While statistics are?difficult to gather, ?polyamory ?does not go totally unnoticed, especially in overseas Christian Right propaganda. On Family First?s website, the New Zealand Christian Right pressure group was shocked to see a? tripartite? ??civil union???which had no constitutional or legal status between a man and two women sparked in Brazil in August 2o12.??One conservative lawyer told?? the BBC that it was ?something completely unacceptable, which goes against Brazilian values and morals.?
Meanwhile,? Rick Santorum, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and other tiresome ?US social conservative demagogues have??included??polygamy and?polyamory? ?as? inevitable ?moral perversions? that would follow introduction of same-sex marriage ,?either with or without pedophilia, ?incest and bestiality.
Unexpectedly though, US popular culture seems to be evolving toward inclusion on the issue of polyamory. During the course of this year, US ?Showtime cable channel?s series Polyamory: Married and Dating aroused keen interest.? Also screening on Canada?s Movie Network pay channel,?the??seven episode -series? follows the lives of ?two polyamorous families. One is a two-female, one-male ?triad? of graduate students in Riverside, California, while the other is? a ?quad? of two married couples?who live ?together in San Diego.?The triad?s members are?bisexual, while the men within??the quad are straight but the women are bisexual and are emotionally and sexually involved with each other. There are graphic group-sex scenes included within the series.
The Showtime series marks a step toward?mainstreaming ?polyamory ? and a new spin to the debate over whether marriages should only involve a single man and woman.? Montreal?s Natalia Garcia is the show?s executive producer: ?I made this show for monogamous, mainstream people who are in traditional relationships, who don?t know they have an option, who feel like they?re stuck ? or they?re cheating secretly or they?re about to break up. Why is it that we can only marry one person if we love multiple people? Who decided that??
Polyamory (or ethical non-monogamy) is the current incarnation of an egalitarian non-monogamous western subculture whose roots extend from nineteenth-century utopian communes to 1960s ?free love,? 1970s ?swinger? straight ?lifestyles and open marriages and BDSM communities within the 1990s.?Unlike seventies swingers, though, polyamory emphasizes transparency and emotional commitment to all romantic and sexual partners through polyfidelity.?Furthermore,?it is not uncommon for?partners in a ?poly? family?to cohabit or raise children.
Books like Opening Up and The Ethical Slut advocate polyamory and it has also been endorsed by public figures such as US gay sex columnist Dan Savage and British actress Tilda Swinton.
Back in ?December 2011, polyamory earned some legal recognition within Canada after?the British Columbian?Supreme Court?accepted ?that multiple conjugal unions between?cohabiting partners are legal as long as there is no formal ceremonial recognition as there are within monogamous straight, lesbian and gay same-sex marriages.
Polyamory is quite distinctive from the misogynist and patriarchal, polygamous marriages familiar from fundamentalist?schismatic sects that broke with the mainstream Church of the?Latter Day Saints when the latter abandoned polygamy in 1890?(as portrayed within US television series such as? Big Love or Sister Wives) and some other religious sects. In polyamory?s most common form,?whether straight, bisexual, lesbian or gay, ?women and men alike can seek multiple relationships, without formal marital recognition or ceremonies.
In Atlanta, Elisabeth Sheff, a sociologist, has studied polyamorous families in detail since the nineties.Within polyamorous relationships,?female participants?share sexual power more equally with men ?? because women?value interpersonal relationships and emotional contact with their ?sexual partners, and find new ones more easily, which gives them leverage within their relationships.
Earlier this year, Canadian Simon Fraser sociologist Melissa Mitchell carried out an Internet survey of 1,100 polyamorists ? the largest academic survey of polyamorists to date. She found that most?polyamorist individuals (64 per cent) have two partners. Sixty one?per cent of the women identified their two closest partners as both men and?eighty six ?per cent of men identified their two closest partners as both women.
Most of the women in the sample identified as bisexual (at sixty-eight?per cent), while bisexual men were less frequent (only thirty nine?per cent) and exclusive?lesbians or gay men?were rare (only four percent?identified as lesbians and three percent identified as gay? men).
Polyamorists spend more time with and feel more committed to their primary partners than their secondary partners, according to Sheff?s survey. However,? they may also find that secondary partners are more amenable to their sexual needs. Seventy per cent of the sample live with their primary partner and?forty-seven per cent are married to?them. The average relationship?duration was nine years for?primary partners and?three years for secondary partners.
The?Canadian survey is self-selected, so it? cannot provide a representative sample, but Sheff says the Simon Fraser University ?results line up with those of other studies, such as?seventy-one focus group?interviews that she?made with Midwestern and Californian polyamorists over a thirteen year period (1996-2009). Sheff also notes that despite the?importance of?feminism?to polyamorists, it?s not unusual for?straight men to become involved?because they believe that it will lead to ?easy sex? or sex with more than one woman. However, straight or bisexual?male swingers tend to ?have a difficult time meeting the emotional demands of? polyamory and are either? turned off ? or ostracised ? by polyfidelity as a social norm within polyamorous relationships
?Ongoing poly relationships can be enough of a challenge, and require so much communication, that there is often less sex than talking. If the men come in thinking, ?This is going to be a big free-for-all,? and they?re not willing to put in the effort to maintaining the relationship part of it, they get a bad reputation.?
Polyamory: Married and Dating?demonstrates that the?advantages of?such relationships come at a price. Although the members of the cast have considerable sex, they spend much more time in discussion of ethics, ?emotions and debates over each? participant?s rights and responsibilities.
In polyamorist relationships, common?monogamous spousal dilemmas can result in particularly thorny dilemmas for?participants, particularly if the community norm of polyfidelity has been implied to be infringed.??Ms. Garcia, the producer, elaborated that ?Truthfully, poly doesn?t work for everyone, the way monogamy doesn?t work for everyone. To claim that polyamorous families don?t argue and everything is perfect would be a lie.?
Within the online polyamorist community?websites Modern Poly and Polyamory in the News, some views are negative- the programme is viewed exploitative and oversexualised. However, ?others are just happy to have representation of their relationship option within mainstream media.
The cast of Polyamory? resembles the population of the?polyamorist subculture. According to a growing body of research, the community?consists of?white professionals and college students. Ninety per cent of the respondents to Ms. Mitchell?s study were Caucasian-identified, and ninety-five per cent had some access to higher education. Amongst Sheff?s interview participants,?eighty-nine per cent were white,?three-quarters? were in professional?employment and two-thirds had at least a bachelor?s degree.
According to a ?2011 polyamorist ?literature survey by Sheff and Corie Hammers, racial and class data on polyamorists and related groups?was compiled from thirty six?independent studies, and confirmed that sexual minorities?largely consist of ?upper-middle-class Caucasians. Sheff concludes?that lower socio-economic class?individuals and people of colour cannot usually? afford to take the risks associated with defying social norms, which could lead to employment, accomodation, parental or other forms of discrimination against polyamorists, given that legal protection is particularly scarce for polyamorists. This provides community participation advantages for those with the financial resources to hire legal assistance.
Authors of polyamorist self-help literature?view ?it as a ?choice? that?is reliant ?on ethical conviction, hard relationship maintenance?work and personal?endurance, rather than security conferred through relative affluence. Sheff notes that polyamorists don?t tend to discuss class or ethnicity within their ethical debates about their relationship option:
?It?s easy to cast as a personal choice if that?s all it seems to you, devoid of social and political context. But some people can?t ignore that context.?
On the other hand, some individuals and families?may?participate covertly within? non-monogamous relationships, but?refuse to consider??coming out? and adopting an identity that could lead to further stigmatisation or experiences of discrimination. This is one of the reasons it is hard to estimate the scale of the US polyamorist community? researchers are unsure about operational definitions in this context.
Sheff advocates more openness, arguing?that ?public role models, like those?within Polyamory: Married and Dating, may help to destigmatize polyamory and decrease its risks for more marginal potential participants.
Recommended:
Jeff Fraser: ?Polyamory: Three or Four or Five?s Company? Globe and Mail: 22.09.2012: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/relationships/polyamory-threes-or-fours-or-fives-company/article4560587/service=mobile
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Source: http://www.gaynz.com/blogs/redqueen/?p=1753
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