Another suggested radical monogamy was the progressive version of “the old monogamy of our parents and grandparents [that] doesn’t really work.”
To be honest, the article never makes it quite clear what separates “radical” monogamy from, well, the regular old kind, except that some of its adherents tried out polyamory first and didn’t prefer it.
Every generation believes itself to be breaking new ground. But millennials and Gen Z in particular seem wedded (old monogamy alert!) to the idea that the “normal” way of doing things is almost always oppressive and must be either reclaimed or disavowed. Especially in the sexual realm, anything that could be viewed as traditional or average is passé.
As the lecturer and essayist Phil Christman wrote in a Substack post, his students “have a bias, so strong that I wonder if it’s hard-wired, to believe that complexity itself is new. In the past, people were drones who acted on the tenets of Religion, or Society, or The Way Things Were Then, whereas now people think about what they do.”
That kind of bias is extraordinarily common — the inability to recognize that the past was a real place, where real people made choices just as new generations do: weighing their options and coming to conclusions about what worked best for them and occasionally surfacing ideas that then stood the test of time.
So for generations coming of age today, the optimal identity is a novel one. Through this lens, unprotected sex becomes the appropriately mysterious (if vaguely nauseating) “fluid bonding.” If you need an emotional bond to want sex with someone, it sounds more inscrutable, and thus tolerable, if you call yourself “demisexual.” (One of former New York governor Andrew M. Cuomo’s daughters came out as demisexual last summer.) And monogamy, the most old-fashioned arrangement of all, must be smuggled into acceptability via the label “radical.”
There’s a tendency, in hyperprogressive circles especially, to think that progress must be synonymous with wholesale change. This stems from a healthy understanding of the past’s failures when it comes to certain norms, and of the need for their correction.
It’s true, for instance, that many forms of monogamy have been exclusionary, were based on outdated gender conventions and could, as one of Vice’s radical monogamists put it, breed “boredom, disloyalty and stagnation.” In the past, departing from the traditional practice of marriage often led to damaging and unwarranted stigma — Hester Prynne’s scarlet “A.”
But this inclination to view only the present as enlightened can veer into overcorrection, creating new forms of silencing and new stigmas that evoke their own kind of shame. Voguish new relationship styles become prescriptive in their own right. An overemphasis on testing out the new can make it hard for people to recognize which among the old way of doing things — whether monogamous or non- — might serve them well, or to declare what they actually want (an emotional bond, say, or a committed relationship). Thus a generation loses sight of, and loses out on, goods they might have had all along.
Eventually, though, individuals’ true needs will out. This can then lead to an identity crisis, attempts to square the circle and, potentially, a reversion to the norm — with, one hopes, a few healthy edits.
The Vice article suggests that that’s where we’ve arrived here with monogamy: working it out anew, while trying to check its failures.
“I’ve always wanted a gigantic love,” one interviewee says. “I wanted to be one person’s joy and delight.” Then, “I grew up and I was told that was ridiculous, unrealistic and unhealthy. … But now I’ve come around to believing that all those other people’s messages were wrong. If approached with intentionality, effort and a willingness to grow, it is possible to have a love that’s big and magical.”
It’s easy to make fun of the radical monogamists, but I wish them good luck. Like everyone else, they’re just trying to find their way to something true.
"Opinion" - Google News
March 24, 2022 at 07:02PM
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Opinion | How radical is 'radical monogamy,' really? - The Washington Post
"Opinion" - Google News
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