I saw a video by Kat Blaque today. Here it is: Does Polyamory Make You Queer?
A feminist video mentioning polyamory? Yay!
No reading list? Not yay!
But, taking the video seriously.
In my opinion, polyamorous civil rights are 30-50 years, or more, behind trans* and LGB civil rights. I take issue with this! I care the most about the civil rights and the broader societal acceptance of diversity in all its non-abusive forms. Such as: The colour of the sky at different places and times of the day, different expressions of intimacy and sexuality that all involved parties enthusiastically consent to, different shaped holes that bugs eat out of leaves. But not: sorting humans into boxes based on their personal preferences, or superficial differences, to decide which box is entitled to or deserving of resources. (Footnote: I think race is an excellent example of this kind of boxing people into arbitrary groups. And these two books offer an excellent recount of why this is so problematic for race specifically. Bonilla-Silva, E. (2014). Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in America (Fourth edition). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Roberts, D. (2011). Fatal invention: How science, politics, and big business re-create race in the twenty-first century. New Press. )
There are a lot of philosophical dawdlings that detract from civil rights movements. They are important to have, but often come at the expense of real people living oppressed lives, that just can't function because their rental agreement refuses to acknowledge all three people in a triad (or other polyamorous structures), or because there are no anti-discrimination laws for polyamorous people anywhere on the planet, or because polyamorous marriages (that are not explicitly polygynous) are outlawed and/or not recognised. I would however acknowledge the efforts of the Polyamory Legal Advocacy Coalition in the US, and their FAQ page has some information on specific legal issues. Here are two legal analyses over a 7 year period I read and personally found insightful about polyamory: (Footnote: Emens, E. F. (2004). Monogamy’s Law: Compulsory Monogamy and Polyamorous Existence. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.506242 ) (Footnote: Tweedy, A. (2011). Polyamory as a sexual orientation. University of Cincinnati Law Review, 79, 56. )
"There's a lot of this I just don't know, so I want to open up to..."
Okay Kat, well, what do I think? I'll focus on one question, about how male hinges (Footnote: A hinge is a person dating multiple other people who are only dating one person. ) seem common in Kat's anecdotal experience.
Quoting the largest study I know about which addresses these issues, with a sample size of 1,093: (Footnote: Mitchell, M. E., Bartholomew, K., & Cobb, R. J. (2014). Need Fulfillment in Polyamorous Relationships. The Journal of Sex Research, 51(3), 329–339. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2012.742998 )
As shown in Table 1, the majority of women (n = 421, 67.6%) identified as bisexual or pansexual, whereas the majority of men (n = 253, 61.4%) identified as heterosexual.
[...] The majority of female participants (61.4%) reported on relationships with two men; an additional 21.1% reported on a male SO and a female OSO, 8.1% on a female SO and a male OSO, and 4.0% on two female partners. The large majority of male participants (86.6%) reported on relationships with two women; an additional 4.9% reported on a female SO and a male OSO, 4.6% on two male partners, and 1.2% on a male SO and female OSO.
(In case you do not know, SO stands for "significant other" or "primary" in a polycule, and OSO stands for "other significant other" or "secondary" in a polycule. Read the paper for more info on their methods.)
This largely confirms Kat's anecdotal experience seeing many polygynous relationship structures, although the citation doesn't give much indication if we were to numerically measure the "patriarchal-ness" or "abusiveness" of these relationships - need fulfilment is a metric limited by the fact that it can't tell the difference between a distant relationship or an abusive one. It would still be nice if the sample size was bigger, so it's not super strong evidence, but it's something to start with. So I'm going to move on to an underlying assumption of this line of reasoning:
I could define queer as "alternative (non-normative) sexuality". The confusing part in this definition is how to handle polyamory: A large fraction of it, a likely majority of it, could be considered polygyny. And polygyny isn't widely accepted, and it isn't accepted in western countries right now. It was accepted however, maybe 50-100 years ago, in many countries like the US.
So, polygyny can't be viewed queer because it was mainstream at this point, and polyamory is hard to separate from polygyny because there's the assumption of deception in some cases that people identifying as polyamorous might be using it as a euphemism for polygyny.
Polygyny used to be very mainstream. It still exists, and is still mainstream, in some regions of the world - one such doctrine is Islamic marriage law and its significant influence on South African countries and in India. These specific manifestations are extremely patriarchal. So I suppose that's reason to believe hinge men more inherently patriarchal than hinge women are matriarchal, because of this specific large scale patriarchal Western history in polygyny.
Here's a different way to approach this issue. The issue is the resemblance between modern polyamory and a horrible history of polygyny, which "taints" the modern concept. The issue is the patriarchal theme, or more specifically, how that manifests as abuse, or discrimination, both individually and systemically. With that in mind, is there any research on rates of abuse in polyamorous relationships specifically?
No. There is no research I know about on assessing rates of abusive polyamorous relationships. I nonetheless personally speculate it's pretty high. The different (non-monogamous) structure inherently means there are many different metrics of abuse or satisfaction when one relationship's effects can spill into another.
But, I do know about research into abuse and satisfaction in lesbian and gay monogamous relationships. And the evidence is pretty solid on that: Abuse occurs at roughly the same rate as in heterosexual couples. (Footnote: Walters, Mikel L., Jieru Chen, and Matthew J. Breiding. "The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS): 2010 findings on victimization by sexual orientation." Atlanta, GA: National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 648, no. 73 (2013): 6. Cincinnati Law Review, 79, 56.) ) It's a piece of evidence that I personally have a hard time reconciling with.
I could also define queer as what shows up on wikitionary:
A person of any non-heterosexual sexuality or sexual identity.
Which would again shift the goal post to asking if polyamory is a sexual identity. I could identify as polyamorous, so it's an identity, but is it a sexual identity? What about polyamorous people who are asexual? So... it's still a muddy question, and I think after a point it becomes pointless. The point of umbrella terms is to include lots of different things, so inevitably some groups will view certain things as queer and others will not, but the influence of public stigma towards polyamory I think is the main factor which dictates whether it's predominantly viewed as queer or not. (Footnote: I really like Julia Serano's section "Destigmatization, Contagion, and Disgust" in the below book, which provides a model of how identities become destigmatised through "acknowledgment that biases against the trait may be occurring in an unconscious or systemic manner. This is often accompanied by increased recognition of these more subtle double standards, and efforts to transcend or dismantle them."
Serano, J. (2022). Sexed up: How society sexualizes us, and how we can fight back. Seal Press.
)
I will finish this topic by providing a quote: (Footnote: Katz, M. I. L., & Graham, J. R. (2020). Building Competence in Practice with the Polyamorous Community: A Scoping Review. Social Work, 65(2), 188–196. https://doi.org/10.1093/sw/swaa011)
There are many debates concerning whether polyamory is a practice, an identity, or a sexual orientation. Benson (2017) reminds us of the assumption that nonnormative identities are fixed. However, the idea of polyamory as a practice suggests that there is greater freedom and fluidity. Henrich and Trawinski (2016), who conducted a study of poly clientele from their practice, quoted one such interviewee who "considered polyamorous identity as a process and explained that if or when she has a girlfriend in addition to her primary relationship . . . then she would identify as polyamorous".
I will also give some recommended readings that I have found most helpful in my learning journey. First, if you haven't already, check out the polyamory.com forums. They are very active, covers pretty much every subtopic I can think of, and it goes back further than a decade. That's where I really started to think that, no, not all polyamorous relationships need to be uneducated or toxic, that there are so many different shapes and sizes of polyamory, and it's just a really, really narrow cross-section of that which actually leads to long term stability and benefit for all involved. This is how I feel about celebrating diversity: The assumption of this statement is that the positive aspects of diversity are being celebrated, but this necessarily comes at the expense of ignoring the so many intricate ways in which hatred can be expressed; I think the vast diversity of hatred is also important to understand to enact meaningful systemic change.
Second, are two books on my reading list, and I hope to finish them by the end of this year. They are both published in the same year, both with almost the same title, both about 150 pages of prose, both extremely well written (in my opinion).(Footnote: Schippers, M. (2016). Beyond monogamy: Polyamory and the future of polyqueer sexualities. New York University Press.) focusses more on the role of biology/genetics/neuroscience/anthropology and the nuclear family trope, and (Footnote: Willey, A. (2016). Undoing monogamy: The politics of science and the possibilities of biology. Duke University Press.) looks more at masculinity, and is more philosophical in my opinion.
Third, there's the question of how to actually deal with abusive relationships. Irrespective of how "patriarchal" it looks, smells, sounds, etc. By far the best material that I've seen for this is (Footnote: Fern, J. (2020). Polysecure: Attachment, trauma and consensual nonmonogamy. Thorntree Press. ).
I have hardly used YouTube at all the past year. But I happened to open it up and see, Kat Blaque talking about polyamory, published three hours ago? Wow, I am lucky! Video essayists talking about polyamory is a rarity for me! So, it was a good motivator for me to write on here again. I hope I find the energy to keep writing too.
Of course, it would be nice if polyamory wasn't in the "don't ask, don't tell" phase that lesbian and gay people had during the 50s. That it isn't safe in a majority of public spaces to identify as polyamorous, specifically in work and in public because of lacking anti-discrimination protection. But, the fact that it's able to be hidden and have that stigma ignored, is something that gay and lesbian people lost which in a way precipitated their respective civil rights movements. Also, this is something that's happened in the past and continues to happen, that discussion is likely not going to happen until it gains more acceptance and credibility as falling under the massive "queer" umbrella.
For if I were to make a fairly brash comparison, transgender women in both the past and present still frequently get labelled as heterosexual or homosexual cisgender men. So, if the thing really stopping you from taking the perspective seriously is not the content of a group's rhetoric, but just that it's comprised largely of cisgender men? The argument has some merit, but I think it's important to be cautious using the same kind of argument that has historically been used as a conservative force against transfeminine communities.
Footnotes
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