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.