Re: Promiscuity Bashing WAS: Re: [UUPoly-L] poly & pop culture

[Crouton Jones <croutonj@yahoo.com>]

I think its important to realize that in sexual-loving behavior there
are many, many continuums.  I think one of these is between
swinging-and-poly with "social polyamory" being in the middle (can't
have just two categories, can we?).  I think its hard to convey this
sort of thing against prevalent normative American moral judgment. 
Harder still perhaps, not to react to it from a standpoint of
countervaling moral judgement as well.

In communicating with the world out there, I tend to think that its
better to say/write what polyfolk do rather than what polyfolk don't
do.  Good too, I think, to talk about what we need rather than about
what we lack in terms of social and legal recognition and justice.

Legally, in my locale, its lawful to have sex with any other adult who
is able to give consent as defined by the law.  It is not lawful to
marry or domestic-partner with more than one person, hence for me its
more about rights than social acceptance.  But social acceptance is the
ground for legal recognition so... well, gotta start somewhere.

Last year -on Valentine's Day Sunday- I'm proud to say that our
then-minister gave a sermon on polyamory.  Unfortunately, I spoke to a
few folks who, after hearing it, equated poly with swinging
interspersed with comments like "oh yeah, we did that in the 70's" and
"What people do in the bedroom is their own business" etc. and totally
missed the point that there's a justice issue here, just as there is
with queer rights.

Am I off-topic enough?  Let me see if I can get back, uh hold on...

Its my hope that the leering newsmedia looking for sex-stories will
talk more about rights and less about poly-people-as-curiousities in
the future.

Its also my hope that they-and-us become ever more fully aware of the
diversity of human sexual-loving experience and embrace this with
compassion.

One night stands as such are ok.  I think its easy for us to fall into
a position of being defensive that "its not just sex" as though a
sexual-loving relationship is more valid than a sexual relationship. 
Certainly, the former may well be more enduring, but that doesn't as
such make it better.  Because the greater culture that we live often
values love relationships over sexual ones, I think its often easier
for us to say that we're "not all-about sex" than to say "sex is ok
**and** we value love-and-connection".

Rich

--- John Ullman <jsu627@earthlink.net> wrote:

> Moonstorm Erosong wrote:           (On 07:44 AM 2/22/2006)
> >A quote from the cited article:
> >"Other defenders point to the fact that practicing "polys" don't
> engage in
> >one-night stands."
> >
> >Oh, really?  My impression is that some of us do and some of us
> don't.  I
> >hope that some time we will stop trying to justify ourselves to the
> >mainstream by dissing the promiscuous, which, quite frankly, some of
> us
> >are.
> 
> The only way NOT to participate in one night stands is to be 
> celibate. To paraphrase Chairman Mao, a relationship of 1000 nights 
> starts with a one night stand. How do you know if the first time ever
> 
> I lay with you will be one night or forever?  My personal experience 
> is roughly as follows:
> 
> Of about 60 individuals I've had sex with since 1959:
> 
> 30% 1 night stands
> 60% 2 to 20 night stands
> 10% relationships of 5 to 40 years, I haven't kept count of how many 
> times we've had sex. sorry. And to be clear, I am NOT saying you have
> 
> to fuck a lot of frogs. I'm saying that some of those one night 
> stands were memorable, and I have no regrets.
> 
> John U
> 
> 
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