Vees, triads, quads and the whole sick freak show: Good Weekend magazine on polyamory

There was a sickening article by Ms Louise France in The Sydney Morning Herod’s Good Weekend magazine on Saturday, reporting (largely uncritically) on the debauchery of Ms Jenny Block, an American woman with a husband and a live-in lesbian lover. What was most repugnant about the whole sordid story was the fact that Ms Block’s daughter lives in this moral cesspool. When asked about the effect that this living arrangement (and the publicity resulting from Ms Block’s book on it) would have on her daughter, Ms Block replied that

When she asks, I will tell her that people love in different ways and that Mommy and Daddy don’t think that sexual ownership is part of a marriage. People say she’ll hate me when she’s 12 but she’ll probably hate me by then anyway.

Vomit. How can this woman be so glib about the welfare of her own daughter? What I found heart-breaking though was when

the other day [the daughter] asked [Ms Block], ‘Do you love [the lesbian lover] as much as you love Daddy?’ And I replied, ‘Do you know? I do!’

Vomit, vomit, vomit.

The reporter asked Ms Block why, given her same-sex attractions, she ever married? Ms Block answered

“Well, in the first place I didn’t know this was going to happen.

But as Ms Block admitted earlier in the piece “[i]n her early 20s she’d enjoyed flings with women”, so it shouldn’t have surprised her that she would return ad vomitum during her marriage. Ms Block then says that

Second, I really like being with someone who says he will stick around, regardless of how kooky I am. It’s easier to navigate the world as a couple. I expect to grow old with him.”

So here we have marriage conceived of as accessorisation. No notion here of marriage being a total and irrevocable gift of oneself or anything. In one of her few critical insights the reporter wonders

if [Ms Block] is a lesbian who realised after she married and had a child that she prefers sex with women but is not willing to give up the conveniences of a heterosexual lifestyle.

Ms Block might identify as a ‘bisexual’ but she displays one of the widely-observable characteristics of ‘gays’ and ‘lesbians’: narcissism. It’s all about her, no matter what damage it might do to her illicit lovers or even her own daughter. (The article's title evoked this self-absorption quite nicely, though probably unintentionally: "He, she + ME", with "ME" in huge letters.) What repulsive individuals are Ms Block and those of her ilk. In a just society the only ‘swinging’ these degenerates would be doing would be from the gallows.

The article was interesting also for its information on the polyamorist lexicon:

In poly-speak this means she’s in a “vee” relationship (in which one person has two lovers who aren’t involved with each other) as opposed to a “triad” or a “quad” …

Now presumably ‘triads’ and what-not involve mutual relationships all round—spouse 1 with spouse 2 and 3, spouse 2 with spouse 1 and 3, and spouse 3 with spouse 1 and 2, and so on ad nauseam. Now recall my thesis that, once society has abandoned the perfect-complements model of marriage and parenthood in favour of the perfect-substitutes one (in which ‘two mums’ or ‘two dads’ are as good as one mum and one dad), all else equal, society cannot deny the possibility that the more ‘co-parents’ the better, and that fixing the number of spouses at two is arbitrary, ‘heteronormative’ (as they say) and discriminatory. Now the ‘gay marriage’ lobby might object that although ‘two mums’ or ‘two dads’ are as good as one mum and one dad, two is still the optimal number because parenthood must be founded on the love (really a parody of love in the case of gays and lesbians) between two individuals. But the Good Weekend article shows that there can be love (so they would say, though I reject it totally and it sickens me even to think of it) all round among more than two ‘partners’. How, then, can the Sodomites’ League and the liberals put limits on how ‘big’ people’s ‘love’ can be? How can they fix the number of co-parents at two? After all, the fundamental tenet of liberalism is that anything be permitted, save that which disturbs the public peace, and they’ve never shown any great concern for the present and future welfare of the children consigned to the kind of moral squalour in which the Sodomites’ League and the Bill Hensons of this world revel. So the inevitable logical consequence of ‘parent 1/parent 2’ birth certificates (as are now, appallingly, available in New South Wales) is simply birth certificates with a slot for ‘co-parents’ and one can list as many as one pleases! Sounds ridiculous? Sounds insane? Sounds laugh-out-loud absurd? You bet. But don’t forget that a mere twenty years ago, or even less, the very thought of so-called gay marriage would have been exclusively the stuff of one-liners. In the case of polyamory though it might be a good deal less than twenty years away:

http://wdtprs.com/blog/2009/01/canada-ramifications-of-the-crown-losing-a-polygamy-case/#comments

Over to you now, Mr. Obama. 'Hope' doesn't come much more 'audacious' than this.

Reginaldvs Cantvar
Feast of St. Agnes, Virgin, Martyr, A.D. 2009