Polyamory is/is not a feminist movement

[AlwaysGrowing]

Are these far-right-winger, Trump-supporting (conservative "Christian" [?]) polyamorists egalitarian, where both the men and women have the full right to have relationships with any gender, or are they of the patriarchal sort, where the men have multiple "wives," but the women all have to only share one guy? I just wonder what the dynamic is like, in general.

It varies. Some are solidly unicorn-hunting couples. Some are seemingly egalitarian. Some have OPPs or are only open to additional partners of the same gender. Some of the coupled people are actually only open for the women to date because the man has no interest (or realized his prospects aren't great and decided having hobbies was more fun than being rejected). It really just depends.

Maybe I just don't get closed poly relationships. That's just me? I think no one person should be able to tell another whom they can date. It just smacks too much of fundamentalist polygynous patriarchal cults like the FLDS (Fundamentalist Mormons) where the men have so much power they can get away with marrying 14-year olds, marrying literally a dozen or more women, and getting them all pregnant, having 30-40 kids, and usually forcing them all into lives of poverty.

Closed just because, or closed for a reason? I completely understand closing for a reason, i.e., trying to conceive/pregnancy/raising young children, other big life changes like moving, grieving, long-term illness, etc. It isn't someone dictating what you can and can't do, it's agreeing that the resources for more aren't there at the moment, so closing is the best thing for everyone currently involved.

 

[Magdlyn]

It varies. Some are solidly unicorn-hunting couples. Some are seemingly egalitarian. Some have OPPs, or are only open to additional partners of the same gender. Some of the coupled people are actually only open for the women to date, because the man has no interest (or realized his prospects aren't great and decided having hobbies is more fun than being rejected). It really just depends.

Well, those conservative men sure don't sound like they hold to the "family values" of the time when America was "great" (in a fictional 1950s kind of world), where men ruled the household and women stayed in their lane, in the kitchen, honoring and obeying, keeping only unto him, pregnant and barefoot, but keeping slim and looking great (long hair, plenty of makeup, high heels), when their king came home (like the women Trump likes). But I'll take your word for it.

Closed just because, or closed for a reason? I completely understand closing for a reason, i.e., trying to conceive/pregnancy/raising young children, other big life changes like moving, grieving, long-term illness, etc. It isn't someone dictating what you can and can't do, it's agreeing that the resources for more aren't there at the moment, so closing is the best thing for everyone currently involved.

Yeah, I do understand and agree with those reasons. I know lots of poly people close when they are raising young families. I guess I mean poly-fidelity otherwise, where everyone is supposed to be happy with X number of partners, and no one is allowed to seek other partners. If there is an exception, the entire pod needs to approve of any new partner "coming in to the relationship." Anyway, that's getting off topic.

 

[Inaniel]

I see at least five distinct topics being discussed.

Polyamory: A Feminist Movement?
I perceive this as a matter of definition. I would expect a feminist movement to define advocacy for equality as central to its definition. For instance, women’s suffrage clearly meets the criteria of a movement, as human rights are fundamental to its definition.

Feminism's Influence on Modern Polyamory
I agree with this notion to the extent that feminism also informs modern monogamy, marriage, workplaces, universities, and Western cultures in general. However, there are exceptions in all these examples.

Feminism in Modern Poly Dating
I believe these accounts to be true, based on my own shared experiences. However, I'm hesitant to use my subjective experience of dating in a big city to make broad statements about the entire movement.

Origins of the Modern Polyamory Movement: Feminist or Not?
I can see how this argument could be made. Morning Glory made patriarchal distinctions and also spoke of equality. The book "Fifty Years of Polyamory in America" references utopian groups forming in the 1960s and 1970s known as Synergy, where triads, both FMF and more common MFM, were noted among participants, suggesting a deconstruction of the typical patriarchal gender norms of the time.

However, in the descriptions of practice, rules, and the apparent authority Morning Glory's husband held over her lovers, I question whether feminism truly represented the value structure there.

Defining Polyamory, i.e., "That is/not Polyamory":

Morning Glory defined polyamory broadly, intentionally avoiding exclusivity. Who were they worried about excluding? According to the Morning Glory article:

"Historically and mythologically, polyamory and polygamy have always been considered viable options among pagan peoples for those who choose them, and such relationships are honored and supported today within the worldwide neo-pagan community, where nearly 50% of contemporary pagans polled have stated polyamory to be their ideal relationship choice."

They were likely concerned about excluding the polygamous population of the pagan community to which they belonged. Gender equality did not make it into the definition of polyamory over which Morning Glory had sole discretion in defining for the Oxford English Dictionary. I don’t see any evidence suggesting the term polyamory was ever meant to exclude specific gender combinations. In fact, the article refers to polygynous relationships as polyamory, as evidenced by the section titled “Polyamory in the Bible”; all the relationships described were polygynous.

Thank you for taking the trouble to do that. Perhaps it would allow you to upload the uncompressed versions if you broke them up into separate posts.

I found that even well below the upload limit, the upload would fail on file sizes above 1 MB, even the first upload. Not really sure why.

 

[Magdlyn]

I see at least five distinct topics being discussed.

I appreciate your brief summations.

Polyamory: A Feminist Movement?
I perceive this as a matter of definition. I would expect a feminist movement to define advocacy for equality as central to its definition. For instance, women’s suffrage clearly meets the criteria of a movement as human rights are fundamental to its definition.

Feminism's Influence on Modern Polyamory
I agree with this notion to the extent that feminism also informs modern monogamy, marriage, workplaces, universities, and Western cultures in general. However, there are exceptions in all these examples.

True. The influence of feminism and the increasing equality of women has impacted all these areas, especially the enrollment of women in institutes of higher learning. Their power in the workplace, and especially in government (which you don't mention) still has a long way to go. But marriage, workplaces, colleges, etc., would still exist without feminism. I don't think today's polyamory would even exist without the benefits of feminism.

Feminism in Modern Poly Dating
I believe these accounts to be true, based on my own shared experiences. However, I'm hesitant to use my subjective experience of dating in a big city to make broad statements about the entire movement.

Feminism and poly are both much more common in any US city than they are in small towns and rural areas, because people who want to practice or benefit from these movements move away from the conservative countryside to big cities. So, I think that's why they go hand-in-hand. Or, people move to the cities for educations or jobs, and come into contact with progressive attitudes, which usually include more rights for women and queers (not so much for POC...), and a bigger dating pool, and less of a push for early, MF mono marriage and getting started on having kids.

Origins of the Modern Polyamory Movement: Feminist or Not?
I can see how this argument could be made. Morning Glory made patriarchal distinctions and also spoke of equality. The book "Fifty Years of Polyamory in America" references utopian groups forming in the 1960s and 1970s known as Synergy, where triads, both FMF and more common MFM, were noted among participants, suggesting a deconstruction of typical patriarchal gender norms of the time.

However, in the descriptions of practice, rules, and the apparent authority Morning Glory's husband held over her lovers, I question whether feminism truly represented the value structure there.

Yeah, that part is a record scratch, probably influenced by the Heinlein stuff they liked so much, which still carried misogynistic ideas from the 1940s/50s. He objectifies the hell out of women in his books.

Defining Polyamory, i.e., "That is/not Polyamory":

Morning Glory defined polyamory broadly, intentionally avoiding exclusivity. Who were they worried about excluding? According to the Morning Glory article:

"Historically and mythologically, polyamory and polygamy have always been considered viable options among pagan peoples for those who choose them, and such relationships are honored and supported today within the worldwide neo-pagan community, where nearly 50% of contemporary pagans polled have stated polyamory to be their ideal relationship choice."

They were likely concerned about excluding the polygamous population of the pagan community to which they belonged. Gender equality did not make it into the definition of polyamory, over which Morning Glory had sole discretion in defining for the Oxford English Dictionary. I don’t see any evidence suggesting the term polyamory was ever meant to exclude specific gender combinations.

The article refers to polygynous relationships as polyamory, as evidenced by the section titled “Polyamory in the Bible”; all the relationships described were polygynous.

I think that section's title of "Polyamory in the Bible" is misleading, since she goes on to just call it polygamy, and admits most of the women were only kept for sex and breeding purposes. Of course, the ability to collect women was also a sign of status/wealth. (And the number of Solomon's women was ridiculously inflated.) The "amory" part was quite absent. They were there for his "pleasure," she says. She was just pandering to Christians with that part. Christian men today can be quite fine with polygyny, not polyandry or polyamory. That's the whole problem.

 

[icesong]

"Some of our biggest challenges within the polyamory community have occurred quite recently. It's been challenging to maintain clarity of the definition with individuals who keep trying to change it to fit their own reinterpretations of value, ethics, and history. The movement seems to have gotten more politicized, and downright meaner. We are now seeing poly people using their public platforms to be judgmental, disrespectful, and exclusive, ironically the opposite of what we always stood for as cultural groundbreakers in the United States."
Link:
https://polyinthemedia.blogspot.com/2018/10/oberon-zell-co-creator-of-word-on.html?m=1

So that particular answer was taking a swipe at a very specific fb group and the mods/community organizers who ran it. (I was there for the… discussion… I don’t necessarily want to go into the whole thread because it was a shitshow but it’s interesting to see that pop up again out of context. )

 

[Inaniel]

That particular answer was taking a swipe at a very specific FB group and the mods/community organizers who ran it. (I was there for the… discussion… I don’t necessarily want to go into the whole thread, because it was a shitshow, but it’s interesting to see that pop up again out of context. )

I would be interested in knowing the context behind his statement. I find the history portion of this thread fascinating.

 

[SEASONEDpolyAgain]

I also want to hear.

 

[SEASONEDpolyAgain]

See, I do know people the age of MG and her husband, who are essentially swingers by modern standards, but they were some of this first modern poly crowd. They probably hung out with MG. I also remember infighting when they would use the word and then detail a very restrictive open relationship.

 

[icesong]

Welp, you asked, so I’m going to talk, though this feels a bit gossipy, so I’m going to try to leave names out of it, as some of the people involved are still friends of mine. And, to be honest, while a lot of it happened in public at the time, the relevant FB posts/comments and blog posts have since been deleted. So I’m kind of trying to reconstruct this from memory and/or threads with half the posts gone.

Basically, there is one particular person who, at the time, was running a major NYC poly social event and was one of the admins on a then-very-active FB group (which honestly I thought was where this all went down, although I now realize after going back to check that it was on her personal page). She met Oberon at that event, and not long after that, she posted something about polyamory as a concept/practice predating the word… which got shared a lot. And he showed up on the thread.

600+ comments later on in the post (I am not exaggerating), people criticized him for some (possibly inadvertently) racist comments. But it was, in the end, mostly left in a reasonable place, or so I thought. And then the interview quoted above shows up less than 2 weeks later, a lot of which was actually cribbed from comments from the 600-comment thread almost directly. So. Not a coincidence.

I can’t give you receipts on that, as all the people involved ended up blocking each other, which causes the comments to go off to the black hole of nothingness. But yeah, that happened.

 

[Magdlyn]

I'm sorry I let this thread die after icesong was kind enough to give context for the Zell quote, how it was based on a specific argument in a specific Facebook polyamory group way back when.

Thanks for the information, icesong!

Let me bring this thread around to my original post, "Polyamory is/is not a feminist movement." This is not a doctoral dissertation. As Inaniel pointed out, it has no thesis. It is an informal discussion, as is every thread on this forum.

We have had a lot of sharing about the modern poly movement, as it was first begun in the 1990s in a pagan intentional community (who got to put their definition of "polyamory" in the Oxford dictionary). There were some feminist ideals to it back then, at least lip service to feminism, as in gender equality. But feminism itself, as well as polyamory itself, have evolved since the 1990s. The movement started over 30 years ago! We've come a long way (although the government is trying to undo that quite openly now [2025], of course).

One thing that stands out to me is how those 1990s polyamorists seemed to take couple-centricity for granted, as a good. They assumed polyamory was based on a formerly-monogamous couple "opening up" to having multiple shared partners, with everyone (more or less) sexually, if not romantically, involved with everyone else.

In the case of the Zells themselves, the male of the couple ("Wizard") seemingly would go out and find the new partners (I guess he traveled around doing public speaking, pagan rituals and the like), people he found attractive, and have them be vetted and (hopefully) approved by his wife Morning Glory. These people would then move in and live with the Zells as willing (ahem) secondaries, with gods knew what community service expected, along with their sexual services.

We can all see how 21st-century poly, in the huge majority of cases, bears little to no resemblance to this! In my decade-plus of poly-dating, in a liberal state, I met exactly one poly man who lived in an intentional polyamorous community. In his group, each couple or V (maybe quad, I dunno) had their own home, and then there was a shared clubhouse, used for special occasions, and I think a weekly Sunday dinner, for which everyone chipped in on a rotating basis. This guy and his two female partners weren't engaging in any group sex there. In fact, his newer gf found out this guy I dated was on OKCupid and looking for one more gf, and she wasn't pleased, and he had to stop seeing me after two dates. Oops.

(This V was also planning to leave the community and were saving for a home of their own.)

Anyway, one thing we here are constantly telling women who naively/proudly call themselves "unicorns seeking a poly MF couple" to watch out for is "couple-centricity" or "couple privilege," just the thing the Zells and their community held as a given!

Since a lack of couple privilege protects women (and the occasional male unicorn), I call it a newer, "more evolved," more feminist part of today's poly movement (as opposed to the 1990s commune-style poly of the Zells and their followers). The Zells' poly was feminist to an extent, but today's poly is more feminist than that, just as the Zells' poly was more feminist than that of the 1960s free love movement. Both of those movements were closer to swinging, which is still mostly a hetero movement, and a couple-centric movement, with the central couple having certain exclusivity.