The divided slut

Perspectives on polyamory

The slut agenda

Sluts¹ have been around forever — and not just in the world’s oldest profession. There have always been sluts slutting it out for the sheer joy of slutting. (Not that it is always a joy, mind you. There is no need to swallow the pro-slut propaganda. You can spit if you want to.²)

Our culture is rather fond of sluts, at least compared to the Victorians. Twenty-person polycules are having a moment. Has slut acceptance gone too far? Or not far enough?

Is slut the new gay?³

What’s your number?

Ethical non-monogamy is … ?

1. a pragmatic approach to romantic relationships.

2. a sign of moral degeneracy.

3. mostly a gay thing.

4. a psyop.

5. a passing fad.

6. a luxury belief.

7. a threat to the ideal of love.

8. easier said than done.

Cards on the table: I’ve concluded that in my own case, for the time being, ethical non-monogamy is about the best that I can aim for. But I wouldn't be writing a pseudonymous neoblog inspired by Iris Murdoch if I didn't feel conflicted about my errant heart.⁴ So I’ll try to give each of these perspectives their due.

A pragmatic approach to romantic relationships

In her 1964 essay ‘The Moral Decision About Homosexuality’, Murdoch considered ‘the problem of homosexuality’ as more than a legal question (‘Of course the law ought to be changed’)⁵ but as ‘fundamentally a moral problem which the whole community ought to face, and that the facts we need in order to make a judgment about it are quite ordinary facts which are accessible to the observation of or­dinary people’. I propose taking a similar approach in considering the moral question of various forms of non-monogamy.

Murdoch states upfront that she is not intending to argue with those who oppose homosexuality (or extra-marital relations in general) on religious grounds. Instead, she argues against charges that homosexuality is ‘unnatural’, that homosexuals are uniquely ‘promiscuous, neurotic, jealous and generally unstable’ and that homosexual relationships are ‘impoverished or unsatisfying’. She observes that ‘many homosexuals do succeed in their search for a steady partner and do achieve a happy and stable menage’.

Murdoch adroitly sidesteps questions of sexual and romantic fidelity by noting that heterosexual men appear no less scrupulous in their sexual appetites than their homosexual counterparts.⁶ She concludes:

In the end it is a simple matter of human rights. One has a right to choose to be celibate: though even this right is sometimes challenged nowadays and the celibate person looked on with suspicion or contempt. One has also a right to choose to be homosexual, or to accept the fact that one is, and to be left alone. Human beings differ vastly, and being heterosexually married is not the only 'proper' or 'rich’ or 'rewarding' way of life. The choice to be homosexual is a hazardous choice, for the reasons I suggested; but the choice to be cel­ibate is a hazardous choice, and the choice to marry is a very hazardous choice. It is not easy for human beings to achieve a completely contented and orderly existence whatever they do; and responsibility for others and service to the community can be found on all these paths.

To add non-monogamy to the list of hazardous paths that may nonetheless be compatible with responsibility for others, it is not necessary to prove that it is the superior solution in all (or even most) cases, or that things never go wrong. It only requires acknowledging that some people do not consider sexual exclusivity as a necessary constituent of a loving relationship.

A sign of moral degeneracy

The convenient thing about being a conservative is that you don’t need to develop counterarguments to progressive developments, you can simply point to some unfortunate consequences, yell ‘Chesterton’s fence!’ and call it a day. On the question of ethical non-monogamy, Ross Douthat pulls it off with his usual aplomb:

You can have a culture of hard moral constraint, a conservative order that imposes norms that intentionally limit human freedom — remain faithful to your chosen spouse, live with your given body. Or you can have the kind of freedom-maximizing culture that removes limits and strictures but creates new regrets, new kinds of suffering, new dangers for the vulnerable and weak.

I won’t deny that Chesterton can be fiendishly persuasive: whenever I read the old dipsomaniac, I can feel him edging me ever closer to conversion.⁷ Take the following passage from Orthodoxy:

Those countries in Europe which are still influenced by priests, are exactly the countries where there is still singing and dancing and coloured dresses and art in the open-air. Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground. Christianity is the only frame which has preserved the pleasure of Paganism. We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff's edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.

The historical accuracy is dubious, but the evocative imagery is a rather apt description of our ‘forbidden to forbid’ age filled with anxiety-ridden young people terrified of any form of human contact that is not mediated through a screen or a pre-approved script. The relaxation of the one big rule of monogamy often seems to necessitate the establishment of dozens of little rules (especially if there are adult human females involved).

Mostly a gay thing

In the words of Louise Perry: “The problem with our current straight culture is that it encourages women to imitate male sexuality and they don’t want to.” In this view, non-monogamy is a great solution for testosterone-ridden men who are ready to fuck anything that moves (or in some unsavoury cases, doesn’t move), but such practices puts physically and emotionally vulnerable women and children at risk.

One doesn’t have to be a biological essentialist to concede that women do not always have an equal footing in these negotiations (does the patriarchy stop operating under polyamorous conditions?) A book marketed as showing “how nonmonogamy can be a powerful catalyst for living more authentically, breaking free of socially scripted people-pleasing roles, and having a more secure relationship with one’s self, family, and partner” in fact reveals a much darker reality:

Roden Winter sobs in hotel rooms on work trips, she sobs in hotel rooms on sex trips, she sobs in her own Park Slope home. At one point, about two-thirds of the way through the book, she confronts Stewart: “‘If you want to protect me,’ I scream, ‘don’t keep making me do this! Stop dating Kiwi and whoever else and just be with me! Don’t you understand! I can’t do this anymore!’”

We should nevertheless guard against being too categorical in our judgements: there are plenty of gay men in toxic open relationships and at least one woman who appears to be genuinely enthusiastic about polyamory.⁸ Far be it from me to mansplain the joy of sex to my non-male readers, but I would caution against considering Andrea Dworkin to be the ultimate authority on the matter.⁹

A psyop

It is a matter of historical record that the CIA promoted sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll to the distract the youthful Boomers from truly revolutionary ambitions. And if they were pushing LSD and Buffalo Springfield in the 1960s, can we say with confidence that they are not doing the same with ketamine and Kim Petras today? What better way to keep a population pliable than to sever sex from commitment à la Brave New World? It wouldn’t be my first entrapment.¹⁰

If you don’t want to blame the spooks, late capitalism will do. Why not improve the productivity of your love life with the latest AI-powered project management software?

A passing fad

The more sensationalist forms of polyamory certainly have all the hallmarks of a media-manufactured craze. The steady stream of trend pieces offer plenty of opportunities for ‘recreational judgement’ (making the reader feel better about the messiness or aridity of her own love life) rather than trying to win converts. Let’s be real: a throuple does not strike me as a particularly stable arrangement, merely multiplying the original problems of coupledom. But just as most yoga practitioners can benefit from the stretching and breathing techniques without becoming fixated on opening their third eye, most non-monogamists opt for less dramatic, but more durable, arrangements.

A luxury belief

Thus argues Kat Rosenfield. Unfortunately, I’m out of free Unherd articles, so I’m unable to consider her argument.

Nevertheless, I am persuaded by this post that a ‘luxury belief’ is one of those pithy concepts which fall apart if you examine it too closely.

A threat to the ideal of love

Matthew Arnold’s 1867 poem Dover Beach captures how we started clinging to the belief in a One True Love as faith in the One True God began to wane:

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

A century and a half onwards, Eros seems just about ready to be buried next to the Old Man. When Whitney Houston sang about ‘The Greatest Love of All’, she was, of course, singing about herself. Our favourite conservative pundits are now complaining about the lack of sex in Hollywood movies. ‘Kitchen table polyamory’ didn’t kill romance, but it might have been the final nail in the coffin.

Defenders of monogamy don’t deny that most people fail at the attempt, but they believe in keeping the hope alive. There is a sense in which romance is a myth co-constructed by (usually) two people. Some customary sweet nothings like ‘I’ve only got eyes for you’ can’t help but sound less sincere when you were boning someone else a few hours ago. But maybe it’s not always a bad thing to be less dewy-eyed about love.

The fact that love is paired with sex as a source of potential addiction requiring its own AA-style treatment either means that our culture has a debased understanding of love, or that we are finally starting to see through its relentless propaganda. As the invaluable Laura Kipnis writes in the prelude to her polemic Against Love:

There’s no way of being against love precisely because we moderns are constituted as beings yearned to be filled, craving connection, needing to adore and be adored, because love is vital plasma and everything else in the world just tap water. We prostrate ourselves at love’s portals, anxious for entry, like social strivers waiting at the rope line outside some exclusive club hoping to gain admission to its plushy chambers, thereby confirming our essential worth and making us interesting to ourselves.

But is there also something a bit worrisome about all this uniformity of opinion? Is this the one subject about which no disagreement will be entertained, about which one truth alone is permissible (Even cynics and anti-romantic: obviously true believers to the hilt.) Consider that the most powerful organized religions produce the occasional heretic; every ideology has its apostates; even sacred cows find their butchers. Except for love.

There seems to be a connection between monotheism and monogamy: it is hard to indulge in one without implying the other. Opening a relationship means letting go of the idea that someone was made for you.

Easier said than done

People seem less outraged by what non-monogamists do than by how they talk about it. I get it. Terms like ‘compersion’ make my skin crawl. ‘Aftercare’ makes sex sound like an invasive medical procedure. Poly lingo tends to be either legalistic (‘negotiating rules and boundaries’) or infantilising (‘playing together and apart’) — in either case it is deeply unsexy: friends with benefits, playmates, fuckbuddies … heaven forbid referring to someone as a lover!

Language which reduces human relationships to contractual arrangements is not without moral consequence. Mary Midgley, a lifelong friend of Murdoch’s and fierce critic of all kinds of reductionism, wrote in her prophetic essay Philosophical Plumbing:

Systematic contract thinking makes it possible to rule that personal relationships, like political ones, can only arise out of freely negotiated contracts, and that what is freely negotiated can at any time be annulled.

This conceptual move certainly did make possible much greater social freedom, and thereby a great deal of self-fulfilment. Yet it has some extremely odd consequences. Unfortunately, personal relations, such as friendship, do normally have to be relied on to last, because they involve some real joining-together of the parties. Friends share their lives; they are no longer totally separate entities. They are not pieces of Lego that have just been fitted together for convenience.

Pieces of lego looking for a convenient fit is not a bad description of contemporary dating culture.¹¹ We are encouraged to ‘collect experiences’ rather than ‘share lives’: everyone can be Madame Bovary without the tragedy, mining new ‘connections’ for that sweet ‘New Relationship Energy’ until things become complicated or tedious, in which case the person is added to your collection of ghosts, and you move on to the next one.

At some point the mathematics of this ‘metaphysical capitalism’ breaks down: we cannot all be taken care of if no-one is taking care. But before the poly sceptics get too smug, let’s consider the kind of monogamist who expects a lifetime performance from his partner, punishing her in small ways and large for deviating from her assigned role. That’s not giving I-Thou either. Loving someone is hard. Shackles don’t necessarily make it any easier.

Synthesis

It ain’t easy being an ethical slut, just like it ain’t easy being an ethical prude. If we let go of our shame and our defensiveness, we might be able to learn something from one another. Or we can at least admit that love makes fools of us all.

1. A note on terminology: I’m reclaiming the word ‘slut’ as a term of endearment that my gen Z boyfriend uses to refer to me, like ‘faggot’. Words only have the power we ascribe to them. I acknowledge the sexist double standard implied by the customary use of the word ‘slut’, but I’m using the term inclusively to refer to anyone who is not celibate or monogamous: boysluts, girlsluts and enbysluts alike (with a special shout-out to remunerated sluts, SPOCs and sluts on the spectrum).

I’m also not writing a poly 101 article — this is a decent overview of the basic concepts (although refer to ‘Easier said than done’ section of my post for a critique of the usual poly lingo). I use the terms polyamory, ethical non-monogamy and open relationships interchangeably — I couldn’t decide which one I dislike the least.

2. I have never in my life seen a guy spit rather than swallow. Is it a girl thing?

3. I’m aware that according to conventional wisdom, trans is the new gay (either as a logical extension or as a perversion of the movement), but there are a lot more (potential) sluts out there.

4. To go meta for a sec: I’m growing increasingly ambivalent about ambivalence. I’ve been haunted by this exchange in Anatomy of a Fall between the court-appointed guardian and the wavering blind child:

Marge Berger: When we lack an element to judge something, and the lack is unbearable, all we can do is decide. To overcome doubt, sometimes we have to decide one way over the other. Since you need to believe one thing but have two choices, you must choose.

Daniel: So you have to invent your belief?

Marge Berger: Yeah, well.. in a sense.

Is it worth the cognitive dissonance to maintain that my participation in a lifestyle should not be read as an endorsement? But how to take that leap of faith to one side without looking back (and turning into a pillar of salt, as I was taught in Sunday School)? I’ve learnt from Murdoch that the moral life requires endless second-guessing: anything else is fantasy or fundamentalism or both.

5. In 1967, the UK parliament decriminalised consensual homosexual acts conducted in private between men over the age of 21. Sexual activity between two members of the same sex remains unlawful in over sixty countries. (Yes Ann, I got that information from Wikipedia.)

A few thoughts on the public discussion of moral matters, as opposed to legal or political ones:

Although I share concerns about The Death of Debate Culture, I think the greater problem with ‘the discourse’ is the implicit assumption that there are clear opposing sides to every issue. Such a framing is well-suited to answering questions in legal proceedings (Should the accused be sentenced to prison?) or parliamentary-style political debates (Should this House provide military aid to Ukraine? ) but it is less amenable to questions concerning morals and values, which are the ones that really rile people up.

Take the example of abortion. The law needs to be precise about the circumstances under which a woman is permitted to terminate her pregnancy. But one’s opinion on where to draw the line in law does not exhaust the moral implications of the matter. Wrestling with moral ambiguity can feel very uncomfortable, which is why it is so tempting to default to a reductionist framing (an embryo is either a baby or a clump of cells) to simplify the moral calculus. It is my contention that we have a duty, individually and collectively, to resist such impulses.

Freddie de Boer aptly articulated the relationship between politics and morality in response to a reader’s question:

I feel equipped to criticize moral systems that I think are obviously flawed, like utilitarianism, but I don’t feel equipped to articulate a positive vision of one. My morals are indeed informed by my politics and vice versa. But I actually kind of prefer to not put too fine a point on any particular principle of morality and instead look at specific scenarios; it makes it less likely that you’ll force yourself into a repugnant position. It’s kind of like Gödel’s incompleteness theorem - no moral philosophy that can address every situation can address them with actual justice. Morality is always an applied science.

The context of Freddie’s reply (a question on the morality of eating animals) is a good demonstration of the limits of treating morality as a purely personal matter. Although I’m a strict vegetarian, I’m under no illusion that my personal choices make a dent in the practice of factory farming (and I also can’t logically defend being vegetarian but not vegan). Treating morality as a matter of personal taste encourages us to either ignore suffering if we can convince ourselves that our hands are clean (or that there is nothing that we can do about the situation), or to put aside all other moral qualms in pursuit of ridding the world of what we consider to be an especially egregious form of suffering.

We cannot leave discussions of morality to the moralists.

6. Murdoch does not mention her own struggles with competing affections (both hetero and homo) as reported by her (homosexual) biographer:

On 16 November 1968, on discovering and rereading her diaries from 1945 onwards she wrote: ‘That business of falling in love with A, then with B, then with C (all madly) seems a bit sickening’ and noted what an ‘ass’ she then appeared. ‘I mustn’t live in this torment of emotion (Empty words — I shall always live so)’ she by contrast wrote on 15 August 1952.

She and hubby John Bailey had come to an arrangement:

Though so frequently in love, she tried to apply ‘a strict set of rules’ for putting on the brakes which John ‘the kindest man I’ve ever met’ approved, never wanting to hear details; rules honoured in the observance as well as, sometimes, in the breach.

7. Make me holy, Daddy! But just! not! yet!

8. The copious amounts of LSD might have helped.

9. Perry hails Dworkin as foreseeing “the damage that is done to both women and men who live in a culture drenched in pornography”. She embeds a video in which Dworkin delivers a heartfelt, but undeniably kooky, indictment of pornography:

The more I learnt about sexual abuse in all its forms, including incest, including prostitution, including battery, including rape, the more I understood that pornography was like the nerve centre for all of these forms of abuse, it was kind of the pentagon, the war room where strategies of sexual abuse were both planned and communicated to a population of men that were going to go out and do them to women, and I was going to meet the women and I was going to have to remember the women’s faces and the women’s voices and the women’s tears and the women’s stories for the rest of my life. So it became impossible [for me to dismiss] the meaning of pornography in keeping women frightened and terrorised and insulted and second class.

If pornography was a person, she could have sued for libel!

I can’t rival Blake Smith’s archive of gay smut, but during my peak Paglia era I got high and ordered this XXL Taschen edition of the collected works of Tom of Finland to read the essay she contributed. She writes, contra Dworkin:

Anyone familiar with Tom’s exuberant gay wonderland would have found as patently ridiculous as I did the feminist mantra that pornography is nothing but an instrument of political intimidation by which men threaten women with rape or, even more absurd, that pornography causes rape.

10. That awkward moment when you realise you’re a Baby Reindeer.

11. Jarryd Barlett wrote a good piece on how apps like Grindr make casual encounters so predictable that there is little room for true eroticism.