Why are we normalizing polyamory?

Hello all,

A few columns for you today.

“MrBeast normalizes transgenderism.” The world’s most popular YouTube star—one many of your children likely watch—is normalizing transgenderism, and it very much matters.

“Andrew Tate Claims ‘They’ Are Lying About WWII.” This is also a commentary on Internet culture—online manosphere influencer Andrew Tate is now telling his followers that we should question the narrative that the Nazis were “the bad guys.”

“Holocaust Remembrance Day Amidst Surging Antisemitism.” Increasingly, young people across the West have not even heard of the Holocaust—and a disturbing percentage believes the Jews themselves are at fault. I end with a letter written by a Jewish woman, clutching her young son, minutes before entering the gas chambers.

As always, I’ve got plenty of other short, regular culture updates on The Bridgehead, and you can get a copy of Prairie Lion: The Life and Times of Ted Byfield here and here, and my other books here.

The Normalization of Polyamory

This essay was first published at The European Conservative.

I have been covering the push for the normalization of polyamory for several years now, as human interest stories on formalized cheating came into vogue. In California during 2017, a ‘throuple’ of men first successfully petitioned a judge to put all three of them on the birth certificate of a little girl named Piper before authoring a book titled Three Dads and a Baby. Several U.S. cities, including Somerville and Cambridge, Massachusetts, have approved family benefits for polyamorous clusters over the past few years. These stories seemed to fizzle swiftly.

Over the past several months, however, the media campaign to normalize polyamory has ramped up in earnest on both sides of the Atlantic. In a recent column titled “Still searching for The One when polyamory is more fun?” The Guardian reported that “Polyamorous relationships are having a moment” and that while “only” 10% of Brits report being willing to consider a polyamorous relationship, anybody who has used a dating app will tell you that “folks searching for not The One but The Several seem to be everywhere.”

Last month, the Daily Mail published a similar piece titled “We have been polyamorous for 20 years—here’s how we make things work.” It was a profile of Texas couple Andrea and Brandon Peters, who described happily cheating on each other for two decades and the various rules (most of which were broken) for doing so. Andrea even dropped this gem: “I don’t experience jealousy often. When I do, I try to figure out what is maybe causing it for me.” The cause could be anything, apparently, except for the fact that her husband is sleeping with someone else.

The Brussels Times, too, is interested in polyamory, asking: “Polyamory: The more, the merrier?” Their conclusion is unsurprising: “This isn’t simply a greater acceptance of divorce as a frequent (if unfortunate) outcome of marriage, but engaging with numerous partners is now conscionable where not long ago it would be taboo … secretive affairs remain deplorable, yet Belgians are increasingly open to polyamory.” The report adds that “with the push for gender equality leading to questions about traditional gender roles, the notion that monogamous partnerships should be the cornerstone of civic living has been superseded.”

Many elite American publications have put polyamory front and centre recently, as well. The New York Times published a review of Molly Roden Winter’s “open marriage” memoir titled “How a Polyamorous Mom Had ‘a Big Sexual Adventure’ and Found Herself” (the short version: she found herself in bed with other people). The review is a defence of Winter’s decision to put her personal sexual desires over the needs of her family, especially her children. The New Yorker published an essay titled “How Did Polyamory Become So Popular?” on Christmas Day. Time Magazine published an essay titled “Polyamory isn’t just for liberals,” which begins this way:

Polyamory seems to have burst upon the American mainstream over the past two decades. The deluge of podcasts, TV shows, books, and magazine articles detailing polycules, metamores, throuples, threesomes, and moresomes testifies to the growing number of Americans willing to jettison monogamy.

The most forthright contribution to normalizing polyamory comes from New York Magazine, which dedicated its entire last issue to instructing its readers on how to go about things. Titled “Polyamory: A practical guide for the curious couple,” and featuring a cover photo of four cats clutching each other, the issue includes subjects such as “How do I broach this with my partner?”; “Does my wife want to hear about my night?”; “Should we sleep with them on the first date?”; “Am I being nice enough to my boyfriend’s girlfriend?”; and, “Should we tell our kids?” This is not Cosmo—this is New York Magazine, and their opening paragraph is a real barnburner:

“If you live in New York, it’s very possible you’ve recently found yourself chatting with a co-worker, or listening to the table next to you at a restaurant, and heard some variation of ‘They just opened up, and they’re so much happier.’ Or ‘My partner’s partner truly sucks.’ Ethical non-monogamy isn’t new (The Ethical Slut, the polyamorous bible, came out in 1997), and it isn’t exactly mainstream, but it isn’t so fringe either (or reserved for those who live in the Bay Area). A curious person might be tempted to download Feeld or let their partner know over salmon they’re ready to let in a third. But though people don’t talk about it in hushed tones anymore—Riverdale just ended with Archie, Betty, Jughead, and Veronica in a quad, after all—it isn’t such a simple thing to do well.”

The entire issue is an exercise in disguising the desire of those who wish to sleep with whoever catches their fancy with a thin, patchy, academic veneer. To normalize something, it must first be granted respectability. Thus, New York Magazine includes an entire glossary of technical terminology to dignify infidelity, including recently-invented terms such as “metamour,” which is “your partner’s other partners whom you are not also dating”; “polysaturated,” which is “when you’ve reached maximum capacity on partners and/or time”; and, “compersion,” defined as “the pleasure you derive from your partner enjoying romantic or sexual happiness or success with a person who isn’t you”—which, incidentally, does not exist.

In addition to attempting respectability, this glossary of formal terms is also intended to give people who wish to cheat on their partners the language they need to justify it. Conversely, this language also serves to make those who do not want to participate in complex sexual webs seem unprogressive and closeminded. Everyone sympathizes with people who don’t want their partners to cheat on them—but what if we didn’t call it cheating? What if the wife could be badgered into approving “ethical non-monogamy”? “Everyone is doing it these days, dear—just look at New York Magazine, or The New York Times, or the New Yorker! Don’t be such a prude.” ‘Consent,’ as the last few years have shown us, is a tricky thing.

Why is there a push for normalization and, increasingly, formal legal standing for these unorthodox sexual arrangements? It isn’t illegal to be promiscuous. There is nothing stopping husbands and wives from cheating on one another by mutual agreement. So why the creation of a new academic vocabulary? Why are there think pieces and human-interest stories and how-to manuals in formerly prestigious publications? Because, despite all our best efforts, human beings have consciences, and we crave legitimacy for our sins. We wish to dispense with our guilt by attaining formal social standing and legal recognition.

That is why, after laws restricting sodomy (and, indeed, virtually any sex acts) were struck down, gay rights activists began the push for redefining marriage. It wasn’t enough to have relationships; it wasn’t even enough to simply have legally recognized relationships or civil partnerships. The word “marriage” was heavy with moral meaning, and the campaign for same-sex “marriage” was about a social and legal endorsement of a specific sexual arrangement, followed swiftly by the ostracization and prosecution of those who dared to question it. When one gay rights activist was asked what the plans were after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex “marriage” in 2015, his answer was blunt: “Punish the wicked.”

Moral relativism was never a viable social system—even for the sexual revolutionaries who initially embraced it. We are human beings, and we must have morality. But because we are immoral, we must now have a new morality. That is why the polyamorists cannot be satisfied with quietly going about the business of bed-hopping and leaving the rest of us alone. Somewhere, deep down, they know that they are betraying those they swore to love and sentencing their children to familial chaos. That voice, they hope, will be silenced when society affirms them and tells them that they, too, are normal—a normality that is synonymous with morality.