The Invention of Free Love
aeon.co
aeon.co
To me as a late-30s person with no intention to reproduce, that seems a little like: damned if you do, damned if you don't. And, it leaves me wondering if I've missed out by not pursuing this free love thing.
What I'm hearing from the parent comment is that they're weighing positives and negatives of focusing on commitment vs focusing on freedom, respectively, in different situations.
Maybe I'm weird, or doing it wrong, but in my life so far, I just don't see a real tie between romantic relationships and those familial/aging/life responsibilities. My partner and I each have our webs of responsibilities; the edge between us goes both ways, and I can't see how it being labelled "romantic partner" has any bearing on the rest of the web. Sometimes that edge makes dealing with a particular family situation easier, sometimes it doesn't. I don't think it's even possible to say whether there's any net effect, since of course there's more to it than this, and the experiment only gets run once.
There are two straightforward contributors to younger people being more interested in that sort of romantic fluidity: hormones and energy.
I think when practiced mindfully, this kind of relationship structure is really powerful. You don't have to go through things alone or with only one other person who'll always truly have your back.
I don't want to idealize it: polyamory is hard work, without which it becomes a toxic dumpsterfire shitshow. Being able to have a tight knit community like this and maintain it for years is tough, and requires lots of patience, honesty, vulnerability and mindfulness. But it's gone a long way towards showing me how flimsy the traditional family structure in the West can be -- particularly for those of us who have complicated relationships with the families we were born into.
This seems remarkably high. Is this including "cheating", the very name of which implies it's not considered ok?
> A YouGov poll of more than 23,000 Americans finds that about a quarter (25%) of Americans say they would be interested in having an open relationship.
https://today.yougov.com/topics/society/articles-reports/202...
"On a scale where 0 is completely monogamous and 6 is completely non-monogamous, how would you describe your current relationship?"
The results were:
0 (completely monogamous) 71%
1 4%
2 3%
3 4%
4 5%
5 2%
6 5%
Not sure 6%
* Occasionally kisses other people
* OK with oneself and SO dancing with other people with physical contact
* One of the members of the partnership does some form of sex work (including phone-sex operator, webcam peformer, exotic dancer, etc)
* Occasional threesomes
None of these would be monogamous by some definition, but some would consider these different from a style of nommonogamy where someone dates entirely separately from their partner(s)
No ring, no alimony and no child support has free love written all over it in the 21st century.
Its obvious that it takes a lot of synergy nowadays to not be a statistic :)
For most of us, I think it's generally accepted that unless both parties explicitly say they want to be in a relationship, they aren't in one. Sex by itself means nothing with regard to the actual status of the relationship.
I and a lot of my friends have been in/are in open or semi-open relationships.
- G.K. Chesterton
Currently reading Sex, Sin and Zen by Brad Warner, which offers a (westerner's) take on the relationships between sexuality and Buddhism, which I'm finding fascinating.
IIRC there were also indigenous American cultures that had nonmonogamous marriage/relationship structures but I don't have a source for that off hand.
And Christian European to boot. Take: "But for centuries in Europe, nobody openly defended, and few dared to imagine the possibility of, greater sexual freedom for both men and women; and no one discussed alternative sorts of relationships. There was one exception: a few authors defended male polygamy, as sanctioned in the Bible."
I know very little about the Iberian peninsula under Islamic rule, but reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abd_al-Rahman_III with "His natural hair was described as being reddish-blond, and he apparently wished to avoid looking like a Visigoth (from many European concubines in his ancestry), desiring to look more like an Umayyad Arab." makes me pretty certain that that non-monogamous {wife + concubine(s)} was established in that part of Europe.
"Polygyny , Concubinage, and the Social Lives of Women in Viking-Age Scandinavia" byt Ben Raffield, Neil Price, and Mark Collard at https://www.brepolsonline.net/doi/pdf/10.1484/J.VMS.5.114355 also points out evidence for multiple wives and concubines in Scandinavia. And it adds "it is estimated that 85 per cent of societies in the anthropological record have practised some degree of polygyny, and many societies around the world continue to do so today".
Or cultures with more polygyny tend towards sexual dimorphism?
Or is this a meaningless correlation?
How is this supposed to explain why the early Latter Day Saint movement were polygamous when they were from the same genetic population as other white Americans in western New York?
Or how Muslim Iberia maintained polygamous traditions despite an increasing genetic contribution from monogamous Christian Europe?
Or how Norse monogamy appears to have increased after the introduction of Christianity, even among the same genetic population?
Or how non-monogamous relationships are increasing in the US even after only 20 years? That's too fast to be caused by a change in population genetics.
Simply put, I don't see how your claim makes any sense. What sources did you use to come to your conclusion?
Here's what I think is the Milton reference, https://archive.org/details/atreatiseonchri00miltgoog/page/n... .
> or it is said, Deut. xxiii. 2. a bastard shall not enter into the congregation qf Jehovah, even to his tenth generation. Either therefore polygamy is a true marriage,* or all children born in that state are spurious; which would include the whole race of Jacob, the twelve holy tribes chosen by God. But as such an assertion would be absurd in the extreme, not to say impious, and as it is the height of injustice, as well as an example of most dangerous tendency in religion, to account as sin what is not such in reality;"
His more in-depth discussion starts at https://archive.org/details/atreatiseonchri00miltgoog/page/n... , investigating each of the relevant verses from the Bible which the Church used to inform its prohibition.
(Note that while Milton died in 1674, the manuscript wasn't found until 1823, well after "Free love was invented in 1792".)
There isn't much about "his German contemporary Johann Leyser" in English, though I've verified that he was a public proponent of polygamy by reading the German Wikipedia entry at https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Leyser .
Further, "Western Polygamy? Some Reflections on Witte’s new book" By Rafael Domingo at https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/55608020/Wittes_On_Pol... comments:
> Witte analyzes the writings of John Milton, Gilbert Burnet, Johann Leyser, Martin Madan, and others who argued that the Bible allowed for polygamy alongside monogamy.
These are not free love nor polyamory.
Some interesting intentional communities and wild social experiments came out of this. See:
Oneida stirpiculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneida_stirpiculture
Oneida Community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneida_Community
> Oneida was formerly known as Oneida Depot. In the nineteenth century its residents were among the closest neighbors to a utopian socialist commune, set up by John Humphrey Noyes, lasting from 1848 until 1881. This commune, called the Oneida Community, produced silk and canned goods until the manufacturing of flatware picked up in the later years of the Community's existence. This would lead to the foundation of Oneida Limited, a company which survived the Community and became one of America's most important flatware producers in the twentieth century.
Another intentional community, Temple of the People, was established late in 1898, also in New York like Oneida. They were not based on free love, but on Theosophy. They did have similar notions about unconditional love in a Christian brotherhood sort of way. They moved to Halcyon, California, in 1903. John Varian raised his family here, including the famous set of engineers, Russell and Sigurd Varian, whose inventions are often credited with establishing Silicon Valley.
[1] https://www.polyphilia.blog/home/polyamory-is-not-cheating
Inventing "multi-partners families" is a way to re-create the old family model with enough young and enough not too old to help the elders and the children while still ensuring a reasonably free and productive life to anyone "in the family".
It's hard to agree ourselves also in two, in more it's even harder, convincing people to a new social model it's equally harder, but probably certain trends are a potential partial answer to such demographic problems that summed to others might "solve enough" for the not-so-far future...
Countries that depend on children caps also generally see sex-selective abortion, because generally in most marriage customs the man is favored over the woman and no one wants to be unfavored. (Interestingly, as regulations have eased and also with both increased gender mobility in general and the current lopsided situation favoring women, the sex ratio is starting to swing back in China.)
If anything, lopsided sex ratios are even more dangerous, because revolutions do often get started by young, restless men.
Not that I particularly support such a policy. It appears that a country becoming richer and more educated automatically reduces population growth, to the point where the classic Western countries tend to have mostly stable populations. I don't see multi-partner families being a significant part of the solution for large population numbers.
They might be a solution to allow fast population shrinking, since they offer enough free and productive life to those in a productive age inside the family.
Women have their own interests and their highest interest is that the man stays with her, to help her care for their offspring.
For men, it's obviously advantageous to go around knocking up as many women as possible without having the burden to raise and support those children.
Citation needed. My wife would like to disagree.
Interesting to see the term child-begeter, reminds me of the _breeder_ trope. If you always expect people to find new ways to convince others to have sex with them, you will never be surprised again.
I think COVID and monkeypox epidemics show free love is a backwards way of thinking.
In a globalized world, disease can spread faster than our ability to make cures.
“The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous.” ― G.K. Chesterton
“I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. The supporters of this system claimed that it embodied the meaning - the Christian meaning, they insisted - of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever.” ― Aldous Huxley, "Ends and Means"
Whenever you meet someone promoting free love, look at whether they struggle with sex addiction or guilt over having done something sexually illicit. Margaret Mead serves as another example, now known for her fraudulent studies of Samoan sex life in which she claimed that free love is the state of nature. It turns out that Mead, too, had been having an adulterous affair.
What a heap of tosh.
Thankfully it’s the twenty first century, adults are free to enjoy their sex lives how they want without having to endure these puritanical cliches.
What those ethical responsibilities might be varies, of course, and it shouldn't be a surprise when people's specific related advocacies might be consistent with their behavior.
I'm all for discussing the merits of monogamous vs non-monogamous conduct or other sexual ethics, but I have little respect for people who seem to be primarily orient their discussion around supposed moral corruption of people who have openly endorsed non-monogamy, especially given how many who have ostensibly endorsed monogamy can similarly provide us with examples of "struggle with sex addiction or guilt over having done something sexually illicit."
There is not much in the way of evidence or argument that the line between good and evil runs neatly down the middle of this debate.
As I understand it, the GP was suggesting that people tend to define the nature of that restraint and those ethical responsibilities around their behavior rather than conforming their behavior to them. That’s not a controversial statement as people tend to rationalize their own behavior to justify themselves in all manners of behavior. Therefore the GP is suggesting that anyone investigating sexual ethics to analyze the lives of who they’re listening to lest they become embroiled in the self justifications of others instead of sober reasoning.
I’d also recommend to be suspicious of oneself around one’s own self-justifications and underlying motivations because we’re all prone to this.
When someone advocates for a given ethical standard that permits their activities, how would you tell the difference between:
* post-hoc rationalized personal behavior
and
* real conviction in principles guiding their behavior
Personally, I start with whether they recognize any obligations/responsibilities, and my experience is that people do this across a spectrum of social outlooks. They construct the obligations differently -- there is reason to believe that people actually believe different things -- but there's no outlook on this topic that I've found corresponds to self-justification more than any other.
Rationalization's twin self-deception is nevertheless usually a worthwhile topic. But there's some good reason to suspect monogamists are not exactly in a superior position.
Well, there’s no infallible way to tell but it would pay to give extra careful critical attention to an ethical principle if that principle is extremely convenient to the lifestyle choices or proclivities of those proposing it or to oneself. Another good hint that something is self-justification or at least some kind of distortion is if there is no requirement for sacrifice, or no responsibility for the consequences, or no acknowledgment of any negative consequences. I.e. if you’re not being asked to give up/take on something you’d really rather not, and especially if you’re being told there’re no costs to these actions then be very suspicious.
Just wanted to point out that while the Bible depicts a lot of polygamy, that depiction is not ever given explicit approbation. While polygamy is never banned or explicitly labeled wrong (a fact that many evangelicals are unaware of and get very squirmy about when they encounter it), it is also never praised or labeled as a good thing. Most of the stories featuring it end in agony and tears (Jacob, Leah, Rachel, and the handmaidens produce a lot of offspring, but boy does it sound like an awful environment as depicted).
Finally, in the New Testament, you get Jesus explicitly calling out "one man, one woman" as the intended design for marriage (Matthew 19:4-6):
"'Haven’t you read,' he replied, 'that at the beginning the Creator "made them male and female," and said, "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh"? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.'"
So, while not as clear-cut as the average evangelical would like, still fairly consistent.
Not trying to throw shade - legitimately curious why they all seem to fit into this category. It's not clear to me if polyamory allows them easier access to sex than monogamy or something - it certainly does't seem to get them access to partners that would be out-of-reach otherwise, as most polyamorous groups seem to be within a relatively similar attractiveness band.