I've been thinking a bunch about monogamy and responsible non-monogamy lately. In the past, I felt that some people were monogamous, and some weren't, and the two shouldn't date, but that was about it
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Anthropological perspectivejoanhelloDecember 18 2009, 16:12:55 UTC
The whole question of what is "natural" for humans tends to treat sexual bonding behavior as if it had a life of its own, completely detached from the rest of human life, except possibly for the childrearing part. In fact, sexual behavior tends to depend very strongly on economic and environmental factors. Among the Native tribes of this region, for instance, the economy was based on a matrilineal kinship system in which the strongest bond was not the sexual bond but the mother-daughter bond. A child's social identity derived mostly from the mother. Because it really didn't matter much who a kid's father was, there were no rules enjoining monogamy. Several surviving diaries of missionaries reported that the notion of monogamy as "fidelity" was pretty much unheard of and proved difficult to teach until the missionaries had enough government firepower behind them to forcibly change the kinship system.
In our society, the change in attitudes that we call the Sexual Revolution happened twice: once in the Twenties and once in the Sixties. In both cases, it followed and was probably a result of a change in the way most of us get our livings, from family farms and small-town family businesses to jobs with large organizations that hire impersonally and don't care what you do when you're not at work, accompanied by heavy propaganda to encourage people to think of themselves as individuals, not parts of families, and to express their individuality by their choices in the market economy. Naturally we have ended up with a sexual market economy as well, with more and more relaxation of the traditional rules in order to allow individuals to fine-tune our love lives to an ever-closer match with our individual desires and fantasies.
Pantheons tend to be composed of dieties who control/embody/represent aspects of the world that are (a) important in human life and (b) controlled imperfectly or not at all by humans. Earth, sun, moon, bodies of water, meteorological phenomena, species of animals and plants, fire, mountains (especially if volcanic), health/disease and communication all fall into this category. So does sexual love. There's always a love diety, sometimes more than one, and they get lots of worship because of the uncontrollability and vital importance of love. In this context, our efforts to customize our love lives just seems like hubris. Given the many stories I've heard of men and women who were happily heterosexual until middle age and then were blindsided by a sudden, powerful same-sex passion, and of people who fell out of love in a moment because the context of the relationship changed, I can't see lasting romantic happiness, monogamous or polyamorous, as a result of anything but divine intervention.
In our society, the change in attitudes that we call the Sexual Revolution happened twice: once in the Twenties and once in the Sixties. In both cases, it followed and was probably a result of a change in the way most of us get our livings, from family farms and small-town family businesses to jobs with large organizations that hire impersonally and don't care what you do when you're not at work, accompanied by heavy propaganda to encourage people to think of themselves as individuals, not parts of families, and to express their individuality by their choices in the market economy. Naturally we have ended up with a sexual market economy as well, with more and more relaxation of the traditional rules in order to allow individuals to fine-tune our love lives to an ever-closer match with our individual desires and fantasies.
Pantheons tend to be composed of dieties who control/embody/represent aspects of the world that are (a) important in human life and (b) controlled imperfectly or not at all by humans. Earth, sun, moon, bodies of water, meteorological phenomena, species of animals and plants, fire, mountains (especially if volcanic), health/disease and communication all fall into this category. So does sexual love. There's always a love diety, sometimes more than one, and they get lots of worship because of the uncontrollability and vital importance of love. In this context, our efforts to customize our love lives just seems like hubris. Given the many stories I've heard of men and women who were happily heterosexual until middle age and then were blindsided by a sudden, powerful same-sex passion, and of people who fell out of love in a moment because the context of the relationship changed, I can't see lasting romantic happiness, monogamous or polyamorous, as a result of anything but divine intervention.
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