try and fulfill her needs (she has done this, somewhat, to no avail), and to demand that he either let her go find it willingly or share, and fly the polyamory flag. Or, at least fly the find-a-partner-who-treats-me-well flag. She has not said she wants to be polyamorous per se, but she has said that she wants sexual and emotional intimacy, and he will not give it any more than he already does.

So should she cheat?

Yes. I think she should. And when she can get away, she should. Because in this case it is not the seeker of extra-marital sex who is untrustworthy or a bad person, it is the person she is stuck with who is. And I am not convinced that such people deserve the respect of marriage vows. I don’t think he’s given all he can give to their relationship, and she shouldn’t have to suffer because of that.

Polyamory is great, but it can’t solve this problem because polyamory requires the consent of her husband, and he almost certainly will not give it. And if he should be hurt by any such cheating, he should take responsibility for being a terrible partner, both emotionally and sexually, and deal with it. You can’t be an un-giving partner and also expect your partner to be happy just with you.