Category: Sociology

I have recently made clear on my twitter my belief that “polyamory” is cheap pop term invented to let closeted polygamists avoid both the stigma the government has cleverly attached to the term and the fight with the government that would ensue.

I have sympathy for them. As my readers well know my loathing for enforced monogamy knows no bounds. As my readers also know I am well aware of the consequences of pissing off the government at level as deep as this. I’ve written before about the foundational level the mate selection process is at with regard to the hierarchy Company supports.

But as justified as a person is in personally choosing their safety over their principals, the polyamorist camp has smugly tried to make the choice for everyone to justify making the choice for themselves.

Now just to be clear, I understand what is claimed and in the most strict pedantic sense I realize that polyamory and polygamy are different.

Polyamory is the practice of loving multiple people, polygamy is the practice of marrying multiple people. (not multiple wives BTW, that’s Polygyny)

In the strictest sense that makes them different things, but lets explore a few other terms.

First of all, what would you call it when 3 polyamorists get married to each other? Polygamy. So there’s that. What do you call it when a couple decides that each will only sleep with the other? Monogamy.

This is important. Polyamorists struggling to save face often tell me that polygamy is about marriage and polyamory is about love. Overlooking the saccharine and trite nature of that, I ask then from a zoological perspective what then do we call it in the animal kingdom when mates pair bond?

We apparently can’t call them monogamous anymore since the ‘gamy makes it about marriage.

Bob and Sandy are in love, they love no one else in the romantic sense, what are they called? Monogamous. Bob and Sandy fall in love with Ted, Ted loves both Bob and Sandy. What are they called?

Polyamorists say they are polyamorous until they decide to get married, at which point they would then be polygamists. A biologist would call them polygamous from the start because its not about a ritual its about intent or inclination.

Polyamory is equal in every way to polygamy by definition except in that there is again by definition a lack of desire for marriage. “Many love not many marriage.” But monogamy has no such analog. Why? Because it never needed one. Animals and people are monogamous with or without marriage. The same is true of polygamy.

Polygamy as a named term obviously predates polyamory. It seems to me there is a glaring contradiction. Since for a marriage to exist, to be “real” it must be legal. Therefor polygamy can’t exist in the United States. Indeed when a person marries more than one person legally he’s a bigamist criminal.

Polyamory just means “We’re not even TRYING to get married, we don’t even want too, really, please don’t sue or siege us.”

The activism angle, and that’s the core of the issue for me, is even more convoluted. The religious fundamentalist polygynists, who along with CNN call themselves polygamists, fight for the right for a man to marry consenting women by way of the right for consenting adults generally to get married. All polygynyists are polygamists, but not all polygamists are polygynyists. Some polyamorists make a similar claim.

Some polyamorists fight for the same right but don’t call it polygamy, still others are fighting for the effective right to get married by kicking the state out of the bedroom entirely. That is my camp.

Polyamorists by strict definition need not fight at all, since its legal to love whoever you want so long as you don’t want marital rights. THAT’S my problem. That’s the whole point of the word. Trustees in a corrupt prison system convincing themselves that a riot isn’t required. They are avoiding the water fountain issue completely saying we don’t like public water.

Marriage licenses and divorce court are as silly to me as baptism licenses and excommunication court. They need to be fought. Virtually every argument in favor of gay marriage applies to polygamy and that’s why we need marriage abolished.

But reading that, polyamorists, and even some gay marriage activists everywhere cringe because they know the reaction that would cause in the right wing crowd. The slippery slope crowd that claimed “well if we let gays marry pretty soon marriage will be destroyed.”

The gay marriage crowd got so much accomplished in part because of the implication that the status quo wont really be harmed. This is a complicated and hard fight we have coming. The American “family” is at stake. The way in which we organize our society from its most fundamental association up is being looked at here. This has repercussions across the board. Read my other essays for a glimpse.

Polyamory as a term side steps all of this. It wedges a category where there was none before, between falling in love with multiple people and marrying them. A totally superfluous category designed it seems to me to do little else but excuse those claiming it from any sort of debate or fight on the subject.

I am reminded of closeted homosexuals who argue against gay marriage rights on the grounds that they aren’t all that important. Or the don’t ask don’t tell crowd. The type that thinks its ok to be gay but asking for “special” rights is somehow, just not cool.

Polyamorists are uncle toms to me.

And now is not the time for quietly sitting in the back of the bus, no matter how many of the cool kids are there.

We’ve moved past fearing Jews in the neighborhood. We’ve moved past tolerance for beating your wife. We’ve moved past thinking blacks in schools with whites as dangerous. We’ve moved past seeing the red threat around every corner. We’ve moved past black and white TV, and father knows best.

But John Wayne’s ghost still lingers. Men are still expected to throw themselves on the grenades of society to protect the women and children. We are still expected to suffer silently, to do as we are told, to kill and die on command, to act is if our very purpose for being is to live up to a woman’s idea of what a man should be.

Nothing has as much power over a John Wayne type than a socially aligned scolding, a questioning of “manhood” which always boils down to rational risk aversion negation, or sublimation of the individual will for the good of the state.

So clear has this trend become in the modern mind that a phrase like “man up” was coined, which means simply “act as your gender stereotype demands over your personal feelings.” Why do we tolerate this shit?

What if I said to a woman… “Woman up, I need this floor scrubbed?” What would happen then? What if I said “Grow a vag and get me a sandwich?” I’d be a sexist misogynistic pig.

If you see a woman crying, and you walk up to her and say “quit being emo.” What’s the first thought? Insensitivity, callous disregard for the suffering of another? You see a man crying and you say “quit being emo” and people laugh. “Oh cry me a river, quit being all emo butthurt, man up and get to work.” What’s the first thought? I’ll bet it something about trying to understand WHY the man is crying, and instantly making a set of value judgments about the validity of his emotional display.

When men cry, they have to have a reason, and not just any reason mind, you a GOOD reason. Men are expected to hide ALL emotional displays. Unless they are violent, in defense of the status quo, anger, or snide gloating, and perhaps lust, so long as its for a socially sanctioned target.

John Wayne’s emotionally crippled sexist legacy lives on.

The point is indeed neglect. I’m tired of good parenting being synonymous with restrictions and controls.

I was only formally punished once in my whole life by my parents and that was by making me stay in the house for a day. I have no idea why and it was a big joke really for all concerned.

My parents had long before earned and still to this day retain my deepest respect.

As a result I didn’t merely obey them or mimic them like the trained monkey most parents seem to want.

I listened to what they had to say, I tried to understand their perspective, I learned what it was to be an adult, and to be hip deep in the human condition.

People are like computers, garbage in garbage out, you treat someone badly and they’ll act badly.

This is happening constantly, especially to women. They receive so much external discipline as children because of the collective obsession with their sexuality, and who they give it to, coupled with the stereotypical emotional conditioning, that they develop almost no self discipline until college.

They become impulsive, rash, and sometimes quite brutal.

Typical middle class children in the United States as a whole effectively have two childhoods. One at home and one at college. Isolation, communication control, sheltering, strictness, external discipline, none of these things are conducive to growth as a self actualized person.

Obedience through fear or greed, is not virtue, its victimization.

Society decides what is done with a child, and society places various decisions regarding what is done in the hands of the parents, but not all. Society if it feels you’re not up to the task will take the child from you. If you fail miserably enough it will incarcerate you, or even kill you. You have an illusion of solitary child rearing in your skull that needs to be erased if you wish to reach parity with reality. My position is that children are raised by society as a whole in any case excepting feral children, which are absurdly rare. Parenting these days is largely about who pays for things more then anything else. The Company takes care of the rest, from the message they get at church, to the shows they watch on TV, to the lies taught them at school. Of course The Company convinces you that you’re in charge that way when the children utterly fail at beginning human they can blame you instead of themselves, if they can’t find a profitable use for that failure first.

This system of encouraging psychosis and then profiting from it was in my opinion best exemplified by the SS. The HJ selected young impressionable boys, engineered submission to the group, fostered insecurity and jealousy and then gave them a victim. All that sounds disturbingly familiar.

I don’t care how hard you find it to use your upper abstract reasoning to rule your lower primate brain, it is still required of you if you choose to be a human over a chimp. If you wish to indulge your base animal instincts and feel that their label of natural instinct justifies the resulting horror then go live in the woods, if you can. And leave your kids with the humans.