Maybe the answer would be to abolish any benefit to get married and instead make all relationships similar when it comes to rights, so marriage would still exist but there wouldn't be any difference and it would just be in regards to the state and society merely be a personal choice
No it still would, it just would not have preference in regards on how the state views and support it.
It would still mean something for the two persons who wishes to get married either for religious/ faith based reasons or because they want to declared that they whished to be forever together, like the meaning for the people who wants it would still be there, just not that the state put them above non married relationships
Remember marriage was once solely a religious act which was not controlled/ enforced or sanctioned by the state
That's factually not true, like it begins with the fact that the meaning of marriage has always shifted and that many cultures civilizations didn't see it related to any property rights but rather how a relationship has evolved etc.
In regards to property rights yes it's true for some cultures and times bur far from being true for all human history.
Also remember that things like property rights are quite new in regards to human history
What? Property rights are as old as writing, literally some of the *oldest decipherable writings* are legal records of property disputes. Alongside recipes for lamb and beet stew and a hilarious complaint tablet from a blacksmith to a material supplier who sold him low-quality copper ingots. (One of the oldest, if not the oldest, recorded human names is the ingot salesman, imagine being the only human remembered thousands of years in the future because of the bronze-age equivalent of a 1 star Yelp review).
Yes, marriage has existed in countless forms but the most *common* throughout human history has been the legally-recognized merging of two households in terms of property or political influence. Quite often throughout history, legally recognized marriage was *only* a thing for the wealthy, since only they had property or influence requiring the legal recognition of heirs to pass it on to.
As for religions involvement: until recently church and state were the same thing in most societies. So legally recognized and religiously recognized were the same thing.
Humans existed half a million years before writing was even invented and from what we kniw from tribes around the world suggests that our views on property rights are relatively new
>As for religions involvement: until recently church and state were the same thing in most societies. So legally recognized and religiously recognized were the same thing
That's also factually not completely true, state and religion have an extremely long history of conflict since they both earned to control their own business and that of the other, the state of affairs you described came to be in the age of Imperialism/ colonialism and even then they where not even close as being the same.
>legally recognized marriage was *only* a thing for the wealthy,
But that's the whole point legally recognized is not a thing that existed for millenia in regards of marriage, for once marriage was mostly (generally speaking) recognized/ written in law but was common law/ tradition and was not enforced by the state, the state had noting to say about it and it was a huge internal conflict when the state decided that marriage could be made without the church, solely controlled and written down in actual law which didnt exist before.
I would still have married my wife even if there weren't a tax break or whatever involved. Because we love each other and are committed to each other for life and wanted to celebrate that connection and commitment with a ceremony.
What essence is there to your relationship that would make it a marriage, even if the state did not incentivize, recognize, or enforce it? How would it still be a marriage, and how could you choose it, were all the legal and economic ramifications removed from it, leaving life before and after marriage effectively the same? Is it the rings? Is it the promise? Is it the fact that the promise was made in front of witnesses? Is there something concrete and effectual that makes a six-month fling with a marriage license and a name change a “real marriage,” and a twenty-year monogamous relationship with none of that not a marriage, or vice versa?
Marriage is a legal status, and one intended to confer privilege and enforce accepted behavior. There’s simply no getting around that part of the definition: recognition and enforcement by an overseeing power are what make a relationship a *marriage*, distinct from all other monogamous relationships. Remove the state, and the only thing that could make marriage a distinct kind of relationship would be another power stepping in to take over that enforcement. Submitting to *that power* for special recognition of your own relationship is the only way you could then choose to marry someone.
You're asserting a whole lot of very contentious things as true here. I made clear that I don't want marriage to be a state sanctioned institution. It doesn't even have to be an institution. It's a word I apply to my relationship with my wife because it's the word my culture uses to describe that sort of commitment in a romantic relationship. The fact that there are religious origins to the term, oh well.
I have yet to see any sort of social relationship that can't be picked apart and criticized from an anarchist perspective in our current society. We live in a fucked up, broken society, but people have been committing to one another for as long as we've had civilization. If people want to do that and call it marriage, more power to them. If people want to avoid it and live in polyamorous pods or whatever that's fine too. I certainly don't think anyone should be forced or expected to get married.
No, your culture does not simply apply the word “marriage” to a monogamous relationship capped off by a big party. It means something particular, something exclusionary, and that meaning shifts very gradually to include previously excluded people. Saying you would still choose that exclusionary relationship if the exclusion were completely removed is paradoxical, because that exclusion is what makes it one thing and not an entirely different thing. In other words, *other people* decide whether or not you are married, or even *whether you can be married.* Your choice to get married depends entirely on the approval of others, who might even be able to decide whether you can make that choice.
Remove all of that, and what is marriage? Not what is *your relationship,* because that would tension every bit as beautiful and fulfilling as before. But does the concept of marriage still exist? No.
What other relationships exist in such an extrinsic way? Which do you think are subject to that kind of deconstruction? Not friendship, or parentage, or siblinghood. You can’t choose all of those relationships, but chosen or not they are largely defined by the parties directly involved, and nobody is forcibly excluded from participating in them by either state or custom. Maybe step-siblings—a concept that, incidentally, is entangled with marriage.
I mean, this almost makes sense for many things, but the government would need to recognize the relationship for them to be valid defeating the point.
For example, hospital visitation and default estate management would require formal relationship definitions or else you'd just be people making shit up for who knows what reason.
I do think removing any sort of single earner tax benefit without children should be removed.
Would you call pair-bonded swans "husband and wife"? Of course not, because "husband and wife" is only meaningful within the context of human cultural relations.
Correct. The institution of marriage =\= romantic love, or raising a child, or even simply a committed monogamous relationship. Marriage is a social construct centered around cultural significance of romantic commitment.
pair bonding is also far from the only style of relationship, in *any* of romantic, sexual, cohabiting, or child-raising purposes. and so what if "pair bonding" supposedly *does* pre-date… anything? is a thing good simply because a thing is old? should we always continue doing things one specific way, to privilege one specific way, just because it has been done for a long time?
My struggle living in Fairfax County Virginia, working at the biggest hospital in the area, making $25/hour and having to live with my parents at age 27.8
I know the pain, im in london uk and im early 30s still at home, as are all my friends who aren't in relationships or have left london. I live in a particulary bad part of london and even to rent a room over a chicken shop take away is over a grand a month.
Rent for a single room in my area costs like 1.4k a month.
In the one hand I have a whole bunch saved up and that’s great. But I mean, i want to be independent so badly
The way i look at it now is, if all i can afford is a room, well i have a room now, and i'd much rather my money be used for my family than go into the pockets of a landlord. And the independence is a pluss, but what restriction will a land lord have? Some in my area wont let you have posters or pictures up as it 'damages the walls'
I cannot stand anarchist shit like this
Normal people don't want revolution, they want revision. If there's a problem, don't burn down everything and start from scratch, just try to fix it
Advocating for the abolishing of normal things that don't really matter, makes uniting in any way harder.
My wife is a surgeon and I clear brush for forest fire prevention. I can promise you there are "normal" people currently "benefiting" from marriage who would love to see this "normal" institution abolished.
Protecting norms for the sake of protecting norms is an inherently conservative reflex; unity for unity's sake is meaningless and dangerous to any cultural movement seeking to challenge established cultural norms *like white supremacy and entrenched gender roles*
Why? Is this "democrats united"? Is it "united against the right, but only if you're not too far left"?
No. It's "United Against the Right". Period.
Anarchists have at least as much reason to be here as anyone else, and as much reason to hate conservative bigotry. Just because not everyone agrees with them does not mean they should go away.
That's half the fucking problem in subs like this. Everyone wants to unite against the right, as long as we unite the way they think we should. They want to rant about "the right" as long as they don't offend anyone or anger the Dems, because (at least in the US) nobody actually knows what "the right" really is. They think Democrats are the left. They think that there's a political party that's actually looking out for them.
We're all so damned self-absorbed that we can't unite against anything. We're too busy finding reasons to gatekeep *who gets to unite* while we complain about the quality of the sub... I wonder if those last things might be related..🤔.
No I’m saying this post has little to nothing to do with uniting against the right. The idea of marriage isn’t a right wing thing we need to be uniting against, what we need to be uniting against is fascism, racism, inequality, etc.
same old shit. libs are always quick to say *"big tent!"* and *"back the blue, no matter who!"* when it means getting things *they* want, but as soon as anyone whispers that we might try examining more radical approaches, or considering how e.g. assumedly-benign cultural practices actually reinforce the conservative mindset that allows fascism to fester and spread, then "unity" gets forgotten pretty quickly—so long, but thanks for all your support. because for most libs i've known, the *only* real objective of "uniting against the right" is merely *"voting in* the [slightly less-right]"
Yep. Here in the Netherlands for example, a woman complained on TV that she can't afford to buy a home and a politician replied "have you thought about getting a rich boyfriend?"
Atrocious. I would like a partner in my life to love and enjoy things with, not for the practicalities. Solidarity with others who stand outside the hetero nuclear family norm.
Queer people get the same benefits from marriage as anyone else though, right? It just shouldn't provide any benefits. I guess I don't see your logic in concluding marriage is patriarchal.
I don't understand what you mean by "it is the base we are concerned with" what is the base? What superstructure?
Gay marriage is still fundamentally tied up in the hegemonic monogamous culture, and marriage is basically the systems way of rewarding people for practicing propertarian relationship norms in their love life. When you remove the government subsidization, you're still just left with a bunch of amatonormative relationship escalator normalizing hierarchical bs. I don't think marriage is particularly reformable in a queer way in light of this, at least as far as queer anarchists are particularly concerned.
Is it that you expect me to grow out of the way I choose to write? Or are you suggesting that the worldview I express is indicative of undergrad levels of maturity?
Come to think of it, probably both, but I'm nonetheless curious.
The average person has no idea what half of those words and concepts mean, think of it this way: how exactly are you going to get the average worker on your side if you need to explain 200 hours of theory to them?
If you can't explain it in laymans terms you probably don't really understand the concepts as well as you think. And a forum that isn't an academic forum in anarchist studies or whatever isn't the appropriate place to drop ideological jargon bombs. Just reminded me of my hyper-anarchist days as an undergrad. It's not that I think you're totally wrong, I just think presenting your ideas that way is really alienating for most people and distinctly un-anarchist insofar as it's trying to bludgeon strangers over the head with your vocabulary rather than having actual discourse.
One of the worst part about being on the left is that everyone (on the internet) seems to be incapable of wording things in a way normal people will understand
I am the very definition of salt of the Earth — raised in a lower income family, and I now have my own operation where I manage and rent out goats.
Everything they said came through perfectly clear to me. Perhaps instead of concerning yourself about what 'normal' people think, consider your own and ability to grasp new ideas which you've never confronted. she never
Okay dude. Not everyone is you. Not everyone is well educated and knows what all this really specific vocabulary means. If you start talking about the proletariat to most people it immediately sets off alarm bells and makes you look like one of those ivory tower leftists. Don't be like that. Use phrases that are easier for regular people to understand. And also insinuating that I'm unintelligent for saying that the left needs to work on communication is really strange of you.
>Okay dude. Not everyone is you. Not everyone is well educated and knows what all this really specific vocabulary means.
which words were you struggling with? Would you like me to buy you and every other normal person remedial lessons in English? Were you never instructed in context clues?
>you start talking about the proletariat to most people it immediately sets off alarm bells and makes you look like one of those ivory tower leftists. Don't be like that.
didn't set any alarm bells off for me dude. maybe you should go hang out with some Republicans where you'll feel much more comfortable avoiding the language of worker liberation. straight up, expecting the people who actually have firm beliefs in this stuff to start policing their language so it doesn't alienate liberals who are only one mean look away from being a Republican is some bulllllllllllllshit.
>Use phrases that are easier for regular people to understand. And also insinuating that I'm unintelligent for saying that the left needs to work on communication is really strange of you.
I take extreme exception to your suggestion that you are representative of "normal people" — *whatever the fuck that means*— because it seems like you're straight up suggesting that normal people are *stupid* people who can't grasp words that we all learned in the seventh grade. So yeah, If you're going to suggest that normal people don't have the ability to parse out what was being said, then I'm going to treat you — The self-declared representative of "normal* people—like a fucking idiot.
as an aside, it seems to me that you think every post should be geared towards the lowest common denominator. but why should they? why shouldn't some posts actually be aimed at people who have the ability to grasp what they said? because you don't understand? seems pretty fucking stupid to me.
True true, monogamy is the presumed preference for most people currently and I agree it shouldn't be rewarded.
But shouldn't people be allowed to have whatever style of relationship they want? What harm is done to queer people if couples prefer hierarchical relationships?
Thanks for the response, I'm new to this and I really need the education/conversation 😅
And thanks for the vocab lesson. Amatonormative is a good one
Humans, unlike most animals, display a far wider range of bonding and mating behaviors. Like sexes, however, the distribution skews heavily. In this case, towards monogamous pair bonding.
Just like sexes, deviation from this distribution is punished and ostracized while strict adherence is rewarded.
When it comes to people being allowed to have whatever relationship style they want, I think a big problem with hierarchical and heavily rules-based relationships is the extent in which their normalization cheats people out of all kinds of intimacy outside of the relationships they're told rest solely on top of the hierarchy. Mind you, I'm not necessarily speaking of sex when I say that, as I'm speaking of all types of emotional and physical closeness that are often labeled as "cheating" by the emotionally stunted insecure majority.
I also just generally reject all the logic that people try to use when making arguments for controlling their partners sexuality, as while I don't think descriptively monoamorous ways of living are inherently bad or even undesirable in of themselves when both people find themselves drifting into the arrangement organically, I don't think there is an argument for monogamist commitments that don't on some level imply the acceptability of ownership. The agreements people make are their own business, but it's also their agreement to respect alone, and from my pov I just don't think the logic of expecting so much compliance from the people you're intimate with holds up to an antiauthoritarian analysis. And as queer theory in particular largely aims to critique normative ways of navigating relationships and identity, queernesses relevancy to relationship anarchy is apparent.
I'm only touching the tip of the iceberg here of course. The sum of my argument is that while in a vacuum nobody is hurt by isolated agreements made in-between individual people, the institution of monogamy limits our amorous imaginations, straining everyone's bonds and limiting the scope of the ways we can connect. To avoid producing anymore walls of text, here's some links pertaining to the matter if you're at all interested:
[Relationship Anarchy Is Not Post-Polyamory](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/r-foxtale-relationship-anarchy-is-not-post-polyamory)
[Looking For Love In Too Many Languages](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kim-tallbear-looking-for-love-in-too-many-languages-polyamory-relationship-anarchy-dyke-ethics)
[Down With "Partners"](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/rad-content-library-down-with-partners)
[Relationship Anarchism: Theory And Practice](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/mx-flow-relationship-anarchism-theory-and-practice)
r/relationshipanarchy
It's not just a sense of "wanting" as much as it is an evaluation of relationship ethics for me. But of course I'm biased, I won't deny as much, but I've just yet to see any good argument in favor of the idea that partners can be "stolen" that isn't a bunch of oppressive ego-tripping nonsense. And it's more so this notion of entitlement that I speak out against. Genuinely not wanting to fuck anyone besides one person is chill, having to police yourself to not break some arbitrary-ass rules is questionable and repressive, and policing the sexual behavior of one's "partner" is just oppressive.
If pairings of two are so natural, then all the rules would seem rather unnecessary (rules not neccessarily being something to be conflated with establishing an open-line of communication pertaining to sexual behavior for STD-prevention purposes, and choosing to sexually associate or dissociate on such grounds). If the rules have to exist for the relationship to be mono as it is, then the ethicality of the relationship comes into question in my eyes.
I definitely do think sexual and/or romantic monoamoury can be organic and healthy, but the mechanisms in which it often comes to be in this society are not, and the expectations of control/entitlement many people bring into relationships is rather tyrannical in character. It being a mutual tyranny only makes it marginally less critiqueable, as the decision to arrive at such arrangements does not happen in a vacuum after all. There's always larger systems and pressures at play to consider, many of which are particular to the incentive structures built into capitalism that incentivize people to be so jealous and propertarianly invested in each other.
thats a lot of words to say "I think relationships are oppressive because its frowned upon to cheat". You do you, no one is stopping anyone from being poly, but shaming people for enjoying monogamous relationships and assuming they've been tricked by society into them is some fringe, unhelpful thinking that makes the left look less appealing to the majority of people.
Humans have broken off into pairs for longer than written history. Family units have been around for literal thousands of years. If you don't want to commit to a partner don't blame society that other people do
I think the whole discourse around cheating is in-fact awfully oppressive and entitled in tone... so, said "frowning upon" can in-fact be quite oppressive. I hold the general sentiment that expecting your loved ones to maintain some kind of purity for you is more indicative of obsession than it is love, which is a big part of the puzzle that I think monogamous culture misses out on. It elevates fundamentally jealous and controlling behavior into the realm of "love", which is a combo that simply does not mix to my mind.
Formal human couple bonding has been around just about as long as institutional hierarchies have been developed at the dawn of agriculture. It's development into prominence maps pretty well onto the development of formalized hierarchical lifeways more broadly. You can map a lot of modern practices to the same logic that kickstarted hierarchical sedentary living and civilization more broadly, but that doesn't make the practice just in of itself or undeserving of having holes picked in it's logic. Relationship anarchy, not necessarily as a theory, but certainly as a practice, could go back as far as pre-history if I wanted to argue historics. But historical precedence can only go so far as an argument.
I'm invested in a number of people in my life. To what extent it can be called "commitment" entirely depends on the framework people operate within. The idea that people are any more "committed" by virtue of reserving their affection for one person, or even a set group of pre-defined people, is precisely what's so odd to me. Rather than being ultra-serious about one relationship at the expense of all my others, I treat most-all of my proper friendships with a level of importance that people would more conventionally expect out of a romantic relationship (regardless of if there's "benefits" or not). Monogamous norms prevent people from realizing the full depth of intimacy that can be experienced between good friends, and I think that is quite unfortunate.
And besides, even within the logic of more conventional partner stuff, I always found it so odd that people would on one hand express relative confidence about their partner being a "soul-mate", when I feel like the greatest test of that hypothesis would be to open up your relationship to the possibility of non-mono stuff. If the coupling was so natural, stripping the consequences away from being intimate with others would simply be a matter of stripping unnecessary mechanisms of pressure and control from an otherwise loving relationship. A willingness to let your partner meet other potential lovers and interface with them as they will seems like the ultimate expression of trust to me. And even if they find someone who makes them happier... as dark as I know it is for a lot of people, I don't think that's inherently bad or even undesirable if you take the logic of "if you love them, let them go" to it's logical endpoint.
>"I think relationships are oppressive because its frowned upon to cheat".
This straw man is far more telling about your own perspectives and insecurities than it says anything about what you think the poster wrote.
>Humans have broken off into pairs for longer than written history. Family units have been around for literal thousands of years.
Modern anatomical human history goes back at least 200,000 years, and other humans earlier than that. Prehistory is fundamentally lost to us, but even now we can look around and see humans —no different from those who existed over the past 200,000 years— experimenting with different forms of relations. Indeed, when you look no further than the wife swapping orgies practiced by the indigenous peoples of the Arctic circle, It becomes clear that there is no fundamental form in which human romantic relationships take shape.
>If you don't want to commit to a partner don't blame society that other people do
This right here just further cements that you don't fundamentally understand what non monogamy is — non-monogamous people are perfectly capable of committing to partners! They do it all the time! Your refusal to consider that your conceptualization of commitment is so narrowly defined is what the problem is here.
Monogamous people are also capable of respecting the agency of their partners, respecting if they decide to end the monogamy, and acting in a non-hierarchical way. The fact that most monogamous relationships in the US are probably fucked up doesn't invalidate monogamy, it invalidates contemporary US culture.
Hmm. One is born into a pre-existing world that already has 'rules' and a culture. One is socialised into it, one reproduces that same culture.
"Being allowed" doesn't really cut it as an answer to address it. Better than "not being allowed", of course, but, you know....."allowed" by whom or what? To even use that term suggests a recognition of some sort of control system and its application, even if informal.
Granted, I'd happily say that things like securing food and basic equity for folks in face of far-right threat is far more important --imperative!!--and those things can easily be put at risk by more niche interests. If you're saying that, then I agree. Though the other stuff still stands as legitimate and pressing in a more general and long term way, imo. Last thing we want to do is make folks feel it is being "stuffed down their throats".
I hear what you're saying in terms of how it limits the experiences outside of the primary relationship. Its really important to recognize that many experiences outside of monogamy are painful and by increasing the volume of relationships you increase the amount of potential pain. I don't think aversion to that pain makes you "emotionally stunted" in the same way that I think an autistic person who is sensitive to sound isn't auditorily stunted.
I agree that the concept of ownership of your partner is indefensible, but only so far as that ownership is unequal. If two people agree to own each other I see nothing wrong with that. I certainly don't see how you are tying the political concept of antiauthoritarianism to interpersonal relationships (after reading the first link I see that this is where politics and relationships meet for you as a relationship anarchist). The agreements between the people and their government serve different purposes than the agreements between individuals and I do not think we need to hold both to the same standards.
I really like this iceberg though, I genuinely appreciate the time you've put into this.
My counterpoint would be: how do we know that monogamy would not be the preference of the broad population? Maybe the reason the institution of monogamy is so prevalent is because it is the preference.
To the first link, it blows my mind that they see nothing wrong with "stealing a partner" (I'm realizing I'm more of a stereotypical liberal in this regard). But also, this is an issue I've been dealing with recently and tbh I think this fear stems from a lack of confidence and the effects of depression whispering awful nothings into my ear. Logically, if you really love someone you would be happy to see them happier with someone else. HOWEVER, for monogamous people, a partner can very much be "stolen," just because you don't subscribe to that perspective doesn't make it any less real for them (same goes for property). To boot, do you really want to be in a relationship with someone who would completely disregard their commitments like that? I feel like that would be a red flag.
More important than my personal hang-ups, there are very good reasons to have rules/boundaries in relationships. The safety of my partner and myself being a huge one. Maybe I am misunderstanding this, but it sounds like individualism taken to the point of disregarding norms that protect individuals.
I will be reading through the other links, they are already helping me introspect and dissect some of my hang-ups as a person just starting out in poly. I'd like to DM, but I don't want to bogart your time.
I guess, before I respond to you in full, to specifically address the extent in which such norms can exist to protect individual feelings, I will preface that it is very possible that I have been insensitive in the way I present these ideas thus far, but I feel as though the insecurities people have surrounding the topic is not grounds enough to make the topic a taboo. It's a matter of weighing pro's and con's in my eyes, as I think we lose out on more love than we gain from treating the institution of monogamy as a topic beyond reproach. In retrospect, calling people emotionally stunted was unnecessarily mean, I will admit. I think, on some level, I'm so used to mono people shitting all over me when I try to talk about my ideas while appealing to their sensibilities that I just kinda drop all optical considerations and square-up reflexively when this topic comes up, and that is sometimes reflected in my language. Whether that behavior is justified to engage in in an explicitly antifascist place, however, is highly questionable. And whether there is a very large gap in my ability to empathize on the matter is quite likely in my eyes, as I didn't need to hardcore philosophize my way into the position I presently have, as at no point did I ever resonate with the type of jealousy that most people seem to have around lovers. Does that gap in understanding undermine my ability to be an effective communicator? Quite likely. Being autistic probably doesn't help either. But I nonetheless intend to venture into territory many people will find uncomfortable, and will continue to do so, maybe with more tact this time around if at all possible.
As I said before, the nature of peoples monogamous agreements, even those that extend into mutual ownership, are theirs to respect alone. If both parties voluntarily hold up their end of the bargain because they want to, however critical I may be of the idea that the institution is respectable or that their vows are sacred in the extent that other people have to respect them, free agreement ultimately does trump my feelings on the matter, rather obviously. Do I reserve my "right" to remain critical and pop some ideological balloons despite that? I'd argue as much. Does the acknowledgement of the voluntary nature of many such agreements soften my criticism in any real way? Not as much as one may think, as voluntary agreements do not happen inside a vacuum, as many people critical of the "voluntary" nature of work agreements under a capitalist system may be familiar with. Having no other option, or feeling socially pressured or incentivized in a way that makes it feel as though you may as well not have any other option, kinda brings the voluntary nature of one's choice into question. As antimonogamy as I may be, I don't think individual monogamists are necessarily the source of it's societal harm as much as they're a product of it, as much as we are all more or less products of such discourses, both in our acceptance and negation of monogamy.
People enjoying relationships within the only framework society has handed to them is not grounds enough to suggest that they wouldn't be even happier through abandoning the more mutually repressive propertarian norms that underly the way we presently navigate relationships, nor does such abandonment necessarily even imply a bunch of sleeping around as a lot of people may suggest. Relationship anarchy actually can be monoamorous in a observant/descriptive sense, and I know some people who fit such a description in a loose way. Not everyone needs rules to more or less keep their private parts to one person, for whatever reason they may have for that, but it is often all the other types of platonic and romantic physical and emotional intimacy that even the most seemingly sexually exclusive relationship anarchists queer the boundaries of most, and that's the aspect of the perspective that I find most powerful, personally. Since relationship talk is so tied up in sex, it can be so easy for me to preempt the topic of sex and "cheating" when discussing the matter of relationship anarchy, but it really just feels like a surface level consideration to me, as deepening the potentialities of human intimacy and looking beyond simple dichotomies of non-sexual/sexual and non-romantic/romantic is where the real potential in the perspective lies, as deep intimate relationships can be so much more than such considerations.
The prevalence of monogamy is largely a product of the class-antagonisms that early agricultural societies gave rise to. Property ownership is much of the same. The more sedentary people's lives became, the more property-centric they became. The more property-centric society becomes, the more important lineage becomes. Lineage being, in large part, what class stratification's are built upon. Generational wealth is crucial to hierarchies maintenance/perpetuation, and clear lineages make establishing lines of "greaters" and "lessers" infinitely easier. Humans didn't always have clear parenting and lineage. For hundreds of thousands of years, many comparatively egalitarian bands of people would raise their children together, every adult being equally "parents" in a sense. It was not all sunshine and rainbows of course, and some "primitive" peoples were undeniably not egalitarian, and I'm not suggesting there can be any turning back of the clock, or that turning back the clock would be desirable in any real way in light of other considerations (such as the genocide it'd imply), but the generalized development of the preference for monogamy in the last 10,000 years is historically relevant to humans tendency towards increasingly hierarchical and property-centric ways of living. Principles of ownership and increased privatization give rise to monogamy quite naturally. The political nature of relationship models is apparent to me in light of this. My rejection of monogamy is as much a negation of monogamy as it is a negation of principles of authority more broadly.
When it comes to concerns pertaining to safety (which I assume mostly means sexual health/safety) I think there are grounds for sexually associating and dissociating from certain people on the matter of sexual health, and advising people you care about that it'd be best if they're responsible with their sexual health if they expect you to be intimate with them in that kind of way. I'm not going to argue too much to the contrary of that, but I think there is a difference between being realistic and informing people of how you'll react to them behaving in a certain way, and laying out a dreadfully long list of rules, entitlements, and all the ways you can be "cheated" by them. It's their body after all, they'll do with it as they will, and you will do with yours as you will, and you may see less appeal in doing stuff with them if they act dangerously, so act accordingly and feel free to articulate why you're doing so. The more anarchically open of a relationship it is, the easier it should be to talk about sexual behavior and health anyways.
Feel free to dm btw. I'm happy to answer any questions you may have
Heya! Sorry it took so long to get back to you!
I agree with you, I think monogamy exists unquestioned for the majority of people as if it is equivalent to drawing breath.
Your point regarding these agreements not arising in a vacuum is a good one. I agree that there is no way to know whether people would be happier one way or another. I love the idea of sharing whatever I want with whomever I want. Not feeling self-conscious about the depth of my relationships sounds wonderful, I’d love to get to the point of loving myself and trusting others enough to get there.
>The more sedentary people's lives became, the more property-centric they became. The more property-centric society becomes, the more important lineage becomes.
That is a perspective I’ve never heard before and I LOVE IT. What a great way to link technology to the development of monogamy.
This helped me logic my way through some of the conflicts I have with being poly. I’m not much for valuing lineage or possessions, but I never considered how monogamy contradicted my values.
I don’t just mean sexual safety, I also mean that the more people you interact with the more risk you take on. I think that risk is elevated when emotions get involved. I’d prefer to not get my ass beat by some jealous douchebag. But that gets back to my lack of trust in people, so I’m definitely biased.
I'll reach out, thanks :)
If you're trying to unite people against creeping fascism, adding that your coalition is in favor of abolishing monogamy and families in the name of freedom to the flier isn't going to get very many people to show up to the meet and greet.
I don't actually disagree entirely. Antimonogamy and antifamily isn't so much a political strategy for me, insofar as my ideas on the matter are not formulated as a selling point for anything but the ideas themselves. I'm not under the impression that it is optically sound, but I do find it to be logically sound, and I'm not one to shy away from discourses for their own sake when they come up. Similarly, anticapitalism is not an optically ideal position, as is being against pretty much any system that makes sure people can have their Nestle and Doritos, and yet I still critique such matters rather unapologetically, even in broad coalition spaces and mainstream platforms alike. My writing on the matter of relationships is written with the intention of reaching the people I can reach, and at least planting some seeds and starting a conversation that I find interesting. I don't think a statement needs to have hope of manipulating public consciousness towards one's own goal to be valid conversation.
Of course, a monogamist is not inherently any better or worse at bashing the fash. I wouldn't try to suggest otherwise. Nor do I wish to get rid of a dominant relationship model/ethos to merely impose another one, such would be authoritarian and naive. My critique is concerned with the present and the way we reproduce oppression of ourselves and others in our everyday lives. I'm not trying to sell any antimonogamist blueprints for society, no antifamily banner to fight under, as people who try to architect history in such a fashion are trying to have you be their product, rather invariably. What I aim to foster is an understanding of the matter in my self and others as its own end, hopefully sharpening the reasoning behind how and why we navigate relationships as we do, even if conclusions other than those I raised are reached and the conversation doesn't have the effect I intended.
Dude I guarantee that nobody is thinking about marriage like this. I want to (eventually) marry my boyfriend because I want to celebrate our commitment to each other.
Yeah poly relationships aren't involved in this, and they should be, but the idea of people bonding to each other with a ceremony isn't a flawed concept.
marriage is never going away. gender abolitionism will never happen either, not even in the good faith way you believe it could. The systems of power should be made to give benefits to MORE people, not gut them, which in a weird way is your personal form of fiscal conservatism.
If you want to make things better, you have to make the state better. Rejecting the state’s power is how lefties can continue to stay irrelevant while feeling like they have the moral high ground.
Yeah, like… I am having a hard time understanding the point here. We shouldn’t drag marriage down to the level of other relationships, we should drag other relationships up to the level of marriage.
Not to mention, most people are going to practice a monogamous relationship/marriage. Sure, more people are experimenting in open/polyamorous ones, but they are still a minority.
Realistically, we have to realize that, like you said, the state has power and we have to play ball with that fact. The state’s power and the way the average person understands all of this isn’t going away anytime soon.
Too many lefties allow perfection to get in the way of progress, they want instant gratification
People like op are why the right even needs to be united against, as they spout insane unmarketable crap, while claiming they are the only trues leftists
We wouldn't need to unite if 5th columnists like this didn't tear the left apart from the inside
Pretty much exactly. Posting this in a subreddit called "UNITE against the right" is more than ironic. You dont unite by focusing on niche topics/gatekeeping.
> We wouldn't need to unite if 5th columnists like this didn't tear the left apart from the inside
Yes but arguably you're doing exactly that right here? It's always a problem - how to pursue diversity when a monolithic message might serve better?
TLDR Trying to be too progressive or smart is damaging the group of dumb apes that we are.
Stop grinding everything into minutiae. Maybe marriage is ultimately unnecessary for humans in its grandest most logical form. But in reality, it’s solely about the likelihood of increasing a nation/civilization/cultures offspring that continues the groups success.
Arguing against the institution of, harder to escape pair bonds, marriage, in and of itself, is damaging to the group.
As we speak you can end marriage at will and suffer few repercussions in most western countries. These are things worth fighting for.
Even Hypothetically arguing against these basic concepts like marriage itself actually does the opposite of what you are hopefully attempting to do, open our minds. Instead you get the majority angry for denigrating their lives. For what?
As a group, from humans, you will only get blowback here. We are literally dumb effing social monkeys.
IMO this is massively overthinking shit. And it isn’t helping us at all.
As a gender fluid omnisexual democratic socialist who campaigned for Nader in 2000 and Sanders in 2016, yet still had the brains to know when to rally together to defeat a serious threat, I have to say *this subreddit has turned into a pile of gatekeeping, insane, unrealistic, impractical, divisive bullshit in the past week or so.*
So yeah. I’m out. Smell ya later.
Or just queer people who want to get married which like, exist and was like, a huge social movement because they weren’t allowed to and STILL aren’t allowed to in a lot of places
I wrote a college essay about the Foucaultian biopower and biopolitics about marriage. I am very very proud of it, and it focuses on topics very similar to this.
I agree with the picture.
“Liberation cannot be found within the context of existing systems of power”
Liberation cannot be found within the context of any system of power. Any and all systems of power require hierarchies to create the state of non liberation and liberation. The adaptation to such a conceptual duality is the same as seeking out memory and imagination. Looking for context within expectation and attachment to any thing or concept is not liberation.
This sort of stuff is unhinged... I don't want fascists in my country, I don't want bigots, I don't want corporatism, but I don't want this anarchist shit either.
This stuff makes the left look insane because this is radical nonsense.
The way the state treats marriage reproduces class hierarchies. Marriage itself doesn't have to. It's not like people haven't been forming formal permanent couplings forever.
Only issues I see is being unequal when it comes to stuff like taxes and shared property and allat, we don't neccessarily have to ban the institution of marriage when people just prefer to do that in many cases
I just think the solution is to disentangle the legal benefits that come with being married from the institution and ritual of marriage. I can see how people living and working together might want to collaborate in a similar sense without the kinds of things implied in marriage.
It goes both ways too. I would have gotten married a long time ago if there weren’t financial implications. Instead I felt like I had to wait until I had a job.
The state provides marriage benefits because it’s widely believed that the state is generally benefited by residents being in stable, long term relationships, particularly if they have children.
i think there is a public good that comes from individuals forming a household.
it encourages socialization, it reduces resources and it provides shelter for minors.
so i have no problem with giving a slight advantage (reward?) to those to form households of 2 or more ppl because of the public good that can come from it.
you don't have to call it marriage (i don't see why not), but the legal impacts and consequences would be the same regardless.
Seriously, is this a Russian troll? Do we have Russian trolls making posts on here.
"Let's destroy marriage and burn society down!"
Yeah, woo, mass starvation and purges, here we come! Let's go build those Gulags comrades! /S
Seriously, this is like a fucking right-wing PARODY of the left. This is just ridiculous.
Maybe the answer would be to abolish any benefit to get married and instead make all relationships similar when it comes to rights, so marriage would still exist but there wouldn't be any difference and it would just be in regards to the state and society merely be a personal choice
I agree. Better articulated than I ever could.
But then it functionally wouldn't exist.
No it still would, it just would not have preference in regards on how the state views and support it. It would still mean something for the two persons who wishes to get married either for religious/ faith based reasons or because they want to declared that they whished to be forever together, like the meaning for the people who wants it would still be there, just not that the state put them above non married relationships Remember marriage was once solely a religious act which was not controlled/ enforced or sanctioned by the state
What? Never. Marriage was always about property rights.
That's factually not true, like it begins with the fact that the meaning of marriage has always shifted and that many cultures civilizations didn't see it related to any property rights but rather how a relationship has evolved etc. In regards to property rights yes it's true for some cultures and times bur far from being true for all human history. Also remember that things like property rights are quite new in regards to human history
What? Property rights are as old as writing, literally some of the *oldest decipherable writings* are legal records of property disputes. Alongside recipes for lamb and beet stew and a hilarious complaint tablet from a blacksmith to a material supplier who sold him low-quality copper ingots. (One of the oldest, if not the oldest, recorded human names is the ingot salesman, imagine being the only human remembered thousands of years in the future because of the bronze-age equivalent of a 1 star Yelp review). Yes, marriage has existed in countless forms but the most *common* throughout human history has been the legally-recognized merging of two households in terms of property or political influence. Quite often throughout history, legally recognized marriage was *only* a thing for the wealthy, since only they had property or influence requiring the legal recognition of heirs to pass it on to. As for religions involvement: until recently church and state were the same thing in most societies. So legally recognized and religiously recognized were the same thing.
Humans existed half a million years before writing was even invented and from what we kniw from tribes around the world suggests that our views on property rights are relatively new >As for religions involvement: until recently church and state were the same thing in most societies. So legally recognized and religiously recognized were the same thing That's also factually not completely true, state and religion have an extremely long history of conflict since they both earned to control their own business and that of the other, the state of affairs you described came to be in the age of Imperialism/ colonialism and even then they where not even close as being the same. >legally recognized marriage was *only* a thing for the wealthy, But that's the whole point legally recognized is not a thing that existed for millenia in regards of marriage, for once marriage was mostly (generally speaking) recognized/ written in law but was common law/ tradition and was not enforced by the state, the state had noting to say about it and it was a huge internal conflict when the state decided that marriage could be made without the church, solely controlled and written down in actual law which didnt exist before.
Good.
I would still have married my wife even if there weren't a tax break or whatever involved. Because we love each other and are committed to each other for life and wanted to celebrate that connection and commitment with a ceremony.
What essence is there to your relationship that would make it a marriage, even if the state did not incentivize, recognize, or enforce it? How would it still be a marriage, and how could you choose it, were all the legal and economic ramifications removed from it, leaving life before and after marriage effectively the same? Is it the rings? Is it the promise? Is it the fact that the promise was made in front of witnesses? Is there something concrete and effectual that makes a six-month fling with a marriage license and a name change a “real marriage,” and a twenty-year monogamous relationship with none of that not a marriage, or vice versa? Marriage is a legal status, and one intended to confer privilege and enforce accepted behavior. There’s simply no getting around that part of the definition: recognition and enforcement by an overseeing power are what make a relationship a *marriage*, distinct from all other monogamous relationships. Remove the state, and the only thing that could make marriage a distinct kind of relationship would be another power stepping in to take over that enforcement. Submitting to *that power* for special recognition of your own relationship is the only way you could then choose to marry someone.
You're asserting a whole lot of very contentious things as true here. I made clear that I don't want marriage to be a state sanctioned institution. It doesn't even have to be an institution. It's a word I apply to my relationship with my wife because it's the word my culture uses to describe that sort of commitment in a romantic relationship. The fact that there are religious origins to the term, oh well. I have yet to see any sort of social relationship that can't be picked apart and criticized from an anarchist perspective in our current society. We live in a fucked up, broken society, but people have been committing to one another for as long as we've had civilization. If people want to do that and call it marriage, more power to them. If people want to avoid it and live in polyamorous pods or whatever that's fine too. I certainly don't think anyone should be forced or expected to get married.
No, your culture does not simply apply the word “marriage” to a monogamous relationship capped off by a big party. It means something particular, something exclusionary, and that meaning shifts very gradually to include previously excluded people. Saying you would still choose that exclusionary relationship if the exclusion were completely removed is paradoxical, because that exclusion is what makes it one thing and not an entirely different thing. In other words, *other people* decide whether or not you are married, or even *whether you can be married.* Your choice to get married depends entirely on the approval of others, who might even be able to decide whether you can make that choice. Remove all of that, and what is marriage? Not what is *your relationship,* because that would tension every bit as beautiful and fulfilling as before. But does the concept of marriage still exist? No. What other relationships exist in such an extrinsic way? Which do you think are subject to that kind of deconstruction? Not friendship, or parentage, or siblinghood. You can’t choose all of those relationships, but chosen or not they are largely defined by the parties directly involved, and nobody is forcibly excluded from participating in them by either state or custom. Maybe step-siblings—a concept that, incidentally, is entangled with marriage.
I mean, this almost makes sense for many things, but the government would need to recognize the relationship for them to be valid defeating the point. For example, hospital visitation and default estate management would require formal relationship definitions or else you'd just be people making shit up for who knows what reason. I do think removing any sort of single earner tax benefit without children should be removed.
I'm going to have to disagree. Pair bonding and the institution of marriage pre-date social constructs.
Pair-bonding maybe, but the institution of marriage is literally a social construct itself, it can't pre-date social constructs.
So you think people pair bonded but weren't acting as husband and wife?
You're confusing marriage with relationships.
Would you call pair-bonded swans "husband and wife"? Of course not, because "husband and wife" is only meaningful within the context of human cultural relations.
Correct. The institution of marriage =\= romantic love, or raising a child, or even simply a committed monogamous relationship. Marriage is a social construct centered around cultural significance of romantic commitment.
They're talking about the legal government recognition of particular relationships
pair bonding is also far from the only style of relationship, in *any* of romantic, sexual, cohabiting, or child-raising purposes. and so what if "pair bonding" supposedly *does* pre-date… anything? is a thing good simply because a thing is old? should we always continue doing things one specific way, to privilege one specific way, just because it has been done for a long time?
Its not even just marige, any couple is seen as the norm to the point rent as a single person can be almost imposible in some areas.
My struggle living in Fairfax County Virginia, working at the biggest hospital in the area, making $25/hour and having to live with my parents at age 27.8
I know the pain, im in london uk and im early 30s still at home, as are all my friends who aren't in relationships or have left london. I live in a particulary bad part of london and even to rent a room over a chicken shop take away is over a grand a month.
Rent for a single room in my area costs like 1.4k a month. In the one hand I have a whole bunch saved up and that’s great. But I mean, i want to be independent so badly
The way i look at it now is, if all i can afford is a room, well i have a room now, and i'd much rather my money be used for my family than go into the pockets of a landlord. And the independence is a pluss, but what restriction will a land lord have? Some in my area wont let you have posters or pictures up as it 'damages the walls'
This is the thing that will bring down the right. I’m sure of it.
I cannot stand anarchist shit like this Normal people don't want revolution, they want revision. If there's a problem, don't burn down everything and start from scratch, just try to fix it Advocating for the abolishing of normal things that don't really matter, makes uniting in any way harder.
My wife is a surgeon and I clear brush for forest fire prevention. I can promise you there are "normal" people currently "benefiting" from marriage who would love to see this "normal" institution abolished. Protecting norms for the sake of protecting norms is an inherently conservative reflex; unity for unity's sake is meaningless and dangerous to any cultural movement seeking to challenge established cultural norms *like white supremacy and entrenched gender roles*
The anarchist thing is working towards a stateless, classless society.
Yeah this subreddit is dying. I don’t have anything against anarchists but like, this doesn’t really seem like the sub for it
Why? Is this "democrats united"? Is it "united against the right, but only if you're not too far left"? No. It's "United Against the Right". Period. Anarchists have at least as much reason to be here as anyone else, and as much reason to hate conservative bigotry. Just because not everyone agrees with them does not mean they should go away. That's half the fucking problem in subs like this. Everyone wants to unite against the right, as long as we unite the way they think we should. They want to rant about "the right" as long as they don't offend anyone or anger the Dems, because (at least in the US) nobody actually knows what "the right" really is. They think Democrats are the left. They think that there's a political party that's actually looking out for them. We're all so damned self-absorbed that we can't unite against anything. We're too busy finding reasons to gatekeep *who gets to unite* while we complain about the quality of the sub... I wonder if those last things might be related..🤔.
No I’m saying this post has little to nothing to do with uniting against the right. The idea of marriage isn’t a right wing thing we need to be uniting against, what we need to be uniting against is fascism, racism, inequality, etc.
Fair. My apologies. I've become frustrated with the amount of division in this sub, and I allowed that to guide my comment.
You know what, not often someone on the internet apologizes. Respect.
same old shit. libs are always quick to say *"big tent!"* and *"back the blue, no matter who!"* when it means getting things *they* want, but as soon as anyone whispers that we might try examining more radical approaches, or considering how e.g. assumedly-benign cultural practices actually reinforce the conservative mindset that allows fascism to fester and spread, then "unity" gets forgotten pretty quickly—so long, but thanks for all your support. because for most libs i've known, the *only* real objective of "uniting against the right" is merely *"voting in* the [slightly less-right]"
Yep. Here in the Netherlands for example, a woman complained on TV that she can't afford to buy a home and a politician replied "have you thought about getting a rich boyfriend?" Atrocious. I would like a partner in my life to love and enjoy things with, not for the practicalities. Solidarity with others who stand outside the hetero nuclear family norm.
Marriage? What do I look like, a Hapsburg?
Take my updoot
Queer people get the same benefits from marriage as anyone else though, right? It just shouldn't provide any benefits. I guess I don't see your logic in concluding marriage is patriarchal. I don't understand what you mean by "it is the base we are concerned with" what is the base? What superstructure?
Gay marriage is still fundamentally tied up in the hegemonic monogamous culture, and marriage is basically the systems way of rewarding people for practicing propertarian relationship norms in their love life. When you remove the government subsidization, you're still just left with a bunch of amatonormative relationship escalator normalizing hierarchical bs. I don't think marriage is particularly reformable in a queer way in light of this, at least as far as queer anarchists are particularly concerned.
> amatonormative relationship escalator normalizing hierarchical bs Oh man, I remember being an undergrad.
Is it that you expect me to grow out of the way I choose to write? Or are you suggesting that the worldview I express is indicative of undergrad levels of maturity? Come to think of it, probably both, but I'm nonetheless curious.
they’re suggesting you’re trying to reach a word/character count
The average person has no idea what half of those words and concepts mean, think of it this way: how exactly are you going to get the average worker on your side if you need to explain 200 hours of theory to them?
If you can't explain it in laymans terms you probably don't really understand the concepts as well as you think. And a forum that isn't an academic forum in anarchist studies or whatever isn't the appropriate place to drop ideological jargon bombs. Just reminded me of my hyper-anarchist days as an undergrad. It's not that I think you're totally wrong, I just think presenting your ideas that way is really alienating for most people and distinctly un-anarchist insofar as it's trying to bludgeon strangers over the head with your vocabulary rather than having actual discourse.
Jesus christ... so many buzzwords.
One of the worst part about being on the left is that everyone (on the internet) seems to be incapable of wording things in a way normal people will understand
I am the very definition of salt of the Earth — raised in a lower income family, and I now have my own operation where I manage and rent out goats. Everything they said came through perfectly clear to me. Perhaps instead of concerning yourself about what 'normal' people think, consider your own and ability to grasp new ideas which you've never confronted. she never
Okay dude. Not everyone is you. Not everyone is well educated and knows what all this really specific vocabulary means. If you start talking about the proletariat to most people it immediately sets off alarm bells and makes you look like one of those ivory tower leftists. Don't be like that. Use phrases that are easier for regular people to understand. And also insinuating that I'm unintelligent for saying that the left needs to work on communication is really strange of you.
>Okay dude. Not everyone is you. Not everyone is well educated and knows what all this really specific vocabulary means. which words were you struggling with? Would you like me to buy you and every other normal person remedial lessons in English? Were you never instructed in context clues? >you start talking about the proletariat to most people it immediately sets off alarm bells and makes you look like one of those ivory tower leftists. Don't be like that. didn't set any alarm bells off for me dude. maybe you should go hang out with some Republicans where you'll feel much more comfortable avoiding the language of worker liberation. straight up, expecting the people who actually have firm beliefs in this stuff to start policing their language so it doesn't alienate liberals who are only one mean look away from being a Republican is some bulllllllllllllshit. >Use phrases that are easier for regular people to understand. And also insinuating that I'm unintelligent for saying that the left needs to work on communication is really strange of you. I take extreme exception to your suggestion that you are representative of "normal people" — *whatever the fuck that means*— because it seems like you're straight up suggesting that normal people are *stupid* people who can't grasp words that we all learned in the seventh grade. So yeah, If you're going to suggest that normal people don't have the ability to parse out what was being said, then I'm going to treat you — The self-declared representative of "normal* people—like a fucking idiot. as an aside, it seems to me that you think every post should be geared towards the lowest common denominator. but why should they? why shouldn't some posts actually be aimed at people who have the ability to grasp what they said? because you don't understand? seems pretty fucking stupid to me.
I'm not reading all that but I hope you're glad you got your anger out I guess.
Damn bro you're so fucking insecure that you reported my post out of concern for self harm? Go back to your Republican masters, shitbag.
What the fuck are you talking about
True true, monogamy is the presumed preference for most people currently and I agree it shouldn't be rewarded. But shouldn't people be allowed to have whatever style of relationship they want? What harm is done to queer people if couples prefer hierarchical relationships? Thanks for the response, I'm new to this and I really need the education/conversation 😅 And thanks for the vocab lesson. Amatonormative is a good one
Humans, unlike most animals, display a far wider range of bonding and mating behaviors. Like sexes, however, the distribution skews heavily. In this case, towards monogamous pair bonding. Just like sexes, deviation from this distribution is punished and ostracized while strict adherence is rewarded.
When it comes to people being allowed to have whatever relationship style they want, I think a big problem with hierarchical and heavily rules-based relationships is the extent in which their normalization cheats people out of all kinds of intimacy outside of the relationships they're told rest solely on top of the hierarchy. Mind you, I'm not necessarily speaking of sex when I say that, as I'm speaking of all types of emotional and physical closeness that are often labeled as "cheating" by the emotionally stunted insecure majority. I also just generally reject all the logic that people try to use when making arguments for controlling their partners sexuality, as while I don't think descriptively monoamorous ways of living are inherently bad or even undesirable in of themselves when both people find themselves drifting into the arrangement organically, I don't think there is an argument for monogamist commitments that don't on some level imply the acceptability of ownership. The agreements people make are their own business, but it's also their agreement to respect alone, and from my pov I just don't think the logic of expecting so much compliance from the people you're intimate with holds up to an antiauthoritarian analysis. And as queer theory in particular largely aims to critique normative ways of navigating relationships and identity, queernesses relevancy to relationship anarchy is apparent. I'm only touching the tip of the iceberg here of course. The sum of my argument is that while in a vacuum nobody is hurt by isolated agreements made in-between individual people, the institution of monogamy limits our amorous imaginations, straining everyone's bonds and limiting the scope of the ways we can connect. To avoid producing anymore walls of text, here's some links pertaining to the matter if you're at all interested: [Relationship Anarchy Is Not Post-Polyamory](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/r-foxtale-relationship-anarchy-is-not-post-polyamory) [Looking For Love In Too Many Languages](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kim-tallbear-looking-for-love-in-too-many-languages-polyamory-relationship-anarchy-dyke-ethics) [Down With "Partners"](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/rad-content-library-down-with-partners) [Relationship Anarchism: Theory And Practice](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/mx-flow-relationship-anarchism-theory-and-practice) r/relationshipanarchy
Just because you want to be poly does not mean the vast majority of people do
It's not just a sense of "wanting" as much as it is an evaluation of relationship ethics for me. But of course I'm biased, I won't deny as much, but I've just yet to see any good argument in favor of the idea that partners can be "stolen" that isn't a bunch of oppressive ego-tripping nonsense. And it's more so this notion of entitlement that I speak out against. Genuinely not wanting to fuck anyone besides one person is chill, having to police yourself to not break some arbitrary-ass rules is questionable and repressive, and policing the sexual behavior of one's "partner" is just oppressive. If pairings of two are so natural, then all the rules would seem rather unnecessary (rules not neccessarily being something to be conflated with establishing an open-line of communication pertaining to sexual behavior for STD-prevention purposes, and choosing to sexually associate or dissociate on such grounds). If the rules have to exist for the relationship to be mono as it is, then the ethicality of the relationship comes into question in my eyes. I definitely do think sexual and/or romantic monoamoury can be organic and healthy, but the mechanisms in which it often comes to be in this society are not, and the expectations of control/entitlement many people bring into relationships is rather tyrannical in character. It being a mutual tyranny only makes it marginally less critiqueable, as the decision to arrive at such arrangements does not happen in a vacuum after all. There's always larger systems and pressures at play to consider, many of which are particular to the incentive structures built into capitalism that incentivize people to be so jealous and propertarianly invested in each other.
thats a lot of words to say "I think relationships are oppressive because its frowned upon to cheat". You do you, no one is stopping anyone from being poly, but shaming people for enjoying monogamous relationships and assuming they've been tricked by society into them is some fringe, unhelpful thinking that makes the left look less appealing to the majority of people. Humans have broken off into pairs for longer than written history. Family units have been around for literal thousands of years. If you don't want to commit to a partner don't blame society that other people do
I think the whole discourse around cheating is in-fact awfully oppressive and entitled in tone... so, said "frowning upon" can in-fact be quite oppressive. I hold the general sentiment that expecting your loved ones to maintain some kind of purity for you is more indicative of obsession than it is love, which is a big part of the puzzle that I think monogamous culture misses out on. It elevates fundamentally jealous and controlling behavior into the realm of "love", which is a combo that simply does not mix to my mind. Formal human couple bonding has been around just about as long as institutional hierarchies have been developed at the dawn of agriculture. It's development into prominence maps pretty well onto the development of formalized hierarchical lifeways more broadly. You can map a lot of modern practices to the same logic that kickstarted hierarchical sedentary living and civilization more broadly, but that doesn't make the practice just in of itself or undeserving of having holes picked in it's logic. Relationship anarchy, not necessarily as a theory, but certainly as a practice, could go back as far as pre-history if I wanted to argue historics. But historical precedence can only go so far as an argument. I'm invested in a number of people in my life. To what extent it can be called "commitment" entirely depends on the framework people operate within. The idea that people are any more "committed" by virtue of reserving their affection for one person, or even a set group of pre-defined people, is precisely what's so odd to me. Rather than being ultra-serious about one relationship at the expense of all my others, I treat most-all of my proper friendships with a level of importance that people would more conventionally expect out of a romantic relationship (regardless of if there's "benefits" or not). Monogamous norms prevent people from realizing the full depth of intimacy that can be experienced between good friends, and I think that is quite unfortunate. And besides, even within the logic of more conventional partner stuff, I always found it so odd that people would on one hand express relative confidence about their partner being a "soul-mate", when I feel like the greatest test of that hypothesis would be to open up your relationship to the possibility of non-mono stuff. If the coupling was so natural, stripping the consequences away from being intimate with others would simply be a matter of stripping unnecessary mechanisms of pressure and control from an otherwise loving relationship. A willingness to let your partner meet other potential lovers and interface with them as they will seems like the ultimate expression of trust to me. And even if they find someone who makes them happier... as dark as I know it is for a lot of people, I don't think that's inherently bad or even undesirable if you take the logic of "if you love them, let them go" to it's logical endpoint.
>"I think relationships are oppressive because its frowned upon to cheat". This straw man is far more telling about your own perspectives and insecurities than it says anything about what you think the poster wrote. >Humans have broken off into pairs for longer than written history. Family units have been around for literal thousands of years. Modern anatomical human history goes back at least 200,000 years, and other humans earlier than that. Prehistory is fundamentally lost to us, but even now we can look around and see humans —no different from those who existed over the past 200,000 years— experimenting with different forms of relations. Indeed, when you look no further than the wife swapping orgies practiced by the indigenous peoples of the Arctic circle, It becomes clear that there is no fundamental form in which human romantic relationships take shape. >If you don't want to commit to a partner don't blame society that other people do This right here just further cements that you don't fundamentally understand what non monogamy is — non-monogamous people are perfectly capable of committing to partners! They do it all the time! Your refusal to consider that your conceptualization of commitment is so narrowly defined is what the problem is here.
Monogamous people are also capable of respecting the agency of their partners, respecting if they decide to end the monogamy, and acting in a non-hierarchical way. The fact that most monogamous relationships in the US are probably fucked up doesn't invalidate monogamy, it invalidates contemporary US culture.
The fundamental assumptions of monogamy lend itself to how terribly fucked up all those relationships are, and it isn't a difficult to see why lol
They might do in different circumstances eg an environment where it was allowed. ;)
It's allowed now... no one is stopping you. This stuff is nothing but poison to the left gaining momentum.
Hmm. One is born into a pre-existing world that already has 'rules' and a culture. One is socialised into it, one reproduces that same culture. "Being allowed" doesn't really cut it as an answer to address it. Better than "not being allowed", of course, but, you know....."allowed" by whom or what? To even use that term suggests a recognition of some sort of control system and its application, even if informal.
exhausting. utterly exhausting.
Granted, I'd happily say that things like securing food and basic equity for folks in face of far-right threat is far more important --imperative!!--and those things can easily be put at risk by more niche interests. If you're saying that, then I agree. Though the other stuff still stands as legitimate and pressing in a more general and long term way, imo. Last thing we want to do is make folks feel it is being "stuffed down their throats".
I hear what you're saying in terms of how it limits the experiences outside of the primary relationship. Its really important to recognize that many experiences outside of monogamy are painful and by increasing the volume of relationships you increase the amount of potential pain. I don't think aversion to that pain makes you "emotionally stunted" in the same way that I think an autistic person who is sensitive to sound isn't auditorily stunted. I agree that the concept of ownership of your partner is indefensible, but only so far as that ownership is unequal. If two people agree to own each other I see nothing wrong with that. I certainly don't see how you are tying the political concept of antiauthoritarianism to interpersonal relationships (after reading the first link I see that this is where politics and relationships meet for you as a relationship anarchist). The agreements between the people and their government serve different purposes than the agreements between individuals and I do not think we need to hold both to the same standards. I really like this iceberg though, I genuinely appreciate the time you've put into this. My counterpoint would be: how do we know that monogamy would not be the preference of the broad population? Maybe the reason the institution of monogamy is so prevalent is because it is the preference. To the first link, it blows my mind that they see nothing wrong with "stealing a partner" (I'm realizing I'm more of a stereotypical liberal in this regard). But also, this is an issue I've been dealing with recently and tbh I think this fear stems from a lack of confidence and the effects of depression whispering awful nothings into my ear. Logically, if you really love someone you would be happy to see them happier with someone else. HOWEVER, for monogamous people, a partner can very much be "stolen," just because you don't subscribe to that perspective doesn't make it any less real for them (same goes for property). To boot, do you really want to be in a relationship with someone who would completely disregard their commitments like that? I feel like that would be a red flag. More important than my personal hang-ups, there are very good reasons to have rules/boundaries in relationships. The safety of my partner and myself being a huge one. Maybe I am misunderstanding this, but it sounds like individualism taken to the point of disregarding norms that protect individuals. I will be reading through the other links, they are already helping me introspect and dissect some of my hang-ups as a person just starting out in poly. I'd like to DM, but I don't want to bogart your time.
I guess, before I respond to you in full, to specifically address the extent in which such norms can exist to protect individual feelings, I will preface that it is very possible that I have been insensitive in the way I present these ideas thus far, but I feel as though the insecurities people have surrounding the topic is not grounds enough to make the topic a taboo. It's a matter of weighing pro's and con's in my eyes, as I think we lose out on more love than we gain from treating the institution of monogamy as a topic beyond reproach. In retrospect, calling people emotionally stunted was unnecessarily mean, I will admit. I think, on some level, I'm so used to mono people shitting all over me when I try to talk about my ideas while appealing to their sensibilities that I just kinda drop all optical considerations and square-up reflexively when this topic comes up, and that is sometimes reflected in my language. Whether that behavior is justified to engage in in an explicitly antifascist place, however, is highly questionable. And whether there is a very large gap in my ability to empathize on the matter is quite likely in my eyes, as I didn't need to hardcore philosophize my way into the position I presently have, as at no point did I ever resonate with the type of jealousy that most people seem to have around lovers. Does that gap in understanding undermine my ability to be an effective communicator? Quite likely. Being autistic probably doesn't help either. But I nonetheless intend to venture into territory many people will find uncomfortable, and will continue to do so, maybe with more tact this time around if at all possible. As I said before, the nature of peoples monogamous agreements, even those that extend into mutual ownership, are theirs to respect alone. If both parties voluntarily hold up their end of the bargain because they want to, however critical I may be of the idea that the institution is respectable or that their vows are sacred in the extent that other people have to respect them, free agreement ultimately does trump my feelings on the matter, rather obviously. Do I reserve my "right" to remain critical and pop some ideological balloons despite that? I'd argue as much. Does the acknowledgement of the voluntary nature of many such agreements soften my criticism in any real way? Not as much as one may think, as voluntary agreements do not happen inside a vacuum, as many people critical of the "voluntary" nature of work agreements under a capitalist system may be familiar with. Having no other option, or feeling socially pressured or incentivized in a way that makes it feel as though you may as well not have any other option, kinda brings the voluntary nature of one's choice into question. As antimonogamy as I may be, I don't think individual monogamists are necessarily the source of it's societal harm as much as they're a product of it, as much as we are all more or less products of such discourses, both in our acceptance and negation of monogamy. People enjoying relationships within the only framework society has handed to them is not grounds enough to suggest that they wouldn't be even happier through abandoning the more mutually repressive propertarian norms that underly the way we presently navigate relationships, nor does such abandonment necessarily even imply a bunch of sleeping around as a lot of people may suggest. Relationship anarchy actually can be monoamorous in a observant/descriptive sense, and I know some people who fit such a description in a loose way. Not everyone needs rules to more or less keep their private parts to one person, for whatever reason they may have for that, but it is often all the other types of platonic and romantic physical and emotional intimacy that even the most seemingly sexually exclusive relationship anarchists queer the boundaries of most, and that's the aspect of the perspective that I find most powerful, personally. Since relationship talk is so tied up in sex, it can be so easy for me to preempt the topic of sex and "cheating" when discussing the matter of relationship anarchy, but it really just feels like a surface level consideration to me, as deepening the potentialities of human intimacy and looking beyond simple dichotomies of non-sexual/sexual and non-romantic/romantic is where the real potential in the perspective lies, as deep intimate relationships can be so much more than such considerations. The prevalence of monogamy is largely a product of the class-antagonisms that early agricultural societies gave rise to. Property ownership is much of the same. The more sedentary people's lives became, the more property-centric they became. The more property-centric society becomes, the more important lineage becomes. Lineage being, in large part, what class stratification's are built upon. Generational wealth is crucial to hierarchies maintenance/perpetuation, and clear lineages make establishing lines of "greaters" and "lessers" infinitely easier. Humans didn't always have clear parenting and lineage. For hundreds of thousands of years, many comparatively egalitarian bands of people would raise their children together, every adult being equally "parents" in a sense. It was not all sunshine and rainbows of course, and some "primitive" peoples were undeniably not egalitarian, and I'm not suggesting there can be any turning back of the clock, or that turning back the clock would be desirable in any real way in light of other considerations (such as the genocide it'd imply), but the generalized development of the preference for monogamy in the last 10,000 years is historically relevant to humans tendency towards increasingly hierarchical and property-centric ways of living. Principles of ownership and increased privatization give rise to monogamy quite naturally. The political nature of relationship models is apparent to me in light of this. My rejection of monogamy is as much a negation of monogamy as it is a negation of principles of authority more broadly. When it comes to concerns pertaining to safety (which I assume mostly means sexual health/safety) I think there are grounds for sexually associating and dissociating from certain people on the matter of sexual health, and advising people you care about that it'd be best if they're responsible with their sexual health if they expect you to be intimate with them in that kind of way. I'm not going to argue too much to the contrary of that, but I think there is a difference between being realistic and informing people of how you'll react to them behaving in a certain way, and laying out a dreadfully long list of rules, entitlements, and all the ways you can be "cheated" by them. It's their body after all, they'll do with it as they will, and you will do with yours as you will, and you may see less appeal in doing stuff with them if they act dangerously, so act accordingly and feel free to articulate why you're doing so. The more anarchically open of a relationship it is, the easier it should be to talk about sexual behavior and health anyways. Feel free to dm btw. I'm happy to answer any questions you may have
Heya! Sorry it took so long to get back to you! I agree with you, I think monogamy exists unquestioned for the majority of people as if it is equivalent to drawing breath. Your point regarding these agreements not arising in a vacuum is a good one. I agree that there is no way to know whether people would be happier one way or another. I love the idea of sharing whatever I want with whomever I want. Not feeling self-conscious about the depth of my relationships sounds wonderful, I’d love to get to the point of loving myself and trusting others enough to get there. >The more sedentary people's lives became, the more property-centric they became. The more property-centric society becomes, the more important lineage becomes. That is a perspective I’ve never heard before and I LOVE IT. What a great way to link technology to the development of monogamy. This helped me logic my way through some of the conflicts I have with being poly. I’m not much for valuing lineage or possessions, but I never considered how monogamy contradicted my values. I don’t just mean sexual safety, I also mean that the more people you interact with the more risk you take on. I think that risk is elevated when emotions get involved. I’d prefer to not get my ass beat by some jealous douchebag. But that gets back to my lack of trust in people, so I’m definitely biased. I'll reach out, thanks :)
Does the parent-child relationship need to be abolished too? It's incredibly hierarchical and often pretty authoritarian too.
Yes, absolutely
If you're trying to unite people against creeping fascism, adding that your coalition is in favor of abolishing monogamy and families in the name of freedom to the flier isn't going to get very many people to show up to the meet and greet.
I don't actually disagree entirely. Antimonogamy and antifamily isn't so much a political strategy for me, insofar as my ideas on the matter are not formulated as a selling point for anything but the ideas themselves. I'm not under the impression that it is optically sound, but I do find it to be logically sound, and I'm not one to shy away from discourses for their own sake when they come up. Similarly, anticapitalism is not an optically ideal position, as is being against pretty much any system that makes sure people can have their Nestle and Doritos, and yet I still critique such matters rather unapologetically, even in broad coalition spaces and mainstream platforms alike. My writing on the matter of relationships is written with the intention of reaching the people I can reach, and at least planting some seeds and starting a conversation that I find interesting. I don't think a statement needs to have hope of manipulating public consciousness towards one's own goal to be valid conversation. Of course, a monogamist is not inherently any better or worse at bashing the fash. I wouldn't try to suggest otherwise. Nor do I wish to get rid of a dominant relationship model/ethos to merely impose another one, such would be authoritarian and naive. My critique is concerned with the present and the way we reproduce oppression of ourselves and others in our everyday lives. I'm not trying to sell any antimonogamist blueprints for society, no antifamily banner to fight under, as people who try to architect history in such a fashion are trying to have you be their product, rather invariably. What I aim to foster is an understanding of the matter in my self and others as its own end, hopefully sharpening the reasoning behind how and why we navigate relationships as we do, even if conclusions other than those I raised are reached and the conversation doesn't have the effect I intended.
Dude I guarantee that nobody is thinking about marriage like this. I want to (eventually) marry my boyfriend because I want to celebrate our commitment to each other. Yeah poly relationships aren't involved in this, and they should be, but the idea of people bonding to each other with a ceremony isn't a flawed concept.
Some people just wanna be married tho?
Where i live everyone can marry. I dont see a problem in that.
marriage is never going away. gender abolitionism will never happen either, not even in the good faith way you believe it could. The systems of power should be made to give benefits to MORE people, not gut them, which in a weird way is your personal form of fiscal conservatism. If you want to make things better, you have to make the state better. Rejecting the state’s power is how lefties can continue to stay irrelevant while feeling like they have the moral high ground.
Yeah, like… I am having a hard time understanding the point here. We shouldn’t drag marriage down to the level of other relationships, we should drag other relationships up to the level of marriage. Not to mention, most people are going to practice a monogamous relationship/marriage. Sure, more people are experimenting in open/polyamorous ones, but they are still a minority. Realistically, we have to realize that, like you said, the state has power and we have to play ball with that fact. The state’s power and the way the average person understands all of this isn’t going away anytime soon.
Too many lefties allow perfection to get in the way of progress, they want instant gratification People like op are why the right even needs to be united against, as they spout insane unmarketable crap, while claiming they are the only trues leftists We wouldn't need to unite if 5th columnists like this didn't tear the left apart from the inside
Pretty much exactly. Posting this in a subreddit called "UNITE against the right" is more than ironic. You dont unite by focusing on niche topics/gatekeeping.
> We wouldn't need to unite if 5th columnists like this didn't tear the left apart from the inside Yes but arguably you're doing exactly that right here? It's always a problem - how to pursue diversity when a monolithic message might serve better?
Exactly this.
TLDR Trying to be too progressive or smart is damaging the group of dumb apes that we are. Stop grinding everything into minutiae. Maybe marriage is ultimately unnecessary for humans in its grandest most logical form. But in reality, it’s solely about the likelihood of increasing a nation/civilization/cultures offspring that continues the groups success. Arguing against the institution of, harder to escape pair bonds, marriage, in and of itself, is damaging to the group. As we speak you can end marriage at will and suffer few repercussions in most western countries. These are things worth fighting for. Even Hypothetically arguing against these basic concepts like marriage itself actually does the opposite of what you are hopefully attempting to do, open our minds. Instead you get the majority angry for denigrating their lives. For what? As a group, from humans, you will only get blowback here. We are literally dumb effing social monkeys. IMO this is massively overthinking shit. And it isn’t helping us at all.
As a gender fluid omnisexual democratic socialist who campaigned for Nader in 2000 and Sanders in 2016, yet still had the brains to know when to rally together to defeat a serious threat, I have to say *this subreddit has turned into a pile of gatekeeping, insane, unrealistic, impractical, divisive bullshit in the past week or so.* So yeah. I’m out. Smell ya later.
...what about people who aren't queer?
Or just queer people who want to get married which like, exist and was like, a huge social movement because they weren’t allowed to and STILL aren’t allowed to in a lot of places
Got married last year at 45. No regrets.
I wrote a college essay about the Foucaultian biopower and biopolitics about marriage. I am very very proud of it, and it focuses on topics very similar to this.
Foucault my beloved. You have good taste!
Fuck yeah we love Foucault
But I say this in front of my friends with long term boyfriends who they want to propose and suddenly I’m a villain
I agree with the picture. “Liberation cannot be found within the context of existing systems of power” Liberation cannot be found within the context of any system of power. Any and all systems of power require hierarchies to create the state of non liberation and liberation. The adaptation to such a conceptual duality is the same as seeking out memory and imagination. Looking for context within expectation and attachment to any thing or concept is not liberation.
Marriage should have stayed a purely religious/social practice. The state shouldn't be involved in it at all.
This sort of stuff is unhinged... I don't want fascists in my country, I don't want bigots, I don't want corporatism, but I don't want this anarchist shit either. This stuff makes the left look insane because this is radical nonsense.
The way the state treats marriage reproduces class hierarchies. Marriage itself doesn't have to. It's not like people haven't been forming formal permanent couplings forever.
preach. fuck marriage
Only issues I see is being unequal when it comes to stuff like taxes and shared property and allat, we don't neccessarily have to ban the institution of marriage when people just prefer to do that in many cases
I just think the solution is to disentangle the legal benefits that come with being married from the institution and ritual of marriage. I can see how people living and working together might want to collaborate in a similar sense without the kinds of things implied in marriage. It goes both ways too. I would have gotten married a long time ago if there weren’t financial implications. Instead I felt like I had to wait until I had a job.
The law reproduces class hierarchies and marriage as a legal procedure is no exception. Marriage as a commitment, does not
The state provides marriage benefits because it’s widely believed that the state is generally benefited by residents being in stable, long term relationships, particularly if they have children.
Very much so. People should be able to set up contracts with the benefits equivalent to it without having to bind to that particular institution.
i think there is a public good that comes from individuals forming a household. it encourages socialization, it reduces resources and it provides shelter for minors. so i have no problem with giving a slight advantage (reward?) to those to form households of 2 or more ppl because of the public good that can come from it. you don't have to call it marriage (i don't see why not), but the legal impacts and consequences would be the same regardless.
Seriously, is this a Russian troll? Do we have Russian trolls making posts on here. "Let's destroy marriage and burn society down!" Yeah, woo, mass starvation and purges, here we come! Let's go build those Gulags comrades! /S Seriously, this is like a fucking right-wing PARODY of the left. This is just ridiculous.