Angelus Morningstar explains how queer polyamory challenges ingrained behaviors of masculine dominance within same-sex relationships.
Last Sunday, Sandy Peace wrote an article detailing how polyamory challenges and helps to break down male privilege, by virtue of requiring a more conscientious approach to negotiating non-monogamy. For many queer men, there are lessons to learn from this as queer men usually benefit from male privilege, and typically use that privilege in acquiring and maintaining (or controlling) their partners. Also, the experiences of queer men are useful for straight men who seek to reconstruct their own masculinity.*
Perhaps the largest misconception about queer polyamory is that it is easy. It is not unusual to hear envious commentary from straight men about how easy it is for queer men to pick up and find sexual encounters. The presumption runs that as long as queer men can easily access sexual partners, it must be then mirrored by a default ability to access multiple romantic partners. However, here is where relationships between men (whether gay, bi, or pan) exist in an exquisite state of irony where we have inherited a legacy of sexual liberation, yet cleave to traditional forms of masculinity in gender roles and romance.
♦◊♦
Pretty much any polyamorous guy who sees other guys inevitably finds themselves explaining polyamory on multiple occasions, just like our straight counterparts. Sexual promiscuity needs no explanation, and is often assumed, but we are equally beset by the same litany of questions that most poly straight guys endure: ‘how does it work?’, ‘don’t you get jealous?’, ‘does that mean we can have a threesome?’, ‘are you top or bottom?’ (questions of dominance and submission exist within the straight community too, but they’re often assumed). To which the answers are typically: ‘frequently and with practice’, ‘sometimes, maybe, it’s so contextual’, ‘I don’t know, you’d have to ask him too’, and ‘yes’. There are also a number of questions around safer sex, but these are complex enough to warrant their own article.
By embracing our sexual deviance we challenged, and eventually helped to break down, the idea that same-sex attraction was a mental illness.
|
This sexual libertine part is the deliberate embrace of hedonism in reaction to overarching repression, suppression, and erasure of sexuality in our historic struggle for recognition. By embracing our sexual deviance we challenged, and eventually helped to break down, the idea that same-sex attraction was a mental illness. This has left a profound blueprint beneath our culture such that sexual taboos are greatly diminished (i.e. promiscuity, sex in public, and sex with friends). So intrinsic is it, that as gay culture goes mainstream, men new to the gay scene tend to either embrace or resist this very ideal. At its most beautiful, it is provocative and transgressive, but at its worst, it becomes fixated on the sexual capital of its membership.
However, culturally we tend to subscribe (mostly) to traditional relationship models; some of this debate is playing out internally and externally over marriage equality. The truth is that queer men tend to default to relationship models borrowed from heterosexual couples: for good or for ill. It is an amazing form of cognitive dissonance where our shared norms and expectations of sex do not always align or reconcile with our notions of romance. Basically, sexually open relationships are normal but open intimacy is still challenging and dangerous. In this, gay, bi, and pan men share much with heterosexual men.
♦◊♦
By living a life that implicitly challenges traditional notions of masculinity (i.e. having sex with other men), we are constantly challenging and are challenged by masculinity: there is a heightened experience of fragility in maintaining and protecting that masculinity. Despite our same-sex attraction, we have learned all the same lessons around how to express our feelings and how to communicate our needs, as well as a sense of entitlement towards having access to sex. For some, the challenge enables us to embrace and redefine our own experience of masculinity, for others (particularly for those who have been socialised strongly within patriarchal lifestyles) the experience of being invalidated as a man is still a deeply shameful experience. It is along these fault lines that the commonalities exist, and where the foundations of our shared male privilege have been founded, both in the way we often try to establish and protect our relationships.
Moreover, our traditional notions of masculinity have come to reinforce separation between intimacy and sexual desire. We see this reinforced with messages of ‘boys don’t cry’ and others. As Pearce noted, many men struggle within polyamory due to deficiencies in how we have been socialised to communicate and embrace intimacy, and uncertainty around intimacy. Instead we see patterns of behaviour that attempt to dominate and control others marked for the sharing of intimate experiences, and this has frequently translated to historic and sexist practices of ‘slut shaming’ and other behaviours which mimic policing within heterosexual relationships designed to socialise women into ideal ‘obedient’ and submissive partners. Not only are these patterns of behaviour self-perpetuating in the way they internalise shame over intimacy, but they are tactics that are then employed by men in attempting the control the intimacy they share with other men in their life. It begs the question of why men who are given an opportunity to transgress gender roles can still default to such an inherently sexist system of control.
♦◊♦
Male privilege manifests in the exhibition and use of power within same-sex relationships: typically this is predicated on hierarchies of sexual capital keyed to a youth-focused and beauty-obsessed culture. All is reinforced by little hierarchies formulated on age, ethnicity, virility, body shape, fitness of body, height, role preference, HIV status, and sexual orientation: all of it is very frequently rooted in validating us as ‘real men’ or for those seeking ‘masc only’ (whatever that means). Look past the façade of easy promiscuity into the lives of those typically excluded because of the veneration of a masculine identity. I’d recommend looking at the Grindr Guide for an overview.**
Male privilege manifests in the exhibition and use of power within same-sex relationships: typically this is predicated on hierarchies of sexual capital keyed to a youth-focused and beauty-obsessed culture.
|
Notably, many of the issues that Peace raises are reinforced in these dynamics, and sometimes exacerbated. Often in such scenarios asymmetry emerges in the open relationship, where one partner is more keen for openness than the other. Said partners may assert dominance in a manner characteristic of male privilege to achieve what they want. We can also fall victim to policing our relationships and perceived infidelities in the same way as straight men do; such as lashing out when we feel emotionally vulnerable or volatile, or attempting to impose a kind of authority over the relationship, and even resorting to things like slut shaming and displays of verbal and physical hostility. When domestic violence within gay relationships occurs, it often receives less support and response by external help because of inbuilt assumptions into its legitimacy.
In other circumstances, the pair may form a faulty or sketchy compromise around the openness, formulated on rules, rather than an open discussion of needs and wants. Since rules are easier to negotiate and remain emotionally distant, a rigid set of rules often fails to embrace the complexity of human wants and needs. While they can create good baseline levels for emotional security, they are crude and have difficulty responding to the myriad of eventualities. Worse, when the rules are transgressed, the lack of communication means the experience of insecurity can produce feedback because both men fall back to non-communicative methods of conflict resolution, and the relationship becomes an echo chamber of anxiety.
Some of this male privilege is most clearly seen in Dan Savage’s (of whom I am not a fan) vision of ‘monogamish’. The idea being that it is okay to embrace the appearances of monogamy concerning the stability of relationships and romantic entanglements, but to accept that extra-marital affairs do happen for the sake of a healthy relationship. While I generally applaud the idea of anything that challenges sexual inhibitions, this format tends to foster the abovementioned cognitive dissonance. It creates a message that says that infidelity is okay as long as you don’t talk about it, and worse it subtly reinforces the status of these affairs as forms of infidelity, both emotionally and conceptually.
The good news is that as much as our community co-opts traditional forms of masculinity, we are equally subverting it. The bear community (a gay subculture of guys that embrace being burly, heavyset, and hairy) has created spaces that challenge assumptions of the fitness and sexual attractiveness of certain body types; genderqueer directly challenges the gender binary and the necessity to fit discreetly into masculine or feminine; and the small but growing poly community challenges ingrained behaviours of masculine dominance within our relationships.
—
*In writing this, I acknowledge the limitations of my perspective as a gay white cis-male. I also would like to acknowledge that my perspectives focus on Western subcultural norms of gay men, and may not easily translate to the experiences of men who have sex with men outside of the west.
**The good news is that as much as there is now a mainstream gay communities, there are also fringe communities that are springing up, around, and cohabitating in those spaces, allowing a plurality of the weird and wonderful.
Photo–Flickr/PS Photography
I was with you (mostly) until you got to “particular for those who have cultural backgrounds that emphasise machismo.” Why infect a proposed intellectual engagement with such racially charged ignorance? What does that statement mean, exactly, if not that some cultures’ (read: non-white) expressions and expectations of masculinity deem them backwards and inferior to white cultures? How, if not by the grace of racism, do you get to imply such a racially charged “fact” about non-white cultures when predominating expressions and expectations of hyper-masculinity in Western societies (and many non-Western as well) come from white imaginations and are overwhelmingly represented… Read more »
I was not excluding white culture from machismo, nor was I attempting to characterise any particular culture as such.
I have nevertheless requested an edit of that line, because I agree that it casts an aspersion that was not my intention.
If you’re going to talk smack about the monogamish, you might first want to meet them: Savage Love, Meet the Monogamish, January 4, 2012, http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/SavageLove?oid=11412386
If two people hook up for sex and neither of them is seeking the ‘intimacy’ you seem to be arguing is necessary, is one of them dominating the other? If one of them is partnered and the other doesn’t care whether s/he’s hooking up with a single or partnered person, how does dominance apply? If Couple A and B have a long-standing intimate relationship by your definition, including discussions about acceptable hooking up outside the relationship, which both have negotiated and agreed to, and have tested out in real life as well as in theory, and have found that they… Read more »
Hi Pete,
I don’t believe I argued that intimacy is necessary for all encounters. There is a distinction between a casual encounter and establishing relationships. I think you’ll find I acknowledged that people do strike arrangements and compromises like that. I also noted that tactics of dominance don’t exist in every single instance of relationships. I was pointing out that when they are dysfunctional, there is a tendency for guys in relationships with other guys to default to mechanisms of control that are typical of the way the man in a heterosexual relationship has historically tried to dominate women.
If two people hook up for sex and neither of them is looking for ‘intimacy’ by your definition, is one of them dominating the other? If one of them is partnered and the other doesn’t care whether he’s hooking up with a partnered person or not, is one of them dominating the other? If Couple A and B have a long-standing intimate relationship by your definition, and so do Couple C and D, and if both relationships include fully-negotiated, emotionally honest discussions about “hooking up outside the relationship is okay, and we both really mean it, and I love you”… Read more »
I’m neither a devoted fan nor a rabid hater of Dan Savage, and I think you misrepresent his term “Monogamish”. You say it means it is okay to embrace the appearances of monogamy concerning the stability of relationships and romantic entanglements, but to accept that extra-marital affairs do happen (…) It creates a message that says that infidelity is okay as long as you don’t talk about it I’ve read and heard enough of Dan Savage to think you’ve got this wrong. I think “monogamish” means, essentially, mostly monogamous: monogamy is the default behavioural configuration and understanding of the relationship,… Read more »
Hi Daniel, The reason why I don’t consider this a straw man argument is because the emphasis (regardless of the don’t ask, don’t tell policy or no) is to emphasise the stability and protection of intimacy while embracing a broader culture of sexual promiscuity. It’s a way of sublimating desire and finding sexual outlets, yes, but fails to attack the main issues I’m concerned about, being how it stratifies and produces hierarchies of relationships. It’s as though it’s borrowing the “primary-secondary” model from polyamory without having the discussions of intimacy before hand. Certainly, monogamish relaxes some of the constraints of… Read more »
monogamish (…) doesn’t really provide space to talk about the challenges and explorations of intimacy That’s really presumptuous of you. There’s nothing about a monogamish relationship that precludes or discourages meaningful discussion and related negotiations about the challenges and explorations of intimacy. You’re (still) defining monogamish in ways that don’t seem to align with Savage’s own descriptions, and while you get to define terms as they apply to your relationships, he’s more credible than you on the subject as it applies in general. Monogamish is an idea, a concept; not a “ready-made model”. It’s looking more and more to me… Read more »
this present topic is complicated enough without dragging in (yes) straw men and red herrings.
—
I once went to this after hours club where there was a lot of straw man/red herring play and it was HAWT.
As you will.
Angelus, thank you for this important, thought provoking piece!!
Thanks immensely.