Why I don't like Elisabeth Sheff

[Ravenscroft]

Not properly a blogpost, more of an editorial, but I couldn't figure out which forum (if any) would be better...

In any case, it needs to be broken into a few chunks.
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SUMMARY

Dr Elisabeth Sheff says (among other things) that polyamory is just another form of BDSM (along with swinging), & that "the poly community" is inherently intolerant of difference, particularly of nonwhite races & homosexuals.
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HOW I GOT THERE

First of all, let me make clear a prejudice: I distrust “activists.” I can trace this sentiment back through my experiences in the various “communities” of bisexuality, Wicca, BDSM, and polyamory.

Such groups tend to be rather poor examples of community. Rather, they are loose social agglomerations with highly permeable borders. They generally welcome membership by individuals who have no actual interest in the supposed defining factor of the group. Rather than communities, they are probably more akin to SIGs, the special-interest groups some may have encountered in Mensa or ACM publications or similar. In the end, though, none is cohesive enough to ever become a social movement, so it’s doubtful whether activism has any necessary place.

Setting that aside, the quality of activism is also very poor. Rare is the “activist” who actually steps out and works with the general community, with other organizations, or with government. A “poly activist,” for instance, is someone who tells self-identified polyamorous people that polyamorous people are wonderful beings, and noble for tolerating the abuse (often entirely imaginary) inflicted upon them by the larger world. Generally, the presenters of these mass preening sessions receive cash or recognition (reciprocal preening); in some cases, they publish guidebooks to reinforce the preening between sessions, and may even manage to parlay their “edgy” stance into paid publication or research money.

Here’s an example: Melita Noel. In 2005, Sage published her paper, “Progressive Polyamory: Considering Issues of Diversity,” in Sexualities. As I had raised questions of diversity in my book, and in fact for a few years previous in forum discussions that led to the book, I was interested in the subject area. I was quite surprised to find that Polyamory: Roadmaps for the Clueless &Hopeful was one of the twelve books Noel examined. (Actually, reading the bibliography, I can only spot ten.)

Until back around 2008, I could find full versions of “Progressive Polyamory” online; now it’s just an abstract and the references unless you pay up, so FWIW:
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1363460706070003?journalCode=sexa

Noel claimed that she had performed “content analysis” on all those books. Right there, I doubted her. I have done thorough sociological content analysis, and it is a PAIN. First of all, you either need a textfile, or to enter every last damned word manually. (My book alone is like 150,000 words.) Then you need to check frequency of usage (a significant word that appears very regularly is significant, as is one that rarely occurs). Then you need to consider terms that use more than one word. THEN you need to look at how words interrelate in the text. This crap can go on forever, or until the grant money runs out, whichever comes first.

Noel didn’t go that far. It quickly began to appear that she just skimmed through with a checklist, noting the existence (or not) of a short list of keywords and maybe concepts.

For me, that means one of two things. Most optimistically, this was a “first pass” in order to note points of interest for further deep study and analysis. Instead, it went with Door Number Two: make the data fit the preconception.

In this case, that’d be “these authors are just a bunch of privileged meanies!! They’re oppressing us and impeding the Glorious Revolution!!” The abstract says it all.

Polyamory has the potential to revolutionize how people in the USA engage in and think about relationships and families at the beginning of the 21st century.

However, as indicated through content analysis of 12 texts published between 1992 and 2004, polyamorists fail to meaningfully acknowledge or collaborate with others with shared interests to advocate common goals. In particular, these texts, written by and geared toward an assumed audience of white, middle-class, able-bodied, educated, American people fail to address how nationality, race, class, age and (dis)ability intersect with gender and sexuality in the theory and practice of polyamory.

In order to successfully challenge systemic, intersecting oppressions, polyamorists must move beyond the limits of identity politics to build coalitions and norms of inclusivity around shared issues, such as expanding definitions of relationships, families and communities.

And as it turns out, it’s not a scholarly article, but polemic. First of all, any “activist” who calls for Glorious Revolution while holding out her/his hand for payment is probably a con artist who will gladly say whatever it takes to close a sale. The first words of the abstract say it all. And she then goes on to damn ALL “polyamorists” based on that dozen books.

So far as I can tell, Noel has never lived polyamorously, meaning that she’s telling others how they need to run their lives, which I find questionable at best. Instead, she “amplifies conversations that celebrate Diverse Sexuality and Gender (DSG).” Yes, really.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/melitanoel

I have a strange enjoyment for sharp criticism. It keeps me intelligent. Often, answering back to a critic forces me to tighten up my own critical processes.

Noel’s paper can only make me stupider. See, in my Introduction, one of the things which I had specifically addressed, in great detail, is my own limitations. So, to then turn around and bark at me for NOT addressing these things is ludicrous at best, and maybe insane. A source that cites her paper even quotes a chunk of my Intro that Noel used!!

If a given person identifies with the term “polyamorous,” chances are that she or he is a citizen of the United States, raised in a middle-class household by a nominally Christian family with moderate-to-poor communication skills, where folks were loving and supportive but not great at showing how they felt ... he or she is most likely of high intelligence, has spent two or three years in college, is conversant in technology and the Internet.

More interesting is what Noel chose to ignore. In that Intro, I made clear that

This book is essentially being written by, about, and for middle-class Caucasians raised in the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century AD. ... I truly do not know my own biases well enough to correct for all of them....

...I restricted myself as much as possible to speaking about heterosexuals. ...I in no way consider myself a representative of gay men, much less of lesbians.

If I’d glossed over this stuff and claimed (or at least intimated) that I was speaking for everyone, I ‘d have been deserving of criticism. Or, as I said elsewhere, “There is no way I can speak to the experience of a black lesbian working two jobs to eke by in downtown Chicago.” Nor, incidentally, can that made-up person speak directly to my experience. We have a basis for discussion, but very little inherent commonality.

I have done some work to properly define polyamory as a term and a concept, in order that people improve likelihood of actually discussing the same subject. I am in no way interested in “normativity” – quite the opposite. For many years I’ve said that maybe there needs to be (say) “lesbian polyamory” or “black polyamory” or “Thai polyamory” or “New Orleans polyamory,” because the context in which it is practiced likely requires behaviors and thought patterns that wouldn’t work (or would be entirely vestigial) in another setting. (Certainly, closed-form polyamory (group marriage) is quite distinct from open-form.)

One recurring form of budding activism is when the bright idea is floated to “make our community more diverse.” On the one hand, I am glad that it occurs because it means a few are at least paying attention, and willing to admit that there’s a lot of sameness in “the community” (which is denied by some even when presented with clear fact).

Nobody has any idea how to do such. In our instance, polyamory is not out on the streets recruiting members, so it’s not as though we can just change our marketing strategy. People simply tend to hang out with others similar to them. As I stated in my admission of my own likely biases, my limited personal diversity draws boundaries that are to a high degree self-perpetuating. It is up to those outside the fence to step through, and NOT for me or anyone else to go out and drag them in. To make any such attempt means that I’m claiming to be somehow superior to them, that I know better than they what is best for them. Artificially extending the boundaries in order to rope in people who are “almost the same as me” is nothing less than a sneaky version of the same superiorist mindset.

And that brings us to Dr Elisabeth Sheff.

 

[Ravenscroft]

Why we suck.

Sheff is regularly cited in discussions of polyamory, often as “an activist.” Very rarely does anyone apparently read her actual writing, rather picking out summary claims from abstracts or repeating what others have claimed Sheff said.

Hoping to overcome this, I found a paper by Sheff and Corrie Hammers, “The Privilege of Perversities: Race, Class and Education Among Polyamorists and Kinksters” (2010).
https://elisabethsheff.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/the-privilege-of-perversities-20111.pdf

Right there, I hit a wall. See, I don’t consider polyamory to be “kinky,” much less to be just another paraphilia. As I read, I was willing to let it alone, but it kept recurring. The authors actually explain that we are stuck with the somewhat horrid misperception:

Conventional society ... generally classifies as perverts people who have multiple and concurrent romantic and/or sexual relationships, engage in group sex and/or openly espouse non-monogamy. Polyamorists are thus defined as perverts by the popular imagination, even if they themselves do not identify as such.

Get it? “The clueless herd thinks this way, so rather than hold your own against that nonsense, or maybe even try to educate them, we’ve decided you’re just going to accept it.”

This certainly muddies the paper’s thesis. The pile of assumptions above clearly says that polyamory is interchangeable with any other expression of non-monogamous sexuality, then turns around and claims that they’re discussing not nonmonogamous sexuality but polyamory. I can thus blame Sheff for intentionally diluting the practical definition of polyamory for her own benefit.

Better yet, anyone who merely defends the validity of nonmonogamy is “a pervert.” Yes, in so many words. The foregoing is at least tied to a footnote. I scrolled down, hoping to discover what misbegotten bonehead put this notion into their scholarly minds, only to find

The authors do not claim the right to define others’ identities, but rather use the term pervert to describe polyamorists both because conventional society views them as such and for theoretical coherency.

Yay – both self-serving AND intellectually lazy!! Entirely whizzing past the authors is the heavy irony of them griping (p. 200, for instance) that polyfolk suck because they focus on navel-gazing individual experience rather than rallying to “challenge the status quo.”

(This non-debate reminded me of my disappointment to discover that the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom is little more than kink “activists” whose calendar of events manages to almost entirely avoid anything not BDSM. I mean, a five-day “Couples Cruise,” the sole October 2017 event, sounds about as non-poly as possible without torches and pitchforks. I have been unable to find any references to officers or staff. On the upside, their Incident Reporting program, though underutilized, does make some effort to offer advice to those who suspect bias, for instance the seven 2016 instances where anti-poly bias may have cause child-custody problems.)

Anyway, back to Sheff’s report. The reason I recalled Melitta Noel after all these years:

Noel’s (2006, p. 604) content analysis of 12 key texts on polyamory illuminated how polyamorists ‘offer a short-sighted, isolationist alternative that serves to further solidify privileges for a few rather than realize an improved reality for many.’

Yah, Dr Sheff LOVES you.... (Though it’s amusing to see my book called a “key text.”)

The article is sporadically informative, as it actually tells me something about the “longitudinal study of polyamorists” for which Sheff is so often praised. For instance, the first published study was based on 40 interviews. These were recruited from poly events, including two Poly Living conferences. As it’s likely there were more than forty people altogether at these various meetups, I will eventually have to pay for the full published paper to know what the criteria were for deselection... assuming it’s explained at all.

The second publication followed just 15 of that 40, but added in 41 new people, so I’d have to see some really fancy dancing to justify calling this “longitudinal.”

It seems clear enough that every time someone crows about what Sheff says about “us,” it’s entirely based upon one or two interviews with 81 people.

That’s about where the self-serving aspect really began to bother me. See, Sheff and Hammers admit that relying upon convenient pools of interview candidates meant that they were inflicting biases. Consider Poly Living: being able to take a few days off work and park the kids somewhere (or pay their airfare) to travel hundreds or thousands of miles is NOT something everyone can do. Rather, it suggests that the attendees are either bohemian (younger, no kids, disposable income, short-term employment) or economically comfortable (middle aged, educated, professional) and in either instance probably white. To be blunt, it’s self-selected for a high degree of siocioeconomic privilege. On page 203, you’ll see this borne out.

This leads directly to a bizarre claim:

Although it is quite unlikely that these samples are representative of the actual range of kink and poly people, they are certainly representative of the range of people involved in mainstream poly and kink communities.

I’d appreciate a clear translation of THAT one. It appears to be making some distinction between an “actual” and a “mainstream.”

At no point do they clearly step back and wonder whether people who DON’T go to conferences and open social events are demographically different. Our house parties were heavily nonmonogamous because that was representative of our social circles, not because we had a theme. And Sheff wouldn’t have been invited to our BDSM parties unless she was willing to be a participant rather than a Wandering Wanker, so there would have been no chance to set up interviews.

And let’s not forget social class and economic level. My friends have incomes all over the map, and I’ve been known to get bored with (comparatively) wealthy people dicksizing about their latest acquisitions, but certainly someone else might feel that this sort of bragging was being directed at them.

There’s also the method of selecting and pursuing interview candidates. Those who feel that their personal opinions are superior will more likely get interviewed, and at length, rather than those who prefer to “soak up the atmosphere” at such events and remain in the background. That is to say, not only are there multiple layers of selection bias, but there’s further bias introduced by self-selection factors. In short, my undergrad adviser would’ve ragged the hell out of me for trying to run this past him, and rightly so.

But as the article wears on, the authors continue to intimate that this lack of diversity is the fault of the communities, not the idiot researchers. Page 209:

...one plausible rationale is that poly and kinky people hold the same kind of racist views as do others of their social ilk.

There ya go: by not dragging people through the gates and indoctrinating them, we are being racist, and are therefore oppressors. If you’re interested, it goes on a bit in that direction, complaining about how we are (intentionally, I assume) benefiting from “white privilege.”

 

[Ravenscroft]

MY STANCE

I believe that the question of race bias is valid, perhaps even vital. After all, by not being as diverse as possible, we the polyamorous impoverish ourselves intellectually, and certainly run the risk of the sort of “echo chamber” we’ve seen arise on so-called social media in recent years (which to a significant degree earned us President Trump).

Furthermore, nonwhites tend to have less education and lower incomes, and in partial result less social mobility and more vulnerability to pressure from their social circles to hew to some sort of “normalcy.” When we speak of “polyamory,” we likely ought to feel chagrin if we don’t take those facts into account.

But does that make us inherently “privileged”? No. Is there any demonstrated validity to Dr Elisabeth Sheff damning polyamorists (and “kinksters”!!) as inherently “racist”? Oh, hell, no.

It’s not a winnable argument in any case: the authors proceed to state that if someone shows up to your play party who’s not Caucasian, you’re probably guilty of tokenism. The same would likely be trotted out if you’ve got friends who are homosexual, trans, or have a disability; I base this on a 2016 blogpost that calls out the polyamory community (there’s that damned word again...) for excluding homosexuals, and incidentally draws a line between “LG” and “BQ”:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/bl...esbians-and-gays-in-mainstream-poly-community