1.2. SITUACIÓN ACTUAL DE LA RED
1.3.4. PROTOCOLOS DE CALIDAD DE SERVICIO
The way language is used to define and describe relationships is of particular interest to people involved in consensual non-‐monogamy (Barker, 2005; Ritchie and Barker, 2006). To tell the stories of CNM, they need an appropriate vocabulary for their relationships, one that moves away from the familiar language of “cheating.” For many monogamous unions, the revelation of a partner’s sexual infidelity is interpreted as a devastating betrayal of trust, and sometimes, legitimate grounds for the dissolution of a relationship. “True love” in many monogamous relationships means limiting your sex life to your partner (Easton and Liszt, 1997); choosing to have sex with another is assumed to demonstrate immaturity, selfishness, and superficiality, among other negative traits (Kipnis, 2004; Perel, 2006). In contrast, non-‐monogamists do not believe that the desire and/or choice to sleep with other partners necessarily constitutes a betrayal, people with multiple lovers are bad, or that “real” romantic love means sexual
monogamy. To make CNM intelligible as a legitimate way of life to themselves and to others, my interviewees define their practice of non-‐monogamy in a way that differs from “cheating.” The first step in making this distinction is to claim a name for their lifestyle17, a recognizable word or phrase that would act as an umbrella and encompass a singular and general understanding of what this kind of intimate relationship looked like.
Yet, despite an acknowledged need for respectful and accurate language for discussing non-‐monogamy, one of the first sentiments expressed by many research participants was a
17 I’m not using the term “lifestyle” the way it’s used by marketers and popular media. Following Giddens’
(1991) use of the word, I mean lifestyle in a very substantive sense. Giddens uses the term broadly, to refer to the kinds of choices many individuals in Western societies are faced with making. The lifestyle choices include options regarding where and with whom to live, whether to pursue higher education, what kind of job to take, whether and whom one should marry, how many children to have, etc. My work is more limited in its scope than Giddens’ analysis, so in this dissertation, lifestyle refers to the kinds of personal beliefs and practices that inform how people engage in intimate relationships.
wariness of labels. In this chapter, I use excerpts from interviews with six different non-‐ monogamists – Erica, Rob, Theresa, Liam, Rowan, and Pearl – to better understand why the issue of labeling their lifestyle was so important to many of my interlocutors. There were two main reasons behind my interview participants’ ambivalence towards adopting a single, widely-‐ shared definition of CNM and identifying with a larger community of like-‐minded people. First, it was a commonly held belief among my interviewees that a person should not feel beholden to another’s definition of what constitutes the “correct” kind of relationship. There were some ethical ideals they endorsed for themselves and others (I will go into more detail about this in Chapter 4) but overall, they expressed very little support for individual interference or social regulation of the sexual relationships of consenting adults. For many of those I spoke with, part of the point of being non-‐monogamous was experimenting with relationships that didn’t conform to prevailing norms. Intimate relationships were viewed as highly individual and unique; everyone should be able to explore that uniqueness in her own way. This desire for freedom sensitized several of my interviewees to the possibility that not only monogamists but others in CNM relationships might try to enforce a single orthodox definition of what a “real” CNM partnership should be. For those with this fear, “polyamory” was usually the worrisome term.
The second reason many of my research participants felt ambivalent about naming their relationship style was a reluctance to be grouped with other non-‐monogamists they deemed undesirable. Among my research participants who did identify with more recognizable labels and identities – as polyamorists, for example – there was still a form of CNM that functioned as “Other” against which they defined themselves. These “othered” non-‐monogamists were objectionable not because they were ethically wrong but because my interviewees thought they
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were unsexy. For example, among those who defined themselves against polyamory,
polyamorists were depicted as nerds and social misfits; for those who disliked swinging culture, swingers were believed to be physically unattractive and too indiscriminate in their choice of sexual partners. These stereotypes are perhaps less a fair portrayal of polyamorous or swinger culture than straw men for my interviewees to define themselves against. Instead of primarily contrasting their beliefs with those of monogamists, my interviewees frequently illustrated what Freud called “the narcissism of small differences”: rather than comparing themselves with people in monogamous relationships, they chose to portray themselves as freer, more accepting, and sexier than others in consensually non-‐monogamous partnerships.
Anthropologists have long noted the tendency for people to define themselves by what they are not (Douglas, 1966); however, for my interviewees, this wasn’t just a matter of binary oppositions, i.e. who was in the group and who was out. Along with rejecting identities
associated with particular words like “polyamorist” and “swinger,” many interviewees expressed a general skepticism about the ability of words to adequately capture what consensual non-‐ monogamy meant to them. Furthermore, they distanced themselves from groups that used CNM as an identity that could form the basis of a broader political or social community, a rhetorical move that relied on both a “privatization” of the self and longstanding Western beliefs about romantic love as a rebellious, individualistic experience. This chapter explores the tensions and complexities of defining a non-‐monogamous identity that is at once distinctive and flexible, and capable of differentiating self-‐identified non-‐monogamists from similar but
objectionable others, whose desires and practices contradict their understanding of CNM.
Erica: Labels are limiting
Several interviewees took the position that intimate relationships were too singular, too different from couple to couple, to be encompassed by the generalizations supplied by a label. Erica provides a good example. A fashionable, self-‐possessed African-‐American woman in her mid-‐30s, Erika had worked as a high-‐power corporate professional for almost ten years before deciding to switch career tracks and join the non-‐profit sector. The hours for her new job were flexible and Erika agreed to meet me one afternoon in late autumn. We met up at a park. I started out the interview the usual way, by asking her how she defined her relationships. Erika responded that relationships were too unique to be accurately and completely defined by any one label.
B: What’s the term you would use to describe your relationships: open, non-‐ monogamous, polyamorous…?
E: I actually wouldn’t use a term. B: You wouldn’t?
E: Yeah, I think it’s too convenient to dismiss whatever mutation a situation takes by putting a term on it because any term is going to mean something different to different people.
Erika takes the position that a single label can not accurately capture the arrangements between lovers, which are always in flux. Her comment that using a particular term makes it “too
convenient to dismiss whatever mutation a situation takes” implies that labels make it easy to assume someone else’s definition of what constitutes a “good” relationship. The implication of her remark was that if this happens, a person stops being as sensitive and aware of their own and their partner’s needs. That was the fate that befell Erika’s first marriage. This relationship, which had been monogamous, worked “as long as it fulfilled [her] needs” but once it didn’t,
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Erika got a divorce. She explained that the divorce “was definitely… about his ability to support me versus my ability to support him, you know, the basic relationship underpinnings of ‘lifelong partners should do this.’” When Erika uses the term “support,” she means in the sense of providing emotional, rather than financial, support; this is also true of her understanding of her “needs.” Erika was a high-‐earning professional who could more than provide for herself
economically. Unlike most women of previous generations (as well as many today), Erika had the luxury of not only of safely leaving her husband but also of seeking out a new male partner who would show her the affection, respect, and emotional compatibility to which she felt entitled.
In seeking a divorce from her first husband, Erika was showing how the expectation of a “pure relationship” can shape a person’s intimate life. Giddens writes, “All relationships which approximate to the pure form maintain an implicit ‘rolling contract’ to which appeal may be made by either partner when situations arise felt to be unfair or oppressive” (192). For Erika, a marriage to man who didn’t “support” her in her endeavors, who didn’t provide her comfort, love, and encouragement, wasn’t a marriage worth remaining in. Erika perceived that her marriage was changing over time and her “conventional” husband was not willing to evolve along with her. Relying on “convention,” on a singular, time-‐honored understanding of what it meant to be husband and wife, was not enough to keep Erika and ex-‐husband together. In keeping with casualization’s demand that individuals be flexible, Erika wanted her husband to be adaptable, to be capable of changes as their relationship did. For Erika, the failure of her first marriage demonstrated the limitations of holding to just one definition of what a “good” intimate relationship is. Labels encouraged stasis; what Erika had needed from her first husband
was attention to the “mutation” that had altered their marriage. This wariness was articulated several other times during the interview.
Erika’s tendency to dismiss labels dovetails with her varied sexual experiences. In many ways, Erika upheld the norm of the bourgeois, heterosexual life trajectory (Berlant, 1998b). She had gone to college, established a successful, high-‐paying professional career and settled down with her partner in a monogamous relationship. When that relationship ended, she sought out another life partner. But not every detail of Erika’s personal life conformed so neatly to
hegemonic expectations. Though the majority of her romantic and sexual experiences had been with men, Erika talked about her sexual and romantic interest in women, including a
relationship she had with a woman a few years previously. When I asked her if she identified as either bi or queer, her response echoed her feelings about relationship or lifestyle labels:
B: Do you consider yourself bi or queer?
E: I don’t know about “queer.” Queer sort of lends itself to political positions. Bi is fine. I’m sexual, I’m not necessarily bisexual. I don’t know if I feel comfortable with those set up labels as they are, they’re very limiting. If you actually let people do what they would do without, I don’t know, social constraints or conventional restraints, they would probably all be that way.
Erika’s unwillingness to subscribe to mainstream understandings of sexual orientation may have signaled some discomfort regarding her sexual attraction to women. In responding to my question, Erika contradicted herself, saying at first that “bi” was an appropriate description of her sexual orientation only to follow that up a moment later with, “I’m not necessarily bisexual.” She felt comfortable claiming her sexuality in the most general terms but preferred not to identify as bi or especially “queer,” which she thought was tied to a set of political beliefs. Erika didn’t want to be reigned in by even the term bisexual, which she found “limiting”; the idea that
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her sexuality would tie into a political ideology was even worse. Instead, she voiced the opinion that when it came to sex, if people simply stopped labeling their identities and their sexual preferences, they would enjoy greater sexual freedom. Erika’s distaste for labels is stronger than most of the people I talked to over the course of my research, but her attitude is not unusual. In fact, Erika’s desire to be free of the constraints of commonly ascribed identities would come up time and again as I conducted interviews with other non-‐monogamists.
Rob and Theresa: Polyamory as orthodoxy
Rob and Theresa, two newly engaged 20-‐somethings I met over coffee, expressed views similar to Erika’s. Rob, a tall, soft-‐spoken man with shorn hair, worked in local media; Theresa, was between jobs when we talked. Theresa had short, brightly colored hair and an endless supply of witty one-‐liners. Both Rob and Theresa are white. The couple provisionally identified as polyamorous; the reason for such tentativeness was that Rob and Theresa felt very strongly about every person being able to define what polyamory was for himself or herself. They too portrayed every couple as unique, making it impossible to describe a relationship with a single word. This came across very clearly at the beginning of our interview:
B: How do you refer to your relationship? Do you call it non-‐monogamy, an open relationship, polyamorous…?
R: We call it polyamorous, just for ease…
T: Because it’s not exactly non-‐monogamous. Non-‐monogamy means sex without looking necessarily for any sort of connection. And open… open also implies kind of a lesser degree of intensity [in secondary relationships]. Polyamory is just the best fit because it implies that there’s a certain level of emotion there, but it’s still not ideal. B: What would be ideal?
R: I really think the dynamic in every single relationship is different in one way or another. Whether that implies the boundaries of what you’re free to do, um, without hurting the other person…the uniqueness is what’s great.
Like Erika, Rob and Theresa were wary of the limiting power of labels. They expressed
ambivalence toward even their preferred term, polyamory, saying that the “ideal” would be to not have “to call it anything.” This desire to escape from the constraints of language exhibits the individualism at the heart of the Western understanding of romantic love. The ideology of individualism is robust and protean, remaining central to the idea of romance while managing to modify its definition in keeping with broad social and economic changes (see Campbell, 2005; Coontz, 2005; Giddens,1992; Illouz, 1997a; Jackson, 1993; Regan, 1998 for examples and analysis). Whatever its variations over the centuries, from its inception in the courtly romances of the early middle ages to the present, romantic love has always been based on two
foundational themes, “the sovereignty of the individual” and the “privilege of sentiments over social and economic interests” (Illouz, 1997a, p.9) If the ideology of romantic love has long privileged a sense of individualism and rebellion, a desire to forge intimate relationship free of limitations of “mainstream” society makes sense. My interviewees’ desire to shed the
restrictions of language is an even more idealistic (not to mention a diffusely post-‐structuralist) example of romantic, anti-‐conformist attitudes. Rob and Theresa believed that a label shared with others could never authentically communicate an irreducibly unique relationship.
In addition to expressing distaste for labels, Rob and Theresa also felt ambivalent about identifying with any community that shared their lifestyle. They feared that any group they became involved with would be too doctrinaire and restrictive regarding what a consensually
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non-‐monogamous partnership should look like. Because of this fear, they disassociated themselves from organized communities of non-‐monogamists:
T: Plus, when you pick a label, you have to stay in the borderlines of that label. Even the poly community seems to, like, “Smack!” you if you don’t…
R: Oh yeah. [Laughs]
T: … follow the certain, the one true path. B: Can you give me an example?
T: Um… it’s just like….
B: Did anything specific happen?
R: No, it’s just that people have specific definitions of what something is, in this case, what poly is, if your relationship falls outside the boundaries of that then they’re like, “That’s not real poly.”
T: We don’t have another partner right now like… I might go out occasionally with a girl or make out with somebody but we don’t have that other relationship there, so does that make us not polyamorous? ... I don’t want to belong to a group that’s going to put me in a box.
Interested to hear more about the people with whom Rob and Theresa discussed polyamory, I asked who was trying to push a particular definition of polyamory on them. Rob and Theresa confessed that this was less an issue with friends or people in their community that with anonymous individuals they communicated with on poly-‐oriented websites:
B: It sounds like you’ve had experiences with friends who are poly and who hassle you [about] this…?
R: No.
B: You just disagree with each other?
R: No, more on the internet than actual friends.
Here, it becomes clear that the harassment Rob and Theresa believe they have experienced hasn’t come from any face-‐to-‐face interaction. Rob and Theresa’s agitation suggests that in addition to online arguments, they might be trying to figure out exactly what “being poly” means for them.
Consensual non-‐monogamy is already an often misunderstood minority practice. For people like Rob and Theresa, dealing with other non-‐monogamists who contested their self-‐ understanding was unsettling. Such interactions threatened to further destabilize a relatively expansive and fluid lifestyle identification. Their insistence that every intimate relationship is singular and unique helped them set themselves apart from killjoy rule-‐makers who would quash others’ free choice while also ironically positioning themselves as among the select few who really understood what CNM was all about. This response to their critics shored up and validated Rob and Theresa’s identities as non-‐monogamists. Yet, Rob and Theresa were not the only ones who opposed themselves to rhetorical others; it was a strategy used by several interviewees. The specter of “othered” non-‐monogamists enabled interviewees not only to downplay the inherent ambiguity of what constitutes as a “real” consensually non-‐monogamous