Are poly people annoying? Also, Oakland's new relationship non-discrimination law. A spate of open-marriage discovery books. And more.

First off: The big poly/ ENM/ alt-family news of the month (see last week's Another city! Oakland passes nondiscrimination law) finally got some mainstream media coverage. From KQED in San Francisco: Bay Area Cities Push to Legally Validate Polyamorous Families (April 25). Note the "cities" plural.

And yes, life- and career-disrupting discrimination against us in housing and employment is a real and common problem. 

"John Owens poses for a photo with his partners Emily Savage (left)
and Alejandra Bravo Ducey at a celebration party at the East Bay
Community Space in Oakland on April 16, after a bill prohibiting
discrimination of nonmonogamous families passed in the
Oakland City Council." (BethLaBerge/KQED)

 

By Lesley McClurg

John Owens pulled his brown shoulder-length hair back into a bun and tossed brightly colored T-shirts and books into crates and boxes. The 37-year-old artist and writer is moving for the fifth time in less than a decade. ...

Six months after moving into the duplex tucked off the 580 freeway in Oakland, the dishwasher, garbage disposal and driveway gate all needed repairs. Owens told his landlords that one of his romantic partners would be visiting the house and could meet the repair person. This was the first time he’d shared details about his love life. After that, Owens said, the interactions between the landlords “felt much stranger,” and it grew more awkward as time passed.

“The landlords are pretty judgy about polyamory,” Owens said. “At one point, they tried to ask us to leave, threatening an owner-occupied eviction thing. Then, they backtracked and said we could stay, but with a 10% rent increase.”

He said his polyamorous lifestyle alarmed the landlord or master tenant in his last four living situations. 

...“That type of discrimination is pretty common,” Owens said. “It’s hard to even think about all the different times, different people that I’ve encountered in professional, medical, housing or institutional settings that have made it pretty clear that they’re not OK with the way I live my life.”

Research shows that two-thirds of people engaged in consensual nonmonogamy report feeling stigmatized, which inspires many people to hide that they are polyamorous because they fear negative perceptions.

“Stigma and discrimination can show up in a range of domains: housing, employment, health care and immigration,” said Brett Chamberlin, founder and executive director of the Organization for Polyamory and Ethical Non-monogamy [link], a nonprofit advocacy group. “Courts have revoked custody from parents who have multiple partners.”

This month, the Oakland City Council passed new legislation formally recognizing polyamorous families, the first of its kind on the West Coast. It protects “diverse family structures” from discrimination in housing and at businesses and introduces a civil financial penalty for any rights violations by city services or facilities.

...“There’s not a lot of really wonderful good news in the world,” Owens said. “And this is a really wonderful and unambiguously good thing that Oakland is doing.”

Berkeley lawmakers plan to vote on the same legislation on May 7.

A growing movement

Somerville and Cambridge in Massachusetts passed the first laws granting rights to nontraditional families.

“This is a really exciting moment for the nonmonogamy movement because it helps validate and protect families and relationships that for a long time have existed in the shadows or at the margins of societies,” Chamberlin said.

“The nonmonogamous community has something really important to offer this world,” he said. “The way that we pursue relationships is an expression of our values. We put connection above consumption, and we put community and cooperation above competition.”

...Owens said the traditional model didn’t work for him. He had a daughter in his early 20s when he was living in Durham, North Carolina.

“It was hard,” he said. “I can’t imagine trying to parent in a one or two-parent household ever again. There’s no way. For the long arc of human history, children have been raised by the village in large groups of people. My dream scenario is some big polyamorous collective.”

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●  Some people support polyamory in principle but find themselves annoyed by us in practice. Here's one of them. She's witty.  

The Yale Review (it originated in 1819) says it "aims to discover a new generation of writers and thinkers." It says "Brandy Jenson lives in New Orleans with her two dogs" and does an occasional advice column called "Ask a Fuck Up." The magazine published her meditation The Polycrisis: Why can’t we stop talking about nonmonogamy? (April 24).

Excerpts below. How many of her impressions sound plausible to you? Why?

"Polyamory sometimes seems like a practice made to generate
conversations, writes Brandy Jensen." (Getty Images)

TOO OFTEN THESE DAYS I find myself in the position of defending someone I think is annoying from someone I know is dangerous. Most recently this happened with polyamorous people, the existence and behaviors of whom many readers claim to be tired of talking about, only to gleefully comb through every new book or magazine profile. ... I’m guilty of participating in the endless chatter: these too-deep dives are very easy to make fun of. Plus I’m not straight and live in New Orleans, and you can only go on so many dates with people who say things like, “I separated from my nesting partner to go solo poly, although lately I’ve been thinking I’m actually more of a relationship anarchist,” before you build up sufficient resentment to want to get a few jokes in.

This isn’t the fault of the polyamory community as a whole. It’s easy to have your scene ruined by annoying rich people (for example, San Francisco) or to make something cool sound uncool by talking about it too much (for example, weed) or to be right and yet still be embarrassing about it (for example, atheism). The lighthearted mockery of terms like “compersion” is mostly a harmless good time, until it inevitably provides cover for reactionary sexual politics. Suddenly someone is writing an essay in The Atlantic about how polyamory is bourgeois, and before I can even think “That doesn’t seem right,” a bunch of revanchist weirdos eager to roll back the Sexual Revolution are chiming in on X to call polyamory both bourgeois and morally degenerate, and all the fun has been sucked out of my eye-rolling. And so I end up back in bed with the polyamorists, wishing they could figure out how to make having sex sound sexier.

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THE FIRST TIME I slept with a couple it felt like it happened by accident. I don’t mean that it was farcical, but simply that there wasn’t any planning beforehand. Had they told me in advance that they were interested in sleeping together, I probably would have laughed. As I remember it, we were in a big room full of people at a party, and then somehow we were in a bathroom doing drugs, and then somehow we were in a bed doing things I’d never done before. ... 

A classic critique of polyamorists: these people appear to like talking about sex more than they like having it. Perhaps that’s unfair, but polyamory sometimes seems to me like a practice made to generate conversations. Conversations between partners about the possibility of new lovers and between new lovers about prior partners, meta-conversations about how well or poorly all these conversations are going—and, of course, conversations between people who aren’t in any way involved.

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There’s no getting around how important communication is to the polyamorous lifestyle. They are always communicating. This ardor for talking may be, in part, what inspires so much chatter among outside observers. ... Monogamous marriages are famously inscrutable to outsiders — you never know what really happens behind closed doors. [But when they're poly] how thrilling to feel that one’s nosiness is justified. Don’t you think this is a sign they’re going to break up? Is she really okay with it, or is she just doing it to make him happy? Do they think we’re prudes now? Can you believe they think they’re better than us?

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And then there is the content of the communication between polyamorous people about the practice itself, which can come off as smug. In January’s New York feature, a member of a polycule named Nick described his relationship like this: “Some people like to run marathons. We like to do polyamory, complex relationship stuff. Sarah’s favorite activity for the two of us to do is couples therapy.” A member of the Boston polycule featured in The New York Times had this to say: “We learned a strategy from the Multiamory podcast called ‘agile scrum,’ which was adapted from business-meeting models. We utilized that format. We did that for a year and a half, at least once a month, sometimes six to 10 hours of hard poly-processing. That gave us great communication tactics.” I have no interest in going to grad school for relationships, especially when the other students sound so keen to be best in class. 

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THIS KEENNESS TO STUDY, and schedule, and have discussion groups, goes some way to explaining the moniker sex nerds, which my friends and I began using a few years ago to express our benign derision, and a long way to explaining the temptation to bully them. Nerds have spent the past few decades triumphing in almost every aspect of American popular culture, and it’s impossible to make them feel bad about it. ... But the classic tactic of saying they are doing sex in a weird way remains available—especially when they’re so eager to tell you about how they play Catan with their polycule every Wednesday.

Polyamory, in this country at least, has pretty much always been the domain of nerds, as... Christopher Gleason’s [recent book] American Poly: A History, makes clear. ... All of these earnest weirdos thought they could remake the world, and insofar as they succeeded, the results have been unevenly distributed.

 ... Liberationists and free lovers had hoped that remaking sex might remake the world, but the relationship between sex and other terrains of political struggle has turned out to be far more complicated. ... Nonmonogamy does not automatically bring about the structural changes which might materially improve intimate life for everyone, As it becomes increasingly popular, [historian Florence] Sutcliffe-Braithwaite cautions, it may also become more easily “sublimated into simple lifestyle politics.” It can therefore be maddening when some polyamorists insist that a day job making surveillance technology does not preclude them from considering themselves politically radical, as long as they spend their weekends having orgies.

...Some threshold number of polycules will never bring down a government.... If what one wants is revolution, of course it isn’t enough to be a revolutionary of sex—but neither does that mean that we shouldn’t be. The answer to any critique which distinguishes between sexual and material freedom must be to claim both. In a system that seeks to atomize and isolate, there is still some emancipatory potential in exploring different styles of living. ...

●  On the subject of self-focused, unrevolutionary revolution — Molly Roden Winter found herself the poster gal for this when her open-marriage memoir More, set in Brooklyn's tony Park Slope, came out with a publicity bonanza starting in January. She adjusts with an interview in the Guardian/Observer. It's titled ‘I wanted sexual adventures, I didn’t want to fall in love’: Molly Roden Winter on her astonishing memoir of an open marriage (April 21).

Vincent Tullo/The Observer

By Michael Segalov

More documents Roden Winter’s life from 2008 to 2018. “I’ve done a lot of living since then,” she says, “a lot of thinking and experiencing. How we do polyamory today is hugely different to what’s at the heart of the book.” Her marriage has evolved, as has the wider conversation about ethical non-monogamy. At present, the couple are properly poly. “My husband and I both love multiple people,” she says, “and it makes us love each other more, not less.” She has two additional partners: one relationship has been ongoing for three years, the other for two. ...

“One response” from critics, she says, “has been to tell me how my husband manipulated me into having an open marriage. That I’m a victim of the patriarchy with no agency.” Certainly, he encouraged the idea – Roden Winter being with other men was a turn on for him. “At first, the only way I could give myself permission was by telling myself that Stew wanted me to have sex with someone else. I was still trying to please him.” But therapy reshaped her rationalisation. “Women of my generation were taught to be pleasers. That being a good mother is to take burnt toast and scraps. In time, I realised I was craving something of my own, that didn’t belong to the marriage.”

Needless to say, there have been snipes and revulsion aplenty from conservatives. “Their view is that I’m a pervert and, with kids involved, what we’re doing is immoral. Meanwhile, they’re 19 and 22 and completely flourishing. It’s why I felt in a good position to write the book.”

...Roden Winter feels the book has proved both popular and divisive not because of its content, but who its author is, and what she represents. For generations, queer people – and gay men in particular – have operated outside the marriage, children, monogamy trifecta. ... “The idea it’s an American heterosexual woman, with children, talking so openly? A heteronormative couple breaking the rules and being honest about it?” This, Roden Winter believes, is what’s causing a stir.

“It shows that people like me could be anywhere. I have a husband, house and kids. I dress, act and live like a Park Slope mom. It throws people off kilter to imagine they, too, could live like me. That I have children, who aren’t fucked up and I’m not being manipulated or miserable.”

...And there have been plenty of positive responses to the book: young parents, mothers in particular, in newly opened marriages grateful for seeing their experiences and emotions acknowledged. ...“Where I live, people consider themselves super liberal. You’ll see in shop windows matching mother and daughter sized shirts emblazoned with ‘The future is female’. But the rules for how you’re supposed to behave as a mother are suffocating, I feel. We put mothers into these straitjacketed roles and shame them for not fitting. ... That’s why this book resonates.”

...Frankly, it all just sounds… exhausting? Not the sex, specifically. But managing multiple long-term romantic relationships. “Most worthwhile things are,” she replies. “We don’t say: medical school sounds so hard, just quit.”...

...Only one rule remains in place today. “If one of us has feelings about something the other is doing,” she says, “we have to work through it together. You can’t say ‘Don’t be jealous’ or ‘It’s ridiculous that you feel insecure’. You have to help the other person feel better.”...

Roden Winter does an interview on polycoach Kitty Chambliss' Loving Without Boundaries podcast just up (April 24; 49 minutes).

●  A 2024 flood. Following Roden Winter's More, Rachel Krantz's memoir Open being reissued, and Holly William's novel The Start of Something soon to appear, another woman's open-marriage-inspired book just came out: Open Season by Cassie Werber in the UK.

It's a novel. Werber writes about her own life in the Guardian: My husband is my co-parent, friend and lover – but he isn’t the only person I have sex with: the inside story of an open marriage (April 20)

By Cassie Werber

I settled back into the train seat and pulled a notebook out of my bag: something extraordinary had happened... the night I’d [just] spent near Brighton with a man I’d known for years, but seen again in a whole new context. About how delighted I felt, how hot, how incredibly free.

My body, which had been pregnant in the Covid pandemic, given birth and then dragged itself through several house moves with a baby and a three-year-old, seemed to be renewed, on fire. My mind was blown, and my lips were bruised. ... I texted friends, caught eyes with strangers: I wanted to talk to everyone about how I was feeling. Most of all, I wanted to tell my husband.

For plenty of people, the idea that I could be so excited about a new sexual encounter, and at the same time in a truly committed marriage, doesn’t compute. But that’s the experience I’ve had for the last eight years, during which I’ve been married to my life partner, had two children, pursued career goals – and also seen other people. It hasn’t all been easy but, honestly, it hasn’t been fraught. ... 

...So how did it happen? ...In the first year of our marriage, we started talking about going together [to a sex club]. We’d both assumed that that world, which we’d only brushed up against before, was probably closed to us now; we were excited to discover it wasn’t. This discussion was organic, gradual and mutual, segueing from the language of fantasy into one of more concrete, real-world plans. It wasn’t driven by one person, and no one had to do any convincing. We didn’t know what it would feel like to experiment with other people, whether it would be the right step for us. We didn’t know whether we’d feel jealous.

There are an infinite number of ways to be in an open relationship. ... David and I haven’t felt the need to lay down hard rules for our relationship. So far, at least, we seem to understand each other and communicate quite well. We set aside times for the discussion of worries and annoyances, and usually do so out of the house, while walking. We also talk to each other about the more intense feelings that do, sometimes, come up: rejection or hurt, longing or confusion. Our relationship isn’t some kind of ideal template. We argue as much as many couples. We just don’t often argue about this.

That doesn’t mean it’s always easy. When I stepped off the train after that incredible night away, I walked into several hard days. I found myself feeling really strong, but also spiky. The house was still a mess. Our son still didn’t like preschool. David wanted me to slot back into the exact groove I’d left. But I felt wild, in a good way, and didn’t want to fit back in. ...

●  People posts What Is a Throuple — and How to Know When the Relationship Type Is Right for You, According to an Expert (April 21). "Dr. Lori Beth Bisbey speaks with PEOPLE about [this] 'type of polyamory' and when it may be something to consider." She gives some good warnings for new folks. 

By Nicholas Rice

...Highlighting whether a throuple is right for certain individuals, Bisbey first warns, "Getting three people who align enough to live together with deep intimacy is not simple."

However, "If you are willing to live with two people and have the skills to work through the complexity, it might be a good choice," she adds. "One reason is that two incomes aren’t enough in a lot of places, so three people sharing works better."

(Getty stock photo)

...Bisbey tells PEOPLE signs that it might be the "right choice" include: "You didn’t mind sharing your toys (even your favorite ones) as a child, you desire high levels of communication and interaction with people, and you have found it difficult to be monogamous."

Other reasons that she considers non-monogamy may be of interest to people is if they "have lots of complicated desires and needs, really enjoy complexity in your life (but not drama) and have a high level of honesty with yourself and others and are willing to be authentic."

..."People often romanticize being part of a throuple, but it is actually quite complicated. It is easier to have multiple separate relationships where you are not all sharing space, finances, decisions about everything," she explains. "Throuples work together like couples, dividing labor between three instead of two. Consensus is harder because of more people. Higher levels of communication are needed and all relationships within the group need attention."

Speaking about the stigma surrounding throuples, and the reaction they may receive for their relationship type, Bisbey offers a few words of advice.

"Be prepared to educate people when needed, but remember not everyone is entitled to know your business.... Make sure you have thick skin. If you offend easily, do some personal work to increase your resistance to other people’s views of you. Keep your life private and only share what you are comfortable with anyone knowing."

"Finally, make friends with other non-monogamous people."

 -----------------------------------

● The New York Times Magazine story on the "20-person polycule" a couple weeks ago (parts of the polycule are actually rather loosely bonded) made waves closer to where the 20 live. The Boston Globe's site Boston.com followed up with What’s a polycule? What we learned from the NYT story on an unusual arrangement happening near Boston. (April 17)

By Abby Patkin

...According to The New York Times Magazine, the term “polycule” suggests “an intricate structure formed of people with overlapping deep attachments: romantic, sexual, sensual, platonic.” In other words, a sort of web of various relationships and personal connections.

One polycule member interviewed for the article said the Boston-area group includes about 20 people in their mid-20s to mid-40s, with gender identities and sexual orientation running the gamut. ... 

“It’s an evolving organism that looks entirely different from everyone’s perspective,” Ashley said. 

...“It’s loving people in a very unapologetic way, not conforming to norms,” polycule member Bine said, later adding, “As a woman, and as a queer woman, being able to live my life as authentically as possible without needing my husband’s permission, that’s empowering.” ...

...The bottom line: If you’re polyamorous and/or looking to join or form a polycule, the Greater Boston area isn’t a bad place to be. ...

Actually, many people around here find poly community hard to locate. But we're definitely not Topeka.

●  From Business Insider: Members of a 20-person polycule used a business strategy called 'agile scrum' to resolve their relationship issues. Here's how it works. (April 18, paywalled) 

By Julia Pugachevsky

...Agile scrum is a combination of business principles and strategy. The idea is for teams to break down their deliverables into smaller tasks and shorter timeframes, reviewing their progress as they go. That way they can swiftly adapt to changes to produce more effective results in the long run.

In The New York Times, Ann said the couple practiced agile scrum "for a year and a half, at least once a month, sometimes six to 10 hours of hard poly-processing."

...[She and her husband] said agile scrum — which they learned from the podcast, Multiamory — helped them to find themselves and each other within the polycule dynamic.

...In 2001, 17 software developers in Utah got together and wrote a manifesto on ways to improve their work. Agile is a set of principles that promotes collaboration and flexibility among teams to produce faster and more effective results. The values include "individuals and interactions over processes and tools," and "responding to change over following a plan."

Scrum is a concrete framework based on agile philosophy that involves smaller, cross-functional teams delivering products in short cycles, or "sprints." It's essentially a more structured approach to agile principles, allowing teams to frequently complete projects together and give each other feedback.

At some point, agile scrum crossed over into the realm of love. ...

●  PS: Poly and neurodiversity research. Comments I made about poly and neurodiversity caught the eye of Janet Walsh-Adams at Australia's Deakin University. She's a PhD candidate doing research at the university's Healthy Autistic Life Lab. She writes, 

Click image to enlarge,
click here for the survey.

I've been following your page for several years, and found it personally helpful as a polyamorous person in getting a nice overview of what was happening in the worldwide community.

You might be aware of some discourse in the online forums about how neurodivergent people (especially autistic and ADHD) seem to be more likely to be attracted to non-monogamy, but nobody has studied this empirically yet. I feel pretty fortunate to be the person who is undertaking the topic for my PhD, and hope to do the community justice in exploring whether there are specific motivations, experiences or supports relevant to different types of practitioners.

Whilst my lab focuses on autism, we're accounting for all neurotypes, and welcome self-identified participants, those with formal diagnoses, those who are non-autistic and those who are unsure. Participants just need to be 18+ and be proficient in English. They can come from any location, have any relationship preferences or experience, and identify with any gender or sexuality. 

Also, here's a story I published with some early speculation on the relationship between autism and non-monogamy.  

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Meanwhile,

    

Aid for Ukraine finally made it through Congress — hopefully not too late to save a free and promising society, but already too late for many thousands of the pro-democracy resistance — after months of blockage by the pro-Putin half of the U.S. Republican Party. The List of Shame.

Here is why I've been ending posts to this polyamory news site with the Ukraine situation: I've seen many progressive movements die out over the years because they failed to scan the wider world accurately and understand their position in it strategically.

We polyamorous people are a small, weird minority of social-rule breakers. Increasingly powerful people call us a threat to society — because by living successfully outside of their worldview, we expose its incompleteness.

Our freedom to choose our relationship structures, and to speak up for ourselves about the truth of ourselves, is just one way we depend on a free and pluralistic society that respects people's dignity to create their own lives, to access facts, and to speak of what they know.

Such a society is possible only where people have reasonably good power to govern themselves, combined with legal structures that are at least supposed to guarantee the rights of all.

Innovative people, communities, and societies who create their own lives, and who insist on the democratic structures and legal rights that enable them to do so safely, infuriate and terrify the authoritarians who are growing in power around the world and in our own United States. Now with direct mutual support, which is increasingly unhidden.

Such rulers and would-be rulers seek to stamp out other people's freedom to choose their lives — by intimidation, repressive laws, inflammatory disinformation and public incitement, weaponizing police abuse, or eventually, artillery.

For what it's worth, Polyamory in the News received more pagereads from pre-invasion Ukraine over the years (56,400) than from any other country in eastern Europe.

You can donate to Ukraine relief through this list of vetted organizations (last updated Oct. 2023). We're giving to a big one, Razom, and to a little informal one, Pizza for Ukraine in Kharkiv, the project of an old friend of my wife.

But that is only the start. For those of us born since World War II, this is the most consequential war of our lifetime. Because we have entered another time when calculating fascism, at home and abroad, is rising and sees freedom and liberalism and social tolerance as weak, degenerate, delusional — inviting easy pushovers. As Russia thought it saw in Ukraine. The whole world is watching what we will do about it.

Background: "The United States has a much higher stake in Russia's war on Ukraine than most people think."  More: "If we stop supporting Ukraine, then everything gets worse, all of a sudden, and no one will be talking about “fatigue” because we will all be talking about disaster."

The coming times may require hard things of us. We don't get to choose the time and place in history we find ourselves born into. We do get to choose how we respond to it. 

Need a little help bucking up? Play this. Another version. More? Some people on the eastern fro nt trying to hold onto an open society. (TW: war is awful.) Maybe your granddad did this from a trench against Hitler's tanks— for you, and us, because a world fascist movement was successfully defeated that time, opening the way for the rest of the 20th century.

But the outcome didn't look good for a couple of years then, either. Popular history remembers the 1945 victory over the Nazis and the joyous homecoming. Less remembered are the defeats and grim prospects from 1941 through early 1943.

Remember, these people say they are doing it for us too. They are correct. The global struggle between a free, open future and a fearful revival of the dark past that's shaping up, including in our own country, is still in its early stages. It's likely to get worse before it gets better. The outcome is again uncertain, and it will determine the 21st century and the handling of all its other problems.

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PS: Ukraine should not be idealized as the paragon of an open democratic society. For instance, see If Ukraine Wants To Stand for Liberty and Democracy, It Should Rethink Some of Its Wartime Policies. And it has quite the history of being run by corrupt oligarchs — leading to the Maidan Uprising of 2013, the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, and Zelensky's overwhelming election in 2019 as the anti-corruption candidate. So they're working on that. And they're also stamping hard on the old culture of everyday, petty corruption.  More on that.  More; "Ukraine shows that real development happens when people believe they have an ownership stake in their own societies."

Now, writes US war correspondent George Packer in The Atlantic, 

Here was a country with a tragic history that had at last begun to build, with great effort, a better society. What made Ukraine different from any other country I had ever seen—certainly from my own—was its spirit of constant self-improvement, which included frank self-criticism. For example, there’s no cult of Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine—a number of Ukrainians told me that he had made mistakes, that they’d vote against him after the war was won. Maxim Prykupenko, a hospital director in Lviv, called Ukraine “a free country aspiring to be better all the time.” The Russians, he added, “are destroying a beautiful country for no logical reason to do it. Maybe they are destroying us just because we have a better life.”

They have a word there, with a deep history, for the horizontal, self-organized, mutual get-it-done that grows from community social trust: hromada. Learn that word. It's been keeping them going  to the extent they've been able. We polyfolks often dream of creating something like that community spirit in miniature, in our polycules and networks. Occasionally we succeed.

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Social attitudes in Ukraine are mostly traditional, rooted in a thousand years of the Orthodox Church. But not bitterly so like often in the US; in the last generation the ideal of modern European civil society has become widely treasured, and social progressivism has room to thrive. The status of women has fast advanced, especially post-invasion. More than 43,000 women volunteer in the armed forces, flooding traditionally male bastions — including as combat officers, artillery gunners, tankers, battlefield medics, snipers, and infantry. (Intimidating video: "Thus the Witch has Said".) Ukraine has more women volunteering in combat positions than any other armed force in the world.

  
Some LGBT folx in the armed forces display symbols of LGBT pride on their uniforms, with official approval, whereas in Russia it's a prison-worthy crime for even a civilian to show a rainbow pin or "say gay." A report on Ukraine's LGBT+ and feminist acceptance revolutions. Another. Another. Another. War changes things.

And in December 2022, Russia made it a crime not just to speak for LGBT recognition in Russia or occupied Ukraine, but to speak for "non-traditional sexual relations." Belarus, a Russia subject state, has followed suit. Pre-invasion, Russia had a visible polyamory education and awareness movement.

Polyfolks are like one ten-thousandth of what's at stake globally. Ukraine must have our full material backing for as long as it takes them to win their security, freedom, and future. Continue to speak up for it.

                                     

A Russian writer grieves: "My country has fallen out of time."

Women defenders near the eastern front

PPS:  U.S. authori-tarians, such as Sen. Ted Cruz, are saying that allowing women in front-line roles is a woke plot to weaken America's armed forces. Ukraine puts that shit to bed. Do you have a relative who talks like that? Send them this video link to Vidma, who commands a mortar platoon, recounting the story of one of their battles near Bakhmut.

Update April 22, 2024: A year and a half later Vidma is still alive, still with her mortar unit in the Bakhmut region, and posting TikToks. They are now at the front in, it looks like, the battle shaping up for Chasiv Yar, a strategic hilltop town west of Bakhmut that will soon, unfortunately, be in world news. A young girl who looks high-school age has showed up to join them. Another. Their lives, and their promising society, depend on us. 

And maybe our own? Says Maine's independent Senator Angus King (Jan. 31, 2024),

Whenever people write to my office [asking why we are supporting Ukraine,] I answer, 'Google Sudetenland, 1938.' We could have stopped a murderous dictator who was bent on geographic expansion…at a relatively low cost. The result of not doing so was 55 million deaths.

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The New York Times' star conservative takes us on... and not badly. Two more women's open-relationship stories on the way. And, psychedelic-assisted poly transformation.

Chacruna Institute

●  Ross Douthat is house conservative columnist at the New York Times. That can't be easy; he can't write dumb shit but has to be consistently worth reading for people who disagree with him. 

He discusses us polyfolk as his central focus in a pick-apart of society's current sexual transitions: The Quest for a New Vision of Sexual Morality (March 27). He starts with a recent New York magazine cover story about the pop-neuroscience men's influencer Andrew Huberman, who he agrees is an abusive pig:

...The portrait of a figure like Huberman would be interesting under any circumstances. But the special focus on his sex life, the detailed testimony from allegedly mistreated girlfriends, marks this as very much a post-#MeToo profile. Huberman is not accused of any sexual crime; he’s seemingly just a creep, cheat and control freak. But that kind of misbehavior is treated as essential to any judgment of his public career. Whatever the new rules of sex might be, it’s clear that we’re supposed to judge the cad’s lifestyle as regressive, deplorable and wicked. [Well yeah?]

So what kind of lifestyle might be preferable? Well, here we can turn back a few issues to a New York magazine January cover story on polyamory, featuring both a profile of a specific polycule and an extensive guide to “opening” your relationship or marriage.

When the Huberman profile appeared, some social-media voices suggested that there’s a tension in publishing a takedown of a man juggling six girlfriends after celebrating the juggle just a couple of months previously. But in reality the two cover stories are entirely of a piece. The implied critique of the neuroscience cad isn’t just that he has sex with lots of different women but that he does so deceptively and selfishly — instead of following the kind of open, complex process of negotiation that’s ethically required to be the kind of person who has sex with six different people at a time.

That idea of sex-as-process, with the sexual act itself embedded inside a kind of “best practices” of dialogue and interaction, seems to be where social liberalism has settled, for now, in its attempt to create a post-Hefnerian sexual culture. Thus the general fascination with polyamory, manifest in trend pieces, books and essays too numerous to count, isn’t just about envelope-pushing and shock value. It also reflects a desire to maintain the permissive sexual ethic that men like [Playboy founder Hugh] Hefner turned to their own exploitative ends, but to make it healthier and therapeutic, more female-friendly and egalitarian, safer and more structured.

Polyamory isn’t being offered as an alternative to conservative monogamy, in this sense, so much as an alternative to more dangerous, irresponsible, and deceptive forms of promiscuity — a responsible, spreadsheet-enabled, therapeutic version of the sexual revolution, in which transparency replaces cheating, and everything is permitted so long as you carefully negotiate permission.

Sounds pretty good! Especially because conservatives (of the old-fashioned type) are always talking about personal responsibility.

But I think he is committing a swap of cause and effect here, as people weak on history often do. In this case, our history.

For most of us old polyfolks who were there when today's movement settled on its current shape in the mid-1980s through 90s, polyamory (as opposed to broader forms of ethical non-monogamy) was not about tidier promiscuity. It was about actual heart-centered love — for people you truly want to treat well because you truly care about them. It was about the generalization of limerent, romantic love — that thing that has awed and obsessed and driven humans since humans existed — from the isolated couple, where society has carefully walled away its power, into wider, community-like fields that, we discovered, are not only imaginable but actually possible. Sometimes.

In the history of the poly movement, personal Road-to-Damascus revelations about such larger, agapé-style erotic-romantic love came first. Today's best poly practices developed not by an antiseptic therapeutic ideology, but by experiment and experience amid the early poly community's often bitter trials and errors. The wider world only later started to notice the emergent best practices — those found to improve the chance of success — as awareness of the movement finally began to spread mass-market.

Douthat continues:

A glance at some actual human relationships should raise some doubts about how well this model really works. Whatever Huberman’s failures of honesty and communication, for instance, he appears extremely well versed in the kind of therapy-speak that’s supposed to tame libidinous excess — suggesting that predators and cads can work through this system as well as any other.

Too true. 

...Or again, the new mom-with-an-open-marriage memoir by Molly Roden Winter, “More,” reads more like a testament to marital suffering than any kind of guide to the good life.

Also true. But as conservatives frequently say, getting to a good life often requires hard work and suffering. Ad astra per aspera. Roden Winter herself declares it was worth it.

●  Speaking of open-relationship memoirs by women, Rachel Krantz's Open comes out in paperback in June. Interviews and podcasts with her are already showing up. The book is sure to get more attention in the current environment than it did when it came out in hardback two years ago. From the publisher's description:

Krantz documents her dive into polyamory, from Brooklyn sex parties to swinging and beyond, in her extraordinary debut memoir. As she attempts to write a new plot for her love story with Adam, she runs up against miscommunications, gaslighting, and ancient power dynamics, and seeks solid ground in a relation-ship where the rules are ever-shifting. An award-winning journalist, she interviewed scientists, psychologists, and people living and loving outside the mainstream to understand what polyamory would do to her heart, mind, and life.

Here's a poly reviewer of the book for NPR two years ago: 'Open' explores polyamorous relationships through personal experience.

...I'll admit that I was trepidatious when I first approached this memoir. I've never really hidden the fact that I am polyamorous, nor that my partner of seven years and I have always had, to one extent or another, a non-monogamous relationship. Anyone who is poly (or polyam, the short form Krantz uses in the book) or non-monog knows when to share this information and when to silo it away in order to avoid the judging eyes and skeptical questions of the monogamous overculture. Knowing the memoir was about Krantz's introduction to non-monogamy — and not only that, but that she was introduced to it by a straight cis man, a demographic that is often assumed to abuse this relational preference — made me brace myself for a traditional happy ending about how it was a valid life choice but simply not for her.

Rachel Krantz

I couldn't have been more wrong. It's no spoiler to say that Krantz still identifies as polyam, at least according to social media, and... it's neither a manifesto of polyamorous ideals nor an argument against it. It's Krantz's sincere and curious reckoning with the cultural messaging we all receive about gendered expectations and power dynamics in romantic and sexual relationships in general. How do we untangle those from our own desires? How do we differentiate between those desires and the things we think we should want, or that our partners want us to want? The highs and lows of a first non-monogamous relationship prove the perfect canvas on which to explore these fundamental questions.

At first, things between Krantz and Adam seem rather rosy, although readers familiar with gaslighting and manipulation in relationships may recognize the red flags early on. ...

●  Holly Williams is another woman with a book coming out. She writes in the UK's Independent how she went back to monogamy brimming with good poly lessons: An open relationship taught me everything I needed to know about love (April 2). Her novel The Start of Something starts shipping next week. It's already a Cosmopolitan best book pick for 2024.

...The best lessons I’ve learned in how to be a good partner, and have a good relationship, came from exploring non-monogamy. ... I’m now in a happy, basically monogamous relationship. But starting out non-monogamous actually proved a pretty fantastic bedrock for long-term, committed love.

...My second novel, The Start of Something, tells the story of 10 characters via 10 interlocking sexual encounters. I wanted to explore the different shapes sex, love, and relationships can take in the modern world. ...

Running through The Start of Something is the belief that what makes love work is honesty – it doesn’t matter the structure, as long as you can communicate within it. This is hardly a new or radical take, I know. But – and it’s a big but! – it can still be alarmingly difficult. And while you might assume that opening a relationship would make it thornier, my own experience suggests the opposite – exploring non-monogamy made me a better partner.

...When I got into a serious relationship in my twenties, obviously it was monogamous, because I thought that was what being in a relationship meant. That was the point.

...[It] ended because of my unfaithfulness. Cue crushing, terrible guilt – and a new certainty that monogamy was Not For Me. ... I needed to be free: no one was ever going to tie me down again!

A pinball of pent-up horniness, I rebounded my way through Tinder, Feeld, and the nightclubs of east London. But I didn’t know how to communicate my need for freedom, and so often took a don’t-ask-don’t-tell approach. ... Still, there were clues that “just not mentioning it” was not working amazingly: the racing heart, the niggling guilt… And I did hurt people, by not being honest, and not really taking their feelings into account.

...It wasn’t until I started seeing people who were already in their own open relationships that I really understood what it took to make things work. What I learned was pretty simple: the more we properly talked about what we were looking for, without any moralising or persuading, the easier and safer it felt. If you’re gonna do ethical non-monogamy, my god you’re also gonna do a lot of talking. You can’t muddle through on vibes and hunches – there have got to be explicit boundaries, because there are a thousand ways to “do” non-monogamy. It meant planning before certain situations, and debriefing after: Are we all happy going out together? Will I stay over afterwards? So, how did it feel…?

...It all felt uncomfortable at first, and then it felt liberating. Have you ever been trapped in circular discussions with a partner, where you expect them to silently know what you need and if they don’t, you subtly punish them? There was way less of all that. Fewer games. Almost no sulks. Dating poly people made me more upfront, more realistic, less embarrassed about my true desires; it made me think harder about what’s behind feeling jealous, or insecure.

When I began dating my current partner Tommo, I was still seeing someone else. But then… as we fell in love, we also fell into monogamy. I believe that romantic love is not a finite resource: you can love more than one partner, like you can love more than one child, or friend. However, time is a finite resource. I soon found I wanted to spend more of it with Tommo than with anyone else. But I maintain that the open beginning was a great basis for the relationship. From the off, we learned to be calm, transparent, and clear in our communication. Our trust in each other is not predicated on exclusivity – but on honesty.

It helped us ditch any assumptions of what a relationship “should” look like…

Knowing this makes me feel both more free, and more secure. ... We talk about what’s working and what’s not. We ask the big questions. Including whether or not we should open up. I don’t want to just slot into a societally-approved, till-death-do-us-part model – I want to allow for movement, and growth.

Because for me, monogamy shouldn’t be the default: it should be a question. ... Right now, I’m happy spending all my romantic energy on just one person – but I think the reason that works is because there was never the assumption it had to be that way.

●  An example of some early best practices surviving, mostly intact, into today's mass market is this quickie little Open Marriage 101 in a women's mag: The 4 Do’s and 3 Don'ts of a Successful Open Marriage, According to a Non-Monogamist (PureWow, March 25; reprinted on aol.com and Yahoo).

"We chatted with Ally Iseman... a speaker, non-monogamy educator and practitioner and organizer in the sex-positive community in Los Angeles....'"

The subheads:

DO: Establish Your "Why"...

DON’T: Think This Will Fix Anything...

DO: Have Weekly Meetings Where You Discuss the Specifics of Your Agreement...

DON’T: Expect Your Partner to Be a Mind Reader...

DON’T: Go with the Flow...

DO: Connect with Fellow Non-Monogamy Enthusiasts...

DO: Decide How Much You Want—or Don’t Want—to Know...

●  Lastly: Old forgotten revelations, if they are correct rather than illusory, do not die but lie dormant, reawaiting their time. How Psychedelics Can Guide the Transformative Journey of Polyamory is a serious new paper by ketamine-assist therapist Justin Natoli, JD, LMFT, in Los Angeles (Chacruna Institute, April 2).

In my work as a psychotherapist, I have found few opinions that feel as personal or divisive as those around monogamy and polyamory. I hold a mindset that different arrangements work better for different people, and what works best may change over the course of one’s life. However, I also observe that institutions of power put monogamy on a pedestal in the postindustrial world. The result is a queering of other healthy forms of relationship that limits the love we share as a human family.

My intention with this paper is to help balance the scales. First, I will offer an expansive definition of polyamory and explore how it can be a journey of healing and transformation. I will then identify the three primary struggles I have observed along the polyamorous journey: shame, past trauma, and difficulty transcending labels. I will also illustrate how the spiritual and therapeutic use of psychedelics can help guide us through those struggles. To be clear, I make no claims for or against monogamy in this paper. I simply wish to highlight polyamory’s transformative potential and reclaim its validity.

The ideas in this paper come from my own psychedelic and polyamorous experiences, my clinical observations as a psychotherapist, and 25 transcribed interviews. All personal statements in this paper come from these interviews with the participants’ consent. I found interview participants by posting queries in Facebook groups related to psychedelic healing. The participants who responded were diverse in age, gender identity, sexual orientation, nationality, socioeconomic status, and preference for monogamy or polyamory. Each interview lasted approximately 30 minutes and followed a structured series of questions.

Chacruna Institute 

...Psychedelics help us transcend our labeling ego to see the full complexity and potential of our relationships. By removing limits and expectations, we are able to access what Hardy and Easton (2009) call “clean love”:

How many times have you rejected the possibility of love because it didn’t look the way you expected it to? Perhaps some characteristic was missing you were sure you must have, some other trait was present that you never dreamed of accepting. What happens when you throw away your expectations and open your eyes to the fabulous love that is shining right in front of you, holding out its hand? Clean love is love without expectations. (p. 59)

To illustrate how psychedelics help us access clean love, it is fitting to share my own story. ...

(Obligatory caution: These substances are not to be taken lightly. Read up.)

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Meanwhile, as the larger world stage darkens. . .

Call or write your representative.

(Look up their phone / email.)

    

Here again is why I've been ending posts to this polyamory news site with Ukraine: I've seen many progressive movements die out because they failed to scan the wider world accurately and understand their position in it strategically.

We polyamorous people are a small, weird minority of social-rule breakers. Increasingly powerful people call us a threat to society — because by living successfully outside of their worldview, we expose its incompleteness.

Our freedom to choose our relationship structures, and to speak up for ourselves about the truth of ourselves, is just one way we depend on a free and pluralistic society that respects people's dignity to create their own lives, to access facts, and to speak of what they know.

Such a society is possible only where people have power to govern themselves, combined with legal structures that are at least supposed to guarantee the rights of all.

Innovative people, communities, and societies who create their own lives, and who insist on the democratic structures and legal rights that enable them to do so safely, infuriate and terrify the authoritarians who are growing in power around the world and in our own United States. Now with direct mutual support, which is increasingly unhidden.

Such rulers and would-be rulers seek to stamp out other people's freedom to choose their lives — by intimidation, repressive laws, inflammatory disinformation and public incitement, weaponizing police abuse, or eventually, artillery.

For what it's worth, Polyamory in the News received more pagereads from pre-invasion Ukraine over the years (56,400) than from any other country in eastern Europe.

You can donate to Ukraine relief through this updated list of vetted organizations (Oct. 2023) or elsewhere. We're giving to a big one, Razom, and to a little informal one, Pizza for Ukraine in Kharkiv, the project of an old friend of my wife.

But that is only the start. For those of us born since World War II, this is the most consequential war of our lifetime. Because we have entered another time when calculating fascism, at home and abroad, is rising and sees freedom and liberalism and social tolerance as weak, degenerate, delusional — inviting easy pushovers. As Russia thought it saw in Ukraine. The whole world is watching what we will do about it.

Background: "The United States has a much higher stake in Russia's war on Ukraine than most people think."  More: "If we stop supporting Ukraine, then everything gets worse, all of a sudden, and no one will be talking about “fatigue” because we will all be talking about disaster."

The coming times may require hard things of us. We don't get to choose the time and place in history we find ourselves born into. We do get to choose how we respond to it. 

Need a little help bucking up? Play this. Another version. More? Some people on the eastern front trying to hold onto an open society. (TW: war is awful.) Maybe your granddad did this from a trench against Hitler's tanks— for you, and us, because a world fascist movement was successfully defeated that time, opening the way for the rest of the 20th century.

But the outcome didn't look good for a couple of years then, either. Popular history remembers the 1945 victory over the Nazis and the joyous homecoming. Less remembered are the defeats and grim prospects from 1941 through early 1943.

Remember, these people say they are doing it for us too. They are correct. The global struggle between a free, open future and a fearful revival of the dark past that's shaping up, including in our own country, is still in its early stages. It's likely to get worse before it gets better. The outcome is again uncertain, and it will determine the 21st century and the handling of all its other problems.

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PS: Ukraine should not be idealized as the paragon of an open democratic society. For instance, see If Ukraine Wants To Stand for Liberty and Democracy, It Should Rethink Some of Its Wartime Policies. And it has quite the history of being run by corrupt oligarchs — leading to the Maidan Uprising of 2013, the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, and Zelensky's overwhelming election in 2019 as the anti-corruption candidate. So they're working on that. And they're also stamping hard on the old culture of everyday, petty corruption.  More on that.  More; "Ukraine shows that real development happens when people believe they have an ownership stake in their own societies."

Now, writes US war correspondent George Packer in The Atlantic, 

Here was a country with a tragic history that had at last begun to build, with great effort, a better society. What made Ukraine different from any other country I had ever seen—certainly from my own—was its spirit of constant self-improvement, which included frank self-criticism. For example, there’s no cult of Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine—a number of Ukrainians told me that he had made mistakes, that they’d vote against him after the war was won. Maxim Prykupenko, a hospital director in Lviv, called Ukraine “a free country aspiring to be better all the time.” The Russians, he added, “are destroying a beautiful country for no logical reason to do it. Maybe they are destroying us just because we have a better life.”

They have a word there, with a deep history, for the horizontal, self-organized, mutual get-it-done that grows from community social trust: hromada. Learn that word. It's been keeping them going  to the extent they've been able. We polyfolks often dream of creating something like that community spirit in miniature, in our polycules and networks. Occasionally we succeed.

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Social attitudes in Ukraine are mostly traditional, rooted in a thousand years of the Orthodox Church. But not bitterly so like often in the US; in the last generation the ideal of modern European civil society has become widely treasured, and social progressivism has room to thrive. The status of women has fast advanced, especially post-invasion (pre-invasion article). More than 43,000 women volunteer in the armed forces, flooding traditionally male bastions — including as combat officers, artillery gunners, tankers, battlefield medics, snipers, and infantry. (Intimidating video: "Thus the Witch has Said".) Ukraine has more women volunteering in combat positions than any other armed force in the world.

  

Ukraine's LGBT military unicorn.
The thorns and barbed wire
represent old restrictions
now being cut away.
 

Some LGBT folx in the armed forces display symbols of LGBT pride on their uniforms, with official approval, whereas in Russia it's a prison-worthy crime for even a civilian to show a rainbow pin or "say gay." A report on Ukraine's LGBT+ and feminist acceptance revolutions. Another. Another. Another. War changes things.

And in December 2022, Russia made it a crime not just to speak for LGBT recognition in Russia or occupied Ukraine, but to speak for "non-traditional sexual relations." Pre-invasion, Russia had a visible polyamory education and awareness movement.

Polyfolks are like one ten-thousandth of what's at stake globally. Ukraine must have our full material backing for as long as it takes them to win their security, freedom, and future. Speak up for it.

Your congressperson's email and phone. Putin-aligned Republicans right now are blocking some $60 billion in aid, especially ammunition, that the Ukrainians desperately need in order not to be overwhelmed by Russian advances. Just a handful of other Republicans getting some courage to do what they know is right would be enough.                         

A Russian writer grieves: "My country has fallen out of time."

Women defenders in a trench in the Donetsk region

PPS:  U.S. authori-tarians, such as Sen. Ted Cruz, are saying that allowing women in front-line roles is a woke plot to weaken America's armed forces. Ukraine puts that shit to bed. Do you have a relative who talks like that? Send them this video link to Vidma, who commands a mortar platoon, recounting the story of one of their battles near Bakhmut.

Update April 14, 2024: More than a year later Vidma is still alive, still in the Bakhmut area, and posting TikToks. Her unit is at the front in or around the battle for Chasiv Yar, a town just walking distance west of Bakhmut that will soon, unfortunately, be in world news. A young girl who looks high-school age has showed up to join their fight. Another. Their lives, and their promising society, depend on us. 

And maybe our own? Says Maine's independent Senator Angus King (Jan. 31, 2024),

Whenever people write to my office [asking why we are supporting Ukraine,] I answer, 'Google Sudetenland, 1938.' We could have stopped a murderous dictator who was bent on geographic expansion…at a relatively low cost. The result of not doing so was 55 million deaths.

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