At issue is Newsweek's, "Only You. And You. And You: Polyamory—Relationships With Multiple, Mutually Consenting Partners—Has a Coming-Out Party." Newsweek also features a special supplement, "The Feminist Roots of Polyamory":
Terisa and Scott have been together for 12 years, and live in a lakeside neighborhood of Seattle, where they share a vegetable garden and three dogs. For 10 years, Terisa has also been dating Larry, who on the side is dating Vera, who is married to Matt. Now Terisa is dating Matt, too. It’s like a real life Big Love, without the Mormonism: they’re “polyamorists”—a term used to describe people who believe in loving, consensual, multi-partner relationships. And while it’s easy to brush off anything with the word “poly” as some kind of frat-house fantasy gone wild, polyamory has a decidedly feminist bent.I'm struck by how casually acceptable this all sounds.
The key to poly relationships is gender equality, and women have been central to the creation of the practice. The word "polyamory" itself was coined by two women, in the early ’90s, and the first five books on the topic were all female-authored. Over the past year, writers like Jenny Block and Tristan Taormino, the sex columnist, have written on the topic, while celebrities Tilda Swinton (who called herself a “freak” in an interview with Double X) and Carla Bruni, the first lady of France, have spoken out in favor of open relationships. “Multiple-partner relationships have always gone on, but they have rarely had the gender equity characteristic of poly relationships,” says sociologist Elisabeth Sheff, one of the few researchers to study polyamory.
As much as I've blogged on gay marriage, it's astonishing to read how the culture is developing on the radical left.
For a good response to all of this, see Gay Patriot, "Defend Marriage as an Institution to Avoid Slippery Slopes."
I found the article and watched the video last night and was amazed at how many times the couples repeated, "We're just like any other family." Or, "We don't do anything around our six-year-old other parents wouldn't do." Oh, yes, besides make out with my girlfriend with the kid's mom sitting a few feet away. If that's normalcy, count me out. Or, maybe even they don't really believe its normal, and like President "I saved the economy!" Obama, they figure if they can say it enough times, it will eventually be true.
ReplyDeleteCall me old-fashioned!
ReplyDeleteIf you don't care about anything or anyone other than yourself and your own base desires, multiple partner unions and casual sex make perfect sense.
ReplyDeleteWhether it's "feminist" or not is debatable. In any event it's not new at all - this sort of thing has been common amongst the drunks, drug addicts and street people of most every Western nation for years.
I wonder how different from the "college hook-up scene" this is?
ReplyDeleteI graduated in 1995 and it was pretty confusing back then with the general acceptance of a wide range of sexual activity between persons not even dating. I have read, and been assured by persons teaching on campuses here in Philadelphia, that it has only become more blatant and generalized.
I supposed that this was the immature experimentation of youth and a shot at institutionalized morality that would be discarded upon graduation. Maybe it is making the transition to "a alternative lifestyle."
G-Veg