Critical Sexology Seminar on "Non-monogamies"
Just the highlights, and no spoilers for anyone who hasn't tried non-monogamy yet.
Poly
There was a paper (from Eleanor Wilkinson (School of Geography, Leeds University)) around how polyamory fails in its political role, by accepting monogamous mainstream ideas like romantic love and living in normal households as being good, and in not opposing capitalism, post-colonialism, and all the other things that favour a privileged few.
Curiously, after 30 years in it, I'd entirely missed all these aspects of it, and probably am among the privileged few, who just have a good time without engaging in a dialectical anti-dyadic discourse. I think I've had a sheltered life since escaping from this sort of thing when I was a student the first time around.
The media's portrayal of poly was also described as the opposite of everything I've ever seen, as pushing its normality and how it's just lovely for everyone involved, rather than being demonised as a harmful freak show to the extent that no UK poly people will appear in it any more.
The UK public is 58% in favour of poly, which I'd have thought is a higher percentage than know what it is, but maybe that's why they think they like it. (This statistic was used as part of the argument that we must be doing it wrong if we're not universally condemned).
The paper, and most of the seminar, defined poly in terms of sex rather than love, which seems to miss the point, particularly when contrasting it with swinging.
Apparently there's a pattern of poly women managing their multiple male partners, which can be seen as empowering for women, or as just more work for them on top of telling their equally clueless adult sons what to do. It's always been striking how many personal assistants are women with teenage sons, but perhaps poly women would do even better at baby-sitting the men notionally in charge of things.
The origin of the neologism "frubbly" was a joke, meant as an example of a word that certainly shouldn't come into existence.
The roots of non-monogamy were pushed back to a judge writing in 1927 that there might be much more consensual adultery than people thought, though I'm inclined to date it from about the invention of internal fertilisation, maybe 360 million years ago.
Swinging
The swinging lady (Dee McDonald( Department of Psychology, University of Sussex)) uniquely provided a conclusion, based on her 20 years of professional involvement, 5 years academic study, and 30 years of doing it. She'd found that couples engage in swinging to reinforce their couple bond.
Unfortunately the rest of the participants, conspicuously younger, were so uniform in their non-conformity and deep in the anti-knowledge cult of critical theory and liberal relativism, that they immediately savaged her for that and she backed off to explain that it was only a preliminary result and she would go on to refine it, presumably to remove the element of having found something out.
That was also the response to any reference to biology, bizarrely for people working in a field based on a real science with evidence and testable results, they all treated it as an amusing foolishness to be ignored in favour of making stuff up. The guiding criteria for what to believe seem to be novelty and consensus. It is what Jacob Bronowski called the retreat of the West from what we are now able to know, and really suggests a civilisation in terminal decline.
Someone managed to ask the slightly naive question of why are so many single men rejected by swinging groups, which turns out to be not only because they outnumber single women applicants by at least ten to one, but also because 64% of swinging women are interested in bi adventures, while less than 5% of swinging men are (perhaps aggravated by boy+boy fun being outlawed in some groups).
Misc
There was meant to be a paper on 'On the Discourse of Love in Polyamory' (from Christian Klesse (Department of Sociology, Manchester Metropolitan University)), but he got the dates wrong and forgot to turn up, which was unfortunate because I've seen him before and he's relatively sane.
There was some concern over how to normative one group without othering someone else. It seems that anything can be verbed.
Loss of control of the word "queer" was also a worry, with its modern wide use including things like anti-racism undermined by newspapers identifying it with kinky sex, of all things. Poly might go the same way, getting attached to normal people who happen to have multiple lovers (though my impression is we have the opposite problem).
News from Bisexual Central Command is the community is about to become big enough to schism, so it'll be best to start the split from the middle and keep it firmly under control. Heresy is too important to be left to people who don't agree with us.
A panellist mentioned tangentially that he'd once tried to research why people have children, and there's no answer - if you ask people they've never thought about it, before, during or after doing it. If only one could believe in the fantasy of biology.
Poly
There was a paper (from Eleanor Wilkinson (School of Geography, Leeds University)) around how polyamory fails in its political role, by accepting monogamous mainstream ideas like romantic love and living in normal households as being good, and in not opposing capitalism, post-colonialism, and all the other things that favour a privileged few.
Curiously, after 30 years in it, I'd entirely missed all these aspects of it, and probably am among the privileged few, who just have a good time without engaging in a dialectical anti-dyadic discourse. I think I've had a sheltered life since escaping from this sort of thing when I was a student the first time around.
The media's portrayal of poly was also described as the opposite of everything I've ever seen, as pushing its normality and how it's just lovely for everyone involved, rather than being demonised as a harmful freak show to the extent that no UK poly people will appear in it any more.
The UK public is 58% in favour of poly, which I'd have thought is a higher percentage than know what it is, but maybe that's why they think they like it. (This statistic was used as part of the argument that we must be doing it wrong if we're not universally condemned).
The paper, and most of the seminar, defined poly in terms of sex rather than love, which seems to miss the point, particularly when contrasting it with swinging.
Apparently there's a pattern of poly women managing their multiple male partners, which can be seen as empowering for women, or as just more work for them on top of telling their equally clueless adult sons what to do. It's always been striking how many personal assistants are women with teenage sons, but perhaps poly women would do even better at baby-sitting the men notionally in charge of things.
The origin of the neologism "frubbly" was a joke, meant as an example of a word that certainly shouldn't come into existence.
The roots of non-monogamy were pushed back to a judge writing in 1927 that there might be much more consensual adultery than people thought, though I'm inclined to date it from about the invention of internal fertilisation, maybe 360 million years ago.
Swinging
The swinging lady (Dee McDonald( Department of Psychology, University of Sussex)) uniquely provided a conclusion, based on her 20 years of professional involvement, 5 years academic study, and 30 years of doing it. She'd found that couples engage in swinging to reinforce their couple bond.
Unfortunately the rest of the participants, conspicuously younger, were so uniform in their non-conformity and deep in the anti-knowledge cult of critical theory and liberal relativism, that they immediately savaged her for that and she backed off to explain that it was only a preliminary result and she would go on to refine it, presumably to remove the element of having found something out.
That was also the response to any reference to biology, bizarrely for people working in a field based on a real science with evidence and testable results, they all treated it as an amusing foolishness to be ignored in favour of making stuff up. The guiding criteria for what to believe seem to be novelty and consensus. It is what Jacob Bronowski called the retreat of the West from what we are now able to know, and really suggests a civilisation in terminal decline.
Someone managed to ask the slightly naive question of why are so many single men rejected by swinging groups, which turns out to be not only because they outnumber single women applicants by at least ten to one, but also because 64% of swinging women are interested in bi adventures, while less than 5% of swinging men are (perhaps aggravated by boy+boy fun being outlawed in some groups).
Misc
There was meant to be a paper on 'On the Discourse of Love in Polyamory' (from Christian Klesse (Department of Sociology, Manchester Metropolitan University)), but he got the dates wrong and forgot to turn up, which was unfortunate because I've seen him before and he's relatively sane.
There was some concern over how to normative one group without othering someone else. It seems that anything can be verbed.
Loss of control of the word "queer" was also a worry, with its modern wide use including things like anti-racism undermined by newspapers identifying it with kinky sex, of all things. Poly might go the same way, getting attached to normal people who happen to have multiple lovers (though my impression is we have the opposite problem).
News from Bisexual Central Command is the community is about to become big enough to schism, so it'll be best to start the split from the middle and keep it firmly under control. Heresy is too important to be left to people who don't agree with us.
A panellist mentioned tangentially that he'd once tried to research why people have children, and there's no answer - if you ask people they've never thought about it, before, during or after doing it. If only one could believe in the fantasy of biology.