Episode 18 - Polyamory

Transcript

Ellie: 0:07

Hi, I'm Ellie Anderson,

David: 0:09

And I'm David Peña-Guzmán. Welcome to Overthink.

Ellie: 0:12

The podcast where two friends,

David: 0:14

who are also professors,

Ellie: 0:16

put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.

David: 0:18

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach. This is the fourth and final episode in our series on intimate relationships.

Ellie: 0:36

David. I've been thinking a lot about what we discussed in our last episode, which was on open relationships. In that episode, we concluded that if you really take seriously the queer and feminist critiques of monogamy, it sorta seems like you should just be polyamorous, even though neither of us is, at least of this moment. What do we make of this? Is it true that polyamory seems to have more liberatory potential than other sorts of intimate relationships?

David: 1:04

Well, it definitely seems as if a lot of queer theorists and feminist theorists believe so. Uh, many of them argue that polyamory is the way of the future. For instance, sociologist Mimi Schippers says that polyamory offers a way to reorient not only our romantic relationships and our desire, but also gender and race relations. And so on her reading, it has very radical potential.

Ellie: 1:31

Yeah. So this is a really radical claim to make, the idea that polyamory doesn't just reshape intimate relationships, but also reshapes relationships more broadly. And I'm thinking here about how, when I was a teenager, I was having an argument with a very strict conservative Catholic about gay marriage, and her reason for rejecting gay marriage was that she thought it would ultimately lead to plural marriages. And I, you know, had some counter-argument like, "What are you talking about? That's a slippery slope fallacy, just because we extend marriage to people who are of the same gender doesn't mean suddenly we're going to have plural marriages." And then now, you know, like 10 or 15 years later, I'm like, actually, does though?

David: 2:11

Yeah well, I mean, it seems like her problem was that she overestimated the power of gay marriage, because ideally it would have led to that slippery slope.

Ellie: 2:22

And I think certainly polyamory is often associated with leftist thinking today. It's relatively popular among folks who are socialists or in the activist communities. It's also a pretty recent term, originating only in the 1990s. So, David, how would you define polyamory?

David: 2:39

Well, I really like Schipper's definition and I think it's helpful. She defines polyamory as committed emotionally and sometimes sexually intimate relationships that involve more than two persons. And so it's just a relationship between more than two people that has this emotional or sexual dynamic.

Ellie: 2:59

I think that is indeed a very succinct definition of it. I do think some polyamorists would emphasize the fact that being polyamorous can be more of a lifestyle or attitude than manifesting in actual relationships all the time. So for instance, polyamorist and academic Kim TallBear talks about being a solo polyamorist. Polyamory refers to intimate relationship structures, but it also can sort of refer to a mindset or an attitude.

David: 3:23

That's interesting, because when I think of solo polyamory, my first reaction is that it's oxymoronic, but I want to hear how that's cashed out in her account.

Ellie: 3:33

Yeah, definitely. One thing to say in the meantime is that the word polyamory is a combination of the Greek word poly, which means multiple, with the Latin word amor, meaning love. And so I wonder if there's even an ambiguity in the word where love could either refer to relationships or you have multiple loving relationships, or just to the sort of state of love, or the practice of love more generally. And I think, you know, the word is- is quite interesting because it's not only a sort of weird amalgamation of Latin and Greek, but it also has no equivalent in say monogamy, right? We don't talk about monoamory or even monoeros, if we were to stick with the Greek root. Polyamory is different from polygamy, which is the practice of having multiple spouses, right? So monogamy, one marriage, polygamy, marriage with multiple people, and a lot of polyamorists will talk about the difference between polyamory and polygamy in terms of gender equality. So polygamy is typically associated with one man having multiple wives. There are societies where that has been inverted, and one woman has had multiple husbands. There also has been a history of plural marriages, but polyamorists will say, "Well, those structures have usually had some sort of gender asymmetry. And what we really want to focus on in polyamory is the egalitarian dimension of it." Also the fact that it's not about spouse relations, but about love relations. And so it's a little bit more anarchic, perhaps.

David: 5:05

Yeah, although some feminist and queer theorists like Elizabeth Brake also have been writing recently about polygamous marriages as expressions of polyamorous love relations.

Ellie: 5:17

And part of what's interesting here is that these discourses are really taking off, at least in the US, quite recently. And so, as opposed to say some of the material that we were talking about in monogamy or marriage episodes, a lot of our discussion material for today is written in this century.

David: 5:34

And the whole "poly" jargon has emerged in the online polycultures of blogs and podcasts and threads, so now we talk about people in poly relationships as being, for example, in pods or constellations, or we talk about the lovers of your lovers with whom you yourself are not attached to as metamours, like at the meta level of amor.

Ellie: 5:57

Yeah. So if you and I are in a relationship and you're also in a relationship with another person, and I'm not in a relationship with that person, that person would be my metamor. And this is such an interesting expression of the way that labeling things can really contribute to our conceptual and philosophical understandings of them, as well as the fact that a lot of this philosophical work is happening in informal settings online.

David: 6:21

And one of the things that we have learned from recent work in the philosophy of language is that once you have a term to describe a feature of your experience, you're able to reflect on that aspect much better than if you had to tip toe around it. And so having all this terminology emerge really helps us hone in our understanding of the phenomenon in question.

Ellie: 6:46

Today, we're talking about polyamory.

David: 6:49

Is polyamory unnatural and perverse or is it the way of nature?

Ellie: 6:55

In the end, does it even matter?

David: 6:57

And how do people in polyamorous relationships navigate complex emotions like jealousy?

Ellie: 7:03

And are they exempt from replicating structures of gender and racial oppression? One of the most common objections to monogamy is that it is unnatural for humans. Often this gets wrapped up into a gender narrative how like, "Oh, it's natural for women, but it's unnatural for men," some of which we talk a little bit about in the monogamy episode, but I think it's becoming more and more popular to hold the view today that monogamy is an unnatural state for humans, and that we'd all be better off if we just went with our lust.

David: 7:37

Yeah. And, you know, we talk in our monogamy episode about the way in which the idea that humans are naturally inclined to bond emotionally with only one other person really took off during the Hellenistic and especially the Roman period. So here, we're talking about the first couple of centuries of our era. And at that time, this was one of the main reasons for justifying state intervention into the institution of marriage, which previously was a purely private affair that the state didn't have any say over. And so for many Romans, the reason that the state should promote monogamy, officially, is because human nature demanded it and happiness meant living in accordance to nature.

Ellie: 8:22

Yeah. This idea that monogamy is natural has been passed down through history and it's still articulated by a lot of anthropologists today, but it may not be very accurate. There's a lot coming out in recent decades around the idea that if anything, polyamory is more natural than monogamy for humans. One of the most influential articulations of this view comes in the book Sex at Dawn, which is written by two evolutionary psychologists and geared towards a general audience. And the basic thesis of this book is that humans in prehistoric times were almost certainly non-monogamous, and that we actually evolved to be non-monogamous. And so there's a lot of details about human anatomy and physiology that the authors drawn on in order to make this case.

David: 9:09

Ooh. Tell us about those details

Ellie: 9:10

Oh, yeah, no, I mean, it's like juicy. They basically hypothesize that humans evolved to have group sex, where one woman would, at a particular time, have sex with a number of different men in succession, often with those other men watching each other have sex. And so for instance, they talk about the idea of sperm competition, which is the notion that if a woman receives sperm from multiple men within the same sexual experience, there will be a survival of the fittest battle, where one will win out.

David: 9:46

In the vaginal canal? Like that's where it actually unfolds?

Ellie: 9:49

Yes. I mean, this is literally what they talk about. And they also talk about the fact that women tend to have a much longer time achieving orgasm than men. And so it was in men's best interests, evolutionarily, to come quickly because that would minimize the chance of another man being like, Get away! And taking the man off the woman before he finished," but that women had an evolutionary advantage if they could take longer to achieve orgasm, because then they could go for a while, right. And sort of like go through all of these different men who would orgasm inside them. And then their vaginal canals would get to choose which sperm were going to stick around, right. And-

David: 10:31

Nothing like- nothing like an evolutionary 'just so' story about taking loads.

Ellie: 10:38

Exactly! I mean, and some of the things that they draw attention to also are things like the fact that women tend to be louder during sex than men are. And they think that, like, basically the man and woman would have been in the woods, and the other dudes would have been within earshot and thought to themselves, "Ooh, some actions happening, maybe I can get in on it." And so the woman's noises of pleasure actually would have been like a sort of mating call. And then they also talk about the fact that men today tend to get aroused by pornographic depictions of group sex, such as the gangbang genre of porn. And they were like, "Oh, doesn't it make sense that this would be in our evolution?" And I have to say, I do think there's something interesting about an evolutionary story that explains women's orgasm and women's pleasure because a lot of folks have just taken that as a weird mystery. Like, "There is no reason that women would have evolved to have pleasure during sex," but I'm guessing David, you have a lot of issues with this data.

David: 11:34

Yeah. Well, I mean, anytime you have an evolutionary, psychological explanation for something like gang bang pornography, uh, I'm going to basically raise all of my eyebrows. I only have two, but I'll end up raising more than two if possible, just because I have a lot of difficulty processing this because it sometimes turns on, um, effectively, the retroactive projection of contemporary practices on to the Pleistocene period when a lot of these processes presumably took shape in our evolutionary past, and then just essentially giving what biologists call a 'just so' story, this notion that like, "Oh, well, do we want to understand why men love gang bang pornography? Here is a story. It's because back in the day in the forest, the woman was howling to get more partners, to get a rat race of semen going on, uh, during the sex act." I- anyway. Yes. Evidently, I have a lot of problems with it, but nonetheless, I find it interesting insofar as it does turn on its head that argument about the unnaturalness of multiple partners. Here it- it sort of says, if you want to play the game, it seems like polyamory or at least poly sex is the norm.

Ellie: 12:55

Yeah. So it's almost like we don't really think you need an argument from nature about, uh, human sexuality. But if you are one of those people who thinks you do, then this might be a place to go, as opposed to the sort of monogamous narrative of anthropologists like Helen Fisher, who say humans evolve to be pair bonded, and that is increasingly coming under attack.

David: 13:16

And I know that some people really objected to that book, Sex at Dawn, because it came across as relatively preachy with its naturalism, like you ought to be having sex with multiple people because, again, our evolutionary ancestors did it. But I nonetheless think it's a good point that the authors make, which is that we live in a culture that treats anything but dyadic, monogamous love as pathological, as sinful, as degenerate, and Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy talk about this cultural denigration of polyamory in their book, The Ethical Slut, which in many ways became the polyamory manifesto of the late 1990s and early 2000s, like everybody was reading it when I was in college-

Ellie: 14:02

Oh, you got with the cool crowd.

David: 14:05

Oh, yeah. I was having discussions about The Ethical Slut when I was a freshmen and a sophomore in college, and I also was having a lot of discussions about polyamory when I was a graduate student and I got, uh, semi-involved in Atlanta with the Radical Faeries, a community of radical queers that, in general, believe in non-monogamous relationships. But in this book, The Ethical Slut, which is great because it has a lot of little exercises that you have to do as you read it.

Ellie: 14:34

I mean, it's like- it's- it's a fun read. It's also really cheesy looking.

David: 14:38

Yeah. A lot of people have heard about it and it's main claim is that a sexual desire that has been liberated from monogamy is really scary to a lot of people, especially because we live in a mono-normative culture. And this knee jerk reaction is precisely what makes us reach for that argument that says, "Oh, no, polyamory is bad because it's unnatural. It goes against the fundamental order of things."

Ellie: 15:08

Mm. And I think one thing that's interesting, even beyond some of the problems with the appeal to nature, or the naturalist, fallacy, which we've talked about in our monogamy episode, is the idea that these appeals to nature presume that there is an innate sex drive to begin with, right. And those of us living in the 20th century in relatively monogamous societies are just like really uptight, and we'd be so much better off if we just liberated our sex drive, then everyone would be happy. And this was a very popular view in the free love movements of the 1960s, which took their inspiration from Freudian ideas about sex drives. As we know now, those free love movements were anything but free. They tended in many cases to reproduce extremely problematic gender norms, and here, I'm thinking about German philosopher Herbert Marcuse's book, Eros and Civilization, which became extremely popular during the 1960s. It had a big impact on the free love movement and especially on the student movements. And according to the view that Marcuse develops in this book, everyone would be happier if we just loosened up, if we liberated our sex drives. And the book itself is actually pretty nuanced in a lot of ways, but a lot of students just read it and were like, "Oh, here's this fancy German philosopher telling me I need to have more sex. And because doing so is natural for humans." And so there was this sort of bad reading of this book that took over in that period.

David: 16:34

Yeah. And one of the criticisms that was made of that bad reading of Marcuse, as well as of that book Sex at Dawn, is that the story they tell about how we are fully repressed and all we need to do is, you know, bang a little bit more like our ancestors did, at least in the case of Sex at Dawn is that they fall victim to what Michel Foucault calls the repressive hypothesis, which is simply this idea that we are currently oppressed by sexual repression, and we will only be liberated from that repression through talking about and having sex. So it equates having sex with becoming free, and Foucault, in The History of Sexuality, argues that the problem with this hypothesis is that it simply ignores the many ways in which sex and power, in fact, go hand in hand. As you mentioned, Ellie, a lot of the free love, uh, folks in the 1960s actually ended up being kind of creepy in some ways with the power dynamics that they cultivated without realizing it, because they just thought, "Oh, well, if we're just having sex, then we are automatically more free."

Ellie: 17:45

And I think one of the things that Foucault hits on is the idea that according to the repressive hypothesis, all that is needed for liberation is a

release of pressure: 17:54

power is essentially a negative thing that is bringing us down and repressing our sexual instincts. But, Foucault counters, that power actually works in productive ways. It doesn't just repress our desires, it actually constitutes them. It orients us. And so the idea that we are all essentially sexual beings and we have to hide this in common society actually might serve to create us as essentially sexual beings who just want to pursue that all the time because of the narratives that we're being fed.

David: 18:30

And there are two aspects to Foucault's critique of the repressive hypothesis. One is as you point out, Ellie, that sexuality itself is historically constituted, right? It's not as if there is this pristine sexuality that we have before entering culture. Our sexuality is thoroughly infused with cultural norms, with social relations of power, and so on. The second one is that there are cases where, because of that, an incitement to sex, or a demand to engage in certain forms of ,sex can be a power move. And so I have a story about this that's, you know, a little bit TMI, but it's okay. I'm gonna- I'm gonna- I'm gonna put it on the podcast. It happened about 10 years ago when I was in my early twenties and I was living in Atlanta, Georgia, where you and I were going to grad school. It's something that happened at a Radical Faerie gathering, um, where I showed up for a social event and I started talking to people, and there was this guy who identified as a Radical Faerie and who very politely invited me to a group sex event. Now, at the time, I was 22 or 23, I believe, um, and I equally politely declined. Uh, it's not because I was clutching my pearls thinking like-

Ellie: 19:51

It sounds like it's just going to be a juicy story. It's like, "Oh, that one time I got invited to group sex and said no."

David: 19:56

Yes. I know it's actually an anti-juicy story. No, but so I- I told this guy like, "Oh no, thank you. Like, don't think I want that but thank you for your offer." And the guy continued to press the issue in the way that men press in those subtle, but insistent ways.

Ellie: 20:16

I have no idea what you're talking about.

David: 20:19

And the pressure mounted and it mounted until I found myself being lectured by this man about why I was repressed for saying no to his offer and how the only way in which I would ever be free would be by effectively doing what he wanted me to do, which was joined his orgy. And I remember thinking in that moment, "Well, this is fucked up to be liberated by force, by joining somebody's orgy, even if I didn't want to." And this highlights this danger.

Ellie: 20:53

It's also something that a lot of feminists would talk about in the 1960s and 1970s, when they were pushing the bounds of monogamous relationships and often engaging in free love subcultures, this notion that, "Well, ultimately I'm being pressured to do this thing," right. And I think this is interesting because if we think back to Mimi Schippers' definition of polyamory, polyamory is not primarily identified with sexual activity. Schippers is careful to say that, "Yeah sometimes, maybe even often, polyamorous relationships are sexual, but they aren't defined by being sexual." So there's a way that polyamory gets associated with promiscuity, right. And considered primarily sexual, when for a lot of folks who are polyamorous, that's not at all the case. Polyamorous relationships are much more about emotional expression, love, et cetera, which isn't to say that they can't also be sexual. That's fine too, but we don't want to limit them to that.

David: 21:44

No. That's exactly correct. And I think the takeaway here about this discussion of Foucault and the repressive hypothesis, it's not really even about polyamory as much as these appeals to the naturalness of some forms of sexuality or others, that anytime you make an appeal to nature, to something sexual being either natural or anti-natural, you really run the risk of falling into this model of repression that according to Foucault is not only inaccurate, but it's also dangerous because it conceals the connection between sex and power.

Ellie: 22:24

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David: 22:42

So, Ellie, one of the things that a lot of people who are in polyamorous relationships talk about is that their relationship offers an opportunity for really confronting an emotion that most of us think of as negative, which is jealousy. What are your thoughts about this?

Ellie: 23:00

A lot of polyamorous relationships accept that jealousy emerges in a lot of situations, especially at first, right? If you're first trying on polyamory, it's almost inevitable that you're going to get jealous, because we live in a society that makes monogamy the norm. And so things that go outside of that trigger negative emotions, one of which is jealousy. And so there's a lot in the polyamory literature around how to deal with jealousy. It's not about denying that it's there when it's there, but it's about grappling with it. And a lot of these tools I think are pretty straightforwardly psychological ones, you know, ones that come from the therapeutic culture that we

live in: 23:36

things like journal about it, um, think about what this might be triggering for you, communicate with your partner about it.

David: 23:44

Yeah. And one of the things that really stands out about jealousy is that it's almost universally considered to be a negative emotion across the board, right? For a lot of other emotions we can come up with reasons why they might be positive in some cases. So things like anger, there is righteous anger, uh, but with jealousy, I can't really imagine a situation in which we think about it in positive terms. Clearly, we have this cultural idea of jealousy as inherently corrosive and destructive.

Ellie: 24:15

Yeah. I think jealousy tends to emerge when we feel insecure, right. We feel insecure in ourselves. And one thing that I think is really beautiful about polyamory is that that insecurity is under the surface of any human relationship at any time, but polyamory permits it to be brought to the surface.

David: 24:37

I have a friend who is in a polyamorous relationship, and, uh, one of the things that they've told me repeatedly is, "Look, David, I'm very committed to overcoming jealousy because I don't want to be that kind of person that has possessive impulses. And the shocking thing is that the more I work on it, the more I realize just how deeply ingrained in me it is. And so even as I am committed to this radical sexual politics, live in a commune, I'm in a polyamorous relationship, I find myself, sometimes against my better judgment, falling into this really icky emotion, precisely because there is no primacy. There is no primary partner in these structures and it's just so hard."

Ellie: 25:26

And it's interesting because in describing that, you associated your friends jealousy with possessiveness. And I think that really speaks to the nature of jealousy, because a lot of times when people describe, for instance, the difference between jealousy and envy, they'll say, "Jealousy pertains to feeling insecure about something you have and not wanting to lose it, whereas envy pertains to something you don't have, but want to have." And when we think about that difference between jealousy and envy, we can see that possession is built into it. That jealousy emerges when you think you have something, but you don't, or you have it and it's like going out on you, right? So I think one thing that polymers will often focus on is the fact that once you really are able to calm those habits of perception that associate love with possessiveness, jealousy falls away.

David: 26:18

Yeah. And to be honest, I wonder how true that is in the full sense of the term, because what I like about the way my friend phrased said is, "Look, it- you never arrive there just because of how rooted it is. And of course you can make tons of progress. You can get to a fundamentally new position in your life where you look at the world and a human relationships and at your own needs in a new way. But sometimes, you still have that darkness return, even if for a moment, um, which is not to say that you're a jealous person or that it's a character trait, but that it- it never fully, fully goes away. At least not without a ton of work."

Ellie: 27:05

Yeah, even though we sort of teased the book Sex at Dawn earlier, reading that for the first time a number of years ago did have a pretty transformative effect on my way of thinking. And one thing that stuck out to me about that book is this one one liner. The authors are like a lot of juicy one liners, and one of them is

the following: 27:23

"If fear is removed from jealousy, what's left?" I mentioned earlier that I think jealousy is rooted in insecurity, and I think this is a similar concept. The idea that jealousy is rooted in fear of losing someone, and in a polyamorous relationship, your fear of losing someone may emerge in all sorts of different ways, but ideally it's not going to emerge with respect to their experiences with other people, right? Because their experiences with other people don't mean that they don't want to be with you. And so there's something about the fear of losing someone that gets its sting taken out of it.

David: 28:02

It reminds me of Slavoj Zizek's concept of traversing the fantasy. Traversing the fantasy means fantasizing about that worst case scenario, and it seems like in polyamorous relationships, that's precisely what you're doing. You are entering into a relationship where your fear of not being somebody's primary lover is already built into the very structure of the relationship.

Ellie: 28:25

Ooh I love that phrase, traversing the fantasy, but I just have to call Zizek out here and say that a lot of ancient traditions described a similar phenomenon. For instance, there is the method of negative visualization in stoicism, which also has a corollary in Buddhist meditation practices. But we'll- we'll let Zizek have the phrase traversing the fantasy. I do think that is a really interesting point though, although all the same as somebody who's prone to rumination or sort of obsessive thought patterns at times, I don't know that traversing the fantasy is going to be an antidote for everyone. In fact, traversing the fantasy might be the problem for a lot of people, if you're unable to stop yourself from traversing that fantasy.

David: 29:04

Yeah. And I mean, this is one of the limitations of, uh, behavioral therapy, where you expose somebody to their fears. That might work with some fears, like your fear of spiders or your fear of heights, but the therapeutic literature has found out that, of course, in many other cases, especially those involving more intense forms of trauma, like sexual trauma or childhood trauma, exposure of that kind will only intensify the original trauma. It won't make it go away. So the fantasizing then becomes the problem. Ultimately, the point that I'm trying to get at here is that I have serious respect for people in polyamorous relationships because they have to engage in a kind of self-work, emotional, psychological psychoanalytic, existential self work that I think is very difficult for most of us to really do.

Ellie: 29:56

And I think as much as polyamorous folks are often working through the negative emotion of jealousy, they're also cultivating positive emotions that may seem somewhat foreign to those who are in non-poly relationships. So one of the jargon terms that's come out of the poly communities is compersion, which is the feeling of pleasure when one's partner experiences pleasure with another person. In British poly communities, this is described as the feeling of being frubbly, which is like the joy you feel when you're- British poly communities.

David: 30:31

Frubbly?

Ellie: 30:33

F R U B B L Y, which is similar to compersion. And I think it's so telling that we've needed to coin a new term in English for this, because really the English language does not adequately have the resources as is to describe such a feeling. It's like the opposite of schadenfreude, right.

David: 30:54

Yeah. It's like instead of the joy of seeing somebody else get punched in the face, it's the joy of seeing your partner have a great time with another person.

Ellie: 31:03

Exactly, or hearing about it, right. And I think compersion requires a sort of balance between on the one hand, an empathetic or compassionate response, which is best achieved when you really know somebody well, right, when you're intimate with them. You're like, "Oh my God, I can totally understand how that would have brought you so much joy or so much pleasure, so much satisfaction." And on the other hand, a recognition that that person is not you and is not your possession. And so I would say that compersion allows us to hold space for the difference between self and other, while also recognizing the co-constitution of our experiences.

David: 31:40

And one of the themes that comes out over and over again on writings about therapy in connection to polyamory is that one of the ways in which therapists can fail their polyamorous clients is by failing to understand compersion, because often therapists cannot visualize, they cannot comprehend, they cannot fathom, the idea that somebody might genuinely derive joy and pleasure from their partner being with another person that is a good fit for their partner and who is not a good fit for them, right?

Like that's the definition of compersion: 32:15

when you're happy that your partner found somebody else as a partner, who is not off of your partner. And this almost breaches the bounds of the imagination of a lot of therapists, who then end up not being as helpful as they could possibly be when they're dealing with clients in polyamorous relationships.

Ellie: 32:36

Well, I will say you can have compersion when one of your levers is experiencing pleasure or joy with another one of your lovers, right? So if you're in the same pod together and you have relationships with both of them, you might actually be experiencing compersion for both of those people at the same time. So it's not exclusively used to refer to partners relationships with metamours, but I think your general point still stands, David, and I will say that I think therapy, as amazing a tool as it is in many respects, often does serve to police the boundaries of the normal, especially when therapists aren't really bringing an intersectional lens to their therapy, because I have sometimes had a hard time talking about therapists with my own practices of non-monogamy, because I feel like they think it's a phase, right, or it's like me trying to bring my philosophy in a daily life in a way that's not going to work for me. And I just have to be like, "Trust me, this is my desire," right. Or they're really skeptical that the other person wants it, and like, "Are you sure your partner is okay with non-monogamy?"

David: 33:33

Yeah, the idea that one partner must have been forced into it against their will, um-

Ellie: 33:40

Yes. It's what Dan Savage calls PUDs: polyamory under duress.

David: 33:43

Oh my God. Uh, yeah, I, and you know, I hate Dan Savage with the force of a thousand suns, uh, but I will not talk about that right now. Um, and this actually has been a major critique of Freudian psychoanalysis. This is a critique that was made by Herbert Marcuse, whom you mentioned a few minutes ago, as well as by the German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, both of whom expresses this concern that the function of therapy is to normalize the subject. This is also an argument that the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze makes against Freud, that it's through therapy that a lot of social norms are enforced under the guise of health and rehabilitation. If you were only more normal, you'd be functioning well.

Ellie: 34:30

Absolutely. And one thing that's also unintelligible from that standard therapeutic standpoint deriving from Freud is the idea that a relationship is not just about the two people involved, but intimate relationships involve people outside of the couple as well. So for instance, if you're in a polyamorous throuple, couple's therapy is an unintelligible term for you. You want throuple's therapy, or thinking about the relations between metamours. So if I'm in a polyamorous relationship with somebody else and that somebody has other lovers, who I'm not also in a relationship with, as we said before, those are my metamours and it's very common in poly communities for metamours to communicate with each other, to be acquaintances or friends, to check in about their mutual lover if they're going through a rough time, to talk about their schedules, all of these things, you know, that- that in some cases might trigger jealousy, might bring about drama, but often encourage cooperation.

David: 35:31

Yes, and I think there's always a danger in idealizing any particular relationship structure, but I do come very close to wanting to idealize polyamory, um, because I do think it's a platform or a space for doing a kind of work that I think we all need to be doing all the time independently of our sexual orientation, independently of our relationship structures, and because it fosters a regard for the needs of those around us, when those needs don't involve us necessarily directly as a factor in them.

Ellie: 36:06

Absolutely. Ultimately, polyamory for many dissolves the boundaries between a sexual, romantic, and erotic relationship and other kinds of relationships, which I think you're not alone in believing seems kind of ideal given what we've talked about in recent episodes about the oppressive histories of marriage and monogamy. We've said that a lot of feminist and queer theorists, and I would also add philosophers of love, idealized polyamory today.

Polyamory: 36:48

so hot right now.

David: 36:50

So hot.

Ellie: 36:52

So what are people referring to when they think of polyamory as having potential for getting us outside of the oppressive histories of other forms of intimate relationships?

David: 37:01

Well, one of the arguments has to do with the mere fact that polyamory breaks the shackles of monogamy, which has been historically a by-product of colonialism. Christian colonizers, in particular, have seen monogamy wherever they land in their colonizing mission.

Ellie: 37:20

Too many places.

David: 37:21

Yeah, was definitely far too many. Um, and so whenever Christian colonizers arrive in other places, they tend to see monogamy as natural and godly, and they treat cultures with other relationship structures as savage or backwards. And there's a documentary called Concerning Violence by the Swedish director, Gran Olsson, which came out in 2014. And the film is wonderful. It is based on the Martinican philosopher Franz Fanon's book, The Wretched of the Earth, which I think is one of the most penetrating analyses of colonial rule and anti-colonial liberation of the 20th century. And the documentary is basically a series of nine vignettes about the nature of European colonialism in various parts of the world. Uh, so there is something about Central America, there is something about Southeast Asia, there is something about the Middle East and North Africa and so on. And one of these vignettes is old footage of an interview showing a Scandinavian missionary couple in Africa who talk about why they are in Africa in the first place. And they say our mission is to Christianize Africans, and what that means for them is stopping them from having many wives. And interestingly, when the interviewer asks them, "Oh, okay. So you're here to Christianize-"

Ellie: 38:43

Proselytize baby.

David: 38:45

Yeah. And the interviewer says, "Well, okay. But what does that even have to do with polygamy or monogamy? Can you tell me where in the Bible it presents monogamy as a compulsory rule?" And these colonial missionaries are dumbfounded when on screen, they sort of realize that yeah, the Bible actually doesn't say anything about this. And so the interviewer presses the issue. "Are you here to Christianize them or are you here to Europeanized them?" And it's very clear that it's both. And the two are not exactly identical.

Ellie: 39:23

Absolutely, because even within Christianity, marriage was not considered a sacrament until the end of the 16th century. So I think the wedding of Christianity and monogamy has wreaked all sorts of havoc in colonial periods, even though it didn't actually precede those colonial periods by much. Settler colonialism in particular has really enforced compulsory monogamy and pathologized anything that went outside of monogamous relationship structures. So, for instance, non-monogamous relationships were associated with an inferior form of humanity, right. We were closer to the apes if we didn't enact monogamous marriages. In the US in particular, even though we mentioned in our marriage episode that enslaved peoples were disallowed from having legal marriages, they were very strongly encouraged, and sometimes even forced, to have monogamous life partners through informal marriages, as a way of, you know, creating a biopolitical atmosphere that was enforcing monogamy and actively breaking up prior modes of kinship, a way of forcing people to forget their own histories. We also see the enforcement of monogamy among indigenous communities through the erasure of their plural marriages. So for instance, Kim TallBear, who is both an academic and a major blogger through the blog The Critical Polyamorist, talks about how the Dakota peoples had plural marriages and frequently gender queer marriages, also marriages that were considered not to be lifelong, but those marriages were erased through settler colonialism.

David: 41:01

What I like about these comments, and for example, I didn't know about the moment in history at which marriage becomes a sacrament, and it's fascinating that it's in the 16th century, precisely as the European project is really taking wing because it means, yeah, because it means that compulsory monogamy and colonial rule are co-constituents of one another, not just conceptually, in the sense that they support each other, but also historically, in the sense that they are fundamentally interlocking parts. The more you promote colonialism, the more you can preach monogamy and vice-a-versa.

Ellie: 41:38

And I should provide a brief caveat to that earlier claim. Technically the Catholic Church made marriage a sacrament in the 13th century, but it only started enforcing it in the 16th century, which I think perhaps even more strongly proves your point, David, that it's around this colonial period where the enforcement of monogamy becomes expected, both of people within the church and also of those they're trying to colonize.

David: 42:00

And we see this co-constituitive relationship even more recently in the case of Japan. Japan only outlawed polygamy officially after World War Two when it was occupied by the US yeah, so the arrival of American imperialism that led to the enforcement compulsory monogamy.

Ellie: 42:22

Wow. And so this association of compulsory monogamy with colonialism, for many, is reason not only to reject monogamy, but also to embrace polyamory, in part because a lot of cultures that were forced into monogamy previously had some sort of poly structure to their relationship formations. There's also, of course, the argument for polyamory that it's getting rid of structures of possessiveness and competition among mates, which are very closely tied, in most cases, to patriarchy. And so many scholars and practitioners of polyamory will talk about polyamory as decolonizing relationships, by which they mean not only dismantling structures of racism and the idea that some humans are more advanced than others, but also the vestiges of patriarchy and its association with gendered asymmetries.

David: 43:15

And I am very amenable to those arguments. However, I think we also need to have a bit of a balanced account here of polyamory, because even if it has all these virtues, and like I said, I respect people who are in polyamorous relationships. I think it's really interesting and a great relationship structure. The truth is that like all forms of human relationships, polyamorous relationships do not occur in a social vacuum. And so this means that polyamory itself is not only helping to shape structures of oppression, or in this case dismantle them, but it can also be shaped by structures of oppression, even as it tries to dismantle those same structures. And so there can be social forces that render polyamorous relationships asymmetrically accessible to different social agents. So there can be, let's say, a different tax, like a gender tax or a racial tax for entering into these relationships. I'm here thinking about the well-known slut-stud binary that is commonly noted in feminist theory, where women are condemned for expressing sexual desire and for acting out on those desires, while men are praised for it.

Ellie: 44:34

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right, David. Sometimes women's polyamorous desires are rendered unintelligible because it's assumed that women secretly would want monogamy and at most they're putting up with polyamory, whereas men, of course they would want polyamory. There's a kind of polyamorous alpha male who can be extremely dangerous, right? Somebody who has not worked at all through questions of male privilege and who sees themselves as just wanting to like, you know, to be with a bunch of women and if you get hurt, it's no big deal, whatever. One commonly noted phenomenon in polyamorous communities among feminists is that like in heterosexual monogamous relationships, heterosexual polyamorous relationships often involve a majorly unequal distribution of emotional labor, where women are expected to work through their feelings and the feelings of men, and men are just able to sort of do whatever they want, and be jealous if and when they want, and police women's behavior, but then not have any culpability for their own. So there's like an eschewing of responsibility and of emotional labor.

David: 45:38

Yeah. And so it just shows the extent to which certain dynamics that we develop on account of living in a shitty society that is misogynistic and patriarchal and racist, how that seeps into our behavior, wherever we go, even when we're trying to potentially work towards a liberatory sexual politics.

Ellie: 45:58

Yeah. And I think we have to take an intersectional approach here because philosopher Justin C. Clardy argues that the slut-stud binary doesn't capture black men's non-monogamous practices. So black polyamorous men are often considered players, right? And the player trope, Clardy argues, has a negative connotation among black communities where it implies some sort of deception, right. And so he says a lot of times black men in polyamorous relationships are assumed to be deceivers. But he says being considered a player is a misleading and mistaken term when it comes to black polyamorous men, because polyamory is about as far as you can get, at least ideally, from dishonesty, right? Polyamory involves lots of communication. It involves tons of disclosure. And so it's not deceitful, right. He's talking about consensual polyamorous practices.

David: 46:53

Well and it also involves a lot of vulnerability, which is exactly opposed to the stereotype of the emotionally stunted player who doesn't want to get involved emotionally and just instrumental lysis in this case, typically women, although I have heard the stereotype used against black gay men. So it doesn't really, uh, it, you know, it's not limited two straight black men.

Ellie: 47:16

Absolutely. And I think polyamorous black men are not only contending with stereotypes of dishonesty or deceitfulness, but also Clardy notes. Stereotypes about hypersexuality that go back to basically racist, pseudo science and eugenics where black folks were considered to be. Hyper-sexual

David: 47:36

and predatory. So not only the fact that they have a higher sex drive, but that they enact it through force.

Ellie: 47:42

Clarity is one of the few philosophers who's working on polyamory. It's sort of just a burgeoning field. And I think his argument here, as well as the arguments he makes elsewhere about polyamory are really important to consider because they suggest that polyamory is asymmetrically accessible to different people and to different groups. And this is borne out by some of the statistics on polyamory, which show that it's. Largely been a middle-class white phenomenon, right? Who has the freedom to go outside of the bounds of what's traditionally been socially accepted in relationships. Surprise, surprise it's folks who are pretty privileged.

David: 48:21

So it's typically people who already have a social safety net in place, who know that they're not going to be penalized in the same way as let's say a black man. Entering into these relationships and to this discussion, I want to add another variable, which is the question of sexual capital, because even if people are committed to polyamory, they still have internalized notions of beauty, , beauty as whiteness, beauty as thinness. And these. can very easily creep in, into a polyamorous dynamics. So earlier we mentioned how during the sexual revolution of 68, where a lot of hippies and feminist and radicals started experimenting with non-hierarchical and polyamorous forms of love. In many cases, it quickly became obvious that. You know, everybody was equal, but the hot ones were more equal than the rest. And so you start replicating. Really imbalanced sexual dynamic on the basis of aesthetic judgments and I can easily imagine this happening also in polyamorous relationships. And again, it's not that it happens there any more than in other relationships, but I think that sometimes there is a danger in spaces that are openly non-hierarchical. Which is that because people see that space as non-hierarchical, they can sometimes miss the hierarchies that emerge through the interaction of the members.

Ellie: 49:54

And I think one thing to keep in mind here too, is we talk about the slut stud binary and the sort of problems with the free love movement back in the day, as you were discussing, is that all of these foreground, the sexual component of polyamory, which is part of the problem, stigmatizing polyamory on the basis of the idea that it's really just sex erases the truth of a wide variety of polyamorous relationships that are either not sexual or that are sexual, but aren't mainly about sex, right? It makes forms of love and emotion and connection in thinking about this stigma around polyamory as just sex, I'm thinking about the work of philosopher, Carrie Jenkins. Who's another person who's working on this topic currently. And I want to just say, as we start to close that one thing I find interesting about Jenkins's argument in her book. What love is is that she doesn't think polyamory, whether it's ultimately ideal or not ideal, she herself is polyamorous, but she doesn't say like, this is the way things should be. She a pretty neutral approach there. But is that polyamory is unlikely on her view to be adopted by the mainstream anytime soon, she thinks it's much more likely that we'll start to adopt serial short marriages rather than get rid of the norm of monogamy. What do you think about this, David?

David: 51:14

Well, I don't know, but I like to keep in mind the radical unpredictability of historical change. So I'm thinking here about all those things that people would say, you know, that's very far in the future and sometimes things change very radically from one moment to the next, I mean, think about discussions about reparation. If you had asked somebody 10 years ago, that's like 50 years in the future. And suddenly we're having discussions about the nature of reparations for slavery. Although I. Agree at the moment that polyamory is not likely to be widespread. I kind of want to hold this space for hoping that the future will surprise us and it will arrive much sooner we think.

Ellie: 51:59

we just have to keep in mind that we can't automatically leap into the ideal we desire and suddenly solve all our problems.

David: 52:06

Yeah, wherever there is liberatory promise, there is also liberatory labor. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can email us with questions, feedback, or even requests for life advice at dearoverthink@gmail.com. You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at overthink_pod. We want to thank Anna Koppelman, our production assistant, Samuel P K Smith for the original music, and Trevor Ames for our logo. Thanks so much for joining us today.