baratron | should I return to usenet?

I have had two days of thinking profound thoughts. I have posted in

compersion about being comfortable with your partner's other partners, and on The Sims Resource about polyamory in The Sims. I've also noticed in referring the TSR people to the polyamory.org FAQs that there's actually nothing in the alt.poly FAQ about the difference between polyamory and polygamy/polygyny/polyandry, which seems a bit of an oversight... and something that did frequently come up on the group when I was there.

I'm thinking about dropping back into alt.polyamory, because I still consider it "home". For a start, there's alt.polycon, which has a very important place in my heart. apc 8 was... stressful in a way that means I'm still procrastinating on tidying up some of the odds and ends, yet it must have been successful - even if just on a ratio of number of attendees to number of new relationships ;) I really want to get to apc 9, but the only way I can afford it would be if I stayed with someone, and I'm no longer close to the friends I had in Boston. (Unless one of my LJ friends lives there, and I'm being forgetful). Wild horses will not keep me away from apc 10, because I need to see Toronto again, revisit all the wonderful things we saw there, and get to all the things we wanted to but didn't have time. I have to talk to Bearpaw about passing on the consuite decorations & so on - if someone could give me his email address, I'd be most grateful.

On a more practical level, I'm thinking I should talk to people there about adding some stuff to the FAQ, and thinking some of them might like to read my post on how labels work for this geek. But it would be rude to pop in without sticking around for the discussion - and I simply don't have time to keep up with the traffic. Even after installing gnus and putting in some heavy-duty rules/filters, I was unable to keep up with it. I miss it, but since

lilairen arrived on LJ, everyone whose stuff I really enjoy reading is here. And here, I can read them unmolested by idiots and trolls.

And I like the LJ interface so much better than usenet. I much much prefer the discussion style of livejournal comments. Because of how they work, you only ever get short conversations in comments - if people want to branch off from it, they do it in their own journals - so I can follow threads a lot more easily. soc.bi and alt.poly were nightmarish for me because if I didn't have time to read the groups properly, I'd keep missing out on stuff, and getting upset.

Blah.

Current Mood: ambivalent

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

kiya

I've also noticed in referring the TSR people to the polyamory.org FAQs that there's actually nothing in the alt.poly FAQ about the difference between polyamory and polygamy/polygyny/polyandry, which seems a bit of an oversight...

If it's an oversight, I'd love to know what it's overseeing. :P As far as I can tell, the only "difference there is" between polyamory and the other things is that some people say the other things aren't "real" polyamory and get their knickers all knotted up over the subject, some people (like me) think the first group of people are essentially illiterates who have no notion what the words actually mean when they condemn them and get their/our knickers knotted up over the subject, and most people really don't care . . . .

Me, I'm polyandrous and wannabe polygamous. There doesn't look like much of a difference there to me from polyamory; they seem to me to be a natural consequence of being a het chick with two primaries, one she's married to and the other she'd marry if we were to that point in that relationship.

People who don't do multiple primaries or polyfidelity aren't likely to be polygamous; non-monosexuals aren't so likely to be polygynous or polyandrous. It's just a thing, like polyfi, like primary/secondary, like no-rules polyamory, what have you; just a descriptive label. < a name="neh?" >

I wouldn't say there's a distinction to be made between polyamory and non-heirarchical polyamory, say. One's a subtype, is all. Just like multiple-spouse, multiple-chick, multiple-dude.

From:

rivka.livejournal.com

baratron: I've also noticed in referring the TSR people to the polyamory.org FAQs that there's actually nothing in the alt.poly FAQ about the difference between polyamory and polygamy/polygyny/polyandry, which seems a bit of an oversight...

lilairen: If it's an oversight, I'd love to know what it's overseeing. :P As far as I can tell, the only "difference there is" between polyamory and the other things is that some people say the other things aren't "real" polyamory and get their knickers all knotted up over the subject, some people (like me) think the first group of people are essentially illiterates who have no notion what the words actually mean when they condemn them and get their/our knickers knotted up over the subject, and most people really don't care . . . .

Me, I'm polyandrous and wannabe polygamous. There doesn't look like much of a difference there to me from polyamory; they seem to me to be a natural consequence of being a het chick with two primaries, one she's married to and the other she'd marry if we were to that point in that relationship.

I think there are a couple of reasons for making the distinction. The first is that, where a lot of polyfolk live, polygamy (in terms of actual multiple marriages) is a crime. I think one of the reasons that people talk about polyamory is to make it crystal clear that they're not involving marriage-the-legal-entity and thus opening themselves up to legal complications.

The other reason that I'm familiar with really doesn't sound like it applies to you,

lilairen. It's that, all legalities aside, some people don't model their relationships on marriage, and therefore aren't comfortable using a word with marriage at its root. Their relationships with their partners aren't particularly spouselike, but they still want to identify those relationships as significant in their poly structure. So they say -amorous instead of -gamous.

But yeah, if you're not worried about legalities and your relationships are all in spousal form, there's no reason not to use -gamous or -androus.

From:

kiya

From:

rivka.livejournal.com

I tend to figure that people who don't have marriagelike relationships are entirely free to not call 'em marriages. I don't understand why that means that other people should avoid using words making reference to marriage.

I don't either - I was just trying to identify a shade of meaning difference, and apparently not doing so very well. I think of polygamous relationships as a subset of polyamorous relationships in which the bonds between partners are spousal. The set of polyamorous relationships would include polygamous relationships plus relationships in which bonds are not spousal.

From:

baratron.livejournal.com

The problem is that in a lot of people's eyes, polygamy is something practised by men who marry three or four women or girls, where the women have very little choice about who they marry, no choice about how many other wives there are in the family, and where girls of a very young age are brought into the family as wives. I, personally, abhor traditional monogamous marriage where the woman is subservient to the man - let alone multiple marriages where the women are all subservient to the man, who establishes a patriarchy by keeping as many of them pregnant as possible.

Polyamory is associated in my mind with consent - the whole point of it is multiple relationships with all parties giving informed consent to the arrangement. I am sure that your polyamorous or polyandrous relationships are not characterised by your men having extreme dominance over you. If you are ever shackled to the kitchen sink barefoot with a baby in one arm and a toddler running round on the floor, it will be as part of a scene or lifestyle choice that you have consented to. I would argue that it is necessary to have a word that isn't tainted with half-misunderstandings to separate a consentual arrangement from an imposed patriarchy. Polyamory, polyandry and polygyny are all fine for that - but I have a bad taste in my mouth to think of someone I know doing polygamy.

Note all the "I" words in this statement :)

From:

kiya

A while back, there was one of those godawful Defense of Marriage Act things wandering through Massachusetts (it was procedurally killed by the legislature a couple weeks ago, IIRC).

I went to the public hearing before one of the committees.

One of the arguments for the DOMA was that if same-sex partnerships were legitimated, it would be the slippery slope towards ". . . polygamy." This was said in that horrified intonation, as if there needed to be no explanation for why this was a terrible fate.

The conflation of "polygamy" and "patriarchal polygyny" is, therefore, in my experience, not only being used to keep me from being able to marry my partners, but to keep other people, who may be monogamous, from being able to get a legally recognized bond made with theirs. Which is one of the reasons I have my knickers in a twist over it: this particular bit of usage is being used to justify the behaviour of bigots.

(I also tend to go ballistic on people who tell me that the roots of the word clearly limit it to polygynous situations. People who try to pull that I tend to beat bloody with a Greek lexicon.)

Call it word-reclaiming if you want. I'm going to continue pigheadedly insisting that someone with more than one marriage is polygamous, because that's what the damn word means, and I'm not going to let ignorance take it away. Moomph. :}

From:

baratron.livejournal.com

Perhaps, then, what needs to be added to the alt.poly FAQ is a definition of the various word roots in "polyamory", "polygyny", "polyandry" and "polygamy", and a definition of consensual multiple-marriage as contrasted with patriarchal polygyny? Even if it's just "polygamy as practised by polyamorists is not X", where X is the sort of thing I said above?

That would please me, and answer a frequently-asked question.

From:

kiya

That looks like a damn good idea to me, especially since the word-roots thing is not only meaningful to mention occasionally, but the sort of thing that's fairly illuminating about group culture.

I wonder who to bug about it.