from an anti-poly BookFace group that claims to be ML :wtf-am-i-reading:
a lot of things have been ruined by captialism but this is such bad fucking analysis
Its not entirely without basis, in the sense that a lot of poly indeed has a lot of neoliberal underpinnings related to individuals being individuals, individuals being replaceable, treating people as commodities, the transient nature of most modern relationships, and the lack of community, which some people try to replace with an inordinate amount of intimate relationships. With all that I don’t mean that poly is bad, au contraire, poly can and does work, but it does require you to decolonize your mind.
no seriously like everything does, imagine thinking this specifically is relevant in any way except if you’re a straight-up theorist writing a book rn
IDK, when youre drunk at 2 am with your buddies and talking about all kinds of things a lot of stuff becomes relevant.
my ass has neoliberal underpinnings
I am really trying to come up with a joke about this that involves “destroyed by privatization” and the free market …
It goes either way IMO
some people really just want to be selfish atomized sex addicts, and polyamory is technically compatible with that
other people just legitimately want to have more than one actual relationship, and polyamory is compatible with that.
The first kind is even more alienating than a “trad nuclear family”, and the second kind is less alienating.
well, you made me revisit my reason for using that language. The reason I used it was that I’ve seen instances where a (usually hetero) couple goes poly, and one partner will essentially stop sexually desiring the other.
Whether this cessation of sexual desire was there to begin with and was the original motivation for the polyamory in the first place, or whether it developed naturally after going poly, is an open question. If the former, I think it qualifies as “selfish”. If the latter, then it can’t be helped and too bad
But yea I guess it was harsh and not super accurate language. But I really doubt that there are zero couples who fit that first type
again this isn’t a criticism of polyamory as every other arrangement has its own problems too
To be fair, trad nuclear family is something that I find particularly scary, but yeah.
Well I actually misspoke, I should have said “trad monogamous couple”. Multigenerational family would still work
What do you find scary about nuclear families? Environmental impact/suburbia?
It’s a lazy, non-materialist take which is extra egregious when you have literal Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries like Kollontai out here doing in depth work on the nature of sex, love, and romantic relationships as superstructural outcomes of the material world. There’s so much work to actually be done untangling and understanding these social dynamics from a Marxist perspective and this guy ain’t it lol
