Posts by Max Rose
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Up Front: I'll Be in My Bunk, in reply to Emma Hart,
I mean, the "player" (always male) who thinks he isn't monogamous and then meets "the one" and completely reforms is a staple of the romantic comedy, and it is a refusal to accept that that experience really exists. You'll never see either him, or a "permanent" polyamorous relationship portrayed positively.
Yes. And even though conservatives and anti-sex types wring their hands about NZ's supposed acceptance of promiscuity, that sort of non-monogamy is pretty much limited to certain age groups and expectations. It may be considered normal for young men and women to play the field a bit, there's an expectation that once they hit a certain age they ought to settle down and adapt to monogamy, either through meeting "the one" or through giving up on the childish idea that one's sex life can be an enjoyable adventure and settling for someone who will be a reliable spouse.
I think there's a passage in The Ethical Slut saying that society expects sexual relationships to be essentially either hookups or marriage, with nothing in between. If one wants to have a caring sexual relationship with someone that is not exclusive or not based on "romantic" love, then despite the meme of "friends with benefits" it's still seen as a stop gap measure (so to speak). The only people who maintain a diverse love life beyond youth are crusty old free-love hippies, tacky suburban wife-swappers, and creepy, self-deluding loatharios and cougars.
I have strayed (as I do) a bit beyond the original topic of porn & masturbation, but the underlying concept is the same: that sex is okay as long as it's between two people in a long-term exclusive romantic relationship, but sinful or pathological outside of that. While the Dirty Girl Ministries are obviously ludicrous and easy to dismiss in a secular context, the same anti-sex assumptions underly the less obviously conservative work of mainstream sex therapists and newspaper columnists. And I think that their influence is even more insidious than that of American fundamentalists, because it comes across as caring and reasonable rather than batshit insane.
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Up Front: I'll Be in My Bunk, in reply to Emma Hart,
And I think that ties in with what you're saying about how that plays out in individual relationships, because people who aren't monogamous-straight-cis-vanilla are quite likely to have at least tried to have a socially conventional relationship, especially if they're older. That pressure to conform leads to other people getting hurt. You can only be honest about what you want if you know and accept what that is.
Exactly. It's probably ridiculous for me to moan about discrimination, given that as an able-bodied middle-class white cis male I'm about as privileged as it's possible to get without a trust fund and a peerage, and I can't claim that my battle for acceptance as a proud man-whore is even vaguely comparable to the struggles faced by LGBT people. In my community of urban liberals I might occasionally get chastised for being "afraid of commitment", but as long as I treat people with respect I don't generally have any problem accepting and even celebrating my dirty mind and non-monogamy.
But the very fact that I'm reluctant to use my real name here, for fear that a Google search could forever tie my name to porn, paid sex and generally being an all-round hussbag, suggests that it's still far from socially acceptable to publicly acknowledge that my sexuality extends beyond the confines of long-term exclusive romantic relationships. Of the privileges you combine under "monogamous-straight-cis-vanilla", it may be that, at least among socially liberal people with feminist beliefs, the cultural expectation of monogamy may now be the last remaining shackle to break. The West may have reduced social and legal sanctions against nonmonogamy during the last few generations, but it's still seen among otherwise liberal people as a moral/ethical failing or at least a character flaw. And if you believe the arguments in books like Sex at Dawn, enforced monogamy might actually be the most widespread suppression of human sexuality.
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The explanation for this seems awfully obvious, and possibly undermines the entire idea of sex addiction. It's not what you do, it's how you feel about it.
Exactly. After reading some depressingly judgemental stuff from the SST's resident (anti-)sex columnist, I ended up taking the Sex Addiction Screening Test, pretty much just for the lolz. Despite my admittedly filthy mind and depraved lifestyle, I got a very low score indeed. But as an experiment, I imagined myself back a few years, and answered the questions as I would have done when I was in a relationship where such things were frowned upon. Despite doing pretty much the same things that I do now, I rated as a borderline sex addict, because at the time I had to hide & feel guilty about my actions.
To your formulation "it's how you feel about it", I'd add "how others feel about it". Sometimes other people will be hurt by your actions because those actions are contrary to the boundaries of your relationship, and being hurt is natural & reasonable. In those cases you'd have to either change your actions, negotiate different boundaries or end the relationship, and while none of those are easy, they may be possible to achieve in a humane and thoughtful way without necessarily demonising the desires themselves. Of course, in some cases other people might express their displeasure at your thoughts and actions purely because they're judgy-pants moralists, in which case it's none of their fucking (no pun intended) business.