The Atlantic Report: The Gary Hart Renaissance

I don't have the inclination to do it but it would be enlightening to the public to have some sort of weekly report detailing what trends and figures pop up, seemingly randomly, only to become firm Subjects of Discussion.

Case in point, "The Gary Hart Renaissance:"

But less than a month after a new book thrust him back into the news, Hart has a new job, and it comes courtesy of a fellow member of the semi-exclusive club of presidential losers, John Kerry. 

The secretary of state announced Tuesday that he was sending the former Colorado senator to Northern Ireland as his "personal representative" to the new round of talks to resolve political issues and secure a long-term peace deal there.

Apparently, now we are to believe that Hart's reputation has been "reformed." We aren't to think of him as a philanderer who stupidly carried on with bikini models on board the Monkey Business in the middle of his presidential campaign. No, he was a hero--almost certain to become a statesman on the level of our Founding Fathers--who was cut off at the knees by a craven Miami Herald reporter.

It certainly seems to have worked on The Atlantic's commenters. Paul Galvin says this:

[Herald reporter] Mr. Fiedler "monkeyed" with the timeline of The New York Times story to spice up his unprecedented stake-out of a presidential candidate's private residence, wearing hoodies and sunglasses at night in the summer! Yes, good question indeed; what kind of "Monkey Business" is this - for the Herald to act as the decider of what should be the voters' ultimate decision? Now that's some mean "Monkey Business."

bobtube says this:

You can go back and wallow in the mud with snarky remarks about his aborted 1988 presidential campaign if you like; it mainly reflects shallow thinking more appropriate of Entertainment Tonight or some such drivel. In all my reading of American history, I've yet to figure out how marital fidelity or infidelity made any president a better or worse president. There seems to be no connection.

I discussed the NYT article that preceded the book here.

I mentioned there that the assertion underneath the Hart reformation is that a politician's infidelity doesn't matter. bobtube above seems to have gotten that message very clearly.

Does this mean there is some morally-lax Democrat being prepped in the wings for 2016?

 

The Atlantic Report: Jennifer Lawrence Shames Nude-Photo Thieves

Megan Garber reads Jennifer Lawrence's response to the Fappening in Vanity Fair and, faced with an incongruity, sputters and mouths this fall's mantra, "consent."

The incongruity in question is Lawrence's vehement disgust with the leak of her nude photos in contrast with the cheesecake photos that accompany the article. The writer is confused about how an actress marketed as an object of lust is then subject to unethical lustful objectification. The picture that makes Garber wax philosophical is here.

The picture itself—bird, baubles, breasts, "both"—carries its own telling tension. On the one hand, you have a story in which Lawrence, the smart, sassy celebrity, refers to the spread of images of her body as a "sex crime."
...
But then: There's that image. Which features—really, focuses on—that pair of buoyant breasts. It's another strain of nude photo, the classic kind if not the fully classy kind, the kind that has been running in Vanity Fair and its fellow celebrity magazines for decades now. The crucial difference between this and the leaked images, of course, is that this one isn't fully nude and that, more to the point, Lawrence approved its publication. The power dynamics here—and the moral and legal dynamics, too—come down to consent.

In other words, the stripper defense. Because a stripper, by commodifying her sexuality, claims to control her sexuality, she can be shocked and horrified when the response to her sexuality is outside the boundaries.

Is Lawrence the Barack Obama of Hollywood actresses? It seems there is no superlative quality that can't be affixed to her (generally undefined) image:

[About Lawrence's protest:]This is heady stuff, and good stuff. Lawrence is talking about ethics. She's talking about law. She's talking about, essentially, decency in the age of digital reproduction. And she's also, of course, talking about the tensions that inevitably exist in a world mediated by images.
...
[T]he compound message [of the VF picture] is this: "Do not look at my breasts!" and also "Oh, hey, here are my breasts." Lawrence is, with one image, saying both of those things. But she's saying much more, too—about magazines, about fame, about images themselves, about the tensions everyday women navigate as they both react to, and participate in, a media-driven culture.

Wow! This gal is a regular James Franco!

But I think the most important quote from Lawrence is this:  "It does not mean that it comes with the territory." The second "it," of course, means having one's nude pictures looted.

Unfortunately, it does come with the territory. We are twenty years post-Pam Anderson sex tape, thirty years into the Celebrity Skin era and forty since Hustler published photos of Jackie Onassis sunbathing nude. Before that, Joan Crawford's stag pictures and Tijuana Bibles. Naked female celebrities have been a hot commodity since long before Lawrence was born.

I saw a funny response to the multi-layered hoax in which someone threatened to release naked photos of Emma Watson. Watson, the writer said, probably thought, "But I haven't taken any nude photos."

Victim-blaming? Well, that's someone else's definition. My point is, similar to The Atlantic's discussion of long acting reversible contraception, that traditional morality had already taken care of this problem.

The issue is in this Lawrence quote:  "I can’t believe that we even live in that kind of world." We do, Ms. Lawrence, we do--and it's nobody's fault.

I've discussed it before:  The traditional attitude towards women was that they were to be protected from the ugly, mean world. Early feminism answered that women are just as capable as men at handling the ugly, mean world.

What Lawrence represents is the dominant contemporary thought:  The ugly, mean world must change because it hurts women.

That's not far from what the traditional arrangement said all along. But tradition is realistic; we can't change the world but we can create a haven. To be safe, we must be aware of danger.

The progressive vision is that the borders of the haven are actually prison walls and demands that we go beyond them. When the world outside the borders is found to be hostile, progressives believe that there is some magical switch somewhere that can change it. Only villainy prevents that switch from being flipped.

This is the same attitude that we see often in the world of the chronically sick or, more obviously, the world of fat acceptance. Doctors can cure the ailments, they can operate on obese people, but they refuse to out of prejudice or laziness. Someone is all-powerful and can change reality.

Perhaps this is why Lawrence and the mainstream media are so dense about the way these pictures were unearthed and distributed:

That’s why these Web sites are responsible. Just the fact that somebody can be sexually exploited and violated, and the first thought that crosses somebody’s mind is to make a profit from it.

The pictures were distributed by hosting sites. Reddit's administrators, for example, didn't receive the pictures and then post them to their front page to boost clicks. And, while the "hackers" that leaked the pictures are unknown, it appears that they worked for their own prurient pleasure, not for financial gain.

But such arguments are probably disingenuous. Scolding the public for viewing the pictures is useful for more "rape culture" hot air, but targeting hosting websites is more effective than raging at the wind.

In the long run, harping on the major arteries of web discussion like Reddit can force them to employ more content monitors. Content monitors, having acted as goalies against incoming "illegal" nudes, will inevitably go on to police discussions. "Inevitably" because it's already been happening--nary a day goes by on Reddit without a controversy regarding politicized deletions and shadowbans.

Ultimately, like Gamergate, what we have here is the practice of the old saw, "Never let a good crisis go to waste." Lawrence isn't a legal theorist or a culture jammer or anything but a young woman who took a risk and lost. It's the same story that thousands of young women have experienced in the digital age, only her embarrassment has a global reach.

What's puzzling is that we're not allowed to say that the world will probably always be a rotten place and that it's best to plan for that. Garber, Lawrence and the rest of the chattering class forget that you can't shame the shameless.

The Atlantic Report: Gay Marriage Support Dropping?

Robert P. Jones and Daniel Cox have an amusing article with "Is Support for Gay Marriage Dropping? Don’t Count On It."

Why amusing? Because it attempts have it both ways--reassuring the mob that the march for marriage equality continues unabated while at the same time reminding them that powerful bigots still conspire against them.

Pew Research's polls show that gay marriage support has dropped by 5% from February to September, 54% in favor to 49% in favor. Less than 50%? Are the fascists taking over?

Considering that there's been no national controversy regarding the issue since February, my initial thought is that something was wrong with the polling. The sample may have been off, but, really, what does a single outlying poll matter?

Jones and Cox, who are respectively the CEO and research director for the Public Religion Research Institute, are awfully reassuring about the future of gay marriage for people claiming to be non-partisan.

I think the key to the polling numbers is in this:

In the 2014 surveys that show a dip in support for same-sex marriage, including the Pew survey and the two PRRI surveys, the dip is not mirrored by an equivalent increase in opposition, but there is a rise in non-response. The Pew survey, for example, showed a five-point drop in support between February 2014 and September 2014, but only a two-point increase in opposition of same-sex marriage. The portion of respondents who offered no opinion, however, increased by three percentage points to 10 percent.

Oh, it isn't that there are so many more opposed to gay marriage, it's that more people don't give a shit.

Why should they? That battle seems to have been won. All that's left is a handful of feeble state-by-state legal challenges, mostly by people who have a lot more faith in the court system than I do.

But we should know by now that the march of progress does not allow for apathy. If you aren't with them, you are against them. So, a decrease in potential zealots may be bad news, because evil is always plotting:

Opponents are often more politically active than supporters, and they tend to be geographically or culturally clustered in ways that give them outsized influence at the local level. 

I particularly like that last remark. There are still localities where 51%+ are against gay marriage! The battle rages on!

More disturbing is the sense that Jones and Cox take comfort in the deaths of the elderly:

By all current indicators, generational replacement is the slow-moving steamroller that will continue to pave a path toward greater support for same-sex marriage. 

... 

The incoming tide of support for same-sex marriage may ebb and flow, but it is unlikely to recede as the youngest generation replaces the eldest and as American attitudes across the board continue to shift.

 Those people who oppose us? Won't it be better if they were all dead?

The Atlantic Report: IUDs and Implants

No serious journal has seen a greater decline in the Internet age than The Atlantic. As a sharpening tool, I'll be examining an article a day for the next month.

As we reach progressive domination, it is more and more clear that their real enemy is consequence.

IUDs and Implants Are the New Pill is a water-testing article. Look for agitation supporting long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) for teens in the future.

According to an important new study that will appear in tomorrow's New England Journal of Medicine, more than 16 times more teenage women would choose these options over birth-control pills if given proper information and affordable access to all forms of medical contraception. That would dramatically lower rates of unplanned pregnancy and abortion, which cost the country billions of dollars every year.

That "if given proper information," et al, is fun. Teenage "women" respond positively to a sales pitch for LARC, in other words.

What is this a consequence of? Well, the Pill reduced the ostensible risk of extra-marital sex. The result was a general loosening of public sexual morals. "General"--not "responsible." The culture of "sex=no big deal" meant an increase of consequences:  unplanned pregnancies and STDs. Taking the Pill, or using condoms, requires a level of discipline that is not usually found in conjunction with teenage sexual activity.

The progressive vision preaches freedom, so, when it's necessary to compel, it relies on economics:

The United States has more teenage pregnancies than any other wealthy country, and the cost of that is around $11 billion every year─in the form of public assistance, care for infants more likely to suffer health problems, and income lost as a result of lower educational attainment and reduced earnings among children born to teenage mothers. 

That last, "income lost as a result," is one of those amusing line items that seems to always appear within alarming figures. How is imaginary lost income a cost?

The phrasing here is interesting:

But [unintended teenage pregnancy] is a stubborn problem in that it persists despite being, apparently, readily solvable. 

Writer James Hamblin falters at the word "stubborn" because he fails to realize that not everyone is as smart and responsible as he is.

Well, not really. The attitude reflected in this article is the sideways acknowledgement Progress gives to intractable human nature. Teenagers--even grown-up teenage women--aren't as responsible as full-grown adults. It's best, then, to make sure that they don't have a choice but to be responsible.

CDC has targeted the country’s teenage pregnancy rates as among a handful of what it calls “Winnable Battles.” Apart from the implication that some battles are un-winnable, it’s been a laudable initiative.

Implying that we can't do everything we want to is dangerously close to thought-crime!

Finally:

Like any public-health solution, the primary challenge is culture. No less than the bastion of sexual liberation the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recommends that countries with the most sex-positive sexual instruction have the best outcomes in preventing unintentional teenage pregnancy, and that the public-health issue is best addressed with "societal acceptance of adolescent sexual relationships."

The long-running argument on the left has been that teenagers don't practice responsible sex because they are embarrassed. They are embarrassed because of social attitudes toward teen sex. Society must change so these kids can get it on worry-free!

What is the underlying assumption in this article? That sexual "freedom" is sacrosanct--its consequences must be managed. I say, fruit of the poisoned tree, and all that.

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.

Starting From Scratch, Again and Again

Bruce Charlton makes a good point:

One of the strangest traits on the Left is the one when people behave as if pacifism, secularism, egalitarianism, feminism, racism, the sexual revolution etc. are new ideas - fresh, exciting, untried, untested - give them a shot why not? Don't write-off idealism! They might work!
---
The point is that we actually know, in so far as anything can be known, how these ideas turn out - and they they turn out very differently from how idealism paints them.

In the Brian Eno article I quoted yesterday, he also said this:

So, just as we might come to accept that "coriander" is a name for a fuzzy, not very clearly defined space in the whole of our smell experience, we also start to think about other words in the same way. Big Ideas (Freedom, Truth, Beauty, Love, Reality, Art, God, America, Socialism) start to lose their capital letters, cease being so absolute and reliable, and become names for spaces in our psyches. We find ourselves having to frequently reassess or even reconstruct them completely. We are, in short, increasingly uncentered, unmoored, lost, living day to day, engaged in and ongoing attempt to cobble together a credible, at least workable, set of values, ready to shed it and work out another when the situation demands. 

And I love it: I love watching us all become dilettante perfume blenders, poking inquisitive fingers through a great library of ingredients and seeing which combinations make sense for us, gathering experience - the possibility of better guesses - without certainty.

 The thing is, I agree with Eno that so many of the things we argue about are "fuzzy, not very clearly defined spaces." Where we differ is that I don't think we started feeling out their borders in 1965.

Civilization has been a millennium-long project of pushing and pulling against the concepts and mores of human life in order to provide more order, more stability and more happiness to the individual.

Tradition provided that, creating the best possible outcome for the largest number of people--restraining their worst impulses and, at its best, coaxing out the saint within. "Progress!" is the cry of the person desperate to indulge their vices but too cowardly to defy society. When vice fails as it always does, the progressive never blames vice itself.

Wealthy and lauded people like Eno think that being "uncentered" and "unmoored" is a great freedom. Perhaps for them it is, but their pronouncements ignore the addict, the narcissist and the child of divorce and all the people who crash on the rocks for lack of guidance.

Transactional Love

Bryce LaLiberte is probably the best example of neoreaction's tendency toward enthusiasm over rigor but he makes a good point over at Social Matter:

While in the past one generally had a guarantee that their romantic partner would live and die with them, the breaking up of relationships is now the norm. The effect of this is neither inconsequential nor non-negligible, yet we rarely analyze it as a social ill, practically discounting heartbreak as not a real problem deserving of a solution. Yet the costs of heartbreak are tangible and for a majority of people heartbreak plays a role in the onset of mental disorders, a decreased pleasure from love and romance, and an eternal fear of ever becoming attached and letting someone else have power over your emotional state. As such, we withdraw from each other, pursuing sexual relations as though the emotional element might be sanitized. Recovery from heartbreak changes a person, and while they might come out better for it in certain material ways, there will always linger that unease at being asked to trust someone.

By the time one reaches thirty, most everyone that's single is emotionally damaged. Some have been heartbroken and avoid making emotional attachments the way one learns to avoid touching a hot stove. Others become emotionally callous.

Manosphere writers have lately made a point of highlighting articles in which female writers announce that they're "ready for a nice guy." This is especially sad. Red pill writers point out that the women's sexual market value has expired and that a woman whose body is well-known to a surfeit of men is less than attractive.

But there's also the condition known as being an "alpha widow." Though the woman has settled down--and settled--for the proverbial beta provider, she still dreams of the lotharios of the past. Whether the yearning is sexual or emotional, that circuit has been burned out; it will never fire for the man with whom she condescended to spend her life.

Men do a little better with experience. If the man at the end of his peak decides to settle down, he has a more objective measurement of what will make him happy than a woman's, her preference is for being emotionally overwhelmed. While a man decides that he wants a woman who is, say, attractive, cheerful and loyal, a woman wants to be swept away by her partner. She may find a man that meets her checklist--good job, good with kids--but she'll always be tempted by the possibility of rapture.

Either way, the relationship can shade into becoming transactional, the way thrown ball is drawn towards the ground. Both the over-experienced man and woman become self-centered--the relationship is a method for obtaining what they emotionally desire. The old definitions of marriage and family, of being a part of a whole, of union, are harder to achieve.

That's not to say that the majority of marriages pre-Sexual Revolution were two becoming one, but the culture pointed us in that direction. The message was, if you are unsatisfied, turn toward your relationships. The answer isn't out among the mass of strangers but within yourself and how you relate to those closest to you.

Our current understanding tells us that we are all self-contained objects, extracting our needs from the environment around us, billiard balls bouncing against one another. Two people enter a relationship because it is mutually beneficial; they part when the good feelings dry up.

Each sex is suspicious of the other, and the assumption that the relationship will end, while simultaneously continuing it as though it might end in a lifelong marriage, alienates the self from his most primal urges to belong to another, to have another to protect and call his own.

I touched on that balancing act the other day. The definition of what a sexual relationship is has been thrown away so everyone chases exactly what they want at the moment, just as the alpha widows above say, "I am now officially pursuing a long-term relationship." That one's desires may change from day to day isn't considered.

The old dynamic was that the husband and wife were at the core of the family. Families were at the core of the community. The communities were at the core of the state. Society had a million tiny anchors, as small as the house you grew up in. Now, that house is just the rack from which the balls roll out to bounce against one another.

Prudence is Our Greatest Virtue

Adam Gurri at The Umlaut tells us Prudence is a Virtue:

If you assume a notion of justice, or an extremely other-directed moral philosophy, in which the entire purpose of our lives is to provide for other people, prudence is still a crucial virtue. If you cannot provide for yourself, you cannot hope to provide for others. Au contraire; the selfless and imprudent saint becomes nothing more than a sinking ship, who is more likely to pull those he wishes to help to the bottom of the ocean with him, rather than improving their lot. If you cannot provide for yourself, how can you hope to provide for others?

In my foot-dragging path back to Catholicism, contemplating prudence was a major step. To hear progressive Christians and holier-than-thou leftists tell it, there is no martyrdom too stupid to avoid. Better to open one's borders to foreign cultures and endanger one's neighbors than to be intolerant. Better to allow all manner of sexual deviance at one's doorstep than to be judgmental. It's no virtue to allow one's children to be slaughtered because one is a pacifist. A pacifist is not what the children need.

As Gurri points out, prudence is the balance by which all moral judgments must be measured.

When thinking about human society, my starting point is the isolated village of the pre-modern age. The population and resources are small. Travel to the nearest city takes days. The monarch's army is nowhere close.

Assume you are the patriarch of that village and a stranger has come into town and murdered a resident. He is captured and brought to you for justice. He swears that, given a chance, he will kill again, and will do so as long as he is able.

What is the appropriate action? There is no prison in the village--the crimes committed there don't require major penalties. It's impossible to confine the man for the rest of his life--the necessary resources aren't there nor is there a way to keep him permanently locked away. The prudent action is to execute him.

But isn't taking a life a sin? Yes, but the patriarch has an obligation to his village, who look to him for protection and guidance. Is it better to let the man loose to wreak violence on them? Say he is escorted out of the village--is it moral to sentence a stranger to certain death?

No. The patriarch's obligations to the dependent and the innocent outweigh his obligations to the murderer as a fellow human. So he orders an execution and prays for forgiveness.

The progressive evolution described by Moldbug as an outgrowth of Quakerism and Unitarianism is really just Christianity stripped of prudence. There is no hierarchy of virtues or vices--every moral failing or achievement can be thrown into an enemy's face, like when Alec Baldwin discovered that his years of championing liberal poverty and environmental policies meant nothing because he was thought homophobic.

Prudence tells us how to make the best of the world as it is. That's why it's the highest of virtues man can achieve without God's intervention.

Sonic Youth, Infidelity and Powering Through

Righteous Gen-Xers might remember the public weeping when Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon, of Sonic Youth, announced their split a couple of years back. The couple were the king and queen of Alternative Rawk and, I guess, a model for marriage-minded hipsters.

You know what? I've never met anyone--or read anyone--who said that Sonic Youth was their favorite band. Daydream Nation is always in the mix when talking about "best albums" of one stripe or another but their tracks don't often turn up in the legion of Spotify mixes out there. For as respected as they are, they get a lot more lip service than accolades.

Thurston Moore recently poked his head from the rarefied air of genius to make an ass of himself. The AV Club has the rundown.

Moore had an interview in The Fly in which he said that he'd been in a relationship with his current flame for nearly six years, which significantly overlaps with the time he was officially married. Needless to say, the usual suspects lambasted him for dickishness. Moore lashed back, accusing Jezebel, which is normally the most level-headed and understanding of maniacs, with "gender fascism."

Moore is in the same situation that Alec Baldwin recently found himself:  "B-but, I thought we were all cool with each other." Note that mid-80s tone in the "gender fascism" slur. And like the straight white man that he is, he was angry. He probably should have taken the self-flagellating tack that Ani DiFranco (eventually) used; sobbing and admitting that there's so much to learn, so much to repair, God help me.

But Moore is right about one thing:  "[W]hen they grow up, maybe they’ll glean the complexities of real life and love."

Moore's apparent infidelity isn't necessarily understandable and definitely not praiseworthy. Leaving aside his crybaby defense and the stupidity of assuming that no one would do the math, he has a right to take a look at his life and make a bad decision.

But, by God, he should have to walk through the fire if he's so sure he's right. I don't doubt that Kim 'n' Thurston were much like John 'n' Yoko and Bill 'n' Hillary--relationships that became more usefully symbolic than personally meaningful. There's a good chance that the last years of their marriage were public appearances together and separate lives privately, all in support of Sonic Youth, Inc and their image. Their image of authenticity.

None of that means that he shouldn't be subject to ridicule and shaming. That's more or less the entirety of my societal thinking:  You can't be subversive and applauded at the same time. If you're right, you're still right even after you've been thrown to the lions.

The Charity of the Egalitarian

An older one from Henry Dampier, How Hierarchy is Kinder to the Poor Than Equality:

Egalitarianism turns poverty into something like a chronic medical condition that requires a treatment or a cure. This denies the poor the self-respect that might otherwise be accorded to them were society allowed to recognize their true position in life relative to others. Further, by treating poverty like a disease, superior people lose their sense of obligation to provide personal leadership and guidance to the impoverished members of society.

Dampier is onto something I've been turning over in my mind. Progressivism is a form of moral cowardice cloaked in moral superiority. The progressive does nothing to help suffering individuals, yet he considers himself a good--better--person because he votes for his government to perform charity in his name. Holiness with no heavy lifting.

The progressive refuses to give a hungry man a place at his table then turns around and rages at the injustice of a society that allows a man to starve.

What he really rages at is a society that allows a starving man to exist. However we get to an absence of starving people, whether by breaking the lock on the supermarket's doors, or packing them away in workhouses, or putting them out of their misery--any of that can be rationalized, as long as he doesn't have to look into a pleading face. Even the progressive understands that he might find himself saying, "No." How can he live with that?

There is another element in the egalitarian's perspective on poverty--vanity. If all are equal and if the progressive has emptied everyone else's pockets to promote equal opportunity, then his exalted position can only be explained by his wonderful self. He could have done it, too. It's just that I'm more...And that's especially delicious when it comes with no responsibility towards others.

The poor will always be with us, so it’s our duty to provide them with dignified, stable, respectable roles of service within civilization.

Quite right. If we accept that there is inequality among people, then we are given the question, What are we to do about it? It's a question that can only be approached morally because any other way gets very ugly, very fast.

How to See Real Magic

This is as much as what Tumblrites call a "signal boost" as it is a commentary. I'm really enjoying Henry Dampier's Quick Reactions blog. He's approaching neoreactionary thought in a similar manner as myself, with an eye towards the moral and the non-rational.

From his post, Magic: More Real Than You Think:

If magic is a way of perceiving the world, then it may be more ‘real’ than the enlightenment-rationalist method of pretending as if the many things that we don’t understand accord to natural laws that we only pretend to be familiar with.

I didn't realize it at the time but Chesterton's Orthodoxy had a profound effect on me. On the first reading, I recognized the feeling of searching the world for a philosophy that made sense to me and then arriving upon the Christianity I was raised with. The rest made sense only on the surface.

The second reading jimmied some cracks in my mind. Chesterton presents the point that faith allows us to see the world as being as magical as it is. It took some time for it to sink in.

I was already down that path. I realized that the best way to approach the world is to picture oneself smaller and smaller within it--that is, that the world was getting increasingly bigger around me.

It started as a response to the artistic-types with whom I had surrounded myself. Most of them came from comfortable backgrounds and the rest had recklessly charged into the world, unconcerned with consequences--they had experiences that I envied. But as I heard them talk, I realized that their experiences were badges that they wore, not events that shaped and changed them.

I can explain it this way:  I imagine myself and the individuals I envied sitting in a Roman piazza, sipping espresso. My eyes would be wide, trying to take everything in, trying to imagine it hundreds of years before, trying to incorporate all the historical figures who'd been there, trying to understand the architecture, the people, the atmosphere and my reaction to it. I'd be a tiny child on an enormous playground. The people I met--who had been able to make these kinds of trips--sat there thinking, basically, "Hey, check me out. It's me, in Rome."

(Lest you think that I'm just guessing at my reaction, I was lucky enough to travel to India for a couple of months at the end of the last century. This is an accurate description of how I felt, with the addition that everything was a mystery to me, having no grounding in Indian history.)

But the entire world is this way, even the path from your door to your car. I wrote a bit in this direction in my piece about polyamory. Traditional marriage is one of those magical phenomena in the world. Even the concept--it's a human discovery rather than a human invention. It seems to exist in our collective psyches without anyone making it up; after all, nearly every culture has some variation on the union.

Our world is filled with these. The novel, for example--was it invented? Or is it an outgrowth of our natures, a knotting of language, imagination, our need for narrative and our ability to manage complexity? Wasn't it inevitable, not the creation of one individual but a diamond that only needed to be unearthed?

When one looks at the world with an understanding that it is more strange and wonderful and complicated than you can know, that it all exists outside of you, when one understands that there are dynamics at play of which one only sees shadows--well, it's a lot happier place to be.

That's why the post-Enlightenment, pseudo-rationalist progressive worldview is repugnant. It's not a matter of maintaining ignorance, like one burning astronomy books because one wants to believe that stars are the candles of angels, but a matter of knowing that our struggle to understand is like emptying the ocean with a teacup. The progressive tells us that the ocean is only an inch deep and a mammoth teacup will be here any day.

Take, again, Diana Adams' relationship philosophy. Her perspective was that humans have some finite number of needs/desires that need to be checked off to become happy or satisfied. Her particular set of needs could not be satisfied in a relationship with one partner, so she expanded.

Adams and her Yale-educated brain were bigger than the human phenomenon of relationships--she could map and diagram all the gears and controls and engineer a relationship(s) that fulfilled her needs.

That's not what relationships are and that's not how the world works. So much is unknowable--and if we do learn something, you can bet that there's another mystery right behind it.

Western Civilization has struggled with male-female relationships its entire existence--Adams and her comrades believe that the problem is that there weren't clear rules. Not only that, they believe that clear rules are possible and that they will cover every eventuality. I say that's madness.

Tradition, not speculative logic, is the method of handling the mysteries of the world. We can map the path through the forest, but only once we've gotten through it.

Make Mistakes Now!

Sunshine Mary had a typically great post, Girls conspiring to turn other girls into sluts: a good reason not to send your daughters away to college.

I don't have anything to add to her piece, but this caught my eye. A quote from her source article:

All of these things are part of being young, make mistakes now so when you’re too old for these mistakes to be acceptable, they’ll be out of your system. It may seem far off, but everything will fall into place someday. Being twenty-something is awesome, and you’re never getting these years back so stop planning your life and start living it.

Long before I started walking the Catholic and Dark Enlightenment paths, I knew this attitude was garbage.

One makes mistakes in one's twenties--that's a fact of life. Those mistakes are made because one enters adulthood with a head full of untested theories about the way the world works. We forgive these mistakes because they are understandable--young people think that they are making good decisions but they are incorrect. In those situations, we pick them up, dust them off and make sure they've learned their lesson.

But by no means are you supposed to make mistakes. You shouldn't make decisions that you know are wrong just because you know that they'll be forgiven.

I have a feeling that when all these young feminists, social justice warriors and evangelical atheists realize that they aren't living in a world made of Nerf, we're going to see a real backlash and, I hope, a return to wisdom.

Polyamory in The Atlantic Part Two-The Politics

From The Atlantic's interview with polyamorous lawyer Diana Adams (also discussed here and here):

I'm working to create alternatives to marriage, because I think that if we could choose marriage affirmatively instead of it being a default, it would make relationships stronger.

Ah, the old "I'm trying to protect tradition" argument. This is the old progressive habit of attacking the consequences of their reforms. The problem with marriage, you see, is that people get married as if it's something that should be done, instead of looking at it as simply one possibility in a smorgasbord of choices.

Progressives believe that our traditions were handed down to us by a handful of frightened, violent old men who enforced their prejudices upon pain of death. Old fashioned marriage--that may be fine for some people but, you know, most people do it just because they think they're supposed to.

The high rate of divorce is offered as proof that traditional marriage isn't a very good option for a lot of people. So, let's add more options! That way, the people who choose traditional marriage are doing so because that's the romantic relationship they want--thus, all traditional marriages will be successful.

Progressives simply don't believe in the concept of sin. They don't believe that people want to do things that are wrong and that those urges need to be managed and suppressed. No, instead, they believe that those urges are right and that restrictions against them are what's wrong.

Traditional marriage is not a cakewalk and is always imperfect. But, historically, it's been effective in minimizing the damage caused by giving in to traditionally-sinful desires. Polyamory represents the effort to create institutions around our desires and not what works best. The political agenda is to make the arrangements of self-indulgence legitimate,  as legitimate as the self-sacrificing arrangement of traditional marriage.

Marriage is an incredibly intense contract. It's a legal-financial contract that you're making, declaring that you're going to be the other person's social welfare state and safety net if they screw up. I mean, you’re signing the most important document you’ll sign in your life and people read it less carefully than a cell phone contract. People have no idea what they’re actually committing to and are horrified a lot of times when they find out.

"I always cry at the signings-of-the-most-important-document."

This is an example of the progressive's materialist view of the world. Traditional marriage is a declaration of oaths, not a legal matter. A man and a woman declare that they are linking their lives together (as the beginning of a family) until their deaths. They are affirming their responsibilities to one another. Should they fail in their attempts, their behavior is considered a reflection of their character--it is dishonorable to backslide on one's oath.

No, to a progressive a marriage is a little government, a personal "social welfare state and safety net."

But we see that, for all of Adams' paradigm-shattering rhetoric, her real work is--like all lawyers--manipulating the legal system to get what her clients want.

Domestic partnership, for example, has tremendous possibility to create a more expansive version of what a relationship can look like. Domestic partnership was originally created as an alternative for gay couples who couldn’t legally get married. But then, all these surprising things started happening where these other kinds of people started using it for their own purposes. For instance, many elderly widow friends have entered into platonic domestic partnerships. It’s a situation like the Golden Girls. These are friends saying, “I live with her, and we watch out for each other, and I want her to be the person I can share my health insurance with.”

This, I like. It's a separate, secular arrangement that establishes non-marital households for legal and tax purposes. I'm curious as to what the limits are--certainly all the adult residents of an apartment building can't register as partners--but it makes sense that we have different versions of household arrangements, much like business are arranged differently.

However, it would be wise for social conservatives--who have been largely silent on America's health care situation--to consider how often health coverage has been used as a wedge for attacking traditional institutions.

I’m helping one polyamorous triad right now set up an LLC so they can share their finances. We’re making them employees of their own three person corporation so that they can be covered under an employee health plan.

Well, that's interesting. Would this kind of maneuvering even be necessary if our health care system was less Byzantine?

There are a lot of things we can do with co-parenting. With the busy lives that we lead, I think that three adults per child is actually a great ratio. So many parents are overburdened. I work a lot with lesbian couples and sperm donors in a three-parent model. They’re basing their relationship around a child. That’s a model that many courts and policymakers can wrap their heads around better than a polyamorous triad. If one woman contributes an egg, the man contributes sperm, and the other woman acts as a gestational surrogate, then all three of them are biologically a parent. We can do a three-parent adoption.

I suppose it's nice that it's all child-centered--Oh, wait. That's just to convince the squares, I guess.

I like how Adams makes it sound necessary that a child have three parents. I say that, if you're all so busy that you need three parents to raise your child, it's time to reexamine your priorities. The policymakers like child-centered models because they like the parents to actually be child-centered. In case you've forgotten---and I don't blame you, with the piles of rhetoric on top of the idea--marriage was always about family formation.

Polyamory in The Atlantic Part One-The Emotional Life

The decline of The Atlantic continues with Up for Polyamory? Creating Alternatives to Marriage.

Three things always arise when one reads an article about polyamory:  self-regard for being different, men with no dignity and lots of talking.

This interview is no different. The subject is Diana Adams, who practices alternative family law (but really seems to be a feminist divorce lawyer) in Brooklyn.

She's a good example of the left's penchant for credentials. Adams attended Yale as a political science major and got her law degree at Cornell. She has held a hodge-podge of volunteer and pro bono positions, and

When not practicing law, Diana Adams is a self-defense instructor and nationally ranked martial artist, a relationship coach and workshop leader for individuals and couples seeking greater honesty and communication, a freelance writer working on her first book, and is involved in the New York City art community.

The writers of these polyamory articles are usually impressed with the quirky independence of their (typically female) subjects. Almost as impressed as the subjects themselves.

When I was a child...I had a doll house and a rich fantasy life...I was also an amazing mom to all my dolls, but it was always a little mysterious about where they had come from and whether they all had the same father. A little neighbor boy once said to me, "I’ll be the daddy." I thought about that for a moment. I said, "No, you can be my gay lounge singer friend. That’s much more fun." I’ve always liked boys. I just like them better in groups.

Ain't she somethin'?

For all the precociousness, there's an immature emotional interior revealed here. What's important is that the boxes on her checklist are marked off. Not gay and can't carry a tune? That's not important--put on this Hawaiian shirt and start crooning.

It's tough to compel people into the role you have for them, so it's a good thing she's an expert on asking for "what you you want boldly, clearly, and compassionately."

Humans in general have a hard time with monogamy. That’s always been the case. We used to have a sense that it was acceptable for husbands to go out and have other lovers, but with the shift to egalitarianism, rather than to say that woman could do that too, we’ve gone in the other direction.

Because people had difficulty sticking to the traditional rules and sometimes fudged them, the rules need to be thrown out altogether. What's needed is an entirely new set of rules that encompass and excuse every possible act that one can rationalize. That way, we can do whatever we want and never have to feel guilty about it.

Sexual relationships are complex and irrational. Progressives believe you can approach life rationally, that everything can be plotted out on a graph, or in law or in a narrative. They believe they can make sex rational. Good luck.

I think it's interesting to see the way that when people get into a monogamous couple dynamic, they often have to neuter their sexual desires. As the initial intensity of a relationship shifts to feelings of long-term love, you can end up in a sexless marriage, and I think that’s a huge contributor to infidelity and the breakup of a lot of families. 

Should we talk about the best ways to keep the spark alive in long-term relationships? No, we should start telling people that straying is okay.

Sexual desire is not only inherently good, it's the most important thing in the world. "Long-term love?" Worthless--unless one is getting one's rocks off. Living without sex? "That's unpossible!"

"We put so much emphasis on a partner being everything—that this person completes you—and when that doesn’t happen it creates a lot of pressure."

Ms. Adams, this isn't the message of traditional matrimony--this is the message of romantic movies.

If your romantic ideals are too much for one person, just increase the number of people working on the project. All your emotional dreams can come true, polyamorists tell us, but you're going to need a bigger staff.

What do your other lovers give you that your primary partner can’t?
Well, for example, with my female partners, I feel a different kind of power dynamic. I feel a protective impulse toward women I’m involved with. It's a different kind of love feeling. My partner Ed [Vessel] is a wonderful feminist man, though sometimes I’d really like to be out on a date with the kind of man who wants to open car doors for me and treat me like a princess. I don't want that all the time, but I might want that once a month.

Once again, it's about getting a list of things she wants. But it also shows that Adams lives in a flat, colorless world.

Theoretically, in a traditional marriage, the husband takes the hand of his wife and they go off together into the rest of their lives. What joys and pains will they share together? What changes will they undergo? At the end of their lives, how will they feel about it all?

We throw our lot in together. We know that bad things will happen. We know that good things will happen. We know that, whatever happens, we'll have to come to terms with it--what will come and how it will change us is a mystery.

Adams, in contrast, has arranged her life so she can have a man open a car door for her whenever she wants. That and regular orgasms. How rich.

The convenience of an a la carte emotional menu comes with a cost. Most dangerous to the polyamorous ideal is jealousy.

There are different versions of jealousy. One version might be a feeling of scarcity. Another can be insecurity. The way that I discover what version I’m dealing with is that I ask myself, “How old do I feel right now?” And when I'm insecure, I'm feeling like I'm 13.

No matter how many times jealousy is dissected and analyzed, it still finds a way to sneak back in. From a NYT profile of Adams' primary relationship in 2008:

[S]he was less pleased when she noticed the toothbrush that Mr. Vessel had bought for his other steady girlfriend when she slept over. 

That Mr. Vessel had a second girlfriend was not the issue.[...] The problem was that the other woman’s toothbrush was “a really fancy one that says ‘Primo’ on it, and mine is a junky one that says ‘Duane Reade,’ ” said Ms Adams, 29. For about a month, she was a little miffed every single time she brushed her teeth.

You know, it's more difficult to manage feelings of jealousy when your partner is definitely sleeping with someone else.

Jealousy is an emotion that we treat in a really blunt way. We often say somebody’s jealous and then that's an excuse for all sorts of bad behavior: throwing a drink in someone's face, or storming out, or manslaughter. In manslaughter, it's basically a defense: “I walked in on my wife having sex with another man and I killed them.” We treat jealousy almost with this reverence, but we don’t unpack what’s behind it.

Adams and her ilk have a lot of "reverence" for sexual arousal, even trying to resuscitate it when it fades, but jealousy doesn't deserve respect. In fact, her language implies that it's somehow made up, just an excuse for those that are bloodthirsty or like to toss cocktails at people.

In response to the ancient social construct of jealousy, polyamorists have invented a new emotion:  compersion. One definition at Wikipedia tells us that compersion is "the feeling of taking joy in the joy that others you love share among themselves, especially taking joy in the knowledge that your beloveds are expressing their love for one another."

You know, "I walked in on my wife having sex with another man and I just got the biggest smile on my face."

As I've discussed before, intentionally transgressing one's natural instincts is an occult practice. You're told that your sick feeling is not your conscience telling you that something's wrong but your brainwashing being overcome. Don't worry, after a while you'll get used to it.

It must have been necessary for Adams to conquer jealousy--she seems to be incapable of being alone:

I just had my birthday and my partner Ed is off doing amazing work as a scientist. As a consolation, my long-term boyfriend is staying in the house for the week. So, rather than my boyfriend saying, “Wow why's your partner going out of town when it's your birthday?” he’s asking if my partner is okay having to be away for so long, if he needs support. And my partner is saying, “Thanks for taking care of Diana since I can’t be there.”
...
[M]y dad had a massive heart attack and two of the men in my life came together to be with my family at the hospital. They’re both scientists, so they understood what was going on with his body and were able to explain everything that was happening. Both of them had busy jobs, so they actually coordinated with each other so that one of them was there at all times.

Unless her father is regularly in the hospital, she talked about the same situation in the NYT article almost six years before:

A few weekends ago, she had to rush upstate to see her ailing father. But Mr. Vessel had plans to go to the Jersey Shore with his other girlfriend. 

While both found the situation vexing, “the argument is not ‘I want to do that,’ it’s ‘How can I make you feel better about that?’ ” Mr. Vessel said. “ ‘Perhaps I can check in later that night, and give you a call.’ ” (They also arranged for friends to accompany her back home.)

Can you hear the frustration leaking out of these anecdotes?

Someone else might ask, "How can your partner--the most special man in your life--go out of town on your birthday--a very special day for 35-year-olds such as yourself?"  Someone else might ask--but not Adams. No, she knows Ed is doing "amazing work," so it's okay. Besides, she has her long-term boyfriend for "consolation."

If the two versions of the same situation are even more telling.

Adams' father has a "massive heart attack." Adams wants she and Vessel to be with her family during that difficult time. One problem:  Vessel has a sexy weekend at the beach planned with his other girlfriend. It sounds like he was really conflicted about it, being vexed and all. But polyamory prevailed and they came up with a satisfactory solution:  he'd take a break in between penetrations and "check in later that night."

Worse for Adams is the little tweak she made to the semantics of the resolution. In the original telling, she was accompanied by "friends." In the more recent version, they are "the men in my life." Both are true but the new version sounds a little sexier than the old.

Because Vessel's fine with Adams having other partners, he doesn't have to interrupt his rendezvous for a family emergency or open a car door for her or treat her like a princess. I wouldn't want to spend more than thirty seconds with the guy, but I do admire his style.

Dig deep enough into Adams primary relationship and it sounds less like a bold advance of progress than the rationalizations of a "bottom bitch." Consider this, from the NYT profile:

Partners, particularly the so-called primary partners, also carry veto power over their partners’ new prospects. Last year, Ms. Adams exercised them when Mr. Vessel saw a woman who both concluded was trying to pit one against the other. 

Mr. Vessel didn’t want to believe it. “She was hot,” Ms. Adams said in a stage-whisper, a note of jealousy in her voice.

There's one difference between Adams and the average bottom bitch, though:  She attended Yale and Cornell.

Theoretically, a lazy lothario could find a nice niche within the polyamory community. He starts a relationship with a half-dozen or more female polys, choosing only those with long-term partners. It sounds perfect for a guy who wants regular sex from multiple women but doesn't want to spend a lot of time running game.

In order to prevent these vanilla bros from getting in on the action, there's a high opportunity cost:  emasculation.

The men even have a name for themselves. They call themselves “The Man Harem.” Sometimes they’ll play with that. They’ll all show up in matching clothes – wearing all pinstripes, or all red shirts, for example.

Feeling alpha yet, player?

The NYT article points out another obstacle:

In the era of safe sex and cellphones, a life that seems to promise boundless sex in fact involves lots of talking. And talking. And talking.

That's good for Adams, at least, because she loves talking about her progressive and brave lifestyle. In fact, you can even watch her as the main subject's girlfiend in MTV's True Life I'm Polyamorous.

Of course, she leaves out the downside of being an rationalized adolescent. From The Washington Post in 2008:

"People in my generation are recognizing that they have more choices when they're deciding what they want their families to look like," says Diana Adams, 28, a polyamorous lawyer who specializes in alternative family law in New York. "This is an important historical moment because of the gay marriage conversation. We're becoming more accepting of gay parents, of single parents." She hopes to soon start a family with her two male partners.

It's almost exactly eight years since that article was published. Now 35, Adams has turned those two male partners into a "Man Harem."

No children, though.

Maybe she can dig her dolls out of storage.

Part 2--Adams' political agenda