Neil Strauss, who wrote The Game, an account of the pick-up artist (PUA) subculture which I discussed in an earlier post has just published his new book, The Truth. The book describes, as I understand it, with a great deal of candour and personal courage, his process of transitioning from what we might call an obsessively promiscuous lifestyle to a committed open (or at least, not fully closed) relationship with his wife Ingrid. It’s Strauss’s journey, but also – certainly by the provocative title – seems to purport to be more than that.
I should say that these remarks are not based on a reading of the new book, but mostly just on what he said in his recent podcast with Daniel Vitalis. It may be, therefore, that I misrepresent Strauss to a certain extent (which I’ll gladly correct if I can be convinced of it); but in any case, what I will go on to describe and then criticize in this article is a position, I think, that many men are adopting, from whatever angle they come at it, in response to certain obvious facts of our social biology, namely our non-monogamous nature and our desire nevertheless to form deep and intimate bonds with members of the opposite sex, combined with the cultural reality they encounter. This is therefore not a book review, but a critique of that position. It isn’t necessary to listen to the podcast to understand my comments, though I do encourage you to.
Many of Strauss’s erstwhile PUA fans will no doubt be ready to poo-poo the book as a cave-in, and Strauss himself states in the podcast that some have seen it as a defense of monogamy, even a repudiation of his earlier persona, which he insists it is not. That’s fair, though he does bear responsibility for this inevitable media spin (which he doesn’t seem to have been too concerned to avoid). Strauss’s point seems to be that obsessive promiscuity is unsatisfying and successful polyamory hard to pull off, polyamory itself being, in a certain number of cases, a lifestyle choice or label which covers up an inability or unwillingness to go deep in relationships. This being so, Strauss might best be seen as a “pragmatic monogamist” who construes the term not as prohibiting extra-dyadic sex but as requiring, as I understand it, such sex to take place, if it does, on terms which are mutually agreed within the couple and transparent. He puts this forward in the discussion simply as the position to which he has come, not as a universal model, though given this his marketing seems disingenuous. I interpret him as not being opposed to polyamory, but simply skeptical of it in practice.
It might seem that Strauss and I share a lot in common; I too have written about some important misgivings related to the way polyamory is conceptualized and lived in practice (or, let us say, some of the practices which the word is used to cover) and I agree with him on the importance of commitment, communication, transparency etc, at least in that ideal world in which we decidedly do not live.
There is, however, something rather unexamined, it seems to me, in Strauss’s discourse. Vitalis illustrates this in the podcast when he speaks of his sense of shame at hiding extra-dyadic dalliances from his partner, a position he is very uncomfortable being in because he feels it lacks integrity. I would certainly agree with this, but even if we have to live our life as best we can within the constraints we have inherited, it still behoves us to examine this sense of shame critically, something neither Strauss nor Vitalis in the podcast hints at doing. Vitalis, however, offers himself a clue as to the origin of his sentiments in describing his attitude as a child towards his mother: ever fearful she would fly into a rage at the slightest provocation, he was very careful to avoid doing anything which might provoke such an overreaction. As children, of course, we seek to please our mothers because we need their love. Our mothers, on the other hand, often simply take from us what they want, being far more skilled and better placed to obtain it due to being adults and in a monopolistic position of authority. We need to be very careful to avoid the widespread error of reproducing this asymmetry in our adult relationships, and especially of doing so unconsciously, failing to recognize this as a cultural construct rather than an innate difference of social biology.
It will inevitably happen from time to time, in a dyadic relationship, that some courses of action in which the man is inclined to engage may cause discomfort to the woman. This should (ideally) be discussed, of course, and it also needs to be recognized that the woman may have insights into this situation which the man lacks; these should be listened to. However, it cannot be that the man simply does not engage in actions which make his partner uncomfortable; that she has some kind of veto on his behavior (or he on hers). The position of discomfort has a lot to teach us, and ensuring the comfort of the other at all times is a very unrealistic demand to place on oneself. This applies no less in matters sexual than in any other sphere of life. If one backs off from confrontation simply because one fears it, then one loses an essential part of ones freedom and ability to live an authentic life. We cannot rescue monogamy with the artifice of imposing upon it unhealed parent-child patterns of behavior.
In my life, I have seen that it is important to listen and communicate, but it is also important to be brave: not only important for oneself, but also for the relationship and the other. An implicit and festering situation of subordination strikes me as a major risk factor for relationship longevity. I share their desire to be open, though I do not think this is an ethical commandment; indeed, sometimes (as Dan Savage never tires from pointing out) exactly the opposite may be true. However, I am also going to do things which make my partner uncomfortable if those are things which I am convinced I need to do. I will take into account her vulnerabilities and the long run, but they are only factors among others.
There is no inherent reason to be ashamed of ones interest in pursuing any kind of relationship with another person, nor of actually doing so where this does not constitute a material and real (rather than unilaterally imagined) threat to the investment each partner has made in the primary or reference relationship. In this regard, it is irrelevant whether this behavior causes discomfort and even whether it brings about the end of the primary relationship entirely. One may certainly refrain from a course of action in order to avoid those outcomes: but consciously, not based on shame. One must, at the same time, also understand that change and challenge brings growth and new opportunities. If one shies away from this out of fear, the relationship will stagnate and may anyway eventually perish. One would want to be quite confident that in the long run the asymmetry in the relationship is not going to give rise to resentment, the rising tide of which may – and I think often does – pass unperceived under the radar of ones social identity until it is too late.
Strauss argues that we have neuroplasticity and our biology is not the last word. Of course this is correct. But any ability we may have to pursue any sort of relationship which may loosely be called monogamous still begs the question of why we should do so. There may be pragmatic grounds – including that it is a better personal choice than a life of obsessive-compulsive unsatisfying sexual liaisons and that it is a socially stable reference point, an available (if adaptable) paradigm: the path, in other words, that it sounds like Strauss has trodden. But such grounds are no more than that; they are not “The Truth”.
A couple of days ago, I discussed the problem of sexual labels. In this post, I want to zero in on my own search for an adequate label to represent my approach to relationships (to be distinguished of course from my sexuality) and to suggest that this can only adequately be resolved within the framework of a much wider concept. (The title of the post is a bit of a spoiler: sorry for that!).
At first sight, there are a few alternatives to choose from. Subjectively, however, all of them, to my mind, are not only insufficient but positively distortive. Let me explain in a few words why.
Let’s start by throwing the terms out there. There are three expressions which I have on occasion used, and therefore which presumably displease me less on some level than the others: these are “polyamory“, “open relationship” and “consensual non-monogamy” (CNM). Then there are also terms which I do not use, but are somehow related and therefore potential candidates for my verbal affections: “free love“, “relationship anarchy” (RA) and “swinging“.
The main problem with polyamory, CNM and swinging is that these notions, because they are rather broad and mainly defined by what they are not (i.e. monogamy), do not necessarily imply a commitment to full female agency. Many people pursue polyamory, CNM and swinging because they want to satisfy certain sexual or emotional desires, without necessarily critically reflecting on those desires and without an explicit ethic of either agency or commitment. This is why I have written my own cultural critique of polyamory. The well-known “how-to” book The Ethical Slut is a good example of the problem: it starts from patriarchal norms and imagines itself subversive of them (such as by using the word “slut”) but in fact betrays a considerable concern to reassure as to the compliance of the proposed behavior with unacknowledged patriarchal norms of female behavior (presumably there are also “unethical sluts”). To this I immensely prefer those sex-positive feminists who, whether and to what extent they actually are sex-positive or not, at least claim the right to do what they want sexually and not to have to justify it.
The result is that each of these terms (due of course to the societal base-rate of patriarchal attitudes) is used in practice by considerable numbers of people with values not only different from, but fundamentally opposed to my own: especially men who believe it is OK to impose a restriction on their female partner’s expression of her sexuality towards other men, and women who believe it is OK to acquiesce in such a restriction or are not even aware that they are doing so (which is slightly less blameworthy but still unfortunate).
“Free love” sounds attractive, even self-evident, even if a bit dated. I am guessing though that cultural historians would mostly concur that, whatever the probably considerable cultural impact of the free love movement, freedom of love was not one of its achievements. The free love movement had, and, to the extent it still exists, still has, two major flaws. One, again, is its uncritical attitude vis-à-vis patriarchal norms, which continue to enslave both women and men notwithstanding their desire to constitute themselves as free subjects. The second problem, which is closely related, I believe, to the first, is contained in the notion of “love”. In practice, free love had an ideology of love but focused on abolishing societal values and laws stigmatizing sex (as a result, its ideologues often place undue importance on the legalization of sex work, a position which can be discussed on its own merits, but has nothing whatsoever to do with love).
The societal values opposed by proponents of free love, which I am certainly not defending as such, nevertheless proscribed certain sexual behaviors in an effort to find a socially negotiated equilibrium between women and men. This equilibrium, being negotiated under conditions of patriarchy, obviously was always heavily marked by relations of power. But, nevertheless, simply dropping these norms never meant abolishing the symbolic power of patriarchy, and may even have reinforced it. This is because, while some norms restricting women’s freedoms are indeed patriarchal in nature, other norms restricted men’s freedoms, and historically represent achievements of the feminist movement, however perverse some of those achievements may appear when viewed from the partial angle which the free love movement proposes.
This is most clearly illustrated by the development of norms restricting male polygyny. It is likely, as Foucault implies in L’Usage des Plaisirs, that these norms were initially developed in the interests of militaristic agendas, and so are loosely “patriarchal”, though a more sympathetic historian would probably point to their value in societies subject to external existential threats. If the development of the norms, however, can be viewed as patriarchal until at least recent times, the development of their actual enforcement and subtle ways in which they have changed has been largely driven by feminist demands for status, security and the well-being of offspring. Moreover, patriarchal norms limiting female self-expression are written deep in the structure of society, into women’s very bodies themselves; espousing their abolition, even entirely sincerely, does not bring about their abolition in fact. It is thus a low-cost strategy for a man to espouse “free love”. These deep norms anyway remain in place, while the surface norms which limit a man’s freedom are more easily abandoned. I believe deeply in the ideal of free love, but a social critique of the notion has to take seriously the objection that it is highly asymmetric and does little if anything to empower women sexually in reality.
The same objection can be made to all the other terms. Certainly, under any of these headings, there are people, even many people, who have an ethical commitment to freedom for both women and men. But there are also people, perhaps also many people, and sadly also of both genders, who do not.
This, to my mind fundamental, issue gets obfuscated, frequently violently, because all of these terms are thought of as philosophies of freedom in relationships, and under conditions of patriarchy the realization of these freedoms is always going to be asymmetric. In fact, the case can be made that the demand for freedom itself is not a progressive, but a reactionary demand which is propelled by patriarchal considerations.
Although like anyone I am a big supporter of my own freedoms, this has never been how I thought about relationships. It is not my desire to come up with a concept which ring-fences the scope of restrictions which women’s societal interests might place upon me within relationships. Rather, I have a fundamental ethical repulsion to the idea that I might unnecessarily and unreasonably limit someone else’s freedom in order to further my own self-interest. I am sure I do so unwittingly, and I am aware that societal norms do it for me whether I have active agency in the process or not, but I am committed to self-examination and doing whatever I can around me to counter this bias, including trying to help women to understand that what they “want” is not what they really want.
This is, obviously, an attempt to discover forms of relationship in which women have full agency, forms which, I am convinced, are a lot better for the planet and for men. It is a sort of feminist agenda, but it differs in terms of focus. Feminism, for understandable reasons, deploys most of its energy in the critique of patriarchy. And this is very necessary and must continue. The idea of “post-feminism” I find absurd. However, few feminist thinkers have really imagined a post-patriarchy, or taken full advantage of recent insights into human ethology. They have tended to assume that the patriarchal order suited the interests of men, and been dismissive of the idea, espoused by people like Pierre Bourdieu, that the vast majority of men are also its victim.
As I see it, neither men nor women have the slightest objective interest in patriarchy and we should all unite in a struggle to identify its strategies and disarm it. It is only when we appreciate the mechanisms underlying the social construction and reproduction of patriarchal norms that we can start to do so. The assumption of male agency, and exclusive male agency, in the reproduction of patriarchy is fundamentally distracting.
The notion that men get to control women’s sexuality is not only a cornerstone of patriarchy but doubtless its very keystone. The imposition of monoandry on (most) women, whether freeborn or slaves, appears to have characterized the vast majority of human societies, both in practice and as a matter of ideology, since the beginnings of urban civilization at least. Perhaps we might even go further and speak of anandry, because whilst the man had a right of sexual access to his spouse, not even this much applied in the opposite sense. Women’s sex lives probably varied between deeply unfulfilling and entirely inexistent.
As I said, as far as I am concerned the unconditional and irrevocable abandonment of any claim on the life, affections and behavior of another human being is an ethical imperative and a prerequisite of the spiritual process I have referred to, in baptizing this blog, as “becoming human”. Women and children are not the property of men and cannot be treated as such in a humanism worthy of the twenty-first century; every vestige of such patriarchalism has to be uncovered and uprooted. My concept of becoming human, for all extents and purposes, at least insofar as I am meaningfully able to discuss it intersubjectively, coincides with the dismantling of patriarchy and the restoration of biologically innate behavior (although I am of course aware that there is no such thing as a deculturalized biology, hopefully what I mean by this is sufficiently clear from what I have written elsewhere).
My approach to relationships flows from a constructive engagement with the imperative of building a post-patriarchal social system. This is its essence. I can hardly accept to describe myself using terms which at best relegate this essence to a secondary position and at worst lump me together with people whose ideology I find repugnant.
Therefore I am proposing to coin, or at least promote, a term which surprisingly seems to have little academic pedigree to date. I am going to call the project of creating a society which is rid of the normative and symbolic presence of patriarchy post-patriarchalism. As monogamy is an impossible institution in a post-patriarchal world, this term necessarily implies, in the context of relationships, a form of polyamory which cannot be normatively monoandrous. Post-patriarchalism obviously implies concerns and an agenda which go beyond romantic-sexual relationships. In a broader sense, though, patriarchy (like virility and femininity) is a fundamentally relational term, which only has meaning to describe the social structuration of male-female relationships.
That still doesn’t give me a great word, and it’s a bit of a mouthful. But I hope it at least resolves what for me would be an intolerable ambiguity. I am a post-patriarchalist, committed to the sexual agency of women, whom I definitely trust, if empowered and on aggregate, to make the world a better place than it is now, and men better people. At the same time, we should not be under any illusions: most people, even feminists, are unaware and unsuspecting of how deeply the tentacles of patriarchy reach within them and shape their modes of thought. Men are also disempowered. The very notion of feminism as a marked category relies on patriarchy as an unmarked one. I am fully behind a feminist agenda, and yet it is in the nature of symbolic resistance that it inevitably creates an us-versus-them mentality of which we need to be acutely aware. Feminism is perceived as posing a threat to the relative position of men in the society in which we live because it would operate a rebalancing in favor of women.
This perception, however, aligns the vast mass of disempowered men with the interests of an empowered elite – just as that elite would wish and has always engineered – an elite which, moreover, itself disregards in plain sight the same values which it instrumentalizes and promulgates (again largely unconsciously) for the purpose of social control. In fact, I would go further and say that the control of women’s sexuality has never been a goal in itself: it has “merely” been the means employed by society to control the behavior of men. Thus many men believe they need to struggle against feminism because feminism is opposed to their interests qua men, and therefore they align themselves with the interests of patriarchy, which is much more deeply opposed to their interests. This is precisely the mechanism which reproduces the symbolic domination both of women by men and of men by elite (male) interests.
In a war of men against women, conducted within the symbolic universe of patriarchy and on its terms, it is obvious who will win. Feminist strategies will not eliminate patriarchy even centuries from now unless they address the central facts of symbolic domination. Thus, feminism is commonly thought of as striving for equality for women. However, equality is an extremely loaded term, and one which does not really mean what it says. Entitled groups have long appropriated the struggle for equality in such a way as to ensure it never happens in fact, because what is sought is impossible: it essentially amounts to pretending that disadvantaged groups can one day become advantaged groups. Perhaps a few will, but the vast majority cannot. This is not a strategy for social change but for social reproduction. The problem is not the distribution of advantage, but advantage itself. Thus, feminism will never fully realize its goals if all it seeks to do is extend male advantage to women. This is playing the patriarchal game by the patriarchal rules. It’s fully legitimate and I would never oppose it, but it is not strategic. Given that patriarchy oppresses both men and women, and given that its abolition would benefit both men and women, a way needs to be found to coopt all those of good will which does not frame the issue only as one of men vs. women. Men need to understand that they enjoy a relative advantage over women as a result of patriarchy, but they also pay a huge price for this; women’s emancipation is not a zero-sum game, but an intrinsic consequence of a whole new project of a much better society.
We are certainly not in a world where the goals of the feminist movement have been realized: far from it. Nor would I advocate shedding the label. But I think we need to be aware of some of its limitations and look for complementary notions which make clear that women and men have a common enemy, which is patriarchy. Those women and men who are reaching for personal empowerment need to strive to reinvent social institutions freed from all traces of patriarchy, not just from male privilege. These institutions need to do much more than make men and women formally equal: they need also to make them happy. Therefore women and men should unite under the banner of post-patriarchalism in their, and everyone’s, shared interest. And it seems to me that this must start in the bedroom, and it must start with an unequivocal renunciation, by men, of any attempt to control or limit the sexual and emotional freedom of women. Post-patriarchalism implies non-mononormativity in relationships. Once this is clear, who really cares what we call the relationship structures which will result?
These days it seems there is an ever increasing list of terms that people use to refer to their sexuality. As Dan Savage humorously put it in reply to a polyamorous letter writer, who was asking to join the LGBT acronym, “We are no longer the LGBT community. We are the LGBTQLFTSQIA community, aka the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, leather/fetish, two-spirit, questioning, intersex, and asexual community/communities. I don’t see why [not…]?“.
What’s going on here? Are we uncovering ever finer detail of the deep structure of the human psyche by successive iterations? Obviously not.
When a new term is coined, there are people who adopt it because they feel it avoids some of the connotations of existing terms with which they were uncomfortable. If, however, they are already invested in the existing term, they may do this only with reluctance or not at all. This is because new terms have their origin in a sense of dissatisfaction with the assumptions about oneself inherent in existing terms, but once they are coined they become an element of identity. The search for identity by means of the adoption of labels sounds a lot like it is a quest for personal meaning, but in fact it is something else: labels are an instrument of social structuration and our predilection for them derives its origins from our tribal nature. We use labels – sexual or otherwise – because we find them to be a key to unlock social doors; to pre-identify as “one of us” and thereby lower the barriers to acceptance, perhaps even claim a right to inclusion.
It is common to say that, these days, we live in a world of overlapping identities. What this means in essence, and this is probably a better way of putting it, is that each of us is simultaneously a member of multiple tribes, some quite local and, in this, more resembling ancestral tribes, others quite open-ended imagined communities (a term Benedict Anderson first applied to the social construction of nation states). These multiple loyalties may coexist peacefully, but also may come into painful conflict.
When one points these simple – and widely recognized – facts out to persons who strongly identify with one or other label, often one gets into very hot water. But what were queer people before the word “queer” was invented? What were “relationship anarchists” before that expression was created? The history of language shows that there will be more words created that suddenly people will cling to as “the” word that captures who they are. These words are social constructions, strategies in a struggle against symbolic domination.
To understand the meaning of words, as philosophers and sociologists have argued ever since Wittgenstein’s symbolic revolution in the theory of language, we need to look at the uses made of them. People are inclined to imagine that words such as “heterosexual” or “straight” describe something that has existed since time immemorial. This is far from the truth: they are neologisms (“heterosexual” first attested in 1892, in common use only since the 1960’s; “straight” in this meaning first attested in 1941; source: etymonline.com). These words have come into the language and are used exclusively in opposition to oppressed categories of thought and behavior, first and foremost within oneself. Critical social thought has to identify hidden motivations in the structure of discourse. All of us have many deep seated fears. Biologically, everyone can enjoy same-sex intimate touch. Those who choose to exclude it categorically do so, ultimately, and whatever their rationalization, out of fear.
The war of words is fundamental to social progress or, conversely, social regression (as so well illustrated in Orwell’s 1984). Nevertheless, the only coherent attitude is one of non-identification. Although a universal strategy, it really makes no sense to identify with labels, because a label is a word, and each of us is a living being. In the same way as Magritte’s painting of a pipe is not a pipe: it is a painting, a signifier and not what is signified. There is nothing wrong with labels, obviously: we need them to carry on a discussion. There is only something wrong with how we think about language: it does necessarily name preexisting “things out there. There is such a thing as a lemon, arguably, but there is no such “thing” as polyamory, it is just a word, used by people to try to communicate their values and lifestyle in opposition to perceived social norms, It is a term those people have chosen, and it means what they want it to mean, i.e. different things for different people. Any one person’s meaning of it evolves over their lifetime, and it may be that at some point they will find another label that better describes them as they then are. Throughout the process, it is not only unnecessary, but it is illogical, to identify with the label. But this is difficult because labels create tribes, and people naturally love their tribe.
This is not to say that there are no “things” at all, no biological or physical basis for the terms we use, no logical distinctions at all: merely that these “things” are not coextensive with the label. Thus being same sex attracted may be a birth condition, but it isn’t necessarily, and so, as Foucault has shown, “homosexual” is a social construction, not a thing in itself. Indeed, everything about sexuality is socially constructed. The very word “sexuality” is a social construction, which has been used with its current meaning only since the 1980’s. The sexual trajectory of some persons who identify as “homosexual” may encompass (or have encompassed) members of the opposite sex at some point, even if in most cases it seems that it may never. Whatever the reasons for our sexuality we have a right to express it (consensually of course). But one should not choose a label and then preclude self-development for fear of exclusion from the tribe which it names and to which it is assumed to belong.
For those of us who think of ourselves as being on a spiritual path, it should be evident that we cannot simply decide that something we are now is what we will be for the rest of our life, we have to stay open to change: because being on a spiritual path, a path of inner inquiry, is the same thing as recognizing that we do not yet know ourselves fully.
So why are many people so virulent when it comes to anything perceived as calling into question their labels, even when there is no question of adopting a repressive stance towards the behavior which they name? I think for two reasons. Firstly, because it is such a relief to have a term which affirms an aspect of ones personality which had been unnamed and in all likelihood repressed. Finding a term means that giving up on repressive social norms does not mean, as it otherwise might, exclusion from society; it can be used to find others whose worldview does not depend on the norm in question; perhaps it can change society itself. But in the same way the virulence also betrays insecurity: insecurity as to the acquired status of the legitimacy of the behavior in question, but also as to the adequacy of the definition we have found. Is this really me? Or am I once again only finding myself to lose myself again?
We are accustomed to think of the act of “coming out” as one of moral courage, and indeed it often is; but Foucault’s unwillingness to do so surprises us all the more for a moral courage which is even greater, no denial of his nature but a willingness to live unnamed. For someone so aware of how language shapes thought, and in turn behavior and society, this was perhaps the only coherent choice.
For those who do not know it, “Sex at Dusk” is a book by Lynn Saxon which purports to “debunk” Sex at Dawn. Everyone seems to be agreed that Saxon has a lot of science at her fingertips and that this unreadable book nevertheless makes a number of valid points.
What people are missing in this debate is, however, fundamental. It seems to me that Saxon commits an error of method, epistemological in nature, and an error of genre.
The question in which the readers of Sex at Dawn are interested is what is the most plausible account of evolved human sexuality given the balance of the evidence. This question is not answered by pointing out errors and misinterpretations in the book. Even if couched in scientific terms, this comes pretty close to an ad hominem attack. On the contrary, given all the obvious societal interests vested in the “standard narrative”, it is the scientific underpinning of that narrative regarding which we should be particularly attentive and skeptical. This is clear from Kuhn, Popper, Bourdieu, and any number of other philosophers and sociologists of science. If you have to choose a null hypothesis, it would be better to go with S@D and not with the standard narrative because this would at least counterbalance to some extent almost everyone’s internalized biases. This would be good and correct scientific method, just as it is the church that should have had to prove the terracentric view of the universe and not Galileo the heliocentric one, once 51% of the evidence was on Galileo’s side. What evidence is there that S@D’s conclusions are wrong, not just that the authors made some errors getting there? The conclusions can only be wrong (in the normal sense of this word within the social sciences) if there are other conclusions which are more plausible. What are these conclusions? A vision of a more “polyamorous” ancestral environment is not scientifically suspect just because the Church Fathers have indoctrinated us with the idea that it is morally suspect. This is an epistemological error which I personally find inexcusable on the part of a contemporary social scientist.
This brings me to the error of genre. S@D is a work of popular science. The intention of the authors is demonstrably to affect the terms of the broader, and hugely important, social debates which sexuality feeds into. They do this by presenting science, but they are allowed, and even required, to be selective given how biased much of the “evidence” is. They are even allowed (thank you, Seneca) to make mistakes. It is a book with an agenda (as all books have an agenda, for, as Derrida famously observed, “there is no text without context”). That is why Saxon’s book can only be an ad hominem attack. Her choice of method condemns her to this. If Saxon believes the balance of evidence points towards monogamy then that is the book she should write. This would, however, be surprising as I think one of the criticisms one might make of S@D is that the “standard narrative” is not actually a standard narrative from a scientific perspective. What it is, is a socially standard narrative (something very different) which is a hidden bias in much scientific writing, especially the more distant the theme of that writing is from actually investigation into evolved human sexuality. Saxon’s book, less excusably given its subject matter, inadvertently proves the point. Barash and Lipton (The Myth of Monogamy, 2001) do the same when they show that we are not naturally monogamous and then claim that we “should” be anyway.
The point is that what we “should” be is up for grabs. We no longer have to take Plato’s word on it. This emancipation from the patriarchal bias in classical moral thought around sexuality, so brilliantly analyzed by Foucault (The Use of Pleasure, 1984), is what S@D sought to achieve, and what it has achieved. S@D has been justly successful in reaching its goals because it is engaging, humanistic, humorous, optimistic, and entertaining. This is how you change the world, if you are courageous enough not merely to analyze it, and particularly in ways that have an unrecognized bias towards the status quo. Wanting to change the world is not illegitimate and the fact that so many in the scientific community seem to think it is shows, I think, something of the power relations between vested social interests and the scientific establishment.
I am not saying that S@D is the last word on the subject, or even that it is a Copernican moment (and the authors are very quick to disown such an idea, as witnessed by Chris Ryan’s comment on one of my earlier articles). There are elements in the conclusions which I myself have argued are incomplete. In a way, in places it’s an engaging caricature. Perhaps this is a moral failing on my part, but I find it hard to be appalled by that. I think what it nevertheless is, is a brilliant popularization of the relevant science combined with true wisdom and compassion for the human condition. This makes it, as I think its short history has shown, a defining moment in the Kuhnian process (which is to be interpreted in a post-structuralist sense given the nature of “truth” in the social sciences(*)) by which one scientific paradigm is replaced by another. The authors achieve this by undermining the forces which maintain the status quo. They manage to dissipate some of the fear inculcated in us by established social discourses according to which we have to hang on for dear life to the disintegrating institution of monogamy because of the imagined catastrophic social consequences of giving it up; rather, we can trust our biology and imagine better ways of ordering our affairs than those which served Roman and later European militaristic expansion so well, and therefore survived that “evolutionary” race, but perhaps are not relevant to life on the planet in the 21st century.
Note
* Cf V. Romania (2013), Pragmatist Epistemology and the Post-Structural Turn of the Social Sciences, in Philosophy Today, Summer 2013 (link).
PS: Before anyone is tempted to conclude anything from the ratings of Saxon’s book on Amazon, do recall selection bias and confirmation bias…
“It seems certain that the habit of marriage has been gradually developed, and that almost promiscuous intercourse was once extremely common throughout the world.” – Darwin, The Descent of Man
Let me add a few more words of explanation to what I wrote yesterday on the subject of mononormativity, a term coined by Pieper and Bauer (2005) to refer to the normative social matrix of monogamy in its various cultural manifestations. Sociological research into mononormativity is very much in its infancy, meaning that unfortunately there is not a lot I can base myself on in order precisely to map the concept and its influence (I think we have some idea of the economic circumstances under which the monogamous norm developed, but little real grasp on the social mechanisms which maintain and enforce it).
When I was fourteen, the world around me, uninvited, started changing. The hitherto somewhat annoying subspecies known as “girls” suddenly became objects of intense fascination – and intense fraternal rivalry. Handicapped by my childhood emotional injuries, and with no manual to follow, I was ill-placed to play this game. It didn’t take long for this to become clear to me, and so, rather than make a fool of myself, I placed my erotic ambitions on hold; instead I focused on getting into a position of financial independence from which I imagined I would be better able to shape my life. At fifteen, I developed generalized fasciculations which, though it turned out they were benign, I was convinced were the onset of a muscular wasting disease. This was the state in which I spent all of my later teens and my college years.
My pubescent sexuality was born into a social context, one in which I knew, was linked to and cared about the objects of my affection; but it was soon divorced from it. Unable to develop in an integrated way, the sexual drive was transferred to images and fantasms, objects without social context and unable to receive love, with which I engaged in a perplexed monologue. I am sure I am describing here the sexual development of a majority of teenage boys of my cohort in our culture.
Several years ago I did quite a bit of work on my childhood traumas, but this particular, pubescent trauma I never paid much attention to. I have at least the impression that it is generally supposed in psychoanalysis that the resolution of earlier experiences will also resolve later ones and that these latter need no special attention. But this, I now think, is not true; this part of my life also needed to be revisited. Until recently, I had never given it much thought.
In fact I did not give it any thought recently either, but I received a gift of healing during a shamanic soul retrieval session which specifically related to this, and since then I have actively been trying to make friends again not only with my inner child, but also my inner fourteen-year-old : a much unloved and forgotten creature. That I suddenly adopt a caring attitude to him, asking him to contribute to my adult life, is, I am sure, a great and unexpected relief to him.
Pubescent male sexuality is a bubbling soup. The objects of ones affections are not chosen according to some fixed set of preferences: it is a time of experimentation, and tactical opportunism, a game in which one seeks to optimize a complex equation involving not only the girl one is dating and sexual payoffs, but also ones reputation and position in the group. Exclusive partnering, advocated usually by the girls, who to be fair also need a mating strategy, is discovered to be part of the rules of the game, adaptation to which is a pragmatic necessity; it is, however, absolutely alien to the subjective experience and every teenage boy knows it. We are by nature polyamorous, but once we discover the sweet pleasures of the union of body and soul, we dive deeply into it, forgetting, in the intoxication, that the circumstances which enabled it had a lot to do with pure chance and assuming that the rules we played by enabled the reward we obtained.
I think it is by now an established scientific fact that, even if sexual appetite may experience a monogamous phase at the outset of a relationship, this does not last for very long. Monogamy in the early days of a relationship may be natural, but subsequently it is only a choice – or no choice at all. Nevertheless, not only the myth, but the institutions of monogamy pervade society, compelling an unnatural compliance with their dictates on pain of social disopprobium, ostracism or worse. In the same way as society is androcentric and heteronormative, it is mononormative.
Mononormativity does violence to our biological nature and severely limits our extraordinary ability and desire to love. And as I have argued elsewhere, restoration of our biological nature is a prerequisite of sustained spiritual growth, at least at the community level, because human beings are not going collectively to be happy in an environment to which they are biologically unadapted.
In its origins, tantra was as iconoclastic in regard to mononormativity as it was in relation to other social institutions such as diet and the caste system. Tantric practitioners frequently did not even know the identity of the person with whom they entered into sacred union. All this though, of course, was devised in a world far removed from our own. Today, the central image of Shiva and Shakti in yabyum enjoys wide appeal in part because it can easily seem (although this is clearly an incorrect interpretation) to endorse the primacy of monogamy – these primal characters are indeed destined to each other and alone in the universe.
Now, while some schools of tantra orient themselves towards couples practice, this is certainly not generally the case: indeed I know few practitioners who are, by conviction, much less de facto, monogamous in the traditional sense. Nevertheless, I would maintain that societal mononormativity influences practice more subtly. People may embrace a rarefied, ritualized interaction with the opposite sex, even a very intimate one, but they do it in a spirit of dissociation from the biological foundation of their sexuality, in a way which is almost ascetic, and certainly unerotic.
My inner fourteen-year-old is mystified by this disenchantment. He wants a place at the table. He likes it messy and raw. Indeed, this for him is alignment with ecstasy; the ascetic, transcendent imagery is incomprehensible.
We can live a life in alignment with spirit only if we are aligned with our biological nature. Then life’s experiences wake us up, move us in new directions, bring healing and creativity; just as falling in love always has, the world over. We are in a state of bliss when we are constantly falling in love with all around us, the physical and biological world and also our fellow human beings. For me, if I review my life, my sexual instinct has always been the major driver of healing and renewal. But that instinct, like the spirit, blows where it will. I am not its master; and in fact I am not the master of anything about myself, I am more like a servant of myself, curious to discover who I am and what I can do and experience in the world. This attitude of humility and service towards ones own essence is, I think, key to the spiritual life and to alignment and abundance.
This is why I insist that all notions of mononormativity within a couple must be banished if its component parts are serious about their spiritual life, and indeed about living their relationship as an adventure in growth and healing. One simply cannot place any a priori constraints on where the breath of spirit may blow. Because we have absolutely no idea, not even the remotest basis for an idea. Radical honesty within a couple only makes any sense if it is based on radical honesty to oneself, a person one cannot presume to know but is always discovering. One cannot bind this unknown self. Indeed, the discovery of self, this unbinding of Prometheus, is the spiritual path.
I do not think this makes dyadic relationships impossible or even undesirable, but I think it is a very strict condition regarding which, at the level of aspiration and shared values at least, no compromise is possible. When desire taps on my shoulder, that is a moment of opportunity and rebirth. I owe it to myself, my partner, and the world, to greet her with open arms.
I am moved to share this article over on Guernica in which a journalist – Katherine Rowland – pays a sympathetic visit to the ZEGG “free love” community near Berlin in Germany.
The writing is perceptive and beautiful; it is a gorgeous portrait, and as Johanna in the comments implies, does not only illuminate the contemporary struggle between monogamy and polyamorous community but the whole social history of the sixties free love movement.
The problem, it seems to me, as I suggested in my earlier blog post on polyamory, is that what we have here is a utopian community for dystopian individuals. By that I mean simply that there are many obstacles to leading what may be a more natural existence, and only those whose biological nature is the most exhausted by struggling with social norms (like me) are moved to try. Groupthink in such a context is almost inevitable. Such communities are courageous experiments which one may envy, but on the whole they are not very self-reflective or self-aware. A bit like launching off across the ocean with only a hollowed-out canoe. It’s not going to work unless set in a very careful therapeutic context, and at present our lamentable state of almost-inexistent knowledge as to what it is we truly desire as human beings, coupled with the neurotic state of how these drives are expressed in contemporary society, affords few points of safe anchorage. Which may, though, not matter if we just view it as one resource in a personal journey of self-discovery.
For my part I do not believe that this kind of community is a solution to most people’s socioerotic ills. It may provide a framework for important experiences to occur, but it does not provide a complete answer to the needs of the heart. This is because of the ways in which it necessarily differs from ancestral communities and because, as a species, we are also on a journey and cannot simply return to the conditions of the past; we must adapt, and we are very (but perhaps too) adaptable.
The needs of the human heart are most practically met, for most people, in structures which build upon social monogamy. This is for reasons which have nothing to do with our biological nature, but only with the consequences of our fall from grace. Already a relationship with a single person is hard; there is every risk that adding more people in makes it worse and not better. Worse, because it makes it easier to dodge the inevitable confrontations with self which come up in a relationship, to slip into a superficial, self-indulgent erotic reverie.
We nevertheless have little choice than to invent new models, because as far as human sexuality is concerned, the cat is not only out of the bag, but equipped with a dazzling array of techno cat-toys with which it can catch all the mice it could ever dream of – and more. The Aquarian couple is different from an “open relationship”, swinging or “consensual non-monogamy” in that it is about love and self-discovery, not just getting sexual “needs” met (there is no such thing as merely “sexual” needs anyway – impulse perhaps, but not needs). But it is also different from polyamory in that it does function based on something close to a traditional family unit. Unwavering commitment to truth, freedom and self-discovery are as important as the commitment to the spiritual and financial needs of that unit. Only such a marriage of yin and yang can, I believe, take society on the next step of its painful journey to more joy, love and inclusiveness.
In my last post, I wrote about the need to constitute relationships which are free of all forms of control and self-limitation. Only when we are open to life in its entirety are we aligned with our biological nature and our spiritual destiny.
As I’ve said before, this does not, however, mean that we need to embrace polyamory. It is important to recall a fundamental truth, namely that most social institutions are based on real human needs even whilst they are inimical to others. The demand for sexual exclusivity within marriage betrays a deeper, valid intuition as to the possible depth of a loving relationship. Many people are not willing to explore this depth, but by refusing to do so, they just as certainly set themselves on a path away from self-examination and transformation. Therefore I advocate radical commitment and radical openness. One must be willing to be burnt in the fires both of particularity and of generality – not pick and choose a la carte.
Our ancestral nature is tribal, but we are not going back to being hunter-gatherers in the jungle any time soon. For most people, pair bonding is the obvious solution to a biospiritual imperative. As I have previously argued, both the pleasures and the pain of this situation are there to teach us and to make us more aware.
Today’s spiritual couple is not just a neoprimitivist reincarnation, but is called upon to reinterpret our biological heritage to the needs of the present time. In my vision, the Aquarian couple is more deeply committed than any traditional couple, and at the same time more radically open than most polyamorists and almost all swingers and other persons in so-called “open marriages”. For this reason, whilst it is important to make clear that one stands outside the dominant social norm, these other terms are also inadequate. One is forced, really, to coin a term. I call this the Aquarian couple.
Aquarian relationships may come to an end, as everything eventually does, but they never fail, just as life is not a failure simply because it ends in death. On the spiritual path, we do not hold on to life but each day, each moment we die and are reborn. Similarly we do not hold on to our relationships, and they are new in each moment. I know many examples of this kind of couple and it is time that their stories are told and honored, as testimony to what is possible, satisfying and desirable in human relationships at the dawn of this new age.
As I have noted before, mankind has an amazing and innate skill for manipulation through shame, which implements an effective evolutionary strategy designed to ensure group coherence and the passing on from one generation to the next of epigenetic knowledge about the world. Emotional manipulation is particularly easy for persons in positions of authority.
This skill, or Achilles’ heel if you will, has been exploited by agrarian societies in order to solidify the social relations of economic production. They have done so in two main ways, one of which Aquarian society is well aware of and in the process of abandoning, but the other of which remains largely normative and unquestioned.
The institution of whose corruptness we are well aware is religion. Organized religion cynically latches on to mankind’s inherent sense of awe and numinosity, and channels it into a vehicle which commands subservient obedience. True religion is a demand-side, or better collective experience, but the supply side has used threats, misrepresentation and coercion in order to dominate it.
We have been fighting this and pushing it back for centuries. In the Enlightenment we coined the idea of separation of church and state, choosing, no doubt opportunistically, to ignore that this is a complete nonsense: church and state have always been simply two aspects of each other. Whenever a religious movement has really challenged the basis of the agrarian state, it has either been short-lived and brutally repressed, or rapidly co-opted, and thereby denatured, by the powers that be. As Marx stated, “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness.”
We have been much less willing to dethrone the second pillar of social subservience: the family. Should we be in any way surprised to learn that this institution is one of those dearest to a religion whose founder stated “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters–yes, even his own life — he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26)? We should not be surprised: the intentions of the religion and of its founder are diametrically opposed to each other.
I am not, however, going to get into a lame exegesis of statements I am not concerned to defend. The point I wish to make is that human nature displays a tribe-building instinct which social authority has deemed is allowed expression only through the institution of the family.
That institution and its rules have of course varied from place to place and changed significantly over time. For most of human history it has not implied complete restriction on the sexual freedom of men, but it has ensured that women occupy a subservient place in society, essentially reducing them to one more item of property in the estate of their husband.
The social allocation of women – what we may term the bridal economy – has, of course, reduced men’s sexual freedom indirectly, by making many women sexually unavailable, but there has always remained the institution of the brothel, and enough “shared” women with no choice other than to populate it due to unfortunate circumstances in their lives. However, this is no more than a valve to let off what would otherwise be an unbearable build-up of pressure due to the power of male sexual drives. A brief liaison with a prostitute in a brothel, even when relatively free from shame, hardly allows for satisfaction of the complete sexual instinct, which requires relationship and connection. Indeed, the sexual drive itself is only the basest component and the easiest to gratify. Thus it remains the case that within all systems where women are treated as property, the sexual instinct of both sexes, in its full sense, is almost completely repressed.
Repressed, of course, is not the same as forgotten, as many utopian attempts at reconstituting polyadic communities over the centuries attest. Free love has often been subversive and remains so today. Friedrich Engels wrote that “It is a peculiar fact that with every great revolutionary movement the question of ‘free love’ comes to the foreground“. As Reich can testify, the idea of sexual pleasure as an organizing principle of society has hardly been universally welcomed.
Monogamy and its historical variants have served the goal of social control not only by repressing sexuality and the empowering vitality which it engenders. Families are perfect units to tax, both for money and for soldiers. They are associated with transgenerational property rights, the defence of which necessitates compliance and docility. They are also far less robust than tribes to the losses of individual members, meaning that those members must be risk-averse. Lastly, the family unit is naturally self-propagating. Children are conditioned into it and their economic incentives are aligned with it.
Even today, there is a doctrine of humanitarian intervention into the affairs of state, but families are very largely self-governing, not as a result of any liberal conviction but rather because they are so constitutive of the greater whole which is the state. But if monogamy were intrinsic to our species, why would we need so many institutions to enforce it?
We sleep around, but we feel guilty, just as we used to feel guilty for not going to church. This is a sure sign of having been manipulated into believing that the behavior in question is inconducive to the welfare of the group. If we believe the exact contrary to be the case, then it behooves us to be courageous. We need to reject the traditional institution of marriage with the same joyful iconoclasm as many of us reject the institutions of the church.
Certainly, we will need to find other ways to structure our lives remaining compatible with the need for community, companionship, allowing each person independence, and rearing emotionally healthy children. This is a vast project with no map to guide the way, and it is easy to fall back on what is tried and tested, even if the result of testing conventional monogamy in its modern form has been to show that it is an enormous failure. Whatever institutions we may invent going forward, however – and I use as always the word ‘institution’ to mean not only form but also content – such institutions will need to be compatible with human nature and aspirations, or they are not worth having.
The confinement of sexual expression, and indeed frequently of all expression of adult intimacy, to one single other person, together with the societal assumption that this will, always and everywhere, be the case, is a pillar of oppression which we need to pull down if we purport to be on a spiritual path. This alone, however, is insufficient because it considers only the sexual dimension and ignores the aspiration – often passed over by some of the more austere thinkers I have quoted – to live in deep community and to raise children together in love. Given our biological nature, this is frequently hard to realize other than within institutions which have the form of dyadic relationships with dependent children, and I am not arguing that everyone is obliged to follow a more utopian path whatever the practical difficulties. Within that structure, it must, however, be absolutely clear that commitment does not translate into exclusive focus and that other loves, on the part of persons equally conscious and enlightened, are considered an enrichment, and welcome.
I just finished reading Monique Roffey’s “With the Kisses of his Mouth”, an astonishingly forthright – if frustratingly incomplete – account of the author’s exploration of her sexuality following her breakup from her former husband, through casual sex dating, swinging, tantra and new age practices.
The book is so personal that I have hesitated in how to review it. It feels like I have become a party to confidences which normally stay safely confined in workshop spaces, as if a private diary had been left on a train and discovered by me inadvertently. In short, it seems indecent to respond publicly, and even more so in a critical, if I hope sympathetic tone. On the other hand, the decision to publish so uncensored an account belongs to the author, and puts her views on record. By virtue of this it makes a leap from subjectivity to intersubjectivity, occupying a shared space which is also mine. I also get a sense that part of the author’s purpose is to invite readers to react. So here goes with my thoughts.
There are already several reviews out there. Julie Myerson’s in The Guardian is excellent and I largely share it. The book has an engaging character despite its literary flaws, and this is essentially because, at all times, one senses the author is being breathtakingly honest – to the point, indeed, of a degree of dullness at times. Literary critique should however be carefully distinguished from the slutshaming disguised as esthetics that has evidently motivated a number of her reviewers, and which I feel no obligation to reproduce.
As I have some familiarity with the settings portrayed in the book as well as with the quest that underlies it – and care about it also – my own review is from a different angle.
There is no denying this is a courageous book. It captures a lot of the flavor of tantra in the UK, and also of the other places the author visits and discusses, insofar as I am familiar with them – Cap d’Agde for instance. I am glad she is proud of her sexual quest and willing to say so. This is a major contribution to creating a sex-positive climate for her peers, from which we can all only benefit. However, I do find the book, as an account of a quest which is ultimately and obviously spiritual – as the title of the book, taken from the Biblical Song of Songs implies – painfully self-absorbed.
Moved by the author’s predicament, one reads on hoping at some point she will transcend the limitations of her own tragic discourse on love and achieve a new triumphant synthesis; and yet ultimately this is not so. This gives the book a feeling of incompleteness and anticlimax which I found frustrating. The attempt at a synthesis at the end feels little like one, and more, in fact, like a distraction from the themes discussed throughout the book.
Viewed from Europe, with most of my experiences in Osho-related and German milieu, which stress humanistic psychology and meditation rather than sex and esotericism (much less BDSM), the UK tantra scene the author describes – accurately I believe – looks erratic, veering off into new age meanders the purpose of which can only be to escape the path inward. Roffey’s book is absorbed with the question of who she is: but not yet really as a spiritual enquiry; it comes across still primarily as an attempt to salvage the ego. The author’s journey – perhaps also her decision to publish the book – appears as a quest for an intellectual and/or relational refuge which would finally allow her to affirm that how she is, is actually OK. This quest, by its very existence, however, is evidence she is still consumed by doubts on this score. Her inner dialectic between salvation and self-doubt is markedly narcissistic and ultimately, I found, also became for this reason tedious in the retelling (scarcely a word attempts to establish a bridge between writer and reader; all this is left to intuition). Yet there seems to be little or no awareness of this indelicate degree of self-centeredness. It would have been the job of her spiritual teachers to point this out; I am a little disappointed if they have not. (Astonishingly, Osho is dismissed in the book as “much vilified”; in my view there is no more profound and practical teacher, and it sounds like Roffey knows him only at second hand).
The dilettantism of the author’s quest is illustrated especially by her discussion, in the closing pages, of Quodoushka and her valedictory declaration that she has discovered herself to be “monogamous”.
Now Quodoushka, apart from being hilariously funny (and hard to spell), has little else going for it. It is a patent and unimaginative fraud, as the link to the Wikipedia article makes amply evident, best known for (and in Roffey’s account largely limited to) a somewhat bizarre character typology based on genital types. In contrast, however, to the Reichian analysis of character, or the one offered by the enneagram (discussed by me here and here) – the purpose of which is to uncover and deconstruct patterns of childhood conditioning and to return to essence – the Quodoushka typology relies on allegedly objective anatomical features to categorize people into categories which they then can hide behind, but never change.
Conceivably there might be elements of truth in this typology, though I highly doubt this given how ridiculous it is. But in any case the spiritual point of this – other than the convenience of escapism – eludes me. Ultimately we are one; it cannot be that acquired character traits have in fact some indelible nature. And more particularly, it cannot be that some of us are “monogamous” and others not, or suffice for our salvation that we accept such a conclusion and move on. It can only be, as I have argued time and again on this blog, that those who stress monogamy have sensed certain truths but missed others, and those who stress polyamory may have lofty ideals but still often fail to engage with the challenge of unconditional love for actual real people because it is too painful a mirror of themselves.
One may, perhaps, accept that one is conditioned in a certain way and likely to remain so conditioned; but then ones spiritual quest is at an end. And this is not the kind of end to which, in my eyes, such a book should point.
I in no way want to denigrate what the author means by identifying as “monogamous”, but her adoption of this label seems to preclude further enquiry and, against the backdrop of a hoped-for epiphany, is wildly disappointing.
Roffey uses the term “monogamous” as if she knows what it is. But she, and we, do not know what it is, at all. We have no idea, or rather a wealth of conflicting ideas. “Monogamy”, as uncountable studies show, is an essentially contested concept. The behavior she recounts in the book moreover – with, if I am not wrong, some pride and satisfaction – is hardly “monogamous” in any identifiable sense, past or present. She seems simply to conclude that it lacks something and remains unsatisfying – and thereby prepares the bed for her inane critics and the chorus of self-justifying I-told-you-so’s.
This “something missing” she leaves, in line with the dominant social mythology, to serendipity, to the future, to a force outside of herself. The hackneyed, and overbearingly dehumanizing, “knight in shining armor” projection which so disappoints in every encounter man has with woman: that moment of realization that it will never be you that is object of love, but only ever a distorted representation of you.
It must be obvious, and it is obvious to all true spiritual teachers, that this claimed contingency of self-realization is only ever a sign of resistance to self-knowledge. What Roffey seeks is what we all seek, and few of us, whatever our relationship status or history, ever actually find, namely the ability to utterly abandon ourselves and to dance in love among the stars. But, to this end, members of the opposite sex, and relationships, are merely vehicles. The turgid institution we call monogamy is antithetical to the desire for transcendence in most cases, and tangential to it at best. Marriage simply is not the logical consequence of the numinous rapture we call “falling in love” which it purports to be. In self-identifying as “monogamous”, Roffey makes an ersatz projection which at the same time precludes what she is looking for – unimpaired and ecstatic love.
My advice to the reader is to reach beyond this well-disguised counsel of despair. Love where love is – as Roffey has been doing in practice – and become aware and compassionate towards the feelings of incompleteness which result, because they are a guide. Monogamy is not a precondition of plenitude. Pace Aristophanes and his drunken nonsense, there is nothing out there for you to find in order to become complete, but only things inside of you, negative self-judgments, to drop. Sex has no importance at all, it is just a celebration of what is. It only becomes important because it is so problematic: the barriers we put in place to our sexual expression tell us almost everything about our conditioned selves and our inability to love. The monogamy fixation, by abandoning the moment and subordinating it to expectations and unmet needs, voids sexual experience of its essence, voids it in fact of what we sense is there and some of us imagine to imply monogamous pre-eminence. Monogamy clutches at stars, for fear they will elude us. But they will not elude us; it suffices to open our heart and they are always there.
Life may certainly be lived in such a way as to be marked by deep union with just one soul. There is no reason why not. However, there is equally no need to choose this or to accord it preference, and still less normative status, blindly unaware of the mixture of motivations that contribute to the moment of rapture and the meaning given to it. By projecting on a man the burden of impossible roles to play, a woman can only estrange herself – and her partner – from self-realization and numinosity.
As someone who has for a long time intellectually moved beyond inherited notions of monogamy, and who certainly subscribes to the sort of ethical precepts people who expound polyamory defend, I have often wondered why the notion itself is not one that appeals to me more.
Perhaps it starts with the word itself: the blend of Greek and Latin is itself disturbing. Why can’t it be “multiamory”? Or “poly-“…?
Well, poly-what? The inability to decide if it should be “polyeros” or “polyagape” together with the technical/commercial connotations of “multi”-anything no doubt explain this unhappy (not so) neologism. We think we know what “amor” is, and we very “nobly” want more of it in our lives.
But actually we do not know what “amor” is, no more than the ancients. We do not even know what “eros” is (and we are so far from understanding “agape” that it is no more than a hypothetical alien lifeform to most of us, inconveniently embedded in our superego). Continue reading “A cultural critique of polyamory”
