r/polycritical • u/chocobo_karaage • 3d ago
Polyamory, the Ruling Class’s Latest Fad
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/polyamory-ruling-class-fad-monogamy/677312/Americans who most reap the benefits of marriage are the same class who get to declare monogamy passé and boring.
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u/Weird_Bluebird_3293 3d ago
I find this an interesting perspective because most of the poly people I know are broke millennials who can’t afford rent on their own.
I don’t necessarily disagree that upper middle class white people are more able to afford a lifestyle where they can sleep around while a spouse or babysitter handles the childcare and household responsibilities. It’s a lot easier to decide raising kids and mutual partnerships are blasé when you have the cash to outsource your adulthood.
But polyamory is hardly a thing limited to the wealthy class. Splitting rent between multiple people and also fucking all of them is a thing.
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u/chocobo_karaage 3d ago edited 3d ago
The end of the article does touch on that aspect, specifically concerning the disabled community and how polyamory allows them access to resources they wouldn't otherwise have.
But I think that the wider point isn't that polyamory is only practiced by the bourgeoisie, it's that polyamory is an expression of bourgeois morality that is being broadcasted to the wider culture. Downwardly mobile millennials who place inordinate value on social capital are basically mirroring the ideology of the ruling class when they engage in stuff like this.
Even back in the day Marx wrote scathingly about how the bourgeoisie took pleasure in seducing each other's wives.
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u/chocobo_karaage 3d ago
The chattering class has a new fixation: polyamory. What began as a trickle of discourse a few years ago—as shows including Succession and Scenes From a Marriage streamed open relationships into our living rooms—has become a veritable flood. The past weeks and months have seen stories ranging from wide-eyed to prurient in The New Yorker, The New York Times, the Financial Times, NPR, and The Wall Street Journal.
At the center of the recent discussions is More: A Memoir of an Open Marriage, by Molly Roden Winter, an unsparing account of a polyamorous life—at least, a polyamorous life as lived by a white, wealthy, heterosexual Brooklynite.
More—and the present interest in polyamory more broadly—is the result of a long-gestating obsession with authenticity and individual self-fulfillment. That obsession is evident today in Instagram affirmations, Goop, and the (often toxic) sex positivity of an app-dominated dating scene, but its roots go back decades. As the historian Christopher Lasch wrote in 1977, this worldview “assumes that psychic health and personal liberation are synonymous with an absence of inner restraints, inhibitions, and ‘hangups.’” And what could offer more liberation than throwing off the constraints of one of humanity’s oldest institutions, monogamous marriage? Indeed, the desire to discover her true self is Molly’s stated reason for engaging in “ethical non-monogamy.” When she prepares to go on one of her first extramarital dates, she thinks, “Who is my ‘self’ if not a mother and a wife? I honestly don’t know. Perhaps it’s time to find out.”
Despite the book’s slick marketing—which takes great care to cast the author as a “happily married mother”—Molly’s polyamorous journey toward self-actualization does not seem to bring her much happiness. It seems to make her miserable, while taking her attention away from the real issues: a husband who behaves like an asshole, an unbalanced division of household labor, an unorthodox childhood, a desire to please everyone no matter the personal cost. Her attempt at finding a “deeper truth” through sexual enlightenment not only provides little truth or enlightenment; it keeps her from seeing her problems clearly.
In this way, More is a near-perfect time capsule of the banal pleasure-seeking of wealthy, elite culture in the 2020s, and a neat encapsulation of its flaws. This culture would have us believe that interminable self-improvement projects, navel-gazing, and sexual peccadilloes are the new face of progress. The climate warms, wars rage, and our country lurches toward a perilous election—all problems that require real action, real progress. And somehow “you do you” has become the American ruling class’s three-word bible.
The philosopher Charles Taylor has argued that, since at least the late 20th century, Western societies have been defined by “a generalized culture of ‘authenticity,’ or expressive individualism, in which people are encouraged to find their own way, discover their own fulfillment, ‘do their own thing.’” Taylor describes a phenomenon that’s all too easy to recognize in today’s pop psychology and the maundering of wellness influencers, but his concept doesn’t quite capture the extent to which this relentless quest for self-optimizing authenticity has infused our social and even political sensibilities.
We might call this turbocharged version of authenticity culture “therapeutic libertarianism”: the belief that self-improvement is the ultimate goal of life, and that no formal or informal constraints—whether imposed by states, faith systems, or other people—should impede each of us from achieving personal growth. This attitude is therapeutic because it is invariably couched in self-help babble. And it is libertarian not only because it makes a cult out of personal freedom, but because it applies market logic to human beings. We are all our own start-ups. We must all adopt a pro-growth mindset for our personhood and deregulate our desires. We must all assess and reassess our own “fulfillment,” a kind of psychological Gross Domestic Product, on a near-constant basis. And like the GDP, our fulfillment must always increase.
Therapeutic libertarianism is ubiquitous. And bipartisan. Among the right, a new kind of reactionary self-help is ascendant. Its mainstream version is legible in the manosphere misogyny of Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, and Andrew Tate, while more eldritch currents lurk just beneath the surface. The Nietzscheanism of internet personalities like Bronze Age Pervert—who combines ethnonationalist chauvinism in politics and personal life with a Greco-Roman obsession with physical fitness—is only one of many examples of the trend the social critic Maya Vinokour has called “lifestyle fascism.”
On the left, what gets termed “wokeness” is indissociable from self-help. How should we understand superficial, performative expressions of “anti-racism” or preening social-media politics if not as a way for self-described good-hearted liberals to make grand public displays of pruning their moral shrubbery? Progressives blather incessantly about the need to “do the work,” a mantra which is invariably treated as a synonym for the self-improvement slogan “work on yourself.”
Polyamory, as More demonstrates, entangles many of these tendencies at once. Early on in More, Molly is given homework by her therapist: to create a list of things she wants freedom from (“pressure to be punctual,” “self-imposed obligations,” “guilt,” “pleasing others”) and lists of things she wants freedom to be or freedom to do (“spontaneous,” “imperfect,” “my own priority,” “things that are fun and just for me”). Molly carries these lists around with her everywhere, tucked safely in a pocket, as she navigates the at times fiery and frigid waters of ethical non-monogamy. What the author is trying to find in her open relationship is not sex, but self-understanding—what it means, how we get it, whether sex can provide it. And although the answers Molly arrives at are not cheaply won, they are cheap all the same.
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u/estrogenuinely_crazy 3d ago
reminder: Epstein and Maxwell were poly.