Random raves

So, there was a thread on dot_poly_snark over on LJ, where someone got snarked when they went all bawwwwww about their coming out to one friend who didn't immediately do the happy dance about the good news. And justifiably so.

But one person commented by saying in part, "But then generally, I don't get the whole "coming out" process for poly people. Just live your life and the people will either figure it out or they won't."

Obviously I'm just a big old queer with a chip on my shoulder, because this really irked me. And I had to rant in reply:


I dunno, maybe I got a bit into lecture mode, but "letting people figure it out for themselves" is only a useful strategy when you're coming from a fairly secure base to begin with. I still don't overtly out myself at work, except to a selected few people, sometimes. Maybe I'm still paranoid, but fuck, we only got "rights" in NZ the year I officially came out. And given the whole gay marriage debacle, we still aren't fully equal citizens, according to most - I'm still not in favour of marriage as a whole, but this willful discrimination just serves to show we don't have "real" relationships and we're not "equal" in some fundamental ways. It's fucked up.

And I'm still fucking angry with Gillard, to give it some Australian context. Not that I can vote here, so it's all a bit moot.

Just because you're poly, it does not make you a speshul snowflake. All relationships require negotiation, all relationships should have a reasonably clear set of expectations. All the people you deal with deserve respect and consideration.

Like any other relationship, there will be conflicts because of misunderstandings (or acting out). Issues like one person getting upset when "check in with me when you shag someone new" was done after the event rather than before are not that different to one person getting upset because "a few drinks after work" should not imply rolling in at 3am completely drunk.

Ok, poly gives you a few new and creative ways to misunderstand and cock up - or be malicious and cause drama - but strictly mono couples still manage to have very similar issues.

If anyone's been following the recent discussion on the Polyamory comm, am I barking up the wrong tree? What is it about "I prefer open/multiple relationships" that newbies need educating about (according to some)? (Ok, if you're into orgies, there's some etiquette there.) Is it because some people are so immersed in their alt.sex environment that they forget that these kinds of issues are well-nigh universal? Or is there some glaring point of difference that I'm missing?

Some of it is good for those of us negotiating open/multiple relationships. But some of the therapy-speak drives me up the wall.

For example, sharing sex. To me, "sharing" something has the connotation of something being doled out. So, I'll have a sex, and you can have a sex, and we'll just share all these seXX0rs. Saying that you're having sex with someone is much more immediate and descriptive of what you're doing. Like a good meal when you're hungry, you're diving in and consuming it together. Nom!

So, why the "sharing" of sex rather than the having of it? Possibly due to the association of "having someone" when referring to less-than-egalitarian sex? Do we avoid certain verbs because they can be used in a negative construction as well as the very positive ones? I'd really love to know how the "sharing sex" locution came about.

Moving onto a more serious topic, there is a discussion about the fact that no-one can make anyone feel anything. This is true. No-one can make me be angry or indifferent or happy. However, the behaviour that someone carries out can have the effect of eliciting a reaction. Depending on what buttons they're pushing (or not) with that behaviour, that reaction may be positive or negative, strong or mild.

Following on from the premise that no-one makes anyone feel anything, no-one is responsible for someone else's feelings. And again, this is true, when it comes down to the essentials. We all own our own feelings, not anyone else.

What they're aiming at here - I think - is the idea that if your partner is jealous, or experiencing some other negative emotion, the best thing you can do is "be there" and listen to them express their feelings, but you're not responsible for what those feelings are. I had one partner who, when she was drunk and when I merely talked to another woman, would fly into a jealous rage. I've had sex with another person in front of another partner, who thought it was great. So, yes, the stimulus most certainly does not necessarily predict the response.

I agree that we should not feel responsible for fixing someone's feelings, or, actually, for how they manifest themselves. But in the need to be groovy and not get into guilt-tripping, I don't think ignoring someone's agency in what feelings they elicit is that constructive either. Other people are going to piss you off, whether by ignorance, indifference or outright malice. With the latter two motivations, there really isn't much point in blame, other than yourself for putting yourself in their path.

But for problems that relate to ignorance or thoughtlessness, I think expressing your displeasure and clearly identifying where you think the problem lies - that behaviour of theirs - is something you should do. Wimpily sitting around and saying "I was upset and felt abandoned when you spent all night shagging girlfriend X" is going to achieve sweet F-A with those who are determined to be obtuse (although with the chronic and wilful obtuse types, DTMFA is the best solution). Saying "I was pissed off that you stayed out all night with X when you said you'd be back by 9. A phone call to let me know what was happening was the least you could do." seems to me to be a constructive approach. Problem, desired solution. And in response, I would not like this kind of thing: "Yes, I hear your anger. I bet you felt abandoned." I'd want to hear acknowledgement (of "responsibility" for the behaviour that upset me?) and a solution. Possibly a request for clarification if they didn't understand why I felt so strongly about something (because maybe my response was disproportionate to the stimulus... or there was a simple misunderstanding). I also think a response of "Get a grip, that curfew was last week due to the fact we were getting up early the next morning - this was my usual stay-over date night with X, and I didn't feel I had to renegotiate" is also perfectly valid!

I agree that blaming individuals tends to be pretty much a zero-sum game. Telling someone they're an irresponsible fucktard is only going to get their backs up without creating a solution (and why waste your energy on an actual irresponsible fucktard). But identifying problematic behaviour - at least what you find problematic, in the context of whatever kind of relationship you have - and expecting those who carry it out to acknowlege their agency seems to be not unreasonable either.

So maybe I simply haven't got to the point in the book where people have to own their fuckwittedness as well (and preferably do something about it), or maybe I'm missing the actual point. Maybe we need to evolve different language around things like "responsiblity" for emotional reactions - I do think we are responsible for the triggering (I loathe that term, but oh well) behaviour, even if we aren't directly reponsible for the resulting feelings.

I think that part of being responsible within a relationship is learning as well as one can what behaviours are likely to tweak one's partner... and being responsible for dealing with the consequences. Whether it's to vow to completely change a long-embedded behaviour (ok, I'll put my socks in the laundry basket from now on!), or to tell them to get over it, or all points in between. However, we can't be aware, responsive and responsible all the time, and we all get surprised by what others around us react to. Responsibility for our actions does not have to equal guilt or being accountable for fixing the problem... but I don't think we should dodge the times when we should be accountable for the effects our behaviour may cause. Or maybe we need to think of responsibility as a thing of degrees, not absolutes. Contributing factors? Hm.

I don't run a server of my own, but if I did, it's likely I'd use FreeBSD. I'm quite happy with Ubuntu on my laptop at home. But I did find a very compelling comparison on the merits of BSD vs Linux here.

[My sexism alert wasn't so much tripped due to the relative gender balance on each side. Yes, I'm pathetic.]

And really, there's nothing else I want to report about my week so far. It was long and tiring, and featured CEOs, spam, video conference resource booking fuckups, PMT and Goddess Hatchet Jobs™.

There was nice food last weekend, though. The Bear was finally able to drink her birthday wine after over a month of crappy stomach stuff, so we had to have something suitable to go with. I don't eat red meat, and the CDL isn't much on pork, but I managed to get inspiration for a nice pasta sauce.

I made it with a veal stock (veal chop and mince (tastee doggie treats after!), dried porcini, celery, onion, light garlic, bay leaves, white peppercorns, sea salt and a slosh of red wine - all boiled for about an hour, then strained and defatted after resting a bit), a pile of assorted mushrooms (@200g+ of oyster mushrooms and other weirdnesses) wilted in butter, a bit more fresh garden garlic, some duck breast (yay CDL inspiration) sautéed with olive oil and cherry tomatoes smushed into a pan with a bit of crushed dried chilli. Add the mushrooms to the duck and tomato and a cup or so of stock, a sprig of fresh garden thyme and a bit of chopped Italian parsley, and simmer for about 20 mins, adding more stock to keep it moist and simmering before allowing to reduce to the final sauce consistency (the mushrooms were very tender, but retained their shape). A bit more parsley just before serving, and the sauce went fab over the ricotta ravioli, with yummy salad leaves 'n' light dressing and wood-fired crusty bread on the side, and complemented the Central Otago (I still can't get over Otago as a wine region!) pinot noir beautifully. Of course, now I can't remember the wine-maker. D'oh!

BTW, it'd be easy to turn the sauce into a vegetarian rendition. With the stock, omit the veal (of course), use more dried porcini and supplement with a couple of shiitakes (not too many, because they have an overpowering flavour), and maybe a dsp of barley miso. The duck breast was far from being a compulsory ingredient (although it did go beautifully, and we could have had a bit more) - mushrooms, garlic, cherry tomatoes, stock and herbs make a fine sauce.

Yay team cooking and provision-providing efforts, though. It makes for much contentment. :-)

After much anguish over naming, I've finally started up that comm for queers in open relationships, queerly_open. It isn't supposed to be another People's Front of Judea in detracting from the aims of the polyamory community, but I do think there is a niche for a comm for those of us types who aren't in straight-orientated open relationships (or straight relationships aren't all of our relationships).

Please check out the userinfo and comment if I've made bizarre statements, left anything out, should clarify something, or should stick the goddamned apostrophes in the right places.

After some (gentle) nagging by some friends, I had dinner with my mother and my youngest sister (still living at home... at age 28) while I was still in NZ.

My mother is pretty good. She's very laissez faire, proud of me, and not neurotic. However, she has some behaviours that drive me up the wall, and if I wasn't related to her, she wouldn't be a person I'd spend much time with. Not that a few hours a year is much time anyway. *cough*

Ok, you may have gathered from reading this L/J that I'm fairly opinionated. And easily irritated. My mother is much worse than me with the opinionatedness. Yes, I know, it's hard to believe. The thing is, she tends to keep her mouth shut better, and she's much more phlegmatic than I am. But while I'm intolerant of and irritated by gratuitous ignorance, my mother is just intolerant.

For once, we didn't get onto the topic of the Maaaaaries (Maoris) and how they're screwing up NZ. No. This time, my mother explained how she "doesn't believe" in global warming. Doesn't believe?! Global warming isn't like "believing" in little blue fairies at the bottom of the garden, or god, or UFOs. It's like not believing in gravity, or that the earth is round, or that genetics influence our bodies, or other scientifically proven facts. I frothed on about all that for about 5 minutes, while my mother maintained that stony silence that means "You're talking absolute rubbish, but I won't say anything because then you'll keep going for longer".

This, thank goodness, was after I finally told my mother about the CDL... and that I'm still with the OGF. Her entire response was, "Oh." Did she want to know anything about this other person in my life? No. It's kind of on the principle of "If we don't discuss it, perhaps it will go away". I must add that she doesn't do it in a rejecting kind of a way - it's more of that complete not-understanding, and not wanting to get into something that isn't understood. And I don't want to sit there and point out that monogamy hasn't exactly worked out well for her either (if we're going to get into passing judgements).

Well, I'm just hoping that the test of time will help improve her understanding. None of this stuff is a flash in the pan for me, nor are the people concerned.

First day back at work was fun in a completely not fun kind of way. At least one of our systems waited until today to run out of space. Thank god for virtual machines, and the ability to add whole new disk volumes to a box within five minutes of remembering it isn't a physical host (after a couple of hours of trying every other possible way of reducing the size of a database... which is interesting when the mailboxes in it take up less than 10MB in total, and the database as a whole has somehow grown to 10GB - don't ask me what's going on there either). More fun tomorrow trying to get to the bottom of it, but at least I'm not there right now trying to get it running again.

This is why, when people lazily equate polyamory with polygamy, I want to puke.

Yes, I realise it's an extreme example, but it represents the mindset of the polygamists I know of, no matter how many people want to weasel-word and say "polygamy" only means multiple marriage. That's only true in the strict anthropological sense - otherwise, there are still a whole raft of other associations with the concept, especially to do with religion.

On a tangentially-related note, Laurie R. King wrote a recent blog demanding an end to tolerance:

I’m sick of tolerance. We don’t need to “tolerate” gays or blacks or Hispanics or women in politics or people in wheelchairs, any more than we need to tolerate the sky above or trees in the forest or our own left foot. They’re here, they’re as much a part of us as our left foot, they’re not going to go away, so as the old gay rights chant has it, get used to it. Instead of begrudging them their existence, “tolerating” them because the law says we have to, we need to learn to look at their differences—OUR differences—as a part of the texture of life. ...

We don’t have room for mere tolerance in this crowded world. Instead, we need to celebrate the richness of the humanity God has created. We need to turn a disbelieving eye on any thug who uses God as an excuse for his actions.

See, if you couldn't tell, I find polygamists personally distasteful. But if those concerned are entering into such arrangements with full awareness, the ability to get out if they want, and it is their choice, well, yes, hooray for diversity. I just wish I believed that polygamists who refuse to let the "sisterwives" touch each other had that viewpoint as well. Or that their version of God did.

I had a really nice evening with the OGF last night, thank god. It consisted of kid-wrangling, cooking my own dinner (since I have vowed never to eat spag bol with mince, ever again), drinking 1/2 a glass of wine, watching a movie while the baby refused to go to sleep, and then giving the OGF a shoulder rub until she passed out on me. I seem to have this effect on women, heh. Except babies.

But, we talked. And it was nice. She's having four new people move into her house. Her hubbies have gotten involved with another woman, and she and her husband and their two children are officially moving in this weekend. Dear lord - five adults and five children, all in the same (admittedly large) space. I'm just relieved I can visit.

Due to the fact that all of these rumptions had been going on while I hadn't spent any quality time with her in literally months, I was feeling a certain degree of insecurity about the whole thing, but she made a couple of observations that were reassuring. Firstly, it appears that there are limits to Puppy Pile Polyamory, at least for her. She doesn't want to majorly bond with the two new additions, especially the "other woman". Of course, the (well, my) definition of PPP is that you want to snuggle up with all your loved ones. These two additions are not her loved ones. Yay boundaries. Secondly, she said this morning that she doesn't have mental or emotional room at all for another woman. This is the first time in her life that that's been the case, since she's apparently always had at least a couple on the go up until I came along. But it seems that I take up as much mental space as any two other women.

Regarding that last, I'm a little unsure what to think. The reason I'm happy she's not all "boots in" with the new additions is time. She and I don't have enough time as it is, and I was quite wibbly about the idea that someone else was going to make it shrink even further (rampaging orgies would be fine, since, you know, that wouldn't impinge on our quality time; emotional investment would be something else). I said that I don't know how I take up so much "mental space", since we hardly see each other, but I apparently "just do". Actually, I do know what she means in terms of thinking about loved ones constantly - I certainly do nearly all the time - and I think that's pretty much what she was meaning. I didn't want to pursue the topic too much, and sound all neurotically demanding about "What exactly do you mean?", so I think I'll ruminate on it a bit further myself.

Why is this niggling at me a wee bit? It's because I tend to get involved with ambitious, go-getting and busy women. And since I'm not particularly those things myself, I like to take on a nurturing and "cheerleading" (if you like) role where I can. [How butch am I? Hah.] And if I'm taking up someone's mental energy, am I being more a drain than not? Because I cannot bear to feel that that might be the case. I'm actually quite sure I'm not, on a gut-instinct basis. All I need to do is sort out in my head what the implications are, and I'll be groovy.

And this is really the point of the post. While I don't think I tend to intellectualise my (and others') emotions much, I obviously do have to make logical sense of them - as much as possible - before I trust my instincts. I'm surprised as to how much it makes a difference to my inner feeling of security - and it's something I wish I'd realised about myself a lot earlier. I might be fairly trusting on an emotional basis, but my poor brane needs some assistance, evidently.

ETA: And I forgot to mention Mistress Matisse's latest column on poly in The Stranger. Leaving aside the primary/secondary terminology, I think it should just about be required reading. Especially, "When you say, "it's fine," really mean that it's fine." And, "Don't stick your dick in crazy."
I liked her thoughts about queerness in relation to poly as well - mainly because it's exactly what I think.

There's just been a fairly frank exchange of views over on the polyamoryaustralia list about the old chestnut of ranking relationships as to primary/secondary/tertiary ...and not. The original discussion was sparked by Mistress Matisse's article on the very same topic, which I rolled my eyes at and disregarded, as I normally do when that subject rears its ugly head.

I briefly said onlist that I was "allergic" to my relationships being defined that way, and that it made me "foam at the mouth" when people used heirarchical language to describe my situation. Well, apparently I didn't acknowlege the fact that relationship heirarchies exist (goodness!), that it's dishonest not to admit that, and that obviously people who believe they don't have such a heirarchy want to live in some hippy utopia.

I got a little cross at this point, hee!, but I didn't use any swearwords in any of my responses! But what it boiled down to for that and at least one other person onlist (the proto-fascist wanker) was that the labels help describe where everyone stands in a relationship structure.

And this got me thinking of the wider issue of people conflating heirarchy with structure. There is a reason these words are not synonyms in English - they are not the same. But many people appear to conflate the two, or say that without the one, the other doesn't exist. Bollocks.

I personally like structure. I'm naturally a very lazy person. If I didn't have to get up and go to work in the morning, I wouldn't. I'd doss around the house all day on the Internet and would generally do sweet F-A. I like to pay my bills so that I continue to get supplied with shelter, food and fun. I like the fact that those organisations I pay money to to supply these things are in fact obliged to do so. I carry out my own obligations (virtually all of the time), and I like people's obligations to me to be fulfilled. All that requires structure, both for the delivery mechanism and for the expectation that things will be carried out as arranged.

A heirarchy is a model for defining inter-personal relationships in any structure that involves people. You know your place, and your boss knows their place, and their boss does theirs... and so it goes. It's a way of assigning authority and obligations. I have authority over the email systems. I'm obliged to my boss. He has authority over 6 staff and the email and storage systems, and is obliged to his boss and his financial reporting. It's very clear as to what place in the structure we're in. We know the rules for each of our positions.

What that doesn't confer, however, is certainty or security. And I think that most people who enjoy heirarchies believe those things are precisely what you get from "knowing the rules". If you're in the military, someone tells you where to point your gun. You don't have any moral dilemmas (well, they're trained out of you), because that is someone else's responsibility. You know you're doing the right thing, because you're following orders. The trouble is, when the orders are wrong, things can fuck up in a bad way. Or they're not applicable. You can't go around saluting people at a cocktail party.

It seems that people who rely on certain kinds of external structures for certainty and security get really fucked-up when they lose them. So, why do some people insist on them, while others are "eh, that's all there is" and others again are strongly allergic? Perhaps there's a genetic component. Heh.

I strongly believe that heirarchies are the 4th Form maths of interpersonal relationships. You have a simple equation, and when you know that x = 5, it's very easy to solve y = (2x + 1)². What if you don't know the value of x? What if it's i? Bugger.

And really, personal relationships are all about i, as far as I can tell, leaving aside other kinds of relationships. Which means there is a limit to how well rules and heirarchies can model what you should do and how you should do it. IMO, of course. :-)

When talking about poly stuff, a lot of people like to slot their relationship styles into little boxes: triad, quad, poly-fi, network, polygamy, One Big Happy Family, primary, secondary, tertiary, quaternary (j/k!)... blah, blah, blah.

Really, I think there are two categories that count: the puppy-pile polys - those whose aim in life to end up in a big snuggly puppy pile with all their lovely partners - and those who aren't. That's not say that never the twain shall meet; my OGF is pretty much a PPP, while I and the CDL are not. But yep, I think that really is the most fundamental division in poly styles. :-)

Anyone else? Heh.

While I'm on the topic, I'd like to pimp a new Yahoo group for all the Australian poly-type people out there. (It may not be on Yahoo forever, but that's where it's starting). My OGF has started a group called polyamoryaustralia, which has been up and running a couple of months, and has had some decent discussion going on lately.

A few PolyOz (that was a mailing list that I had the shortest ever sub to - 10 days?) types tried to bring some old business across, and they were promptly squelched. A few of them have even stayed around to post about polyamory. So, that should indicate a different kind of culture there. The Melbourne and Sydney poly social groups organise their regular meets on the list, and the OGF is in the process of organising something similar for here in Canberra.
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