Safer Sex and Polyamory, Pt. 1

Life is full of risks.  All sex carries certain risks – chief among them risk of pregnancy, followed by the risk of sexually transmitted infections.  Part one deals with pregnancy, part two, STDs.

Pregnancy is without question the most serious of these potential consequences.  There are few diseases, and no sexually transmitted ones (except perhaps HPV induced cancers) that can change your life as drastically as the addition of a child.  Potential fathers need pay special attention to this warning.  Potential mothers have recourse to plan b, termination, and adoption, all of which can have short and long-term consequences of their own that are very significant.  Men ought to do their part to avoid putting the people they love in a position where they have to choose from a variety of bad outcomes. 

Aside from this, men run a risk of becoming resentful at their partners for their own lack of power over the decision of what to do in the event of an unwanted pregnancy.  Even the most carefully laid contingency plan can be tossed out the window without warning when ladies face the reality of a child, their child, living inside of them.  Regardless of her decision, whether according to previous plans or not, the inequality of power over that decision can lead to serious strife within a relationship.

The effectiveness of birth control is overstated significantly when perfect use statistics are cited.  Typical use statistics represent data collected from consumers in real world conditions, while perfect use statistics are gained using trained personnel, frequently PHD or MD students, in controlled and/or somewhat observed environments.

The most effective forms of birth control are the shot and IUDs.  Their effectiveness in the lab and on the street is identical or nearly so, and they’re more 99% effective.  That means that only 1% of couples, having sex an average of three times a week, will get pregnant within the first year of relying on any of these as their lone form of birth control.

The pill is 99% effective when used perfectly, but there are a lot of ways to make a mistake beyond simply forgetting to take multiple pills.  Additionally, studies have shown that women are most likely to make such a mistake during their fertile periods.  As a result of these and other factors, fully 8% of couples that rely on the birth control pill as their lone form of birth control are pregnant within 1 year.

Condoms are also highly effective when used perfectly.  It is more difficult to explain in kind terms why their typical use effectiveness is only 85%, a mere 10% better than natural family planning/the rhythm method.  Most likely failure to use condoms all together on one or more occasion over the course of the year and undetected breakages (perhaps due to intoxication) make up most of the lost effectiveness.

The hard facts are that 15% of “just condoms” and 8% of “just the pill” end up pregnant.  Combining the pill and condoms, with typical use, results in a pregnancy risk of only 1.2%, nearly as good as the shot or an IUD. 

Within traditional relationships, unwanted pregnancies affect the people responsible for them.  It is even more important in ethical polyamory to take responsible precaution at all times because the consequences of an unwanted pregnancy will reverberate through the poly network, potentially harming the relationships of people who were not directly or indirectly responsible for the pregnancy.  Even the most carefully developed compersive attitude can be strained and overcome by the jealousy potentially occasioned by a child.

To sum up, the ethical practice of polyamory virtually requires two forms of birth control, usually including condom, outside the primary couple pair, for reasons of pregnancy prevention alone.  There is no more serious risk than unwanted pregnancy for the polyamorous individual, and both partners must be responsible for their portion of pregnancy prevention.

Vulnerable No More

Vulnerable No More

“This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

-Laertes to his son Polonius

No relationship model is without its weaknesses.  One inherent problem with polyamory seems to be exposed when you examine the relationships between honesty, intimacy and vulnerability.  Can a person have an intimate relationship, let alone many intimate relationships, when sharing their flawed humanity with someone else poses no threat to their own security of identity?

Melanie Beattie had a smash hit with her 1987 self-help book, Codependent No More, selling 8 million copies, 6 million in the United States.  Codependency is a major flaw of many relationships, and describes a tendency of individuals within a relationship to see their significant other as their sole source of value and identity, believing that their own happiness is derived from another person.  The codependent party generally becomes controlling of the party they hold responsible for their own happiness.  In many ways, this discussion is the flip-side of the codependency coin.

My primary girlfriend and I were talking about the almost religious devotion we have to a doctrine of open and honest communication.  We are honest to ourselves about who we are and what we want.  We take responsibility to provide those things for ourselves.  We communicate that honestly to our partners.  And in my case, I communicate that, as much as possible, to the internet.

In our view, intimacy is the ability to share yourself in all your human imperfection and find acceptance with your partner, and the reciprocation of this.  And it seems clear that the risk of rejection, the vulnerability you stare down when you share yourself with your partner, contributes greatly to the feeling of closeness you get to enjoy after revealing your secrets and finding that your partner still loves you.

Many polyamorists, me included, try very hard to have no secrets.  I strive to share everything with my partner, or anyone who cares to know.  My primary girlfriend pointed out that if all my secrets are already common knowledge, if I am so secure with myself that I’m able to share all of my humanity with whomever should like to see it, I am not taking much of a risk when I share those things with a partner.

Seeing the relationship between vulnerability and intimacy, my primary girlfriend inquired whether we should resolve to keep some openness and honesty just between the two of us. I'm really not sure either way.

On the one hand, intimacy is not only sharing yourself but accepting your partner, and that because my primary partner and I communicate much more than I do with my other partners or with the public at large, quantitatively, we offer more acceptance and therefore intimacy to one another than we find elsewhere.  And because accepting another person for who they are isn’t a binary construct but rather something that occurs by degrees and is communicated in a unique way within each relationship, our intimacy would therefore be qualitatively unique in some respects.

It is true, of course, that a new partner might not accept me, and decide not to see me as a result of something I am.  I’m still vulnerable to rejection.  At the same time, I am secure enough with myself that such judgment or rejection would not threaten my sense of self in any significant way.  If I have no vulnerability in that sense, it may seem like it would be difficult for me to have real intimacy, which in turn would suggest a lack of depth to my intimate relationships.

As a subjective and biased observer of my own relationships, I can tell you that I can’t really tell a difference in the depth of my intimate relationships when comparing my multiple relationships now to one-at-a-time relationships I’ve maintained in the past.  I certainly don’t feel less intimate in my relationships since becoming surer of myself and “less vulnerable”.  But I don’t really know.

What I do know is that I am happily without a codependent relationship at the moment, and would be very pleased to keep it that way, even at the expense of some degree of intimacy.

Animal Farm

“Then again, all you do is fuck random people all day like farm animals or some such thing. I'm far from prude, but the ‘lifestyle’ you engage in is disgusting.”

-Anonymous

Some people feel so threatened by the way I practice loving relationships that they cannot think of what I do as anything more significant than animalistic rutting like you might find on a farm. 

I do not in fact “fuck random people all day long”.  95% of the sex I have is within the context of a committed relationship, with one of my girlfriends, someone I’m dating, or with a friend.  The 5% of sex I enjoy outside such relationships generally occurs at orgies, and even that sex, while perhaps ‘random’, isn’t anonymous.  Responsible casual sex requires the parties to at least be able to contact one another in the event of a STD scare.

Polyamory is not about high volumes of random sex.  It’s about engaging in multiple romantic relationships.  My relationships depend on the same things anyone’s rely upon, like communication, intimacy, and compromise, for their success or failure.

I’m not a prude either.  I don’t like sex negative attitudes.  I don’t like it when people judge other people for consenting behaviors carried out in private.  I think people have restrained their sexuality for too long, and I don’t think that sexual deprivation a good thing.

There are two pretty interesting questions that come out of the author’s comment.

Is monogamy and/or polyamory disgusting? 

I personally don’t think that either mode of dating is inherently disgusting – and I think there’s a lot of room for disgusting behavior in both.  People who find themselves stuck in a co-dependent relationship that is unfulfilling can do some pretty despicable things to one another, manipulate one another, and have a strong incentive to lie to one another in the pursuit of a better sex life or more fulfilling emotional connection.  Polyamorists have to defend against the idea that they’re only in the lifestyle for sex, that they use people as objects, and a pervasive assumption that a lack of exclusivity means a lack of commitment.  None of those criticisms are generally valid, though certainly an individual could personify all of them while claiming to be a polyamorist.

What about this farm animal thing?

This to me is the most interesting comment in the quote.  Because to me, it seems that its monogamists who have the most in common with domesticated animals.  If anything, a polyamorist is more inline with a wild, highly evolved animal like a Bonobo.  Monogamy is an innovation of the agricultural revolution.  There is much evidence to support the idea that the first domesticated animals were human beings.  We settled down into hamlets, tied to the land in much the same way a farm animal is stuck in their barn or pen.  Our political and religious masters turned our sexual habits toward breeding, out of the same motivations for which domesticated animals are bred – to provide more labor, to create more wealth, none, or little of which, was applied to the betterment of the animals (the people) themselves, and most of which was used by the masters to come up with more and better ways to subjugate and train into obedience the subjects of the domestication.

What is polyamory?

What is polyamory?

Polyamory, from the Greek root ‘poly’ (many), and Latin root ‘amor’ (love), describes a mode of practicing relationships wherein the involved individuals are free to pursue loving relationships beyond their primary romantic partner.

In many ways, polyamory is an accurate description for how virtually all people relate to one another.  Anyone with a family is accustomed to loving more than one person at a time, such as siblings or parents.  We love our friends and our neighbors.

Polyamory only becomes controversial when we apply the term to romantic love, a complicated and somewhat poorly understood neurochemical response to interpersonal interaction involving  nerve growth factor, testosterone, estrogen, dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, oxytocin, and vasopressin.

Since the agricultural revolution, most western societies have organized themselves according to patriarchy.  There is strong evidence to support the idea that prior to the agricultural revolution, for most of the evolutionary history of human existence, a more communal and polyamorous attitude dominated human interactions, including romantic relationships.  After the advent of agriculture, western societies became preoccupied with the mechanics of passing land and other acquired wealth from generation to generation – and with this new preoccupation came a massive social shift, away from loving fraternity between members of the tribe or social group towards individualism centered on possessiveness.

This new greed manifested in a social order that protected the transference of property from father to oldest son.  It was at the advent of agriculture that women first became subjugated to men, that feminine sexuality came to be regarded as a commodity to be regulated by men.  Promiscuity was replaced with prudishness.  Women were denied the company of men beyond their masters so that these masters could be sure that their property was passed to a legitimate heir.  Sexual pleasure for women became at best an afterthought, and now the proper scope of sexual activity for a woman was limited to procreative activities.  This desexualization of women reached its apex during the reign of Queen Victoria of England (1837-1901) and the bias against female sexuality is obvious in the social and scientific work of the era, including Darwin's On the Origin of the Species.

For some decades, since the free-love movement of the 1960s, human beings have been critically examining the virtues and shortcomings of the male-centric monogamous relationship model.  Recent scholarship including works like Sex at Dawn have lent a scientific and historical perspective in support of polyamorous relationships to a field that had already been enriched by philosophical and psychological advocates such as the authors of The Ethical Slut.

It is not only possible to practice responsible polyamory, but far preferable.  It is a model that provides far greater security to individuals who are seeking love, acceptance, support, frequent sex, close personal connections, lifetime commitments, stable parenting environments, and virtually every other thing that human beings have generally sought through monogamous relationships.

This blog will examine issues surrounding polyamory.  It will offer relationship advice for those in both open and closed relationships, from a polyamorist’s perspective.  Finally, this blog will advocate for polyamory, a lifestyle choice with nearly universal appeal, both for single people and for people who find themselves in unfulfilling conventional relationships.

I hope you will visit us often.  Write me at patientpolyamorist@gmail.com.

PP