Great post! I agree with a commenter above who says that “The problem is not a lack of ideas that needs to be rectified by brainstorming—we have the information already. The problem seems to be that no one wants to act on this information.” That being said, I have a few thoughts:
Regarding code of conduct at events, I’m hesitant to make hard and fast rules here. I think the reality around situations such as asking people out/hitting on people, etc, is that some people are better at reading situations than others. For example, I know couples who have started dating after meeting each others at my local EA group’s events, and I don’t think anyone would see an issue with that. The issue comes in when someone asks someone out/hits on someone and makes the other person uncomfortable in the process. That being said, not asking people out during 1:1s seems like a good norm (I’m surprised I even need to say this, to be frank), as does not touching someone unless you have explicitly asked for their consent to do so (this can apply even to something like hugs), and not making comments on someone’s appearance/facial features/body.
In terms of power structures/conflicts of interest, I would love to see us borrow more from other organisations that have good guidelines around this. I can’t think of any specific ones right now, but I know from my time working in government that there are specific processes to be followed around conflicts of interest, including consensual workplace relationships. I’m sure others can chime in with organisations that do this well.
In terms of hiring, I like what Rethink Priorities is doing. They attempt to anonymise parts of applications where possible, and ask people not to submit photos alongside their CVs. I think more could be done to encourage partially blind hiring/funding processes. For example, an employer/funder could write their first impression of someone’s application without seeing any identifying information (eg. name, age, gender, ethnicity, etc), then do a second impression after. I’m conscious that names are quite important in EA and that this could add more work to already busy grant-making organisations, but maybe there is a way to do this that would minimise additional work while also helping reduce unconscious bias.
I would also love to see more writing/information/opinions come from the top-down. For example, people who have a big voice in effective altruism could write about this more often and make suggestions for what organisations and local groups can do. We already see this a bit from CEA, but it would be great to see it from other EA orgs and thought leaders. Sometimes I get a sense that people who are higher-up in the movement don’t care about this that much, and I would love to be proven wrong.
Lastly, when it comes to engaging with posts on the forum about this topic, I was disappointed to recently see a post of someone writing about their experiences in the EA NYC community be met with a lot of people who commented disagreeing with how the post was written/how polyamorous men were generally characterised in the post. I think we should establish a norm around validating people when they have bad experiences, pointing them to the community health team, and taking steps to do better. There is no “perfect victim”—we need to acknowledge that sometimes people will have bad experiences with the community and will also hold opinions we disagree with. When they bring up their bad experience, it’s not the time to say, “not all men are like this” or “I disagree with how you went about bringing this up.”
So I was one of the top comments disagreeing with that post, and I’m a poly woman, and my interest wasn’t to defend predatory poly men but to argue against the idea that my relationship structure, which is consensually, positively practiced by many people the world over, isn’t inherently toxic or embedded in predatoriness. Trauma and upset should be met with sympathy, but it doesns’t justify shitting on others’ morally-neutral choices, and a community that’s hostile to polyamory is hostile to many women and NBs, not just men.
I’m conflicted here. I completely agree with you that shitting on others’ morally-neutral choices is not ideal, but I don’t think anyone was coming away from reading that post thinking that polyamory = bad. I would hope that the people on this forum can engage thoughtfully with the post and decide for themselves what they agree/disagree with.
If someone had a bad experience with a man, and in the process of talking about it said something like, “all men suck and are immoral,” I just don’t think that is the right time or place to get into an argument with them about how they are wrong. It may have not even been coming from a place of “I actually 100% believe this,” it may have just been something thought/written about in the heat of the moment when they are recounting their negative experiences. Again, there’s no “perfect victim” that is going to say things in a way you 100% agree with all the time, but IMO the forum to disagree with them does not need to be while they are recounting their negative experience.
I guess I don’t see why someone wouldn’t come away from the post thinking that polyamory = bad.
I think the analogy here is not “all men suck and are immoral” (though I’m not even sure how much I endorse that), but like, if someone had had a bad experiences with men of a certain race, and in talking about it continually mentioned their race. I think people would rightly call that out as racist and not ok—we want to be sympathetic to victims, but if they are saying things that are harmful to others in the course of telling their experience, it’s ok to point that out. Now obviously polyamory and race aren’t exactly analogous, but I think the relevant differance is that poly people are a minority, that does face some stigma. And from my point of view, in trying to make the community less toxic for women, the poster made it more toxic for me (and other women like me).
I worry that race is a poor analogy here and may lead to more heat than light being generated in this discussion. Race has little bearing on dynamics around sex and relationships, while the mono/poly distinction does substantially impact them. I totally agree that it’s unfair to stigmatize all poly men as abusers, but I think it’s fair to consider whether the high rate of poly folks in the EA community creates unique considerations when thinking about community norms.
In terms of people coming away from the post thinking that polyamory = bad, I guess I have faith in people’s ability on this forum to separate a bad experience with a community from an entire community as a whole. (Maybe not everyone holds this same faith.)
The post was written by one person, and it was their experience, but I expect by now most EAs have run into polyamorous people in their lives (especially considering that EAs on average tend to be young, male, non-religious, privileged, and more likely to attend elite universities where polyamory/discussions about polyamory might be more common) and those experiences speak for themselves. For example, I personally have met lots of polyamorous people in my life, and I’ve seen everything from perfectly healthy, well-functioning relationships to completely toxic relationships (just like monogamous relationships). So when I engaged with the post, I was thinking, “this person had a bad experience with the poly community, and it sounds terrible. I know from my own experiences that polyamory relationships can be healthy, but unfortunately that’s not what this person experienced.”
I’m persuaded by your analogy to race, and overall I don’t want the EA community to perpetuate harmful stereotypes about any group, including polyamorous people. I think my main conflict here is I also want a world where women feel okay talking about their experiences without holding the added worry that they might not word things in exactly the right way, or that some people might push back against them when they open up (and I think you would probably agree with this).
Yeah that’s fair, I definitely don’t want people to have to watch their wording too closely when sharing their experiences, and I felt complicated about that post and my own replies/reaction to it.
None of them walked away with your conclusions. The response from within EA forum, the people who can take action from within, was a completely different distribution. You’re interpreting my post, not as it is written, but as it is implied to you. But I am only responsible for what I say, not what you think I said.
Ultimately, no action was taken on my post and EA remains unsafe, partly because of you.
Do you think that the EA community would be safer if fewer people in it were polyamorous? That was the impression I got from your post, but I’m willing to be corrected. You didn’t mention polyamory in the Twitter thread, but you did in the post (I counted about 5 times in the first paragraph). This gave me the strong impression that you think polyamory is closely linked to the predatory behaviour you witnessed.
I don’t think I’m responsible for EA being unsafe.
Do you think that the EA community would be safer if fewer people in it were polyamorous? - I am not going to give a moral lecture on what people should do with their sexual choices, it’s up to them.
The men who abused me were poly, the dynamics of poly are important for amplifying their harmful reach. They’re using polyamory to legitimize reaching a wider number of victims, and they’re piggybacking on EA’s compelling call for impact to meet and discover new victims.
If a poly man asks me out respectfully because they did not know I was mono, I say no and they accept my decision. No harm, no foul. This is not what happened.
If people are not respecting your no, that’s not acceptable, but I’m not really sure what their poly status has to do with it (any more than their nationality, their job, the fact that they play video games, or whatever). I don’t think poly ‘legitimizes’ reaching a wider number of victims—being willing to date multiple people doesn’t give you a right to cross others’ boundaries. I suspect that in communities less friendly to polyamory, these predators would just stay single, or cheat on their partners.
If a poly man asks me out respectfully because they did not know I was mono, I say no and they accept my decision. No harm, no foul. This is not what happened.
It sounds like your issue isn’t with polyamory in principle, but with people who don’t respect you / your boundaries? I think the EA community would be safer if there were fewer people who didn’t respect other people’s boundaries, irrespective of whether they were mono/poly.
I wrote that post. I just want to clarify that I did not say “all poly men”, but “many poly men”. The difference is important. As someone who has no theoretical issue with poly practiced consensually, I’m not getting it why Amber Dawn and others feel attacked.
Me: “I was harassed by many poly men. ”
Amber: “Stop attacking poly men. Not all poly men.”
I have been harassed by many monogamous men but if I posted on the LW forum saying “I was harassed by many monogamous men” I would expect a lot of pushback from people who—very sensibly—would think I was trying to stigmatize monogamy.
There are places for unendorsed venting. Those places are not the Less Wrong forum.
ETA: I’m guessing from comments of yours I read elsewhere that you didn’t mean to come off as anti-poly as you did to me and Amber, and I’m sorry if my comment came off hostile. I know I’ve definitely written things that came off in ways I didn’t intend. :)
Your expectation of push back is wrong. If you say ” i was harassed by monogamous men”, I’m never going to be like “not all monogamous men are like that”, “oh but it is just a statistic”. I am female, Indian, bisexual. I am a minority on many axes. I don’t defend female abusers, Indian abusers or LGBTQ abusers. I am going to stand with the victim, not with the class of victim/abuser. A wrong is a wrong, plain and simple.
@ozymandias: now that you have clarification, can you help me get action on the pointers and suggestions on my post? My post is here : https://keerthanapg.com/random/ea-women/ All action items are agnostic to poly/mono status of victim/abuser. I didn’t barely post it in EA forum to talk about it and then move on, I want things to change.
I feel attacked because it’s implied that this is relevant to their toxicity, and it’s not. And you’re not getting that you wanted to make the community less toxic for women, but I’m a woman, and poly, and the community will become more toxic for me is polyamory is stigmatized. I’m not interested in defending poly men—though of course it is true that many poly men are perfectly fine—on a more basic level, I’m defending myself.
Your feeling attacked is slightly unwarranted, because everywhere I mention poly men in the article, I say “these poly men”, “many poly men”, I never say “all poly men”. It’s hard for me to write a post anticipating what you could imply from it, right?
In fact poly women have the most incentive to stop bad poly male actors because they’re more dangerous to you than they are to me. I will never enter into a relationship with them because they’re a disjoint dating pool for me, but they’re lurking in your pool, making you unsafe more than me. And not just that they harm one poly woman, each bad poly male actor will harm multiple by definition, so that multiple poly women are traumatized and driven away from EA due to one poly bad male actor.
Do you think the way we should try to stop bad poly male actors is different from the way we should try to stop bad male actors in general? I totally agree that we should try to prevent predators from being able to harm people, generally.
I think if you replaced the word “poly” with the word “American”, you’d see why I took away that implication. Even if you didn’t say “all American men”, I think readers could be forgiven for thinking you had it in for American men, or thought that they were worse than men of other nationalities.
And not just that they harm one poly woman, each bad poly male actor will harm multiple by definition
I think the fact that “poly” means “multiple” and “mono” means “one” are misleading in this case if you think about what these scenarios look like in practice. I don’t see why you’d expect a poly man to cause significantly more harm than a serial monogamist, a single man casually seeing people, or a man who cheats. And incidentally, I know many poly men who just happen to only date one person for long lengths of time and many poly men who are single for long lengths of time.
I also think that poly men are more stigmatised than those other relationship structures—although sometimes less so than cheating depending on your social circles—and that EAs are tired of being dismissed as a “poly cult” (I prefer “free-loving hippie nerds” but sadly we don’t get to choose our insults).
I assume you didn’t have all of this context before, so thought that associating bad behaviour with being poly wouldn’t be a big deal, or perhaps you even saw being poly as a privilege and therefore thought it would be okay to attack it (in the same way people associate bad behaviour with “rich, young, white men” for example). So I hope this context helps. And FWIW, my own experience of being a poly woman has always felt more like an identity than a choice, although the associated stigma means that I have not always acted on it.
Great post! I agree with a commenter above who says that “The problem is not a lack of ideas that needs to be rectified by brainstorming—we have the information already. The problem seems to be that no one wants to act on this information.” That being said, I have a few thoughts:
Regarding code of conduct at events, I’m hesitant to make hard and fast rules here. I think the reality around situations such as asking people out/hitting on people, etc, is that some people are better at reading situations than others. For example, I know couples who have started dating after meeting each others at my local EA group’s events, and I don’t think anyone would see an issue with that. The issue comes in when someone asks someone out/hits on someone and makes the other person uncomfortable in the process. That being said, not asking people out during 1:1s seems like a good norm (I’m surprised I even need to say this, to be frank), as does not touching someone unless you have explicitly asked for their consent to do so (this can apply even to something like hugs), and not making comments on someone’s appearance/facial features/body.
In terms of power structures/conflicts of interest, I would love to see us borrow more from other organisations that have good guidelines around this. I can’t think of any specific ones right now, but I know from my time working in government that there are specific processes to be followed around conflicts of interest, including consensual workplace relationships. I’m sure others can chime in with organisations that do this well.
In terms of hiring, I like what Rethink Priorities is doing. They attempt to anonymise parts of applications where possible, and ask people not to submit photos alongside their CVs. I think more could be done to encourage partially blind hiring/funding processes. For example, an employer/funder could write their first impression of someone’s application without seeing any identifying information (eg. name, age, gender, ethnicity, etc), then do a second impression after. I’m conscious that names are quite important in EA and that this could add more work to already busy grant-making organisations, but maybe there is a way to do this that would minimise additional work while also helping reduce unconscious bias.
I would also love to see more writing/information/opinions come from the top-down. For example, people who have a big voice in effective altruism could write about this more often and make suggestions for what organisations and local groups can do. We already see this a bit from CEA, but it would be great to see it from other EA orgs and thought leaders. Sometimes I get a sense that people who are higher-up in the movement don’t care about this that much, and I would love to be proven wrong.
Lastly, when it comes to engaging with posts on the forum about this topic, I was disappointed to recently see a post of someone writing about their experiences in the EA NYC community be met with a lot of people who commented disagreeing with how the post was written/how polyamorous men were generally characterised in the post. I think we should establish a norm around validating people when they have bad experiences, pointing them to the community health team, and taking steps to do better. There is no “perfect victim”—we need to acknowledge that sometimes people will have bad experiences with the community and will also hold opinions we disagree with. When they bring up their bad experience, it’s not the time to say, “not all men are like this” or “I disagree with how you went about bringing this up.”
So I was one of the top comments disagreeing with that post, and I’m a poly woman, and my interest wasn’t to defend predatory poly men but to argue against the idea that my relationship structure, which is consensually, positively practiced by many people the world over, isn’t inherently toxic or embedded in predatoriness. Trauma and upset should be met with sympathy, but it doesns’t justify shitting on others’ morally-neutral choices, and a community that’s hostile to polyamory is hostile to many women and NBs, not just men.
I’m conflicted here. I completely agree with you that shitting on others’ morally-neutral choices is not ideal, but I don’t think anyone was coming away from reading that post thinking that polyamory = bad. I would hope that the people on this forum can engage thoughtfully with the post and decide for themselves what they agree/disagree with.
If someone had a bad experience with a man, and in the process of talking about it said something like, “all men suck and are immoral,” I just don’t think that is the right time or place to get into an argument with them about how they are wrong. It may have not even been coming from a place of “I actually 100% believe this,” it may have just been something thought/written about in the heat of the moment when they are recounting their negative experiences. Again, there’s no “perfect victim” that is going to say things in a way you 100% agree with all the time, but IMO the forum to disagree with them does not need to be while they are recounting their negative experience.
I guess I don’t see why someone wouldn’t come away from the post thinking that polyamory = bad.
I think the analogy here is not “all men suck and are immoral” (though I’m not even sure how much I endorse that), but like, if someone had had a bad experiences with men of a certain race, and in talking about it continually mentioned their race. I think people would rightly call that out as racist and not ok—we want to be sympathetic to victims, but if they are saying things that are harmful to others in the course of telling their experience, it’s ok to point that out. Now obviously polyamory and race aren’t exactly analogous, but I think the relevant differance is that poly people are a minority, that does face some stigma. And from my point of view, in trying to make the community less toxic for women, the poster made it more toxic for me (and other women like me).
I worry that race is a poor analogy here and may lead to more heat than light being generated in this discussion. Race has little bearing on dynamics around sex and relationships, while the mono/poly distinction does substantially impact them. I totally agree that it’s unfair to stigmatize all poly men as abusers, but I think it’s fair to consider whether the high rate of poly folks in the EA community creates unique considerations when thinking about community norms.
In terms of people coming away from the post thinking that polyamory = bad, I guess I have faith in people’s ability on this forum to separate a bad experience with a community from an entire community as a whole. (Maybe not everyone holds this same faith.)
The post was written by one person, and it was their experience, but I expect by now most EAs have run into polyamorous people in their lives (especially considering that EAs on average tend to be young, male, non-religious, privileged, and more likely to attend elite universities where polyamory/discussions about polyamory might be more common) and those experiences speak for themselves. For example, I personally have met lots of polyamorous people in my life, and I’ve seen everything from perfectly healthy, well-functioning relationships to completely toxic relationships (just like monogamous relationships). So when I engaged with the post, I was thinking, “this person had a bad experience with the poly community, and it sounds terrible. I know from my own experiences that polyamory relationships can be healthy, but unfortunately that’s not what this person experienced.”
I’m persuaded by your analogy to race, and overall I don’t want the EA community to perpetuate harmful stereotypes about any group, including polyamorous people. I think my main conflict here is I also want a world where women feel okay talking about their experiences without holding the added worry that they might not word things in exactly the right way, or that some people might push back against them when they open up (and I think you would probably agree with this).
Yeah that’s fair, I definitely don’t want people to have to watch their wording too closely when sharing their experiences, and I felt complicated about that post and my own replies/reaction to it.
Amber, I also shared this on twitter and this is the response I got: https://twitter.com/keerthanpg/status/1591515890109255680?s=20&t=WobT4rLWtpPRSOryCTlDxw
None of them walked away with your conclusions. The response from within EA forum, the people who can take action from within, was a completely different distribution. You’re interpreting my post, not as it is written, but as it is implied to you. But I am only responsible for what I say, not what you think I said.
Ultimately, no action was taken on my post and EA remains unsafe, partly because of you.
Do you think that the EA community would be safer if fewer people in it were polyamorous? That was the impression I got from your post, but I’m willing to be corrected. You didn’t mention polyamory in the Twitter thread, but you did in the post (I counted about 5 times in the first paragraph). This gave me the strong impression that you think polyamory is closely linked to the predatory behaviour you witnessed.
I don’t think I’m responsible for EA being unsafe.
Do you think that the EA community would be safer if fewer people in it were polyamorous? - I am not going to give a moral lecture on what people should do with their sexual choices, it’s up to them.
The men who abused me were poly, the dynamics of poly are important for amplifying their harmful reach. They’re using polyamory to legitimize reaching a wider number of victims, and they’re piggybacking on EA’s compelling call for impact to meet and discover new victims.
If a poly man asks me out respectfully because they did not know I was mono, I say no and they accept my decision. No harm, no foul. This is not what happened.
If people are not respecting your no, that’s not acceptable, but I’m not really sure what their poly status has to do with it (any more than their nationality, their job, the fact that they play video games, or whatever). I don’t think poly ‘legitimizes’ reaching a wider number of victims—being willing to date multiple people doesn’t give you a right to cross others’ boundaries. I suspect that in communities less friendly to polyamory, these predators would just stay single, or cheat on their partners.
It sounds like your issue isn’t with polyamory in principle, but with people who don’t respect you / your boundaries? I think the EA community would be safer if there were fewer people who didn’t respect other people’s boundaries, irrespective of whether they were mono/poly.
Correct. I had mentioned in my post it was not a criticism of polyamory that is practiced consensually and without conflicts of interest.
I wrote that post. I just want to clarify that I did not say “all poly men”, but “many poly men”. The difference is important. As someone who has no theoretical issue with poly practiced consensually, I’m not getting it why Amber Dawn and others feel attacked.
Me: “I was harassed by many poly men. ”
Amber: “Stop attacking poly men. Not all poly men.”
Read this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NotAllMen
I have been harassed by many monogamous men but if I posted on the LW forum saying “I was harassed by many monogamous men” I would expect a lot of pushback from people who—very sensibly—would think I was trying to stigmatize monogamy.
There are places for unendorsed venting. Those places are not the Less Wrong forum.
ETA: I’m guessing from comments of yours I read elsewhere that you didn’t mean to come off as anti-poly as you did to me and Amber, and I’m sorry if my comment came off hostile. I know I’ve definitely written things that came off in ways I didn’t intend. :)
Your expectation of push back is wrong. If you say ” i was harassed by monogamous men”, I’m never going to be like “not all monogamous men are like that”, “oh but it is just a statistic”. I am female, Indian, bisexual. I am a minority on many axes. I don’t defend female abusers, Indian abusers or LGBTQ abusers. I am going to stand with the victim, not with the class of victim/abuser. A wrong is a wrong, plain and simple.
@ozymandias: now that you have clarification, can you help me get action on the pointers and suggestions on my post? My post is here : https://keerthanapg.com/random/ea-women/ All action items are agnostic to poly/mono status of victim/abuser. I didn’t barely post it in EA forum to talk about it and then move on, I want things to change.
I feel attacked because it’s implied that this is relevant to their toxicity, and it’s not.
And you’re not getting that you wanted to make the community less toxic for women, but I’m a woman, and poly, and the community will become more toxic for me is polyamory is stigmatized. I’m not interested in defending poly men—though of course it is true that many poly men are perfectly fine—on a more basic level, I’m defending myself.
Your feeling attacked is slightly unwarranted, because everywhere I mention poly men in the article, I say “these poly men”, “many poly men”, I never say “all poly men”. It’s hard for me to write a post anticipating what you could imply from it, right?
In fact poly women have the most incentive to stop bad poly male actors because they’re more dangerous to you than they are to me. I will never enter into a relationship with them because they’re a disjoint dating pool for me, but they’re lurking in your pool, making you unsafe more than me. And not just that they harm one poly woman, each bad poly male actor will harm multiple by definition, so that multiple poly women are traumatized and driven away from EA due to one poly bad male actor.
Do you think the way we should try to stop bad poly male actors is different from the way we should try to stop bad male actors in general? I totally agree that we should try to prevent predators from being able to harm people, generally.
I think if you replaced the word “poly” with the word “American”, you’d see why I took away that implication. Even if you didn’t say “all American men”, I think readers could be forgiven for thinking you had it in for American men, or thought that they were worse than men of other nationalities.
I think the fact that “poly” means “multiple” and “mono” means “one” are misleading in this case if you think about what these scenarios look like in practice. I don’t see why you’d expect a poly man to cause significantly more harm than a serial monogamist, a single man casually seeing people, or a man who cheats. And incidentally, I know many poly men who just happen to only date one person for long lengths of time and many poly men who are single for long lengths of time.
I also think that poly men are more stigmatised than those other relationship structures—although sometimes less so than cheating depending on your social circles—and that EAs are tired of being dismissed as a “poly cult” (I prefer “free-loving hippie nerds” but sadly we don’t get to choose our insults).
I assume you didn’t have all of this context before, so thought that associating bad behaviour with being poly wouldn’t be a big deal, or perhaps you even saw being poly as a privilege and therefore thought it would be okay to attack it (in the same way people associate bad behaviour with “rich, young, white men” for example). So I hope this context helps. And FWIW, my own experience of being a poly woman has always felt more like an identity than a choice, although the associated stigma means that I have not always acted on it.