Content note: This post has rather little to do with skepticism, secularism, or atheism.
Over at Elyse Anders blog there is a thought-provoking post up entitled Monogamy is Just Gross. It’s mostly an emotional rant along with an argument by way of analogy to a woman’s love of shoes (many and diverse shoes) but Elyse brings up a couple of points which I would say are well worth discussing.
The way monogamy is the only possible romantic relationship portrayed in the media and pop culture, the way monogamy is the only acceptable romantic relationship to be discussed in polite company. The way that monogamy makes assumptions about how you feel . . . and how that affects your ability to feel emotions for other people. The way that anything other than pure monogamy is considered a road to failed relationships and certain heartbreak. It is gross and it doesn’t make sense.
You could replace the word monogamy in this passage with any other sexual or romantic arrangement, and it would still be unduly oppressive. If polygyny, for example, was only acceptable relationship to be discussed in polite company, that would be a bad thing. If anything other than bisexual threesomes was considered a road to failed relationships and certain heartbreak, that would be too constrictive. If society generally assumed that one’s ability to feel romantic emotions for other people cannot possibly be channeled into a long-term monogamous relationship, that would be wrong and harmful.
Adults should be completely free to structure their romantic affairs as they see fit, so long as they are not deceiving anyone else in the process. Of course we should be able to discuss all the various consensual alternatives in polite company. And, of course, we should avoid reading our own experiences and desires into other people’s love lives.
Instead of advocating for a more open and tolerant approach, though, Elyse sets up an oppositional framework wherein monogamy is “weird,” “fucked up,” “gross,” and entails “full and exclusive rights” to someone’s body, along with the antiquated notion that “a romantic partner gets to determine what you do with your body.”
This is an apt description of the situation faced by Warren Jeff’s wives or Immortan Joe’s sex slaves, all of whom are inhabiting a patriarchal dystopian nightmare, but surely this is not an accurate characterization of a situation in which two people—who see each other as equals—freely vow to be romantically faithful one to another.
With the exception of religious fanatics who preach womanly modesty and wifely submission, no one believes that a monogamous relationship entails one person wielding power over the body of another. If you want to make a strong argument against monogamy (or religion, for that matter) you have to discuss the phenomenon as it stands today, rather than focusing on the worst historical excesses thereof.
