Oceans Yet to Burn — feotakahari: As long as I’m picking fights: ...

feotakahari

As long as I’m picking fights:

“Actually, attacking LGBTs is one of the single dumbest things SoCons have done, because LGBTs do not actually undermine the nation just by being LGBT. In fact, gay marriage is good because stable family units are good, and we can incentivize the creation of stable queer families with similar methods to straight families.

“(Polygamy, as practiced by people that aren’t autistic-spectrum rationalists, is still bad though.) …

“It isn’t enough that I not marry my cousins and engage in polygamy. For my home to not be terrible, I must stop others from doing so as well. And if they want to make a place where those are the norms, then let them, and not me, suffer the consequences of that. I don’t need dumb social policies banned everywhere, only in the places I live in/am responsible for.”

I can’t bring myself to care about “stable family units.” I just can’t. The only reason I give a crap one way or another about gay marriage is that I know some gay people who want to be married, and I like those gay people and want them to be happy.

I’m not sure if there’s meant to be a distinction between “polygamy” and polyamory in this post, but I know some polyamorous people. I like those people, and I want them to be happy, and that apparently means making polyamory into a thing that is considered acceptable.

Maybe “polygamists” as a class will make your home terrible. But I’ve never met “polygamists” as a class, just as I’ve never met “gay people” as a class. I’ve met individual people, and some of the individual people I have met don’t seem like they make society worse just by being present. Sure, I’ve also met polyamorous people who were assholes, but I think they’d be better covered by a rule against being assholes than a rule against being polyamorous.

To be clear, this is not to say that I don’t like you or don’t want you to be happy. I just feel like if you met some of the polyamorous people I’ve met, you’d have more in common with them than you seem to think.

mitigatedchaos

I can’t bring myself to care about “stable family units.” I just can’t. The only reason I give a crap one way or another about gay marriage is that I know some gay people who want to be married, and I like those gay people and want them to be happy.

Are we immortal yet? No? Then it matters. A lot. Because each generation needs to create and raise the next generation.

The last time I checked, broken families are not good for people, statistically.

You can choose to be single or unattached until you die. It just doesn’t work as a way to structure mortal human societies, unless you are willing to do things that are, hmn… drastic.

I’m not sure if there’s meant to be a distinction between “polygamy” and polyamory in this post, but I know some polyamorous people. I like those people, and I want them to be happy, and that apparently means making polyamory into a thing that is considered acceptable.

Polygamy is bad along multiple axes.

Polyamory, it hasn’t been proven.

Maybe “polygamists” as a class will make your home terrible. But I’ve never met “polygamists” as a class, just as I’ve never met “gay people” as a class. I’ve met individual people, and some of the individual people I have met don’t seem like they make society worse just by being present. Sure, I’ve also met polyamorous people who were assholes, but I think they’d be better covered by a rule against being assholes than a rule against being polyamorous.

1. Polygamy is, generally, really polygyny, and married polygyny is bad for women, it’s bad for children, and it’s bad for men.

2. No one actually has to be trying to be an asshole, so long as most people are straight and men marry multiple wives more than women marry multiple husbands.

3. Not everyone is bisexual.

Alright? So what are we supposed to do with all the “extra” men?

To be clear, this is not to say that I don’t like you or don’t want you to be happy. I just feel like if you met some of the polyamorous people I’ve met, you’d have more in common with them than you seem to think.

This isn’t about whether individual polyamorous people are mean. It’s about the overall effect on society when polygamy is widely practiced, and “the overall effects on society when polygamy is widely practiced” are backwards anti-feminist-as-in-gender-equality societies when it’s a subset (even in developed countries), or the Middle East when it’s most of society.

When weird autistic (lovable!) internet nerds do it, it stays below the threshold necessary to fuck everything up, unless they’re foolish enough to start normalizing it and spreading it among normal people.

gendpol politics social centrism

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feotakahari

As long as I’m picking fights:

“(Polygamy, as practiced by people that aren’t autistic-spectrum rationalists, is still bad though.) …

mitigatedchaos

I can’t bring myself to care about “stable family units.” I just can’t. The only reason I give a crap one way or another about gay marriage is that I know some gay people who want to be married, and I like those gay people and want them to be happy.

Are we immortal yet? No? Then it matters. A lot. Because each generation needs to create and raise the next generation.

The last time I checked, broken families are not good for people, statistically.

You can choose to be single or unattached until you die. It just doesn’t work as a way to structure mortal human societies, unless you are willing to do things that are, hmn… drastic.

I’m not sure if there’s meant to be a distinction between “polygamy” and polyamory in this post, but I know some polyamorous people. I like those people, and I want them to be happy, and that apparently means making polyamory into a thing that is considered acceptable.

Polygamy is bad along multiple axes.

Polyamory, it hasn’t been proven.

Maybe “polygamists” as a class will make your home terrible. But I’ve never met “polygamists” as a class, just as I’ve never met “gay people” as a class. I’ve met individual people, and some of the individual people I have met don’t seem like they make society worse just by being present. Sure, I’ve also met polyamorous people who were assholes, but I think they’d be better covered by a rule against being assholes than a rule against being polyamorous.

1. Polygamy is, generally, really polygyny, and married polygyny is bad for women, it’s bad for children, and it’s bad for men.

2. No one actually has to be trying to be an asshole, so long as most people are straight and men marry multiple wives more than women marry multiple husbands.

3. Not everyone is bisexual.

Alright? So what are we supposed to do with all the “extra” men?

To be clear, this is not to say that I don’t like you or don’t want you to be happy. I just feel like if you met some of the polyamorous people I’ve met, you’d have more in common with them than you seem to think.

feotakahari

And that doesn’t seem at all cold-blooded to you?

When you get right down to it, I kind of suck at this “Utilitarianism” thing that I’ve built my life around. I stumbled ass-backwards into it because I don’t believe in human sacrifice, and “all human happiness has equal value” was the only way I could think of to avoid “some human happiness is worthless and can be freely discarded for the benefit of others.” I could try to build a rational argument for why some people being polyamorous doesn’t automatically lead to a massive spread of male-dominated polygamy that breaks society. But the reality is that after it turned out we don’t actually need to take children away from gay couples so they’ll be raised properly, and it turned out we don’t actually need to take children away from Native Americans so they’ll be raised properly, I’m inherently skeptical that children raised by folks who’re polyamorous will all turn out broken.

Also, someone tell @pervocracy he’s a “weird autistic lovable internet nerd.” You’re speaking about people like they’re overgrown children who aren’t capable of making their own decisions.

mitigatedchaos

And that doesn’t seem at all cold-blooded to you?

I recently made a post about how the tyranny of resource scarcity significantly limits our ability to provide medical care, so in fact, I can be cold-blooded.

I can even be cold-blooded and petty - I agree with Singapore’s decision to ban chewing gum because vandals were using it to disrupt the transit system.

When you get right down to it, I kind of suck at this “Utilitarianism” thing that I’ve built my life around.

You don’t need Utilitarianism to object to this: what have the “extra” “surplus” men done to deserve their situation?

But the reality is that after it turned out we don’t actually need to take children away from gay couples so they’ll be raised properly, and it turned out we don’t actually need to take children away from Native Americans so they’ll be raised properly, I’m inherently skeptical that children raised by folks who’re polyamorous will all turn out broken.

Ah, yes, we had all of those gay countries to compare to as an example. So many of them. And someone like me, who routinely suggests forming city-states to run political experiments, would never have suggested actually testing it on a smaller scale, which would have established just how (relatively) harmless it really was…

Look, we know what polygamy looks like in our countries (cruddy polygynous cults/backwards communities with “extra” “surplus” men). We know what polygamy looks like when it’s the norm in a country (the Middle East). We know single parenthood isn’t great, either.

Hypergamy isn’t perfectly established, but it’s probably true enough to matter. And once a social change has taken place, it’s difficult to put it back without great cruelty.

Also, polygamy is more dangerous than polyamory, but I don’t recommend polyamory to anyone. You’ve got increased risk for STIs (much broader network of sexual contact), you’ve got the risk that they’ll fall in love with someone else and leave you, but without the increased transaction cost/friction of monoamory, you’re not their number one priority and if it comes down to a choice between you and someone else, they may pick someone else, you might just not even be poly, you could end up a single parent begging for money in online groups (okay okay, I wasn’t close to that particular drama, but it happens), etc.

(”But those are all risks in monogamy, too!” Sure, but not ones that are part of the very structure of it.)

It’s not some kind of virtuous, enlightened thing we should all aspire to. It’s just a preference that some people have. It’s not even an orientation.

Also, someone tell @pervocracy he’s a “weird autistic lovable internet nerd.” You’re speaking about people like they’re overgrown children who aren’t capable of making their own decisions.

Oh, you think that’s what I meant by it?

And not the more obvious “actually, because neurodivergents are different from neurotypicals, the outcome of neurodivergents doing something may be different than neurotypicals doing the same thing, particularly if there are fewer of them”?

gendpol social centrism

Anonymous asked:

Is cousin marriage for one generation bad beyond the genetic and possible tight family control aspect?

Well, see, here’s the thing. White people (broadly) have been largely not-marrying-their-cousins for a while now, and they live in societies in which cousin marriage is fairly taboo. So when white people marry their cousin, it typically is a one generation thing, preventing a whole bunch of snowballing consequences.

I’m sure it seems otherwise on this blog, but I actually don’t have a strong disgust reaction towards cousin marriage. And if we continued to see rates around 1%, I wouldn’t really care.

But some populations have cousin-married at much higher rates, for much longer times. So one generation of cousin marriage for them isn’t the same as one generation of cousin marriage for other people.

It isn’t “too late.” Humans are resilient. We just have to have them stop doing it now.

Since we don’t have the full lineages of everyone, and I don’t want to go by other categories, I’d rather just throw the (very tiny) baby out with the bathwater and ban it for everyone.

Also, a big chunk of the tight family control aspect is cultural transmission. So now I’ll have to actually make that post about cultural transmission (generally) at some point, seeing as some things like FGM are cultural so cultural transmission isn’t all nice things like ethnic foods.

gendpol politics social centrism ban cousin marriage anons asks

@poipoipoi-2016

In response to that last, I’ve heard enough stories about my paternal grandparents to really want divorce to be a thing that happens more often, but at the same time, I heard enough stories about Grandma and her six husbands to be deeply suspect of divorce.

I realized that something related showed up in my life. There was a guy I knew online. Black guy living in a city. His step dad had him working at his small business, and it interfered with his ability to complete school. Then he was of age, and the step dad tried to kick him out, but he didn’t have a job, so he was sneaking into the house to avoid ending up homeless. His resume was terrible, just a few cobbled-together, unformatted paragraphs. I would say “shouldn’t they teach resume writing in school?” but even if they did, the terrible step dad might have had him working or something so that he wasn’t able to attend or complete that! But he was a decent guy, and had a good work ethic, so I went through carefully building a resume with him, and he got a job soon enough after and was able to move out. It’s no wonder he had been depressed earlier! And, like, in between then, we got advice from my ex-girlfriend’s partner, who has lived the low-class life, on how to try to keep him out of the street at night until he could move out.

But how many guys like him are out there, even in this country, you know? Who don’t have a hand-me-down laptop and a connection to a bunch of random nerds who know how to write a resume for him so he can get a stable income?

So I can’t really be a true GOPper, but also the risk with the step parents stuff is real.

私 personal politics social centrism

bambamramfan

slatestarcodex.com

Polyamory Is Not Polygyny

[Content warning: polyamory, brief quote of weird Heartiste stuff] The objections I hear to polyamory tend to separate into two narratives sharing a common thread. The first narrative is supposedly…

bambamramfan

SSC’s latest seems like a classic case of letting gender politics obfuscate power and class issues that cut across gender.

He quotes some PUA:

Polyamory — multiple and simultaneous sexual relationships — means, in practice, a few high value dudes hording all the pussy.

And then he uses both his intuitive experience and his LW survey data to show that men and women in polyamory date about the same number of people. There’s at least no clear cut numerical advantage to men. My experience also agrees.

But what if we neuter that sentence, and look at it again:

Polyamory — multiple and simultaneous sexual relationships — means, in practice, a few high value people dudes hording all the dates.

Which is to say, charismatic and confident people of either gender, dating a lot of people, and awkward and introverted people of both genders dating no one, only one person, or being a hanger on in a larger polycule that doesn’t get a lot of attention from the partner regardless.

That sounds… less implausible. It doesn’t exactly match my observed experience, but it’s not super far from it either. I’ve certainly seen in nerdy groups a Queen Bee that is dating half the men, in a way that seems parallel to the alpha-males that PUA’s fear/worship.

It’s not at all clear that this is bad. This seems just as likely to be the result of “some people want more partners, and are more socially outgoing to find them, while some people want less or are less willing to put themselves out there to meet them,” which would be fine. Or it could be this high-value thing. (I detest rat-tumb’s focus on high-status-males as the evil beneficiary of social engineering, which seems both empirically and ontologically unsound, but from a capitalist-critical perspective, “liberalizing trade regimes” often means “the rich people get more stuff and poor people somehow have less.”)

But, I’m also not going to be surprised by the subjective perspective of people low on the social totem pole. Before, they had hope in this pigeon-hole thing, where each person could get at most one partner, so eventually the people as attractive as them would realize their best chance for a life long relationship was with fellow low-class dates like themselves. It was a bad model, but I’m aware people believed in it. Now they worry no one will be left waiting for them, and they’ll be entirely alone forever. So there’s some people who seem to be having a lot of sex (stealing their jouissance) and they aren’t reaping the benefits.

The answers they come up with are usually dumb, but they are at least seeing/feeling a thing.

mitigatedchaos

Bambam honey darling kun, and also @slatestarscratchpad friend,

I love weird nerds but weird nerds aren’t a representative sample for the behavior of typical relationship norms.

A better example for normies applying this would be all the other countries, territories and communities where polygamy is practiced, as well as communities within the US where one man will have 11 kids by 8 different women.

No full poly until Tranhumanism makes it possible to ‘defect’ from both your sex and sexual orientation, pls.

gender politics

flakmaniak

@mitigatedchaos how about this sci-fi take on gendpol:

“Men are indeed worse than women in various ways, more antisocial, violent etc…

And we have egg-combining technology so we can make a Lesbian Utopia…

HOWEVER, we should still keep the population at approximately 50:50… For the long-term psychological benefits of romantic interaction, given most women are straight.”

mitigatedchaos

You say this, but I already once did a fake nation writeup where they created a single-sex and it turned out terrible - not because they weren’t gay enough, but rather, because they embraced the worst aspects of both masculinity and femininity simultaneously. (And also, they would have been less bad off if they had just a few teaspoons of Feminism, but that wasn’t going to happen, for Reasons.)

gendpol

industrialangel

feotakahari

As long as I’m picking fights:

“(Polygamy, as practiced by people that aren’t autistic-spectrum rationalists, is still bad though.) …

mitigatedchaos

I can’t bring myself to care about “stable family units.” I just can’t. The only reason I give a crap one way or another about gay marriage is that I know some gay people who want to be married, and I like those gay people and want them to be happy.

Are we immortal yet? No? Then it matters. A lot. Because each generation needs to create and raise the next generation.

The last time I checked, broken families are not good for people, statistically.

You can choose to be single or unattached until you die. It just doesn’t work as a way to structure mortal human societies, unless you are willing to do things that are, hmn… drastic.

I’m not sure if there’s meant to be a distinction between “polygamy” and polyamory in this post, but I know some polyamorous people. I like those people, and I want them to be happy, and that apparently means making polyamory into a thing that is considered acceptable.

Polygamy is bad along multiple axes.

Polyamory, it hasn’t been proven.

Maybe “polygamists” as a class will make your home terrible. But I’ve never met “polygamists” as a class, just as I’ve never met “gay people” as a class. I’ve met individual people, and some of the individual people I have met don’t seem like they make society worse just by being present. Sure, I’ve also met polyamorous people who were assholes, but I think they’d be better covered by a rule against being assholes than a rule against being polyamorous.

1. Polygamy is, generally, really polygyny, and married polygyny is bad for women, it’s bad for children, and it’s bad for men.

2. No one actually has to be trying to be an asshole, so long as most people are straight and men marry multiple wives more than women marry multiple husbands.

3. Not everyone is bisexual.

Alright? So what are we supposed to do with all the “extra” men?

To be clear, this is not to say that I don’t like you or don’t want you to be happy. I just feel like if you met some of the polyamorous people I’ve met, you’d have more in common with them than you seem to think.

feotakahari

And that doesn’t seem at all cold-blooded to you?

mitigatedchaos

And that doesn’t seem at all cold-blooded to you?

I recently made a post about how the tyranny of resource scarcity significantly limits our ability to provide medical care, so in fact, I can be cold-blooded.

I can even be cold-blooded and petty - I agree with Singapore’s decision to ban chewing gum because vandals were using it to disrupt the transit system.

When you get right down to it, I kind of suck at this “Utilitarianism” thing that I’ve built my life around.

You don’t need Utilitarianism to object to this: what have the “extra” “surplus” men done to deserve their situation?

But the reality is that after it turned out we don’t actually need to take children away from gay couples so they’ll be raised properly, and it turned out we don’t actually need to take children away from Native Americans so they’ll be raised properly, I’m inherently skeptical that children raised by folks who’re polyamorous will all turn out broken.

Hypergamy isn’t perfectly established, but it’s probably true enough to matter. And once a social change has taken place, it’s difficult to put it back without great cruelty.

(”But those are all risks in monogamy, too!” Sure, but not ones that are part of the very structure of it.)

It’s not some kind of virtuous, enlightened thing we should all aspire to. It’s just a preference that some people have. It’s not even an orientation.

Also, someone tell @pervocracy he’s a “weird autistic lovable internet nerd.” You’re speaking about people like they’re overgrown children who aren’t capable of making their own decisions.

Oh, you think that’s what I meant by it?

industrialangel

Is serial monogamy a substantial improvement over polygamy?

As practiced in the US especially, the majority of people who get married/start a family do not remain together. Many of these relationships end after just a few years if I recall correctly. Divorce and new step parents can cause a lot of harm to children. I have had friends who have been neglected or abused by step parents or parents due to new monogamous relationships.

I would also love to hear thoughts on the impact of extramonogamous relationships. My understanding is that a large percentage of people in monogamous relationships in the US have had an affair. Do you think that monogamy or stable families are more important?

mitigatedchaos

As practiced in the US especially,

I don’t like serial monogamy, but I’m concerned that making it too hard to divorce might cause abuse levels (among adults) to increase, or just make things miserable for people.

(And yes, from what I understand, non-blood relatives are a major source of child abuse.)

My understanding is that a large percentage of people in monogamous relationships in the US have had an affair.

That’s a tough one. My emotional instinct is to ban having sexual affairs, but that probably isn’t the right call. Some people manage to work it out, and the ability to turn in your marriage partner for violation could lead to leverage for abuse.

My futurist shitposting instinct is to ban sex outside of their marriage for married people, except with a prostitute, then legalize some form of prostitution. But I haven’t actually thought that one through.

Probably, resolving these issues will look weirder than what I have in mind right now. I haven’t put tons of thought into this particular area of policy, other than that I don’t want to replicate the policies of known troubled communities.

Source: feotakahari gendpol

industrialangel

mitigatedchaos

@industrialangel

What is your reasoning for the dislike of serial monogamy and extramarital sex? If your concerns are primarily focused on the continuation of nations/states through good childraising, I would expect an exception for extramarital sex that occurs without damaging the ability of a family to raise healthy productive kids. Privacy of one’s own bedroom and all that?

Something like that, which is why I haven’t heavily pushed policy along these lines, as I haven’t as heavily considered it and I’m hesitant to bring the iron hand of the state down and accidentally break something.

Some sort of new policy paradigm would be more appropriate, but I haven’t developed one in this case.

Source: feotakahari gendpol

osberend

kontextmaschine

Mike Cernovich acquired a copy of that “Shitty Men in Media” list (he was offering $10,000) and is using it to run hit pieces

says he’s going to give the accused a chance to reply, I suspect that’s an excuse to sequence them strung out for maximum news impact, in priority as culture war enemies

slatestarscratchpad

What a moron.

These people are going to get away with it, because the accusations will forever be associated with the alt-right. If he’d waited a week or two, someone else would have taken the bait, published, and the media would have eaten it up.

But now the whole issue has been coded “of interest to racists” and everyone else will be careful not to touch it. The people involved will defend with “You’re accusing me of sexual harassment? Aha, I see you’re a fan of Mike Cernovich” and it’ll never go anywhere.

shieldfoss

here you are assuming Cernovich intends to bring abusers to justice in an effort to help women

which

i mean

osberend

Nah, the analysis still applies if he wants to take down Biddle et al. for being sociopolitical enemies. Where it falls apart, of course, is if he really just wants to gather money and love from guess existing base for “boldly standing up to the hypocritical liberal media establishment,” etc. In that case, he’s actually better if the left drops it as a result of his support, because it gives him more “lone voice crying the wilderness” cred.

mitigatedchaos

Beyond just him, does it not empower the hard right in general if this wagon circling happens?

One of the things that’s been really empowering for the hard right (in my opinion) are conditions in Europe, including sex crimes. Because of just who was committing those crimes, they were able to gain a temporary monopoly on “justice” as a platform for that particular issue.

Do people realize how bad that is for Liberals?

They’re building a narrative that the Left and the Liberals are thick with pedophiles, molesters, and sex traffickers, and that when they aren’t committing those crimes themselves, the Left and Liberals are willing to overlook them depending on ethnicity.

Circling the wagons isn’t what the Liberals should do. The way to prevent the hard right from gaining ground in Rotherham was to be better than they were, by actually enforcing the laws, like they are supposed to and, ostensibly, which is in line with their principles.

We’ve seen that at least some of the hard right are willing to fabricate a narrative if they have to, but a non-fabricated narrative has a lot more solidity to it.

So maybe they circle the wagons, and this outsider can’t actually take these guys down. But what if the point isn’t to take them down? What if the point is recruitment? Long-term recruitment, shifting the margins of power, which, when you only need a majority, matters.

Their faction is relatively small right now, but it has room to grow in proportion to how badly their rivals fuck up and/or are disconnected from reality.

Source: kontextmaschine rape discourse cw gendpol politics the culture war

bambamramfan

Life Under Polyamory Ideology

bambamramfan

There’s a lot of… dialogue about monogamy vs polyamory these days, in our cosmopolitan little bubble. No one wants to tell others which lifestyle you should choose so I wouldn’t call it a debate, but there’s a great deal of defending “how your lifestyle works, and why you’re happy with it” that can’t save itself from becoming discourse about the two main options.

This happens enough that we fail to recognize that no, polyamory just won. We all live in its world now.

Or more accurately, we all live free of monogamous ideology now.

Case in point. I have a friend, and she’s monogamously committed to her boyfriend. Sure, she hangs out with a lot of other boys. She even visits them by herself, and crashes in their bed. She’s generous with hugs and other mild displays of physical affection to men. And she kind of pines after some specific men, wishing for greater emotional attachment. This isn’t even hidden, it’s all openly acknowledged. But, this is the definition of monogamy she and her SO have worked out.

The reaction of people from her social circle, the people from our general social bubble is “fine. Whatever works for the two of you. If that’s what you call monogamy, I have no reason to disagree with you.” There’s no call for us to try to strictly define what monogamy should mean for them.

Let me assure you, this is not how it would work under monogamous ideology. In a society where monogamy was the reigning lifestyle choice, it includes a specific definition of monogamy, and “being too touchy with other men” would definitely violate that. Even with her partner’s consent, she would be found guilty of breaking social taboos. (Which is basically how her non-cosmopolitan co-workers react.)

But none of us (which I assume includes most of my readers) give a fuck. Call yourself polyamorous, monogamish, what the fuck ever. As long as you both are happy what business is it of mine? And that is the true spirit of polyamory - anarchism towards society wide definitions of romantic relationships.

You might individually choose to snuggle with just one person, and hopefully can get that special person to agree. But it’s very different when that’s a private agreement between two people (one which can be altered at any time they want), than when it’s an arrangement coded and enforced by the whole social world. And we just don’t have that in liberal cosmopolitania any more.

After all, one of the main benefits of monogamy was that you don’t have to negotiate shit. You’re together, you’re just dating each other, these are the default rules, and for people who don’t want to process and explicitly lay out their preferences, this is a lot easier. But that’s gone now - any couple does have to figure out whether they are poly or mono, and even if they are mono, where they feel those boundaries lie, because ain’t no one else doing that regulating for them.

fierceawakening

I am… really really troubled by the idea that “monogamous ideology” exists. Or that if you don’t have a bad ideology, you have “poly ideology,” even if you have said “FUCK OFF, I’M NOT POLY” more than once.

Anti-poly ideology exists, yes.

But monogamy can mean anything from “I am attracted to one person at a time” to “I want three girlfriends but think God must hate me” to “more just sounds like a brain-breaking logistical nightmarish time suck, I’m good” to “you know, in practice I only ever dated one person at a time.”

The idea that that adds up to an ideology is why I… feel perhaps more suspicious than I should of loud poly people.

I don’t date one person at a time to spite people who don’t. I do it because I don’t like sensory overload.

bambamramfan

I feel you did not read this post.

The point is not “be monogamous or be polyamorous.”

The point is that ideology is a society wide phenomenon, and it is not located solely in the individual.

Under monogamous ideology, not only were most people monogamous (at least publicly), but what monogamy meant and enforcement of following this code was a public matter.

If you live in a bubble where polyamory is accepted now, then you also live in a bubble where no one is defining monogamy for you. You can make up the definition of monogamy to fit your relationship. It can include “cuddling other people is ok but no sex”, or hell, it can include “having sex with other people is okay but we still call it monogamy because we want to” and no one is really going to criticize you for that.

Guess what. This freedom is new. It’s a result of living under polyamory, which exists outside just the individual.

(It’s also a burden. It means when you start dating someone, you need to clarify whether your relationship is poly or mono, and if it’s mono what those boundaries are. You can no longer just assume the default rules. Some people understandably loathe this.)

Transitioning from “the rules of my romantic relationship are defined by the social structure around me” to “I get to / must choose the rules” is a big step. But it’s a culture-wide step, and can’t exist solely on the individual level, anymore than “I decide to have private property” is a decision solely by the individual. Both need the social structures that support them.

There’s no escaping this. It’s not saying “polyamory is an ideology yay”, but rather “your society is going to have an ideology about how much freedom people can expect in defining their relationships.” This has always been true, and will be true in the future.

You can say “FUCK OFF I’M NOT POLY” all you want, but I bet if your partner cheats on you none of your friends are going to immediately tell you (at least, as compared to how likely they were to under monogamy), because that’s now your business and not theirs to enforce. This is the anarchy I am talking about.

(And obviously, the current polyamory acceptance only exists in a few very specific bubbles, and monogamous ideology holds sway in most of America and the world still.)

mitigatedchaos

I can and will tell anyone if I find their partner cheating. I can and will ostracize people from my social groups for cheating. I can and will abandon anyone that knows if my partner is cheating and fails to inform me. Fuck the ideology. I’m physically instantiating my own reality, whether they want me to or not.

The people behind this shift have no idea what it is that they’re unleashing.

gendpol

ranma-official

theonion:
“SAN FRANCISCO—In an effort to reduce the number of unprovoked hostile communications on the social media platform, Twitter announced Monday that it had added a red X-mark feature verifying users who are in fact perfectly okay to harass....

Source: theonion queue

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

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Life Under Polyamory Ideology