On Polyamory (and Trans too)

After reading this short essay by Rachel Williams I am compelled to “come out as poly” as well, and write a bit about it. But me being me, my take on it is, of course, weird, sloppy, overreaching and, as a bonus, openly neurotic at the end.

I don’t think “Polyamory” is a thing. It is a Thing for sure, but the real thing it models, it encapsulates, is actually just “healthy love and relationships.”

“Polyamory” is merely the (Legal, Cultural, Social) shell that people use to be simply loving and relating humans in a crazy society without being burned at the stake by them. You conjure a story: “well, we are, you see, special, different, we have this thing where we, you know, just have many loves, and, you know, it doesn’t hurt anyone, and it’s okay, we promise.” And then the hovering cultural drones leave you alone. “Termination Aborted. Authorized. Proceed.”

The cultural narrative says that, well, there are “normal people,” and then there are “Practitioners of The Lifestyle Choice of Polyamory Because Brain Wired Differently Or Whatever.” But in fact, what is there, is practitioners of an artificial restriction, say, “Monoamory,” and normal, healthy people — i.e. like me and other so-called “Poly” people.

The Relationship(TM), Monogamy, etc. are cultural inventions. Various cultures across history have been inventing and reinventing restrictions on simple human relating, and calling these Things Relationships(TM), as a form of social control, shaping. But whenever you’ll find a culture that has not found a reason to impose that shaping, these restrictions, you will find “polygamous people” (normal people) doing “polygamy” (i.e. being normal)… with zero, one or many “partners,” and no one bats an eye.

Yes. “Polyamory” at its core — ignoring the (useful) shell for now — is so much a mere ease and health of relating that a poly person that is dating one person or zero persons will still benefit from that health. For example, by being free from the delusion that you will only be Complete if you find your Soulmate, and if you Pledge Allegiance to each other, and start a Legal Property-Holding Entity at the local State Office, and then Celebrate the Matrimony under the local Church, under the local State God. A poly person can be just fine not being in a Relationship, much more so than a “Monoamorous” person, which Poly people deride as “serial monogamists.”

I believe that there are “Poly” people who will happily “be their poly selves” and still have “married” or “dated” or “related to” zero or one persons at all times for their entire lives. Historically, for the most part, I have been a “monogamous poly” person (except for that cheating thing I did because I was a self-unaware idiot), though I derive great pleasure in the fulfillment of whoever is with me: I want them, as I want myself, to fully enjoy all the love that miraculously happens to them in this life, be these zero, one, two, or thirty-seven, in series or all at once, “with me” or “without me.” To me that is “love,” if that word is to mean anything.

Why punish, restrict, choke, cut off the greatest miracle that can happen to any one of us? One of the most beautiful things, one of the most beautiful connections? If you truly love someone, don’t you want them to live all of the magic that life offers to them? Even if it makes you feel afraid? Even if it does cost you proximity with them? Why calculate? Are not you free to do the same when it does come to you, unannounced? Will you not take away your precious proximity from someone else at some point? Why set yourself up to feel either enraged or guilty about it? Why set yourself up to needless suffering? Why fight reality? For a culture you don’t even believe in?

“Poly people” are “special” not in the sense that they are non-Monogamous, but in the sense that they have dared to step out of one aspect of cultural stupidity and stand up for themselves. For one aspect of their full humanity.

Now to take that and apply to “Trans people” versus “normal people” (Cis people)… Or perhaps to “Homosexual/Bisexual people” versus “normal people” (“Heterosexual” people)… haha why not trigger three entire fucking (pardon the pun) minefields at once? YODO! (You Only Die Once)

The problem with “deconstruction” of such sort is that there is a subtext of invalidation of our human stories. That’s not the intent. We are real, and the social stories, the “social constructs,” the “culture” we create, the languages we want to use, are real. There is nothing “fake” about lies: someone has lied, and the lie is real, it has existed and had effects, real effects that are not “fake.” I don’t really know how to “deconstruct” and then “construct” back fast enough to completely neutralize the nauseous feeling that agency and empowerment might be under attack under a pretense of enhancing these.

Even after deconstructing Trans and Poly, I say I am Trans and Poly. These are communities, with tons of wisdom. These are entire languages. They are precious, and they are real. To me. The only point in showing that there is a dimension where we can see that the “solid matter” is actually mostly empty space, is to show that the other thing, the thing that is sold to us as normality, is also mostly empty space. And yet, the “atom” is just a pretty classroom or lab model that helps with some shit, and that concrete rock that is mostly “empty space” will hurt like hell when it hits you in the face.

That is, to me, the only way to kill “choice” arguments, and “medical” arguments, and “upbringing” arguments very completely dead: to utterly deconstruct them up to the point everything is revealed to be made of culture, of stories, and as such be rendered actually equal in status to the hegemonic cultural stories that benefit some but not all of us. But our stories are precious. Gender is a cultural “illusion,” but I AM a Woman, and I AM a Trans Woman, because say I am, because that’s what I play being. The Relationship is a cultural illusion, but I AM Poly, and there are things we do, knowledge we share, about how to better be in Poly Relationships.

As a society, we are all people, and the rest is games. Real games. What IS, in concrete fact, this entire world if not an endless intertwined mesh of real illusions?

And if my brain still thinks I’m an evil idiot merely depoliticizing important social issues then well so was Deleuze and Foucault and Butler then, and I’ll happily be a “depoliticized evil idiot” with them then… Fuck you, brain!