Polyamory: Coming to an Orgy near you!

[kindandgenerous]

Last night, a bunch of polyamorists ganged up on me in one of my current livejournal friend's journal because I guess I didn't agree with their views. This is what I said in response to her poll about Polyamory:
I call it what it is. I view polyamory as just another convenient little word with a hidden meaning -- it's essentially promiscuous

Comments

Re: poly...

[zenofit]

"the person that compaired it to incest... OMFG, nasty!"

It doesn't sound like this happened - it sounds like hyperbole. I suspect the person was really saying something closer to:

You can love more than one parent
You can love more than one child
You can love more than one friend

We all do this

So why can't you love more than one sexual partner?

There is no suggestion in this argument that loving your children is in any way sexual, just that love doesn't necessarily have anything to do with sex and it is only in the case of sexual love that society frowns on more than one object of that love.

I think there has to be an evolutionary explanation for why people tend to think this way. I can think of a few candidates, although there are also a few attractive seeming candidates that don't work when you think them through properly. Anyway, I'd suggest that monogamy (with occasional infidelity) is an evolved behaviour in humans. Hence, it is the norm. I don't mean that people are normally unfaithful, by the way, I mean that infidelity is common throughout the human population.

I'm suggesting that we evolved to exaggerate the importance of our relationships with our sexual partners to an extent that is greater than is strictly necessary for reproduction and that there is a good evolutionary reason for this. Monogamy of this kind increased the likelihood of individuals to reproduce and was therefore selected for.

If this is true, it doesn't imply that it is immoral for people to have polyamarous relationships. Just that some (maybe even most) people have quite strong prohibitions against polyamory. Some people, through some combination of genetics and upbringing, have lesser or no such prohibitions. I myself am in a strictly monogamous relationship and have no desire to change this. I've also had simultaneous relationships with more than one sexual partner in the past, including cases where each partner was quite aware of this. I have never been in love with more than one sexual partner simultaneously. However, I think it is quite possible that this could have happened or might possibly happen in the future. I just don't see why anyone should decide in advance that I can love only one sexual partner. I prefer to wait and see what happens.

I don't see a case to suggest that polyamorists immoral. As someone implied earlier in the comments, you could replace 'polyamory' with 'homosexuality' throughout this and the argument would still hold. But fewer people these days think homosexuality is immoral - thankfully, since a significant part of the population is homosexual - the zeitgeist moves on and prejudice - even prejudice with a possible genetic component - is eventually overcome.

This may or may not happen for polyamory, but either way I think we should learn from the history of racial prejudice and homophobia and misogyny and so on and be slower to judge, even if we don't agree.

And sure as shit we should be asking ourselves *why* we feel how we do when something seems immoral. Are our feelings and arguments consistent? Or are we deciding something on an emotional basis and trying to justify it with dubious logic afterwards? I think we all do both of these things. I personally think it is important to question what our emotions are telling us.