Sometimes Any Publicity Is Good Publicity

Thank you to Pendard at the Geeky Sex blog for alerting me: Pat Fagan of the Family Research Council just gave a speech to his right-wing base all about polyamory. Of course, very predictably, Christian Evangelical Pat Fagan does not like polyamory; one of his claims is: "In a polemical vein, one could say they 'snatch' children away from their parents and from the culture of monogamy in ways analogous to the Ottoman Turks of the 14th century who raided boys from Christian nations to train them as their own elite warriors, the Janissaries."

I think the youngest person to whom I'm even out as poly is twenty-one, and I don't remember having kidnapped any children lately, but whatever. What thrills me about this speech is: The Family Research Council is helping us with visibility. Because most people have never even imagined the concept that anyone could carry on multiple sexual relationships at the same time honestly.

As I've written here before, more people can wrap their heads around the phrase "open relationship" - but then they make false assumptions about how seriously committed we can be in "open relationships." A massive, massive quantity of Western literature and film has been devoted to the "tragedy" of falling in love with two people and having to decide between them. A massive, massive quantity of Western literature and film depicts people cheating dishonestly, and the "confession" is always a moment of great trauma.

Some popular TV characters like Sex in the City's Samantha went a long way toward popularizing the concept that a woman could have lots of sex partners without yearning to "settle down" - but even then, after Samantha falls in love, the writers dramatically force her to choose either (a) the man she loves, or (b) freedom to have sex with whomever she wants. Points for making "b" a valid option, but did it never occur to the writers of Sex in the City that the two choices aren't inherently mutually exclusive?

It's hard to fight for acceptance and understanding if you have to spend most of the conversation explaining that your lifestyle does, in fact, exist at all. And we have been getting more publicity lately, and thank you to Alan of the Poly in the Media blog for tracking it. We even got an impressively fair article in Newsweek But the Newsweek article still claims, "It's enough to make any monogamist's head spin."

So back to Pat Fagan's speech. I don't know where he picked up the word "polyamory" - because it's pretty clear that he's never researched as far as the Amazon summary of The Ethical Slut to find out what people who identify as polyamorous actually believe. I could pick through his bullet points and refute every one of them, but they're all such absurd oversimplications that it's hardly worth bothering past the first two examples:

"The culture of monogamy is infused from top to bottom with the sacred, in personal, family, community and national life. Worship of God is frequent and assumed. The culture of polyamory tends much more to hide religion, even to suppress it in all things public. It worships God less and demands religion be private."

Some counter-examples include every monogamous couple in which at least one person identifies as atheist, agnostic, or non-observant. Counter-examples on the other side include everyone who has ever agreed with the book Radical Ecstasy, and all the poly Unitarian Universalists and Pagans out there, of which I promise there are many. Also poly Christians, poly Jews, and poly Buddhists.

"The culture of monogamy views freedom as the freedom to be good while for the culture of polyamory freedom views freedom as having no constraints imposed on you."

Actually I think both monogamous and polyamorous people make up their own minds what freedom means to them. But polyamory has lots of constraints: Our bibles like The Ethical Slut and Opening Up have substantial sections on figuring out what kinds of constraints make your relationship feel more secure. Instead of the undiscussed assumption that our partner just won't touch another person, we have to specifically discuss what acts are okay with what people, in what circumstances, and with what safer-sex practices - and whether we need to be consulted first, or if we need our partner to come home to us afterward, or if a particular toy is not to be used with anyone else, or whatever makes people feel safer. I have constrained my husband not to call anyone else by my term-of-endearment. We're not totally anti-constraint; we just like them customized.

Fagan also somehow reached the conclusion that, "State controlled programs today in developed countries, almost universally, are polyamorous-friendly and monogamy-hostile." Which particularly baffles me, because all Western marriage laws are written for couples. Even same-sex legal marriages, civil unions, and domestic partnerships are limited to two people. What government programs are hostile to monogamy?! And if there are any protecting polyamory, I'd love to hear about them. It was only 2003 that the Supreme Court decided by a 6-3 split that police are no longer allowed to break into people's homes and arrest them for consensual, adult anal sex.

So Pat Fagan doesn't know what he's talking about when he mentions polyamory or monogamy, and maybe he's never used Google. He has separated the entire world into exactly two amazingly narrow lifestyles, tossed out everyone who doesn't conform exactly to one or the other, and fantasized some arbitrary delusions to round it out. But! However vague and absurd his understanding of loving multiple people may be, he is spreading the message that such a thing is possible. And for that, I thank him.