I Need Feminism Because …
Half the problems of my polyamorous life have a common cause.
I’ve been invited to participate in this group workshop, about a week and a half from now, at my favorite coffee-house:
The Inequality Inefficiency:
Sat, August 23, 1pm – 3pm
Shameless GroundsAmy Luechtefeld, M.A., NCC, LPC will be leading a FREE discussion. The group will be addressing the problem of the perceived lack of opportunity of partners in poly relationships; most typically, that of male partners. She will be exploring several stereotypes of males attending events alone, factors inhibiting successful partnering, and strategies for reframing and creating a more active dating and sex life.
This talk is NOT limited to men only, and is open to everyone, but will be focused primarily on partnered individuals who feel the deck is stacked against them.
This is a subject that I have a lot of experience with, that I’ve thought about at length—oh, heck, I’ll just say it out-right: if I let myself, I could rant for that whole two hours. Which, in addition to being rude and uninvited, would be really unproductive. So I’ve got a week and a half to drain the vitriol and boil it down to simple statements, and I’ll start here.
What do the following things have in common?
- Unicorn-hunting: A really useful phrase coined (as far as I know) by Franklin Veaux (LiveJournal’s “tacit”) to describe the most annoying and increasingly unwanted behavior of newcomers to polyamory: a heterosexual husband and his presumed-to-be bisexual wife looking for a young, attractive, single bisexual woman to move in with them and have sex with both of them. (And, all too often, to clean their house and cook their dishes and care for the couple’s children.)
- One-Penis Policies: The less-controversial assumption that, for at least some people, the only or best way to “do” polyamory is for one man to share many women, who can have sex with all the women they want, but only with one man, him.
- Anti-Male Event Policies: The also not-especially controversial assumption, within the polyamory community that because of rape culture, the motives of unaccompanied men who show up at polyamory or sex-positive events can and should be questioned, that they should be treated as suspicious until they prove otherwise. This is often justified by the entirely false belief that men are the only covert monogamists who show up at polyamory events hoping to take advantage of a couple’s openness to steal a wife or a girlfriend.
- Abuse of Secondaries: The most common form of polyamory, one that privileges a couple’s relationship over either partner’s relationship(s) with others, is facing serious push-back because of horror story after horror story about how this has lead to some really abusive, manipulative, and/or exploitative treatment of secondaries—as one friend of mine has taken to saying, “treating secondaries like disposable Kleenex.”
What do I think that these things have in common?
Patriarchy
Polyamory, as I’ve seen it practiced since the early ‘90s (but not so much before that, I insist), thoroughly privileges any man’s fear that another man will steal his wife or girlfriend, while dismissing any woman’s fear that another woman will steal her husband or boy-friend. Why is this? Because men’s fears are always more important than women’s fears: good old fashioned sexism.
Despite the last decade of political advances, men fear (even more than I remember from the ‘70s and ‘80s) being seen as bisexual or gay way more than women fear being seen as bisexual. Why? Because if a man is in a relationship where he is exposed to another man’s genitalia, even by sight let alone brief or fleeting touch, he might be accused of liking it. And that would make him “gay,” and therefore effeminate, and therefore no longer entitled to male privilege.
Note, also, that this leads directly to, and is (I insist) the main reason for, “unicorn hunting:” the one unquestioned form of so-called polyamory, the right of any man to have sex with as many women as he wants, as long as they only have sex with him—or with each other, but only as long as they are attractive to him and he gets to watch.
And a culture that declines to strongly challenge the patriarchal, harem-seeking behavior of only “opening up” a monogamous couple to three-somes with disposable “hot bi babes” is one that is full of couples that have no use for men, whether or not the wives in question find them romantically or physically attractive. So, unsurprisingly, the price of admission for men into the polyamory movement is, increasingly, that they must bring a hot bi babe. Unsurprisingly, “patriarchy hurts men too.”
Completely Backwards
What makes this incredibly galling to me, above and beyond the obvious sexism and anti-feminism of a supposedly (and self-congratulatingly) “open” and “forward thinking” and “sensitive” community, is that from any kind of biological basis, it is, if anything, entirely backwards.
If you read Ryan & Jetha’s Sex at Dawn, one thing that should jump out at you and that is the sheer amount of evidence that humans naturally evolved in, and are most biologically and socially suited to, an environment where receptive women mate with multiple men. It is not a coincidence that this is the norm in all known pre-agricultural societies, to the point where at least one well-documented conteporary pre-agricultural society was surprised to find out that it was actually possible for a woman to get pregnant by one man. It is not a coincidence that among all primate species, the loudness of involuntary female vocalization during sex correlates linearly with the number of males the female typically has sex with during estrus—and that human women have the second-loudest involuntary organsmic vocalizations of any primate species. If nothing else, I shouldn’t have to point out to anybody what everybody over the age of about 12 knows: it takes longer for the average woman to climax than the average man can last, before ejaculation and loss of erection.
And yet so many people in Anglo-American culture accept as unquestioned “the feminine mystique:” the form of psycho-sexual illness, brought on by oppression and near-solitary-confinement isolation in the single-career suburban “nuclear” family of the ‘50s and ‘60s, that women have lower sex drives than men, that it’s natural for a man to want a lot of sex and natural for women to prefer to not have sex. If you read at all extensively, this idea is hilarious: every other culture in human history has known the opposite. Every post-agricultural society, determined to protect male inheritance rights, has fretted over the fact that women want multiple partners even more than men do. The central goal of all patriarchal morality systems, the central “problem” they have all attempted to confront, is how to keep a woman’s sex drive in check.
So excuse me if, after the last couple of decades I’ve lived through, my frustration boils over at the level of acceptance within the polyamory community for the idea that men have a natural right to channel women’s sexual appetites.