The Atlantic Promotes Polyamory Some More

Around twenty years ago, Penthouse Magazine was struggling. The swelling of pornography’s home video market, coupled with the rise of the Internet, meant the public had little need for a more erotic Playboy. Bob Guccione decided to double down on his brand’s image of sensual exploration by pushing a new kink into the mainstream:  urination.

Nearly every layout featured at least one photo of the model squirting a golden stream, so golden that it indicated either devoted color-correction or incipient dehydration. “All the real hedonists love nothing more than the sight of a lovely women excreting her waste,” the magazine seemed to say.

The number of urine fetishists remained exactly the same as it ever had, but the concept of pushing a kink on its readers must have had a great influence on The Atlantic. The formerly WASP-intellectual outlet has been beating the drum for polyamory.

The latest was published last week:  "Multiple Lovers, Without Jealousy," by Olga Khazan.

The worst part of the article is not that the magazine has a bizarre mission to normalize the practice, nor is it that, like Penthouse, it is out-of-step with its colleagues, who are trumpeting transgender theory. The worst part is that it is so horribly written.

Try this sentence:

Despite lingering disapproval, there’s some evidence that Americans are growing increasingly accepting of open relationships. 

Oof. I’ve published more than my share of these tin-ear clunkers, but I’m not scrutinized by the editorial board of a magazine close to two centuries old.

And this:

Increasingly, polyamorous people—not to be confused with the prairie-dress-clad fundamentalist polygamists—are all around us. By some estimates, there are now roughly a half-million polyamorous relationships in the U.S., though underreporting is common. Some sex researchers put the number even higher, at 4 to 5 percent of all adults, or 10 to 12 million people. 

First, the polygamists of the prairie are generally Mormons, and schismatics at that, not “fundamentalists.” “Fundamentalists” usually means Sola Scriptura Christians and the sole scripture they read ain’t the Book of Mormon. Also, the appellation “fundamentalist” is banned in many stylebooks as being non-descriptive and stereotypical--the name of the specific denomination is preferred--so how did it get into The Atlantic? (And the estimation of five hundred thousand to twelve million estimation is so wide as to be useless.)

But most jarring is Khazan’s repeated substitution of “envy” for “jealousy.” We’re used to seeing the word “jealous” used when one means “envious,” as in, “Look at my prestigious writing job in the Northeast. Aren’t you jealous?” The opposite is not common usage at all:

I initially expected the polyamorous people I met to tell me that there were times their relationships made them sick with envy. After all, how could someone listen to his significant other’s stories of tragedy and conquest in the dating world, as Michael regularly does for Sarah, and not feel possessive?

The usage only pops up three times but each instance is like a cymbal crash. Admittedly, there aren’t a lot of synonyms to “jealousy,” but it’s surprising that no one tossed the article back to her for a rewrite. Ms. Khazan, when someone else is making love to your partner, you are jealous of your partner--you want him all to yourself--and you are envious of the other participant--you want to be in her situation, getting his attention. This is the type of thing that English-major sophomores congratulate themselves for knowing.

To her credit, Khazan doesn’t over-emphasize the three hallmarks of polyamory articles, showing strength that other journalists don’t have. The first element is a congratulatory tone describing the polyamorists’ uniqueness:

Both of them say they knew from a young age that there was something different about their sexuality. “Growing up, I never understood why loving someone meant putting restrictions on relationships,” Michael said.

…

“I feel that this whole polyamorous lifestyle is the avante [sic] garde of the 21st century,” [Morning Glory ]Zell [author and “ High Priestess of the Oregon-based pagan Church of All Worlds”] wrote.

The second, even more lightly touched upon, is the incessant conversation that polyamory requires, lauded as that panacea of emotion, Communication:

[Terri] Conley, the polyamory researcher, has noted, “polyamory writings explicitly advocate that people revisit and reevaluate the terms of their relationships regularly and consistently—this practice could benefit monogamous relationships as well. Perhaps a monogamous couple deemed dancing with others appropriate a year ago, but after revisiting this boundary they agree that it is stressful and should be eliminated for the interim.”

… 

Josh and Cassie talk over and negotiate everything—“a lot more than other couples do,” they think.

Avoided almost entirely is the trope of male emasculation. No men wearing skirts here, nor a crew of runners-up calling themselves “The Man Harem.” The closest is a man who declares himself “heteroflexible” in the only chronicled relationship that doesn’t feature female bisexuality.

The same old fallacies of polyamory show through. The core concept is that human fulfillment is a matter of checking off a list of desires:

Even many devout monogamists admit that it can be hard for one partner to supply the full smorgasbord of the other’s sexual and emotional needs. When critics decry polys as escapists who have simply “gotten bored” in traditional relationships, polys counter that the more people they can draw close to them, the more self-actualized they can be.

... 

Why didn’t the wife just ditch the [husband] for the [new lover]? “She gets stuff from the [husband] that she doesn’t get from [the lover],” Sheff explained. “They do fun things together, and the [lover] is too needy for her. She doesn’t want him all to herself, because he would be too much work.”

How sweet life must be for that second man! And how wonderful for her, free now to use another human exactly as she wishes without indulging his “neediness.” And to think, it all started because the husband wanted to spend more time at BDSM dungeons!

Another couple, Cassie and Josh, also have specific needs for self-actualization:

They’ve since had several committed triad relationships lasting from a few months to several years...Cassie always hopes that it’ll be a fellow horror-movie lover, while Josh keeps his fingers crossed for an anime fanatic.

Just what the poets talked about.

Self-actualization is exactly what doesn’t happen here. Growth requires sacrifice--life may be a smorgasbord but the size of one’s plate is limited. Polyamory is the lie that one will never have to sacrifice one’s desires, no matter how insignificant. Your wife doesn’t like watching anime? Get a second one who does!

There is one desire that polyamorists despise, however:  the desire to keep one’s lover all to oneself. To them, jealousy is a demonic force that must be beaten down by rituals of semantics:

But it became clear to me [Khazan] that for “polys,” as they’re sometimes known, jealousy is more of an internal, negligible feeling than a partner-induced, important one. To them, it’s more like a passing head cold than a tumor spreading through the relationship.

… 

People in plural relationships get jealous, too, of course. But the way polys get jealous is unique—and possibly even adaptive. Rather than blame the partner for their feelings, the polys view the jealousy an irrational symptom of their own self-doubt. 

… 

“I think everyone feels jealous,” Josh said. “Us and the people we’ve dated and most of the people I know feel jealous. But when I think of jealousy, I think of it more as it’s another emotion we express as jealousy. You’re not actually jealous; you’re feeling loss.”

Jealousy is negligible, like a head cold. It’s an irrational symptom of one’s own flaws. It’s got nothing to do with one’s partner. It’s “kinda silly.” It’s not even jealousy--it’s something else entirely.

[I]n some ways, polyamory is a more humane way to love.

Jealousy isn’t exactly the most pleasant emotion but there’s no denying it exists, unlike polyamorists’ made-up antonym, “compersion:”

Bill says watching his wife have sex with another man is anything but unsettling. Instead, it sometimes induces compersion—the poly principle of basking in the joy of a partner’s success in romance, just as you would with his or her success in work or sports.

What kind of fool believes that seeing his partner receive sexual attention from another is the same as seeing that same partner get a promotion? The kind of fool who has his home confiscated and congratulates himself for contributing to the socialist future.

I like to think about polyamory because it’s the “avant garde” innovation that’s the most clearly delusional. Polys are like engineers who keep crying, “But the design is perfect!” as they stand amid the rubble. They exhibit modernity’s inability to deal with reality as it is--everything can be altered through logic, study and communication. Nothing shows this better than their endless theories regarding jealousy.

I think that maybe I should add another trope of polyamory articles. Jealousy may be semantically corralled as irrational or negligible but the repressed will have its revenge:

Cassie and Josh had been dating a woman—let’s call her Anne—for about a year and a half when all three went to a diner together. Josh, who doesn’t like tomatoes, ordered a burger. Cassie went to the bathroom. When she came back, the burger had arrived and Anne was eating Josh’s tomatoes. 

Cassie loves tomatoes—and she always eats Josh’s tomatoes.

“They were my freaking tomatoes,” she said. “I had experienced the loss of my tomatoes, and that was a unique thing for me.”

Yes, it was the tomato distribution that was the problem.