I am only tangentially involved in EA, but have been actively polyamorous for around ten years, so I hope it’s not too callous for me specifically to say that that was the most striking part of the article. The article includes a lot of sensationalizing and othering language around polyamory, including the repeated use of “join a polyamorous relationship” to mean dating someone who’s polyamorous, and the ‘so-called “polycules.”’ line.
I agree that it’s bad behavior for polyamorous people to pressure mono people to be poly, talk about monogamy as “less enlightened”, and such (and agree with quinn that it would reduce avenues for attacks on our community to actively discourage this behavior); but I think it’s kind of dishonest to discuss this without mentioning that mono people can be overly quick to categorize positive discussion of polyamory as “pressuring people to be mono”, due to the marginalized position of polyamory in society and the biases that creates.
The article itself is an example:
Prominent figures in EA have cast polyamory as a more “rational” romantic arrangement. The philosopher Peter Singer, whose writing is a touchstone for EA leaders, seemed to endorse polyamory in a July 2017 interview in which he argued that monogamy may be increasingly anachronistic in the age of birth control.
If you click through to the interview, though, what he argues is that 1) monogamy is partially rooted in men’s desire to know if children they’re fathering are biologically theirs and women’s desire to know if they can rely on their partner to stick around to help provide for a child 2) these worries might be lessened in the age of birth control, though he “would be surprised if [polyamory] is adopted by more than, say, 25 percent of the population.”
I don’t want to detract from the very real concerns about sexual abuse and assault, but I would be sad (and more importantly, I don’t think it would do anything to alleviate sexual abuse and assault) if getting media attention from an article writer who isn’t too concerned with distinguishing between polyamory and abuse pushed EA in the direction of replicating these biases.
Thanks for sharing, this is a valuable perspective. I just wanted to add one thing: many people are able to be reimbursed for lost wages, either through their company via something like short-term disability leave, or from kidney donation charities such as the National Kidney Registry (or a combination of the two). I was fully covered by my employer’s short-term disability and didn’t suffer financially at all!