Great post. A lot of dating and relationship writing is overconfident bullshit so kudos to your epistemological humility.
I was reminded of this excellent point from August Lamm:
"But in the ensuing exchange, it became clear to me that he was one of those modern lovers who, in performing sexual freedom and insisting upon the same in others, ends up more sexually constrained and convoluted than any of us normies, who can simply act upon our desires without first codifying and notarizing them in acronym-studded manifestos."
This is fantastic and I'll be chewing on it for a while!
Certainly a high percentage of polyamorous people are bisexual, and there tend to be more bisexual-identifting women than men, so I wonder how that plays a role in the gender disparity. I'm a bisexual woman and I have a boyfriend and a girlfriend. We are triad (aka throuple) so yeah, we appear to be polygynous. Fwiw we are not a closed triad, we have all had other partners during the triad relationship and are open to new partners outside of the triad. But the thing polygyny vs. monogamy doesn't consider is all the bisexual women who are giving & receiving equal attention to our male AND female partners! Like, maybe I'm a 7 who has to share my 10 boyfriend, but I also get to have a 10 girlfriend. But yeah, anyone who has spent time dating both men & women can see clear gender differences when it comes to dating if we're being honest, and the evolutionary roots are deeeep.
Totally, I was surprised the commonality of bisexuality in women wasn't spoken to, many women are seeking and happy to have a girlfriend, and it's a big reason why many bisexual women are poly to begin with.
Fascinating and especially robust analysis. As far as I can tell, most of the articles and studies relating to polyamory tend to focus on young people, generally without children. Who has children and what parenting looks like in polyamorous relationships seems very complicated. Who has parental rights and responsibilities? What happens when new partners come and go? Whose grandparents are involved? Likewise, polyamory among older people is almost never mentioned. A growing proportion of divorces today are among older (50+) couple, usually initiated by women. Is polyamory increasing as well? What does polyamory look like when members get ill, can no longer engage in certain forms of sex or simply lose interest? As unpartnered group living increases, would that give rise to more expanded forms of polyamory? By 70, the proportion of women to men begins to change rapidly. What if any impact does that have?
Many older couples today, usually involving divorced or widowed individuals, prefer the living alone together form of relationship if finances allow. I could see that as potentially increasing the potential for polyamory although it also may ease the stress of monogamy.
I would add: women marrying multiple men also happens even today in certain traditions in Africa, and yet this concept was barely mentioned as a hypothetical. Let's not act like polygyny is an automatic back-slide we have to keep an eye on and avoid as if the past is a monolith. The world is much more expensive than colonialism would have us believe.
Sapolsky missed our closest primate group, the Bonobo, which are actually neither type you describe above but closer to polyamorous. They resemble us and share more DNA with us than any other primate group. It’s not surprising that we are not having a totally smooth time with variable relationship structures. We have been doing forced monogamy for a long time now, it makes perfect sense to be better equipped to grasp it and manage it, despite it still being a poor lifetime fit for a huge chunk of people. to be clear, it’s a poor fit sexually and in terms of raising kids. Therapy offices are full of folks grappling with this.
It seems a pretty far stretch to assert that Bonobo-style polyamory is the "natural" default for humans. We have plenty of chimp DNA too, and they don't behave remotely like that. It's also been shown that subgroups of some primates, such as Baboons, can switch based on culture, so even our primal ancestors can't disentangle nature and culture.
The historical norm for humans living in pre-agricultural scattered societies, across many cultures, has either been strict morals controlling sexuality OR harem-style polygyny. If we are to assume anything is the "natural default" (which I don't think we should really do), it's probably harem-style polygyny established by violent male dominance hierarchies. That is what our genetic record shows -- around 8K years ago, only a small fraction of men worldwide had children. That looks like Chimps or Elephant Seals, not Bonobos. I think most people agree that natural default is not very nice to live in for women, or for most men.
Why on earth would anyone accept a bioessentialist view of relationship styles based on such a basic analysis? Human beings share the most DNA with human beings.
If you’re going to insist that most monogamous relationships are unhappy and that everything could be solved by polyamory, at least drop the bullshit fake scientific explanation.
As an open-minded but generally monogamously-inclined dude, I’ve been thinking about this issue a lot the past few months, and I think you hit the nail on the head. I’ve reached some of the same conclusions, and it’s very reassuring hearing them articulated by somebody with personal experience in the subject.
Fantastic post! Even poly me learned several things, which makes sense as I've only been in the scene for half as long as you. Thanks for teaching us young'uns :)
Thank you! I get the sense that you're deeper in the Bay poly culture than I ever was X'D.
I think there's a lot of types of nonmonogamy though. Some people consider having exes who are important friends to be nonmonogamy, and like...that's table stakes for me. \o/
Feel free to shoot me opinions/insights for a follow up! (which I will definitely do based on the amount of feedback I'm getting from this)
This was a great poly 101! One thing I’d add is that studies indicate that most people are functionally naturally pretty monogamous. About 10% of the population is high in sociosexuality. Poly is probably really only worth the hassle for some percentage of those people and the percentage of the population who isn’t particularly high in jealousy.
Good esssay. You covered (almost) all the bases. You missed the part about *why* monogamy is a patriarchially socially enforced phenomena. The truth is that polygynous societies are inherently less stable. While it may have worked when we were hunter-gatherers, once we coalesced into large societies, polygyny tends to result in an accumulation of frustrated and unpaired young men at the margins. Eventually enough of them pick up weapons and exert their will by force. This is why Muslim societies are still so inherently unstable, and it is partially why Western Christian countries largely took over the globe. Ensuring sexual access to the largest numbers of your males increases productivity and obedience to authority. It's evolution on a societal (vs individual) scale.
What this means is that if our society embraces polyamory/polygyny, we run the risk of an inherent weakness and instability that could eventually result in collapse and takeover by another power that still values patriarchal views on sexual access. Do you value Western-style peace, freedom and order? Do you not want your sister and daughter gang-raped by roving bands of third-world savages? Then it probably behooves you to have ay least *some* focus on shaping sexual and parental relationships in the interest of your own civilization vs your own in-the-moment pleasures. What makes you feel good in the moment is all well and good until it is extrapolates out on all of civilization. The Romans enjoyed a big boost in polyamory towards the end, too. It was all fun and games until the music stopped and the savages busted through the gates.
This is exactly the kind of fact that I want a mountain of, and I love that you and Brian are looking at things this way. This fact seems contrary to Brian's about Muslim societies. Is there a "sweet spot" of sexual permissiveness? Or is "permisiveness" the wrong variable, and it's actually about the pairing structure, of which there are many?
When you compare countries where governments and cultures control sexual behavior more with those that control it less, the former are more violent, including and especially against women, than the latter. Controlling sexuality includes banning gay marriage or even gay sex or even cross-dressing. Punishing sex outside of marriage. FGM. Laws that limit access to and information about sex, consent, and contraception. Laws that dictate how women are allowed to dress and where they can go and what they can do. A lack of laws against marital rape. Etc.
"Societies" or tribal groups? Can you name a single multi-million person societal group that fits your description? You do know that human socities universally changed once we adopted agriculture and started living in civilizations vs tribes, yes? That's what I am talking about. If you are talking about some tribe in New Guinea, that is outside the scope of this discussion. I understand that we are evolved as tribal creatures and that what are commonly called "social constructs" are just group behaviors adapted more recently as we humans coalesced and adopted division of labor, but advocating for a return to behaviors that seem to have only worked in small tribal groups and that are actually dysgenic in civilization is nonsensical, unless you can envision a future where civilization is not a factor anymore.
See my reply to Cathy above. I'll throw in that figuring out a way to emulate small tribal groups again seems like the cleanest way to utopia if we can do it.
Small tribal groups also have one or two guys on the margins who never get laid (and maybe die in conflict or hunting). My point is that as societies get bigger and bigger and more orderly, those "one or two guys who aren't getting laid" turns into thousands and thousands of young sex-starved dudes who have a mountain of testosterone flowing through their veins and nothing to lose if they band together and use violence to attempt to get what they want.
This largely isn't a problem if you can either A) direct that energy outwards, ie Viking raids or large scale wars where men turn into winners or die or B) set up a system where polygyny is largely shamed and monogamy is lauded. If you can maximize the motivation for every man in your society to get out of bed and accomplish things, you can build an empire. I said it in another comment here - patriarchal monogamy is a mechanism to control male sexuality. If female sexuality is controlled in the doing, it's incidental. Unsatiated male sexuality is dangerous.
I'm not exaggerating when I say this essay healed a part of me. I have struggled so much with these ideas and unfortunately, most of my experience w people who practice poly are actually people who identify as poly and tend to be extremely avoidant but cloak these wounds in ideological posturing. I struggle with a clingier type of insecure attachment myself, but am not avoidant at all. I feel drawn to these avoidant people bc they appear to have things figured out. I'm a 25yo genderqueer lesbian in the non-urban Midwest. The queer community here is full of people "identifying" as poly. I don't understand where people get the capacity to invest in multiple romantic/sexual relationships. And what I've experienced is they usually don't have it. I have struggled with where I stand so much bc I kept feeling like I had to "identify" one way or another, but my experience has never neatly fit into any label. I have felt like the way I relate to people isn't radical enough, but left myself and my values behind along the way. I'm so grateful for this perspective. It's so affirming to hear someone more experienced and knowledgeable on the subject say "fuck all the noise" and encourage healing attachment wounds and going with what works for you. Loved the analogy about religion. Thank you so much.
It's a very good article. At once analytical and humane.
My question is, though: you've only analyzed the polygynous and monogamous cases and assume partial polyamory is intermediate between the two. We know among polyamorists it's possible for a woman to date multiple men, and in fact have seen it. Does that alleviate some of the asymmetries? Does that create new problems?
Another thing: from what I've seen, many women are bisexual and date both men and women, but this is much more looked down on among men. Doesn't that affect the distribution too?
That "who benefits" section / graph with the 1-10 partners - but in terms of escaping (male) violence? Avoiding male violence is arguably the main organising principle for most gay male and non-male participants in any relationship, relationship model, dating app, let alone actually being a core goal for entire feminist and queer movements. Who benefits in terms of not being in a coercive / violent relationship?
I forgot to add that "Patriarchy" is a mechanism to control *male* sexuality, not female. Controlling female sexual behavior is incidental to controlling male sexual behavior. It's all about controlling men and it always has been, for very good reasons.
Digestible and thoughtful in the delivery. I especially appreciate the consideration of our biology and the use of the Bay Area anecdotes for a lens, as to not overcomplicate. I weirdly feel a weight lifted for a lifestyle I never have actively lived, seeing it this way. Your humble concluding ideas with respect to the whole conversation were the cherry on top.
one thing I have been considering a lot lately on this topic is the idea of sensuality within the United states. culturally Americans seem to believe that sensuality and sexuality are one in the same, often drawing these concepts to relationship dynamics instead of self. I find myself attracting poly people when dating, but after some thought I think I am just sexually open minded, but not necessarily poly. the idea that sex must be tied to a relationship is probably the real issue.
Great post. A lot of dating and relationship writing is overconfident bullshit so kudos to your epistemological humility.
I was reminded of this excellent point from August Lamm:
"But in the ensuing exchange, it became clear to me that he was one of those modern lovers who, in performing sexual freedom and insisting upon the same in others, ends up more sexually constrained and convoluted than any of us normies, who can simply act upon our desires without first codifying and notarizing them in acronym-studded manifestos."
(source: https://augustlamm.substack.com/p/casual-dating)
This is fantastic and I'll be chewing on it for a while!
Certainly a high percentage of polyamorous people are bisexual, and there tend to be more bisexual-identifting women than men, so I wonder how that plays a role in the gender disparity. I'm a bisexual woman and I have a boyfriend and a girlfriend. We are triad (aka throuple) so yeah, we appear to be polygynous. Fwiw we are not a closed triad, we have all had other partners during the triad relationship and are open to new partners outside of the triad. But the thing polygyny vs. monogamy doesn't consider is all the bisexual women who are giving & receiving equal attention to our male AND female partners! Like, maybe I'm a 7 who has to share my 10 boyfriend, but I also get to have a 10 girlfriend. But yeah, anyone who has spent time dating both men & women can see clear gender differences when it comes to dating if we're being honest, and the evolutionary roots are deeeep.
Totally, I was surprised the commonality of bisexuality in women wasn't spoken to, many women are seeking and happy to have a girlfriend, and it's a big reason why many bisexual women are poly to begin with.
I've noticed that too. If you want both men and women in your life romantically, polyamory is kind of the obvious option.
I guess you could do MFF triads, but then you have a bunch of guys left out.
Fascinating and especially robust analysis. As far as I can tell, most of the articles and studies relating to polyamory tend to focus on young people, generally without children. Who has children and what parenting looks like in polyamorous relationships seems very complicated. Who has parental rights and responsibilities? What happens when new partners come and go? Whose grandparents are involved? Likewise, polyamory among older people is almost never mentioned. A growing proportion of divorces today are among older (50+) couple, usually initiated by women. Is polyamory increasing as well? What does polyamory look like when members get ill, can no longer engage in certain forms of sex or simply lose interest? As unpartnered group living increases, would that give rise to more expanded forms of polyamory? By 70, the proportion of women to men begins to change rapidly. What if any impact does that have?
Many older couples today, usually involving divorced or widowed individuals, prefer the living alone together form of relationship if finances allow. I could see that as potentially increasing the potential for polyamory although it also may ease the stress of monogamy.
Thanks again for this thought-provoking piece.
I would add: women marrying multiple men also happens even today in certain traditions in Africa, and yet this concept was barely mentioned as a hypothetical. Let's not act like polygyny is an automatic back-slide we have to keep an eye on and avoid as if the past is a monolith. The world is much more expensive than colonialism would have us believe.
Sapolsky missed our closest primate group, the Bonobo, which are actually neither type you describe above but closer to polyamorous. They resemble us and share more DNA with us than any other primate group. It’s not surprising that we are not having a totally smooth time with variable relationship structures. We have been doing forced monogamy for a long time now, it makes perfect sense to be better equipped to grasp it and manage it, despite it still being a poor lifetime fit for a huge chunk of people. to be clear, it’s a poor fit sexually and in terms of raising kids. Therapy offices are full of folks grappling with this.
It seems a pretty far stretch to assert that Bonobo-style polyamory is the "natural" default for humans. We have plenty of chimp DNA too, and they don't behave remotely like that. It's also been shown that subgroups of some primates, such as Baboons, can switch based on culture, so even our primal ancestors can't disentangle nature and culture.
The historical norm for humans living in pre-agricultural scattered societies, across many cultures, has either been strict morals controlling sexuality OR harem-style polygyny. If we are to assume anything is the "natural default" (which I don't think we should really do), it's probably harem-style polygyny established by violent male dominance hierarchies. That is what our genetic record shows -- around 8K years ago, only a small fraction of men worldwide had children. That looks like Chimps or Elephant Seals, not Bonobos. I think most people agree that natural default is not very nice to live in for women, or for most men.
Why on earth would anyone accept a bioessentialist view of relationship styles based on such a basic analysis? Human beings share the most DNA with human beings.
If you’re going to insist that most monogamous relationships are unhappy and that everything could be solved by polyamory, at least drop the bullshit fake scientific explanation.
As an open-minded but generally monogamously-inclined dude, I’ve been thinking about this issue a lot the past few months, and I think you hit the nail on the head. I’ve reached some of the same conclusions, and it’s very reassuring hearing them articulated by somebody with personal experience in the subject.
Fantastic post! Even poly me learned several things, which makes sense as I've only been in the scene for half as long as you. Thanks for teaching us young'uns :)
Thank you! I get the sense that you're deeper in the Bay poly culture than I ever was X'D.
I think there's a lot of types of nonmonogamy though. Some people consider having exes who are important friends to be nonmonogamy, and like...that's table stakes for me. \o/
Feel free to shoot me opinions/insights for a follow up! (which I will definitely do based on the amount of feedback I'm getting from this)
This was a great poly 101! One thing I’d add is that studies indicate that most people are functionally naturally pretty monogamous. About 10% of the population is high in sociosexuality. Poly is probably really only worth the hassle for some percentage of those people and the percentage of the population who isn’t particularly high in jealousy.
Good esssay. You covered (almost) all the bases. You missed the part about *why* monogamy is a patriarchially socially enforced phenomena. The truth is that polygynous societies are inherently less stable. While it may have worked when we were hunter-gatherers, once we coalesced into large societies, polygyny tends to result in an accumulation of frustrated and unpaired young men at the margins. Eventually enough of them pick up weapons and exert their will by force. This is why Muslim societies are still so inherently unstable, and it is partially why Western Christian countries largely took over the globe. Ensuring sexual access to the largest numbers of your males increases productivity and obedience to authority. It's evolution on a societal (vs individual) scale.
What this means is that if our society embraces polyamory/polygyny, we run the risk of an inherent weakness and instability that could eventually result in collapse and takeover by another power that still values patriarchal views on sexual access. Do you value Western-style peace, freedom and order? Do you not want your sister and daughter gang-raped by roving bands of third-world savages? Then it probably behooves you to have ay least *some* focus on shaping sexual and parental relationships in the interest of your own civilization vs your own in-the-moment pleasures. What makes you feel good in the moment is all well and good until it is extrapolates out on all of civilization. The Romans enjoyed a big boost in polyamory towards the end, too. It was all fun and games until the music stopped and the savages busted through the gates.
Societies that are more sexually permissive are less violent on average
This is exactly the kind of fact that I want a mountain of, and I love that you and Brian are looking at things this way. This fact seems contrary to Brian's about Muslim societies. Is there a "sweet spot" of sexual permissiveness? Or is "permisiveness" the wrong variable, and it's actually about the pairing structure, of which there are many?
Citations needed all around of course.
https://open.substack.com/pub/cathyreisenwitz/p/sexual-freedom-is-safety?r=5q7u&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
When you compare countries where governments and cultures control sexual behavior more with those that control it less, the former are more violent, including and especially against women, than the latter. Controlling sexuality includes banning gay marriage or even gay sex or even cross-dressing. Punishing sex outside of marriage. FGM. Laws that limit access to and information about sex, consent, and contraception. Laws that dictate how women are allowed to dress and where they can go and what they can do. A lack of laws against marital rape. Etc.
"Societies" or tribal groups? Can you name a single multi-million person societal group that fits your description? You do know that human socities universally changed once we adopted agriculture and started living in civilizations vs tribes, yes? That's what I am talking about. If you are talking about some tribe in New Guinea, that is outside the scope of this discussion. I understand that we are evolved as tribal creatures and that what are commonly called "social constructs" are just group behaviors adapted more recently as we humans coalesced and adopted division of labor, but advocating for a return to behaviors that seem to have only worked in small tribal groups and that are actually dysgenic in civilization is nonsensical, unless you can envision a future where civilization is not a factor anymore.
See my reply to Cathy above. I'll throw in that figuring out a way to emulate small tribal groups again seems like the cleanest way to utopia if we can do it.
But small tribal groups have tons of wars.
Small tribal groups also have one or two guys on the margins who never get laid (and maybe die in conflict or hunting). My point is that as societies get bigger and bigger and more orderly, those "one or two guys who aren't getting laid" turns into thousands and thousands of young sex-starved dudes who have a mountain of testosterone flowing through their veins and nothing to lose if they band together and use violence to attempt to get what they want.
This largely isn't a problem if you can either A) direct that energy outwards, ie Viking raids or large scale wars where men turn into winners or die or B) set up a system where polygyny is largely shamed and monogamy is lauded. If you can maximize the motivation for every man in your society to get out of bed and accomplish things, you can build an empire. I said it in another comment here - patriarchal monogamy is a mechanism to control male sexuality. If female sexuality is controlled in the doing, it's incidental. Unsatiated male sexuality is dangerous.
I'm not exaggerating when I say this essay healed a part of me. I have struggled so much with these ideas and unfortunately, most of my experience w people who practice poly are actually people who identify as poly and tend to be extremely avoidant but cloak these wounds in ideological posturing. I struggle with a clingier type of insecure attachment myself, but am not avoidant at all. I feel drawn to these avoidant people bc they appear to have things figured out. I'm a 25yo genderqueer lesbian in the non-urban Midwest. The queer community here is full of people "identifying" as poly. I don't understand where people get the capacity to invest in multiple romantic/sexual relationships. And what I've experienced is they usually don't have it. I have struggled with where I stand so much bc I kept feeling like I had to "identify" one way or another, but my experience has never neatly fit into any label. I have felt like the way I relate to people isn't radical enough, but left myself and my values behind along the way. I'm so grateful for this perspective. It's so affirming to hear someone more experienced and knowledgeable on the subject say "fuck all the noise" and encourage healing attachment wounds and going with what works for you. Loved the analogy about religion. Thank you so much.
It's a very good article. At once analytical and humane.
My question is, though: you've only analyzed the polygynous and monogamous cases and assume partial polyamory is intermediate between the two. We know among polyamorists it's possible for a woman to date multiple men, and in fact have seen it. Does that alleviate some of the asymmetries? Does that create new problems?
Another thing: from what I've seen, many women are bisexual and date both men and women, but this is much more looked down on among men. Doesn't that affect the distribution too?
That "who benefits" section / graph with the 1-10 partners - but in terms of escaping (male) violence? Avoiding male violence is arguably the main organising principle for most gay male and non-male participants in any relationship, relationship model, dating app, let alone actually being a core goal for entire feminist and queer movements. Who benefits in terms of not being in a coercive / violent relationship?
I forgot to add that "Patriarchy" is a mechanism to control *male* sexuality, not female. Controlling female sexual behavior is incidental to controlling male sexual behavior. It's all about controlling men and it always has been, for very good reasons.
Digestible and thoughtful in the delivery. I especially appreciate the consideration of our biology and the use of the Bay Area anecdotes for a lens, as to not overcomplicate. I weirdly feel a weight lifted for a lifestyle I never have actively lived, seeing it this way. Your humble concluding ideas with respect to the whole conversation were the cherry on top.
Thank you.
If this essay were a book, it'd be sitting on my shelf waiting to be reread.
one thing I have been considering a lot lately on this topic is the idea of sensuality within the United states. culturally Americans seem to believe that sensuality and sexuality are one in the same, often drawing these concepts to relationship dynamics instead of self. I find myself attracting poly people when dating, but after some thought I think I am just sexually open minded, but not necessarily poly. the idea that sex must be tied to a relationship is probably the real issue.