Danish print and TV do it right

Politiken and DR2-TV (Denmark)

The second largest newspaper in Denmark explains polyamory to its readers, at length and in depth, partly through a young, confident bi feminist (photo). Here's a large part of the story, translated with help from Google Language Tools:

Sometimes one girlfriend just is not enough

The polyamourøse movement is gaining ground as alternative to divorce and adultery.

PHOTO CAPTION: Physics researcher Di Ponti is living with two girlfriends. Previously she was the girlfriend of a man and a woman in a couple. "For me polyamori is a mixture of ethics and desire. We want to be deeply involved with each other."

By Stephanie Surrugue

Once she was waiting, like her friends, for him to come. The Dream Man. The one and only.

Di Ponti and her classmates had learned that the story goes: girl meet boy, girl and boy marry and live happily ever after.

But life is not a fairy story. Reality is an unmanageable hugeness full of doubt and desire, longings for both freedom and love — with love and conflict, fascination and frustration, big emotions and big egos too, jealousy and all that.

So Ponti wrote her own story. And when the 28-year-old scientist goes home from the Niels Bohr Institute, where she just completed her doctoral thesis at the Center for the Philosophy of Nature and Science, she goes home not to a husband and children. She goes home to one of her two boyfriends.

"It is a great liberation. We share love, respect and honesty. I have no secrets in my love relationship. I live with a sense of standing for myself, and I sleep well at night. For I will not give up being happy," says Ponti.

She grew up in Portugal, in a large family with six siblings, grandparents.... Her childhood was full of people, and even as a schoolgirl she wondered why you could love as many family members and friends as you wanted, but had to love only one partner. Yet she tried to act correctly:

"For many years I fought with my inner princess, who just sat and waited for the prince on the white horse to come and find me."

...Today she lives in a relationship with two people, one of whom has a second girlfriend — who, incidentally, also has a second girlfriend.

But no... it's not about the freedom to have sex indiscriminately, emphasizes Ponti:

"I've never had one-night stands. I respect people living monogamously, and people who constantly change sex partners, but neither is anything for me. I tried living monogamously, but I felt trapped, both sexually and emotionally. I strive for a pure love relationship, where we are honest about our feelings and dreams," she says.

"Many people live in relationships that are full of taboos. Some choose to live with suppressed emotions, infidelity and secrets. Others choose to live in open relationships where it's hard to withstand the jealousy.... But basically jealousy matches one's own insecurity. If you can't talk about these things and work on them together, it is very, very difficult to live in love relationships with other people. For me honesty is the biggest difference between the 1960s 'free love' and today: Without communication, and personal development in the broad sense, polyamori is impossible."

The dilemma is old, but the word is new.... The polyamourøse movement is gaining ground in the West, where organizations, blogs and books on the subject roll onward in both the U.S. and Europe, not least in Denmark, where books like To Whom Are You Unfaithful? (Hvem er du utro?), A Woman, Three Men (En kvinde, tre mænd), and A Pure Connection (En ren forbindelse) — which comes out on Monday — extend the polyamourøse message....

...There are virtually no statistics or figures on polyamori.... In 2007... Compass Communications asked more than 5,000 Danes about their relationships, and the numbers tell the story... 45 percent have tried to be unfaithful and 26 percent of us have been so more than once, while 48 percent would like to try a sexual relationship with two people at once....

Few, however, have taken on the love bonds of author Carsten Graff. He has lived for seven years with his wife Chandini, his girlfriend Anne, his wife's boyfriend Jonas, and the family's three shared children.... Their bid to create a modern form of nuclear family can be seen by Danish television viewers tonight in the documentary "Carson, his wife and their boyfriends" at 8 p.m. on DR 2, as part of the show "When one lover is not enough" [which portrays four poly groups]....

[Graff] concedes that polyamori is a complex exercise: "The more people who are in a love relationship, the more difficult it is. It's like juggling: Four balls are harder than two. I usually say that polyamori not something you should try at home without adults at home, because you can get hurt emotionally."

But what is it that makes everything worth it?

"There is a freedom in releasing the ownership of other people.... Sex takes on a spiritual dimension, when I for example have a love affair with two women who love each other. Everything just released life in all its dimensions," says Carsten Graff.... And there is the feeling of being part of something bigger, like dragons: "The other day I sat at home with the kids while Chandini and Jonas were out together. I did not feel lonely, I felt happy."

...The same view is shared by American psychologist Deborah Anapol, who has been on the polyamoriens front lines for decades. Most recently she published the book Polyamory in the 21th Century, for which she is touring in Europe in coming weeks. Anapol believes that the idea of the one and only destroys many people and relationships:

"The most important thing in life is that we keep open to let love prevail. We should not write off our quest for happiness and harmony as a legacy from the hippie movement or as a slippery sexual apology. It is a universal mission."

Di Ponti has a dream: A family consisting of a small core of people, two or three or four who are deeply linked. A nuclear family who live together but have freedom to love, live and travel alone and with others.

She smiles almost shyly as she talks about her dream. And Dr. Anapol herself? At 58 she has chosen to live monogamously.

"I have experimented with everything that was to experiment with. I have reached an age that is about wanting to go in depth with one other person. I can surely say I now understand what my teachers said to me in the beginning: It is not the form that is crucial."

Read it in Danish (Sept. 18, 2010).

Here's the one-hour TV documentary that the article refers to (Sept. 18, 2010). On the same page are links to what seem to be four documentaries on poly and open relationships. Only one other seems available to North American IP addresses, at least for now; one of the shows is set to air October 3rd.

When one lover is not enough
If you are a modern man, and if you learn the art of having several love affairs at once -- is it the alternative to today's infidelity and divorce? Tonight's theme: we meet Danish couples where both husband and wife have other girlfriends, and we see how they tackle the difficult jealousy that arises when more people share the love.

Carsten, the wife, and their lovers
Author Carsten Graff has for 7 years formed a family with Chandini, who is also the girlfriend of Jonas, who is the father of her youngest daughter of 2 years. We follow the family's lives closely and see how it goes when Chandini, who is struggling with jealousy, meets Carsten's other, Anne, for the first time. [Watch here. (The same link as above.)]

It's so lovely to go together
Claus and Marie are young, very much in love, and getting married. But they do not feel that love is reserved for only one, so they live in an open relationship where it's okay to have sex with others. [Watch here. My God they're sweet, even if I can't understand a word they're saying.]

I love you. And you. And you
In the western world the polyamorøse are moving forward -- families who thrive on having equal love relationship at one time. In this American documentary, we follow two families; the program examines whether this life is a relevant possibility for future relationships.

Lina and her young lovers
The desire to realize the free love has no age limits. Lina, who is 73, lives near the beach in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, and here she is enjoying life and her young lovers.

[Permalink] Labels: Danske, Deborah Anapol, Europe, TV

View the original article here

"Sister Wives": polygamy reality show premiers tonight

TLC

You know how TV networks copy each other. So when HBO's "Big Love" (a fictional series about a Mormon polygamist family in modern-day Utah) became a success, you knew more was coming.

Here it is. Tonight TLC begins a reality-show series called "Sister Wives" about an actual fundamentalist Mormon family in modern-day Utah, in which one man and three wives are about to add a fourth wife. From the Huffington Post's entertainment editor:

"Sister Wives": TLC's Polygamist Family Asks Us To "Rethink Marriage"

By Katy Hall

Kody Brown married his first wife, Meri, 20 years ago. Three years later he married Janelle, and a year after that he married Christine.

"I just fell in love. Then I fell in love again, and I fell in love again," he says in the opening episode of "Sister Wives," TLC's latest reality series about an excessively large family. This one is set in Utah with a polygamist twist.

The Browns and their 12 children are Fundamentalist Mormons, and their faith, as Kody says, likes to "reward good behavior." Why stop with one good marriage when you could have four? (Kody is courting a fourth wife, whose assimilation into the tight-knit circle of sister wives provides the only conflict in a family that keeps reminding us how happy they are.)

"I never wanted to just be married to a man," says Christine, who is pregnant with Kody's 13th child. She's glad to be his third wife because she never wanted to be alone with a husband, and the third wife balances out the tension between the first two.

"I always wanted sister wives," she says. "There's too many things I wanted to do, to be free for."

Indeed the sister wives work together to raise their plucky children and attend to Kody's sexual needs. The show doesn't waste any time getting to the bedroom dynamics, which are really why viewers are here. Kody is on a rotating schedule of conjugal visits, and the wives make it clear they are not into group sex....

It's okay until Kody begins courting Robyn, a 30-year-old divorcee with three kids who is slim and pretty and brunette and the new hand-holding partner he hasn't had in 16 years....

The Browns have kept their lifestyle an open secret until now, so the show is a coming-out party as well as a much-needed paycheck for the growing family....

Read the whole article, with pictures and video (Sept. 23, 2010).

Watch the riveting introductory videos on TLC's Sister Wives site. Anything look familiar?

Good summary/review on Tubular.

At the New York Daily News: 'Sister Wives,' '19th Wife' and 'Big Love' usher in wave of polygamy programming.

Here's heaps more recent news about "Sister Wives."

By coincidence, I have Mormon ancestry on my mother's side (her generation broke from the church). We have copies of ancestors' journals from the wagon-train days and the settlement of Utah1. You may rightly wonder why today, 120 years after the mainstream LDS Church renounced polygamy (as a condition for Utah joining the union), polygamy is still what leaps to most people's minds when you mention Mormonism. Two reasons:

1) The most obvious is that some tens of thousands of "breakaway" Mormons in various sects have continued polygamy ("Celestial Marriage") in Utah and environs, as proclaimed by Mormonism's founder and prophet Joseph Smith. The largest of these, the Fundamentalist LDS Church, makes the news for its cult-like abuses and restrictive, 19th-century lifestyle. But many other "pligs" (a Utah insult) quietly live modern lives as portrayed in "Big Love."

2) The mainstream LDS Church abolished polygamy only in this life. The church doesn't talk about it, but good Mormon men still marry three wives in the next life. I remember a discussion I had with a teenage girl, a good LDS churchgoer, who was deeply upset that she would have to share a husband with other wives after she died. She didn't think she could handle it, but she was told that's just the way it is. Although you don't hear much about this, it's on the minds of fully-informed LDS Church members today, and somehow this preoccupation seems to seep out to the wider culture.

Update, Sept. 28: In the family's hometown of Lehi, Utah, local police have taken notice of the show: Police investigate US plural family for bigamy. In Utah you're guilty of bigamy (literally, "two marriages") if you merely live together with another person not your spouse. In other states, bigamy refers to an actual second marriage without the first one being nullified.

Note, however:

The Utah attorney general's office has investigated the state's secretive polygamous communities, but focused its efforts on cases involving allegations of abuse, sexual assault and fraud, not bigamy.

"It has been our office's position not to pursue cases of bigamy between consenting adults," the attorney general's spokesman, Scott Troxel, said Tuesday. "We want to use our resources wisely."

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1 My mother, now 91, recalls visiting a great-uncle as a little girl out west where an awful lot of "aunts" lived in the house: Aunt Inger, Aunt Helen.... At another great-uncle's farm, she says, the wife who ran the place most of the time always spoke resentfully about the other wife who got to live in town "in a brick house with curtains."

My mom spent part of her childhood on a sheep ranch near Lava Hot Springs in southern Idaho, north of Salt Lake City, where a lot of single ranch hands lived their lives in an all-male bunkhouse and crammed the kitchen area for meals. Only later did it dawn on her that these might have been the excess men left over after the area's high-status men claimed all the women.

[Permalink] Labels: polygamy, TV

View the original article here

Objecting to "Polyamory Chic"

Scientific American blogs

"There’s a strange whiff in the media air, a sort of polyamory chic in which liberally minded journalists, an aggregate mass of antireligious pundits and even scientists themselves have begun encouraging readers and viewers to use evolutionary theory to revisit and revise their sexual attitudes and, more importantly, their behaviors in ways that fit their animal libidos more happily."

So begins Jesse Bering, a research psychologist writing for the Mind & Brain section of Scientific American's website. He continues:

Much of this discussion is being fueled by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá’s scintillating new book Sex at Dawn, which explores how our modern, God-ridden, puritanical society conflicts with our species’ evolutionary design, a tension making us pathologically ashamed of sex. There are of course many important caveats, but the basic logic is that, because human beings are not naturally monogamous but rather have been explicitly designed by natural selection to seek out ‘extra-pair copulatory partners’ — having sex with someone other than your partner or spouse for the replicating sake of one’s mindless genes — then suppressing these deep mammalian instincts is futile and, worse, is an inevitable death knell for an otherwise honest and healthy relationship.

Intellectually, I can get on board with this.... But the amoralistic beauty of Darwinian thinking is that it does not — or at least, should not and cannot — prescribe any social behavior, sexual or otherwise, as being the “right” thing to do....

...However, there’s an even bigger hurdle to taking polyamory chic beyond the tabloids, talk shows, and message boards and into standard bedroom practice. And that is simply the fact that we’ve evolved to empathize with other people’s suffering, including the suffering of the people we’d betray by putting our affable genitals to their evolved promiscuous use.

Heartbreak is every bit as much a psychological adaptation as is the compulsion to have sex with those other than our partners, and it throws a monster of a monkey wrench into the evolutionists’ otherwise practical polyamory....

Monogamy may not be natural, but neither is indifference to our partners’ sex lives or tolerance for polyamory. In fact, for many people, especially those naively taking guidance from evolutionary theorists without thinking deeply enough about these issues, polyamory can lead to devastating effects....

He goes on to ruminate about why, as a gay man with no reproductive stake in his male partner's sexual behavior, he himself has been prone to wildly irrational fits of jealousy when cheated on. Where's the evolutionary sense in that?

What he needs to hear is that, for some of us, life is not this false-dichotomy choice between suffering in monogamy and suffering with broken hearts and jealous rages. For quite a few people, a modern, consciously managed, ethical, communicative version of multi-partnering — what we mean by the word polyamory! — offers a third way that is neither what animals do nor what our grandparents believed they had to do. Can't he get this?

...And that’s this once-heartbroken gay evolutionary psychologist’s musings for the day.

Read the whole article (Aug. 25, 2010).

Begs for comments, no? Go have at it.

[Permalink] Labels: critics of poly

View the original article here

New poly-trend movie: The Freebie

Has anyone seen the new indie movie The Freebie? It won kudos at Sundance, opened yesterday in New York, and will open in a smattering of other theaters nationwide in the coming weeks1. The premise: a young couple's sex life has gone dead, so they agree to give each other a one-day pass for sex with outside interests to heat things up. Dramedy ensues. Watch the trailer.

Sounds a lot like Breaking Upwards, except it's set in LA rather than NY. Are trendspotters' antennae going up? Yesterday was National Freebie Day, in case you missed it. The movie's website is called Untie the Knot, and most of that is the Untie the Knot Blog "for couples committed to the Freebie: one night, any partner, no questions asked."

On the site's Planning Your Freebie and Rules pages, I find most of the advice disgusting: sneaky, dishonest, disrespectful. So does Eden M. Kennedy, writing at the feminist site BlogHer:

"The Freebie" and Its Bizarre Self-Help-for-Swingers Web Site

...The producers of the new film The Freebie... would like to give married folk everywhere permission to tuck a condom in their pocket and go hit the bars in search of whatever it is they don't have at home.

...An otherwise happily married couple, played by Katie Aselton (who also wrote and directed the film) and Dax Shepard, dance shyly around the concept of sanctioned infidelity, kind of thinking that it's a stupid idea but also hoping that a couple of one-night stands will shake them out of their sexual doldrums and allow them be grateful for what they already have. The fear, of course, is that sleeping with other people will be the end of their friendship and their marriage. Tension!

...I haven't seen the film, but what I have seen quite a lot of is cheerfully disturbing web site that's been launched in support of the film.

The goal of Untie-TheKnot.com seems to be to create some fun, kooky buzz around the concept of open marriage.... "five must-have items for your special night" (include) concocting a sexy backstory to impress your potential hook-up, and a decent lie to reassure your spouse afterward that "it wasn't all that great".

The site also features some terrible Penthouse Forum-type one-night stand stories, and an advice column by two white-bread, can-do columnists named "Bill and Susie." Bill and Susie are about as subtle as a firehose, and seem blissfully assured that swinging, flinging, and serial polyamory are easy as pie if you drink enough tequila.

Kennedy then offers readers some better advice:

If you really want the security and comfort of a long-term relationship combined with the thrill of shagging that handsome stranger who only comes to town twice a year for business, you might be better off reading polyamory.org or unmarried.org, sites run by people who actually work to maintain healthy open relationships that may or may not include children, and who advise you to do the exact opposite of the Johnny-come-latelys over at Untie-TheKnot.

The REAL rules for so-called "freebies" read more like what the movie is trying to show: Tell the truth. Know yourself. Accept responsibility for your actions. Be strong, be loving, be open, etc.

Ironically, these turn out to be good rules for monogamous relationships as well. Hey! No wonder Bill and Susie couldn't hack it with each other -- they have the combined emotional equilibrium of an sleep-deprived toddler whose parents have a giant collection of porn in the basement.

Read the whole article (Sept. 17, 2010).

The online daily newspaper New Jersey Newsroom reviews the movie today, the morning after it opened:

By Miriam Rinn

Most people nowadays believe that honesty is an essential component of a successful marriage, or indeed of any personal relationship.... In "The Freebie," writer/director and leading actress Katie Aselton takes a dispassionate look at a young California couple who struggle with how much truth to tell to each other and, perhaps, to themselves.

Married for seven years, Darren (Dax Shepard) and Annie (Aselton) live comfortably in a very clean, affluent-looking Los Angeles, sharing conversation and laughter, dinner with friends, walks in the mountains, and all the other cool things that well-situated young people share. The one thing they don't share is sex. For whatever reason, Darren doesn't desire his wife. Is he bored? Is he gay? Is he depressed? We don't know, and Annie doesn't ask. Instead, they come up with a scheme to relight their fire. Each of them will go out, score a one-night stand with a stranger, and return to each other sexually reignited.

Needless to say, this plan goes seriously awry. The viewer is left wondering what made them think it could ever work.... They appear to have established a form of intimacy that includes neither sex nor honesty, but is that possible?

"The Freebie" looks and feels very much like an indie....

...Aselton has constructed "The Freebie" to provoke a series of questions, and thankfully, hasn't provided the answers.... In a way, it's reminiscent of a Woody Allen relationship movie, but without the laughs and without the deep humanism. Aselton's film is shallower in its characterizations, but still engaging with lots of room for discussion and disagreement.

Read the whole review (Sept. 18, 2010).

The ABC News site has a brief interview with leading man Dax Shepard.

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So far this is raising my latent conservative hackles about "careless" open relationships and "playing with fire," and it does nothing to allay my fears about what'll happen if any old crappy form of non-monogamy goes mass-market as polyamory. I saw what happened to the open marriage movement in the 1970s, which left a lot of that generation "knowing" that open marriage is just a recipe for disaster. The open marriage movement started out as something much better, but by the time it went mass-market a lot of the people doing it were careless and clueless, and that's all that people now remember. This is not how we want people of the 2020s and 2030s to remember polyamory.

Am I just being paranoid?

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1 The production company says (Sept. 15),

We are actually opening in the following markets:

Sept. 17: NYC - The Angelika
Oct. 1: LA - Nuart
Oct. 8: Seattle - Varsity
Oct. 15: Denver - Chez Artiste
Oct. 28: San Francisco - Lumiere
Oct. 28: Berkeley - Shattuck
Nov. 12: Portland OR
Nov. 12: San Diego - at the Ken or Hillcrest
Nov. 12: Philadelphia - Ritz Bourse
...with more to follow.

Keep an eye out and spread the word. If NY & LA are box office successes it will help us open more markets and theatres!

[Permalink] Labels: movies/plays

View the original article here

The Rolling Stone cover

Rolling Stone

Yowser, I don't watch teen vampire shows, but the cover of Rolling Stone makes it look like they're about gorgeous naked hunky MFM threesomes. Warning: Don't click if you're squicked by blood.

I mean, if these people were ever to give me the wink (like hell freezes over) I would insist they go wash up. Talk about exchange of body fluids.

On True Blood the vamps aren't actually poly, more's the pity. They're just wild. Or so I grok from a little internet research.

Of course the Rolling Stone cover is causing a stir, and some news outlets are refusing to display it. That's the idea, right? Publicity?

The thing to understand here is that threesomes (or rather hints and suggestive images of threesomes) have become a hot ticket in pop culture — as ABC News reported last December and I expanded upon at the time. That was a few months after the national ruckus over the Calvin Klein foursome ad looming five stories over New York.

Oh, you want to read the Rolling Stone article? Sorry, you can only get a teaser unless you subscribe (issue dated Sept. 2, 2010).

[Permalink] Labels: celebrities

View the original article here

Canada: Court case attracts wide attention to polyamory

When the lawyer for the Canadian Polyamory Advocacy Association appeared in court yesterday he made news across Canada and beyond, even though the test case to weigh Canada's extremely broad anti-polygamy law won't begin until November 22nd. (If you're new to this, catch up here.) The CPAA is one of more than a dozen "interveners" in the case who will present evidence for and against the law, or at least the breadth of its wording. But so far the CPAA seem to be getting the most attention.

The lawyer is John Ince, reportedly poly himself, and by all accounts he did a very able job in court and in the media. With all the attention, says one Canadian poly activist, "Everybody is asking 'What is polyamory?' and getting helpful answers."

First up, a wire-service report:

Group wants to know position on sex law

By The Canadian Press

VANCOUVER - The lawyer for a group that advocates for allowing multiple spouses wants to know if a law against polygamy could also apply to his clients.

John Ince, who represents the Canadian Polyamory Advocacy Association, told British Columbia Supreme Court Wednesday that polygamy is based on a patriarchal system, while polyamorous relationships are consensual.

Ince, who practises polyamory, said that such relationships can involve a group of males and females and that members can be heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual or transgendered.

Ince is asking the attorney generals of B.C. and Canada to decide where polyamorous people stand compared to those practising polygamy, saying about 0.5 per cent of people across the country are part of polyamorous relationships.

"We oppose laws that oppose loving, consensual relationships," he said outside court.

Section 293 of the Criminal Code of Canada bans polygamy, and offenders can face five-year prison terms.

Lawyer Deborah Strachan, who represents the federal government, said various issues have to be settled by the court before anyone can determine if people in polyamorous relationships are immune from prosecution.

Craig Jones, a lawyer for the B.C. attorney general, said there's no legal definition for polyamory and the word is debated even among people in such relationships....

Ince said polyamorous relationships "encourage sharing" and joint decision-making, while polygamous ones focus on male dominance, where "you hoard women, you hoard wealth."...

Read the whole article (Sept. 8, 2010).

[Update, Sept. 17: The judge turned down CPAA's request to have the B.C. and federal attorney generals state their positions on the legality of polyamory. Article.]

A story about CPAA appeared on the front page of the Vancouver Sun. It's by Daphne Bramham, a longtime opponent of the Fundamentalist Mormon polygamist leaders in Bountiful, B.C., who are at the center of the case (she wrote a book against them, Lives of the Saints).

Polyamorists want court to declare group love legal

By Daphne Bramham, Vancouver Sun columnist

Is polyamory the new gay? That’s what John Ince and the Canadian Polyamory Advocacy Association would have us believe.

They define polyamory as a post-modern, secular, non-patriarchal, conjugal relationship that involves a panoply of sexual groupings and gender variations. Ince even suggests that it’s non-sexual and is based in love (amore), not sex.

The groupings can be triads, quadrants or more. A grouping could have one heterosexual woman, two men and a bisexual female. It could be all women or all men. It could include transgender and transsexual persons.

It’s an anything-goes kind of relationship, as long as everyone is a consenting adult, participating in a spirit of love and harmony.

Nirvana? Maybe. Maybe not.

But what Ince and the association want is nothing less than the sweeping legal and social reform that occurred in 1967.

That’s when Pierre Elliott Trudeau, as justice minister, declared that “the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation” and that “what’s done in private between adults doesn’t concern the Criminal Code.”

Trudeau’s omnibus bill decriminalized sexual behaviour that had made being homosexual illegal, and it made abortion easier....

But polyamorists aren’t going the political route yet. Instead, they hope to accomplish reform through the constitutional reference case to determine whether Sec. 293 of the Criminal Code — the anti-polygamy section — is legal.

The attorneys-general for British Columbia and Canada argue that the harms caused by polygamy — from child brides, to boys being forcibly evicted to make the arithmetic work, to psychological and economic harm to both women and children — justify the infringement of rights.

But polyamorists hope to convince Chief Justice Robert Bauman of the B.C. Supreme Court that their egalitarian, consensual relationships are nothing like polygamy as practised by fundamentalist Mormons or Muslims.

...But before they’ve even submitted their arguments or lined up witnesses for the reference case, which is scheduled to begin Nov. 22, the polyamorists went to court Wednesday asking Bauman to order the attorneys-general to outline their positions on polyamory and make them available to the five polyamorists who filed detailed affidavits about their families.

When that didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, Ince asked Bauman to craft an order “collaboratively and collegially” that would somehow cause the attorneys-general to be more specific about whether the polyamorists might be prosecuted.

Bauman reserved judgment.

...Polygamy may not survive the constitutional challenge. But polyamory as the new gay? It seems unlikely. But it could be.

And it’s one more reason this case deserves public attention.

See the whole article (Sept 8-9, 2010; it appears online under a different title). Bramham has been the lead newspaper writer on this case from the beginning, but she seems to be confused by the polyamorists showing up and complicating things; she has made careless reporting mistakes and seems to be out of her depth.

In the Sun chain of Canadian newspapers:

Polygamy test case ramping up

By Mindelle Jacobs, QMI Agency

The unusual test case on the constitutional validity of Canada’s anti-polygamy law hasn’t even begun but the pre-trial jousting suggests it will be quite a show.

...The polyamorists don’t support the FLDS polygamists in Bountiful, B.C., emphasizes Ince. But they don’t think free love among consenting adults should be criminalized. “It’s a growing movement. People say that polyamory is the new gay.” Who knew?...

Whole article (Sept. 7, 2010).

As usual, some of the most in-depth reporting comes from Xtra, Canada's chain of gay & lesbian papers:

Group wants Crown to disclose its definition of polyamory

But BC Supreme Court reserves ruling in leadup to polygamy case in November

By Jeremy Hainsworth

...CPAA lawyer John Ince told Bauman the attorneys general for Canada and BC have not delineated what their thinking is on the polyamorists.

That, he said, makes it hard for him to prepare a case.

..."We clearly fall outside the definition of the offence. If there are other elements, please specify," Ince said.

...If polyamory is found to be criminal, offenders could face five years in prison.

But, Ince added, evidence filed by the attorneys general contains no direct evidence pertaining to polyamorous relationships in general, or the five described in affidavits the CPAA itself has filed.

"We are asking why the polygamists get all the details. We get nothing," Ince told Bauman. "Give us the facts. What are the harms associated with polyamory? We'll proceed from there."

But, countered Crown lawyers, that is the point of the reference.

BC Crown Craig Jones and federal Crown Deborah Strachan argued that what Ince is asking for is a detailed analysis of the law before the case starts in November.

Strachan said the ruling Ince seeks could be used as an immunity from prosecution in the future. That would be a violation of the right to prosecutorial discretion in Canada, she added. She said the Crown's opposition is not an attempt to take the CPAA by surprise or hold its cards close to its chest. They will get the position of the attorneys general on this point in due course, she said.

Jones added there is currently no legal or psychological definition of polyamory....

...A so-called amicus, or friend of the court appointed to represent the interests of the FLDS, spoke in favour of the CPAA motion. Amicus lawyer Tim Dickson said the reference itself is the constitutional challenge a polyamorist who is charged under Section 293 could ordinarily use in such a case.

"Is polyamory a crime or not?" asked Dickson. "The polyamorists have a lot at stake in this reference."

Dickson said Ince is "simply asking" the legal position of the attorneys general so he can respond to it.

As part of Ince's submissions to the court, he included a survey of polyamorous relationships.

Of 188 people in polyamorous households that responded, 112 were currently living in one or more households in a conjugal union of three or more people....

The total number of women was 167, while there were 158 men and 40 self-identified as other....

Ninety-nine respondents had no minors under 19 in their households. Another 53 households had one or two minors, while 17 had three to six minors. Two identified as having seven or more minors.

Sixteen of the unions of three to five people were reported to have been sanctioned by a rite or ceremony, contract or consent other than a legal marriage. Another 30 conjugal unions of three to four people were reported, indicated by a verbal or written agreement....

Read the whole article (Sept. 8, 2010).

Ince also appeared on the widely listened-to Christy Clark radio show. From the promo: "You’ve heard of polygamy, but what about polyamory? It's the practice of having more than one intimate, consensual and committed relationship...." Listen here; jump ahead to start at 6:10. (The audio may disappear in a month, on October 8.)

An article appeared on MAARS.net, "the global legal network" for human rights, with an out-and-proud photo; this article is mostly taken from the others above. It adds, quoting Wikipedia,

Polyamory, often abbreviated to poly, is sometimes described as consensual, ethical, or responsible non-monogamy. The word is occasionally used more broadly to refer to any sexual or romantic relationships that are not sexually exclusive, though there is disagreement on how broadly it applies; an emphasis on ethics, honesty, and transparency all around is widely regarded as the crucial defining characteristic.

Read the whole article.

And this afternoon the story made a GLBT paper in Boston, The Edge:

The ’New Gay?’ Polyamorists Pursue Legitimacy.

by Kilian Melloy

...Bramham wrote, polyamory is seen by its advocates as "the way of the future," and to an extent, the way of the present as well....

...For many people, any form of relationship falling outside the male/female pair-bonding model tends to be grouped into one amorphous category. An essay on polyamory at blog The Writerly Life notes, "Other ’kinks’ have come and gone as the primary target of "polite" society’s moral outrage--homosexuality, orgies, swinging--and forged, in some people’s homes, an uneasy truce. Polyamory, then, might be the last taboo--possibly because many people can barely navigate the obstacles of one relationship, let alone several....

Whole article. (Sept. 9, 2010).

Overseas, on what seems to be an India news site based in the U.K.: Polyamory Group Goes to Court for Legalization.

More to come, for sure. As I've said, this is the poly movement's biggest legal initiative since Loving More took on the April Divilbiss child-custody case in 1998-99.

[Permalink] Labels: activism, Canada, legal

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Sex at Dawn making more waves

I'm excited to be meeting author Christopher Ryan — and a lot of you readers! — at the Poly Living conference coming up in Seattle in two weeks (October 22–24; spaces still available; see the end of this post for more info1.) We owe Ryan bigtime for changing the intellectual landscape around us — as Kamela Dolinova writes on her Boston Open Relationships Examiner:

"For polyamorists, swingers, and other practitioners of open relationships, America just became a slightly better place,"

thanks to the publication of Sex At Dawn, the new popular anthropology book that has been tearing up the blogosphere and major news outlets for several weeks now. Since no lesser light than Dan Savage called the book "the single most important book on human sexuality since Kinsey unleashed Sexual Behavior in the Human Male on the American public in 1948," word about husband-and-wife duo Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá's work has been spreading like...well, like prehistoric women's legs.

Some background:

According to Ryan and Jethá, the overwhelming physiological and archeological evidence shows that our pre-agricultural ancestors were not monogamous, nor even serially monogamous as some more liberal thinkers claim. Instead, these hunter-gatherers lived in "fiercely egalitarian" societies where everything was shared: food, shelter, parenting, and yes — sexual partners. The common mode of living in early human bands was apparently closer to a communal marriage than what we think of as a "traditional" one, in which paternity certainty was unimportant and women — as well as men — had sex as often as they wished with as many as they wished.

There is controversy:

Predictably, a few misguided idiots and plenty of random internet commenters are responding to the book with a certain amount of vitriol. But more surprising is that the first three pages of today's Google search for the book's title are full of praise for the work — a wave of mainstream media acceptance of the idea that maybe, just maybe, our species isn't naturally monogamous after all.

Ryan himself (clearly the public face of the book) has repeatedly said that people shouldn't take their findings as carte blanche to cheat on their spouses, or that everyone should be polyamorous. In fact, it's impossible to say at this moment what the impact of the findings might be on the lives of people who now, 10,000 years after the advent of agriculture, live so very differently than their ancestors did.

Nonetheless, as Alan at Polyamory in the News points out, the popularity of this book and its scientific underpinnings are a huge step in the literature for those of us who have refused to buy into the monogamy deal. The idea that jealousy is not an inherent human state, that the exchange of sexual exclusivity for security and support is a cultural construct, and that the natural state of human sexuality is much more complicated than the overculture would have us believe may not go over well with everyone, but it is a great leap forward from the slew of evolutionary psychologists and other authorities from Darwin onward who have insisted on our species' "natural" propensity for pair-bonded monogamy....

Read the original (Sept. 3, 2010).

Dolinova went on to interview Ryan for Carnal Nation. Excerpt:

KD: I live and write in a loose-knit community of polyamorists, and know many people who make it work beautifully. What do you think is the next step for modern romance and family life?

CR: I suspect the next few decades are going to bring a radical reconfiguration of American society. Romance and family rituals generally follow and adapt to economic conditions, so we may well see realignments resulting in multi-family homes and off-the-grid communal situations. Some of these could involve some form of group parenting, home schooling, and so on. But a lot of this depends on what happens economically and politically in the US. Crisis brings opportunity for change, and major crisis looms ever larger these days.

Read the whole interview (Sept. 22, 2010).

An editor of the highbrow Atlantic Monthly is peeved with the book:

I'm in the middle of Sex at Dawn, the book that's caught the attention of a number of commentators... and so far, I'm disappointed to say that it reads like horsefeathers.... The language is breathless rather than scientific, and they don't even attempt to paper over the enormous holes in their theory that people are naturally polyamorous.

For example, like a lot of evolutionary biology critiques, this one leans heavily on bonobos (at least so far). Here's the thing: humans aren't like bonobos. And do you know how I know that we are not like bonobos? Because we're not like bonobos....

More.

Ryan is aggressive about wading into a good food fight; here's from his reply:

Over the years of cocktail party conversations that proceeded the publication of Sex at Dawn, Cacilda and I have witnessed many reactions to our proposal that monogamy doesn't come naturally to most people....

[Sometimes] you get someone who feels so personally threatened by the very idea that they don't give a damn about "your so-called evidence" (they assume you're making it all up anyway).... Stand back, because you're likely to get wine in your eye as they sputter and spray their indignation.... The trick is to learn not to take any of it personally, because they're not really talking about you, or your book. They're talking about themselves, often quite revealingly, at that.

...It's pretty clear Ms. McArdle hasn't read even the first half of the book very closely. Pages 77 and 78 contain a table listing some of the major similarities between humans and bonobos, many of them unique to these two species....

I'm not holding my breath because I don't think she's responding to the substance of the book at all; she's responding to what it makes her feel, which is something entirely different.

More.

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1I highly recommend Loving More's Poly Living conferences, having been to several of them now. The upcoming one in Seattle is the first in that city. Announcement and links:

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Poly Living West Conference, October 22–24, 2010:
From Theoretical Ideas to Practical Living:Polyamory and Relationship Choice in the 21st Century
For its Seattle debut, Loving More's Poly Living conference features:• Two days of amazing RELATIONSHIP and POLY PRACTICALITIES WORKSHOPS• Concert by BONE POETS ORCHESTRA• Keynote Speech by DOSSIE EASTON, co-author of The Ethical Slut• Special Guest Speaker CHRISTOPHER RYAN, co-author of the sensational new book Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality
MAIN PAGE:
www.lovemore.com/conferences/polyliving/seattle

SCHEDULE and WORKSHOP DESCRIPTIONS:
www.lovemore.com/blog/?p=564

REGISTER at
www.lovemore.com/xcart/SeattlePolyLivingFull.html
Day passes available. Discounts are available for groups or two or more registering together, and for people willing to do some light work at the conference (table-sitting, etc.) in exchange for a reduced rate; call the phone number below.

HOTEL INFORMATION:
www.lovemore.com/conferences/polyliving/seattle/hotel.php
Deadline for hotel discount on rooms is day after tomorrow, Friday Oct. 8. (Cite conference group "Poly Living" for the room discount when calling the hotel.) Each room can house up to 4 people; room-sharing available.

"Please call us at 970-667-5683 if you want more information, or have any problems registering for the conference or with hotel registration."Looking forward to seeing you there!"Robyn Trask, Executive DirectorLoving More Non-Profit
www.lovemore.com
robyn@lovemore.com
970-667-5683
PO Box 1658
Loveland, CO 80539

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[Permalink] Labels: anthropology, books

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