Les Liens du Lundi

[highlyeccentric]

Short essays, current affairs, hot takes:

• Dr Phil Metzger, a Scientist On Twitter, talks through the physics of water fountains.
  
• Wilson (the_sidecarist) offers a thread on polyamory (aimed at gay men)
  

  Because so many gays love to post shitty opinions on open relationships and/or polyamory, now I’m going to post some thoughts/takes of my own, as someone who has been in those relationships for 20 years. Thread:

  — Wilson 🏳️‍🌈 (@the_sidecarist) February 21, 2019

  
  
  Something in there doesn't quite sit right with me, but I haven't yet figured out what.
  
• Lucy Fisher (The Times UK) reports that the gatwick drone crisis is believed to be an airport insider's work
  
• The British Library will likely have to suspend public access to the Spare Rib archive as a result of Brexit (EU copyright law will no longer apply to works of unknown authorship).

Longreads - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Hannah McCann and Lucy Nicholls (Inside Story), Gender Troubles, on the boogeyman of 'gender ideology' and disciplinary/ideological divides within feminism:
  

  A more generous reading of both the utopian and the pragmatic politics of many gender theorists could reduce the intensity of the reaction among gender-critical feminists. While gender theorists undermine some of the easier conceptual givens of some earlier feminisms, such as the reality of biological sex, they are not denying that we live in a world where binary ideas shape opportunities and expectations. In the words of original radical feminist Shulamith Firestone, “we are talking about radical change. And though indeed it cannot come all at once, radical goals must be kept in sight at all times.”

  Lived experiences of gender are much messier than any neat theoretical divisions suggest. Rather than hyper-focusing on trans activists as a problem for feminism, feminists could unite pragmatically on specific issues, such as violence, reproductive rights and harassment, around a common ethos such as the reduction of harm. This would not require complete consensus but would focus on real threats to liberation rather than imagined, abstract ones.

  
  I'm a little skeptical of what might be glossed over by 'would not require complete consensus' (who's going to be asked to sacrifice their dignity in the name of pragmatics? Not white cis women), but otherwise, this is a sensible piece.
  
• Gary Pearce (Overland) reviews Jeff Sparrow's 'Trigger Warnings: Political Correctness and the Rise of the Right', and it looks like it might actually be a decent journalistic-historical book on how the right came to position itself as the bastion of free speech. Given the title, I'm skeptical, but... I might give it a shot. I used to like Jeff Sparrow's work.
  
• Fransjohan Praetorius, for The Conversation UK, offers a historical explainer on Conversation camps in the south african (Boer) war.
  
• Sonja Erikanien (University of Edinburgh Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society), On Being, Unquestionably, A Woman (piece on the persecution of Caster Semanya and the regulation of women's sports).
  
• Sarah Kurchak (Far and Wide), 12 Tips for Travelling with Depression. A bit fluffy but much of it rings true for me.
  
• Alexandra (Sugoi.com) interviews Erica Friedman (founder of Ozacu, Yuricon, and ALC publishing) on the genre history of yuri manga. There's a spanish version at below the English, too.
  
• Gay Lynch (Meanjin blog), On Decluttering, Narratives, and Stuff.
  

  Raised in a peripatetic family that moved every two years from one old, stone, bank premise to another, we were adept at fast transitions. We arranged the same furniture, pictures, ornaments and vases in the new space and added fresh flowers. Within two days of arrival our living space signified our ongoing family identity, one that relied on heritage and the slow accretion of material things by annual gift giving. I might interpret Mother’s dedication to cherishing her material world as a longing for her widowed mother, eight hours drive away, and the aesthetic values she had instilled. In each of our homes, she set up a realizable world that worked, a metonym for her childhood home, adding nostalgic objects that triggered memories of her exile in various Australian country towns.
  [...]
  This essay is not, however, just about decluttering, but the relieved gasp of a second-generation, hard core, collector-conservator, whose documentation of history had enslaved her body and crushed her spirit. How did this happen? Like Stewart, I believed that collected historical objects, including ephemera—theatre tickets, launch invitations, school reports—became ‘a mode of knowledge’ that was more than a hobby because I taught history and restored houses (161). My need to conserve and supplement, then display historical items became close to pathological and it generated work for which I had little time, outside teaching loads and unpaid farm labour.

Items of practical interest:

• Judy at The Woks of Life has a piece on how to set up a steamer which finally made sense of steamers for me! Including how to use them to reheat food, which I expect will be very useful to me in Japan.

I have a LOT more links stored, but I think I'll put them off to Thursday, spare your reading lists.

Read anything cool on The Internets lately, folks?

Comments

[kaberett]

THOUGHTS ON THAT TWITTER THREAD before I get any further (since you said things don't quite sit right)

5. Conflating "policing what someone is allowed to feel" with "monogamy" is some bullshit; people are (on this topic as so many others) allowed to feel whatever they feel; "monogamy" is an agreement to a particular set of behaviours, and does not inherently involve anything about What Feelings Are Permissible.

6. No, your partner doesn't owe you anything simply because they're your partner, but at the point at which fidelity has been agreed e.g. they... owe you EITHER honouring that agreement OR signalling, clearly and unambiguously, that they are no longer going to do so. (This is important because of e.g. knock-on effects on the ability to give informed consent.) My partner doesn't owe me shit, and also it's actually okay for me to want their actions to coincide with their stated intentions.

7ish. I think there's also some conflation of ideas around, mm, the ability to grant permission vs negotiation. I don't get to dictate to my partners where they spend their time and energy; however, a relationship in which I don't get to ask how much time and energy they're intending to spend on me, so I can budget reciprocally, is not a relationship that's going to work for me. "In order for outlay of effort/emotional energy/etc to be sustainable for me in ways XYZ, I would need ABC from you. Are those things you're willing to do/provide? If not, what do you want this to look like?" isn't inherently dictatorial or bad or wrong.

10. No, actually, my partner getting another partner doesn't necessarily "add to" my relationship with them. Unless we're treating "increased risk of being lied to" and "reduced emotional intimacy" as "additions", which I'm not inclined to. (Specifically: at the point at which A & I both started dating someone else, who'd been a longstanding if occasionally fraught friend of mine, A's willingness to act as a sounding board about my feelings about said third party abruptly evaporated. This is fair! It's reasonable! But he's somebody I trust to help me sort through things, who prior to that point had been willing to help me sort through this manner of thing, and I categorically do not view the abrupt absence as "an addition". Similarly, histories of trauma mean that A is... genuinely most likely to substantively fuck up communication with me, up to and including lying in response to a direct yes-or-no question though that's only happened once and we sorted it out, where said communications relate to his interactions with other partners. Again, I am... struggling to see how "actively fucks up communications" constitutes an implied-positive "addition" to my relationship.)


I think there are good points! And I think the follow-up thread gets a bit into some of the issues I'm raising above. I just also think some of them don't... quite land.

[kaberett]

... okay scratch that I just got to "It's unhealthy to *need* someone. To want them, to love them, to enjoy their company? Absolutely. But if you need your partner to function and to feel okay with the world, that's not healthy." and WE ARE AN INTERDEPENDENT SOCIAL SPECIES AND I AM DISABLED. (And the nature of my care needs means that a lot of them are, in fact, best met by a partner, and HEY LOOK AT THAT this is something I negotiate up-front.)

[kaberett]

tl;dr I'm not healthy and that's (i) not a moral failing and (ii) not necessarily fixable. actually.

[highlyeccentric]

ahhh yeah that one is a nest of worms that I try not to engage with from any direction - I've had people straight up tell me that polyamory is, ipso facto, ableist, because people have care needs (me:... no one said YOU needed to be polyamorous, my pal?), and then there's the 'no one shall ever need anything from anyone' camp and i rarely see anyone have a sensible conversation about it, so I've trained myself to glide over if at all possible

[kaberett]

ha, fair!

[highlyeccentric]

Which is not to say I haven’t seen individuals talk sensibly about their *own* relationships in that context (eg, you) but I’m very wary of abstracted principles in this light.

[kaberett]

Yep, I have a lot of sympathy with this position. I think the way I'm doing it... needs a lot of careful thought and attention to detail, and is difficult to communicate concisely, hence my grump about the author's attempt. ;)

[highlyeccentric]

5. Point! Also plenty of polyamorists would really like to mandate how their partners and metamours feel.

6, the 'owe' part, is definitely where I was coming unstuck. I have... screwed up a lot, hurt both myself and others, by the false chain of logic 'they don't owe > ergo i can't expect...'. I think polyamory rhetoric often reinforces that poor logic, rather than clearing it up. I also think what the poster was TRYING to say was that 'there is no universal set of doctrines on what A Boyfriend Owes A Hypothetical Partner', if his problem is with people knee-jerk reacting to the fact of open relationships.

7. huhhh... yes.

10. FAIR POINT

[kaberett]

<3

[kaberett]

Like re 6, at this point A & I won't... object if people describe us as "primary partners"? But also we won't... actually reach for that designation ourselves, and won't be entirely comfortable with it, in large part because it does have connotations of off-the-rack-ness, of "this is what a boyfriend does", where actually we've... ended up owning a house together, and we've ended up at a place where we routinely prioritise each other and where if we're in different places (for reasons other than one of us having a date with someone else!) when we go to sleep we routinely call and chat about our days for a bit and say goodnight, but we've explicitly negotiated as much of it as we possibly could, and when we run into assumptions we're making that haven't been negotiated we try to Fix That. So, yes, I have a lot of sympathy with the underlying point; I think it was poorly phrased, though, and I get A Bit Particular about being Precise on this and adjacent topics. >_> (This is actually something we had cause to discuss recently, ha.)

(& it always feels weird saying this kind of thing in public because of the implication that I do think other people off-the-rack their relationships by default, which isn't actually the case. I just... am very aware that I do a kind of atypical amount of Talking, and am similarly v aware from advice columns and observing e.g. r/relationships et cet that a lot of people do enter relationships with a whooooooooole bunch of assumptions about What Dating Means Then that just never get discussed until a mismatch blows up and hurts everyone...)

[highlyeccentric]

I get A Bit Particular about being Precise on this and adjacent topics. >_> (This is actually something we had cause to discuss recently, ha.)

Recent Discussions are absolutely related to why this thread bothered me so much, as I'm sure you can guess.

I have, for the past ... oh, let's say six years, had a conceptual trouble wherein the things *I* think of as primary in a "primary partner" are in no way akin to what most polyamorous people think of as primary-ness (in fact much more like what a monogamous not-moving-in-together-yet couple might look like). Generally hasn't been a problem between me and my actual partners, but dealing with other people? WEIRD.

And then, I'm now thinking perhaps I want, or should at least consider, something *more like* what most people think of as a primary partnership, and... i don't know, but the whole tone of this thread seemed like a 'don't even fucking bother'

[meneltarma]

Aside the content of the thread of self: so that's where Wilson got to. I followed him a decade ago and then he vanished. I ... have some disagreements about his take on polyamory as a poly-romantic person and I think he's seriously misrepresenting the DC-area specific (we both live here) complaint of "why are all the gays poly" if you are a monogamous person on a dating app looking for a single partner to date because you are VASTLY out-ratioed and it isn't bitterness, it's a literally empty fishpond when 7/10 of bi or queer matches that come up for you will be someone looking for a secondary, and you're looking to be someone's primary or only partner. That's both a literal question: why is the dating scene so small? Where do I go instead? And a legitimate frustration: where are all the single queers? How the HELL do I meet them if they aren't around?

I want to chew on the thread and linked thread and come back to it to make sure I am understand his other points correctly, but... I strongly suspect my sense of being in a matrix of mutually supportive and loving relationships is specific and unique to /both me and my partner being ace-spectrum/ (but then again, the changes in the definition of being ace make me grumpy) and how, then, I have and choose to define concepts like "fidelity", "being honest", "commitment", and even "romantic feelings" and "romantic friendship". In the MOST EXPANSIVE sense of my network of relationships, my biological sister does as much labor-in-the-caring-of-me (and we, my husband and I, of her) as a romantic partner, and Gchat's canned auto-answers clearly indicate the algorithm thinks we're dating, it's indistinguishable from the exterior except that we're siblings.

[highlyeccentric]

Re: demographics... hmm. I think the fact that there’s a demographic skew in that particular place toward polyamory doesn’t necessarily invalidate his criticism of the method and tone used to complain. In places where the balance goes the other way, polyamorous people who complain that all their tindr matches are monogamists get a certain amount of leeway for venting but then get rightly pulled up: you’re not entitled to someone just because tindr matched you, and you need to do the work to find your own target market, not sit around whining about how dare the monogamists.

I remain genuinely surprised that there’s so little overlap between polyamorous discussions and ace community ones. I had a sense that there was a lot of recognized common ground, about a decade ago, but the two conversations now seem to be happening on completely different planets. I know individuals in the venn overlap, but the meta conversations seem utterly divorced. And when they do bump into each other the results seem more hostile than productive. (I have learned, for instance, to be very cautious discussing polyamory around people who id as demisexual - the odds of being castigated as sex-driven and unable to understand any of their experiences are WAY higher than I would have expected.)

[kaberett]

(there are Many Reasons I don't ID as demisexual)

[meneltarma]

I could unroll a LONG list of complaints on Ace DiscourseTM (I HELPED COIN DEMISEXUALITY, THANKS EVER SO) saying that polyamory is anti-demisexuality and All About Sex and how can you be poly without sex, What Makes It Poly Then, but it's 100% of the time a rhetorical question.

One place where I strongly disagree with the_sidecarist is that polyamory or being unable to maintain multiple romantic attractions at once is some kind of "choice"; that anyone can "choose" either poly or monogamy; that it is not hard-wired and encoded how we feel attraction (however we are defining attraction) even at the basic level of "can I feel it con-currently for more than one person or is it exclusively felt for one person alone when I experience it". Obviously, some people cannot/do not feel it ever. Some people feel it often. I feel it very rarely, exclusively limited to a very small subset of types of people and people with whom I have a pre-existing relationship and relationship dynamic.

I have tried to fall in love with someone. I was not successful. I have tried not to love someone. It also was not successful. I don't particularly like terms like metamors or polycules (they don't describe my relationship matrices) but one of my main emotional partners is someone I failed to fall out of love with when he got married; that's fine, we are fine, we are now in a romantic friendship that will stay an extremely intense romantic friendship. It doesn't map well onto pre-existing poly terminology; I love other people a lot, but have a set of core reasons my spouse is my primary partner who gets first priority in decisions and how I spend my time. ALL OTHER PEOPLE ARE NECESSARY IN SOME WAY. MANY ARE NOT ROMANTIC. Some I am attracted to. Some I do not have an attraction-based relationship with but they'd traditionally try and be wedged awkwardly in a "polycule" despite my self-declaration they fit better as family.

There's more I want to unpack, about entitlement, dating, and the idea monosexual people are bitter and resentful about polyamory and probably sticks in the mud who should try it like a kink they don't know if they'll like yet or not, but I think that's my big hang-up with the conceit described there: I think it's hard-wiring, with some social influences, not a kink you can turn on or off. It changes, because sexuality is fluid, but ... this one, totally divorced of shame, seems really hardwired to into people the way gender attraction is hardwired into people with a firmer sense of gender than me. (I mean, I could, at length, describe the pattern of my attractions, there IS a pattern, but not now.)

[olivermoss]

The article on Brexit effecting copyright was interesting.

[highlyeccentric]

Wasn’t it just

I was talking to my Dad and he was baffled: ‘why can’t they just pass a law that says everything happens the way it used to until they sort it out’. Because, Dad, no one has actually assessed how much of ‘everything’ is at stake

[olivermoss]

Even as on outsider who has lost track of all the ins and outs, it seems to me that the effects reach into just about everything.

I'm really sorry all that is happening.

[greghousesgf]

Poly relationships aren't for everybody but they work just fine for many people as long as everybody involved is honest and not doing anything they really don't want to.

[highlyeccentric]

Yes thank you captain trite platitudes. There are actually issues of ethics and praxis at stake in how we talk about polyamory, and how polyamorous people represent ourselves to monogamous people. If you look at the other comments to this post you’ll see polyamorous folk, myself included, having an insider perspective discussion about what we prioritize in relationships and how we talk about that.

[greghousesgf]

was that really necessary?

[highlyeccentric]

Was yours?