Newsweek Polyamory article

[xela]

I'm sure this will be of interest to a number of my friends: Newsweek's website today published a matter-of-fact, nonjudgemental (if anything, positive) article on polyamory.

(Not as notable as if the article were actually in Newsweek, of course. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. As the article discusses, the religious wrong uses polyamory as one of its bogeymen when arguing that if gay people get their civil rights, then everyone will want them, thus bringing on the end of days.¹ So on the one hand, this might not be a great time to have an article about polyamory show up on the grocery-store magazine racks of Peoria. On the other hand, the fact that gay marriage will become routine in my lifetime owes a great deal to the gay community's collective decision to come out of the closet and make it clear to the mainstream that gays and lesbians aren't some distant other but rather their friends and neighbors.)

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¹ Come to think of it — if you're the religious wrong, how is bringing on the end of days a bad thing, anyway?

Comments

[motodraconis.livejournal.com]

Utopian-poly articles always upset me. It's not the principle of poly that gets to me... more that with my intensive work commitments I hate to be reminded that I don't have enough time to give to my partner and my many wonderful friends.* I feel guilty enough for short changing them, and wish I had more time to do them justice - how on earth do these triad/quad types cope?


* Not to mention my family, not that I especially want to spend huge amounts of time with my family, but some time would be nice!

[jered]

That's not a bad article, but it perpetuates something I've noticed a lot of -- is all poly culture almost exclusively heterocentric? The article goes to great lengths to emphasize the straightness of all involved.

[siderea]

In the last two months or so, I've noticed the poly community suddenly differentiating between straight and gay and lesbian poly. I have no idea what happened.

See http://heron61.livejournal.com/627048.html which was just posted about the same article.

[jered]

Interesting. One off-the-cuff generalization (and thus wrong in many cases) I'll make is that much of the poly community and poly discussion is about something inherently stressful, managing exclusion. (I.e. "I see Alice on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Bob on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and Charlie on Wednesdays and Fridays, and I need to make sure everyone is happy and schedules can be arranged for birthdays, etc.") This is necessarily a problem in a exclusively heterosexual poly environment but not so in a homosexual one.

Like, the Newsweek article makes a big deal about Terisa sleeping in bed with Matt sometimes and Larry sometimes, but Matt's snoring means that she sleeps with Larry more and needs to make sure Matt doesn't feel left out. The undertone of the whole section seems like they would never have considered all sleeping in the same bed, and doing so would be like suggesting they have sex with farm animals. Or maybe I'm reading into it.

[siderea]

If you're reading into it, then so am I. Not only am I reading heterocentricity into it, but sex-negativity. I've been getting into flame wars about this lately. Poly as a social movement has an unfortunately venerable history of disowning alternative sexual practices to legitimize what they are fiercely trying to construct as a relational practice. So, for instance, poly people have been (sometimes quite condescendingly) differentiating poly from swinging, saying "swinging is about sex [implied: therefore bad], while poly is about love [implied: therefore good]".

This has added up to a really quite remarkably socially conservative notion of legitimate and/or natural sexual relations in the poly community.

[jered]

Sheesh. If it's not about sex, or at least intimacy, what makes it different from deep friendship, already a common and accepted construct?

[siderea]

Yeah, well. *points to long history of straight, White, cisgendered Westerners making sex/love distinctions solely whenever expedient to maintain privilege*

[pwaa.livejournal.com]

It never ceases to amaze me how many people don't understand the concept of (or don't believe in) "live and let live." I can't and don't want to be romantically committed to more than one person, but why should I care if someone else is, as long as they're not my SO, and thus neglecting me? Let people do what makes them happy, as long as they're not stepping on my toes doing it.