Up Front by Emma Hart

Dear Mr McCoskrie,

I'd like to congratulate you on your recent press release, "Where Do Politicians Stand on Polygamy." It's the first thing I've ever seen from you that made any sense. Given you're advocating a position I support, I'd like to make some suggestions that, I feel, would easily improve the clarity and effectiveness of your release. 

To begin with, some small things. I think you'd benefit from consistent use of terminology. You refer to yourself as both "Bob McCoskrie" and "Family First NZ". This could give readers the impression that there was some difference between these two entities. I would suggest sticking to using your name alone, unless you wish to be referred to as Mr First NZ. 

Also, given your obvious aversion to digital investigation, I am having a paper dictionary couriered to your house. Relevant entries are marked with post-its. You seem to be using the terms "polygamy" and "polyamory" interchangeably, and both of them to mean "polygyny". As I'm sure you're aware now you've done some reading, polyamory – loving more than one person – is not currently illegal in New Zealand. Nor, for that matter, is adultery. So advocating legalising polyamory quite simply makes no sense at all, and is the kind of embarrassing error I'm sure you wouldn't want to make in a public forum. 

I understand it might be difficult for you to imagine a woman who would wish to be in a polyandrous relationship. She would, after all, be somewhere between the Slag – all sex, no interest in marriage and just as well – and the Angel of the Hearth – one marriage, sex only for reproductive purposes. Consciously including polyandry in your release, however, would help you avoid the possible appearance of anti-Muslim dog-whistling that appears in your latter paragraphs. 

On to more complex stylistic issues. There are places, much as in any Martin van Beynen column, where it becomes difficult to tell if you're being serious or satirical. I have gone for the former interpretation because otherwise it would appear that you were sneering at "love and commitment" as reasons for marriage, and that would be, well, not just repulsive, but surely unChristian as well. 

Also, if the piece were sarcastic, that would reduce you to your former position that marriage is primarily concerned with reproduction, which is (I hope you'll forgive me saying) obviously ridiculous. It would open you to hyperbolic and absurd arguments, such as advocating that cats be allowed to legally marry each other so they can raise their kittens in a stable and secure environment. And it would be nice if we could have this important debate without irrelevant side issues being dragged in. 

I have to say, what really puzzles me is that you've omitted what should be, from your perspective, the prime argument in favour of legalising polygamous marriages: polygamy is a Christian institution. It's in the Bible. Eliminating polygamy was "redefining marriage", and we know how fervently you're opposed to that. As invested as you are in the Christian model of marriage, and marriage as an unchanging institution, of course you're in favour of polygamy. Have the courage to argue honestly from the basis of your faith. 

One final note of caution. I'm not sure that the context of same-sex marriage equality is the best place to raise this issue. You say the argument has come up in Australia in this context, but that associates you with a number of ridiculous "slippery slope" arguments that are raised in exactly the same way. Child marriage. Dog marriage. Sex with Ducks. Also, as Girl on the Net says: 

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. 

 

And it is, hopefully, a mountain that one day we'll be ready to climb, as a country. I'm very happy to know that, when that day comes, we can count on your support.

For the last two weeks I've been trying to write a follow-up column to my last one, on how we go about moving towards a more sex-positive world. Turns out that once you've typed, "Be the change you want to see in the world," it all gets quite complicated. 

I was raised with my mother's activism. We marched every Hiroshima Day. I went on a bunch of Muldoon-era protests that involved cardboard coffins and street theatre. I did my first radio interview at eight. By the time the Lange government was elected, I was a hardened protest veteran. 

(As an aside, I understand that many people have problems with children being on protest marches. I'd like to suggest those people adopt one of two courses of action. 1/ Offer to babysit for an activist. 2/ STFU. One or the other.) 

These were collective actions, but they happened because of the drive of a few individuals. Phone trees* and placard-making evenings don't just happen. In the pre-internet age, things were pretty simple. If you wanted attention, you had to go and stand outside. 

There was an awful lot of protesting. No so much advocating. That's still true now. I'd rather be positive and constructive, but does that mean ignoring the crap? Or do you speak up even though you know you're giving those idiots more attention? 

Growing up that way, I learned a couple of things. Everyone wants to do the Right Thing. No-one an agree on what that is. Also, you can't vacuum up glitter. 

Take Out to Dinner. What a fabulous idea, and the distilled essence of what I think matters about activism. It's about being able to do something, no matter how small, that can make a real difference to the lives of real people. We don't have to sit on our hands and wait for Society to change. It's something any LGBT ally can do, whether they're connected to a physical-space activist network or not. 

So then I thought about it. I thought about inviting LGBT friends over, and asking them to sit at the same table as people who were "on the fence". And suddenly, when it wasn't an abstract idea, I felt really uncomfortable about putting people through that. 

I mean, I know how much being Out can help. We pay it forward, and also around. We're role models for each other, and we support each other. Everyone who's Out (as LGBT, as asexual, as kinky, as poly, etc) makes it easier for someone else to be. I know my own Typing Activism has helped other people. 

I also know how fucking exhausting it is, and how risky. That risk isn't taken communally, it's individual. And there is no way that I can demand other people expose themselves to that risk: to their jobs, their relationships, their families. To censure and abuse and silent disapproval. To the need to be perfect, because any mistake you make will be seen as a flaw in your entire group. 

There comes a point, though, where if you really believe in something, you have to stop nit-picking and stand up. This Friday is Queer the Night in Wellington. And yes, as an older LGBT person, I have some issues with the word 'queer', but that doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. That slogan, too, really hits home: It doesn't get better until we make it better. It's a simple thing, why not do it? It does make a difference. 

And even if you have problems with the word 'slut', maybe that's not as important as standing up against slut-shaming. There are SlutWalks in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch this year, on the 20^th of May. And yes, I'll be putting my slutty boots where my mouth is and going to the Christchurch walk. 

The 18^th is Pink Shirt Day. And yeah, this used to be specifically about homophobic bullying, and now it's about bullying in general. As Judith Collins' office told Rainbow Wellington, "In terms of homophobic bullying, the Government has made it clear that all forms of bullying in schools are unacceptable." Still, there's nothing to say we can't make it about sexuality-based bullying ourselves. 

The thing is, every action runs the risk of being flawed. But the alternative is to sit around waiting for perfection. As the Out to Dinner video says, between 2010 and 2012, there was a 9% swing in favour of same-sex marriage among the American public. That's huge. Something happened. Not something huge, though. Just hundreds and hundreds of little things. Ordinary people getting married and the sky not falling. Pictures of them smiling and crying in newspapers. People coming out, and turning out to just be people. So many tiny drops of water. 

That's how we get there from here. One drip at a time.

 

*You may need to get someone over thirty to explain this peculiar pre-email practice.

Back when I first started reading feminist bloggage, there was a question I used to see pretty often: the Feminist Utopia Question. Would there be pornography in your feminist utopia? Prostitution? 

As a dirty filthy incrementalist, it always kind of annoyed me. What use was it, without considering the steps along the way? Didn't the very question prioritise ideology over the effects on real people? Wasn't it just, basically, a big pile of intellectual wank? 

Now, though, having been in the game for a while, I'm tempted to give intellectual wankery a try. What would an ideal sex-positive society look like? What would be different, that perhaps is not so obvious? What would have changed along the way? 

Before we begin, a word about what sex positivity is, and ridiculously more to the point, what it isn't. This is my personal interpretation: everyone's will be slightly different. See here, here, and of course the Chocolate Manifesto. 

Sex positivity is not the belief that all people everywhere should have as much dirty dirty sex as possible. The essence of sex positivity is embracing the diversity of human sexuality and gender identity. It's about actively seeking to remove both shame and privilege from particular kinds of sexual activity - or a lack of sexual activity. It's about everyone being able to make the sexual choices that are right for them, free of stigma: having the knowledge and the social freedom to do so. It's about being positive about all sexual choices and the biological bases we make those choices from. And, of course, celebrating the joy of dirty dirty sex. 

For a start, in a Sex-Positive Utopia, the Period Planner app on my phone wouldn't say "love connection". It would say "sex". With no stigma around sex, there'd be no need for euphemism. We wouldn't have to pretend sex was love, or sleep. That wouldn't mean the loss of magnificent figurative language around sex: rather the opposite. We'd have so many more sexual ideas to explore and discuss. 

With the loss of its taboo, sex would actually become less important on a social level. You'd no more use sex to sell a car than you would golf. There'd be no point in policing people's clothing choices, because no-one would care if you were trying to get laid or not. Worried about losing the specialness? Individuals would still be able to create circumstances that made their sexual experiences sacred, or sordid. 

We'd talk openly about sex a lot more, but with less significance. Sexual mores in other times and places would be a simple, matter-of-fact part of History and Social Studies, just like customs of dress and diet. If you were studying Roman History, you'd actually know about this. (Link mildly NSFW - an acronym I wouldn't need in this future.) Sex education would be about sex, not puberty, and focus on the reason most people have most of their sex: pleasure. 

Speaking of school, you know what you wouldn't find there? Gender-based toilets. Having done away with the assumption that absolutely everyone is either male or female and everyone is straight, there is no fucking point in having Girls' Toilets and Boys' Toilets. Ditto changing rooms. And good riddance too, to our earliest introduction to the idea that males and females are mutually-incomprehensible aliens.

Depending on the survey, somewhere between 5 and 15% of people report having experienced same-sex attraction now. Removing the stigma from non-heterosexual sex is hardly going to push that number down. Segregation by gender simply makes no sense at all. 

We are never going to stop passing judgement on each other's relationships. But after the Sexy Revolution, the gender and number of participants and the nature of their sexual practices will be irrelevant. We'll have to stick to judging relationships by the content of their members' character. 

And yes, there would still be prostitution. Good sex is awesome, and not everyone can get as much as they would like, for many reasons. Some people are good at sex and want to make a living from it. In Sex-Pos Wonderland, we could treat those people with the respect they deserve. 

There would still be sexually-explicit imagery. There always has been and there always should be. I just don't know if you still call it "pornography" when it's not stigmatised. 

We would also have a completely different idea of 'masculinity'. Our concept of what it means to be male would bear some resemblance to the men we actually know. We'd finally be free of the Masculinity Box. That doesn't mean automatically rejecting traditionally masculine values. It means including the behaviour and values of all men, until the concept basically becomes meaningless. Having a cock would no longer require or excuse being a cock. 

As a result of all of this, of living in a world free of sexual shame and repression, perhaps the two most significant benefits. One: teenage girls would be allowed to direct their sexual energy into sex, rather than One Direction concerts. There goes the screaming and fainting and incoherent babbling. Two: more people would be having more and better sex. Possibly with screaming and fainting and incoherent babbling. 

Awesome. 

If you have contact with me on Twitter, or at Facebook or The Lady Garden, or you've spoken to me in the last few days, you'll have seen me pimp Emily Dievendorf's HuffPo column on bisexual invisibility. If you haven't, please go and read it now, or the rest of this column of mine will be a complete waste of time for you.

Seriously. I mean now.

Right. I'll admit I'm pushing that so hard because I feel like I could have written it myself – so much so that I did wonder if I had anything left to add. I've ended up writing two* responses to it.

There are obvious differences between Emily and myself. For a start, I'm not the Director of Policy for Equality Michigan talking about feeling excluded from the LGBT community. This still rings very familiar, though:

I'm currently dating a man. I refuse to hide him because being in a relationship with him is part of who I am... I feel like a traitor, I feel like I took the easy way out, I feel like I'm not relating and might, therefore, not be able to represent the queer community. 

I also feel a tiny bit guilty when she says:

Bisexuals are seen as promiscuous, confused, invalid, incapable of monogamy, oversexed, greedy, going through a phase, and on and on...

It might just possibly be true that I'm not doing everything I can in my own life to combat stereotypes about bisexuals. I shouldn't really have to, of course. It should be okay for a few of us to still be dirty slappers.

It should be, but it takes until the second page of the comment threads for a couple of the old tropes to come trotting out.

One, female bisexuals are straight women making out to get attention. And even if they aren't, the fact that straight women will pretend to be bi means that socially, being bi must be awesome-cool. Quite why this argument doesn't also invalidate lesbianism I'm not sure.

And two, some gay men have been left for women by bi men. Therefore all gay men are just sensible to be "cautious" of all bi men. That makes perfect sense, and is in no way bigoted. Just like being scared of all African-American men isn't racist.

But really, being bisexual's just not that big a deal, right? I have a harder time, social-acceptance-wise, being a poly sub. And when I read this:

The stigma, or biphobia, that comes with being bisexual has serious consequences. Bisexuals have higher incidences of depression, suicidal thoughts and attempts, alcohol and drug abuse, and poor physical health in general than their heterosexual, gay and lesbian counterparts... Bisexual women with monosexual partners have an increased rate of domestic violence compared to every other female demographic. Compared to lesbians, bisexual women are twice as likely to live in poverty.

I feel oddly uncomfortable. I mean, I live a pretty good life. I'm not actively discriminated against. I haven't been subject to abuse from my partners... well, okay, that one** time. And yeah, I've been suicidal at a couple of points in my life, but who hasn't? Poverty, physical health... Ha! No drug abuse! Take that, statistics!

Once I got over my discomfort, I started to wonder why. Why, for instance, are bisexual women more likely to be abused by their partners? Why do they have, apparently, such unexpected problems with self-esteem?

Dievendorf argues that it relates to the lack of support bisexuals find in LGBT communities, and the lack of bisexual-specific resources. I'd also argue that the stereotypes of bisexuals are damaging in and of themselves. We're promiscuous, heartless, self-absorbed exhibitionists lacking in empathy and compassion. We're sluts. We're "over-sexed" – a phrase deliciously packed with social conditioning. We are, in short, the women of least value. If you're the kind of man with jealousy issues who needs to control his partner, it's not just men you have to keep away from your bisexual missus, it's everyone. Seriously, the slag could be getting it on with anyone at all. Imagine the strain that places on your average rat-bastard.

On the other hand, we're supposed to be happy. Full of laughs, and probably vodka. We should never have trouble getting laid as much as we want, which as I'm sure you'll be aware is a literal fuckload. We have, after all, the best of both worlds. Right? That pressure to be performatively sexy, there's no way that could ever get you down, right?

The conflict between our stereotype and our statistical reality means that even someone as stroppy as I feels somewhat uncomfortable complaining. I mean, the way the character of Michele makes me uncomfortable, that's just me being over-sensitive, right?  Wait, no, not possible: bisexuals are never over-sensitive. Also, to be honest, I would totally hit that.  

Poor choice of phrase.

 

 

*For very large values of two.

**Four. Those four times. And by 'times' I mean 'partners'.

Recently, I joined a new web community. I don't mean a platform, like Facebook or Twitter, I mean a community, like Public Address. It's been way too long since I was on the other side of the fence, and it's weird over there. When you get an automated welcome email, your first thought probably isn't supposed to be, "Oh, someone doing my job. This is a bit TL:DR, to be honest I'd hack out that whole paragraph..."

My own work-based Issues aside, the thing I find hardest about a new internet community is working out safety. Which of these messages from strangers are appropriate and harmless? Is this a community that's just really friendly, or one that indulges in noob-camping? I've said I'm in a relationship, yet I seem to be getting hit on. I've said I'm only looking for friendship: still appear to be getting hit on. Maybe this isn't actually getting hit on. Maybe it's cultural. I've explicitly said I'm not looking for another relationship: now the messages start, "That's a pity, because..." 

And as we all know, this is what it's like for women on the internet, right? A minefield of alternating (or indeed inextricably mixed) sexual harassment and threats. If we want to do anything more than trade knitting patterns, we're opening ourselves up to abuse. The internet is the Most Dangerous Place. 

Bollocks it is. The internet is, in fact, one of the safest places you can be, and you can tell that by the way people treat it. 

Maybe I'm over-personalising, true. Pretty much everyone who's known me for the last twenty years has found out new stuff about me either here or at The Lady Garden. I've said things I would never say face to face. The reason for that, though, is pretty universal. The net gives you public privacy. 

I can write something, sitting here alone, basically talking to myself. It can be as confessional as I feel like. And then I can post it for, basically, everyone to see. Sometimes, yes, that process is followed by Bloggers' "Oh shit WTF have I done?!" Remorse, but often not. There are so many reasons why I'd rather say something on Twitter than stand up and say it in front of five hundred people in a hall. (Not that I wouldn't do that now, to be fair, but only because I've been warming up on line.) 

On the internet, I don't have to see someone's face when they're listening to what I've said. I don't have to see them accept me as bi, and poly, and then utterly fail to accept me as a sub. (Or any variation on that triple: I've seen them all.) On the internet, they don't get to talk over me when I say things they don't like. If someone chooses to turn away, I've got no idea they've done it. If I feel awkward, and blush, and take ten minutes to put a sentence together because the issue is so intensely personal, nobody can tell. 

On the internet, someone can use a pseudonym and speak in relative safety about being trans*, or a sex worker, or gay in a country where that's an actively-prosecuted crime. And everyone else can have a window into lives we'd never have had a glimpse into out in the "real world". 

I don't want to underplay the down side of the Internet Confessional Experience. I've had mail that made me cry, and as we know I'm largely constructed of cinderblocks and the corpses of adorable puppies. I can only imagine what it's like for people with actual sensitivity. The stalking and harassment and abuse is very real and so is the damage it causes. It doesn't cease to matter just because you can't punch people in the face over the internet. (You can't. Seriously, you can't.) 

Like the dark alley, however, and unlike 'your own home', in general people are hardly under-estimating the dangers of the net. I just had an open conversation about polyamory without getting called a slut, and the internet is the only place I can do that since they closed the Dux. Yes, all the MRAs can get together in their little corner and talk about how they're so pathetic they get beaten up by girls, but all the perverts get their corners too. We call them Safe Spaces, and for some of us they're the only safe spaces we can have if we want to be honest about who and what we are. 

My own points of difference are the kind that can be concealed. My Mild-Mannered Housewife disguise is pretty convincing. Mostly, though, I keep that for the real world. It's the most dangerous place.