Poly activist profiled in her local alt weekly

Santa Fe Reporter

Mim Chapman's book What Does Polyamory Look Like? (2010) deserves more attention than I think it's gotten. It's a light-hearted field guide to the very different things that people often mean when they say "I'm poly!" Mim is a longtime activist and a board member of Loving More. This morning she and the book received some notice in her local alternative weekly paper:

More Than One Way

By Hunter Riley

If a previously taboo topic hits mainstream TV, you can hope it’s on its way to cultural, and eventually legal, acceptance.

....Some people use polyamorous as an umbrella term to mean anything other than monogamy, while some people choose to give “poly” a specific definition. Santa Fe counselor Mim Chapman Ph.D developed her definition of polyamory to help bring understanding of the term and lifestyle to couples, families, churches, agencies and more. Chapman has lived in Santa Fe for eight years and works as a coach to couples trying to navigate and build healthy polyamorous relationships and families. She authored a book, What Does Polymory Look Like?, wrote a curriculum to educate various groups around families that have more than two members, and teaches polyamory workshops.

“To me, poly is a lifestyle that believes that one can openly, honestly, romantically and with commitment love more than one person at the same time,” Chapman says. “And it’s also egalitarian, ideally. Everyone benefits and everyone has a say in the relationship… To me the key to polyamory is synergy.”

...Another common ‘aha’ moment for Chapman’s clients is when they question the scarcity of love model. The scarcity of love model follows the idea that if you love one person, your love is ‘used up’ and you can’t also love another person. I bet most people know that to be false....

Hunter Riley... is the store manager of Albuquerque’s best-voted sexy shop, Self Serve Sexuality Resource Center, selfservetoys.com. She also manages her personal sex education blog, hunterrileysexeducation.com....

Read the whole article (Nov. 6, 2013).

Hunter Riley writes the Santa Fe Reporter's Sex Ed column. Here's another example of sex-toy shops addressing the huge unmet need for sex education among adults in a society that does such a bad job of it in schools and elsewhere. LiveScience published an article about this phenomenon: Lacking Sex Ed, Adults Turn to 'Toy Parties'.

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Poly (Greek, "multiple") Amor (Latin, "love")

Alibi (Albuquerque, NM)

A weekly alternative/ arts/ entertainment paper in Albuquerque features polyamory and some of its local practitioners in a long, front-page feature story.

The cover illustration is lovely: three hands atop each other. This is a particularly effective (for me) solution to the perpetual journalistic problem of how to illustrate an article about people who want their privacy.

By Marisa Demarco

“Compersion.” It's a word that describes happiness at seeing a partner get joy from someone else — almost the opposite of jealousy. Monogamous lovers might hesitate to imagine feeling anything aside from anger at the sight of their other half being loved by someone else. But compersion is a kind of fulfillment gained by the polyamorous, those who maintain honest, committed romantic relationships with more than one person.

The word "compersion" is one of many invented or co-opted by polyamorous people to give names to nouns and verbs outside the dominant paradigm of monogamy. Julian Wolf thinks back to a confusing time before she had words for her preferred method of loving. "It took me going to college and finding other strange and fun people that lived differently before I got words for all of the things I had been doing my whole life," Wolf says.

...With straight red hair and conservative business attire, she's eating oatmeal and taking a break from her nine-to-five day job to talk about her "starfish."... Not that long ago, Wolf was dating five people. Her friend Riotgrrlscout came up with a shape for it. Wolf was the center of a starfish whose arms sometimes touched and sometimes didn't.

...In spite of being at the center of a starfish, Wolf emphasizes that her relationships are not always sexual. In fact, she often won't have sex with a person until she's known them for years.

...Polyobvious, [Erik] Erhardt calls it: When you have multiple "partners" for any definition of the word partner, "and everyone knows about everyone else." It is vital to the philosophy of polyamory that everyone involved in a relationship knows about everyone else and is comfortable and agrees with the situation.

..."One thing polyamorists are not is beyond feeling jealous," says Erhardt. In fact, that's one issue bubbling to the surface of the discussion group he facilitates regularly. Ethi-Q Slutdom meets odd-week Thursdays to talk about challenges and strategies for polyamorous relationships....

Read the whole article (issue of Feb. 14-20, 2008).