Vocabulary update discussion: "polysexual"

There is always an underdog. Gays have more rights now. They can get married. Gay Pride has gone mainstream.

Now the right wing is attacking transsexual people.

And "queers" (in colleges? on Reddit? Twitter?) seem to think they own the term "polysexual." So the polyamorous community can just suck it. :eek::p:cool:
 
Evie said:
I didn't look through podcast stuff, just hit up Google Scholar for a couple of hours.

And our own search function.

I didn't do reddit, either. And I'm not familiar enough with other poly communities to search them all.

I just did 2 hours or so and we both know that's barely scratching the surface, academically.
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Thanks for doing that!

I myself didn't read the books regularly recommended here and I don't listen to podcasts either, so I also just don't know if "polysexual" is in use outside of the forum.
If it is, I may try and pick up the wikipedia fight, but I don't want to push a forum neologism that we just convinced ourselves is a thing.
 
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Sounds like the consensus is we'll just keep using it the way we do until the dictionaries catch up. :)

We certainly do need a term that refers to the desire and/or ability to maintain multiple concurrent sexual relationships with the knowledge and consent of all involved. I personally wouldn't call them loveless, but I'd say they were so far off the relationship escalator that they are generally not ever going to be perceived as a dyad relationship.
 
Evie said:
We certainly do need a term that refers to the desire and/or ability to maintain multiple concurrent sexual relationships with the knowledge and consent of all involved.
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Personally, if I had that kind of arrangement, I'd probably call them FWBs. Because I couldn't imagine hooking up regularly with multiple peeps if there wasn't at least some semblance of friendship, or friendly feelings, between us.


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IndieSolo said:
Personally, if I had that kind of arrangement, I'd probably call them FWBs. Because I couldn't imagine hooking up regularly with multiple peeps if there wasn't at least some semblance of friendship, or friendly feelings, between us.


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Yep, so would/have I. FWBs describes my friends, polysexual describes me.
 
IndieSolo said:
Personally, if I had that kind of arrangement, I'd probably call them FWBs. Because I couldn't imagine hooking up regularly with multiple peeps if there wasn't at least some semblance of friendship, or friendly feelings, between us.
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True, but that is not a name for your ability to have those multiple fwb relationships :)
 
I did another AI search (sorry, lazy here) and I'm less and less convinced "polysexual" is in use by the wider ENM community outside of this forum, in which case I do lean towards avoiding the term.
I had chatgpt brainstorm another options, and - asside from using romantically/sexually non/exclusive - here's an option that's perhaps not terrible: monoerotic and polyerotic.

The framework we've been using to get a clearer understanding is I believe
monogamous (as an identity) = monoromantic and monosexual (=> monoerotic)
polyamorous (as an identity) = usually polyromantic and polysexual (=> polyerotic)

So another question is what to call the romantic axis to reproduce the full framework, since mono and poly romantic have also been coopted. We could accept it's just monoamorous/polyamorous, but that partially shifts the meaning of "polyamory" itself. AI got creative with mono/polyaffective, unfortunately these are already used as psychiatric terms for mood disorders :/

So then
monogamous (monoamorous and monoerotic)​
polyerotic​
polyamorous​
is as good as we get, unless there's another nice idea :)

What do you think?
 
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