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.
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.