(Smart polys, police this so we can all have a real discussion!)
Telling members of a social minority you’re not part of what every member of that minority must do to be worthy of your time and consderation as a member of the social majority, is neither reasonable, rational or realistic. Just FYI. It’s like asking “smart” queers to police the tendency of certain (stereotyped) gay men you have in mind to flame it up, or come to that, asking atheists not to be so militant...
Yes, many poly folks do think they’re more evolved. Yes, this is just embarrassing at best, and sanctimonious and preachy at worst. No, the rest of us are not accountable to shut them down so you don’t feel squicked by the whole thing.
n my personal experience, many of the people who think they’re capable of polyamory are not honest with
themselves, and once a partner starts seeing someone else, they experience bad jealousy which they’re
uncomfortable admitting, because after all they’re not supposed to; they’re poly!
This is a perspective some poly types share, that jealousy and polyamory are not compatible. I’ve never quite understood it; I experience jealousy sometimes (and I’m in five serious relationships; each of the people involved is seeing two of the others in some capacity), yet it never quite occurred to me that experiencing jealousy meant that the situation had to change...unless that jealousy was functioning as sort of an early-warning threat detection (I’ve been in situations I was clearly not going to be happy or functional in, with specific arrangements of other people given their own needs, wants and behaviors—my interests were not being looked after by anyone else, and after interrogating my own emotions and their cause for long enough I realized that I wasn’t comfortable with that).
Suffice it to say there is a diversity of actual opinions about this within polyamory and nonmonogamists generally—some people experience jealousy, some don’t; some experience compersion, some don’t; some think these feelings should be primary drivers of their actions and communication, and some don’t.
Are primary poly relationships, even like Alicorn and MBlume, as stable over time as mono?
Given the divorce rate, should we care about this in a statistical sense? I mean, unless we’re talking about your own children, the odds for or against a given family’s long-term stability are not your business...
(I will note that what little research has been done suggests that polyamorous relationships are less stable, but should that really be surprising? They are more complicated arrangements of complex parts; as the number of people goes up, the number of failure modes AND success modes will increase, and the failures will probably outnumber the successes. My question is, why does this matter? You seem to be arguing against polyamory in general with it, and I can see no sense in that.)
As to the question of children’s welfare, there’s very little data because it’s difficult to get funding for it—what researchers are interested in asking the questions are finding it very difficult to secure the backing needed to perform studies. Speaking anecdotally, I’ve known plenty of people who were monogamous parents, openly-polyamorous parents, and closeted-polyamorous parents (meaning their kids aren’t told). The welfare of the children seemed to have much more to do with their parents’ social and economic standing than their relationships.
Because of the way human brains relate attractiveness to fertility differently for different genders, this is going to give
men an advantage over time as in c. above. One of MBlume’s secondaries is going to knock his socks off and 12
years from now Alicorn might get demoted or fired.
I think your theoretical understanding of human sexuality has left you ill-prepared for making predictions about real-world cases like this.
So far I’ve been discussing polyamory as a hetero practice. I don’t know any gay polys but it would certainly be
informative to see what’s different if anything about gay polys.
Having lots of experience with both hetero and queer poly dating and living: the differences seem to be much more down to the cultural influences on the people involved, and their individual personalities, than anything else.
Explicit symmetrical polyamory has never emerged stably in history so far.
Tell that to the people of Laguna Pueblo, prior to Christian missionaries. They’d be vastly amused to find out they never existed.
Finally, a lot of polys seem to be doing so partly because they get a buzz from being part of an alternative lifestyle
community (affective death spiral, anyone?)
I think you’re seeing what you want to see, there. Do people choose an “alternative lifestyle” because they get a buzz from being altie? Or do they get a buzz from finding someplace they suddenly feel like they fit? Having spent most of my life socially-isolated and largely unable to fit into mainstream society, I was much more stoked about finding a social “fit”, which I stumbled onto just while going about my life.
Yes, many poly folks do think they’re more evolved. Yes, this is just embarrassing at best, and sanctimonious and preachy at worst. No, the rest of us are not accountable to shut them down so you don’t feel squicked by the whole thing.
I’ll call people on the offensive tropes not because I feel responsible on behalf of the Poly Conspiracy to do so, but because they are offensive tropes.
This is a perspective some poly types share, that jealousy and polyamory are not compatible. I’ve never quite understood it;
We’re almost playing Poly Trope Bingo now! (Although they don’t actually seem to have the “poly = no jealousy” meme there, oh well.)
I have said that poly doesn’t mean no jealousy; poly means additional tools in the repertoire with which to deal with jealousy. Perhaps I can draw a long bow and say just as some bi people might describe themselves as gender-oblivious while others might self-ID as gender-aware-and-interested-in-more-than-one gender, my experience has been that some poly people self-ID as “did not install the jealousy patch” while others can be jealous but don’t regard that as fatal to poly. I cannot find any research on this.
As to the question of children’s welfare, there’s very little data because it’s difficult to get funding for it
Custody has been (successfully) awarded and children removed from parents in some (USA) areas simply by referencing open poly or revealing closeted poly. There are a lot of cultural and privilege challenges in poly for families with children.
I’ll call people on the offensive tropes not because I feel responsible on behalf of the Poly Conspiracy to do so,
but because they are offensive tropes.
I do too, when I encounter them in my social sphere (it’s not merely offensive in my view, it’s just a painfully stupid idea). What I dislike is the implied obligation to police a group of people with whom my only assured point of commonality is our nonmonogamy for their painfully stupid and/or offensive ideas so that a monogamous person feels better about poly people as a whole. How they feel about us is not my responsibility, and I’m already acting to counteract the stupid ideas bothering them for my own reasons.
I have said that poly doesn’t mean no jealousy; poly means additional tools in the repertoire with which to deal > with jealousy.
That seems like an accurate summary.
As to the comments re: child custody, yeah, I’m aware of how grim it is for poly parents involved in a custody battle. :\ Several friends of mine have suffered for it, and a few remain on guard against the possibility.
What I dislike is the implied obligation to police a group of people with whom my only assured point of commonality is our nonmonogamy for their painfully stupid and/or offensive ideas so that a monogamous person feels better about poly people as a whole.
I share your annoyance!
However I also have an explicit policy of doing (or continuing to do) something I have decided is the right thing to do, even if in so doing I apparently reinforce stupid/annoying entitlement. I thought I should not allow irritation to be so powerful as to derail me from my chosen behaviour.
Okay. Good for you. That doesn’t make the entitlement any less stupid or annoying.
Note that “Whether I am doing something about this” and “Whether I feel like calling out stupid/annoying entitlement” are seperate questions. It is entirely possible to be aware of both. It is furthermore not necessary for me to prove my credentials on this point to the person making the entitled demand of me (even if only by implication).
In summary: I know what I’m doing about stupid memes within the groups I frequent, including my fellow polyamorists, and I don’t owe an accounting of that to a monogamous person who’s ignorant and entitled enough to seriously demand, anonymously and in general, that “smart” poly folk police the memes he doesn’t like so that “we can have a real conversation.” For all he knows lots of poly people are already arguing the opposite to the “poly = more evolved” boosters—how would he be able to tell the difference between people doing that, and being ignored or just having limited energy and desire and time in the day to spend all their lives seeking out and squashing that one meme that bugs him, and a world where they’re not doing it at all? He wouldn’t, because the meme is there regardless.
If after reading this reply you still fail to understand that I am against the meme in question and believe it is worth countering within our community, I ask you to let it go—I am not interested in taking this conversation any further, if you can’t understand what I’m saying.
I see I have written poorly. I understand you’re against the meme and I have no problem with anything you’ve written about your conduct or attitudes. My apologies, it seems I have come across as combative when I was aiming for “musing collaboratively”.
I think perhaps I had misread you as saying your motivation to combat the memes was reduced if that combat reinforced clueless entitlement. I thought that was an unfortunate result. Entitlement always annoys me, but I try to be explicitly suspicious of decisions I make out of annoyance, and I thought that was interesting in a more general case as well as for our subtopic. Perhaps I’ve been projecting; perhaps I shouldn’t try writing on LW when jetlagged.
I think perhaps I had misread you as saying your motivation to combat the memes was reduced if that combat
reinforced clueless entitlement.
Ahhhh, okay. No, just that I don’t feel it’s necessary or helpful to signal my own participation to someone making such a demand, compared to signalling that they’re being inappropriate.
Entitlement always annoys me, but I try to be explicitly suspicious of decisions I make out of annoyance,
Thanks for reading my (long) comment. RE the Laguna Pueblo, I will read up. Certainly it’s not something that we’ve seen often. Whether this is because “things are different than they were before” or something else less plastic is another question.
To be clear, my argument about the correlation between polyamory and child-rearing is not about how effective a poly environment might be at child-rearing. On the contrary, I’d be that a stable poly family would provide access to consistent capital and caretakers that a mono family cannot. However, the question remains of how it’s in the individual parents’ interests to enter into a given family arrangement. When it’s not, they won’t have kids, and the eventual parenting outcome remains moot; if moms and dads don’t want to do it, it won’t happen. My suspicion is that among those individuals so constituted that polyamory is a good match, having kids might not be part of their plan. (Again, early days, data needed, though this could be done with surveymonkey.)
My objections to your comments: my “hey smart poly people, round up the jerks” comment was intended as a humorous way to point out the sanctimoniousness that you also recognize, and which damages the discussion. It wasn’t intended as a serious proposal for the Grand High Poly Council to take up. (Note: I also don’t really think there’s a Grand High Poly Council, but I think we understand each other by now.)
My second objection is to your statement that “[my] theoretical understanding of human sexuality has left [me] ill-prepared for making predictions about real-world cases like this”. A less charitable person than myself might react to this as a personal attack. Suffice it to say, I must sadly report that I have a good track record of looking at relationships and identifying tensions that later end them. My predictions aren’t based on personality clashes, but rather fundamental supply-demand tensions that would seem to be constant across any kind of arrangement where a person can be happier with one person than another. Maybe I hang out with awful people who act this way, or maybe I’ve just been around the block enough times to know where cynicism is warranted.
Leslie Marmon Silko is a good source there, re: pre-Christianization (and to some degree mid-and post-) sexual practices.
However, the question remains of how it’s in the individual parents’ interests to enter into a given family
arrangement. When it’s not, they won’t have kids, and the eventual parenting outcome remains moot; if moms and > dads don’t want to do it, it won’t happen.
I’d find that an easier statement to accept if I didn’t see many, many people routinely make decisions about parenting (or becoming parents) that did not appear to involve such analysis. The only times I’ve seen parents really think and act the way you describe, was when they were financially-stable and comfortable enough in status from the start that any such alterations would change that (and even then, many of them wind up divorcing anyway if things go poorly instead of staying together for the kids’ sake, something which may or may not be in the child’s best interest as well). And even then, I’ve seen parents in such situations adopt polyamory or whatever; either they don’t agree with your assessment, or they’re not thinking about the decision in those terms in the first place.
(FYI: This is what I meant re: your theoretical understanding of human sexuality—it’s not an attack on you, it’s just me stating you appear to have an understanding of how people behave in these situations that’s informed more by your big-picture theoretical beliefs about human behavior, than by a direct assessment of how people really behave—at the very worst, I am accusing you of generalizing too broadly beyond the scope of what you know).
Tell that to the people of Laguna Pueblo, prior to Christian missionaries. They’d be vastly amused to find out they never existed.
What’s your source for this? Not trying to challenge you factually (it’s a reasonable enough claim given the diversity of cultures out there), but I’ve found non-romanticized sources on all but a few pre-contact cultures fantastically difficult to find short of asking actual anthropology departments, and it’s an area I’d like to know more of.
Telling members of a social minority you’re not part of what every member of that minority must do to be worthy of your time and consderation as a member of the social majority, is neither reasonable, rational or realistic. Just FYI. It’s like asking “smart” queers to police the tendency of certain (stereotyped) gay men you have in mind to flame it up, or come to that, asking atheists not to be so militant...
Yes, many poly folks do think they’re more evolved. Yes, this is just embarrassing at best, and sanctimonious and preachy at worst. No, the rest of us are not accountable to shut them down so you don’t feel squicked by the whole thing.
This is a perspective some poly types share, that jealousy and polyamory are not compatible. I’ve never quite understood it; I experience jealousy sometimes (and I’m in five serious relationships; each of the people involved is seeing two of the others in some capacity), yet it never quite occurred to me that experiencing jealousy meant that the situation had to change...unless that jealousy was functioning as sort of an early-warning threat detection (I’ve been in situations I was clearly not going to be happy or functional in, with specific arrangements of other people given their own needs, wants and behaviors—my interests were not being looked after by anyone else, and after interrogating my own emotions and their cause for long enough I realized that I wasn’t comfortable with that).
Suffice it to say there is a diversity of actual opinions about this within polyamory and nonmonogamists generally—some people experience jealousy, some don’t; some experience compersion, some don’t; some think these feelings should be primary drivers of their actions and communication, and some don’t.
Given the divorce rate, should we care about this in a statistical sense? I mean, unless we’re talking about your own children, the odds for or against a given family’s long-term stability are not your business...
(I will note that what little research has been done suggests that polyamorous relationships are less stable, but should that really be surprising? They are more complicated arrangements of complex parts; as the number of people goes up, the number of failure modes AND success modes will increase, and the failures will probably outnumber the successes. My question is, why does this matter? You seem to be arguing against polyamory in general with it, and I can see no sense in that.)
As to the question of children’s welfare, there’s very little data because it’s difficult to get funding for it—what researchers are interested in asking the questions are finding it very difficult to secure the backing needed to perform studies. Speaking anecdotally, I’ve known plenty of people who were monogamous parents, openly-polyamorous parents, and closeted-polyamorous parents (meaning their kids aren’t told). The welfare of the children seemed to have much more to do with their parents’ social and economic standing than their relationships.
I think your theoretical understanding of human sexuality has left you ill-prepared for making predictions about real-world cases like this.
Having lots of experience with both hetero and queer poly dating and living: the differences seem to be much more down to the cultural influences on the people involved, and their individual personalities, than anything else.
Tell that to the people of Laguna Pueblo, prior to Christian missionaries. They’d be vastly amused to find out they never existed.
I think you’re seeing what you want to see, there. Do people choose an “alternative lifestyle” because they get a buzz from being altie? Or do they get a buzz from finding someplace they suddenly feel like they fit? Having spent most of my life socially-isolated and largely unable to fit into mainstream society, I was much more stoked about finding a social “fit”, which I stumbled onto just while going about my life.
I’ll call people on the offensive tropes not because I feel responsible on behalf of the Poly Conspiracy to do so, but because they are offensive tropes.
We’re almost playing Poly Trope Bingo now! (Although they don’t actually seem to have the “poly = no jealousy” meme there, oh well.)
I have said that poly doesn’t mean no jealousy; poly means additional tools in the repertoire with which to deal with jealousy. Perhaps I can draw a long bow and say just as some bi people might describe themselves as gender-oblivious while others might self-ID as gender-aware-and-interested-in-more-than-one gender, my experience has been that some poly people self-ID as “did not install the jealousy patch” while others can be jealous but don’t regard that as fatal to poly. I cannot find any research on this.
Custody has been (successfully) awarded and children removed from parents in some (USA) areas simply by referencing open poly or revealing closeted poly. There are a lot of cultural and privilege challenges in poly for families with children.
I do too, when I encounter them in my social sphere (it’s not merely offensive in my view, it’s just a painfully stupid idea). What I dislike is the implied obligation to police a group of people with whom my only assured point of commonality is our nonmonogamy for their painfully stupid and/or offensive ideas so that a monogamous person feels better about poly people as a whole. How they feel about us is not my responsibility, and I’m already acting to counteract the stupid ideas bothering them for my own reasons.
That seems like an accurate summary.
As to the comments re: child custody, yeah, I’m aware of how grim it is for poly parents involved in a custody battle. :\ Several friends of mine have suffered for it, and a few remain on guard against the possibility.
I share your annoyance!
However I also have an explicit policy of doing (or continuing to do) something I have decided is the right thing to do, even if in so doing I apparently reinforce stupid/annoying entitlement. I thought I should not allow irritation to be so powerful as to derail me from my chosen behaviour.
Okay. Good for you. That doesn’t make the entitlement any less stupid or annoying.
Note that “Whether I am doing something about this” and “Whether I feel like calling out stupid/annoying entitlement” are seperate questions. It is entirely possible to be aware of both. It is furthermore not necessary for me to prove my credentials on this point to the person making the entitled demand of me (even if only by implication).
In summary: I know what I’m doing about stupid memes within the groups I frequent, including my fellow polyamorists, and I don’t owe an accounting of that to a monogamous person who’s ignorant and entitled enough to seriously demand, anonymously and in general, that “smart” poly folk police the memes he doesn’t like so that “we can have a real conversation.” For all he knows lots of poly people are already arguing the opposite to the “poly = more evolved” boosters—how would he be able to tell the difference between people doing that, and being ignored or just having limited energy and desire and time in the day to spend all their lives seeking out and squashing that one meme that bugs him, and a world where they’re not doing it at all? He wouldn’t, because the meme is there regardless.
If after reading this reply you still fail to understand that I am against the meme in question and believe it is worth countering within our community, I ask you to let it go—I am not interested in taking this conversation any further, if you can’t understand what I’m saying.
I see I have written poorly. I understand you’re against the meme and I have no problem with anything you’ve written about your conduct or attitudes. My apologies, it seems I have come across as combative when I was aiming for “musing collaboratively”.
I think perhaps I had misread you as saying your motivation to combat the memes was reduced if that combat reinforced clueless entitlement. I thought that was an unfortunate result. Entitlement always annoys me, but I try to be explicitly suspicious of decisions I make out of annoyance, and I thought that was interesting in a more general case as well as for our subtopic. Perhaps I’ve been projecting; perhaps I shouldn’t try writing on LW when jetlagged.
Ahhhh, okay. No, just that I don’t feel it’s necessary or helpful to signal my own participation to someone making such a demand, compared to signalling that they’re being inappropriate.
Not a bad policy at all.
Thanks for reading my (long) comment. RE the Laguna Pueblo, I will read up. Certainly it’s not something that we’ve seen often. Whether this is because “things are different than they were before” or something else less plastic is another question.
To be clear, my argument about the correlation between polyamory and child-rearing is not about how effective a poly environment might be at child-rearing. On the contrary, I’d be that a stable poly family would provide access to consistent capital and caretakers that a mono family cannot. However, the question remains of how it’s in the individual parents’ interests to enter into a given family arrangement. When it’s not, they won’t have kids, and the eventual parenting outcome remains moot; if moms and dads don’t want to do it, it won’t happen. My suspicion is that among those individuals so constituted that polyamory is a good match, having kids might not be part of their plan. (Again, early days, data needed, though this could be done with surveymonkey.)
My objections to your comments: my “hey smart poly people, round up the jerks” comment was intended as a humorous way to point out the sanctimoniousness that you also recognize, and which damages the discussion. It wasn’t intended as a serious proposal for the Grand High Poly Council to take up. (Note: I also don’t really think there’s a Grand High Poly Council, but I think we understand each other by now.)
My second objection is to your statement that “[my] theoretical understanding of human sexuality has left [me] ill-prepared for making predictions about real-world cases like this”. A less charitable person than myself might react to this as a personal attack. Suffice it to say, I must sadly report that I have a good track record of looking at relationships and identifying tensions that later end them. My predictions aren’t based on personality clashes, but rather fundamental supply-demand tensions that would seem to be constant across any kind of arrangement where a person can be happier with one person than another. Maybe I hang out with awful people who act this way, or maybe I’ve just been around the block enough times to know where cynicism is warranted.
Leslie Marmon Silko is a good source there, re: pre-Christianization (and to some degree mid-and post-) sexual practices.
I’d find that an easier statement to accept if I didn’t see many, many people routinely make decisions about parenting (or becoming parents) that did not appear to involve such analysis. The only times I’ve seen parents really think and act the way you describe, was when they were financially-stable and comfortable enough in status from the start that any such alterations would change that (and even then, many of them wind up divorcing anyway if things go poorly instead of staying together for the kids’ sake, something which may or may not be in the child’s best interest as well). And even then, I’ve seen parents in such situations adopt polyamory or whatever; either they don’t agree with your assessment, or they’re not thinking about the decision in those terms in the first place.
(FYI: This is what I meant re: your theoretical understanding of human sexuality—it’s not an attack on you, it’s just me stating you appear to have an understanding of how people behave in these situations that’s informed more by your big-picture theoretical beliefs about human behavior, than by a direct assessment of how people really behave—at the very worst, I am accusing you of generalizing too broadly beyond the scope of what you know).
What’s your source for this? Not trying to challenge you factually (it’s a reasonable enough claim given the diversity of cultures out there), but I’ve found non-romanticized sources on all but a few pre-contact cultures fantastically difficult to find short of asking actual anthropology departments, and it’s an area I’d like to know more of.
Leslie Marmon Silko’s writing.
Thank you; I’ll check that out.
Also, one little society isn’t a very impressive track record. Monogamous societies and polygynous societies have ruled continents.