Coming out as polyamorous is hard

Grr, I had a lot more written on this but my browser ate my post...

So I was going to ignore large parts of this thread - specifically this:
It's unrealistic to expect your partner to be the perfect romantic partner, sex partner, wife, mother, financial partner, etc. Polyamory helps you find people who meet various needs. You can have one person who's an ideal sex partner and another person who is an ideal mother.
Along with some other replies that I'm not even going to dignify their misogyny with a quote, because honestly the attitudes in them make me sad. I realize much of the world compartmentalizes and objectifies their partners, I've been guilty of it (or at least unsucessfully tried to do it ) myself. But so many of these comments just don't seem to see partners or potential partners as people, first, and that... we're sitting here on a board dedicated to relating with people in a way that breaks society's rules and has the chance to let us build ways of existing with other people that are braver and more vulnerable and more honest than most people ever even get to think about being... and yet we're sitting here bringing those same monogamous patterns and attitudes into it and that's frankly wildly depressing.

Hell, even notorious-for-his-failures guru Franklin Veaux managed to figure out not doing THAT, or at least talking a good game about it (quoted slightly out of order to make a point):
The tacit view of a partner as a need fulfillment machine explains the way people often deal with problems in a relationship. Many relationships are predicated on the notion that if Alice is involved with Bob, and Bob needs something (particularly if Bob has an emotional need), it is perfectly acceptable for Bob to not only ask for it from Alice but to demand it–and pitch a fit if he doesn’t get it.

The need-based argument for poly (“one person can’t really meet all my needs, so I have more than one!”) is a direct statement of the notion that partners are need fulfillment machines. It assumes as a subtext that getting someone to meet your needs for you is the entire purpose of a romantic relationship, and if one romantic relationship isn’t enough, you turn to more than one...

...it does seem that adults who see members of the opposite sex as The Other also seem more likely to treat their partners as need fulfillment machines than adults who don’t. Bookstore shelves are groaning under the weight of books that try to paint members of the opposite sex as The Other, some strange alien that you interface with in order to get your needs met, but who aren’t really fully individuated human beings.

It seems obvious to me how a partner who is treated as a human being rather than a need fulfillment machine is still valuable even if one’s needs aren’t currently being serviced, but it also feels to me like this is something of a minority opinion.

Maybe I'm just too much of an idealist - after all, who I fuck isn't intrinsically radical (I know I link a lot of things, but that one's particularly good) - but maybe I thought that if we could break the chains in one area it would at least make us THINK about how we might break them elsewhere.
 
and yet we're sitting here bringing those same monogamous patterns and attitudes into it and that's frankly wildly depressing.

Maybe it’s not monogamous attitudes. But just Human attitudes. Y’all act like objectification is some sort of thing people can escape. Y’all be in denial, women objectify to. I don’t get why a small group of idealists on a forum should get to drive out every human behavior they don’t like and say it’s not polyamory.

Idk why women can talk about wanting big dicks round here but men get chastised for wanting tight kitty. Double standards y’all.

People are people and will bring there baggage into poly too. Poly only means multiple loves. It doesn’t have to mean you gotta be woke about kink, feminism, LGBQ, trans, and whatever else. That’s just politics.
 
I don’t get why a small group of idealists on a forum should get to drive out every human behavior they don’t like and say it’s not polyamory.
:🤷: no one's driving out anyone, you're still here talking about it. I'm just disagreeing.

Idk why women can talk about wanting big dicks round here but men get chastised for wanting tight kitty. Double standards y’all.
Haven't observed anyone doing either, tbh. Unless that was your theory in wanting your partners to be monogamous to you? If so, it's pretty off-base to the way bodies actually work...

People are people and will bring there baggage into poly too. Poly only means multiple loves. It doesn’t have to mean you gotta be woke about kink, feminism, LGBQ, trans, and whatever else. That’s just politics.
People have baggage, sure, though I think cultural attitudes and "baggage" are two different things. I'm not sure that working on that baggage has ANYTHING to do with "wokeness", as you put it... and if you think that cultural attitudes ARE baggage, why would one not want to put that down.

But multiple loves does require *love*. I'm not completely against objectification, in all cases - after all, I can appreciate how my partners look and and enjoy it when they are attracted to me, even enjoy some level of being an object (I've written about objectification as part of a BDSM dynamic here repeatedly). But if *all I am* is a source of physical gratification to them, that's not love. If they're assuming I act certain ways or think certain things based on my gender or my genetics alone, that's not love. If my partner is trying to control my other relationships or enforce the lack thereof...well, you get the idea.
 
Y’all already banned someone who was talking in this thread yo. Don’t play dumb.
That wasn't "driven out" it was banned. Bans come about when people do not adhere to the community guidelines. That was an administrative decision after review of general post history. Please do not confuse civil debate with deliberate flaming and/or antagonistic posting.
 
Back to what we were talking about before someone with an apparently fake accent started trying to stir up trouble...

I'd like to add to the discussion about whether humans are hardwired to be promiscuous. Sex at Dawn does not address polyamory, it addresses promiscuity, multiple SEX partners. Love is a separate issue. Multiple sex partnerships happen in most/all of the animal kingdom. Er, queendom. Um... Never mind. It happens with animals. DNA work is proving this, even in certain types of animals thought to mate for life.

So, humans, being animals, will crave multiple sex partners, unless they are not interested in sex at all, or so minimally as to be about the same thing. Breeding with multiple sex partners is good for a species. Mutts are stronger than purebreds. "Noble" humans who breed in a fairly small group (Tutankhamen married his full sister) are thought to be more prone to issues caused by inbreeding, just as purebred dogs, cats or horses are.

We can say humans can somehow rise above our animal natures, but repressions will emerge in different ways. Peppers aside, we are intrinsically made a certain way, beyond our ability to choose. BTW, the idea someone chooses to be queer is a bit upsetting to me. Most queers are born this way, baby.

Final point, don't just depend on Sex at Dawn for information about mating practices and power struggles. I don't want anyone to think I've come up with my ideas based on this one book. On the contrary, I have read extensively about a time pre-"civilization," a time when the Great God was thought of as female. There is plenty of evidence of this all over the world. And if the Great God was a woman, it stands to reason actual women had more power, just as now (meaning about the past 5000 years to the present) the greatest gods were and are men, and men are in power.

Look up the Minoan civilization on Crete. Look up Asherah, Isis, Brigid, Ashteroth, Astarte, Lilith, Inanna. (Most people have never heard of these goddesses. Islam named them demons, satanic.) Go back to the earliest days of Assyrian culture. As for sex practices in religion, look to 1700 years ago, 300 in the current era, just before paganism was vanquished by Constantinian Christianity. It's not that long ago, yet goddesses were still powerful, Greek goddesses such as Aphrodite and Athena. Look into the Roman goddess Cybele. Her priests castrated themselves and wore female clothing and hair styles. Perhaps we'd call them transwomen today, but formerly, the Goddess had female priests. Just as male doctors took over the female realm of birthing from midwives, so men took over the role of being the Goddess's priestesses.

There was a time when women could have multiple sex partners with no adverse consequences. Women now are gaining more power and thereby gaining the ability to have multiple sex (or romantic love) partners. Modern polyamory is being born because women are making it happen.
 
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my polyamory is a choice to love who I love unapologetically and without constraint. I don't need it to be justified by some "natural" instinct.


Preach it, sister!
 
Psychology of any day! Lobotomy, shock therapy. The field has always been a disaster.
Modern shock therapy saved one of my family member's life.

Also, your PUA community is strongly built on psychology. Don't risk cherry picking the bits you agree with.
 
Don’t pretend the field hasn’t left devastation in it’s wake.


Please show the class where exactly this has been stated. And you will need to show your work.

Because I for one have been over this thread numerous times and not one. single. person. has even hinted at that.
 
Don’t pretend the field hasn’t left devastation in it’s wake.
I'm not, but it's also had positive outcomes. Do they balance each other out? No, because we can't quantify suffering, and human beings can be horrifically inhumane. But there can be positive outcomes for certain individuals from modern psychiatry (the actual field which would employ lobotomy and electro shock therapy) and psychology.
 
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