Last month, my sweetie Eve and I celebrated our one-year anniversary with a trip into Oregon’s desert. I took many pictures, which I may one day find the time to post and write about, but I particularly like this one: the sun setting over the John Day Fossil Beds.
On the More Than Two blog, we’ve written about a question asked by one of our backers: “What do I do if two of my partners don’t get along with each other?” We’re certainly getting a workout with our backer questions!
This blog post is a dialog between Eve and me. Here’s the teaser:
Franklin: I’ve been in this situation from every angle: having a partner who doesn’t get along with one of my other partners, being the person a partner’s other partner doesn’t cotton to, and having a partner who’s involved with someone I don’t particularly like. […] When you’re the one who’s in the middle, caught between two partners who aren’t getting along…well, it kinda sucks. It can be easy to end up feeling pulled in two directions. I don’t have a magic solution, though I certainly admire the problem.
Eve: In my experience, it can be hard to hold multiple relationships together without the active support of all your partners for the other relationships, especially if you live with one of them. Situations where partners are just tolerating each other may have a steady undercurrent of stress that can be damaging and hard to manage. But it can be done, and whether you can or want to do it depends a lot on your own coping, communication and boundary-setting skills; your emotional health; and how important both partners are to you.
I don’t have a solution, either, but I think we can offer some management strategies.
The whole post is here. I’d love to hear from folks who’ve been in this position! Experiences? Thoughts? Strategies? Feel free to reply here or over there.
I’ve written a guest post on Greta Christina’s blog about ethics in a poly community. Here’s the teaser:
It’s difficult to talk about polyamory without hearing the expression “ethical non-monogamy.” There’s a bit of a sticky wicket, though, in that we rarely talk about the definition of “ethical,” beyond the obvious “don’t lie to your partners.” That’s a good start, sure, but it’s not enough to construct an entire foundation of relationship ethics on. When we’re living in a society that proscribes everything except heterosexual marriage between exactly two cisgendered people of opposite sexes, how do we even start talking about what makes an ethical non-monogamous relationship? Where do we turn for ethics? What distinguishes an ethical relationship from a non-ethical one? Are ethical relationships egalitarian, and if so, how does that align with BDSM relationships that are deliberately constructed along the lines of power exchange? If two people make an agreement and then present that agreement unilaterally to a third person, who is given few options other than accept the agreement as-is or walk away, is that ethical? What happens when people make relationship agreements, and then their needs change? What are ethical ways of revisiting and renegotiating previous agreements? How do we even define “ethics” in the first place, without resorting to religious or social conventions? What does it take for a person to make ethical relationship choices that aren’t aligned with a religious tradition or a cultural norm?
These are some of the issues we intend to address in our polyamory book, More Than Two, which is going into its last week of crowdfunding now.
I’d love to hear your thoughts! You can read the entire blog post on Greta Christina’s blog here.
Having made his directorial mark with dark, thoughtful movies like Pan’s Labyrinth and sprawling, epic movies like The Hobbit, Guillermo del Toro has turned his sights onto exploring new territory. And with Pacific Rim, his ambition is plain: he seeks nothing less than to make The Silliest Movie Ever Filmed.
Pacific Rim starts with a simple premise: Giant robots fighting aliens. To that premise, it adds: Giant Robots! Fighting Aliens! And also, More Giant Robots! Fighting More Aliens! Plus, it’s chock-full of scenes of giant robots. Fighting aliens.
In this movie, we see a mysterious underwater crevasse, glowing a hellish red and surrounded by special effects, unleash a gigantic alien. And I don’t mean T. Rex gigantic, oh, no. Or even King Kong gigantic. This is a gigantic alien. The size of the bigness of it would make Godzilla say “wow, that’s a gigantic alien!”
The gigantic alien wades ashore and stomps around San Francisco for a while. It smashes the Golden Gate Bridge, sending cars flying everywhere. It stomps along down Folsom Street, sending more cars flying. The army is mobilized. Tanks get stepped on. F-35 Lightning fighters shoot at it with machine guns, which is odd considering their more typical armament includes Brimstone armor-piercing antitank missiles, which one might think (were one of a clear frame of mind and not screaming “OMG it’s a gigantic alien!”) would be a more effective weapon against gigantic aliens. More cars go flying. The monster is defeated. Another monster appears. More fighter aircraft shoot at it with ineffective weapons–a common theme in this movie, as we shall see–and eventually, a plan is made to fight the monsters using gigantic hundred-foot-tall robots shaped like people, because the basic human body plan is so effective at underwater hand-to-hand combat. Pilots are placed in the giant robots and move them around by thrashing and stomping, because it takes about 750 milliseconds for a person to move a limb, and it was felt that simply controlling the giant robots by thought alone rather than by motion might make the giant robots too fast and too responsive, depriving the alien monsters of a fair chance. Having one pilot per robot overloaded the pilot’s brain because of plot, so the solution was to put two pilots into each robot, thereby adding to the response time and generally making the giant robots that much less efficient.
And that’s before the opening credits roll.
The rest of the movie goes something like this:
I’ve scarcely had time to blog these days, what with running the crowdfunding campaign for the polyamory book and having kidney stones and all.
One of the perks we have available to backers is the ability to have us write a poly blog post on the topic of their choosing over on the More Than Two blog. Our first backer to ask for a blog post came up with a topic that’s a oozey: how do we end or transition out of poly relationships? Here’s the teaser:
There’s a trope in some parts of the poly community that being poly means staying friends with all of your exes. I’m going to buck poly convention and say that’s not always the best approach, or even possible.
It’s the ideal I strive for personally, but it isn’t always going to happen, and sometimes that’s okay. What happens after a relationship ends depends a great deal about what kind of relationship it was, what course it took, how it developed, and how and why it ended. (I will say “ended” to mean that it’s no longer a romantic relationship. I’ve heard some folks say no relationship ever really ends, they simply change, though if two people who were once romantic partners aren’t anymore, I think it’s reasonable to say the romantic relationship has ended.)
I’ve had relationships end in just about every way you can imagine. I’ve broken up with partners, I’ve had partners break up with me, I’ve had breakups go smoothly and transition into awesome friendships, I have former partners I will probably never see or talk to again, I’ve had breakups that went really badly… you name it.
The most basic lesson I’ve learned from it all is there is no “breakup roadmap.” I no longer try to carry a set of expectations with me about what might happen if and when a relationship should end. Instead, what I try (not always perfectly) to do is to approach relationship endings with the same tools I use to approach relationships themselves: compassion, integrity and kindness.
It’s a tall order. When a relationship ends, especially if it’s the other person ending it, it’s really tough to reach for compassion and kindness through pain and loss. In some cases, it might be appropriate to take enough space to be able to mourn the loss of the relationship and work through the emotions attached to that before trying to go ahead with a friendship; it’s perfectly reasonable to say it might take some time to get there.
You can read the whole thing here. I’s a complicated topic, and will probably be an entire chapter in the book. I’d love to hear your thoughts! You can reply here or over there.
I watched District 9. I liked District 9. When I heard that the guy who made District 9 was doing another movie, this time about the enormous class divide in modern American society, and that it had a space station and explosions and stuff on it, I was as excited as a hyperactive kid on a cotton candy sugar high.
Perhaps not Prometheus levels of excited, but excited nonetheless.
And, unlike Prometheus, Elysium didn’t disappoint. It was exactly what I expected it to be after seeing District 9: gorgeous, brutal, sprawling, epic, and nasty. Very, very nasty.
The richest of the rich, the top wealthiest of society, have abandoned Earth altogether in favor of a lovely space station called Elysium, where affordable housing starts at just $250,000,000. The people stuck on Earth, the poorest 99% of society, are mired in sprawling poverty.
The movie goes something like this:
YOUNG CHILD MATT DAMON: This world sucks.
ORPHANAGE NUN: Suffering is good. Jesus loves suffering. If you were not meant to suffer, you would have been born rich. Jesus loves the rich.
YOUNG CHILD LOVE INTEREST: This world sucks.
YOUNG CHILD MATT DAMON: One day I will take us up to the space station where the super-rich live and everything is awesome.
YOUNG CHILD LOVE INTEREST: Cool. I will draw on you with a pen now.
A little while ago, I wrote a blog post called Some Thoughts on Rape Culture.
Every time I write a blog post like this, as sure as night follows day, the same thing happens. Invariably, I will get at least one, and sometimes several, private emails in my inbox. The content of these emails is always the same, and they’re rarely stated in the blog comments. Every time, they’re some variant on the same theme:
That must be working pretty good for you, huh? Pretending to be a feminist must really get you laid.
This has happened for years, and this last blog post was no exception.
I’m not quite sure what to make of the assumption that a man who espouses feminist values must be using it as a ploy to get sex. The first time I encountered this, it was quite a head-scratcher, I must confess. Really? I thought. That’s your take-away? I am pretending to support values and ideals about women’s agency because I’m trying to score sex from feminists? Seriously?
Now, in all fairness, if you look at all my partners, it’s very unlikely I would be involved with them if I weren’t a “feminist man,” or, as I like to call it, “a man who thinks women are people.” I have simple tastes; I prefer strong, smart, confident women, and those tend–surprise!–to be women who like being treated as people.
But here’s the thing.
The fact that these women would only be likely to get involved with a man who respects the ideals of feminism doesn’t mean that they’d get involved with every guy who respects those ideals. Treating women as people is necessary but not sufficient; if you treat women as people, that doesn’t guarantee you’ll be involved with them, but if you don’t, you won’t. Yes, in order to have sex with my partners, you have to be a dude who’s a feminist. You also have to be a dude who they think is worth having sex with, and you can’t fake your way into that.
So as a strategy for getting laid, adopting feminist ideals is, by itself, kinda rubbish.
And pretending to adopt feminist ideals is even more rubbish.
I don’t quite get what’s going on in the head of some guy who thinks pretending to be feminist is a ploy to get laid, but I have to assume that a guy who thinks that, probably doesn’t think women are very smart. If someone pretends to think women are people, but doesn’t actually think women are people, I suspect the ploy would be revealed rather quickly. Probably some time between appetizers and the main course, and certainly well before any clothes come off. I really don’t think it’s possible to pretend to be feminist, at least not for any length of time longer than a dinner conversation.
I don’t say that rape culture is a thing because I’m hoping to get laid by women who say that rape culture is a thing. I don’t think women deserve agency and personal autonomy as a tactic to try to get them to use their agency and personal autonomy to fuck me. I mean, seriously, what the fuck? How is it that someone might seriously think that being nice to feminists is a strategy for getting laid? Is it because he thinks feminists are so well-known for…um, having sex with any guy who’s nice to them?
If I were to advocate some kind of duplicitous scheme to get more sex, I would definitely recommend “learn to swing dance” over “pretend to be a feminist.” It certainly seems far more likely to succeed. Pretending to be a feminist when you really don’t think of women as real people, just to try to get in the pants of women who want to be treated like real people, is just…it…I just…what is this I don’t even.
I’ve just written a blog post in the More Than Two book blog about building polyamorous relationships where we move toward something rather than moving away from something. Here’s the teaser:
I was recently asked to do a media interview about polyamory. This happens from time to time, and most of the questions I’m asked tend to be fairly predictable: How do you deal with jealousy? What do you tell your parents or your kids? Do you think polyamory is the next cultural revolution?
This interview was quite different, and one of the questions I was asked helped crystallize for me some of the guiding ideals about the relationships I choose.
The question concerned dealing with fears, and while I was answering it, it suddenly occurred to me: throughout my life, the relationships I have found most rewarding have been those that are guided toward something rather than away from something.
You can read the whole thing; feel free to respond there or here.
I get, as most folks do, a lot of spam in my inbox. A lot of spam.
And, as most folks who follow my blog know, I dedicate some time to tracking down that spam, especially when it involves hacked Web sites.
Lately, I’ve been getting a tremendous amount of spam that all looks pretty similar. It usually offers phony lose-weight-quick products, miracle hair regrowers, and other health and beauty scams, and the emails all tend to look pretty much the same. Here’s an example:
Pretty bog-standard stuff.
These emails invariably contain URLs that are either hacked sites or sites that have no content at all on the home page. The hacked sites are straightforward; the spammers hack the site, put in a new subdirectory, and put an index file that redirects to another site. The sites that have no content on their top level are a puzzler; it’s not clear if the spammers are setting up these sites themselves, using fake or stolen credit card information, or are hacking into sites that have been reserved and configured for hosting but have never had any content placed in them.
Where it gets interesting is in what happens after that.
Clicking on the URL in a spam email takes you to the hacked or blank site, and leads to a redirector. The redirector leads to another, and another, and another, and another, until you finally end up at the spam site. The chain of events looks like this:
The first stop on the chain is ow.ly, a URL shortener used by Hootsuite, the social media company that lets you manage multiple Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social media accounts.
Hootsuite is a large, rapidly-growing company that is filled with bright, ambitious programmers who appear to know very little about security and nothing at all about abuse prevention. I wrote a blog post a while ago with a flowchart of Web 2.0 startups; Hootsuite appears to be somewhere in the early stages of the Loss of Innocence part of the chart, having not yet keyed into the fact that their URL shortener is becoming popular with malware droppers and spammers. (The poor naive dears are still so innocent, they have no mechanism at all for reporting ow.ly spam! I predict that’s going to bite them in the ass in an ugly way, soon.)
After that, things get more interesting.
For years, I’ve been on-again, off-again working on a book on polyamory.
It’s been discouraging, in that all the publishers I’ve talked to want me to make it a personal memoir, and that’s not what I want to write. The project has been languishing for a while, by which I mean for several years, lost beneath the shuffle of More Important Matters.
It has finally, at long last, been resurrected. My sweetie Eve and I have started working on a new book, one that combines her ideas about polyamory and mine. It’s going to be a monster–it’s looking to shape up as a 500-page hands-on guide for folks who want to explore polyamory, chock full of problem-solving ideas, hints and tips.
We’ve launched a new blog which will contain progress notes, ideas and essays that don’t fit into the Web site More Than Two but also don’t make it into the book, and more.
We’re going to crowdfund this project; to get around the small but nevertheless still niggling issue that publishers want a different book from the one we want to write, we’re launching a full-fledged publishing imprint to go along with it.
If you’d like to know more, check out the blog and keep watching this space!