{"id":8648,"date":"2018-11-24T12:52:22","date_gmt":"2018-11-24T11:52:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=8648"},"modified":"2018-11-24T12:58:23","modified_gmt":"2018-11-24T11:58:23","slug":"persecuted-polyamorists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/8648\/","title":{"rendered":"Persecuted Polyamorists"},"content":{"rendered":"

Several readers have asked me if I’ve watched Louis Theroux’s documentary on a polyamorous community, now showing on BBC Three. Alas I haven’t, mostly due to time constraints and the BBC is wise to my VPN, so I can’t hoodwink them into thinking I’m in Lampeter. But I’ll get around to it at some point. Meanwhile, a reader alerts me to this piece<\/a>:<\/p>\n

A few years ago, my then-wife and I decided to more openly embrace an element of our relationship that had been acknowledged since we got together in college: We liked seeing, and sleeping with, other people.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Polyamorists always cite this as if they’ve broken some sort of taboo. Damned near every married man, and probably quite a few women, have the desire<\/em> to sleep with someone else but they don’t in order to preserve the integrity of the relationship and the benefits it brings.<\/p>\n

At one point I was invited to a happy hour in Lower Manhattan for the local poly community.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I might have known all this would be happening in New York, a city seemingly stuffed full of people with meaningless lives. My only surprise is the party didn’t take place in Brooklyn, but I’d hazard a guess most of the attendees live there.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t get me wrong, folks definitely got their flirt on, and plenty went home together. But the night drove home my intuition that there was nothing too radical in polyamory. If anything, it seemed to appeal to gentle, sensitive, somewhat geeky types?\u2014?white-collar hipsters (myself included) of many pleasant backgrounds.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Misfits soy-boys, in other words.<\/p>\n

This did not strike me as a group that faced significant oppression. No poly friend or partner of mine has noted a genuine hardship.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s because it’s generally practiced by the spoiled offspring of dysfunctional middle-class marriages. But this is a problem, because polyamorists want to be accepted into mainstream society and the best route to achieve that is to claim victimhood of some sort. Hence:<\/p>\n

Whereas the poly people I\u2019ve known personally just think of the lifestyle as an arrangement that works for them, the internet\u2019s poly-vangelists are consumed with making it an identity, even claiming it as\u00a0their sexual orientation, which, again, draws\u00a0an improper comparison to the struggle for gay rights. They also continue to alienate monogamists, minorities, LGBTQ groups and their fellow polyamorists by indulging in fantasies of persecution.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, the movement is largely formed from a bunch of weirdos inventing persecution complexes in order to gain attention.<\/p>\n

The statement also curiously overlooks polyamorists of color.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Probably because polyamory is generally a white person’s pursuit, although I’ve noticed a few western-raised Asian women dabbling in it, probably as a result of identity confusion.<\/p>\n

Anti-poly discrimination is \u201ca very first-world problem to complain about,\u201d says Sarah-Louise, a\u00a0solo poly\u00a0woman in New York.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For the uninitiated, solo poly is the term to describe someone who has several secondary partners but no primary one. I imagine the term has been invented in order that women can pretend this suits them, having entered polyamory out of desperation to find a partner with the hope they’d at least be someone’s<\/em> primary. As I wrote in my book:<\/p>\n

Despite saying they love each other equally, someone usually ends up being the number two partner of several people, but the number one of nobody.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If, as they often do, women get into polyamory due to low self-esteem, this can’t help very much.<\/p>\n

She and I dated there, and she has the most poly connections of anyone I know.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s one way of putting it.<\/p>\n

She once sublet a room in a Bushwick building\u00a0expressly renovated for and\u00a0rented to polyamorous tenants?.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My book was partially set in Bushwick, a neighbourhood of Brooklyn. What a coincidence, eh?<\/p>\n

Even so, certain poly individuals nurse a sense of victimhood surrounding their romantic life. I was guilty of this when my parents discovered?\u2014?by an accident of gossip?\u2014?that my wife and I existed in this mold. I fought with my family a lot, which was unusual, and imagined, for the first and only time, that Mom and Dad were old, recoiling conservatives.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Scratch a polyamorist and underneath you’ll find issues with Mum and Dad bursting to escape. And this tweet by the author – included in the article – made me laugh:<\/p>\n

\n

Poly is hard in the current culture, and isn’t for everyone. It requires unusually high IQ, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness, IMHO.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Geoffrey Miller (@primalpoly) June 8, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n