Posts Tagged Sex

Subtitle: Part One of an Ongoing Series Dedicated to the Deconstruction of  Arguments Against Polyamory or NAMBLA

This is not a fully researched, peer-reviewed, cited and documented critical analysis. You won’t find dry, scholarly lecturing using enormous words that only three people in the history of people understand the meaning of and one of those three people went insane in the 1960′s trying to decide whether it was an historic moment or a historic moment and is now wandering in the woods sans underwear, unavailable to answer questions. No, these are my thoughts, off the top of my head, about some arguments against polyamory that I made up off of the bottom of my head. Exactly why the top and bottom parts of my brain are having an argument is better left for a different blog post.

What is polyamory, you ask? I’m glad you asked, friend, glad you asked! Poly, from the greek poly meaning many; -amor, from the latin amor, meaning love; and -y, from the Aztec qxztyclx, meaning, well, no one is sure what it means and the scholarship is sorely lacking on exactly why it is considered part of the etymology of the word “polyamory” so for our purposes, we’ll simply ignore it. Therefore, polyamory directly translates into “many loves (plus that bizarre part we’re going to ignore)”. Polyamory is a having loving, intimate relationships with more than one person, all of whom are aware of all of the relationships. Consent and communication are at the core of this configuration. Let’s take a moment to visualize a standard-issue V-configuration (technical term) consisting of A) one person, B) another person and C) some third person who’s gender is inconsequential to our discussion and therefore is being omitted to preserve our feminist street cred. Now that we’ve all pictured a hot threesome with myself, Captain Jack Harkness and Kathy Ireland, let’s get back to our V-configuration. Person A is in a loving, intimate relationship with person B. Person B is in a loving, intimate relationship with person C. Person C may or may not be interested in Captain Jack Harkness, but that’s beside the point. The point is that there are multiple loving, intimate relationships between these three people that they are all aware of and consent to. Ergo, polyamory!

Perhaps the easiest way to understand polyamory is to contrast it against its non-identical cousin monogamy. Even though monogamy prefers to go by its nickname from high school, The Bull, we’re going to refer to it as monogamy because The Bull is a really stupid nickname that deserves to be left among the detritus of other high school memories such as wedgies, swirlies and that one time you threw up on that really cute girl’s shoes at the dance in the gym. Monogamy should be familiar with anyone who is familiar with Disney World. At Disney World they have these new-fangled contraptions called monorails. These monorails are similar to their sibling duorails only, being born second, they got shafted in the inheritance department and only ended up with one single rail. Hence we now refer to anything that only has one something as mono. Monogamous people are people who only have one gamy. Since the word gamy is offensive to the indigenous peoples of the south antarctic island of Halakalmoniqua, we’re going to use its more popular (and arguably less offensive) synonym, spouse.

To summarize, monogamous people only have one spouse or partner. Polyamorous people have >1 partners. That’s pretty much it. Simple. Non-complex. Quite straightforward.

Or so it would seem. Not everyone on the third planet orbiting a medium sized yellow star called Sol is cool with the whole >1 part of polyamory. Hence, conflict. Hence, strife. Hence, turmoil. Hence, this blog.

What possible problem could anyone find with >1? In a great number of areas of life, having >1 of something is considered a point of pride. In the case of money the further one gets from 1 in a positive direction on the number line, the more wealthy one is considered. In the case of relationships, this dynamic changes. That’s what we are going to be discussing in this epic, sensational, only partially fictionalized ongoing series of blog posts.

I used to have this picture of Kathy on the inside of my locker door in high school.