Posts by Max Rose
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OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
only this would be, uh...malice and habit?
Self-interest and ideology. Big Tobacco wants to make money; individual ACT politicians don't necessarily stand to make personal profits from Big Tobacco, but their ideology supports big profits for big companies.
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OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to HORansome,
(i.e. isn't this a confluence of interests rather than sock puppetry?).
Which is a point that Noam Chomsky made in Manufacturing Consent: somethig along the lines of "you don't need a conspiracy theory of backroom deals when right-wing politicans and corporates all want the same thing anyway."
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Up Front: I'll Be in My Bunk, in reply to Emma Hart,
And when you're in a relationship, and you have no concept of anything other than two-person relationships, and you find you have strong feelings for a third? That you can love another person and not fall out of love with your partner? The first reflex is to lie.
I know that feeling very much. Actually, the first reflex is to lie to yourself: you can't be feeling this, it's just a little crush, it'll never happen anyway. Then you start to think that there must be something wrong with your partner, or that there's something wrong with you. Maybe you then consider that if you're attracted to someone else, it must be because you're no longer attracted to your partner, and maybe you* start diverting your sexual energies through porn, impersonal fantasies or paid sex ... and thanks to DGM and any number of sex therapists we know that this is sinful and/or addictive behaviour. And all because we're taught that love is a zero-sum game.
Except we're not. Most people think that what you feel for a very close friend is also love, yet most people accept that it's possible to have more than one friend. And it's comsidered a terrible thing for parents to tell their children that one of them is their favourite: you're supposed to love them all equally. Why is it only erotic love that we demand to be exclusive?
[*where "you" = "me" in this case. YMMV, but it's far from unusual]
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Up Front: I'll Be in My Bunk, in reply to Lilith __,
I haven’t read Sex at Dawn though, so can’t comment on that
It's worth it, though I had issues with the style and conclusion. It attacks a lot of the tenets of evolutionary psychology, and while it obviously opens itself up to the same criticisms about plausibility arguments, there's enough interesting material from anthropology, history, psychology, economics, primatology and the history of sexuality to make it a good, provocative read.
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Up Front: I'll Be in My Bunk, in reply to BenWilson,
I just had a real deja vu moment. Have we had this conversation before? Did you get a new login?
Maybe :-)
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Up Front: I'll Be in My Bunk, in reply to BenWilson,
Repression is not guaranteed to make people unhappy. I repress, for instance, my urge to bash people I don't like.
I know that one shouldn't read too much into a single analogy, but I'd rather not compare sex with bashing someone. Even if they asked me to, I'm not quite that kinky. It's good to repress violent urges though I'd argue that suppression ot the urge, together with an effort to understand and avoid the situations that brough on those urges, is better than __re__pression.
But sex is something that brings mutual pleasure, or should if you know what you're doing, and unlike violence or excessive lazing around, there's nothing damaging about the act itself. As Emma said a while back, it's the attitudes of you and those around you that makes the difference, and if those attitudes mean that two people who want to do nice things for each other can't, then perhaps questioning those attitudes is at least as good an option as accepting repression and denial as part of everyday life.
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Up Front: I'll Be in My Bunk, in reply to Lilith __,
I think that's actually about control of paternity: it's always the women who get punished.
Agreed, though unfaithful Chinese husbands didn't exactly get off scot-free. I wonder whether the gender difference in apparent rates of adultery (Kinsey said 50% for men, 26% for women, though every survey is different) has more to do with the difference in social, legal and sometimes physical consequences than with a fundamental difference in desire. I sometimes hear, from people who would otherwise reject gender essentialism, that breaking down the structures of monogamy would only be good for men, because women want intimacy and commitment rather than multiple sexual partners. But we've been through that old chestnut many times, here and elsewhere.
There is a remote part of China which has sexual freedom:
The Mosuo. In Sex at Dawn it's used as one example of the great variety of sexual/social structures that have existed, along with various forms of group marriage, ritual sex, and some cute acronym (that currently escapes me) for semi-casual sex as a form of tribal bonding.
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Up Front: I'll Be in My Bunk, in reply to Lilith __,
I think arguments from nature, or some imagined “natural state” are a red herring,
I agree ... up to a point. I don't want to fall into the naturalistic fallacy, but it can be important to recognise that social structures such as the nuclear family are relatively recent inventions. If as some authors suggest, for the vast majority of human history monogamy has not been the norm, then that doesn't mean we should argue that polyamory is the "natural" or "right" option for all of humanity. But it could be very illuminating.
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Up Front: I'll Be in My Bunk, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
Insomuch as that's true, I think it's because of a failure to distinguish between nonmonogamy and cheating, two overlapping but different things. Breaking trust in a relationship is a moral failing. Nonmonogamy is not, but you also have to be able to negotiate it, and to find people who are comfortable negotiating it, which most people aren't.
I totally agree that breaking trust is a moral failing ... or at least an ethical failing, since I have trouble withe the word "moral". But it's more the "character flaw" aspect that I'm talking about; the idea that being "afraid" of commitment is something that has to be fixed.
But it's also true that monogamy does work pretty well for quite a lot of people. I'm absolutely confident that it works for me. Historically, too, monogamy has absolutely not been a requirement for upper-class men, in lots of societally-approved ways - but lots of them were monogamous all the same. I think the picture is more "monogamy works for a lot of people, but not everyone" than "people are only monogamous because society tells them to be".
I'm not saying that no-one would want to be monogamous without social pressure, but I think that many (if not most) people in "happy" monogamous relationships are that way not because they'd never even contemplate looking lustfully at someone other than their partner, but because they've taken conscious vows to restrain themselves and make sacrifices for the good of the relationship. We're all told that lust doesn't last, and we should forget about the fire of adolescent desire once we settle into mature, intimate love. Maybe everyone's okay with that, but I wonder whether a lot of relationships might actually last longer and be happier if society allowed for both commitment and adventure.
Maybe I'm wrong, and I know I can't speak for everyone here. Maybe I am a freak. But I just wonder why, if monogamy is the best and happiest situation for most people, so many societies have to employ penalties ranging from scarlet letters to stonings in order to enforce martial bliss.
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Up Front: I'll Be in My Bunk, in reply to BenWilson,
It might be, but I haven't noticed generally higher rates of happiness amongst the non-monogamous. Some of that is down to a lot of people actually wanting commitment, which is obviously comprised in multi-amorous relationships.
I wouldn't want to comment on the statistical truth of generalising that statement, as I don't have any actual evidence to hand either, but the near-universal existence of adultery and divorce in "monogamous" societies suggests that monogamy doesn't bring the level of happiness that it's supposed to. Also, the fact that non-monogamous relationships might not last doesn't mean that they fail, any more than not having a job for life means that one has had a string of failed careers.
Even if there were a statistically higher incidence of unhappiness among polyamorists, that doesn't make polyamory difficult or unhappy in itself: as Emma said, high LBGT suicide rates aren't because non-heterosexuality makes you depressed, but because of social pressures and prejudice. Similarly (up to a point), any difficulty in making polyamory work may be ast least as much due to social factors (disapproval, lingering guilt, the lack of legal and cultural models for polyamorous relationships) as to the inherent complexities of the relationships themselves. Obviously, it's a lot harder for all parties to agree on a set of boundaries and possibilities without a default set of "though shalt nots" to rely on. But I'd rather deal with the ups, downs and ambiguities of a complex love life than pretend that I'm only going to be attracted to one person for the rest of my life.