About Carrie Jenkins, poly philosopher making waves

Best for last? Here's my final post of three in recent days about poly philosophy professor and new-book author Carrie Jenkins, who's getting in the news.

The Chronicle of Higher Education, read by college faculty and administrators everywhere, has published a 4,000-word article about her life and career, the weak record of formal philosophy on the subject of romantic love, and the literally shitty (as in, human feces) place for women in academic philosophy's very male world. High points:

‘I Have Multiple Loves’

Carrie Jenkins makes the philosophical case for polyamory

Photos: Jimmy Jeong / Chronicle Review

By Moira Weigel

Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins and I have plans to meet her boyfriend for lunch. But first we have to go home to walk the dog. Her husband, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, is out of town at a conference for the weekend, and earlier that morning Mezzo, their labradoodle mix, got skunked; Jenkins says Mezzo is still feeling shaky. Before I traveled to meet her in Vancouver last June, she told me on the phone that most "mono" people misunderstand the challenges of polyamory — the practice of being openly involved romantically with more than one person at a time.

"People ask, ‘Tell me about the downsides,’ " Jenkins says. "They expect the answer to be that it’s so hard jealousy-wise. But the most common answer is timing and scheduling. I’m a fairly organized person, so I don’t find it super challenging."

The claim is easy to believe. In her professional life, too, Jenkins is managing to do several things at once. Since 2011 she has held a prestigious Canada Research Chair in the philosophy department at the University of British Columbia; she has taught 200-person lecture courses in metaphysics to undergraduates and advanced graduate seminars in epistemology. This semester she is co-teaching an interdisciplinary survey on the theme of "Knowledge and Power," introducing students to Freud, Russell, and Foucault in short order.

Jenkins is also in a band, called 21st Century Monads, in which she and several other academics write songs about the philosophy of numbers....

Jenkins wrote about polyamory because she felt she had to. She and her husband were tired of living in the closet.

...As we walk Mezzo around Mount Pleasant, a leafy neighborhood about 20 minutes away from campus by the green electric scooter that Jenkins drives to work every morning, she starts explaining why she prefers the term "polyamory" to "nonmonogamy."

...It took about a year, Jenkins recalls, before "I started to realize that I was in love with Ray as well as in love with Jon. And it probably took even more time to acknowledge it." After that, "the poly label started to feel like more of a useful fit."

Despite the personal clarity that she has gained on these points, socially the relationship has not been easy. Even in liberal settings, where people might not blink at the idea of a friend sleeping around or dating someone of the same gender, Jenkins says that "mononormativity" persists: The ruling assumption is that a person can be in love with only one other person at a time. (She recalls a colleague becoming extremely discomfited recently at her husband’s birthday party, when Hsu introduced himself as "Carrie’s boyfriend.") Still, Jenkins believes that we are in urgent need of a more expansive concept of love. And she believes that philosophy, the discipline named for the "love of knowledge," needs to become more expansive — treating a wider range of questions and addressing a broader audience — in order to help create it.

Jenkins did not set out to become a love expert. After growing up in Wales, she entered Trinity College, Cambridge, and pursued a degree in analytic philosophy; she stayed on to write a doctoral thesis on the philosophy of mathematics. "There’s a tradition of philosophy that I grew up in which is quite narrow in terms of the topics that it would address, in academic journal publications," she recalls. "We were addressing fundamental problems about space and time."

She published her first book, Grounding Concepts: An Empirical Basis for Arithmetical Knowledge (Oxford University Press), in 2008. ...

Following that book, Jenkins published a series of articles on theories of explanation. However, she began thinking more and more about love. It seems logical that a thinker who spent so much time re-evaluating the ways in which experience shaped metaphysical knowledge might attempt to analyze her own life using the tools of philosophy. As Jenkins tells it, however, her inspiration came from Bertrand Russell — one of the founding fathers of analytic philosophy and a titanic presence at Cambridge.

Jenkins with her husband (right) and boyfriend.

"What I didn’t realize when I was studying his philosophy of mathematics was that he wrote about all these other things," Jenkins recalls. She particularly means his 1929 book, Marriage and Morals, in which Russell advocated for what he called "free love." Jenkins calls the book "a precursor of the contemporary sex-positive movement." She thinks that a lot of Russell’s work on love and marriage was ahead of its time, but that he himself remained blind to its philosophical importance.

...While philosophers trained in the Continental tradition — thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Derrida — have written about love, analytic philosophy continues to dominate North American departments. Increasingly, Jenkins has become frustrated with the way it separates philosophy from "real life" concerns.

Personal considerations finally drove her to start making this argument in public. ...

"Despite various kinds of nervousness (justified or otherwise) about disclosure," they wrote, "being closetedly non-monogamous (effectively, mono-acting) has its disadvantages too. We’re ready to be done with it. Academic philosophy is a small world; certain areas of it are very small indeed. What if someone happens to see one of us with somebody else, and assumes (not thinking about the alternatives) that we’re cheating? We each hate the idea of being taken for a cheater, or of being pitied as the spouse of a cheater...."

Jenkins and Ichikawa called their letter "On Being the Only Ones." Soon after they published it, they learned that they weren’t. Strangers, and couples they had known casually for years, started approaching them at conferences, they say, and thanking them for writing the piece. Many said they had quietly lived the same way and felt relieved to be able to speak about it. Emboldened by a new sense that she had an activist mission — that her coming out might help others like her, and that she, as a tenured professor, had the privilege to do so — Jenkins began writing more about nonmonogamy. She wrote about it in The Globe and Mail and Slate. She went on CBC to give radio interviews. ...
...The Cosmopolitan UK spread not only conveyed the opposite of the message that Jenkins had wanted to send. It turned her into a target of abuse online. Like many women who write for the public, particularly about gender or sexuality, Jenkins gets a steady stream of hate mail. Strangers threaten her on Twitter: Why are you acting like this is an ok thing? Get herpes and die, slut. Sharia law looks more attractive by the day. ...

Meanwhile, Jenkins has had to contend with harassment within her discipline, too. She declines to offer specifics but says, "Anonymous commentaries in the philosophy blogosphere can be pretty grim." The field has been widely criticized from within by scholars who say that not only is the curriculum male-centric, but gender discrimination is routine. In recent years, several high-profile cases of sexual harassment have further sullied its reputation. ...

Jenkins emphasizes that this image not only affects who is doing philosophical work. It also shapes what kind of work gets done.

The debate over what kind of philosophy gets rewarded blew up recently in a more specific storm, in which Jenkins found herself at the center. It started as a set of disputes surrounding Brian Leiter, a University of Chicago law professor who founded the Philosophical Gourmet Report, and ran it until recently. The Gourmet Report ranks philosophy departments, based on surveys filled out by hundreds of academic philosophers every year, and enjoys enormous influence within the field. It has also caused consternation among critics who have questioned its methodology and say it is biased against philosophy departments with a Continental orientation or an Asian one.

...It was one of several critiques of the Gourmet Report that prompted a flurry of online and email exchanges between Leiter and his critics, and preceded a statement that Jenkins published in the summer of 2014 pledging to behave with civility in her professional life.

Many in the field, including Leiter, read the statement as an attack on him. He responded by sending Jenkins a derisive email and tweeting that she was a "sanctimonious arse." When Jenkins made the email public, other philosophers rallied to her defense. They circulated a "statement of concern," eventually signed by 600 faculty and students, saying that Leiter’s actions had harmed Jenkins’s health and ability to work, and refusing to participate in the Gourmet Report’s surveys until he stepped down as the editor. Leiter published a series of posts complaining of a "smear campaign" and that October stepped down, though he remains on the Gourmet Report’s advisory board. Later that year, he threatened to sue Jenkins for falsely portraying him.

Jenkins refuses to speak about the Leiter controversy. Last summer she — along with Jennings and two other vocal critics of Leiter’s — each received an envelope full of human feces. Leiter denied sending the packages and has attributed them to someone who must be trying to embarrass him.

I n contrast with these dramas, Jenkins’s book What Love Is reads calmly....

"We are creating space in our ongoing cultural conversations to question the universal norm of monogamous love, just as we previously created space to question the universal norm of hetero love," Jenkins writes. "I’m personally invested, as are you...."

The central goal of What Love Is is to abolish what Jenkins calls "the romantic mystique," a deliberate allusion to Betty Friedan’s classic second-wave text, The Feminine Mystique. "On the one hand, we’ve accepted the idea of love as a tremendously significant social force: something that shapes and reshapes the entire trajectories of lives and serves as a focal point for all kinds of values," Jenkins writes. On the other hand, "we have simultaneously normalized the idea that love is a mystery: something hard or impossible to comprehend."

...While Jenkins criticizes those who are too quick to call "insufficiently examined ideology … ‘natural’ or ‘biological,’ " she also emphasizes that recognizing the biological elements of romantic love can have socially emancipatory effects....

"Let’s not forget that it took many years of serious scientific research to convince (most) people that there is no biologically superior race or gender," writes Jenkins. "Getting a proper grip on the biology of love may help us unravel the idea that there is one biologically superior way to love."

Read the whole article (Feb. 3, 2017).

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Update Feb. 23: A new interview in Vox: Is our view of romantic love too narrow? A philosopher makes the case for polyamory.

...I want to start a conversation. I don't care whether everyone agrees with what I say. I just want people to be talking about this. I think that's the way progress gets done. ... I think we can make progress if we get more people thinking about monogamy, about romantic love, and why it looks the way it does and how much control we have over that.

I keep coming back to this idea that we have so much control over what love is, what love looks like, what stories we tell, what is depicted in romantic comedies, what stories are told in romance novels. All of these ways we determine what love is are a social construct. We have so much control over that. That means we are responsible for getting it right.

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Carrie Jenkins' book: "What Love Is, and What It Could Be"

Canadian philosopher Carrie Jenkins is a rising star for polyamory awareness (see previous post, and remember her piece about poly feet and the white duvet?). Now she's getting wider attention for her book out last month, What Love Is and What It Could Be, deconstructing romantic love for the 21st century. It's been getting a lot of reviews.

● In Quartz, A polyamorous philosopher explains what we all get wrong about romantic love. (February 11, 2017):

...But as Carrie Jenkins, a philosophy professor at the University of British Columbia, points out in her recently published book, [our] concept of [romantic] love is actually the product of a very narrow social script.

...“It’s harming people,” she says — not just those who, like herself, do not fit the conventional script of monogamy and marriage.

Though the social script of romantic love today has recently expanded to allow for same-sex romance, it still expects everlasting couples who stay together till death do you part. Such expectations are damaging for those who don’t wish to follow such a narrative, argues Jenkins. This applies to those in polyamorous relationships but also single people, and those who don’t want children....

Love is a hugely messy concept, and Jenkins argues that it incorporates both a biological side and a socially constructed side. The biological element refers to the physical behavior (the fluctuating hormones and shifts in brain activity) of those who are in love, and is a reflection of our evolutionary need for such ties. But it’s the social script that shapes our norms and expectations of romance, such as the contemporary belief that true love will be permanent and monogamous.

Though this social construct can shift over time, Jenkins says, that doesn’t happen easily. “Some people think it’s made up like fiction is made up, but I’m trying to say it’s made up like the law is made up. We made it, but now it’s real.”

...For example, the “Cinderella story,” in which a woman is rescued by a more wealthy, powerful, high-status man, is still a prevalent tale of what’s considered romantic... “feeding into these gendered stereotypes,” she says. “This is built into our ideas of who we find attractive, what it is to have a romantic story attached to your love life.”

...Jenkins believes that opening up the social construct of romantic love will ultimately be positive for everyone, even those who end up following the traditional script. “If you give people more choices and they choose to be monogamous, then that’s great. I think it’s better to do things with awareness rather than because it’s the only option available.”

● In Canada's National Post and other papers in its chain: From polyamory to marriage values, if you understand what love is to you, you’re more likely to find it (Feb. 13):

By Blair Mlotek

When new ideas threaten what we hold as truth, it is sometimes easier to stay away from them altogether. ...Vancouver-based writer and philosopher Carrie Jenkins sets out to tell us that love may not be what we think it is – a frightening notion at first, but Jenkins means no harm. In fact, this book is a testament to love.

Although Jenkins is a highly educated philosopher, What Love Is should be accessible to all. She believes that there is more philosophy in our everyday lives than we realize; it is there each time we wonder at the way things are.

But if you picked up this book to find out the definitive answer to what love is, you will not find it here.

...She writes, if we understand it, we can control it, and then change it. She asks us to be active readers, “not to passively absorb my ideas” but to question and challenge them.

Jenkins’s explanation of prevailing monogamy is that in the past people married for the purpose of relationships between families and countries; for financial reasons. Today, people are told to marry for love. Having a nuclear family was normalized and so the steps to get there had to be as well. To have kids, people needed to marry, to marry they have to fall in love.

It is our prerogative to change this....

● In her hometown Vancouver Sun: Unlucky in love? Try thinking critically about it, UBC prof suggests (Jan. 25). With a video.

By Stephanie Ip

...“Love hasn’t been viewed as central to modern philosophy, at least not in the traditions that I work in. That’s a problem,” said Jenkins.

“Without thinking critically about love, you’re kind of defenceless. If you just go with the flow, you can end up in some bad situations such as abusive relationships, or feeling like a failure just for being who you are.”

...“If we don’t have our critical-thinking skills switched on when we are surrounded by the Hallmark and Disney stuff, we just absorb it, and then it becomes our theory of what love is,” said Jenkins. “I think that’s dangerous, and it’s what I’m trying to arm people against.”

● On Valentine's Day, Jenkins was on Canada's popular radio talk show The Current: It's possible to be in love with two people, says philosopher (Feb. 14):

..."You know, it was partly prompted by people telling me if you're in love with two people then that's not real. That's not real love. ... And that didn't feel true to my experience, so I started thinking Well, what is it that they're talking about? What are they describing? That got me down the path of thinking about the way that socially, we police and prescribe certain normative models for romantic love."

..."If you don't understand that both biology and society are playing a role, you might mistake some of the things that are really coming out of the social construct side of things for biological or natural reality and I think gender is a huge part of this."

Listen here (23:34). Here's a transcript.


● A fellow philosopher, writing in the Times Higher Education section of The Times in London, is disappointed by the book's lack of rigor: "Polyamory could shed light on whether love is mainly biological or social" (Feb. 9).

By Jane O'Grady

...This book opens with her morning musings, as she walks from her boyfriend’s flat to the home she shares with her husband, about whether or not she can be said to be in love with both of them. Impatient with the way romantic love is presented as mysterious, and therefore unchangeable, she reminds us that loving is something we do, and can perhaps do differently and better. Whether we can depends on how far love is biologically hard-wired, and therefore subject to the slowness of evolution, and how far socially constructed. Jenkins seems to promise a key debate, which, although hardly new, will be conducted from the original angle of polyamory.

Unfortunately, this book is slipshod, repetitive, and full of rambling assertions rather than fine-grained philosophical analysis....

“I propose a new theory of romantic love,” Jenkins declares.... love’s dual nature is instantiated in “ancient biological machinery embodying a modern social role”. But how does that work? Jenkins never fleshes out her airy claim, and annoyingly conflates the origins of love in human history and in the history of a particular human. The crucial allied question of how romantic love fuses genitals and sonnets is never touched on.

Polyamory provides a promising tuning fork for sounding the nature of romantic love, and whether focusing exclusively on one person is essential to it. Jenkins arouses expectations that she will philosophise on this and similar questions via her own feelings, but ultimately offers little in the way either of emotion or philosophy.

● Another philosopher, in the L.A. Review of Books: Illuminating Love (Jan. 28):

By Skye C. Cleary

...Helen Fisher also argues that monogamous romantic love was an evolutionary solution to “female neediness”: once women became bipeds and, arms full, could no longer carry babies on their backs, we needed males for protection. Because men couldn’t protect whole harems of women, heterosexual monogamous nuclear families emerged as the norm. With swift and graceful logic, Jenkins points out that this is highly unlikely, primarily because,

if over 1 million years passed between the arrival of bipedalism and the evolution of love, then there must have been other solutions to the problem of having one’s hands full of babies that worked well enough to keep hominid evolution going for over 1 million years […] And if bipedalism posed such a problem for female ancestors specifically, how come we didn’t end up with male-only bipedalism?

● Quill & Quire: What Love Is: And What It Could Be (Jan. 20).

The philosopher describes What Love Is as “an exercise in critical thinking out loud,” and blends thorough research with personal experiences to present a readable and highly informative book. Jenkins in no way “spoils” love, but rather stimulates an essential, relevant conversation in a novel, inspiring way.

● At the American Spectator, a paleo-conservative organ, Robert Stacy McCain is fuming: They Even Hate Love (Feb. 14):

...Feminism’s goal is to achieve equality through androgyny, eradicating masculinity and femininity so that men and women become exactly identical and, in such an egalitarian post-patriarchal utopia, what basis could there be for romantic love?

None whatsoever, as feminist Carrie Jenkins explains in her new book.... Professor Jenkins, who teaches philosophy at the University of British Columbia, is an advocate and practitioner of polyamory. Her book has been praised by her fellow feminists as an argument against “traditional, heteronormative, monogamous, pair-bonded, procreative, romantic love.” It is wrong even to imagine that kind of love, Professor Jenkins recently told an interviewer: “This idea that it’s very romantic to be swept off your feet by a Prince Charming figure and rescued from a life of poverty or whatever by a wealthy man, is feeding into these gendered stereotypes. This is built into our ideas of who we find attractive, what it is to have a romantic story attached to your love life.”

● Announcement on Booklist (Dec. 1, 2016):

...Equally important to its subject matter, the book is a master class in how to think and why. Jenkins researches, questions, unpacks, considers, and examines. A philosophy professor, Jenkins uses her readable book to advocate for thinking both critically and in great depth as a form of self-protection and self-advocacy. Tolerate no one admonishing you for overthinking love, she advises. Love is an “extreme sport,” and we need parachutes. In so arguing, she empowers her readers in regard to not just their love lives but also their whole lives.

● Continued in Additional post.

● More reviews are linked to from the book's website, with highlights of glowing quotes.

● Further recent news coverage.

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