Poly, BDSM and FedEx

So the Post carried an article on Poly couples yesterday. For those of you just joining this channel, that’s a generic term for “people who fuck around like I do.” Apparently based on some local convention. I don’t know that you deeply need to go read it. The article is just about exactly what you’d expect, the Post’s typical style piece. “Lets depict these people as slightly awkward and a little stupid.” But there is some useful stuff in it, and it’s not hostile, just the way newspapers tend to run roughshod over anything that doesn’t skew to a 50% demographic.

Honestly, it’s probably a bad sampling. This is a convention of people who are strongly self-identifying through the fact that they sleep around. Most of the people I know who are poly just are. You know like one guy may prefer blondes and another red heads, and one woman thinks that it’s kind of cool I’m stubbly and others would prefer clean shaven or more grown out. It’s a preference, not a big deal. When it comes to going to conventions about sex, they are likely to go for considerably more “out there” things. The ones who come up and start talking about how they are poly…that can come off a little weird, even desperate. I’m not saying “make a casual reference.” But you know we’ve all met one of these “Hi! I’m Brie and I’m poly!

About five, six, years back I was on a panel about poly relationships in front of a general audience. I got put on more or less as an afterthought, I was actually attending to talk about interactive theatre. I was kind of appalled at the other people because they were either kind of strange seeming “lifestylers” regrettably not too far from the Post’s depicton, or in one case a kind of activist woman who was clearly in the process of rearranging her poly household around the cult of her baby, and spent most of the time forcing her poly housemates to say supportive things about her new offspring and how her baby was the central thing that the poly group’s relationship really needed to be about. The level of extortion I saw going on in that situation was pretty impressive…she definitely had an iron fist. Who says women can’t be dominant. Of course she was also in a very big group living situation, in which she was clearly Il Duce.

The article actually talks about “v’s.” That most people aren’t living in group marriages, they just have multiple partners, who have multiple partners. I know a few threesomes, but emphasis is on few.

Still, I feel like that sort of thing gives those of us who just fuck around just because we never really got out of the habit a bad name. On the other hand, references to “aging hippies” aside…and yeah, I’ve seen some of those people, the article did have a few bits of sense when it wasn’t poking fun at the gangly awkward people.

The compartmentalization of affection: It’s completely at odds with today’s Disney Princess/Coldplay-lyric view of marriage, in which your spouse is your lover, best friend, therapist and Wii buddy, and you also have identical taste in movies.

But as people are increasingly expected to self-actualize clear to the grave, what are the chances that they’ll pair up with someone who is on the exact same path of discovery?

Thought: Maybe you can have it all. You just can’t get it all from the same person.

It’s the thought that illustrates a paradox in polyamory: Its practitioners have astonishing optimism for humans’ endless capacity to love, to share, to forgive, to grow, to explore. But that optimism seems rooted in a cynical belief that the monogamous are stuck in a myth, one that leads to cheating, unhappiness or divorce court. They believe, as do some evolutionary biologists, that most humans do not have endless capacity to be faithful to just one person.

If you can find me an evolutionary biologist who actually has a good secular education who doesn’t admit/believe that, I’ll give you a dollar. I’m not giving you any more than that, because most of the scientists I know are a little whacked out and drink too much (you know who you are!), and I don’t trust them not to lie just to split the buck with you.

Anyway, all that aside, the reference was interesting to me, because it is mainstreaming. For all the people who might bother to go to a convention, I know ten, fifteen people who just never stopped dating around, really, and sort of moved that into relationships. Many don’t even think of themselves as poly, I think that almost beings to have a bit of a weird feel to it. They just…see more than one person and maybe get married and still see more than one person. No big deal. Just, that’s modern life, like people have two cars. Some people end up pairing off and even that seems less of a big deal. I’ve seen a lot of “well we’re together and not with anybody else right now” but there’s not a huge Disney “together forever” underscore…

I think obviously we’re living in an era where better communications is making sexual choices more available.

The same is true of D/s, and I suppose BDSM in general. I think honestly that the mainstream press is a little behind on these things, even the progressive media. But that’s true of a lot of things. Something seems to have to be in popular culture for a good twenty years before mainstream media really picks up on it. Logistically there are reasons for that. To produce media is expensive, and you have to be hitting a 50-60% demographic. Now you can have a huge number of people doing something and not have it be more than 40% of the population. Of course mainstream media is dying in the rising tide of YouTube and the blogosphere.
It’s true you see things like The Secretary (2002) and way back there was the horrible 1994 adaptation of Exit to Eden. But I think you have to look at the internet to realize just how pervasive BDSM is. Now admittedly my friends bias college educated, eastcoastal, liberal, and artsy. But I see grit girls in the Sheetz convenience store in Hagerstown wearing collars and fetish jewelry. With indicators they probably kind of know what it is. I think honestly you’re talking about a huge percentage of Americans and Europeans coming into at least a fantasy contact with BDSM through the Internet. Within a generation it’s simply going to be the norm. It also won’t be so much BDSM as just a range of sexual choices.

I realize there is a heartland out there and I understand the whole theory of “two Americas.” Remember the fucking primaries are “March Madness” to me – I may not care but damn if I don’t know the stats. Home sports team my ass. Washington only has one real local sport, and it’s played by superstars that with the stunning exceptions of Bill Clinton and probably Barack Obama, no woman in her right mind would date. But I also know that a lot of people in that “other America” are whacking off on the net at night, and their kids are going to grow up realizing that pretty much whatever they want to do sexual that isn’t hurting anybody (at least nonconsensually) is fine.

The people I know who are 22-28 (which is increasingly a big chunk of the people I know) are just overwhelmingly more sexually aware and generally developed than a lot of people I know who are older. I think that’s because they were more or less raised to net culture and so things which seem scary and mysterious to older people are normative to them. I won’t say everybody I know is that way, but it’s definitely a trend. And yeah, it’s mostly college educated people, I admit.

So tying things all back together (because I’m obsessive like that), the one thing I wonder is if the tendency to spread sexual interests is also related to the cultural pervasiveness of BDSM. I mean on one level of course transparently it is. We’re all just learning more about sexual choices because we have access to the information, and so we know more. A High School Junior today can learn in forty minutes on a few websites what I had to learn by word of mouth over years.
But I wonder if like a lot of things there isn’t a push for quality/intensity. In the bad old days of the past, we spent days, months, years, yearning for that one moment with that one special person. Now that may still be a fantasy, but very few people are spending years pining after one person. I’m not saying people don’t attach monogamously, but we expect an emotional payoff right now not “in our golden years after the children grow up.” And if we don’t get it, we are pretty good about smiling, nodding politely and going on to the next, maybe with some trauma but often without much.

I’m not saying it’s a bed of roses. I know a lot of people who are sexually fucked up or broken in some way or another, and for whom their BDSM practices are in some way tied to that. But I remember an awful lot of girls a few years back who were completely ‘vanilla’ but also had some pretty bad elements of ‘broken’ going on and seemed to be trying hard to find a way to equilibrate, and I see more of my friends doing that through their D/s or SM practices than not.

My point is that I don’t think that we’re wired to wait years and years for some mythical sexual satisfaction that may never come, as people were conditioned to do back when, any more than we’ll wait four months for a catalog order when there is drop shipping and FedEx, or wait for weeks for a letter from our true love when we can e-mail or IM.

BDSM represents in many cases a packaged, discreet intensity of experience. “Look I want to feel totally carried away and possessed, but I need to be in the office by 9:30, okay?” It builds intensity quickly by using methodology and process, delivering in a few hours the emotional high that could take a decade for Emily Bronte. “Christ I love fucking you Heath, but you know you hate all Eddie’s friends, and if you show up at the ball he’ll just snivel and be badly behaved…look just let me deal with him this weekend and we’ll get pissed up at the local Monday night, ‘kay….there’s my Heath…you can beat me, that’ll make you feel better about it…you know I still have marks…”

I’m in the weird position of saying that BDSM is the FedEx of sex, but maybe it is. It’s ninety times more efficient than the post office, requires a substantially greater investment, has a complex infrastructure, but it delivers…I think that BDSM in the extended sense of WIITWD, is basically “sex that you actually practice at” rather than “randomly fucking around.” And I think that’s really going to be the dominant sexual pattern of the 21st century. We get better and more sophisticated at everything else, why not our psychosexual lives?

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One Response

  1. Anonymous 15 February, 2008 at 7:33 pm | |

    OMG ROTFL at the Wuthering Heights references. But anyways. I agree with everything you are saying about people being a lot more casual about being poly. I don’t know of anybody else who goes to poly conventions, they maybe go to leather events or nothing. I don’t want to come off wrong but I just feel like it’s a little creepy if you don’t have any alt sex interests but are going to conventions about having more than one partner. It’s called dating, duh! Hello! I can see older people needing that. But it’s kind of like marriage counseling, creepy and a little weird.

    Oh an so like you 20somethings. Whoddathunk?

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