Ethical Non-Monogamy 101: Language and Inclusion

This post originally appeared on aceinthehole.co

As a twentysomething, within my lifetime I’ve seen ENM go from a relatively unknown alternative lifestyle more commonly associated with kink communities to a better-known relationship configuration style that is gaining more widespread approval. 

With visibility, though, does not necessarily come understanding. Popular depictions of non-monogamy in traditional media as well as social media are still susceptible to influences from hetero-patriarchy and its accompanying -isms like racism, colorism, sexism, and fatphobia...ism. As a Black polyamorous woman, I find myself playing double duty as an ambassador for non-monogamy to my personal communities and an ambassador for Black people in non-monogamous ones. This is a common experience, as discussed by educator and author Kevin A. Patterson, M.Ed in his book, Love's Not Color Blind: Race and Representation in Polyamorous and Other Alternative Communities.

What I’ve observed is that education for something as misunderstood as ENM needs to be, at the least, dual-natured. Clarifying language and definitions helps those who are not non-monogamous understand the differences in relationship styles. Within ENM communities, the onus is on those more aligned with dominant identities to foster an inclusive community which starts with introspection and self-education. Consider this post an opportunity to do just that, pull double duty to educate across communities because those of us who overlap within them have to do it whether we want to or not. 

Ethical non-monogamy is, to put it simply, the sum of its parts. In my daily life I don’t often use the “ethical” portion of the term because it’s implied, but for education purposes it’s important to understand what it means. Non-monogamy, in and of itself, refers to having multiple romantic and/or sexual partners at one time. This is why the distinction of “ethical” non-monogamy is so important for people who practice it because the definition of non-monogamy alone includes cheating, which is always unethical regardless of relationship orientation because it’s inherently non-consensual.

Many people choose non-monogamy for a variety of reasons, so if you ask 10 people what their non-monogamous relationship(s) look like, you’ll get 11 answers. Below, I’ll list some non-monogamous relationship styles and their common definitions. I cannot emphasize enough that this list is not exhaustive and may not be the way that a particular person defines how they do [insert relationship style here], but it’s a good starting point for those who aren’t familiar with ENM. This blog post by Franklin Veaux has an in-depth chart you may have seen floating around the internet that shows more relationship configurations as well as their overlap.

• Polygamy/Polyandry: Multiple marriage. Polygamy is one person with multiple wives, and polyandry is one person with multiple husbands. This is what most people think about when they think of ENM, as it’s what’s most commonly depicted in the media (like Sister Wives) and has some cultural acceptance because of the legality of multiple marriage in certain places.

• Polyamory: Multiple sexual and/or romantic relationships with consent of all involved. This can take multiple forms, but polyamory includes romantic relationships in addition to sexual ones and people are aware that they are involved with a polyamorous person. Other kinds of ENM also fall under the polyamory umbrella.

  • Polyamorous relationships can include:

    • Solo Polyamory: People who engage in polyamorous relationships but are still independent and don’t seek a primary partner (in hierarchical polyamory, a primary is a person’s most significant relationship). Solo Polyamory can be closely related to Relationship Anarchy but isn’t the same.

    • Triad: Three people who are dating each other, most commonly a couple who finds another partner.

    • Quad: Four people who are all dating each other, most commonly a couple who finds another couple.

    • Vee Shape: One person who is dating two people who aren’t dating each other, like a triad without one of the links.

    • Parallel Polyamory: People who do not engage with their partner’s partners (also called metamours). People who have multiple polyamorous relationships that do not intersect. 

• Open Relationships: People in an already-established relationship decide that one or both of them can engage in sexual and/or romantic relationships outside of their own. ORs can encompass other ENM types.

• Swinging: These are generally casual sexual relationships that both partners of a relationship engage in, but can be more formalized group dynamics while remaining strictly sexual.

• Monogamish: Members of a couple occasionally date other people.

• Relationship Anarchy: Prioritizes spontaneity and freedom between and with partners. This one is a common identifier but also hard to clearly define.

For people interested in ethical non-monogamy, all the definitions and categories are overwhelming. As an example, I am in an open relationship and practice parallel polyamory. I have a primary partner who I’m marrying this year, but we do not date the same people and the people we date do not engage with each other. We’ll also remain non-monogamous after we’re married. It’s so easy to get caught up in doing ENM the right way that you don’t do it in a satisfying way. This is why community is so important, and why the digital age has done wonders for helping people access information about non-monogamy. What happens, though, when these communities don’t feel welcome to you because you don’t see faces like yours in these spaces? This creates the feeling that Kevin Patterson describes in Love’s Not Color Blind, that non-monogamy is “white people shit”. What happens all too often is that well meaning white people and their attempts to diversify end up tokenizing people of color-- or anyone with a non-dominant identity. To say nothing of the interpersonal racism that happens in polyamorous spaces. 

Tokenization is defined in Love’s Not Color Blind as “the practice of making only a... symbolic effort to…[recruit] a small number of people from underrepresented groups in order to give the appearance of sexual or racial equality…”(p. 82, emphasis by author). In polyamorous communities, tokenism shows up as the same few people of color being heralded as the faces of non-white polyamory. In in-person gatherings, a handful of PoC at an event is considered a success because the expectation is that none would show up. 

Love’s Not Color Blind details multiple people’s personal experiences with tokenization in polyamorous spaces, and Patterson takes community organizers to task for their “passive exclusion” of marginalized people. Passive exclusion, Patterson explains, happens when community leaders and event organizers are not working to be actively inclusive. This puts unspoken stress on people of color who want to be part of these communities to always show up and bring other people to enhance visibility of non-white members of the community. Unpaid labor like this is often thankless and exhausting, and takes all of the fun out of something that, at its core, is supposed to be about forming new connections. 

Whether you’re a monogamous person who’s trying to understand alternative lifestyles or a white polyamorous person, we all have (un)learning to do. Looking to educators of all identities and stepping outside of your comfort zone is the first step towards a more loving world. While it’s challenging, internal growth only happens when we’re pushed beyond our edges of experience.

Black Women, Let's Rethink Our Loyalty

“The most disrespected person in America is the black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman.”

—Malcolm X, 1962

I came back from a month-long social media detox to this garbage. Part of why I decided to take time away from the internet was because I felt like I was becoming too consumed by toxicity and it was exacerbating my anxiety. I wasn’t wrong.

I originally thought about a long twitter thread in response to this but decided against it. I try not to be too reactionary when I’m frustrated and calling this dude a fool in a couple different replies to the original tweet seemed sufficient. I’m also hyper-aware that the majority of my Twitter (and blog) audience is white and this is one of those things that felt better suited for an intra-community conversation. But, things needed to be said and I’ve taken it upon myself to say them, so here we are.

Because it’s not really about him, it’s about his mentality and the reality that’s created for young Black women like me. Because let’s be honest, the City Girls and Baller Alert chicken heads he’s referring to are Black women.

Black women are one of the statistically least likely demographics to partner and marry interracially, second to Asian men last I checked. Black men, on the other hand, are one of the most likely to partner and marry outside of their race. There’s a lot of reasons for this, mostly relating to desirability. Black men, as a group, are considered more socially desired than Black women. There are also a lot of reasons for this, mostly relating to racist ideas about Black men’s sexual prowess. This desirability, in general, allows them a level of romantic and/or sexual access to non-Black people that Black women don’t generally experience. The stereotype about the successful Black man with a white wife isn’t an accident or a particularly negative one depending on who you ask. But I digress. (yes, you “not all Black men” keyboard warriors, I know this doesn’t apply to every Black man, but enough of y’all either agree or don’t care enough about Black women to say something about it yourselves.)

“But Sexology Bae,” you’re probably saying, “people can’t help who they fall in love with. Are you really shaming Black men who don’t partner with Black women for their preference?”

At the risk of psychoanalyzing a whole group of people to make my point, if your preference is rooted in considering a group of people as inferior, then yeah. You’re trash and so is your mindset. The tweet above is concerned with being taken advantage of by Black women specifically, not women in general. As if non-Black women are somehow less likely to be gold diggers. Or, is it that those women deserve “the bag” even if they come across it dishonestly and Black women don’t deserve it at all?

When raging about this tweet in a reply thread on Twitter, my friend Lex touched on the concept of racial meritocracy, which is at play here. If Black women are at the bottom of the barrel as far as our racial hierarchy is concerned, then any woman above us is more deserving of the benefits they’d get from a Black man. Black women are more likely to be better educated and make more money than Black men so why are we the ones regarded as gold diggers? There’s a long legacy of racist characterizations of Black women as money hungry, most obvious the “welfare queen” of the mid/late 20th century. According to this joker and the bums who think like him, we can’t come across love for a Black man naturally, we have to be getting something out of it.

Which brings me to the point about being “trapped”. Did you know there are ways to prevent pregnancy? And maybe you shouldn’t fuck someone in the first place if you think they’re going to get pregnant on purpose just to keep you around? I don’t really desire to have kids so I always have trouble relating to this perceived mindset of women who have kids just to spite men and/or keep them in relationships

I’m sure it happens, but I think what’s more likely is people being on two separate pages about the nature of their relationship when they’ve decided to add a child to the mix. Pregnancy and childbirth, plus the stress of raising a child seem like excessive reactions to spite someone.

Less excessive? Having a child with someone because you love them and think they love you too. But I could be wrong about this, I don’t even desire a child with my partner of nearly 7 years because kids are a lot of work so I can’t even begin to imagine having one because I’m ANGRY.

But Black Patriarchy has us fooled. Black women have been the backbone of our communities and movements because we understand that racial uplift requires unity. But misogynistic leaders have warped that messaging to convince us that we must protect and stand by Black men at any cost, even if it’s to our detriment. What if we let go of this loyalty to people who did not have our best interests at heart?

Even in the responses to the tweet above, most women were calling him (rightfully) trash and challenging other Black men to call him on his behavior. But there were still a few women who agreed with him, saying that we (Black women) got ourselves into this predicament by adopting an “Independent Woman” mentality, being argumentative or aggressive, and idolizing women like the City Girls, Cardi B, or Megan the Stallion, who pride themselves on getting over on men who don’t respect them as fully realized humans in the first place. I argue that flipping the script on someone who wasn’t going to respect you (regardless of what you did) so you get something out of the interaction isn’t inherently dishonest, but of course it’s seen that way when you’re historically expected to take that kind of treatment laying down.

I’ve seen the argument that Black women have let white feminists convince us that we don’t need Black men which is why our race hasn’t made any progress. Not only is this infantilizing, it’s gaslighting Black women into thinking that our experiences with gendered abuse at the hands of Black men aren’t valid.

What if I said that we’ve been receiving messaging like the above tweet for generations and of our own volition decide that we don’t need to tolerate abuse? I know that I’ve been called a bed wench for dating outside of my race by Black men who’ve also dated interracially.

But because loyalty to your race is only one sided, there’s no derogatory equivalent for Black men. Expecting accountability or critiquing how the treatment we’ve historically received at the hands of Black men colors our interactions today does not make Black women man-haters. It doesn’t mean we don’t care about our people. It means we care enough to want to undo the trauma that plagued our foremothers.

I can only hope that one day, we’re ready to have a conversation about how loyalty to and support for Blackness should not be contingent upon an infallible loyalty to men who will cast us aside for more worthy options.

Coat Hangers and Staircases

This post is inspired by the super stringent abortion bills making their way through the Alabama, Georgia, Ohio, Missouri, and Louisiana legislatures (that I’m aware of as of now), and the well-meaning but misinformed takes about the cis white male boogeyman who’s to blame for this attack on women’s* rights. [*I’m a firm believer that abortion restrictions impact people of all genders, not just women, as there are people who are able to get pregnant that are not women and to reduce reproductive rights issues to women’s issues erases them.] My politics related to abortion rights and reproduction more broadly operate under a reproductive justice lens, a framework developed in 1994 by Women of Color seeking to advance conversations about the “Women’s Rights Movement” beyond the interests of cis white middle-class white women.

I just really wanted an excuse to use this.

My frustration at this discourse led to me writing this twitter thread. My overall point was that the abortion debate has always been bolstered by women, normally cis white women, who support anti-choice measures and politicians because it ultimately serves their interest of protecting white supremacy and by extension their role within it. To lay the blame squarely on cis men absolves these women of their responsibility, and much like the 53% of white women who voted for Trump, their role in supporting white supremacist patriarchy cannot be ignored. The author of the Alabama legislation and governor of Alabama are both white women, which you wouldn’t know without some digging because the only images we’ve seen of politicians in Alabama since this first became news are the 25 white men who voted for this bill.

What is the recourse when identity politics fails? If these women have shown that they have no qualms supporting legislation that actively supports white supremacy and harms other women, why continue to frame the conversation exclusively around men? This conversation can go all the way back to slavery, when white women were frequently more abusive towards female enslaved people and their children than their husbands were. White women have always supported white supremacy because it serves their interests, and leaves them as the pinnacle of womanhood with a level of social protection no other group can even compare to — not even white men.

White women historically weaponize this wherever possible, because they continue to benefit. So excuse me for not getting all up in arms because these “backwards” southern white men are trying to take my rights away. If we want to dig a little deeper into the abortion conversation specifically, Reproductive Justice frameworks go beyond having the choice to have an abortion and actually be able to access one— abortions are INCREDIBLY expensive, even if you can “access” one on a literal level.

The double gut punch of this is the reactions of people who aren’t from the South. I don’t even know where to begin with this. Y’all know I’m from Louisiana, and being from the South runs in my blood. I’m immensely proud of where I come from, and to see it reduced to memes about southern people being uneducated or comment threads full of dozens of people unapologetically saying how much they enjoy ragging on the South because it refuses to do better hurts me to my core. What’s always forgotten in these conversations is Northern hypocrisy towards the South because they’re neglecting their own legacies of discrimination and (lasting) segregation. You know where the most segregated cities in the country are located? Overwhelmingly, not the South.

Also missing from these conversations is a lack of historical context for northern elitism and racism that impacts how people feel towards the South. The stereotypical Southerner is not an uneducated white redneck, it’s most likely a Black person, as Black people make up the overwhelming majority of the population in the South. Feeling that these rednecks will be punished for their own stupidity in voting for conservative politicians is not only flawed, it’s dangerous because it neglects the reality that already marginalized populations will now face additional barriers to care.

Calling for industries and businesses to boycott these states to prove a point does nothing but harm the most vulnerable populations in these states. If economies start tanking because businesses leave, poor, multiply marginalized people will bear the biggest burdens of these impacts. But of course, it’s a lot easier to blame the poor white Southern archetype who deserves this for voting for conservative politicians, than to consider the poor rural Black and brown folks who will feel this the most.

And that’s without touching the cissexism of the discourse! People way smarter than me have broken this down in depth like here, but the gist of this is that people who are not cisgender women are capable of becoming pregnant and by extension capable of having abortions. Now, if the previous sentence doesn’t seem legit to you because “all people with uteruses are women”, then boy do I have some news for you. I’d take this as an opportunity to learn more about identity. Erasing trans and/or non-binary people from the conversation about abortion access and rights only makes it that much harder for them to access this kind of care.

So yes, this news is incredibly frustrating and heartbreaking to have to deal with. For those of us who support access, it’s an uphill battle. But a good place to start is supporting the work of organizations that are on the ground every day doing this work.

These abortion laws are all a ploy (albeit a very expensive and time consuming one) to get Roe v. Wade back in front of the Supreme Court and hopefully strike it down. While this may be obvious to some of us, it’s not part of the mainstream conversations about these laws because the internet is too busy pointing fingers and assigning blame without looking at next steps and ways to support the people who will be impacted by these restrictions. Below, I’ve listed some resources as a starting point for donating or providing other kinds of support during this fight. The list isn’t exhaustive, but thinking about some tangible ways to help keeps me from spiraling into a ball of anxiety so I figured it would be useful to others. Leave a comment or tweet me with other suggestions!

Help folks who can’t afford abortions: National Network of Abortion Funds

Donate to Black-led, Reproductive Justice organizations in the South:

Women with a Vision

SisterSong

SisterLove

If you have the ability, volunteer to be a local clinic escort!