"Has Polyamory Hit The Tipping Point?"

When enough people call it a trend, it's a trend. In Harlot magazine yesterday:

Has Polyamory Hit The Tipping Point?

Shutterstock

By Kitty Stryker

Polyamory is totally in right now.

It’s been covered in all the best and brightest digital media, from the Atlantic to ELLE to Forbes. Everyone wants to weigh in on the relationship dynamic. Even the Daily Mail, of all places, seems to have a hot take on polyamory – and they don’t seem to hate it.

The time has come to ask: has polyamory hit the tipping point?

There was a time where monogamy was the go-to default, where you had to create polycules in your personal Tumblr headcanon. Now it’s getting airtime at SXSW, on House of Cards, even being discussed in relationship to that thunderdome of red roses, The Bachelor. Have we reached a place in society where the perfect couple isn’t a couple anymore?

More to the point… do we want that?

If polyamory becomes normalized, what will happen to our daytime television?... Well, at least until networks hire more creative writers....

Read on (April 1, 2016). "Kitty Stryker is porn's riot grrl, striving to bring consent culture and feminism to the forefront of her work as a performer and producer... and has written for Buzzfeed, Fleshbot, the Guardian, the Daily Dot, and more. She blogs at KittyStryker.com" (NSFW).

For the record, the first article in this (ahem) massive archive* about polyamory reaching its tipping point was this one in Wired, dated February 29, 2008.

Full search of "tipping point" on this site.

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* You're reading post number 1,213.

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"Internet Pushes Polyamory to Its 'Tipping Point' "

Wired magazine

Those of us who labor in the poly-awareness vineyard sometimes get a sense that big things are actually starting to happen. I'm always wary of wishful thinking (having taken catechism about this from Heinlein's Time Enough for Love in my youth). But now comes Regina Lynn, columnist for Wired magazine, saying that thanks to the internet, poly is breaking out as some kind of Next Big Thing.

Internet Pushes Polyamory to Its 'Tipping Point'

By Regina Lynn

The internet is famous for hooking people up for everything from blind dates to political activism.

For people into polyamory — a way of life in which participants engage in multiple intimate relationships simultaneously, with the knowledge and consent of everyone involved — the internet provided a handy label for their lifestyle and a launch pad for injecting the concept into mainstream consciousness.

"Around 1990, we found this nifty name to call ourselves, instead of 'responsible, consensual nonmonogamy,'" says Dr. Kenneth Haslam, a retired anesthesiologist and curator of the Kenneth R. Haslam Collection on Polyamory at The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. "About that same time, the internet came along — and it was at exactly the right time. The internet is a tipping point for polyamory."

From its somewhat murky etymological past to 1992's creation of the alt.polyamory Usenet newsgroup, the term has swept to mainstream acceptance.... The Washington Post ran a long feature on the subject for Valentine's Day....

While having multiple committed partners is not a new concept, many polyamorists have told me they felt lost, guilty, alone or freakish until they came across the word polyamory on the internet and for the first time had a context for the way they felt about love.

...Geeks have not traditionally been viewed as relationship experts, yet as a subculture, we are open to alternative ways of life. We immerse ourselves in science fiction and fantasy, imagining other cultures and experiencing relationships not necessarily bound by puritanical traditions.

...Cunning Minx, creator and host of the Polyamory Weekly podcast, says she's seen a significant change in how the mainstream media treats polyamory in just the three years since her first episode. "Poly used to be so alternative you had to adopt this entire different culture [to participate]," she says. "While it's definitely still an emotional and spiritual upheaval for many people to shake off the paradigms of monogamy that are so ingrained in us, now you can meet poly people in a group and talk about it in a safe place."...

Read the whole article (Feb. 29, 2008).

Me, I think it's happening more slowly. I think we'll still be talking about being in tipping-point moments 10 or 20 years from now. I don't think we'll have a really poly-aware and poly-mature culture for 50 or 100 years, but I am convinced that it's coming. (Even then, my hunch is that 90 percent of people will choose monogamy if only because it's simpler, but that's another topic.)

I'm reminded of something that Stanley Kurtz wrote two years ago, when the TV series "Big Love" began, about the nature of social change. Kurtz is an anti-gay-marriage fulminator for top-tier conservative journals and think tanks, and he has us polys squarely in his sights. He wrote:

Collapsing Taboo

It's... important to remember that support for polygamy and polyamory (approval of one is bound to help license the other) cannot be tracked in a simple, linear fashion.... We are dealing, not with an election campaign, but with the possible collapse of a social taboo....

Social taboos may erode gradually over the very long haul, but up close, and especially toward the beginning, you get little collapses — the quick and unexpected falling away of opposition. What used to be hidden emerges with startling rapidity, because much of it was there all along. Polygamy, and especially polyamory, are already widespread on the Internet. Both practices are pushing toward a major public taboo-collapsing moment. We can't know when "critical mass" might be reached....

Three cheers, say I.

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And now, a cautionary note.

The people who push for years to get a bandwagon rolling are usually unprepared for what to do when the bandwagon finally starts to move. No longer is it all about grunting and straining from behind to make the bandwagon's wheels move half an inch. If the effort succeeds, the bandwagon eventually starts rolling on its own, faster and faster. And unless the people with the original vision stop just shoving the rear bumper and run up and grab the steering wheel, pretty soon the bandwagon outruns them and leaves them behind. And their elation turns to horror as they watch it careen downhill out of control, in disastrous unintended directions. And then it wrecks itself spectacularly in a ditch, and onlookers nod their heads knowingly and say they saw it coming all along.

Is this what Stanley Kurtz will be writing about polyamory 20 years from now? Will he be right?

Remember what happened to the psychedelic drug movement. It started with tremendous promise among a handful of philosophers and intellectuals in the early 1960s, gained popularity and momentum, careened out of control downmarket, and morphed into a cheapened, degraded "drugs are good" cultural meme for the masses. By the early 1970s the drug-culture bandwagon was so ugly and indiscriminate that people like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died from, of all the stupid things, tranquilizers and heroin.

So maybe it's time for us poly activists to pay less attention to pushing the polyamory-awareness movement, and more to steering it.

If we are to save our defining word from serious cheapening, and guide this thing in good directions as it gains momentum, we should, in my opinion, be taking every opportunity to:

** Stress that successful polyamory requires high standards of ethics, integrity, intention, generosity, and concern for others;

** Emphasize that poly is not for everyone and that monogamy is the best model for many;

** Insist on the part of the definition that stresses respect for everyone and the "full knowledge and consent of all involved";

** Expand that to not just "knowledge and consent," but well-wishing and good intention for all involved. The defining aspect of poly, I'm convinced — the thing that sets it apart and makes it powerful and radical and transformative — is in seeing one's metamours not as rivals to be resented or even as neutral figures to be tolerated, but as, at minimum, friends and acquaintances for whom you genuinely wish good things. (And beyond that minimum, there's no limit to how deep it can go.) This is what differentiates poly from merely having affairs. In this way it becomes a generalization of the magic of romantic love — into something much wider and more powerful than the dominant paradigm of a couple carefully walling away their particular love from anything to do with the rest of humanity.

** Warn people that, while poly can open extraordinary new worlds of joy and wonder and may help to humanize the world, its benefits must be earned: through courage, hard relationship-honesty work, ruthless self-examination, tough personal growth, and a quick readiness to (as the Marine Corp puts it) "choose the difficult right over the easy wrong." It can cause catastrophes if you let your personal standards of conduct drop even briefly.

Please — with the bandwagon now moving, let's not let it run away from us in the next few years to the point that "polyamory" goes mass-market as something careless, trivial, or in any way less than what we know it to be.

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The movie *Twice* and its Kickstarter campaign

If you're on the polywebs (and why else would you be here?) you've seen the Kickstarter appeal for Sarah Arlen's indie movie Twice. It's all over the place because these people are doing their publicity, but also because lots of folks have looked into the project, gotten interested, and given it a signal boost. Count me in.

Trailer:




The campaign is in its final week — it ends March 17.  It's $18,912 of the way to its goal of $25,000. This is not a "flexible funding" campaign; if they don't raise $25,000 by next Tuesday evening they get nothing, and the donors' credit cards/ PayPal accounts are not charged.

We often say we wish movies and art would explore poly life seriously, so if that's you, now's the time to step up and make it happen.

The Kickstarter pitch:




The press release:

Feature Film Twice is Crowdfunding to Tell a Polyamorous Love Story.

Indie feature film Twice, by Sarah Arlen, plans on being the tipping point of the polyamorous revolution. A crowdfunding campaign for the project is running February 14th (Valentine’s Day) through March 17th (Saint Patrick’s Day), 2015, in order to raise $25,000 in completion funds and to create audience awareness of the film.

The movie tells a polyamorous love story from two divergent points of view, one of “Woman,” the other of “Man.” While the plot revolves around the two characters starting out as friends, becoming lovers, breaking up and getting back together, the core themes of the movie are centered around second chances, being honest, embracing identity and coming out of the closet. The project’s purpose is to show what it can be like to live a polyamorous life, while also exploring how monogamous people can understand, accept and love polyamorists.

...Twice turns the standard romantic comedy plot on its head. The tension of the story doesn’t come from the standard cinema trope of “Who will be the chosen one?” but rather “How will they all love each other?”

Because many polyamorists live in the closet, they stand as an example of what being “closeted” means in everyday life and how “coming out” is something everyone experiences each time they reveal a new facet of themselves that might be misinterpreted or bullied.

In 2014, a major tipping point came for the transgender community when Laverne Cox appeared on the cover of Time magazine. With the recent significant rise of media coverage about polyamory, it appears the next cultural tipping point will be polyamory. Twice, much like Orange is the New Black, is striving to be the entertaining conduit that invites audiences to see the humanity in a word they might not have ever heard before and tips polyamory into pop culture.

More links from Arlen:

My production company is Polyamorous Productions. Its Facebook page.

My Twitter handle is @saraharlen  and my company’s is @polyamorousart .

I registered a hashtag: #makingtwice

Graphics for sharing.

Lots of photos.

Here are some swipe files:

For Twitter:

See #polyamory on the big screen! I backed "Twice: A Polyamorous Feature Film" on Kickstarter, support it today! bit.ly/kickstartTWICE

...

For Facebook:

Come to the poly party! Help make a feature film while getting a great reward: for $100, you get invites to worldwide polyamorous parties, plus the finished film of “Twice” (a polyamorous love story set in sexy Paris) and much more. Support it before March 17th at www.twicethefilm.com.

R-Rated music video of Twice: (feel free to share with the password):
link: https://vimeo.com/118403555
password: KSLove!

Sign up for free videos & updates from Polyamorous Productions.

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Will "Big Love" be a cultural tipping point?

The HBO polygamy drama "Big Love," scheduled to run Sunday nights for 12 weeks, has turned public attention to non-monogamous families like nothing in recent memory. Opinions in the polyamory community are mixed, but the show is certainly better than many feared, and it has won some over. For instance, Rob Wilson at Polyamorous Percolations writes in the first of a series of weekly reviews he plans (titled "Big Love, Big Opportunities"):

...As I sat and watched I found several subtle things that we in the polyamorous world can point to and say "This is very true." Such as the support network created by an extended family.

...The show started off with all the family gathered together about the table sharing dinner. Notice the important word — family. Not a separate dinner with each wife, not a harsh word between the wives; a general sense of well being and community was instead implied.

All three wives are shown at the table dividing up the income, working out a fair and reasonable way to "share" the attentions of their mutual husband and discussing various things.... [When] Margene was way over her head while watching the kids... who comes to comfort her? Not Bill, but the other two wives who cradle her and express mutual support and love for each other.

And that's exactly the idea, say the show's creators, Will Scheffer and Mark Olsen, according to an article in the February 26, 2006, Los Angeles Times:

The more [Scheffer and Olsen] explored the idea, the more they realized polygamists could embody universal and admirable qualities that define the best family love. "We're very much populists in what we're going for. We don't like cynical.... We want people to fall in love with these characters and to root for this family," Olsen said.

...At a time when strong female roles are rare in movies and television, "Big Love" is a candy store for actresses. "There are feminist analogies in the material," Scheffer said. Polygamist women, who are bonded to one another as well as to their husband, have strong and close relationships, he said. "They find their power with and in each other."

"It's not just a marriage between a man and a woman," explained [actress Jeanne] Tripplehorn [who plays Barb] — who, like the other cast members, spoke of the characters as if they were real people. "A woman doesn't enter into that relationship without the agreement of the other woman, or women. If one had said no, then Margene wouldn't have been in the marriage."

Read the whole article.

Even some lions of cultural conservatism are being won over... a bit. At National Review Online, Louis Wittig has gone distinctly wobbly:

Being a cultural conservative is monotonous. Everything is in a perpetual state of going to hell. Two things can really break the routine. The first is when the slippery slope becomes a high-speed luge track....

Big Love is an example of that rare... thing that can interrupt conservatives' parade of sighs: a show that, if you think about it, does eat away at a pillar of society. But a show that you don't think about like that — because it's too good.

...Big Love's polygamy doesn't seem surreally normal because Olsen and Sheffer [a gay couple] tried to make it that way (if they have any obvious take, it's that polygamy is a tremendous hassle). Polygamy seems innocuous because its polygamists are such well-written, well-acted characters.... First and foremost, you like them. Bill, Barb, Nicki, Margene, all of them. You sympathize with them. You're pulling for them to overcome their obstacles.

It's kind of unnatural, then, to try and turn your mind around and start thinking of them in fire-and-brimstone terms. You just go with it. There may be things about the characters you don't connect with, parts of them you don't sympathize with. But if the characters are strong enough — and Big Love's are — those elements recede, becoming quirks more than defects, and, really, afterthoughts. Polygamy: an afterthought.

...At least you'll have something great to watch as everything falls apart.

Read the whole article.

So — is HBO on the cusp of a culture lurch toward group relationships becoming widely accepted, even hip? Karen von Hahn in Canada's national newspaper the Globe and Mail thinks maybe so:

...the people at HBO seem to have some weird third eye thing into the zeitgeist. Remember when they introduced Sex and the City, how it was also the moment that everything was about single girls in Manolos drinking their Cosmopolitans and talking about men? When they launched The Sopranos, we were all suddenly busy listening to the Rat Pack, buying pinky rings, playing five-card stud and taking the red-eye to Vegas. And guess what — Jeanne Tripplehorn, the "Boss Wife" on Big Love, agrees with me. "When I got the script, you know, I just laughed," she said in a telephone interview. "But the thing is, this really is a real way of life for a lot of people." Moreover, according to Tripplehorn, who prepared for her role by researching the "poly" lifestyle (we conventional couples are "diads," by the way), "the numbers suggest that this progressive kind of polygamy is on the rise."

Read the whole article.

(Before anyone gets too excited about Tripplehorn having researched "the 'poly' lifestyle," I wonder if this was just the author's clueless abbreviation for "polygamous." Does any reader know more?)

Our favorite conservative chronicler, Stanley Kurtz, uncovers, as usual, a conspiracy to overthrow Western civilization, and he practically throws up his hands in despair that we polys are winning hearts and minds all over the place:

It has been argued that Big Love is just a harmless drama, no more likely to promote social acceptance of polygamy than the Sopranos is likely to promote crime. But we know that Big Love's own creators and stars don't see it this way. They clearly intend their show to challenge and change America's way of thinking about the family.

...Speaking to The Washington Blade, Olsen said he and Scheffer wanted to address our culture war over the family by trying to "find the values of family that are worth celebrating separate of who the people are and how they're doing it." In other words, family structure shouldn't matter as long as people love each other. Scheffer adds that what attracted him to the Big Love project was "the subversive nature of how we deal with family values.... I think what's really exciting about the show is the nonjudgmental look we have on our characters."

Kurtz then goes on to make a very perceptive point about social change that should gladden us all:

Collapsing Taboo

It's... important to remember that support for polygamy and polyamory (approval of one is bound to help licence the other) cannot be tracked in a simple, linear fashion. This is not something that can be judged by open support, like public opinion during an election campaign....

We are dealing, not with an election campaign, but with the possible collapse of a social taboo — something television is ideally suited to achieve. Social taboos may erode gradually over the very long haul, but up close, and especially toward the beginning, you get little collapses — the quick and unexpected falling away of opposition. What used to be hidden emerges with startling rapidity, because much of it was there all along. Polygamy, and especially polyamory, are already widespread on the Internet. Both practices are pushing toward a major public taboo-collapsing moment. We can't know when "critical mass" might be reached, but Big Love has got to be getting us there a whole lot quicker than we were.

It's a radical's dream come true.

Read the whole article.

In a discussion of that article on the Unitarian Universalists for Polyamory Awareness e-mail list, Stanley Forrester — who describes himself as a conservative Republican with a libertarian bent — offers important insight on why people like Kurtz fear us, and how we can address their fears on their own terms. He wrote (reprinted with his permission):

From my reading of Kurtz he is not opposed to same-sex marriage/polygamy out of a desire to oppress as much as a desire to preserve something he sees as valuable. Advocates for a traditional family structure can point to a system which for all its faults has been instrumental in the continuity of our culture and civilization.... to dismiss out of hand the concerns and doubts of others is to drive yourself into an adversarial relationship with that other.

As a progressive you don't need the support of conservatives (and to try to get it would be a fool's errand in any case), but you do need their acquiescence. Your most powerful lever is the sense of fair play which is so part of the American character. Address the concerns that Kurtz raises, allay the fears that will drive the readers who form Kurtz's audience to the polls to oppose you. If you want to see same-sex marriage or polygamy legalized, then point out that there are same-sex and poly families that raise families and contribute to their communities. Show that these families can be stable wholesome environments that will promote values and the common good they can identify with. You may not convince many people, but all you really need is to move a few of those who would otherwise oppose you to give you the benefit of the doubt.

...Take the time to reach out to conservatives, to convince them that this is not just an issue of individual license. Take the effort to bring them along.

P.S. added later: Another widely printed conservative's column prompted by Big Love is Charles Krauthammer's, which originally appeared in the March 17th Washington Post.

Ménage Your Time; "Why is this stuff so hot right now?"

Style (Richmond, VA)

"Greater Richmond's alternative newsweekly," located in Jenny Block's old hometown, reviews her new open-relationship book and also Tristan Taormino's:

Ménage Your Time

By Valley Haggard

At one time a band of gold was the fashion choice for monogamists everywhere, but for a growing number of people, that ring has gone out of style: For them, polyamory is the new monogamy.

Increasingly, it seems, people in committed relationships are choosing to let the neighbors in on their richer, their poorer, their sickness and their health. The new CBS series “Swingtown” and HBO’s “Big Love” present alternate bedroom realities. And now two smart, unsmarmy books about polyamory are on the shelves, all of which begs the question: Why is this stuff so hot right now?

The writer never tries to answer that.

...“I think we’ve gotten sex and love really tangled up,” Block says. “We’ve gotten really possessive; marriage has become all about sexual ownership, but there’s not necessarily emotional support. That’s not to say I have a problem with monogamy. If it’s a conscious choice, hey, more power to you.”

...“Open” is a memoir, but at times it reads like a critical analysis of evolving lifestyle choices. (It even has footnotes.) “I started out writing more pure memoir, but my editor thought it would be too indulgent and racy,” Block says. So she approached her writing in a more intellectual way, supporting her thesis with the details of her life....

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“We haven’t seen a good book about non-monogamy since ‘The Ethical Slut’ in 1997,” says Tristan Taormino, a Village Voice columnist and author of the newly released “Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships.”

“The more I look around, the more I see two things,” she says. “People seem to be struggling with traditional monogamy — in the news every day, there’s a sports figure or politician struggling with monogamy. Some of the most successful relationships I know in my community are not monogamous. People seem to be willing to go off the beaten path to create relationships that work for them.”

Taormino, 37, has been in an open relationship with her partner, Colten (a transgender person, born a woman, who has not undergone any type of surgery but who prefers male pronouns), for eight years. “Like any relationship, it’s been very dynamic,” Taormino says. “It started as polyamorous, and now it’s partnered non-monogomy [meaning a central committed couple who have casual sex with other people]. Marriage is a point of negotiation. The landscape is constantly shifting in terms of what’s legal and what’s not.”

...Is there any demographic more likely than another to be open? Can you look for an “O” crocheted to the lapels of nontraditionally partnered Americans?

“Oh God, no, not at all,” Taormino says. “In terms of age, race, gender, class and geography, it’s all over the board. I interviewed an enlisted member of the Army, a pastor in a mainline Christian church, phone sex operators, elementary school teachers, lawyers, doctors. And a whole bunch were from Virginia.”

But if non-monogamy is happening successfully in so many ZIP codes, why do so many people find the arrangement threatening?

“I think it’s because we have collectively been told this fairy tale about our one true love, our Prince Charming, our soulmate — and it’s been reinforced in the media and every part of society. And whenever you challenge such a prominent institution, it’s terrifying,” she says. “But on the flip side, it’s courageous to say, ‘You know what? This isn’t working for me.’”

Read the whole article (July 16, 2008). You can send a letter-to-the-editor to letters@styleweekly.com.

Here are my own reviews of the books.

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> Why is this stuff so hot right now?

Okay... deep breath... here's my take:

1. It's been building slowly for 20+ years — ever since Ryam Nearing, Deborah Anapol, and others created the modern poly movement from the ashes of the 1960s and 70s — and now the momentum is finally reaching a tipping point.

2. The invention of the word "polyamory" in 1990-1992 gave it a name. I remember when there was no name — when it was called all sorts of unsatisfactory, un-memorable mouthfuls: ethical nonmonogamy, multilateral marriage, utopian swinging, polymorphous perversity (per Sigmund Freud), polyfidelity, "the Harrad Experiment lifestyle," synergamy, waterbrotherhood.... Only when a movement gets a clear name can it take hold.

3. The internet is letting people find each other and form communities as never before.

4. In the last three years, Loving More has done a lot of media outreach — and when one newspaper or TV show does something others copy it (see "herd journalism"). This matters, because media coverage has become more effective for movement-building in the era of Google. All it takes is one mention of the concept and the word, and an interested person can discover the whole poly scene.

5. A lot of today's polys are well-educated writers and communicators. A survey by Loving More of about 1,000 of its members a few years ago found that 40% had post-graduate degrees, compared to 8% of the general population (see the survey data, page 424). Such people are good at spreading new ideas and memes. Quotable quote here: "There were only a few thousand people in all Europe who brought about the Renaissance." —Paul Tillich.

Other thoughts?

Creating Poly Culture: a British soap, Hollywood, webcomics, and Minx's strategic vision

How often, since discovering poly, have you been struck by movies, books and legends where the whole stupid drama would be so not there if people just grasped the concept? From the Iliad to Shakespeare to Italian opera to The Corpse Bride — why can't people just be more evolved, dammit? So much of our culture-mythos would melt away in the morning sun.

Of course bushels of new drama (and comedy) would take its place. But at least it wouldn't be so hackneyed.

Woody Allen has always mined this territory (for instance in last year's Vicky Christina Barcelona). Now, more drama writers may be starting to see the possibilities. From England, Helen M. writes that the teen soap opera "Hollyoaks" has taken an unexpected twist. The plot was going along ordinary lines about a couple both cheating on each other with the same man. "Now," writes Helen, "it has turned into a proper 'open relationship', as they are calling it, between all three. There are catch-up clips here: tinyurl.com/crvr2j."

A user comment to episode 20: "Thank god i found this..... thank you... i didn't know that this could happen".

Okay, I'll make a prediction: Hollywood won't be far behind.

At Loving More's Poly Living Conference outside Philadelphia last month, Reid Mihalko provided some insider gossip about this. Reid writes TV screenplays and knows that crowd. He co-created a pilot show of his own for a comedy/drama series called "Polly and Marie" (say it fast — get it?), and he said "HBO almost bought" it. (Watch the trailer.) "There's a lot of interest in getting this [topic] on TV," he said, "but nobody is quite biting, because nobody knows if the advertisers will want it. It's kind of happening, but you don't see it yet, because it's not on the air yet."

When'll be the tipping point? The keynote speaker at Poly Living was Cunning Minx of the Polyamory Weekly podcast, and she made an astute point. She told the crowd of about 100 that it's time for the poly-awareness movement to start shifting focus: from education — explaining polyamory to people who've never heard of it — to culture-building — creating recognizable pop images of the polyfolk-world that represent us well, that we can be proud of, and that will appear in people's minds when they think of us.

Right now, she said, what pops into people's minds when they hear the word "polyamory" is maybe swingers at parties, or Mormon polygamists in the desert, or mostly a blank-slate question mark. We need to create our public image.

Think of the images in your mind when you hear "accountant," or "hippie," or "cowboy." If we don't create our own culture-images — the ones that pop into people's heads when they hear the word — outsiders are surely going to do it for us.

How do we do this? We can create our own stories, art, and music. "Twitter. Blog. Podcast," said Minx. "We need novels, music, movies. We need to show our poly culture. Let's show what poly culture is like. This is our next step." We can inspire the larger culture industry, such as the people who produced the new play All My Love, the new webseries "Family", even webcomics like "Fans" (here's a recent page).

But the biggest thing that any of us can do, wherever we are, is (in the words of Goddess of Java), "Be a credit to your kink". Model what good poly people are about. Hell, model what good relationship people are about. Be kind, honest, ethical, self-aware, self-disclosing, bold, generous, caring. Display integrity. Expect integrity in others. As Emerson said, "character is everything." This is how the world is ultimately going to judge us, and how poly culture will rise or fall.

You can listen to Minx's talk while watching her PowerPoint.

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"The Strange Credibility of Polyamory"

Freaksexual

This site is named Polyamory in the News, so I haven't been calling attention to blogs. I'm making an exception for a major, thought-provoking essay by San Francisco queer activist and theorist Pepper Mint (his actual name). He just put it up on his freaksexual blog:

The Strange Credibility of Polyamory

Polyamory has a certain credibility these days. Media outlets interview poly people and actually present it with a positive spin.... While coming out as polyamorous can still lose you friends, often people turn out to be surprising supportive.... Moreover, the idea of polyamory seems to be hitting a cultural tipping point, where people are simply expected to know the word and the ideas behind it, with zero explanation....

I want to point out that the current credibility of polyamory is in fact odd.... We live in a culture that is still puritanical, where mere positive mention of masturbation is enough to have you removed from the Surgeon General’s office, where infidelity is grounds for impeachment....

Since polyamory is a basic rethinking of some primary structures in relationships and culture, you would think it would not be so readily accepted. We should be be getting more flak, more backlash, more hostility, more attempts to make us invisible. The fairly rapid spread of polyamorous ideology, and the relatively positive media and cultural responses to polyamory, are all a bit surprising to me.

The positive shine to polyamory does not seem to apply to other mixed-gender nonmonogamy movements, like communal marriage, swinging, open relationships, or BDSM-based nonmonogamy. The wide media exposure of polyamory does not seem to make sense, given that the actual numbers of practicing poly people are likely somewhat less than these other movements, and polyamory is not nearly as well-entrenched in the culture....

He analyzes several reasons for this "strange credibility," how we can use them to our benefit, and how we could lose them in the future. Read his whole article (Nov. 27, 2007).

Here are two additional explanations of my own:

1) “All the world loves a lover” (Ralph Waldo Emerson). Romantic love brings out warm feelings in onlookers, including journalists, and we spend a lot of time talking about love with earnestness and idealism.

2) “Character is everything” (Andrew Carnegie and others). The poly movement and its spokespeople put great emphasis on honesty, responsible behavior, high ethical standards, self-improvement through hard relationship work, self-discipline in hard situations, owning your own shit, and the need to “Choose the difficult right over the easy wrong” (US Marine Corps).

This creates, or self-selects, a movement of high-quality people. Those who violate these standards hear about it from the community (brutally so when the discussion is online!); they find themselves left out of the community when their reputation gets around; and in any case they tend to fail at polyamory and hence disappear on their own.

The straight world notices these signs of good character in our movement and spokespeople, and tends to be at least grudgingly impressed.

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Post Number 1,000: Poly being seen as a next cool thing... and some history

This is my 1,000th post to Polyamory in the News. So maybe it's time for a look back, and ahead.

When I began this project in 2005, the future of the poly movement didn't look so promising. Loving More magazine (printed on paper) and its conferences had been the movement's centerpiece since the early to mid-1990s, but Loving More had nearly collapsed after the departure of its sparkplug Ryam Nearing. Newspapers and other media rarely allowed the word "polyamory" to appear in stories — because, we were told, it was unknown to readers, technical-sounding, and not in the dictionary.

Few people had even heard of the concept. Those who did mostly thought "old hippies." An article around that time mused about whether this idea could ever attract more interest or was destined to remain a small, little-noticed corner of the human potential movement.

Nevertheless, things had advanced a lot since my last tries to advocate for group relationships in the early 1980s. At that time I'd given up on finding any kind of movement at all. When I came back in 2005 I was impressed by the quality of the new people who had picked up the ball and the sophistication of their ideas.

But the most active poly site I found was polyamory.livejournal.com with about 1,300 members. The internet gave the impression that the late 1990s had been the high point, or at least the start of a plateau. The breakup of one well-known quad threw much of the community into a panic of self-doubt, as was parodied in this comic.

So I never thought the movement would grow and mature as incredibly fast as it has in these last nine years.

In 2006, the well publicized entry of polyamory into dictionaries seemed to break the dam against the media using the word. As a result, interested people could find something to google. Meanwhile Loving More had gotten back on its feet, the Washington Post gave landmark coverage to Loving More's Poly Living conference in 2008, and in 2009 a big Newsweek feature stirred up national attention. "America's next romantic revolution," they called it. Activity seemed to be increasing everywhere (thanks, people!!). At the beginning of 2008 when Wired announced "Internet Pushes Polyamory to Its 'Tipping Point'," I wrote that we campaigners for poly awareness "sometimes get a sense that big things are actually starting to happen."

In October 2008, a National Polyamory Leadership Summit in New York brought 34 of the movements movers-&-shakers together for the first time. At its next big meeting in February 2009, with 62 attending, it changed its name to the Polyamory Leadership Network. Since then the PLN has enabled communication and networking among a large cadre of poly-awareness activists who had previously been fairly disconnected.

Since then the story has been all about growth and increasing confidence, much greater public awareness, and widening diversity and maturity. There are ever more websites and blogs, social groups and meetups, conferences and gatherings, advice and discussion sites (a few topping 20,000 members, one at 41,000 [update: Polyamory.com has 140,000]), a TV series, and so much media attention that it's become routine. There are now 40 nonfiction books about polyamory, 25 of them published in the last eight years. And we're seeing a demographic shift toward millennials, many of whom take the availability of the concept for granted.

What's next? The poly movement is just one part of wider changes in attitudes about relationships, especially a growing public interest in what sociologists are calling "consensual non-monogamy," or "CNM," in general. A much more dramatic shift, of course, has been the rapid public acceptance of gay relationships. Together these are part of a trend toward relationship choice: people gaining the knowledge and skills, and then seizing the right, to build their intimate lives as they choose.

Which, as Barry Smiler points out, is just another step in the 500-year arc toward freedom and personal agency that defines Western civilization. Which makes it look hard to stop.

---------------------------------

Here are some recent straws in the wind of people seeing the poly movement as the future. Some of them may be a little starry-eyed, but here you go.

● Huffington Post:

Are Unconventional Sexual and Romantic Relationships Becoming More Mainstream?

By Douglas LaBier

A recent Pew poll found that millennials have a steadily declining rate of marriage. There are several possible reasons for this, but I think it highlights a broader, changing reality: We're in the midst of a social and cultural evolution regarding the kinds of romantic, sexual and intimate relationships men and women seek and what they experience as fulfilling.

...For example:

Polyamory: The subject of an [sic] annual conference, polyamory relationships are those in which people have multiple partnerships at once with the full knowledge of all involved. A comprehensive report in LiveScience describes how jealousy works in polyamorous relationships, how children in polyamorous families experience them. It also explores several other new findings, including that some polyamorous people report feeling energized by their multiple relationships and say that good feelings in one translate to good feelings in others.

Open relationships: A variant of polyamory [sic], open relationships received some attention in the 1970s among young baby boomers... and looks like it's re-emerging in new form — now called consensually non-monogamous (CNM) relationships. In them, committed partners mutually agree not to be sexually and/or romantically exclusive to one another. Some recent research finds, for example, that up to 40 percent of men and up to 25 percent of women in a monogamous relationship said they would switch to a CNM if they lived in a world where everyone had open relationships. Currently, the research finds a continuum: some people are completely monogamous, others are completely nonmonogamous, and many more are somewhere in between.

Polygamy: Stretching the boundary even further, some suggest that polygamy will become increasingly accepted as a form of relationship in our society....

As our society, culture and world become increasingly co-mingled and diverse, we're witnessing a corresponding evolution in what men and women -- straight, gay; younger and older -- look for in the kinds relationship that they want to enter and build....

Read the whole article (Nov. 19, 2014).


● Things polyfolks can teach everyone, from the Psychology Today blogsite:

Stay Monogamous Using Polyamorous Principles

By Kristen Mark

We have recently seen public discourse challenge monogamy; messages noting it as unnatural, unrealistic, and breeding infidelity.... Others have provided evidence that polyamory may be good for you.

...What if couples who wanted to be monogamous could use some of the principles of polyamory in monogamy?

...Prevalence rates of consensual non-monogamy have been noted to be between 4% and 11% [2]. For people who are open to consensual non-monogamy, it works. Consensual non-monogamous couples report high levels of trust, communication, and satisfaction [3],[4]. But it isn’t for everyone.

A recent issue of Psychological Inquiry provided a number of scientific articles about the current state of monogamy and marriage. One paper in particular outlined how most of us are guilty of psychologically and emotionally suffocating our romantic partners in monogamous relationships [5]. Another offered a solution to this problem in the form of consensual non-monogamy [6]. Although their paper was incredibly interesting and made a great case for embarking upon a polyamorous relationship, its applicability may be limited to people who are open to consensual non-monogamy. And we know this isn’t the majority of people. So here is how these principles can be applied to monogamous relationships while retaining monogamy:

Don’t expect one person to meet all of your needs.

We expect so much from our partners. We want them to be our best friend, our confidant, our lover, caretaker, and a number of other things all at once. This isn’t possible to get from one person. Find other people to meet some of those needs. Lifting some of the weight from your partner can provide more room to be good at just a couple of those things....

Engage in open and honest communication.

One of the things people in consensual non-monogamous relationships do best is communicate. They have to.... This doesn’t just happen overnight....

Integrate some “space” into your relationship.

...When your partner is doing something where they exert their autonomy, it enhances the feeling of your partner being their own individual, which in turn may enhance desire.

...Integrating consensual non-monogamy principles into monogamous relationships offers the potential for some of the benefits of non-monogamy to be integrated into the lives of many.

Read the whole article with the references and other links (Nov. 14, 2014).


● The crucial role of poly pioneers, at Poly Peeps:

Early Adopters of Open Relating

The term early adopter refers to an individual who is amongst the first to try a new product, technology or service. In our context, it refers to the modern polyamorists; social pioneers who have found monogamy to be inadequate for their needs and who have found a polyamorous model more suited to their proclivities.

Early adopters are the trend setters. These are the individuals who were doing [insert activity here] before it was “cool” and “hip.” And they are eager to remind you of this, as if it were a badge of honor. And so it should be.

...The early adopters of polyamory are... actively seeking to find their own happiness instead of blindly following in the footsteps of prior generations. This group does deserve recognition and applause. These are the brave. These are the strong. These are the social pioneers. Others who follow do so in the trails that these early adopters forged when the terrain was much less tamed.

Who is an early adopter of polyamory? While polyamory has been practiced in its modern iteration for decades, the concept has still not achieved mainstream social acceptance and thus, is not yet “cool.” Of course those who actually engage in the practice know otherwise, but for this to expand to a more mainstream awareness, the early adopters will have to educate and inform the population.

If you are an early adopter, this responsibility falls on you, as it does on me. We possess knowledge and experiences that others are still only curious about. There will be those who become disillusioned with monogamy but will not understand what alternatives and choices they have....

It is not our role to overstep our boundaries, proselytize and impose our relating styles. But in the honoring of consent is where the duty to educate and inform springs forth....

The principles and practices we engage in will, decades from now, be traditions adhered to by future generations.

Read the whole article (Nov. 18, 2014).


● At Elephant Journal, "dedicated to the mindful life":

We Are What We Love: How Polyamory Can Change the World for the Better.

By Krystal Baugher

...For the longest time I’ve been grappling between the theory and the reality of polyamory, which is the idea of being in multiple intimate relationships. I remember the moment when I felt I could dive into the polyamorous lifestyle and I would come out okay in the end. It was actually while I was watching the movie Adaptation.... Two characters' conversation went something like this:

Donald: I loved Sarah, Charles. It was mine, that love. I owned it. Even Sarah didn’t have the right to take it away. I can love whoever I want.

Charlie: But she thought you were pathetic.

Donald: That was her business, not mine. You are what you love, not what loves you. That’s what I decided a long time ago.

...Even though bell hook’s book, All About Love: New Visions has an overall monogamous tone, I’d like to discuss why her theory and definition of love could, when combined with polyamory, actually transform the world into a much better place....

Read the whole article (Sept. 24, 2013).


● At A Black Poly Man:

Polyamory: The New Fad

Poly family, I'm worried. Polyamory has gained popularity over the last few years.... Mainstream society has finally begun to recognize that heterosexual monogamy might not work for each and every human being. So why am I worried?

Because I don't want this lifestyle to become a fad, a quick cash-in for the media sharks to utilize....

I'm conflicted on this issue as on the one hand I do want people who would identify as poly but have no idea that there is name and, better still, a community for them to join to know about it -- but I loathe the idea of the lifestyle being something for all the Abercrombie and Fitch crowd to "do" on their days off from nothing.... It won't help at all if it's the "hot new thing to try."....

The whole article (March 12, 2014).


● And this post by a mono-identified person to reddit/r/polyamory (23,000 members) just a few days ago:

For a long time, I just lurked in this subreddit and couldn't figure out why I enjoyed reading it so much. It dawned on me one day and decided I'd let you all know why you guys are top notch.

I don't know if it takes more emotional insight or empathy to have successful polyamorous relationships, but you all exhibit those qualities more than any other sub[reddit] I've come across. Some advice doesn't transfer, but the concepts do. I've learned so many things about all relationships -- not just romantic ones. If I'm speaking honestly though, I like coming here because you're all smart, well-versed, patient, understanding, supportive, and can communicate effectively. This sub is a breath of fresh air.

Riding a wave, we are! When is the other shoe going to drop? And when it does, what will be the cause of it?

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A razor-thin turning point in history

Folks,

Of the 1,238 posts I've put up on this blog in the last 11 years, only a couple have been overtly political. Now it's time.
​
Here is the FiveThirtyEight.com diagram of where the Electoral College stands with two days to go:

Little New Hampshire is currently the tipping point. As of now, Clinton leads Trump there by just 2% with wide uncertainty. That's a margin of 15,000 votes out of the high turnout expected. Sparkle Moose and I are canvassing for the Democrats there For The Duration.

What are the consequences? In the New Yorker, a serious scholar sees many parallels to Mussolini's electoral rise to power: A Scholar of Fascism Sees a Lot That's Familiar with Trump. That's one of many similar articles you can find by sober military experts and historians. This could well be our Italy 1922. Or even Germany 1933.

If you aren't in or near a swing state, or can't canvass (no experience is necessary!), you can join the nationwide Get Out The Vote phoning system from home.

Go to https://www.hillaryclinton.com/start. ​Register, and you'll be offered a chance to canvass, get on a bus to canvass, etc. Keep clicking through the screens till you get "Call voters from the comfort of your couch." You'll need a phone you can use while watching your computer screen.

The system autodials selected target voters in swing states — voters friendly to Dems but with a spotty voting record. It connects you only to a live person answering. On your computer screen are the name and place of the person, a script to read them, and buttons to log the results. Then click to get the next person. It's fast and easy, and you can dip in and out of doing it.

Your grandchildren will someday ask "What did you to to stop Trump?" I urge you to drop whatever you're doing for the next three days and Do Your Bit. It will not wait.

​Please like and pass this on.​

Alan

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From Monogamish to Relationship Anarchy: a Widening Poly Spectrum

America is having a nonmonogamy moment, and probably more than a moment. After a generation in the shadows, the concept of responsible nonmonogamy is settling in as a permanent part of modern life and thought. Workable, agreed-upon multi-relating is certainly getting more attention than at any time since the 1970s, and in healthier, more mature, more sustainable forms.

Many things are contributing to this, from the slow disintegration of traditional marriage to the appearance of books like The Myth of Monogamy (2002) and Sex at Dawn (2010). The latter in particular makes a compelling case from anthropology and other sciences that we have evolved by nature for a life of easy nonmonogamy, a fact that we ignore at our misery and peril.

Getting the most public interest are, naturally, the multi-relationship styles on the least radical end of the poly spectrum: those that challenge the fewest other cultural assumptions.

"Open marriage," for instance, usually implies a very primary couple, secondary relationships that are presumed to be disposable in a pinch, and little or none of the deeper poly ethos that "we're all in this together" even if just tangentially. The standards of communication within the couple, and toward outsiders, are likely to be much more ordinary (and unexamined) than the radical transparency, self-analysis, and fearless honesty that many polys consider to be their guiding ideal, even when they fall short of reaching it.

The new terms "monogamish" (popularized by Dan Savage), "flexogamy" (from Cosmopolitan), and "The New Monogamy" (the title of a book by Tammy Nelson coming out next January) refer to even more tentative dabblings with outside liaisons. For instance, here's a local TV news report on "monogamish" couples that aired last Monday on ABC-2 News in Baltimore.

A different sign of ferment on the mainstream end of the poly spectrum is the growing rapprochement between poly and swinging. Since its origins in the 1940s, swinging has mostly been about couples swapping with other couples at prescribed venues: sex parties where what happens at the party stays at the party, with cultural taboos against falling in love or seeking to build too many real-life connections. That's changing; there's always been crossover, but the current generation of swingers is taking new interest in poly philosophy and practice. At Atlanta Poly Weekend in March, swing-community lawyer and entrepreneur Stephen G. Cobb predicted to the crowd that this trend is reaching a "tipping point" and that the poly movement is about to be inundated by a "flood" of people from the vastly larger Lifestyle. Other signs suggest this may be so.

The biggest difference between polys and swingers is cultural. Swingers tend, on average, to be more conservative, mainstream, Christian, happy to stay closeted, satisfied with standard American life in other ways, and unpracticed in questioning dominant paradigms. As a result, despite its large size (estimated at 4 or 5 million people in the U.S.) and the radical nature of what it's actually doing, "the Lifestyle" has left remarkably little imprint on American life and culture in the last 60 years. If lifestylers really do flood the poly world in the next few years, poly on average is going to look less geeky, alternative, intellectual, queer, and Seattleish than it does now.

However, there is also new activity brewing on the opposite end of the poly spectrum.

"Relationship Anarchy," or RA, is the term being used by really alternative people who disdain "polyamory" as meaning something too limited and ordinary. Or perhaps too much like the older generation. This is the term of choice in some anarchist and Occupy cultures in particular, especially in Europe, and it's spreading.

Deborah Anapol, a spiritual founder of the modern poly movement and author of Polyamory: the New Love Without Limits (1992, 1997), commented a couple of weeks ago,

Most people in open marriages are very deliberately and intentionally committed to the couple paradigm. This has led some younger, more radical people to reject polyamory as old paradigm and advocate what they call relationship anarchy but is pretty much what I called polyamory over 20 years ago....

My feeling is that we are still at least one, if not two or more generations away from evolving beyond the couple paradigm, but that the standard couple is rapidly evolving into an open couple — and an open couple who does not resonate with the word, community, or concept of polyamory. Furthermore, among the people I meet in conscious environments all over the world, most of those who really "get" polyamory —— not so much as an identity, but as a way of life —— don't want to apply the label to themselves or their behavior.

Longtime poly researcher Meg Barker in England notes,

Three phrases that I have heard for a potential 'third wave' of polyamory are 'relationship anarchy', 'relationshipqueer' and 'polytical' (the UK website). All are more explictly politically engaged, tend to come from a queer and/or anarchist perspective, and question things like the privileging of romantic over other kinds of relationships and the ideas of rigid rules and contracts.

(Barker and Daniel Cardoso in Portugal were recently on an academic panel exploring these topics. Elsewhere, Cardoso and Pepper Mint go deeper into theory.)

From the leading RA activist Andie Nordgren in Sweden:

8 Points on Relationship Anarchy

Andie Nordgren

By Andie Nordgren (2006 translation by Leo Nordwall and Elli Åhlvik)

You can love a lot of people — each relationship is unique

     Relationship Anarchy (RA) questions the idea that love is a special, limited feeling which is real only when kept between two people at any given moment.... Every relationship stands on its own, a meeting between independent equals.

Love and Respect is to have no demands

     Refraining from demands, as a basis of a relationship, is to show respect towards other people's independence and capability of making decisions on their own. You having feelings for others or a history together doesn't give you the right to set rules or make demands. Try instead to explore how you can develop a relationship without disregarding each others essential values and opinions.... Demandlessness is the only way to be completely sure that everyone in a relationship is there of their own free will. It's not “real love” to adjust to each other according to an existing template.

Give yourself a solid point of view

     How do you want others to treat you? And I mean everyone. What are your premises and how do you define your boundaries? What kind of people do you want to have around and how do you want your relationships to be? Find such a core point of view and work with all your relationships according to it....

Remember the heterosexual norm but don't be afraid

     Remember that there is an incredibly powerful set of normative beliefs telling you how life and real love should be. People will wonder and question your relationships.... Don't allow your relationships to be driven by fear of societal norms.

Spontaneity instead of duty

     To be able to be spontaneous – to act without the fear of being punished and without obligations – is what makes radical relationships come to life....

Fake it 'til you make it

     Sometimes it might sound like you have to be some kind of übermensch to "stand life" as a relationship anarchist. It's not true. Try using the trick “fake it 'til you make it”, which means that you imagine how you would have done in various difficult situations if you were as strong and cool as you'd like....

Trust is better than being suspicious

     Assume that everyone near you wants you to be happy....

Change through communication

     Whenever people do something together, there is a norm on how to act and what to do – a norm on how a the situation should turn out. If you and people around you won't talk about the whats, hows and whys, everything will turn out as the norm dictates. Communication, common action and a will to change is the only way to break free from the norms. Radical relationships must have open discussions as their main component.... Talk to each other!

That's a condensation; read and save the whole article [updated new translation by Andie, July 2012]. "Andie Nordgren is a genderqueer relationship hacker and a key voice behind the Relationship Anarchy movement, which originated in Sweden but is now gaining international interest."

Similarly, the radical web magazine The Scavenger presents a long article that's worth saving to show anyone who wonders why a person with the author's philosophy takes such utter joy in this life:

Revolutionary romance: A primer for polyamory

By Sadie Ryanne

...I guess because I’ve been talking a lot about new dates (*cough* like a giddy teenage queen *cough*) and my upcoming wedding, I’ve been having to answer lots of questions about polyamory. Monogamous people just seem to be utterly fascinated (or horrified) by it, and they want to talk to me about it all the time.

One friend recently called me “the most amorous-seeking person” they’ve ever met. I’m a flirty gal, it’s true… But when asked how many relationships I’m in (which happens often), I honestly don’t know how to answer. Three? Five? A dozen?

According to dominant monogamous narratives, “a relationship” is a special kind of dynamic that is easily distinguishable (because it is the only dynamic that is supposed to involve both romance and sex), and it needs to be fiercely defined and defended....

I find that when most monogamous people try to understand polyamory, they still generalize this basic idea. They understand that I’m not sexually or romantically exclusive, but they still assume that I have multiple “relationships” the way they understand what a relationship is. Thus, when monogamous people ask me “how many relationships are you in?” they expect the answer to be easy.

Well, that just doesn’t apply to my life....

...And of course, it’s all very flexible: Someone who begins as a sexual partner often ends up as a platonic best friend.

...I still get joyously anxious about new crushes when I’m not sure where they will go, I still squeal when someone asks me to be their girlfriend, and I still cry when one of my partners decides that we shouldn’t call each other lovers anymore. It’s not that the labels have no meaning for me.

But instead of assuming that there is only one, monolithic way to define a relationship, I see it much differently: There are just many different dynamics between two or more people (I’m in at least one triad, by the way), and many different words that they might use to describe their relationship to one another.

...I can still be heartbroken by the breakup of one relationship while being ecstatically in love with another and brimming with excitement about the possibility of another new one starting.

The radical politics of blooming flowers

But there’s also more to my poly identity than that. Polyamory is more than a descriptive term for a certain type of relationship structure. It is also, at least for me, a political identity marking my opposition to compulsory monogamy.

...Polyamory has the potential to challenge many of the entrenched sexist and trans/homophobic social structures — notably, the nuclear family.... Polyamory opens the door to a variety of messy, self-determined, tangled networks as alternatives for creating families, providing for mutual support, raising children and so on.

Not to mention, the more we pursue pleasure and love for ourselves and the people around us, the more we eschew the neoliberal imperative to be productive (where productivity is narrowly defined within a capitalist framework).

...On the whole, I find that poly relationships are usually much stronger because we do openly talk about things like jealousy. I’ve found that many monogamous people (at least the vanilla ones) have no idea how to negotiate things like safer sex, boundaries, desires, and so on. Hell, most monogamous people don’t even know how to talk about sex or romance at all without getting super uncomfortable!

If I need some space from my fiancee or just want to stay in for the weekend, I might ask her, “Hey, I was really hoping to sleep in my own bed this weekend. Do you think you can either not hang out with your other partner, or maybe spend the night at her house so I can have the house to myself?” A lot of monogamous people I know are terrified to ask for space like that, and obsessively worry that they’re going to hurt their partner’s feelings or something. In my case, my lovers just try to accommodate my needs and everyone ends up better off for it.

Poly people basically have to talk about this stuff. With my poly partners, it’s totally considered normal to have regular check-ins about our boundaries to see how they’ve changed and how we’re feeling. Acknowledging things like jealousy and talking about what we’re okay with and what we’d rather not hear about and so on means that we have better communication skills, and thus are healthier partners.

And there’s another emotion that needs to be acknowledged. Jealousy exists, but so does compersion. This is a word that poly people invented to describe the feeling of happiness, satisfaction or fulfillment that is derived from knowing that your partner is happy, satisfied and fulfilled.

It’s real! Whenever one of my partners starts seeing someone new, I get excited and giddy with them. And when they get back from a fun date, I love to hear about it because knowing they had a good time cheers me up, too....

Read the whole long article (June 11, 2011).

We have an interesting and diverse future opening up.

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New research: Yep, lots of people are open, and more are getting interested

How many Americans practice consensual nonmonogamy?

And how does interest in polyamory compare to other kinds of "CNM," as sociologists are calling it?

Short answers from new research: About 20% have had agreed-to open relationships at some time in their lives. And for the last six years, interest in polyamory specifically has been rising all across the general public.

"Consensual nonmonogamy" is a broad category. It includes not just polyamory but open relationships of other types, swinging, hall passes, and don't-ask-don't-tells. The difference is that those models do not carry polyamory's underlying ethos that among a network of lovers, "we're all in this together." This can just mean mutual respect for everyone's well-being, or perhaps friendships developing among metamours, or all the way up to group families and intimate community.

Amy C. Moors at the University of Michigan looked for how public interest in different types of CNM has changed over the last 10 years. She published her findings in the Journal of Sex Research: Has the American Public’s Interest in Information Related to Relationships Beyond “The Couple” Increased Over Time? (online May 13, 2016). The full paper is behind a paywall (get access through a library), but this is from the abstract:

...Although people engage in romance in a variety of ways, alternatives to “the couple” are largely overlooked in relationship research. Scholars and the media have recently argued that the rules of romance are changing, suggesting that interest in consensual departures from monogamy may become popular as people navigate their long-term coupling. This study utilizes Google Trends to assess Americans’ interest in seeking out information related to consensual nonmonogamous relationships across a 10-year period (2006–2015). Using anonymous Web queries from hundreds of thousands of Google search engine users, results show that searches for words related to polyamory and open relationships (but not swinging) have significantly increased over time.... Future research avenues for incorporating consensual nonmonogamous relationships into relationship science are discussed.

Here's the paper's key graphic:

Click for slightly larger view. Courtesy Journal of Sex Research

It shows that "swinging" related keyword searches plummeted by more than 50% from 2006 to 2009 (how come?) and since then have held steady. "Open relationship" related searches rose modestly over the last 10 years. Polyamory-related keyword searches stayed steady or declined a trace from 2006 to 2010, and since then have risen to new levels with some prominent spikes.

Those two big spikes that started in summer 2012 and late summer 2013 line up with the two seasons of Showtime's weekly docu-reality series Polyamory: Married & Dating. TV is clearly powerful, even a non-broadcast premium channel.

The smaller spike starting in August 2009 matches the widespread attention to Newsweek's online article that called poly "America's next romantic revolution." It felt at the time like a tipping point and still does.

The bump in the summer of 2015 coincides with the Supreme Court's Obergefell decision legalizing gay marriage, which prompted a lot of speculation about whether group marriage would be next.

Moors' full paper has had only 45 reads in the more than two months it's been out. But one of them was by a writer at the big, hip online magazine Fusion, who wrote a story that's been spreading around: What Google searches reveal about the rise of ‘open relationships’ (July 7):

By Taryn Hillin

...According to new research, more and more Americans are actively Googling information about alternatives to monogamy—and 1 in 5 Americans say they’ve engaged in consensual non-monogamous relationships IRL.

These revelations come courtesy of Amy Moors, a researcher at the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan. Moors recently conducted a study published in the Journal of Sex Research that looked into the prevalence of Google searches involving non-monogamous relationships. Her goal was to see if searches for terms like “polyamory” and “open relationships” were increasing over time, which, of course, might indicate a growing interest....

Moors analyzed 10 years of Google trends data from January 2006 to December 2015 using sets of the keywords related to polyamory, open relationships, open marriages, and swingers. In order to make sure she was looking at searches in which users had genuine interest in the topic, she also created “negative” search words to exclude certain results. For example, Moors found that a term like “open marriage” yielded a lot of results about Newt Gingrich, who famously had an affair outside his marriage. Searching celebrity gossip doesn’t really count as being interested in exploring the lifestyle, so she excluded all things Newt related (LOLz). Likewise, “open relationship” keywords also produced a plethora of Will and Jada-Pinkett Smith results—go figure!—so they were also used as exclusionary items.

...Moors found that Google searches for terms related to polyamory and open relationships indeed rose... from 2006 to 2015. Interestingly, however, searches for “swingers”-related keywords fell over time. Moors hypothesizes that this is likely due to the fact that the term itself has become outdated....

“Although the present study cannot shed light on why people are searching for more information related to polyamory and open relationships, these results do show that there is increased visibility of these types of consensual non-monogamy and likewise an interest to learn more about them,” explains Moors in the paper.

Moors' other recent paper is Prevalence of Experiences With Consensual Nonmonogamous Relationships: Findings From Two National Samples of Single Americans (Journal of Sex Therapy, online April 20, 2016). From the abstract:

...More than one in five (21.9% in Study 1; 21.2% in Study 2) participants report engaging in CNM at some point in their lifetime. This proportion remained constant across age, education level, income, religion, region, political affiliation, and race, but varied with gender and sexual orientation. Specifically, men (compared to women) and people who identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual (compared to those who identify as heterosexual) were more likely to report previous engagement in CNM. These findings suggest that a sizable and diverse proportion of U.S. adults have experienced CNM, highlighting the need to incorporate CNM into theoretical and empirical therapy and family science work.

The Fusion article continues,

Moors and her colleagues analyzed data collected in 2013 and 2014 by the Singles In America study, sponsored by Match.com. (Participants in the SIA study are not culled from Match.com—they are drawn from a nationally representative sample established by the firm Research Now.) In total, researchers looked at data on 8,718 participants in two different studies. The first consisted of 4,813 participants who were over the age of 21 and legally single, which means they could have been single, dating, or cohabiting but were not legally married to anyone. The second looked at an additional 3,905 participants who were over 18 and were functionally single at the time of the survey, meaning they were not seeing or dating anyone.

As part of the survey, all participants were asked if they “had ever had an open sexual relationship.” In the questionnaire, this was defined as “an agreed upon, sexually non-exclusive relationship.”

In the first study, 21.9% of participants answered yes. In the second, 21.2% of participants answered yes. Put simply? One in 5 [unmarried] Americans now says they have participated in a consensually non-monogamous relationship. Bazinga!

On the face of it, this result should apply to all adults, not just singles, because every married person was once single too. In fact, marrieds have had more time on average to add to their experiences.

Overall, men and folks identifying as gay, lesbian, or bisexual were more likely to report engaging in an open relationship; the least likely group was straight women. However, the authors urge caution about making assumptions about what “type” of person enters into a consensually non-monogamous relationships: The differences between the rates were slight, and according to the data, the rise is happening across the board.

“Despite previous speculation that people in consensual non-monogamous relationships tend to be homogeneous in terms of education, socioeconomic status and ethnicity, this proportion remained roughly constant across age, education level, income status, religion, region, political affiliation and race,” explain the researchers. It’s not just one group that’s spearheading the move toward open relationships—it’s all groups.

The biggest takeaway of all? We may just be headed toward another sexual revolution. But rather than thinking of it as a zero-sum game in which the birth of polyamory means the death of monogamy, Moors suggests we think of these shifts as making as room for everyone....

Read the whole Fusion article (July 7, 2016).

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"Bisexuality’s Watershed Political Moment"

The Daily Beast

Many surveys and observations suggest that about 40% of self-identified polys also self-identify as bisexual, compared to just a few percent of the general population. Meanwhile, a 2013 Pew Research study found that bis are the most numerous of the four letters in LGBT, but are much more closeted than either gays or lesbians.

So this article seems relevant. The news hook is that Kate Brown was just sworn in this morning.

Bisexuality’s Watershed Political Moment

Polls show that bisexuality is the least accepted of all sexualities. New Oregon Governor Kate Brown, who is openly bisexual and married to a man, could help change perceptions.

Michael Lloyd / The Oregonian / Landov

On February 18, former Oregon Secretary of State Kate Brown (D) will become the first publicly bisexual governor in the United States. Brown’s swearing in comes on the heels of Democrat John Kitzhaber’s resignation of the governorship Friday following allegations of corruption and influence-peddling lobbied against both him and his fiancée Cylvia Hayes. But what’s bad news for Kitzhaber is great news for the future of LGBT political representation in the United States.

And it’s even better news for bisexual Americans who are sorely lacking public visibility at a crucial moment in LGBT history.

...The occasion of the first openly bisexual governor of the United States is a cultural watershed for bisexual people in the United States, who have historically been better represented by celebrities like [David] Bowie than by politicians like Brown.

With same-sex marriage in the United States — which has traditionally been represented as an exclusively gay or lesbian issue — seeming all but inevitable in 2015 and public attention quickly turning to what Time has called “The Transgender Tipping Point,” the “B” in the LGBT is at risk of becoming lost in the shuffle. Brown’s assumption of state leadership in 2015 is a particularly fortuitous opportunity to keep bisexual people in the conversation surrounding LGBT equality, as the country’s focus shifts to the last two letters of that ubiquitous acronym.

...In 2012, the Advocate could only count five openly bisexual state officials including Brown out of the then-90 or so LGBT state-level legislators. That’s a lot less than half.

Since that time, former Arizona State Senator Kyrsten Sinema has become the first out bisexual congresswoman but that’s the highest an openly bisexual person has climbed until now, making Brown the highest-ranking openly bisexual public official in U.S. history.

...Why are bisexual people, in particular, lagging so far behind in terms of their willingness to come out?

Brown’s own story contains one possible answer: Many bisexual men and women fear social exclusion from both straight people as well as lesbians and gay men.

...The Oregonian also reports that, in 2008, a Portland LGBT magazine advised Brown to “butch it up” if she wanted to be taken seriously as an LGBT public official.... And today, the fact that Brown is currently married to a man, Dan Little, is reportedly being raised to question her allegiance to the LGBT community....

Here's the whole article (Feb. 14, 2015).

Also, Washington Post story (Feb. 13).

Christian Science Monitor story (Feb. 15).

KOMO News in Seattle (Feb. 14).

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