Posts by Max Rose
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Hard News: Friday Music: Full-on First Person, in reply to Tom Semmens,
Mind you the whole Lolita Lana Del Rey meme that seems to be going on right now isn't really to my taste, it is a bit tortured and a little bit pedobear creepy for me.
Projecting, much? I haven't seen the videos yet, so I don't know what she looks like or how she's being marketed, but I do know that the first time I heard Royals it sounded like an amazingly assured pop song. I also know that there had been a huge buzz around that song before any videos came out, and most of the dedicated early fans of her that I knew were women not that much older than her. It's hardly as if they're going for the Humbert Humbert market.
She is a talented teen, no more.
The same could have been said for Frank Sinatra or Mike Oldfield. "Talent" is the operative word, and to have it together with an apparent maturity and assurance at such a young age is just a bonus. I really don't see your problem.
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Hard News: Not good enough, Eden Park, in reply to Angus Robertson,
You can poke the row ahead without being seen, you can direct comments at them without being heard by anyone else – fuck I was doing that shit in assembly at highschool and didn’t get caught and that was a better lit, quieter, less distracting environment.
So you were one of those people in high school. Good to see you're so much more humane, mature and socially aware now.
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Actually, Coley has nailed it in her blog:
I am sick of invites being extended to bigots. Of lip-service thanks to homophobes for their “passion” and “values” and the desire to create spaces where “everyone can have a say”.
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I’m not saying we shouldn’t create discourse, but I am fucking uncomfortable with the constant need to create spaces where bigots are apparently just as welcome as queer people. We already have enough spaces for bigots. It’s called society. -
Up Front: Gathered Together, in reply to Martin Lindberg,
And I really wouldn't want to look.
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Up Front: Gathered Together, in reply to Emma Hart,
Those other people? Fuck those people.
This. I occasionally have some skerrick of sympathy for people who are raised in such repressive and conservative backgrounds that they can't think for themselves. But those who tied themselves up into rhetorical knots to try to pretend their theocratic arrogance and visceral hatred was a matter of logic? They can go fuck themselves.
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Always gay-drink gay-responsibly
Quite right. We don't want anyone bingeing like a bisexual, now, do we?
And imagine the strain of maintaining the cognitive dissonance of continuing to believe they were right when all around them, society fails to fall apart.
When it comes to cognitive dissonance, the Wellingtonista comments are positively Stravinskyesque at the moment.
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Hard News: The mathematics of marriage, in reply to Euan Mason,
I find myself asking whether or not I would be more concerned for one of my children if she became (1) the sole wife with one husband, (2) one of several wives with a single husband, (3) one of several wives with several husbands or (4) the sole wife with many husbands. I think I'd fear more for her harm in situations 2 and 4 than in situations 1 or 3. Power relations are important in any marriage, and it seems more might go wrong for her in situations 2 and 4, where she would be more likely to emerge emotionally scarred.
While I don't know you or your children, I'd like to think that if she entered into any serious relationship, she'd be doing it as a consenting adult and because she loves the person or person involved.
Presumably you reason that if she had multiple male partners, she'd be more at risk from abuse, whereas if she was one of many female partners she'd suffer from divided attention and the stigma of being in a "harem". While I recognise that power in unequal in society, and that most domestic abuse is male-on-female, this seems like a particularly jaundiced view of men, with a tendency to see women primarily as potential victims.
If she were to have a monogamous marriage, I would hope that your joy for her love would far outweigh any small concern you might have about her husband becoming abusive. Do you think that the potential for abuse increases non-linearly with increasing partners? Or that the love and joy does not increase for polyamorous people when they have more lovers? Or perhaps the thought that a single lover might not meet all her needs seems unbecoming for a woman?
In scenario 4, would you trust her not to make this commitment unless she knew what she was doing? Might it be possible that she's quite independent and either doesn't need a lot of time and attention from her husband or finds it outside the marriage? Perhaps she would feel compersion for her husband when he is able to express his love for his other partner(s)? Perhaps those other women provide companionship (sexual or otherwise) for her as well?
Finally, some people such as Sheff suggest that polyamorous groups are better able to cope with breakups than monogamous couples, because they have different expectations and often a wider support network. Sure, there are opportunities for her to "emerge emotionally scarred" from a poly marriage, but there opportunites for such scarring within a traditonal marriage: if she fell in love with someone else when she's expected to be monogamous; if her husband left her; if the two of them evolved into different people who no longer suited each other or went through the slow heat-death of passion into a bitter and unfulfilled old age.
Love always carries the risk of loss. Trust your loved ones to chose that risk.
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Hard News: The mathematics of marriage, in reply to Emma Hart,
Ben, this post of Max's might help, where he runs through a few different kinds of polyamory. For me personally, it's more been polyfidelity, where I've had more than one long-term partner at the same time, and that's the model I've seen most with other people, too.
Emma, I was about to respond to Craig's question ("what about polyfidelity? How practical is it? How challenging is it?"), but your response already covers some of that.
Personally, I'd find strict polyfidelity too limiting: even when I'm in love with one or more people, I still want to feel that there's at least the possibility of other adventures. In reality, when I have been in a longish-term poly relationship (always as the secondary in a V), I haven't usually felt the drive to seek out other affairs. It's the freedom to flirt, and occasionally (within mutually-agreed boundaries) take that further, that I need in addition to more stable love(s). I suspect that a lot of polyamorous relationships are a bit like this: theoretically open, but practically polyfaithful.
Craig's quote from Sheff is interesting:
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.”
I tend to think, "hey, what's wrong with a big free-for-all?", but then I'm an unreconstructed slut at heart. But "free" doesn't mean you don't fall in love, or that you don't consider the feelings of your lovers. My ideal is more along the lines of a broad group of friends, some of whom have had sexual encounters that strengthen community bonds. Some of these become more established partnerships at times, and may become monogamish in practice, but the defining feature is fluidity, and friendship is the most powerful bond rather than the norms of "romantic" love. (Of course, this tends to work best among youngish privileged people without interests in property or children).
That's not to say that jealousy and awkwardness can always be avoided, but I've mostly found that relatively casual sexual encounters among loving friends usually strengthen those friendships. It's what "Sex at Dawn" calls "Socio-Erotic Exchange", but I prefer to call it "Wellington".
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Hard News: The mathematics of marriage, in reply to BenWilson,
I hope I won’t be judged for sharing my time between couch and bed.
My couch is my secondary partner, but I've lingered with it for a while longer than I expected. I've had a chat with my bed, though, and it's fine with that.
Anyway, I've just skimmed that article so far, but this conclusion is worth excerpting at length:
In the act of publicly discarding the yoke of heterosexuality, lesbigay families and communities open other restrictions such as monogamy to scrutiny, creating exactly the slippery slope that opponents of same-sex marriage fear. Only the end of the slope that need concern them is not the extreme fringe of bestiality with which they appear so preoccupied, but rather the far more mundane continuation of changes already in progress—ongoing shifts toward individuality, tolerance of diversity, and gender equality.
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Refusing to change marital laws to reflect the true composition of society damages far more people than would the potential loss of privilege for heterosexual men in patriarchal marriages. In the highly unlikely event that same-sex and poly marriages actually do obliterate monogamous, heterosexual marriage as Kurtz (2003b) claims they will, it will result from the inadequacies of that “traditional” family form, not the “wickedness” of lesbigay and polyamorous families. -
This paper by Elisabeth Sheff would seem to be highly relevant, but it might have to wait until after I've had a monogamous 8-hour relationship with my bed.