flyingblogspot.com (tales from urban dilettantia)

That title really should end with ‘…walk into a bar’, shouldn’t it?

The underlying gripe driving this post has been bubbling away for a long time.  Far too long a time because I’ve been up to my perfectionist tricks again and had myself convinced that I needed to re-watch every single Amy Pond episode of Doctor Who whilst taking immaculate notes before I could possibly write it.  That, however, is not the only way to do this, and in fact my gripe can be stripped back to the bare bones without losing the point.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the way Amy, Rory and the Doctor have been portrayed.  I’ve seen it on credible feminist blogs, I’ve heard it said in conversation and I’ve seen it posted on fan forums.  (I won’t play name and shame here since I recognise the problem is often societal and structural, even if I do anticipate something of a higher standard from generally privilege-aware people.)  The common thread running through many of these discussions is a disdain for the way Amy has been written, and more specifically her portrayal as a poor damsel torn between two men in a love triangle.  Which, approached from a vanilla feminist point of view, is dreadful, demeaning, patriarchal bullshit.

But I need to call this one out.   None of the highly critical feminist readings I’ve encountered are anything other than blind to monogamous privilege.  Not one.  Maybe I need to up my Google-fu but I can’t find an Amy Pond hating blogger out there who takes a breath to so much as mention the fact that the ‘love triangle’ reading is thoroughly reliant on the assumption that the only real relationships are monogamous ones.  Relationships where a woman loving two people has agency only to choose between them.

To pause and be absolutely clear here, I’m not saying that there aren’t some major problems with Amy’s characterisation from a feminist point of view.  I’m not saying the Amy Pond episodes were written with an explicit commitment to portraying a poly family.  I’m not even saying that a monogamous reading is invalid.  But I am saying that the relationship between the members of the little family on the TARDIS has, over the past couple of seasons, often looked a hell of a lot like a poly family to me.  A real, stumbling-along, first-time poly family with wibbles and insecurities and doubts and a fear that it may just be too hard, but also the structure and core of a deeply loving intimacy between more than two people.  (And before anyone comments to point out that the Doctor and Amy aren’t – at least on screen – having a good, heteronormative shag…just don’t.  Don’t tell me that sex is the defining factor that magically creates a ‘relationship’.  Don’t assume it works that way for anyone other than you.)

So there it is, my dear ones and random-stranger ones.  By all means, write loud and intelligent posts picking apart our popular entertainment.  It’s a worthy use of anyone’s time to do so.  But if you’re going to go to lay into the portrayals of  relationships in that entertainment, take a good, hard look at your own privilege first and think about throwing in a few words pointing out that you’ve made that assumption of monogamy.

I exist.  My lovers, my family, my friends exist.  Oh my how they exist.  But some days in spite of that, it feels like – just maybe – we don’t.

Over the last few months, I’ve started to see more and more incoming requests for an overview of non-monogamy resources, to the point where it’s become more practical to post them here than reply to everyone who asks. Feel free to be intimidated by the wall-of-text and run away, but I think skimming may be more useful!

Useful, Random Internet Stuff

Franklin is a guy I met on LiveJournal who happens to write some good poly / consensual non-monogamy stuff; his intro page is here: http://www.xeromag.com/fvpoly.html   The Polyamory 101, Practical Jealousy Management, and Making Relationships Suck articles linked too on the front page are all a good read, and there are a bunch of other practical entries linked to on the right hand side, He also writes about jealousy and refrigerators here! http://tacit.livejournal.com/157242.html

Gestalt is an ex-lover of a podcaster I discovered very early on when I was starting to research relationship models. He wrote this, and honestly, I just like this because it’s about burritos: http://polytripod.blogspot.com/2009/04/pgs-seven-layer-burrito-of-intimacy.html   And this guy writes polyamory and dim sum metaphors: http://whatexit.org/tal/mywritings/dimsum.html   Clearly I’m obsessed with food and food metaphors.

The Polyamorous Misanthrope is a very good blog; lots of common sense: http://www.polyamorousmisanthrope.com/
The archives are huge and full of interesting of posts, but three I bookmarked for myself were these ones:

Am I Ready For Polyamory – http://www.polyamorousmisanthrope.com/2008/11/03/am-i-ready-for-polyamory/

The Key Factor to Polyamory Relationship Success – http://www.polyamorousmisanthrope.com/2010/10/05/the-key-factor-to-polyamory-relationship-success/

Handling Jealousy: How to Fuck Up – http://www.polyamorousmisanthrope.com/2010/08/18/handling-jealousy-how-to-fuck-up/

Also there’s an interesting blog called Polyamory in the News – http://polyinthemedia.blogspot.com – which follows non-monogamy news from a more political and analytical point of view, which is a really nice break from interpersonal/communication/relationship stuff, which can get a bit overwhelming. (One of the things I’ve been learning in the past year is to try to back off sometimes and have a break from trying so goddamn hard. But it’s hard for perfectionists to try hard to back off from trying hard!)

Forums and Podcasts

Minx does the PolyWeekly podcasts, which are generally good value – there’s a huge archive, full of interesting stuff:  http://polyweekly.com/   I haven’t caught up with the podcasts during 2011, so not sure whether the quality of the content has remained high, but I was planning on downloading a whole bunch this month to see. It’s generally been a good resource in the past.

There are also forums on the PolyWeekly site – I don’t check in much anymore (used to a couple of years ago) – I’ve made a couple of good friends via the forum, but they tend to go through their cycles of good and snarkystupid fail (very much like any internet forum).

There are a couple of Australian forums – I have logins for most of them, but haven’t spent any significant time there, so can’t vouch for the quality. One of the main ones is PolyOz – http://polyoz.net.au/home

To be honest, after spending a little while on forums to get an idea of what people’s lives were like, I stopped looking at forums entirely. They’re so very full of people looking for support with their problems, and so lacking in people talking about enjoying the life they’ve chosen. Maybe worth a browse, but at least for me, far from being a really positive resource.

Books

There are also an increasing number of non-monogamy books out there, often from wildly differing points of view (although I’m sure you have a pretty good bullshit detector). I have these ones, which I’m always happy to lend out:

Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships:  http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/157344295X
(Tristan Taormino’s quite an interesting woman – she’s a pornographer, writer & sex educator, and has quite a good site full of non-monogamy resources too – http://www.openingup.net/ Because I am a big perve, I will also note that she is just gorgeous.)

The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities:  http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1890159018
(This is the first major book written on the subject that I know of; it’s a bit fluffy, ‘love is awesome’ -esque for me, but it is interesting historically.)

Open: Love, Sex, and Life in an Open Marriage:  http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/158005241X
(Nathalie’s late dog, Tessa, chewed this on up a bit, but it’s still good! It’s partly a narrative of the author’s experiences, with some more abstract discussion, if I recall.)

The Polyamory Handbook:  A User’s Guide:  http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1434373444
(Pretty thorough and pragmatic; haven’t looked at it for a while, but I think it ticks off most of the major areas worthy of consideration.)

New sites I’ve noticed recently but haven’t had time to look at yet; do not vouch for quality of content (let me know if they’re dreadful!):

http://www.notyourmothersplayground.com

http://www.modernpoly.com

http://polytical.org

http://www.polyday.org.uk

http://worldpolyamoryassociation.net

http:///www.polyamory.org.uk

http://www.lovemore.com

There are also a few other areas that are really worth taking some time to look into, although they’re wall-of-text topics in their own right:

Sexual-health:  Having open, specific and honest conversations, negotiating boundaries and engaging less awkwardly in a discussion of expectations and needs before entering a new relationship.

Communication:   Spending some time reading general information on human communication in interpersonal relationships is so very worthwhile – I can’t overstate the importance of this one. The thing is, we’re not innately good at this (and rarely culturally conditioned to be). My personal experience is that it’s most valuable to look at this as an ongoing process, not as an end-point – owning our fuck-ups is equally important as doing things well in the first place, and we all make mistakes.

Consent & boundaries:  As much as I wish these were easy, clear-cut issues, they’re not. It’s worth – for any human being – putting some serious thought into this area. My own experience is that these issues really come into the foreground when one can’t cruise on ‘this is how ordinary relationships work’ privilege, and that as a socially anxious person, I’ve needed to learn some skills around having conversations I find fundamentally awkward, in spite of the awkwardness.

Kink:   There’s certainly a cross-over between the kink community and the non-monogamous. I suspect it’s because non-monogamy is often a doorway to asking for what you really want, and raising new ideas that are often intimidating to raise. But the non-monogamy community is not the kink community, and it’s important to say explicitly that no-one with an interest in different relationship models should ever feel pressured to be involved in anything beyond their own wishes. I realise that this is obvious, but also that it’s sometimes challenging to see something normalised in a community and to feel some social pressure to conform.

Slut-shaming:  There’s always going to be someone who’s going to deal out some slut-shaming. Such is our messed-up existence, and it’s not a bad idea to be aware of it and do some reading or talking on it. If it happens to you and you’re not dealing with it well (or start to worry that there’s some validity in it), the best approach can be to hand a little of your concern over to your friends or community. Hopefully you will find a kick-ass friend who can shout ‘bring it!’, hug you, and remind you that slut-shaming has roots in intolerance, bigotry and privilege.

Mental health:  Put some time into examining and caring for your own mental health. Just do the work. I cannot conceive of anything more important than this.

Social, aka You Are Not The Only One

For the locals, we have a small and friendly Perth meetup on the first Wednesday of every month (it’s usually at The Court, is purely social – drinks/coffee/food/no agenda) and can vary between around ten and twenty-something people on any given month. We get all sorts of people coming along; those in multi-person households, stable but open relationships, parents with kids, singles, non-monogamy-friendly people who aren’t currently looking for anyone new and so forth. In the last year we’ve started to do some thinking around pub meetings not being as inclusive for everyone as we’d like, and are keen to run some other things in 2012; picnics, rock-climbing and more have been suggested. You can get notifications by signing up to the super-low-volume announcement list here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/perth-poly-meetup   There’s also a closed Facebook group and a Google Calendar available on request. It’s pretty relaxed, isn’t a meat market in any way, and so far we’ve managed to keep it free of creepy people looking to pick up by only spreading it by word-of-mouth. (I’m told that this one time, a guy came and waited until the end to say ‘so…we all know what happens now…’ and incurred the wrath of all, never to return.

As if this post were not sufficient in the way of information-saturation, please do add any of your useful links and recommendations in the comments!

tacit posted a thoughtful article today on choosing relationships. I wanted to point it out, not simply because it’s a good article but also because it covers a number of points that really resonate for me personally. This part in particular hits home:

I’d also go on to say that it’s possible to choose not to be someone’s partner specifically because you do love them so deeply and sincerely, and want them to live a life the best possible life they can. For me, love is not about being all-conquering, but it is very much about choosing to do the right thing by the people you love even when that’s very, very difficult to contemplate.

Another point that interested me was the discussion of relationship choice in the context of fail-safe logic, basically contrasting the outcomes of taking a blacklist/dealbreaker approach to potential partners to those of taking a whitelist approach. I really like the concept of this being an abundance model as opposed to a starvation model – the choice of approach implies quite a lot about one’s self-perception and self-worth:

And, just because I love this bit, and because I see so many people doing the opposite so unhappily:

So much for writing original content today! However, I’m not sure I can say any of this better than it’s already been said, and it is something I wanted to share.