More Than Two project update with videos, cats, and a guest spot on Greta Christina

With eight days left, the Indiegogo campaign for Franklin Veaux and Eve Rickert's More Than Two book project is $14,203 of the way to its $19,800 goal, outside of the matching grants that Ken Haslam and I put up.

Eve and Franklin have now gone ahead and incorporated a publishing company, Thorntree Press, and they have plans beyond this one book.

Franklin, as I wrote last month, has for more than a decade run possibly the best (IMO) and most widely linked-to poly guidance site. He renamed it More Than Two to match the book title.

Yesterday they scored a surprise. Greta Christina is a big deal in the atheist/ skeptic/ freethought movement. She turned over her blogsite for a guest article by Franklin — on creating well-grounded ethical lives outside of rules-based moral boxes, whether by atheists or by people in unconventional relationships. With of course plugs for the book project.

From what he writes here, I think the book will become a milestone for the poly movement. He also tells about the next book that he and Eve are planning.

Greta Christina

More Than Two: Guest Post on Ethical Polyamory from Franklin Veaux

“Without God, there is no morality.”

Anyone involved in skeptical, atheist, or freethought communities has probably encountered this trope; and if you’ve been around for awhile, you’ve probably run into it quite a number of times.

Any alternative community that’s poorly understood by mainstream society probably has an equivalent — some common objection that gets trotted out whenever a discussion of that community comes up. In polyamorous circles, the trope is “rules and hierarchies (often, by implication, the rules and hierarchies of monogamy) are the only things that keep relationships from descending into unbounded, anything-goes chaos.”

The atheist community has an answer to this trope in books like Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe. Whether we find their arguments compelling or not, at least there’s an effort to address it.

In the polyamorous community, though, that book doesn’t seem to exist…at least not yet. Our goal is to change that.

What’s largely missing... is a book on the tools and strategies to create and maintain successful, healthy polyamorous relationships, and that’s what More Than Two is.

It’s difficult to talk about polyamory without hearing the expression “ethical non-monogamy.”... We rarely talk about the definition of “ethical,” beyond the obvious “don’t lie to your partners.” That’s a good start, sure, but it’s not enough to construct an entire foundation of relationship ethics on....

Where do we turn for ethics? What distinguishes an ethical relationship from a non-ethical one? Are ethical relationships egalitarian, and if so, how does that align with BDSM relationships deliberately constructed along the lines of power exchange? If two people make an agreement and then present that agreement unilaterally to a third person, who is given few options other than accept the agreement as-is or walk away, is that ethical? What happens when people make relationship agreements, and then their needs change?... How do we even define “ethics” without resorting to religious or social conventions?

...We have an ambitious goal. We are trying to set out a rational basis for ethical relationships. Our focus is on polyamory, naturally, though the same ethical principles could apply to any romantic relationship.... Everything else we write about follows from the core ethical foundation we are seeking to create.

Read on (Sept. 27, 2013).

Their next book? "It turns out that constructing a robust and consistent ethical framework that doesn’t rely on external authority is a nontrivial undertaking; in fact, when we have finished More Than Two, we plan a second book entirely dedicated to the ethics of interpersonal relationships."

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Lightening up, here are more videos they've made for the campaign. In the deadpan humor I see the mark of writer Edward Martin III.

On the origin and meaning of bunny ears in their extended romantic network. Warning, Badass McProblemsolver returns, buffered by kittens:



If you've ever wanted to see Aggie Sez, Anita Wagner Illig, Noel Figart, Pepper Mint, and Megh and Kiki from Victoria in real life making endorsements, here they are:



The whole book project team are introduced, Eve's cat eats grass, and more newbie problems are McSolved:



Their proposed stretch-goal book tour route, and a poodle comes out of a tube:



They've also been posting lots of notable new stuff on their More Than Two Book Blog, more than I'm going to list here. Go see. And don't forget to donate.

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