consensual polyamory vs. exploitation in world cultures

[Ispravlennaja Tsekovija]

continuing this discussion from gay adoption thread so as to not threadjack:

Marriage is sacred bond between a husband and wife, One man and one Woman into one family.

So you're forcing your views onto cultures that support consenual polyamory and destroying marriage and families for them.

So you're forcing your views onto cultures that support consenual polyamory and destroying marriage and families for them.

which cultures support "consensual polyamory"? queer communes in 3-bedroom portland apartments don't count as cultures for the purposes of this question

polyamory is essentially an alternative name for polygamy, a system in which one person has multiple spouses, some or all of whom know about some or all of the others. historically, this has usually been men having multiple wives (polygyny), but there have been cases of women having many husbands (polyandry) as well, and more modern lgbtq+ interpretations may conceptualize the relationship as one where each spouse has all of the other spouses and so essentially it forms an entire non-hierarchical community. polyamory may include the latter, polygamy typically doesn't. here, consensual means that the relationship is formed without coercion or secrecy.

basically, i'm asking - do foreign or historical cultures (rather than subcultures) exist which practice anything that can be called "consensual polyamory"? we can also talk about the broader point of whether consensual polyamory/polygamy is even possible, and how we define polyamory vs. polygamy.

personally, as i sort of made clear there, i don't believe such cultures exist or have ever existed, but i'm open to new evidence if some exists that i've never heard. i'm also skeptical of the idea that consensual polygamy can ever exist because it is almost always associated with power imbalances, and i do not believe genuinely ethical polygamy can ever be possible.

thoughts?

[Senkaku]

which cultures support "consensual polyamory"? queer communes in 3-bedroom portland apartments don't count as cultures for the purposes of this question

personally, as i sort of made clear there, i don't believe such cultures exist or have ever existed, but i'm open to new evidence if some exists that i've never heard. i'm also skeptical of the idea that consensual polygamy can ever exist because it is almost always associated with power imbalances, and i do not believe genuinely ethical polygamy can ever be possible.

thoughts?

I'm not aware of any historical examples, so you're not totally off-base afaik, but why do contemporary subcultures with different ideas not count as cultures to you? There's probably more people living in 3-bedroom queer Portland/Bushwick apartment communes right now than lived on some islands in Oceania or Neolithic societies, and we rightfully recognize many of the latter as cultures with unique characteristics worth studying-- so why should the ideology and contributions of postmodern subcultures be ignored, especially if it seems as if they may be introducing a genuinely new concept or ideal to civilization?

[Ispravlennaja Tsekovija]

which cultures support "consensual polyamory"? queer communes in 3-bedroom portland apartments don't count as cultures for the purposes of this question

personally, as i sort of made clear there, i don't believe such cultures exist or have ever existed, but i'm open to new evidence if some exists that i've never heard. i'm also skeptical of the idea that consensual polygamy can ever exist because it is almost always associated with power imbalances, and i do not believe genuinely ethical polygamy can ever be possible.

thoughts?

I'm not aware of any historical examples, so you're not totally off-base afaik, but why do contemporary subcultures with different ideas not count as cultures to you? There's probably more people living in 3-bedroom queer Portland/Bushwick apartment communes right now than lived on some islands in Oceania, and we rightfully recognize many of the latter as cultures with unique characteristics worth studying-- so why should the ideology and contributions of postmodern subcultures be ignored, especially if it seems as if they may be introducing a genuinely new concept or ideal to civilization?

that's a fair point but the thing about subcultures in general is that they represent a small portion of the population and may span across multiple actual cultures (especially true for queer culture), and queer culture specifically is often doing things intentionally to subvert wider cultural norms, which i don't view as generating valid cultural phenomena that should be considered on the same level as whole-cultural development. this phenomenon will simply lack the range or the historical significance of something that would happen in a whole culture until it becomes wider culture.

so yeah if queer polyamorous communes in portland become a wider cultural phenomenon intertwined with american culture rather than queer american culture specifically (god forbid), then i'd be willing to think about it on the same level as something like thai kathoeys, representing a genuine difference from the modern western sexual paradigm. but as it is now, it seems ephemeral and isolated, with an inorganic origin.

[Senkaku]

I'm not aware of any historical examples, so you're not totally off-base afaik, but why do contemporary subcultures with different ideas not count as cultures to you? There's probably more people living in 3-bedroom queer Portland/Bushwick apartment communes right now than lived on some islands in Oceania, and we rightfully recognize many of the latter as cultures with unique characteristics worth studying-- so why should the ideology and contributions of postmodern subcultures be ignored, especially if it seems as if they may be introducing a genuinely new concept or ideal to civilization?

that's a fair point but the thing about subcultures in general is that they represent a small portion of the population

That's true of all but the most influential cultures in human history.

and may span across multiple actual cultures (especially true for queer culture),

Not that many people exist/are habituated to only a single culture, so this isn't really unusual either-- and you seem to agree "queer culture" exists, so why not a more specific poly subset?

and queer culture specifically is often doing things intentionally to subvert wider cultural norms, which i don't view as generating valid cultural phenomena that should be considered on the same level as whole-cultural development.

I mean, I think this is a simplistic understanding of modern queer culture. It's really only emerged as a conceptual whole in the context of a global, literate, industrialized society that's still a newborn in historical terms, I don't think we can easily dismiss all of queer culture as just a bunch of episodes of countercultural defiance-- either historically, or looking forward at what it might become in the next century.

this phenomenon will simply lack the range or the historical significance of something that would happen in a whole culture until it becomes wider culture.

I mean, the ritual practices and material cultures of societies on obscure Micronesian islands were extremely limited in range and historical significance and never "became wider culture"-- what does that even mean? What do you even mean by "historically significant" here, tbh?

so yeah if queer polyamorous communes in portland become a wider cultural phenomenon intertwined with american culture rather than queer american culture specifically (god forbid),

They exist inside American society, how can you say they're not already intertwined with American culture? How can you separate two things that exist alongside and inform one another, even if that process isn't always obvious to the majority of people who're on one side of that exchange? And how "wide" does it have to get to count?

then i'd be willing to think about it on the same level as something like thai kathoeys, representing a genuine difference from the modern western sexual paradigm.

So basically at a certain point, they'll cross a magic numerical threshold where they go from just some weird individuals to "representing a genuine difference"? How does that work?

but as it is now, it seems ephemeral and isolated, with an inorganic origin.

What do you mean by "inorganic origin"? It seems less ephemeral to me with every passing day, and I'm not convinced that "isolation", which you seem to be defining based on a lack of mainstream adoption/recognition/interest, deprives it of all meaning or significance.

I don't know if ethical/consensual polyamory is possible, since I have no personal experience with it, and I don't know whether the modern attempts at it will flourish and become a pillar of 21st century culture or fade into obscurity as a movement that had its time and then passed, but dismissing its existence as insignificant when you evidently feel it's significant enough to at least make a discussion thread about strikes me as an odd form of denial. You clearly do think it's a culturally significant phenomenon, you're just not necessarily in favor of it on personal grounds. I'd like to hear more about why you think ethical polyamory is impossible, and less about why you think we should discount contemporary attempts to bring it into existence when considering whether it has any precedent in human history-- maybe it is a new thing, and if that's the case then you should be able to substantively explain why you think it's wrong, rather than devoting your energy to just re-stating the fact that it seems to be new.

[Punished UMN]

As Fahr has pointed out with numerous studies in other threads on this issue, whether it's consensual or not, there is a causal relationship between polygamy and social strife because it increases competition among those lower on the socio-economic ladder by reducing their quality as mates.

[Ispravlennaja Tsekovija]

that's a fair point but the thing about subcultures in general is that they represent a small portion of the population

That's true of all but the most influential cultures in human history.

i mean the population of the culture in which they exist. within a papua new guinean tribe of 2000 people with a distinct shared culture and language who typically cover their genitals in a very unique fashion but normally leave everything else uncovered, there might be a subculture of 20 people who believe that nipples should be covered in a similar way. another tribe about the same size with a separate language and culture on the same mountain might wear a completely different style of genital coverings and no nipple coverings at all. the difference between the style of genital coverings is relevant when you talk about differences between the cultures on this mountain because it spans both entire cultures. the people who believe in nipple coverings are not meaningless or irrelevant when you're talking about just differences between individuals, but you cannot fairly say in comparison that there is a culture on this mountain with nipple coverings, because that is only a small subculture within the wider culture.

the point is basically that you cannot normally generalize a subset and compare it to or treat it like a complete set, which is implied by what vassenor is saying (that is, "cultures" implies a complete set of individuals sharing at least one common social/behavioral characteristic as well as a language or dialect). i don't think it's totally always invalid to compare apples to apple cores, but it just doesn't sit well with me as someone who works in and mainly studies hard science. perhaps sociologists conceptualize the matter differently and i'm just failing to see their perspective.

and may span across multiple actual cultures (especially true for queer culture),

Not that many people exist/are habituated to only a single culture, so this isn't really unusual either-- and you seem to agree "queer culture" exists, so why not a more specific poly subset?

i actually would argue that all people are habituated to only a single overarching culture and other cultural aspects they have are not comparable because anything they do in those extraneous cultures will at least to some extent be informed by what their basal culture is. even if we suppose a person might grow up bilingual smack dab in the center of a place where multiple cultures overlap, with two parents who are equally present from both cultures, but i would argue even then it's not actually two cultures that end up equally influencing the child, but a synthesis of both cultures into a single fundamental culture. not sure what this has to do with what i'm talking about though.

i don't see how what i've said implies there's not a specific polyamorous/gamous subset. i think it's self-evident that one does exist. subcultures can absolutely be nested and overlap.

and queer culture specifically is often doing things intentionally to subvert wider cultural norms, which i don't view as generating valid cultural phenomena that should be considered on the same level as whole-cultural development.

I mean, I think this is a simplistic understanding of modern queer culture. It's really only emerged as a conceptual whole in the context of a global, literate, industrialized society that's still a newborn in historical terms, I don't think we can easily dismiss all of queer culture as just a bunch of episodes of countercultural defiance-- either historically, or looking forward at what it might become in the next century.

i don't think we can dismiss all of it as such, and that's why i said often, but when i think about queer 'polyamory' specifically, the clear reasons for its revival that come to mind are:
- novelty and subversiveness
- just being really horny
and i really just don't think actions performed for the sake of novelty, or because someone is aching for some action, should be considered cultural phenomena.

i don't know, maybe there's other reasons you can think of, but i'm struggling.

this phenomenon will simply lack the range or the historical significance of something that would happen in a whole culture until it becomes wider culture.

I mean, the ritual practices and material cultures of societies on obscure Micronesian islands were extremely limited in range and historical significance and never "became wider culture"-- what does that even mean? What do you even mean by "historically significant" here, tbh?

maybe a poor term to use but i mean that a phenomenon like this ought to be consistently practiced of a culture which is capable of being the native culture, i.e. the basis for cultural cognition, like i described above, in order to be spoken of in the way that vassenor is.

an example of a cultural practice or ideal becoming relevant to the wider culture could be civil rights in america; the idea within a subculture (civil rights activists) of racial equality managed to become part of the general american consciousness.

so yeah if queer polyamorous communes in portland become a wider cultural phenomenon intertwined with american culture rather than queer american culture specifically (god forbid),

They exist inside American society, how can you say they're not already intertwined with American culture? How can you separate two things that exist alongside and inform one another, even if that process isn't always obvious to the majority of people who're on one side of that exchange?

because nobody who is not part of the queer subculture is practicing "ethical polyamory". it is a practice restricted to that subculture. if it started to be found in non-queers it would maybe begin to cross the threshold where vassenor can say that consensual polyamory is practiced by a culture.

then i'd be willing to think about it on the same level as something like thai kathoeys, representing a genuine difference from the modern western sexual paradigm.

So basically at a certain point, they'll cross a magic numerical threshold where they go from just some weird individuals to "representing a genuine difference"? How does that work?

i think i explained the magic numerical threshold already in this post.

but as it is now, it seems ephemeral and isolated, with an inorganic origin.

What do you mean by "inorganic origin"?

what i wrote above, the fact that it's borne of rebellion and/or horniness.

It seems less ephemeral to me with every passing day,

perhaps that's wishful thinking on my part but disco was around for about the same amount of time as polyamory has been and i think we tend to think of that as pretty ephemeral beyond the passing reference.

and I'm not convinced that "isolation", which you seem to be defining based on a lack of mainstream adoption/recognition/interest, deprives it of all meaning or significance.

I don't know if ethical/consensual polyamory is possible, since I have no personal experience with it, and I don't know whether the modern attempts at it will flourish and become a pillar of 21st century culture or fade into obscurity as a movement that had its time and then passed, but dismissing its existence as insignificant when you evidently feel it's significant enough to at least make a discussion thread about strikes me as an odd form of denial. You clearly do think it's a culturally significant phenomenon, you're just not necessarily in favor of it on personal grounds.

you seem to be misunderstanding the context in which i'm discussing it and its "significance." i do think it can be relevant as a culturally significant phenomenon within a (sub)culture, in the same way as team edward is relevant. but i would never say a team jacob-ite was "forcing her views onto cultures that support edward x bella and destroying marriage and families for them" because that would sound bizarre, and not just because it's twilight - it implies a level of comparison which just isn't appropriate.

[Ispravlennaja Tsekovija]

the only thing that actually matters in the above post is the very last paragraph so feel free to skip everything else that i totally didn't spend 30 minutes on

[GuessTheAltAccount]

The other thread on this, if you whittle it down to "in and of itself" arguments (ie. putting aside anything that could be filed under "guilt by association"), boiled down to 3 main lines of reasoning against polyamory, each of which strike me as hypocritical.

A: The notion that women are more likely to double/triple/etc...up on a few guys than the reverse. (Almost as if the pickier sex is going to prioritize having someone you can keep to yourself less, and other traits more. It's only confirming what we already knew from women and girls insulting guys they don't like about their supposed virginity, and men and boys insulting girls they don't like about their supposed promiscuity.) Human nature is not "gender neutral" and no one has the right to stack the deck against gender differences any more than in their favour.

B: The notion that it's the most wealthy guys, not the most attractive, who would end up with the most wives. (If that's what happens, so be it. Expose the hypocrisy of those who make cheap shots about Ben Shapiro's supposed inability to arouse his wife by the fact that given the opportunity, some of them would go for the wealthy that they supposedly find unattractive instead of the poor they find more attractive. Also, nationalizing child care expenses would go a long way to determining whether or not the affordability of having children in particular would change the game.)

C: The notion that those left out by this arrangement would become bitter and resentful. Well, the monogamous dating world leaves all sorts of people out, and not just the ones who are genetic dead ends. Someone could be thin and babyfaced, but because they had the sense not to risk a lifetime of poverty through teen dating in a world where she has the right to drag him with her into poverty even if she didn't warn him she'd keep the baby, then some overweight guy at the mall is going to be more sexually experienced than he is, and therefore more useful to her even for the purposes of monogamy. And even that wouldn't bother me as much if not for people then trying to pretend this isn't what's happening. If you're going to leave such people out, you don't get to complain that polyamory would leave you out.

I can appreciate that people raised in a society that worships monogamous love get sentimental about it; and don't claim to know whether or not we should be subsidizing marriage at all (though if we do, we'd best be ready to scrutinize it as heavily as we scrutinize everything else we subsidize; starting with mandatory paternity testing); but it's just the hypocrisy of the specific reasons for the continuing taboo against polyamory that bother me a little more.

[Ispravlennaja Tsekovija]

The other thread on this, if you whittle it down to "in and of itself" arguments (ie. putting aside anything that could be filed under "guilt by association"), boiled down to 3 main lines of reasoning against polyamory, each of which strike me as hypocritical.

A: The notion that women are more likely to double/triple/etc...up on a few guys than the reverse. (Almost as if the pickier sex is going to prioritize having someone you can keep to yourself less, and other traits more. It's only confirming what we already knew from women and girls insulting guys they don't like about their supposed virginity, and men and boys insulting girls they don't like about their supposed promiscuity.) Human nature is not "gender neutral" and no one has the right to stack the deck against gender differences any more than in their favour.

B: The notion that it's the most wealthy guys, not the most attractive, who would end up with the most wives. (If that's what happens, so be it. Expose the hypocrisy of those who make cheap shots about Ben Shapiro's supposed inability to arouse his wife by the fact that given the opportunity, some of them would go for the wealthy that they supposedly find unattractive instead of the poor they find more attractive. Also, nationalizing child care expenses would go a long way to determining whether or not the affordability of having children in particular would change the game.)

C: The notion that those left out by this arrangement would become bitter and resentful. Well, the monogamous dating world leaves all sorts of people out, and not just the ones who are genetic dead ends. Someone could be thin and babyfaced, but because they had the sense not to risk a lifetime of poverty through teen dating in a world where she has the right to drag him with her into poverty even if she didn't warn him she'd keep the baby, then some overweight guy at the mall is going to be more sexually experienced than he is, and therefore more useful to her even for the purposes of monogamy. And even that wouldn't bother me as much if not for people then trying to pretend this isn't what's happening. If you're going to leave such people out, you don't get to complain that polyamory would leave you out.

I can appreciate that people raised in a society that worships monogamous love get sentimental about it; and don't claim to know whether or not we should be subsidizing marriage at all (though if we do, we'd best be ready to scrutinize it as heavily as we scrutinize everything else we subsidize; starting with mandatory paternity testing); but it's just the hypocrisy of the specific reasons for the continuing taboo against polyamory that bother me a little more.

well this was quite the interesting march through your psyche. the way that you've internalized and now attempted to replicate what i'm sure were much less abhorrent arguments than they appear here is genuinely fascinating, but i don't see how it really relates to the question i've posed?

[GuessTheAltAccount]

The other thread on this, if you whittle it down to "in and of itself" arguments (ie. putting aside anything that could be filed under "guilt by association"), boiled down to 3 main lines of reasoning against polyamory, each of which strike me as hypocritical.

A: The notion that women are more likely to double/triple/etc...up on a few guys than the reverse. (Almost as if the pickier sex is going to prioritize having someone you can keep to yourself less, and other traits more. It's only confirming what we already knew from women and girls insulting guys they don't like about their supposed virginity, and men and boys insulting girls they don't like about their supposed promiscuity.) Human nature is not "gender neutral" and no one has the right to stack the deck against gender differences any more than in their favour.

B: The notion that it's the most wealthy guys, not the most attractive, who would end up with the most wives. (If that's what happens, so be it. Expose the hypocrisy of those who make cheap shots about Ben Shapiro's supposed inability to arouse his wife by the fact that given the opportunity, some of them would go for the wealthy that they supposedly find unattractive instead of the poor they find more attractive. Also, nationalizing child care expenses would go a long way to determining whether or not the affordability of having children in particular would change the game.)

C: The notion that those left out by this arrangement would become bitter and resentful. Well, the monogamous dating world leaves all sorts of people out, and not just the ones who are genetic dead ends. Someone could be thin and babyfaced, but because they had the sense not to risk a lifetime of poverty through teen dating in a world where she has the right to drag him with her into poverty even if she didn't warn him she'd keep the baby, then some overweight guy at the mall is going to be more sexually experienced than he is, and therefore more useful to her even for the purposes of monogamy. And even that wouldn't bother me as much if not for people then trying to pretend this isn't what's happening. If you're going to leave such people out, you don't get to complain that polyamory would leave you out.

I can appreciate that people raised in a society that worships monogamous love get sentimental about it; and don't claim to know whether or not we should be subsidizing marriage at all (though if we do, we'd best be ready to scrutinize it as heavily as we scrutinize everything else we subsidize; starting with mandatory paternity testing); but it's just the hypocrisy of the specific reasons for the continuing taboo against polyamory that bother me a little more.

well this was quite the interesting march through your psyche. the way that you've internalized and now attempted to replicate what i'm sure were much less abhorrent arguments than they appear here is genuinely fascinating, but i don't see how it really relates to the question i've posed?

You asked if there's any culture that can practice "non-exploitative" polyamory. I pointed out why there's no reason to presume it necessarily any less exploitative than monogamy.

Here's the other thread. If you think the arguments were "less abhorrent" than I'm portraying them, feel free to make the distinction.

[Ispravlennaja Tsekovija]

You asked if there's any culture that can practice "non-exploitative" polyamory. I pointed out why there's no reason to presume it necessarily any less exploitative than monogamy.

no you didn't, you made no overarching thesis clear and your conclusion was nonexistent, you basically just gave us a long and meandering tour of the hall of mirrors that your mind apparently sends meaningful input and output through. but whatever, at least i know what you're going for now.

Here's the other thread. If you think the arguments were "less abhorrent" than I'm portraying them, feel free to make the distinction.

i lack the time nor the energy to read the whole thread but i know some of the people making the anti-polyamory arguments and i know none of those accurately represent their positions!

[Dreria]

The other thread on this, if you whittle it down to "in and of itself" arguments (ie. putting aside anything that could be filed under "guilt by association"), boiled down to 3 main lines of reasoning against polyamory, each of which strike me as hypocritical.

A: The notion that women are more likely to double/triple/etc...up on a few guys than the reverse. (Almost as if the pickier sex is going to prioritize having someone you can keep to yourself less, and other traits more. It's only confirming what we already knew from women and girls insulting guys they don't like about their supposed virginity, and men and boys insulting girls they don't like about their supposed promiscuity.) Human nature is not "gender neutral" and no one has the right to stack the deck against gender differences any more than in their favour.

B: The notion that it's the most wealthy guys, not the most attractive, who would end up with the most wives. (If that's what happens, so be it. Expose the hypocrisy of those who make cheap shots about Ben Shapiro's supposed inability to arouse his wife by the fact that given the opportunity, some of them would go for the wealthy that they supposedly find unattractive instead of the poor they find more attractive. Also, nationalizing child care expenses would go a long way to determining whether or not the affordability of having children in particular would change the game.)

C: The notion that those left out by this arrangement would become bitter and resentful. Well, the monogamous dating world leaves all sorts of people out, and not just the ones who are genetic dead ends. Someone could be thin and babyfaced, but because they had the sense not to risk a lifetime of poverty through teen dating in a world where she has the right to drag him with her into poverty even if she didn't warn him she'd keep the baby, then some overweight guy at the mall is going to be more sexually experienced than he is, and therefore more useful to her even for the purposes of monogamy. And even that wouldn't bother me as much if not for people then trying to pretend this isn't what's happening. If you're going to leave such people out, you don't get to complain that polyamory would leave you out.

I can appreciate that people raised in a society that worships monogamous love get sentimental about it; and don't claim to know whether or not we should be subsidizing marriage at all (though if we do, we'd best be ready to scrutinize it as heavily as we scrutinize everything else we subsidize; starting with mandatory paternity testing); but it's just the hypocrisy of the specific reasons for the continuing taboo against polyamory that bother me a little more.

Pretty sure it does not say this in the bible

[Senkaku]

the only thing that actually matters in the above post is the very last paragraph so feel free to skip everything else that i totally didn't spend 30 minutes on

sincerity and actual reflection detected on American soil, lethal irony engaged !

i actually would argue that all people are habituated to only a single overarching culture and other cultural aspects they have are not comparable because anything they do in those extraneous cultures will at least to some extent be informed by what their basal culture is. even if we suppose a person might grow up bilingual smack dab in the center of a place where multiple cultures overlap, with two parents who are equally present from both cultures, but i would argue even then it's not actually two cultures that end up equally influencing the child, but a synthesis of both cultures into a single fundamental culture. not sure what this has to do with what i'm talking about though.

Like what I said earlier-- I think that at this stage, at least in the US, that "synthetic culture" informed by the cultures of the child's guardians is really its own separate, atomized thing that's then further altered by the child's unique interaction with mass culture through the internet and media consumption. In some cases, they might gravitate to an established subculture within the digital cultural environment that they're stumbling through-- that seems closer to what's going on with the poly subculture than people being habituated to a single American culture and then separately indulging in polyamory as a sort of hobbyist thing to piss off their parents/get their rocks off, if I'm understanding you correctly.

I mean, I think this is a simplistic understanding of modern queer culture. It's really only emerged as a conceptual whole in the context of a global, literate, industrialized society that's still a newborn in historical terms, I don't think we can easily dismiss all of queer culture as just a bunch of episodes of countercultural defiance-- either historically, or looking forward at what it might become in the next century.

i don't think we can dismiss all of it as such, and that's why i said often, but when i think about queer 'polyamory' specifically, the clear reasons for its revival that come to mind are:
- novelty and subversiveness
- just being really horny
and i really just don't think actions performed for the sake of novelty, or because someone is aching for some action, should be considered cultural phenomena.

i don't know, maybe there's other reasons you can think of, but i'm struggling.

If you discount things from the realm of true culture because they're driven by novelty, reflexive rejection of authority, or horniness, you may as well throw out most of human development over the last three thousand years. I wouldn't be so quick to ascribe people's reconfiguration of their entire lifestyles purely to horniness or a need to be at the center of controversy.

I mean, the ritual practices and material cultures of societies on obscure Micronesian islands were extremely limited in range and historical significance and never "became wider culture"-- what does that even mean? What do you even mean by "historically significant" here, tbh?

maybe a poor term to use but i mean that a phenomenon like this ought to be consistently practiced of a culture which is capable of being the native culture, i.e. the basis for cultural cognition, like i described above, in order to be spoken of in the way that vassenor is.

an example of a cultural practice or ideal becoming relevant to the wider culture could be civil rights in america; the idea within a subculture (civil rights activists) of racial equality managed to become part of the general american consciousness.

That's basically saying a belief system only becomes culturally relevant when it's embraced by incumbent political elites, though, and by that metric, we've been de facto embracing some type of polyamory for centuries-- not ethical polyamory, certainly, but it certainly seems to open the door to a societal re-evaluation of the practice gaining some cultural legitimacy.

They exist inside American society, how can you say they're not already intertwined with American culture? How can you separate two things that exist alongside and inform one another, even if that process isn't always obvious to the majority of people who're on one side of that exchange?

because nobody who is not part of the queer subculture is practicing "ethical polyamory". it is a practice restricted to that subculture. if it started to be found in non-queers it would maybe begin to cross the threshold where vassenor can say that consensual polyamory is practiced by a culture.

Who is part of the "queer subculture" now, though? I think that's contested-- widespread embrace of the concept of demisexuality and the abundance of bisexual white women flooding into queer spaces are the first heralds to me that queer culture is being adopted to an increasing degree by other segments of society, and I know there's at least some straight people already professing to practice polyamory who seem very much in line with that trend to me.

So basically at a certain point, they'll cross a magic numerical threshold where they go from just some weird individuals to "representing a genuine difference"? How does that work?

i think i explained the magic numerical threshold already in this post.

Well, try using smaller words this time, I'm not as bright as you

What do you mean by "inorganic origin"?

what i wrote above, the fact that it's borne of rebellion and/or horniness.

Do obelisk or skyscraper construction have "inorganic origins"? Does Impressionism? What's more organically human than rebellion and horniness?

It seems less ephemeral to me with every passing day,

perhaps that's wishful thinking on my part but disco was around for about the same amount of time as polyamory has been and i think we tend to think of that as pretty ephemeral beyond the passing reference.

That's one we'll just have to wait and see on, but I think in the context of increasing atomization and the breakdown of public political institutions, it wouldn't be surprising if there was a long-term, sustained growth in alternative cultural models for building strong social support networks. If you interpret poly clusters as the informal development of a new model of bottom-up social safety net due to the erosion of the welfare state, then political indicators across the Western world might lead you to believe this thing will stick around.

and I'm not convinced that "isolation", which you seem to be defining based on a lack of mainstream adoption/recognition/interest, deprives it of all meaning or significance.

I don't know if ethical/consensual polyamory is possible, since I have no personal experience with it, and I don't know whether the modern attempts at it will flourish and become a pillar of 21st century culture or fade into obscurity as a movement that had its time and then passed, but dismissing its existence as insignificant when you evidently feel it's significant enough to at least make a discussion thread about strikes me as an odd form of denial. You clearly do think it's a culturally significant phenomenon, you're just not necessarily in favor of it on personal grounds.

you seem to be misunderstanding the context in which i'm discussing it and its "significance." i do think it can be relevant as a culturally significant phenomenon within a (sub)culture, in the same way as team edward is relevant. but i would never say a team jacob-ite was "forcing her views onto cultures that support edward x bella and destroying marriage and families for them" because that would sound bizarre, and not just because it's twilight - it implies a level of comparison which just isn't appropriate.

So if polyamory is simply a culturally significant phenomenon within queer subculture, what exactly is the issue with it? You say it's totally divorced from the principal cultural experience of the rest of society, comprised of a small group of people, and will perhaps prove ephemeral-- so what's worth discussing about it? Why would you be worried about it?

[New haven america]

Polyamory=/=Polygamy.

Polygamy means having multiple marriages at the same time and only marriages. Usually subdivided into Polyandry (Multiple husbands) and the more popular Polygyny (Multiple wives).

Polyamory is having multiple romantic relationships regardless of marital status.

[Senkaku]

women are more likely to double/triple/etc...up on a few guys than the reverse. (Almost as if the pickier sex is going to prioritize having someone you can keep to yourself less, and other traits more. It's only confirming what we already knew from women and girls insulting guys they don't like about their supposed virginity, and men and boys insulting girls they don't like about their supposed promiscuity.)

is there a single thread on this forum that you can resist sticking your weird Oedipal rage into

Polyamory=/=Polygamy.

Polygamy means having multiple marriages at the same time and only marriages. Usually subdivided into Polyandry (Multiple husbands) and the more popular Polygyny (Multiple wives).

Polyamory is having multiple romantic relationships regardless of marital status.

thanks Merriam-Webster

[New haven america]

women are more likely to double/triple/etc...up on a few guys than the reverse. (Almost as if the pickier sex is going to prioritize having someone you can keep to yourself less, and other traits more. It's only confirming what we already knew from women and girls insulting guys they don't like about their supposed virginity, and men and boys insulting girls they don't like about their supposed promiscuity.)

is there a single thread on this forum that you can resist sticking your weird Oedipal rage into

Polyamory=/=Polygamy.

Polygamy means having multiple marriages at the same time and only marriages. Usually subdivided into Polyandry (Multiple husbands) and the more popular Polygyny (Multiple wives).

Polyamory is having multiple romantic relationships regardless of marital status.

thanks Merriam-Webster

You're welcome.

[Nilokeras]

I'm not sure the objections raised by the OP about the novelty and subculturalness of polyamory really work if we want to try and take a historical perspective. We are, after all, sitting here at the top of a million-year ocean of human history of which we have records of only small portions of. The last four hundred years have also seen the total destruction of many cultures that did not conform to many of our 'modern' conceptions of how sexual relations should work and the erasure of any evidence of the way they lived.

Besides which, at some point 2000 years ago Christian marriage rites and conception of sexual relations was the bizarre practice of a tiny cult, and now it's the default mode of sexual relations for billions of people. History has a way of confounding our expectations.

[Ispravlennaja Tsekovija]

i actually would argue that all people are habituated to only a single overarching culture and other cultural aspects they have are not comparable because anything they do in those extraneous cultures will at least to some extent be informed by what their basal culture is. even if we suppose a person might grow up bilingual smack dab in the center of a place where multiple cultures overlap, with two parents who are equally present from both cultures, but i would argue even then it's not actually two cultures that end up equally influencing the child, but a synthesis of both cultures into a single fundamental culture. not sure what this has to do with what i'm talking about though.

Like what I said earlier-- I think that at this stage, at least in the US, that "synthetic culture" informed by the cultures of the child's guardians is really its own separate, atomized thing that's then further altered by the child's unique interaction with mass culture through the internet and media consumption. In some cases, they might gravitate to an established subculture within the digital cultural environment that they're stumbling through-- that seems closer to what's going on with the poly subculture than people being habituated to a single American culture and then separately indulging in polyamory as a sort of separate hobbyist thing, if I'm understanding you correctly.

i do see what you're going for and i'll just say i disagree that that's exactly the way it works, but i really think this is a philosophical matter and probably not something that can be determined through argumentation or experimental testing, so i don't think it's worth arguing.

If you discount things from the realm of true culture because they're driven by novelty, reflexive rejection of authority, or horniness, you may as well throw out most of human development over the last three thousand years.

i definitely don't think that's true. the development of modern religions, for example, especially their early adoption, was clearly not driven entirely by any of those things and that's had a profound impact on society. i'm curious as to what you actually think those exclusionary criteria would devalue other than, like, certain types of art.

I wouldn't be so quick to ascribe people's reconfiguration of their entire lifestyles purely to horniness or a need to be at the center of controversy.

what do you suppose the other reasons would be? like i'm not trying to omit any for political reasons, i straight up cannot think of another reason that a person would view polyamory as a superior enough lifestyle that they'd be willing to face social ostracism for it. maybe that's just because of my monoheterocisnormative worldview though

I mean, the ritual practices and material cultures of societies on obscure Micronesian islands were extremely limited in range and historical significance and never "became wider culture"-- what does that even mean? What do you even mean by "historically significant" here, tbh?

maybe a poor term to use but i mean that a phenomenon like this ought to be consistently practiced of a culture which is capable of being the native culture, i.e. the basis for cultural cognition, like i described above, in order to be spoken of in the way that vassenor is.

an example of a cultural practice or ideal becoming relevant to the wider culture could be civil rights in america; the idea within a subculture (civil rights activists) of racial equality managed to become part of the general american consciousness.

That's basically saying a belief system only becomes culturally relevant when it's embraced by incumbent political elites, though, and by that metric, we've been de facto embracing some type of polyamory for centuries-- not ethical polyamory, certainly, but it certainly seems to open the door to a societal re-evaluation of the practice gaining some cultural legitimacy.[/quote]
that's not necessarily the point of the civil rights example, that's just an easy one to pick but it genuinely affected social consciousness beyond just government implementation. maybe a less loaded example would be using computers to write manuscripts instead of typewriters; writing manuscripts on the computer is all but a cultural universal in america and the world and has nothing to do with politics.

They exist inside American society, how can you say they're not already intertwined with American culture? How can you separate two things that exist alongside and inform one another, even if that process isn't always obvious to the majority of people who're on one side of that exchange?

because nobody who is not part of the queer subculture is practicing "ethical polyamory". it is a practice restricted to that subculture. if it started to be found in non-queers it would maybe begin to cross the threshold where vassenor can say that consensual polyamory is practiced by a culture.

Who is part of the "queer subculture" now, though? I think that's contested-- widespread embrace of the concept of demisexuality and the abundance of bisexual white women flooding into queer spaces are the first heralds to me that queer culture is being adopted to an increasing degree by other segments of society, and I know there's at least some straight people already professing to practice polyamory who seem very much in line with that trend to me.[/quote]
insofar as those people have adopted all the other cultural traits common to those actively engaging in the queer community prior to those marginal cases becoming a part (adoption of queer-specific speech registers, consumption of queer-targeted media, etc.) and identify as queer or LGBT+ in some manner i would argue they constitute a part of the queer subculture. if they don't identify as part of that subculture and don't share all or at least the vast majority of typical queer cultural traits, then that's a signal to me that those practices are starting to be generalized to the rest of the population.

So basically at a certain point, they'll cross a magic numerical threshold where they go from just some weird individuals to "representing a genuine difference"? How does that work?

i think i explained the magic numerical threshold already in this post.

Well, try using smaller words this time, I'm not as bright as you[/quote]
how about a diagram that would be even easier to interpret i think - https://imgur.com/RMfKPpM
(the uniformly dotted lines are subcultures, cultural groupings that cannot act as root cultures for an individual, i.e. a person can be fundamentally culturally american but not fundamentally culturally queer; 'western culture' is dotted differently since it is a group of multiple valid cultures and cannot act as a culture on its own).

basically my point is, as long as polyamory is wed specifically to one subculture, it cannot be considered an aspect of a culture by most definitions of "culture" or "subculture".

What do you mean by "inorganic origin"?

what i wrote above, the fact that it's borne of rebellion and/or horniness.

Do obelisk or skyscraper construction have "inorganic origins"? Does Impressionism? [/quote]
with the narrow definition i'm using for what i'm talking about, impressionism and obelisks might but don't necessarily, skyscrapers definitely don't because they serve some functional purpose beyond novelty.

women are more likely to double/triple/etc...up on a few guys than the reverse. (Almost as if the pickier sex is going to prioritize having someone you can keep to yourself less, and other traits more. It's only confirming what we already knew from women and girls insulting guys they don't like about their supposed virginity, and men and boys insulting girls they don't like about their supposed promiscuity.)

is there a single thread on this forum that you can resist sticking your weird Oedipal rage into

Polyamory=/=Polygamy.

Polygamy means having multiple marriages at the same time and only marriages. Usually subdivided into Polyandry (Multiple husbands) and the more popular Polygyny (Multiple wives).

Polyamory is having multiple romantic relationships regardless of marital status.

thanks Merriam-Webster

other disagreements notwithstanding you hit the nail on the head with this post!

i have to get home now and i can't address the other bits. i will revisit them when i get home unless something more pressing comes up.

[Thepeopl]

Well, if you consider open relationships to be poly armory, quite a few people engage in that.
Even more if you consider cheating to be part of "polyamory".
Would you consider marriage to multiple brothers to be "polyamory"? Or would that fall outside of your definition?

The up side of polyamory is: you don't have to find 1 perfect partner. You can find parts of "the perfect partner" in several persons. If spouse a doesn't like cuddling, spouse b might. So you cuddle with spouse b, have intellectual conversations with spouse a.

https://www.salon.com/2015/06/14/10_tim ... d_partner/

So. I'd say the Mosuo have a pretty stable society.

The ancient Greek and Romans liked brotherly love. Many cultures allowed same sex couples/ marriages. In Europe a lord had "jus primae noctis". The bible allows second wives if the first doesn't conceive.

Nowadays the ideal of "monogamous, heterosexual love" causes a lot of misconceptions to rise. People have to "complete eachother". Be "soulmates". Any form of relationship needs work and commitment. In polyamory it is more obvious one needs to communicate honestly and openly with their partners.

[Senkaku]

If you discount things from the realm of true culture because they're driven by novelty, reflexive rejection of authority, or horniness, you may as well throw out most of human development over the last three thousand years.

i definitely don't think that's true. the development of modern religions, for example, especially their early adoption, was clearly not driven entirely by any of those things and that's had a profound impact on society. i'm curious as to what you actually think those exclusionary criteria would devalue other than, like, certain types of art.

Really? You're telling me you think Mary Magdalene never got wet for Jesus even once? Horniness, authority issues, and the desire for novelty have sparked rebellions, raised and felled dynasties-- and, yes, inspired quite a lot of our species' artistic and architectural accomplishments. Those three things are honestly the closest I think you can get to approximating universal cultural constants across time and space-- I don't think I'm projecting too much when I say it seems like a lot of the human experience is being horny, being bored, or resenting your parents/government.

I wouldn't be so quick to ascribe people's reconfiguration of their entire lifestyles purely to horniness or a need to be at the center of controversy.

what do you suppose the other reasons would be? like i'm not trying to omit any for political reasons, i straight up cannot think of another reason that a person would view polyamory as a superior enough lifestyle that they'd be willing to face social ostracism for it. maybe that's just because of my monoheterocisnormative worldview though

Is there that much social ostracism of it, especially in the sort of Portland/Bushwick-type places where it seems to be geographically centered as a subculture? I feel like we can mostly take them at face value when they say they're doing it because they love multiple people-- there's also the element of building a social support network, and possibly of manipulating or exploiting multiple partners, but those seem like hidden elements that vary from case to case rather than the main motivation for the entire subculture.

maybe a poor term to use but i mean that a phenomenon like this ought to be consistently practiced of a culture which is capable of being the native culture, i.e. the basis for cultural cognition, like i described above, in order to be spoken of in the way that vassenor is.

It's the basis for some people's cultural cognition, at least. What is there to suggest that it's "incapable" of being that for a wider swathe of society, besides the fact that it hasn't become so yet?

that's not necessarily the point of the civil rights example, that's just an easy one to pick but it genuinely affected social consciousness beyond just government implementation. maybe a less loaded example would be using computers to write manuscripts instead of typewriters; writing manuscripts on the computer is all but a cultural universal in america and the world and has nothing to do with politics.

Do you consider the Amish to have a distinct culture? Whether they do or not, do you think they're a part of whatever single dominant culture you've identified as existing in the US or the West, despite their rejection of cultural universals like using computers to produce manuscripts?

insofar as those people have adopted all the other cultural traits common to those actively engaging in the queer community prior to those marginal cases becoming a part (adoption of queer-specific speech registers, consumption of queer-targeted media, etc.) and identify as queer or LGBT+ in some manner i would argue they constitute a part of the queer subculture. if they don't identify as part of that subculture and don't share all or at least the vast majority of typical queer cultural traits, then that's a signal to me that those practices are starting to be generalized to the rest of the population.

That obviously varies from individual to individual, but there's a couple things to touch on here: the influx of cishets trying to present queer aesthetics, claim queer identities, or inhabit queer spaces, whether it's B*rnard bitches trying out lesbianism for a semester or avowedly heterosexual male pop stars using queer and feminine aesthetics to make fashion statements, seem to indicate to me that queer culture has a certain aesthetic and ideological appeal to mainstream WASP culture-- similar to the way that the rise of K-pop and the popularization of Korean TV & movies indicates Korea's growing cultural clout. I don't think Americans are becoming Korean, but I don't think they have to for certain outlooks or trends in Korean culture to become integrated into their own cultures. In both cases, its influence and reach are increasing, even if the "converts" aren't really fully "converting" or adopting most of the meaningful central identities that define membership.

how about a diagram that would be even easier to interpret i think - https://imgur.com/RMfKPpM
(the uniformly dotted lines are subcultures, cultural groupings that cannot act as root cultures for an individual, i.e. a person can be fundamentally culturally american but not fundamentally culturally queer; 'western culture' is dotted differently since it is a group of multiple valid cultures and cannot act as a culture on its own).

basically my point is, as long as polyamory is wed specifically to one subculture, it cannot be considered an aspect of a culture by most definitions of "culture" or "subculture".

I think there's two points of ambiguity and disagreement here: firstly, is "queer culture" actually a culture of its own, or is it just a subset of whatever "Western" culture means nowadays; secondly, is the modern secular conception of ethical polyamory a strictly queer phenomenon. I think in the 21st century, queer culture is its own thing that exists alongside and not necessarily merely as a subset of both Western and non-Western cultures and which has grown large enough to both develop a myriad of its own subcultures and to influence the other cultural traditions that it exists alongside. I also don't think at this point that the phenomenon of ethical polyamory, as we've been discussing it here, is restricted to queer people-- you can make the argument that's where this new modern conception of polyamory came from, and that queer people are still sort of the poly vanguard, but there's definitely cishet types experimenting with it now, just as they're experimenting with other elements of queer culture that they find interesting or attractive.

Do obelisk or skyscraper construction have "inorganic origins"? Does Impressionism?

with the narrow definition i'm using for what i'm talking about, impressionism and obelisks might but don't necessarily, skyscrapers definitely don't because they serve some functional purpose beyond novelty.

Firstly-- who says obelisks and Impressionism served no functional purpose beyond novelty? Secondly-- who says that skyscrapers invariably do? Finally-- if "culture" to you is just "things that serve functional purposes and are not rooted in horniness, authority issues, or a desire for novelty," then what the hell kind of bleak engineering-student-chauvinist world are you living in?

Returning slightly to the topic (lol), I still don't really understand your reasoning for why you're skeptical of ethical polyamory or believe it to be impossible as a concept. I understand the rationale for arguing against traditional forms of polygamy as a demographically destabilizing domestic abuse machine, but the modern phenomenon of queer-informed poly clusters seem like something completely different and far more innocuous.

[Ayytaly]

No matter the excuses, having many sexual partners rationally gains negative feedback as it's the source of STDs.

[Ispravlennaja Tsekovija]

sorry in advance that i'm going to be picking this apart kind of sentence-by-sentence. i try not to do that.

i definitely don't think that's true. the development of modern religions, for example, especially their early adoption, was clearly not driven entirely by any of those things and that's had a profound impact on society. i'm curious as to what you actually think those exclusionary criteria would devalue other than, like, certain types of art.

Really? You're telling me you think Mary Magdalene never got wet for Jesus even once?

well gee whiz, i sure hope she wasn't horny for the Savior! but even if she was, the important part is that something else of genuine lasting value played a role in the expansion of christianity. i'm not saying horniness and authority issues can't ever be involved in a valid cultural phenomenon, just saying they can't be the sole drivers.

Horniness, authority issues, and the desire for novelty have sparked rebellions, raised and felled dynasties-- and, yes, inspired quite a lot of our species' artistic and architectural accomplishments.

authority issues yeah. i'm skeptical of the others.

Those three things are honestly the closest I think you can get to approximating universal cultural constants across time and space-- I don't think I'm projecting too much when I say it seems like a lot of the human experience is being horny, being bored, or resenting your parents/government.

this is actually part of the reason that their sole outcomes can't be associated fairly with specific cultures; the chance result of something that is a constant across all cultures is not specific to the culture it lies within.

what do you suppose the other reasons would be? like i'm not trying to omit any for political reasons, i straight up cannot think of another reason that a person would view polyamory as a superior enough lifestyle that they'd be willing to face social ostracism for it. maybe that's just because of my monoheterocisnormative worldview though

Is there that much social ostracism of it, especially in the sort of Portland/Bushwick-type places where it seems to be geographically centered as a subculture?

perhaps fair, but do also consider that the people taking part in such a relationship also likely have families who might live elsewhere and might well be a bit less, uh, libertine. it's not all about their immediate environment.

I feel like we can mostly take them at face value when they say they're doing it because they love multiple people

i don't. i really don't believe you can romantically love multiple people at the same time. that's not my robot brain coming up with a theory, that's based on real experience.

it is possible to want to have sex with multiple people at the same time, though. and given the sheer amount of sex those people tend to have, i think it's safe to bet that they're more on the latter end.

-- there's also the element of building a social support network,

fair. one wonders why the pretense of a relationship is necessary for that, though.

and possibly of manipulating or exploiting multiple partners,

ha! yeah. tried to avoid that one in order to not be "trolling", but that's a big one. you should look up franklin veaux if you haven't heard of him.

maybe a poor term to use but i mean that a phenomenon like this ought to be consistently practiced of a culture which is capable of being the native culture, i.e. the basis for cultural cognition, like i described above, in order to be spoken of in the way that vassenor is.

It's the basis for some people's cultural cognition, at least. What is there to suggest that it's "incapable" of being that for a wider swathe of society, besides the fact that it hasn't become so yet?

that's not necessarily the point of the civil rights example, that's just an easy one to pick but it genuinely affected social consciousness beyond just government implementation. maybe a less loaded example would be using computers to write manuscripts instead of typewriters; writing manuscripts on the computer is all but a cultural universal in america and the world and has nothing to do with politics.

Do you consider the Amish to have a distinct culture? Whether they do or not, do you think they're a part of whatever single dominant culture you've identified as existing in the US or the West, despite their rejection of cultural universals like using computers to produce manuscripts?

i think the amish can definitely be considered a parallel culture to general american. there is enough distinction there that i think that's fair. they would still be part of the wider grouping of western cultures. i don't know if you've heard of the concept of principles and parameters in chomskyan generative grammar, but i'd argue those have analogues in culture - things like using computers (or typewriters, even? not sure if they allow those) is going to be a parameter with the default value of ON in "western culture" but the amish unset that value.

That obviously varies from individual to individual, but there's a couple things to touch on here: the influx of cishets trying to present queer aesthetics, claim queer identities, or inhabit queer spaces, whether it's B*rnard bitches trying out lesbianism for a semester

im straight and have no idea what "b*rnard bitches" mean so i'm just going to assume that's something unimportant that i do not need to know for this conversation :|

or avowedly heterosexual male pop stars using queer and feminine aesthetics to make fashion statements, seem to indicate to me that queer culture has a certain aesthetic and ideological appeal to mainstream WASP culture-- similar to the way that the rise of K-pop and the popularization of Korean TV & movies indicates Korea's growing cultural clout. I don't think Americans are becoming Korean, but I don't think they have to for certain outlooks or trends in Korean culture to become integrated into their own cultures. In both cases, its influence and reach are increasing, even if the "converts" aren't really fully "converting" or adopting most of the meaningful central identities that define membership.

you can just say harry styles! i won't narc! but i think it's definitely still a specific subset of wasps to whom appropriation from queer culture is appealing - teen girls/young women. (and my theory is that harry styles is doing the queer bit to appeal to them, he doesn't actually like it himself.) once it becomes more popular with men, the current generation starts to replace boomers, then you might be able to say, you know what, what was queer culture in 2021 has basically merged into american culture.

at that point i also imagine queer culture will have evolved into something different, it won't just collapse. it'll still be its own cross-cultural subculture. there is the possibility that polyamory will become a real part of american culture. we're just not there yet.

I think there's two points of ambiguity and disagreement here: firstly, is "queer culture" actually a culture of its own, or is it just a subset of whatever "Western" culture means nowadays; secondly, is the modern secular conception of ethical polyamory a strictly queer phenomenon. I think in the 21st century, queer culture is its own thing that exists alongside and not necessarily merely as a subset of both Western and non-Western cultures and which has grown large enough to both develop a myriad of its own subcultures and to influence the other cultural traditions that it exists alongside. I also don't think at this point that the phenomenon of ethical polyamory, as we've been discussing it here, is restricted to queer people-- you can make the argument that's where this new modern conception of polyamory came from, and that queer people are still sort of the poly vanguard, but there's definitely cishet types experimenting with it now, just as they're experimenting with other elements of queer culture that they find interesting or attractive.

so yes you do make a point in that queer subculture is not necessarily restricted to any one capital-c Culture, but that also doesn't mean it exists alongside Cultures, i.e. at the same level. my graphical representation of it is constrained by the format, but it's more like a verry long tapeworm in someone's digestive system passing through different parts of the intestine corresponding to every sort of Culture. (this analogy is not meant to be offensive i am just taking a parasitology class right now and tapeworms are on my Mind.) it is still something that cannot serve as the base on which other cultural groups are constructed in human development because it is too restricted in domain, but yeah, it is not necessarily accurate to call it a subset of any one culture.

in this system, we'll say polyamory would be the tapeworm's eggs. it lays a bunch of them over its lifetime but only one or two actually manage to take hold - those are the restricted incidences of polyamory in people removed from queer culture. and as those lil baby tapeworms grow, they take up more space in the digestive system and get really rooted in there and only then can we say polyamory is part of american or canadian or swedish or wherever culture. but theyre not there yet.

Firstly-- who says obelisks and Impressionism served no functional purpose beyond novelty?

i don't know, but definitely not me in that post! i feel like you've been having a lot of trouble interpreting the non-universal qualifiers in what i write and maybe that's because it's very unusual on NSG to genuinely mean it when you use such qualifiers thanks to the trolling rules, but regardless of the reason, i'm not a fan of it.

Secondly-- who says that skyscrapers invariably do?

i don't think there are any random modern art skyscrapers around, pretty sure they all house businesses of some sort. if i'm mistaken and there are, then maybe not all skyscrapers are functional.

Finally-- if "culture" to you is just "things that serve functional purposes and are not rooted in horniness, authority issues, or a desire for novelty," then what the hell kind of bleak engineering-student-chauvinist world are you living in?

that's a bit of a misunderstanding of what i'm saying. by 'functional' i don't mean something has to be used for work or bring in money or whatever else, but i mean it has to serve a real and lasting purpose. religion has a functional purpose because it provides people with spiritual satisfaction. art broadly has a functional purpose because it can provide people with entertainment and fulfillment beyond fleeting novelty. both of these statements may not be true universally but religion and art cannot be universally disregarded as culturally pertinent because at least some instances within those broader groups are motivated by something real and lasting (horniness, rebellion against authority, and novelty, in comparison, are fleeting.)

[Ispravlennaja Tsekovija]

Well, if you consider open relationships to be poly armory, quite a few people engage in that.

open relationships are probably included under the definition.

Even more if you consider cheating to be part of "polyamory".

polyamorist activists say no. i don't see the fundamental difference but that's a matter of perspective.

Would you consider marriage to multiple brothers to be "polyamory"? Or would that fall outside of your definition?

i don't think there's anyone in the developed world who would think a polyamorous/gamous relationship stops being polyamorous because it's between a woman and two men who happen to be brothers.

The up side of polyamory is: you don't have to find 1 perfect partner. You can find parts of "the perfect partner" in several persons. If spouse a doesn't like cuddling, spouse b might. So you cuddle with spouse b, have intellectual conversations with spouse a.

wonderful way to ensure that no compromise ever happens in a relationship and everyone always gets what they want. this is a healthy way to have relationships and helps create a more stable society.

https://www.salon.com/2015/06/14/10_times_in_history_when_polyamory_was_surprisingly_embraced_partner/

So. I'd say the Mosuo have a pretty stable society.

none of those are "polyamory" in the sense that queer activists use the term. those situations were/are invariably exploitative and misogynistic and it's certainly bizarre that progressives have taken such a shine to them.

The ancient Greek and Romans liked brotherly love. Many cultures allowed same sex couples/ marriages.

yeah but if you were the bottom it wasn't great for you.

In Europe a lord had "jus primae noctis". The bible allows second wives if the first doesn't conceive.

some of the social rules laid out in parts of the old testament are antiquated and gross and have been abandoned by modern christianity. what's your point.

Nowadays the ideal of "monogamous, heterosexual love" causes a lot of misconceptions to rise. People have to "complete eachother". Be "soulmates". Any form of relationship needs work and commitment. In polyamory it is more obvious one needs to communicate honestly and openly with their partners.

no it really isn't. the only topic about which there would be more communication is the number of partners you're sleeping with at the same time, which is not an issue in a faithful monogamous relationship because the answer is always one.

[Senkaku]

i try not to do that.

your restraint is admirable lol

Really? You're telling me you think Mary Magdalene never got wet for Jesus even once?

well gee whiz, i sure hope she wasn't horny for the Savior! but even if she was, the important part is that something else of genuine lasting value played a role in the expansion of christianity. i'm not saying horniness and authority issues can't ever be involved in a valid cultural phenomenon, just saying they can't be the sole drivers.

What is that "something else of value," though?

Horniness, authority issues, and the desire for novelty have sparked rebellions, raised and felled dynasties-- and, yes, inspired quite a lot of our species' artistic and architectural accomplishments.

authority issues yeah. i'm skeptical of the others.

You're skeptical that horniness has had a dramatic influence on human history? That shit has been fucking us up and shaping our entire civilization since Paris got the hots for Helen!

Those three things are honestly the closest I think you can get to approximating universal cultural constants across time and space-- I don't think I'm projecting too much when I say it seems like a lot of the human experience is being horny, being bored, or resenting your parents/government.

this is actually part of the reason that their sole outcomes can't be associated fairly with specific cultures; the chance result of something that is a constant across all cultures is not specific to the culture it lies within.

Yeah, but you were saying that cultural phenomena "don't count" as culture or whatever if you feel they're "rooted" in those things, not that cultural phenomena that stem from those things can't all be generalized as belonging to a single cultural tradition. I will admit I do not really know what we're talking about any more.

Is there that much social ostracism of it, especially in the sort of Portland/Bushwick-type places where it seems to be geographically centered as a subculture?

perhaps fair, but do also consider that the people taking part in such a relationship also likely have families who might live elsewhere and might well be a bit less, uh, libertine. it's not all about their immediate environment.

People have lots of monogamous relationships that their families don't like too, I'm not convinced this is a super-mega-downside of this lifestyle-- and queer people in such an arrangement are probably going to be ostracized for their identity regardless of whether they're monogamous.

I feel like we can mostly take them at face value when they say they're doing it because they love multiple people

i don't. i really don't believe you can romantically love multiple people at the same time. that's not my robot brain coming up with a theory, that's based on real experience.

it is possible to want to have sex with multiple people at the same time, though. and given the sheer amount of sex those people tend to have, i think it's safe to bet that they're more on the latter end.

My thoughts on this are complicated, but I don't think I can rule out the possibility that it's possible to feel romantic love for multiple people at once. Maybe it's not something everyone can do or wants to do, but I don't think it's necessarily impossible. Obviously that's sort of a fundamental belief that people don't change easily, so you may remain skeptical of it, but I don't think you should assume other people are lying to you and themselves when they say they think about it differently. Maybe some are, but the simpler explanation to me is that mostly, those feelings and statements are genuine.

-- there's also the element of building a social support network,

fair. one wonders why the pretense of a relationship is necessary for that, though.

Why do you assume it's a "pretense"? People make platonic friends to fulfill the same need, but that doesn't mean those friendships are necessarily purely transactional or that the individual went into them with networking as their conscious motivation. Human relationships sometimes grow in unexpected directions, that's all.

and possibly of manipulating or exploiting multiple partners,

ha! yeah. tried to avoid that one in order to not be "trolling", but that's a big one. you should look up franklin veaux if you haven't heard of him.

I mean, I feel like the undercurrent of all of this is that you think that all modern polyamory is like this under the surface. He sounds like a creepy guy, but I don't think that necessarily means polyamory is impossible or that there aren't plenty of poly clusters that don't manipulate, exploit, and abuse one another-- assuming that that must be what's going on seems like jumping to a somewhat histrionic conclusion. You assume that they just want to have lots of sex or get clout rather than feeling genuine romantic love, that they're lying about this motivation to us and probably themselves just to stir the pot and get attention, and that all these relationships are actually secretly abusive-- basically, that the only people involved in this subculture are malicious manipulators. I don't know if you got burned by someone to give you such a dim view, but I'm just not convinced. And if I'm wrong and all these poly people have these harmful urges and flimsy motives, is there any reason to expect them to suddenly start playing nice in the context of a more strictly monogamous society?

Do you consider the Amish to have a distinct culture? Whether they do or not, do you think they're a part of whatever single dominant culture you've identified as existing in the US or the West, despite their rejection of cultural universals like using computers to produce manuscripts?

i think the amish can definitely be considered a parallel culture to general american. there is enough distinction there that i think that's fair. they would still be part of the wider grouping of western cultures. i don't know if you've heard of the concept of principles and parameters in chomskyan generative grammar, but i'd argue those have analogues in culture - things like using computers (or typewriters, even? not sure if they allow those) is going to be a parameter with the default value of ON in "western culture" but the amish unset that value.

I have met a lot of Chomsky/linguistics nerds in my life but they always find a way to manage not to communicate any useful knowledge to me, so no, I had not heard of lol

Anyways good talk but I forgot how this part of the conversation even started

That obviously varies from individual to individual, but there's a couple things to touch on here: the influx of cishets trying to present queer aesthetics, claim queer identities, or inhabit queer spaces, whether it's B*rnard bitches trying out lesbianism for a semester

im straight and have no idea what "b*rnard bitches" mean so i'm just going to assume that's something unimportant that i do not need to know for this conversation :|

I'm just slagging on cis women who briefly experiment with queer identity for social capital in their circles before dropping it as soon as they realize it's actually not the most convenient thing in the world, dw abt it

or avowedly heterosexual male pop stars using queer and feminine aesthetics to make fashion statements, seem to indicate to me that queer culture has a certain aesthetic and ideological appeal to mainstream WASP culture-- similar to the way that the rise of K-pop and the popularization of Korean TV & movies indicates Korea's growing cultural clout. I don't think Americans are becoming Korean, but I don't think they have to for certain outlooks or trends in Korean culture to become integrated into their own cultures. In both cases, its influence and reach are increasing, even if the "converts" aren't really fully "converting" or adopting most of the meaningful central identities that define membership.

you can just say harry styles! i won't narc!

I feel like there's been at least one other but I can't for the life of me think of the name lol

but i think it's definitely still a specific subset of wasps to whom appropriation from queer culture is appealing - teen girls/young women. (and my theory is that harry styles is doing the queer bit to appeal to them, he doesn't actually like it himself.) once it becomes more popular with men, the current generation starts to replace boomers, then you might be able to say, you know what, what was queer culture in 2021 has basically merged into american culture.

The rise of the e-boy and the 5" inseam is already here, it's not just young cishet women adopting queer aesthetics any more.

at that point i also imagine queer culture will have evolved into something different, it won't just collapse. it'll still be its own cross-cultural subculture. there is the possibility that polyamory will become a real part of american culture. we're just not there yet.

I feel like the unsaid thing here is that you hope we never get there, no?

so yes you do make a point in that queer subculture is not necessarily restricted to any one capital-c Culture, but that also doesn't mean it exists alongside Cultures, i.e. at the same level. my graphical representation of it is constrained by the format, but it's more like a verry long tapeworm in someone's digestive system passing through different parts of the intestine corresponding to every sort of Culture. (this analogy is not meant to be offensive i am just taking a parasitology class right now and tapeworms are on my Mind.) it is still something that cannot serve as the base on which other cultural groups are constructed in human development because it is too restricted in domain, but yeah, it is not necessarily accurate to call it a subset of any one culture.

in this system, we'll say polyamory would be the tapeworm's eggs. it lays a bunch of them over its lifetime but only one or two actually manage to take hold - those are the restricted incidences of polyamory in people removed from queer culture. and as those lil baby tapeworms grow, they take up more space in the digestive system and get really rooted in there and only then can we say polyamory is part of american or canadian or swedish or wherever culture. but theyre not there yet.

Mapping Inter-Subcultural Relations in n-Dimensional Culturespace Using Modeled Digestive Tract Surface Topology & Simulated Parasitic Endoscopy (Cek. et al., 2021)
SUMMARY: Builds on previous iteration of 2-dimensional branching network modeling of inter-subcultural relations, relating parasitic reproductive life cycles to cultural growth and iteration.

Firstly-- who says obelisks and Impressionism served no functional purpose beyond novelty?

i don't know, but definitely not me in that post! i feel like you've been having a lot of trouble interpreting the non-universal qualifiers in what i write and maybe that's because it's very unusual on NSG to genuinely mean it when you use such qualifiers thanks to the trolling rules, but regardless of the reason, i'm not a fan of it.

I have a lot of trouble interpreting anything anyone writes, I don't think it's an NSG thing lol

Secondly-- who says that skyscrapers invariably do?

i don't think there are any random modern art skyscrapers around, pretty sure they all house businesses of some sort. if i'm mistaken and there are, then maybe not all skyscrapers are functional.

[irrelevant tangential rant that belongs in a separate thread but does not deserve one]

Finally-- if "culture" to you is just "things that serve functional purposes and are not rooted in horniness, authority issues, or a desire for novelty," then what the hell kind of bleak engineering-student-chauvinist world are you living in?

that's a bit of a misunderstanding of what i'm saying. by 'functional' i don't mean something has to be used for work or bring in money or whatever else, but i mean it has to serve a real and lasting purpose. religion has a functional purpose because it provides people with spiritual satisfaction. art broadly has a functional purpose because it can provide people with entertainment and fulfillment beyond fleeting novelty. both of these statements may not be true universally but religion and art cannot be universally disregarded as culturally pertinent because at least some instances within those broader groups are motivated by something real and lasting (horniness, rebellion against authority, and novelty, in comparison, are fleeting.)

What exactly doesn't have a functional purpose, or can't be said to have one, based on this understanding of functionality? And while boredom and horniness may be fleeting emotions for the individual, I feel like in the long sweep of human history, they're among the least-fleeting things around. It seems like you're sort of just making up words and meandering passages about the root of all human truth to avoid saying the much more straightforward thing you actually want to say but don't want to get banned for saying: polyamory, even in its modern queer-informed secular egalitarian form, is bad for society, bad for individuals, is often practiced by bad people, and should not be regarded as culturally or intellectually legitimate in the same vein as other queer subcultures. Is that about it?

[Ispravlennaja Tsekovija]

i try not to do that.

your restraint is admirable lol

i'm doing the best that i can!!!

well gee whiz, i sure hope she wasn't horny for the Savior! but even if she was, the important part is that something else of genuine lasting value played a role in the expansion of christianity. i'm not saying horniness and authority issues can't ever be involved in a valid cultural phenomenon, just saying they can't be the sole drivers.

What is that "something else of value," though?

im referring to the spiritual resonance it had with its early (and later) adherents.

authority issues yeah. i'm skeptical of the others.

You're skeptical that horniness has had a dramatic influence on human history? That shit has been fucking us up and shaping our entire civilization since Paris got the hots for Helen!

i think it's not the sole explanation for most of those events even though it has had a major influence.. and i dont think it's inspired most of our architectural accomplishments at least. maybe certain silos and rockets

this is actually part of the reason that their sole outcomes can't be associated fairly with specific cultures; the chance result of something that is a constant across all cultures is not specific to the culture it lies within.

Yeah, but you were saying that cultural phenomena "don't count" as culture or whatever if you feel they're "rooted" in those things, not that cultural phenomena that stem from those things can't all be generalized as belonging to a single cultural tradition. I will admit I do not really know what we're talking about any more.

yes i think we have really lost track of the point

perhaps fair, but do also consider that the people taking part in such a relationship also likely have families who might live elsewhere and might well be a bit less, uh, libertine. it's not all about their immediate environment.

People have lots of monogamous relationships that their families don't like too, I'm not convinced this is a super-mega-downside of this lifestyle-- and queer people in such an arrangement are probably going to be ostracized for their identity regardless of whether they're monogamous.

all fair but i do think that your average moderately homophobic parent to a gay kid would probably find a way to tolerate their kid's homosexuality if they at least like had fulfilling relationships and weren't all promiscuous, whereas i think it'd be a lot harder for them to accept a kid who is both gay and refuses to have a normal monogamous romantic relationship. that's just conjecture though, i'm not a parent and i don't know if i'll have gay kids.

i don't. i really don't believe you can romantically love multiple people at the same time. that's not my robot brain coming up with a theory, that's based on real experience.

it is possible to want to have sex with multiple people at the same time, though. and given the sheer amount of sex those people tend to have, i think it's safe to bet that they're more on the latter end.

My thoughts on this are complicated, but I don't think I can rule out the possibility that it's possible to feel romantic love for multiple people at once. Maybe it's not something everyone can do or wants to do, but I don't think it's necessarily impossible. Obviously that's sort of a fundamental belief that people don't change easily, so you may remain skeptical of it, but I don't think you should assume other people are lying to you and themselves when they say they think about it differently. Maybe some are, but the simpler explanation to me is that mostly, those feelings and statements are genuine.

i'm an unusually distrusting person so perhaps you're right and i'm just being harsh. i don't really know

fair. one wonders why the pretense of a relationship is necessary for that, though.

Why do you assume it's a "pretense"? People make platonic friends to fulfill the same need, but that doesn't mean those friendships are necessarily purely transactional or that the individual went into them with networking as their conscious motivation. Human relationships sometimes grow in unexpected directions, that's all.

fair enough.

ha! yeah. tried to avoid that one in order to not be "trolling", but that's a big one. you should look up franklin veaux if you haven't heard of him.

I mean, I feel like the undercurrent of all of this is that you think that all modern polyamory is like this under the surface. He sounds like a creepy guy, but I don't think that necessarily means polyamory is impossible or that there aren't plenty of poly clusters that don't manipulate, exploit, and abuse one another-- assuming that that must be what's going on seems like jumping to a somewhat histrionic conclusion. You assume that they just want to have lots of sex or get clout rather than feeling genuine romantic love, that they're lying about this motivation to us and probably themselves just to stir the pot and get attention, and that all these relationships are actually secretly abusive-- basically, that the only people involved in this subculture are malicious manipulators. I don't know if you got burned by someone to give you such a dim view, but I'm just not convinced.

yeah i will say that my experiences with the subculture have been not many but all resolutely negative and i have not personally met or spoken to a poly person who wasn't either maliciously manipulating others or being manipulated themselves (sometimes both). that's not to say that every poly person is but i do not have a high view of them based on my own experiences and i do not see that changing anytime soon.

And if I'm wrong and all these poly people have these harmful urges and flimsy motives, is there any reason to expect them to suddenly start playing nice in the context of a more strictly monogamous society?

i think that those manipulative poly people (which, for the mods reading this, are not all poly people) would have slightly less of an ability to act on those urges if polyamory did not exist as a social refuge, they might harm less people at a time, and they would not experience feedback loops that worsen the behavior. i don't think they'd suddenly become harmless but i do think the harm would be reduced.

i think the amish can definitely be considered a parallel culture to general american. there is enough distinction there that i think that's fair. they would still be part of the wider grouping of western cultures. i don't know if you've heard of the concept of principles and parameters in chomskyan generative grammar, but i'd argue those have analogues in culture - things like using computers (or typewriters, even? not sure if they allow those) is going to be a parameter with the default value of ON in "western culture" but the amish unset that value.

I have met a lot of Chomsky/linguistics nerds in my life but they always find a way to manage not to communicate any useful knowledge to me, so no, I had not heard of lol

yeah that doesn't surprise me LOL internet linguistics nerds are about the least helpful people on the planet

but i think it's definitely still a specific subset of wasps to whom appropriation from queer culture is appealing - teen girls/young women. (and my theory is that harry styles is doing the queer bit to appeal to them, he doesn't actually like it himself.) once it becomes more popular with men, the current generation starts to replace boomers, then you might be able to say, you know what, what was queer culture in 2021 has basically merged into american culture.

The rise of the e-boy and the 5" inseam is already here, it's not just young cishet women adopting queer aesthetics any more.

oh actually you are right, i think i have e-boys blocked from my memory because their existence is so traumatic.
don't take sole credit for the 5" inseam though, gay men aren't the only ones who encouraged and can appreciate that!

at that point i also imagine queer culture will have evolved into something different, it won't just collapse. it'll still be its own cross-cultural subculture. there is the possibility that polyamory will become a real part of american culture. we're just not there yet.

I feel like the unsaid thing here is that you hope we never get there, no?

well i do think i mentioned or heavily implied that a couple times already but yes

Mapping Inter-Subcultural Relations in n-Dimensional Culturespace Using Modeled Digestive Tract Surface Topology & Simulated Parasitic Endoscopy (Cek. et al., 2021)
SUMMARY: Builds on previous iteration of 2-dimensional branching network modeling of inter-subcultural relations, relating parasitic reproductive life cycles to cultural growth and iteration.

gorgeous , i should write this so i can get rejected from plos one

i don't think there are any random modern art skyscrapers around, pretty sure they all house businesses of some sort. if i'm mistaken and there are, then maybe not all skyscrapers are functional.

[irrelevant tangential rant that belongs in a separate thread but does not deserve one]

i saw what u wrote before u edited and u did have a point but i'll pretend i didnt it lol

that's a bit of a misunderstanding of what i'm saying. by 'functional' i don't mean something has to be used for work or bring in money or whatever else, but i mean it has to serve a real and lasting purpose. religion has a functional purpose because it provides people with spiritual satisfaction. art broadly has a functional purpose because it can provide people with entertainment and fulfillment beyond fleeting novelty. both of these statements may not be true universally but religion and art cannot be universally disregarded as culturally pertinent because at least some instances within those broader groups are motivated by something real and lasting (horniness, rebellion against authority, and novelty, in comparison, are fleeting.)

What exactly doesn't have a functional purpose, or can't be said to have one, based on this understanding of functionality? And while boredom and horniness may be fleeting emotions for the individual, I feel like in the long sweep of human history, they're among the least-fleeting things around. It seems like you're sort of just making up words and meandering passages about the root of all human truth to avoid saying the much more straightforward thing you actually want to say but don't want to get banned for saying: polyamory, even in its modern queer-informed secular egalitarian form, is bad for society, bad for individuals, is often practiced by bad people, and should not be regarded as culturally or intellectually legitimate in the same vein as other queer subcultures. Is that about it?

that's definitely not the gist of it and that's absolutely not what i believe because having that opinion would be trolling and i don't troll!!