Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Hard News: Sub Mission, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Petty and not really that important in the great scheme of things? Perhaps, but why should I take the book pages of a major daily newspaper seriously if they can’t get something that basic right.
That's not petty. That's wrong-President-Roosevelt inaccurate (and they at least shared a *century*.) Imagine the weird view of history it's going to give some of its readers.
In re: reading aloud, partner likes to read his work in a Texan accent, as he claims it makes him think carefully about each word. Oddly enough, have never caught him doing this when I'm home.
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Up Front: Sex with Parrots, in reply to Steve Parks,
Yep. I mean, I’ve personally no interest in being involved in poly-relationships myself, but if it became legally sanctioned, then I’d feel compelled to do so. That’s just how human nature works. Like when they made it legal to turn first at the top of the T. I just spent days making unnecessary turns at T-intersections.
You should try New Hampshire. It's not that I want to take off my seatbelt when we drive across the state line, but I can't help it. Those legislators have a lot to answer for.
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Up Front: Sex with Parrots, in reply to Stephen Glaister,
Granted some very basic assumptions (which you and many others aren’t prepared to grant me) that fulfillment/intimacy work like time/attention/focus, math then tells us what sorts of networks with those links can in principle look and function like.
Everyone else has pretty much explained the problems with this, but I'd like to add: if you haven't discovered by now that the application of logic to problems in a constructive way requires premises your target audience can agree with, you're in for a lifetime of disappointment at the rejection of your "definitive answers".
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Up Front: Sex with Parrots, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
Incidentally, and entirely off-topic, did you also get Lucy Two-Shoes? Lucy Lastic? You picked a fine time to leave me loose-wheel? And of course "Lucy in the sky with diamonds"? The last one got particularly dull, but I quite liked Lucy Two-Shoes.
None of those; I think because a) my middle name was far more mock-worthy and b) there were enough other Lucys that it wasn't perceived as an unusual name. Also I probably wasn't paying attention. But one of my mother's friends did persist in calling me "Lucinda", which irked me greatly.
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Speaker: All aboard: The choice for…, in reply to Jackie Clark,
Do young NZers still leave on their OE's? I've met a number of people in their 20's, recently, who have never left the country. Are they going when they're older. It's a big big question.
Well, it's a trick question to start with; the OE was and is a middle-class experience, predicated on having the time/money/lack of ties (especially children)/encouragement to undertake it. Most of my year-group at high school have gone or are on OEs; but they also mostly went to university. A lot of those that didn't were prevented by illness, early childbearing, lack of money, or family expectations. I don't know how the numbers have changed over the years, but I doubt it was ever a universal experience in the way it's sometimes portrayed.
Could the NZ govt make it easier? I'm not sure they could, and even if they did, I don't know what proportion of people would still stay.
People will always leave. It's about attracting them back and attracting young people from *other* countries who want to bring their skills and talents to our shores. The best thing the government can do, honestly, is make sure there's a good standard of living to come back to - people will take pay cuts for family and lifestyle, but not if there's no or little chance of *any* job that uses their education and experience.
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Up Front: Sex with Parrots, in reply to Stephen Glaister,
Thanks for your comments/queries, but my arguments have nothing to do with probability or with empirical rates of failure, rather I cast everything strictly at the level of logically and mathematically necessary features.
Instead of - bear with me, this is a bit of a leap - examining people's actual experiences of poly relationships, historical and current? I feel that sociology has just a wee bit more to offer here than mathematics.
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Speaker: All aboard: The choice for…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Stay in NZ for lots of reasons, like family and friends, and because it's beautiful here, but not simply to because you believe this is the only place you can contribute. You can and should live your values, you should also be rewarded (and even respected) for your contribution.
I (and my partner) want to come back to NZ, not because we can't contribute anywhere else, but because it's the country we were born and raised in and that gave us the tools and opportunities for success, and we believe we owe it to both NZ and future Kiwis to contribute to it and their future success. Especially since, right now, it feels like a lot of those opportunities are being deliberately taken away from people.
Whether this is going to be possible while maintaining my career in my chosen field is quite another question. But I feel like we have to try.
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Up Front: Sex with Parrots, in reply to James Butler,
I'm not even going to go into the fact that we don't assess hetero couples on their probability of happiness before allowing them to marry
That's kind of a key point though. The question of probability of personal fulfillment is so irrelevant to the question of whether someone's relationship should be able to be legally recognised, it falls on the border of "I wouldn't do this, so it's icky". Which isn't actually an argument.
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Up Front: Sex with Parrots, in reply to Emma Hart,
Every one of those articles focuses on traditional, patriarchal polygyny. There's very little in them that's actually relevant to modern Western polyamory. We're not actually talking about having a society where most people are in polygynous relationships, but one where existing polyamorous relationships are allowed legal recognition. And - entirely erased from those articles - some of those polyamorous relationships will be same-sex.
Yeah, that's basically my concern about difficulty: every legal model we have operates in terms of unequal, patriarchal polygyny, which is pretty much useless when developing a legal framework for dealing with multi-person relationships in general. It isn't that you couldn't do it right now, it's a matter of how many tears before bedtime you're willing to deal with while setting all the legal precedents. The best way, I think, would actually be to tear up current marriage and relationship law and reframe it with a two-person relationship being one of the options, but that's something of an enterprise to even get people thinking about.
The most common reason I've heard people give against it (apart from "ew"!, which isn't really a reason. Lots of people say "ew" about same-sex marriage too) is the potential for birth defects.
That's certainly a concern where close-relative marriage is repeated over many generations, though it's a wash in a once-off situation. I think the main reason incest is problematic aside from "ew" and "mutant babies!" is a) most incest will include abuse/power disparity, when it's between generations and b) it puts a lot of pressure on family relationships by introducing a romantic/sexual component that isn't usually there.
Not to mention, of course, that as I understand it it's pretty well psychologically impossible for people who have grown up in a family situation to develop attraction unless other stuff is going on - it was historically, I believe, even a problem for children who were chosen for arranged marriages young and raised in households with their future spouses. That means that there's pretty limited opportunity for consensual, healthy relationships in there - basically only people who have met as adults or teenagers (e.g. adoptees/step-relatives.) And when that scope is so limited, people are going to default to thinking about the most common forms of incest - the abusive and problematic ones.
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Leaving aside the question of whether we should actually legalise multiple marriages, this is a huge, ridiculous, stinking red herring. Why? Well, legislating for multiple marriages is infinitely more complex and ethically challenging than simply removing the gender specifications from a current marriage law.
It’s not a ‘slippery slope’ – it’s a completely different mountain.
Any form of legalised polygamy is definitely one moral issue I'm willing to set aside on the basis of Too Bloody Difficult until we've sorted all the ins and outs of the two-person legal relationship. After all, physicists have had nearly four hundred years and still haven't got a solution. I'd hate to think how long it's going to take lawyers.