the modern serial “monogamy” is a completely different cluster of relationships from the old monogamy, which implied marriage.
In the comment I was talking about in the grandparent (which I’d link to if this thing wasn’t being so slow today on my netbook), I was talking about the former (it said “relationship with my girlfriend”, not “marriage with my wife”). If you want to say “monogamy” is a bad label for that, fine, but “you are not free to do $thing” is a different claim altogether from “$word is not a good label for $thing”.
(And while modern monogamy is different from traditional monogamy, it’s also different from Bay-area-technophile-style polyamory, and given that the latter is probably much more common around here, I think it’s still useful to have a word to distinguish one from another.)
In the comment I was talking about in the grandparent (which I’d link to if this thing wasn’t being so slow today on my netbook), I was talking about the former (it said “relationship with my girlfriend”, not “marriage with my wife”). If you want to say “monogamy” is a bad label for that, fine, but “you are not free to do $thing” is a different claim altogether from “$word is not a good label for $thing”.
(And while modern monogamy is different from traditional monogamy, it’s also different from Bay-area-technophile-style polyamory, and given that the latter is probably much more common around here, I think it’s still useful to have a word to distinguish one from another.)