Historical note: If EA had emerged in the 1970s era of the gay rights movement rather than the 2010s, I can imagine an alternative history in which some EAs were utterly outraged and offended that gay or lesbian EAs had dared to invite them to a gay or lesbian event. The EA community could have leveraged the latent homophobia of the time to portray such an invitation as bizarrely unprofessional, and a big problem that needs addressing. Why are we treating polyamory and kink in 2023 with the same reactive outrage that people would have treated gay/lesbian sexuality fifty years ago?
I agree with this. Though the thing I’d want to push for isn’t “treat it as an axiom that poly and BDSM are exactly as socially and psychologically healthy and good as LGBT things, and accuse people of bigotry if they ever criticize those practices”.
The thing I’d push for instead is: Err on the side of treating EAs’ consensual choices in their personal lives as None Of The Movement’s Business. But if topics like “what are the costs and benefits of poly?” come up (either because EAs are trying to make personal decisions, or because they’re trying to understand the world at large), try to make it socially safe for people to express their actual views (both pro and con), as long as they’re civil, willing to provide supporting arguments and hear counter-arguments, and otherwise following good epistemic norms in the conversation.
I’d strongly endorse your suggestion that we should ‘Err on the side of treating EAs’ consensual choices in their personal lives as None Of The Movement’s Business’.
Most EAs are adults who are old enough to vote, drive, join the military, own property, take out loans, invest in stocks, get married, have children, and consent (or not) to sex.
IMHO, we should treat each other as adults, and the EA community should not put itself in a position of policing our social/sexual lives.
Side-note: the OP says “Wildly unusual social practices like polyamory”, but I think poly is fairly common in the Bay Area outside of EA/rat circles.
I suspect it’s fairly common in other young, blue-tribe, urban contexts in the US too? (Especially if we treat “polyamorous”, “non-monogamous”, and many “monogamish” relationship styles as more-or-less the same phenomenon.)
Rob—yes, among under-30s in the US, UK, and Europe, consensual non-monogamy is pretty popular; good reliable data are hard to come by, but it’s certainly NOT the case that polyamory is a ‘wildly unusual social practice’.
The most recent Census-based quota sample (Moors et al, 2021) of single adults in the US (N = 3,438) shows that about 17% of people would like to engage in polyamory, and about 11% have done so at some point. (Compare that to circa 4.5% of Americans being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans). So, polyamory as a relationship orientation is arguably about as common as (or maybe more common than) gay/lesbian as a sexual orientation.
Side-note: the OP says “Wildly unusual social practices like polyamory”, but I think poly is fairly common in the Bay Area outside of EA/rat circles.
I suspect it’s fairly common in other young, blue-tribe, urban contexts in the US too? (Especially if we treat “polyamorous”, “non-monogamous”, and many “monogamish” relationship styles as more-or-less the same phenomenon.)
I’ve heard this argument before but I think it’s quite overstated. I grew up in the SF Bay Area and still am in touch with many friends from childhood. They are generally young, blue-tribe, urban/suburban, etc.
Of that group, I think zero of them are polyamorous, with perhaps one exception (though I’m not sure if this person actually practices polyamory or has merely thought about doing so/been attracted to the idea) -- and that one exception is also the one member of the group, other than myself, with by far the most contact with the Bay Area rationality/EA scene.
(Of course, it’s possible and perhaps indeed somewhat likely that some people I knew in childhood are now polyamorous but I haven’t learned about this, as they keep it quiet or we’ve fallen out of contact or whatever? But it certainly does not seem to be a big mainstream thing.)
Third Generation Bay Area, here—and, if you aren’t going to college at Berkeley or swirling in the small cliques of SF among 800,000 people living there, yeah, not a lot of polycules. I remember when Occupy oozed its way through here that left a residue of ‘say-anything-polyamorists’ who were excited to share their ‘pick-up artist’ techniques when only other men where present. “Gurus abuse naïve hopefuls for sex” has been a recurring theme of the Bay, every few decades, but the locals don’t buy it.
if I’m going to be nervous about anything it’s doing things like poly and kink when you don’t have a good sense of how these things ~typically look. fortunately there is plenty of cultural infrastructure for fixing this in EA/rat circles.
I agree with this. Though the thing I’d want to push for isn’t “treat it as an axiom that poly and BDSM are exactly as socially and psychologically healthy and good as LGBT things, and accuse people of bigotry if they ever criticize those practices”.
The thing I’d push for instead is: Err on the side of treating EAs’ consensual choices in their personal lives as None Of The Movement’s Business. But if topics like “what are the costs and benefits of poly?” come up (either because EAs are trying to make personal decisions, or because they’re trying to understand the world at large), try to make it socially safe for people to express their actual views (both pro and con), as long as they’re civil, willing to provide supporting arguments and hear counter-arguments, and otherwise following good epistemic norms in the conversation.
Rob—Yep. Fair point.
I’d strongly endorse your suggestion that we should ‘Err on the side of treating EAs’ consensual choices in their personal lives as None Of The Movement’s Business’.
Most EAs are adults who are old enough to vote, drive, join the military, own property, take out loans, invest in stocks, get married, have children, and consent (or not) to sex.
IMHO, we should treat each other as adults, and the EA community should not put itself in a position of policing our social/sexual lives.
Side-note: the OP says “Wildly unusual social practices like polyamory”, but I think poly is fairly common in the Bay Area outside of EA/rat circles.
I suspect it’s fairly common in other young, blue-tribe, urban contexts in the US too? (Especially if we treat “polyamorous”, “non-monogamous”, and many “monogamish” relationship styles as more-or-less the same phenomenon.)
Rob—yes, among under-30s in the US, UK, and Europe, consensual non-monogamy is pretty popular; good reliable data are hard to come by, but it’s certainly NOT the case that polyamory is a ‘wildly unusual social practice’.
The most recent Census-based quota sample (Moors et al, 2021) of single adults in the US (N = 3,438) shows that about 17% of people would like to engage in polyamory, and about 11% have done so at some point. (Compare that to circa 4.5% of Americans being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans). So, polyamory as a relationship orientation is arguably about as common as (or maybe more common than) gay/lesbian as a sexual orientation.
I’ve heard this argument before but I think it’s quite overstated. I grew up in the SF Bay Area and still am in touch with many friends from childhood. They are generally young, blue-tribe, urban/suburban, etc.
Of that group, I think zero of them are polyamorous, with perhaps one exception (though I’m not sure if this person actually practices polyamory or has merely thought about doing so/been attracted to the idea) -- and that one exception is also the one member of the group, other than myself, with by far the most contact with the Bay Area rationality/EA scene.
(Of course, it’s possible and perhaps indeed somewhat likely that some people I knew in childhood are now polyamorous but I haven’t learned about this, as they keep it quiet or we’ve fallen out of contact or whatever? But it certainly does not seem to be a big mainstream thing.)
Third Generation Bay Area, here—and, if you aren’t going to college at Berkeley or swirling in the small cliques of SF among 800,000 people living there, yeah, not a lot of polycules. I remember when Occupy oozed its way through here that left a residue of ‘say-anything-polyamorists’ who were excited to share their ‘pick-up artist’ techniques when only other men where present. “Gurus abuse naïve hopefuls for sex” has been a recurring theme of the Bay, every few decades, but the locals don’t buy it.
if I’m going to be nervous about anything it’s doing things like poly and kink when you don’t have a good sense of how these things ~typically look.
fortunately there is plenty of cultural infrastructure for fixing this in EA/rat circles.