Blogcomment record: Pam Spaulding at Pandagon

Comments I made on Pam Spaulding's post about the Amanda-Seal Press controversy.

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As I said last week, I'm back at Pandagon to hear what Pam has to say. Maybe I'm the only one, but I found this:

I missed the controversy over Amanda’s book. I’ve been so bogged down here in NC primary fever over at my pad (prez and state races), the Day of Silence, a family member in the hospital and — can you believe this — the day job, that people obviously thought I was simply ignoring this pot boiling over on the homebase stove

a hilarious example of just the kind of communication problem Pam is talking about. I was one of the people who was trying to be tactful and not bug Pam to wade into the mess until she was ready ... completely overlooking the possibility that *she'd never noticed* because of, like, having a life.

I have only a moderate amount of patience for people who talk about needing "safe spaces" on the Internet. As far as I'm concerned, *everyone* needs places where name-calling, ad hominem attacks, privacy violations, etc., won't occur -- that's not IMHO a "safe space", that's a "common decency space" and yes, everyone needs to work together to maintain them. And *glares around at some of the young 'uns* that means YOU.

In my experience (warning: I'm getting my crone on), when people say they need a "safe space" they too often mean "where no-one will tell me when I'm wrong and I can vent without learning anything." I will have no truck with that -- this is the Internet, and you *never* get to stop learning. And everyone gets to be wrong a *lot*: this is "trial and error", not "trial and perfect results every time".

So, to get more specific (because I *hate* vagueness), I think Seal Press's art department is unprofessional. After the uproar over cover #1, they had *no excuse* not to look at the pictures with a careful eye, and they didn't. It's really hard for me to say that I'd be interested in buying their books in the future, because it's pretty clear that they're not professional about their work, so why should I want to help them?

But also, it's got to be possible to say that a WOC messed up without pressing everyone's "racism alert" button. And here I'm going to try an experiment.

Tahlequah, if I say: "brownfemipower did a Good Bye Cruel World post and took down her site" -- does that strike you as demeaning, not just disapproving? What if I call it a Swan Song? In the fannish areas of the 'tubes I normally frequent, it *would* be called a Flounce, but that's partly for alliteration to go in "Fandom Flounce" and partly because of experience. In fandom's experience, people who say they're mad as hell and can't take it anymore *do* take their toys and go home ... and then some of them come back in a couple months under a different name. Or show up in another fandom under a new name, and do the same thing all over again. Serial flouncing seems to be part of some personalities.

BFP may have just been overwhelmed -- I've seen this happen before, the first time someone finds hirself in a true Internet blogstorm and just starts deleting wildly because ze can't cope. But from my cranky crone POV, she gets marked down as "possible flouncer", because that's what I call that kind of behavior. I do not see how it's a racial issue: it's a *people issue*, one of the many many Stupid Human Tricks available to us all.

And speaking of White Gals Who’ve Messed Up Occasionally, I have to agree that:

Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, Amanda’s gotta pop off and say stupid things she later regrets when she feels like she’s being attacked.

If we’re analyzing Amanda’s character and needs, she needs to learn more about where her inner Zen lives — no-one wants to see her become the feminist Bill O’Reilly.

But I also profess myself boggled at mnemosyne saying:

Amanda is one of the most divisive figures on the internet. My husband, who is very feminist and aware, will not read her because he gets too angry too quickly and finds it hard to think logically about what she’s saying.

?? *Really?!?* I mean, “divisive figures on the Internet” is a *large* category. What the heck button does Amanda push that makes him that angry?

Personally, I read Amanda’s posts because they’re often funny, kind of like the progressive-political version of Go Fug Yourself but with a better comments section. (exceptions apply.)

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Foucault (hey, at least it’s not Derrida!):

My waiting for Pam to say something (and I wouldn’t have mentioned it on that Feministe thread if someone else hadn’t said something first) was because I didn’t know what to do, and a number of friends of mine (white and otherwise) were getting more & more upset. Pam blogs on race issues, I thought, Pam will lead me!

My own personal coloration is best described as “whiter shade of pale”, so I was trying to defer (to a certain extent) to the feelings of people who might have more personal feelings.

Re: hoping Amanda doesn’t get caught up in her own outrage, like Bill O’Reilly, I was thinking of a recent discussion at Making Light, trying to separate parody from trolling where SF writer Jo Walton said:

Picture the sad ruin of a once-great troll tearing at the very planks of the bridge he’s sitting under because he can no longer tell them from the goats he used to try to lure, and once they are gone, tearing angrily at his own hair, not noticing as he devours chunks of his own brain.

Breaking up with Pandagon

This is a brief statement, copied from a comment I left at Holly's post at feministe, "I Guess It's a Jungle in Here Too, Huh?.

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I've been wondering about where Pam Spalding is, too.

I'm a regular commenter at Pandagon who doesn't have a feminist blog worthy of the name -- pretty much all I post on my blog are copies of comments I make on other people's blogs, to keep track of the conversations I'm in.

Last week I didn't have time to read all the 200+ comment threads where this was being discussed, so I decided to wimp out and follow Pam's lead, because I think of her as my link into the POC blogosphere. I thought, "as long as Pam's happy, I'll assume there's nothing I need to investigate in greater depth." But I've felt uncomfortable enough to make a point of commenting on other Pandagonian's posts more than Amanda's.

I know, I know, OK?

Anyway, Holly's post here has sealed the deal for me. Unless & until Pam -- for whom I still have enormous respect until proven otherwise -- gives me a persuasive reason to come back, I won't be commenting at Pandagon any more.

And for me this is a wrench that it isn't for most of you. You read the posts; I'm part of the community of commenters. This decision cuts me off from that community, and though some of the regulars are people I run into around the blogosphere, there are a number I can't count on encountering again. And *that's* why I'm crying.

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Members of the Pandagon community, let me know where you're hanging, OK? I know I'll see Jes, Alara & Ginmar around, but for a lot of you I don't know where else you post or comment.

Every time I start trying to add to this post I start crying again, and I have to put in a day's work regardless, so I'm stopping here for now.

Reproductive Justice

Amanda at Pandagon reported about the Reproductive Justice panel at the Women, Action and the Media Conference at MIT. I said:

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I just finished reading E.J. Dionne’s Souled Out. Dionne is a liberal Catholic of a sort that is very familiar to me, many of whom are/were heavily involved in the social justice movement. He doesn’t talk about “reproductive justice” by name, but he does talk favorably about the basic approach.

To what extent do you think Catholics can or will become part of a reproductive justice movement? Do we have to try to make people *consciously* aware of how their anti-abortion platform is

a stand-in for a series of anxieties about sexuality and ego

(which is IMHO certainly true), or is it possible to move them without forcing those issues into consciousness? Can we get them to agree consciously to the importance of empowering women *even though* that is the the thing they’re unconsciously afraid of?

Sexist or Incomprehensible? You decide!

Amanda at Pandagon found an ad for the UK store Harvey Nichols -- click here to see it -- that is either incredibly sexist or makes no sense at all. Possibly both. And no-one can figure out how this is supposed to sell more shoes, either.

Do you only get the plump guy if you wear slippers? What's the correlation between the sneakers and the black guy? Or is this supposed to be a chart where you fill in your results?

Then echnidne of the snakes points out this Oliphant cartoon. What a laff riot! It has been suggested that maybe Oliphant was trying to poke fun at anyone who thinks he can ride roughshod over HRC (or that PMS is still an issue for her, given her age), but his track record argues against that.

When it comes to Chris Matthews, though, I don't think there can be two schools of thought -- he's really not that hard to understand.

Breasts and Evolution

Lightly edited from comments I left in a post by Amanda at Pandagon,
If only someone could make a nifty little program…. about whether men are really more "visual" than women, and some of the fallacies of "Evolutionary Psychology".

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Puttin' on my Actual Evolutionary Biologist™ hat here.

Breasts are an example of how human anatomy & physiology have some unique and biologically bizarre features, features that contradict each other *and* contradict what evolutionary biology leads one to explect. Examples:

1) human males average larger than females -- as is expected if there is significant sexual selection on males (=females are picky, not all males reproduce)

2) human females have enlarged breasts, of a type found in no other mammal. This suggests that biologically unusual sexual selection on females is occurring. I don't think it can be to make nursing easier, Ailurophile, because my experience is that it *doesn't* -- it makes "latching on" a good deal harder than it is for droopy-chested chimps.

3) both human sexes (in most populations) have extremely exaggerated head hair, the longest hair of any mammal. This implies heavy, unbalanced sexual selection on at least one sex.

Look at it this way. You know how many other species of bird or mammals have males larger than females, but females more brightly-colored in *any* respect than males?[1]

*None*. Zip, zero. It does not compute. Far from being explicable by trivially easy "Evolutionary Psychology" reasoning (as practiced by sociologists, ferchrissakes), human reproductive biology is really problematic.

This is why I'm starting to think that self-domestication may be the missing link in human evolution. It's probable that for a long time (at least 100,000 years) humans have been attempting to control each other's reproduction, via arranged marriages and the like. No-one's done the math yet, so this is really just an educated guess on my part.

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growth of the breast isn’t to encourage group survival, but is a result of sexual competition - females with bigger breasts had an advantage over their flatter sisters, suggesting (again) that males favoured them for whatever reason. Evo psych rears its ugly head again.

And again, this is why I talk about “evo-psycho”, because they don’t actually understand biology.

For female mammals to have elaborate, permanent display structures like breasts is *bizarre*, even unprecedented (the role & significance of the sexual swellings in female baboons is hotly debated). It’s particularly weird when you recall that a woman’s breasts swell while she’s nursing — *and thus infertile*.

Frankly, I don’t know why human females have “display breasts”. One thing I would definitely ask is, who are they displaying *to*? Potential mates, or potential in-laws? Or other females?

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[1] In most warm-blooded animals males are larger and less camouflaged than females. There are some groups in which females are larger: baleen whales, birds of prey, and rabbits, for instance. In most of these, the males are still less camouflaged (e.g. Kestrels), so sexual selection is probably still acting on males, but ecological forces make them smaller.

There are a few birds in which females are larger and more brightly-colored than males (e.g. Phalaropes), and in these species females are polyandrous -- that is, sexual selection is for once acting more strongly on them than on the males.

There are *no* species in which males are larger and females are less camouflagued.

Gay-hatin' and Subtractive Masculinity

Fred Clark at Slacktivist has been asked to put in another post on the sources and support of the Gay-hatin' Gospel.. My comments got to be a bit long:

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I'm surprised, Fred, because I think you're overlooking the point, again.

A big part of the issue is gender roles. And that means that a big part of the issue is *women*. Even though (as several people have pointed out) 99% of the vitriol & repugnance is directed against gay men specifically and anal sex even more specifically, I think the thing which is being talked about without being named is *women*.

Same-sex marriage is in fact a threat to traditional heterosexual marriage, because SSM is obviously between equals. Anal sex is a deep threat to masculinity because it involves a man -- a full human being, just like the default "me" of patriarchal society -- being penetrated. And if human beings (=men) can be penetrated and not scorned, then maybe the people who are traditionally penetrated (=women) ... are human beings.

The idea that women might be human beings threatens J. Matt Barber profoundly, because the view of masculinity that has developed over the past century (I'm not sure about earlier) is subtractive. That is, a Man is defined as someone who is Not A Woman. This worked OK when men could do a lot of things women can't. But if women can be smart, then men must be stupid; if women can be moral, men must be evil; if women love beauty, men must love ugliness. You can see this all too clearly in the link Brel found in Part.5: creativity itself (long a male prerogative) has become suspect.

And at the end, Barber and his ilk are faced with the horrific consequences of their subtractive masculinity: if women are human beings, men ... cease to exist. He's reacting like he's facing an existential threat because he *is* facing one: he's standing what used to be a glorious castle but which turned out to be a pile of sand, slipping away into the tide. His idea of masculinity is part of his *self*, and eroding the one is eroding the other.
(continued on next rock)

One of the best illustrations of how subtractive masculinity works is in a old, not all that good science fiction story, "The Last Man" (written by Wallace West in 1929, anthologized in The Pocket Book of Science Fiction). My copy seems to have disappeared (or crumbled into dust), but IIRC the narrator talks about how women's energy and ambition couldn't be suppressed forever, and they moved into one field after another until all that was left for men to consider important were sports and war. And then war became unthinkable, and women got into sports, and then all the men just died out, useless (our hero is a throwback in a zoo).

Subtractive masculinity isn't confined to the evangelical Right in America, by any means. After the 2004 election, religion journalist Jeff Sharlet admitted what he'd been reluctant to say before: that homophobia is the true unifying factor for strongly religious Americans of every stripe. The stresses currently in the Anglican Communion over homosexuality are largely coming from churches in the Southern Hemisphere, based in societies that don't have all that much in common with the US Bible Belt. But they *do* still face stresses from changing gender roles, just as traditional Muslim societies do, too.

Amanda has a post up at Pandagon about the anthology Choice and about how too many men react:

abuse and control is less an obsession for a lot of men and more the natural result of thinking of women as functional objects in your life. Like if she starts behaving in ways that are inconvenient (like getting pregnant or trying to prevent pregnancy), then it’s appropriate to treat her like a malfunctioning appliance. ...

... Anything outside of functional use is considered irrelevant at best, an infringement on functionality at worst. Not that all men are like this, by any stretch, but this way of viewing women as objects is endemic and honest men will admit that even if they resist it, they get messages that it’s an appropriate way to view women.

But with a subtractive model of masculinity, men *have* to think this way -- because if women are not objects, then there's no humanity left for men.

Principles of Proctology

Ideas and phrases I've been using (at least in my head) for a while, now committed to electrons in Pandagon comments:

1. The Principle of Proctouniversality: there’s a little asshole in all of us.

2. The Principle of Non-Autoproctology, or, No Man His Own Proctologist: you’re not the best person to tell how much of an asshole you are.

2. The Law of Procto-Nonconservation: there’s no limit to how much of an asshole a person can be, nor is there a limit to the number of assholes.

All started, I believe, by a New Yorker cartoon, "The Proctologist's Nightmare". Couple in bed, he's sitting up and clutching the covers, terrified; she's saying soothingly, "don't worry dear, there'll always be assholes."

The Right to Mock

In comments at a Pandagon post on Zombie Feminism, someone wrote:

It’s not as though mocking Islam is any less important than mocking Christianity, which is an extensively developed art form.

and I said:

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It is for *us*. Mockery *must* begin at home, otherwise it’s bigotry.

You get to mock your own culture. You *must* mock — or at least acknowledge the bad, silly, arbitrary, or stupid aspects — your own culture. Once you’ve got a track record for mocking your own culture, you *might* — maybe — get a pass to mock someone else’s culture. But the chances are you won’t be very good at it, because only those really inside the culture know the most mockable bits.

Salman Rushdie gets to mock Islam. Madonna gets to mock Christianity. Rushdie may be cross-cultural enough to get a Christianity-mocking license, but Madonna doesn’t get to mock Islam because it’s not part of her psyche.

Here’s another way to put it: humor that is directed at the Other is an ingroup/outgroup marker, it gets us in the habit of being divisive and cruel. Humor that is directed at the *self*, at the ingroup, can be a road to self-understanding, to becoming *less* cruel.

Another other way to put it: Islamic culture helped shape Rushdie, and that means a small part of it belongs to him. Catholicism helped shape Madonna, and so part of it belongs to her. The culture in your head is *yours*, and you get to do whatever you want with it — including mock it.

Is rape a hate crime?

A record of my comments at Amanda's post on "Rape is the grown-up version of pulling pigtails", which started out talking about some of Ann Althouse's commenters but then got actually interesting.

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One thing this has made clear to me, when compared to the very learned posts about hate crimes Orcinus often makes, is that the word “hate” in “hate crime” is a legal term of art. “Hate crimes” in the legal sense are a form of “terrorism”, and the perps don’t have to feel hate in the emotional sense, any more than the victims of terrorism have to feel “terror” (as opposed to, say, anxiety or anger or grief).

I suspect Dennis is correct, and many rapists don’t feel the emotion of hate. Nonetheless, rape may often be a “hate crime”, an attack on a person for being a member of a particular group, and with the goal of controlling that group as a whole.

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The best blogging about hate crimes is probably by David Neiwert aka Orcinus. Here’s a post on why hate crimes are not thought crimes, for instance.

Making something a legal “Hate crime” is not thought-policing any more than defining first- versus second-degree murder is thought-policing. Hate crimes statutes do not change whether something was a crime at all, it just changes how the crime is prosecuted, punished, and categorized.

I don’t think anyone has thought yet about where the line between “hate crime” and “underlying crime” lies with regard to rape.

[warning: thinking things through here.] Rape with the motive & rhetoric of “keeping the bitches in their place” is IMHO (not a lawyer, blah blah) certainly a hate crime. Rape within a relationship probably doesn’t count as a hate crime, *but it functions as one*.

Most rape functions as a hate crime, because it is part of pervasive patterns that frighten and constrain particular groups of people (men in prison, all women). The sense of individual entitlement rapists have is of a piece with group entitlement. The personal *is* political.

So frex, a street harrasser (”hey lady! show us your tits!”) is to a rapist as a kid who hangs a noose on a whites-only tree is to an actual lyncher. The harrasser and the kid both have a sense of personal entitlement — this is *mine*, I can do what I want, you have to be nice to *me* — that is enforced by other members of their entitled group.

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More info to consider about whether rape is usually a hate crime: Orcinus on how it feels to be the victim of a hate crime.

Similarities:

Hate crimes can cause victims to view the world and people in it as malevolent and experience a reduced sense of control

What we also know about the victims of bias crime is that they are substantially harmed well over and above what befalls victims of the simpler versions of the same crimes, perpetrated with ordinary motives (what is known as the underlying or “parallel” crime behind these acts, such as simple assault, vandalism or threatening); for instance, some studies have found that bias-crime victims often experience post-trauma psychological stress syndromes similar to those experienced by rape victims, because the sense of violation can be so profound. The result is a commingling of shame, fear and rage.

Note that this implies that rape is not a simple, “parallel” crime like murder.

There is also a secondary level of victimization that can occur with hate crimes: they create a fear of exposure

— parallel to the traditional (and not unreasonable) fear of rape victims that their sexuality will be dragged through the mud if they come forward.

Differences: Hate crime victims are not usually personally known to the perp(s); rape victims are usually known. Hate crimes often involve grotesque, excessive violence; rape doesn’t *usually* involve that level of escalation.

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So, how ’bout we follow Orcinus’ current practice, and say “bias crime” instead of “hate crime”. One of the issues that’s not clear to me is what the default or simple mens rea of rape might be.

Some rapes are certainly bias crimes. What kind of rape is *not* a bias crime? Are bias crimes against women for being women covered under bias crime law? They certainly aren’t in practice. Are they so common that, even if law enforcement was willing, they can’t be enforced on a practical level?

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Dennis asked:

Is a hate crime a crime that relies on hatred or disenfranchisement of a class (be that class women, children, blacks, the poor, the elderly), or is a hate crime a crime that requires the dehumanization of an individual victim?

My understanding is that hate crime in law is only the first. Pretty much *any* crime against a person falls under the second class.

Further, I don’t think it’s useful to elide the difference between bias crimes (Hate Crimes Class 1) and dehumanization crimes (Class 2, or Crimes of Hate). More strongly, I think it’s actively bad to say all Crimes of Hate are Hate Crimes, because that tends to conceal the political inside the personal.

Hate Crimes are structural, they reinforce each other, in a way that Crimes of Hate do not. That’s why it’s so hard to find examples of rapes that are not Hate Crimes: because the societal bias against women is so pervasive that an individual rapist doesn’t have to hate women very much extra, he doesn’t run the risk of standing out.

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Not building on anything specific that's been said, just getting it out there (as I put together a blogcomment record for my own blog):

I hadn't realized until I went searching for a good link how much Orcinus and other people who track or study hate crimes use rape for calibration (or as a baseline?). Hate crimes are crimes that feel like rape, that have many of the same effects as rape, that are at least as bad as rape. I don't know if they're consciously thinking of rape as a hate crime, but it's there in the background -- as the most *familiar* hate crime, the one that's hardest to notice.

Misogyny as a cross-cultural phenomenon

Hilzoy on "Honor killings" in Syria:

what possible conception of honor could involve being so strict about sexual morality that even sex that's completely involuntary counts as a stain on one's honor, but so loose about murder that the killing of innocents can be tolerated by it, much less required?

Meanwhile, Amanda on Robert Jensen’s book Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity.

People routinely assume that pornography is such a difficult and divisive issue because it’s about sex. In fact, this culture struggles unsuccessfully with pornography because it is about men’s cruelty to women, and the pleasure men sometimes take in that cruelty. And that is much more difficult for people — men and women — to face.

So, class, compare and contrast misogyny in these two societies. Are there common male impulses behind honor killings and porn, or are they arbitrary responses of different societies?

Use other side of page if neccesary.

Conservation and Conservatism

Amanda posted about her recent visit with her family in Lubbock and the mind-set of modern conservatism -- as show in wedding planning, women doing housework while men sit around, and not believing in global warming. One of my comments was:

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What is the connection between conservatism and short-term thinking?

Ethyl, I think you’ve got it backwards: young-Earth theology is attractive to conservatives because they’re already short-term thinkers, not the other way around.

I think the core of conservatism isn’t a philosophy, but an emotional attitude: a preference for the status quo. Don’t rock the boat, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, don’t change horses in mid-stream, the old ways are the good ways, give me that old-time religion.

But I don’t see why that attitude goes with short-term thinking, rather than the kind of long-term thinking traditionally called “prudence”. How did prudence become unconservative?

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One commenter, Richard, also noted:

the corporate mentality that puts short term thoughts and profits over every other consideration in the business world. THAT mentality permeates all the discussions of global warming: “Why, if we do what you say, we would have to invest all this money in processes, equipment, whatever and our profits would go down.” It’s the penny-wise pound foolish attitude that causes firms to not invest in new equipment or preventive maintenance until it is too late.

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Meanwhile, slacktivist had a discussion of the price evangelicalism pays for its bargain with the Republican Party. One commenter (Scott, our pet Libertarian not-quite-troll) deprecated environmentalism by saying

the green tree does have red roots after all

I replied:

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Piffle. The root of the green tree is essentially *conservative*, but in an emotional rather than political sense. That is, it's the desire to keep things from changing -- that's why "conservation" and "conservative" are so similar linguistically, though they're the opposite in current American politics.

Speaking as a scientist and an historian of science who saw this develop over the last several decades, scientific concern about global warming is deeply conservative. It taps into many of the basic conservative feelings: fear that any change may be catastrophe, love of things the way they are, valuing the old above the new. But none of these feelings are attached to human power relationships, which by definition makes them apolitical.

The Wimp Factor

Amanda at Pandagon (I will post my thinky thots about her 15 minutes of fame! really! and long may they wave) just posted a review of Stephen Ducat's The Wimp Factor, which I've been meaning to read for a while. Get cracking, public library! I'm poor!

Ducat’s basic thesis is that boys grow up having a harder time than girls creating a positive gender identity, and therefore grow up too often to define themselves as Not Women, creating misogyny, war, etc. I think there’s little doubt that this is true, though the reasons it is true are in dispute.

Ducat is a Freudian, which I didn't know before this review. Freudians generally write really, really well, have interesting ideas and make wide connections -- and usually go off the tracks toward Looneyville at some point. But at least their sentences aren't dipped in sociologese, so they're never *boring*.

I can't remember if it was in Louise Kaplan's Female Perversions (she's another Freudian) or in a book (by a male author, maybe?) that is linked to Kaplan in my mind, but whichever Freudian it was pointed out that on trouble with dichotomous gender roles is that it restricts what virtues a person can practice.

As Ducat says, sharing *any* quality with women provokes anxious masculinity. Therefore, if feminism lets women cultivate intelligence, anxious men must act stupid. If some women are prudent, men must be reckless. If women do well in school, men must do badly.

I actually think this is where a lot of the anxious-masculine anti-environmentalism comes from. It's not so much that women are associated with nature, but that women are encouraged to show qualities of caring for the future (especially children), of compassion, of prudence and restraint. So a male can only get guy-points by being reckless, greedy, wasteful, and short-sighted.

It's a kind of subtractive masculinity, where the only qualities that make a guy a Real Man are ones women do not display. So if feminism lets women become more fully human, Real Men must become less -- as though being human is a zero-sum game.

This is why we get so much "feminists deny the important differences between men and women! You think everyone should be androgynously bland!" When we say, "the truly important virtues are ones both men and women can display: honesty, courage, intelligence, compassion" they hear, "the important game is one that doesn't define Manhood." And in that way, of course, they're right.

Speaking of Kaplan, one of her most interesting ideas is "homovestism": getting a sexual charge out of dressing up as a member of one's own gender. I think this explains a lot about what fashion means to many women.

Legalizing polyamory & polygamy; includes Heinlein

Amanda posted at Pandagon about efforts to prosecute polygamist Mormons as rapists and accessories. The comments kind of veered into an issue that keeps coming up in discussions of marriage equality for same-sex couples: "is legalizing polygamy the next step?" I'm going to summarize my comments there, and other thoughts have been percolating on this issue for a while now. There are also discussions going on at Feministe and Abstract Nonsense, doubtless elsewhere as well.

In the first place, moving from traditional man-woman marriage to marriage equality is very straightforward. Indeed, equal marriages are *easier* to fit into our system of laws than traditional marriage, because all you need is two consenting adults who aren't too closely related -- you don't have to legally define "man" and "woman". Once women have all the legal rights of men, equal marriage for same-sex couples was IMHO inevitable, because things that are equal to the same thing are equal to each other.

But polygamy does not map so simply onto the pattern of conventional marriage.

There are two basic categories of polygamy that people bring up when they're talking about how legalizing same-sex marriage may lead down a "slippery slope" to all kinds of kinky multiple relationships (not to mention the box turtles).

Traditional polygamy -- as found in the book of Genesis, among "fundamentalist" Mormons, in Islam, pre-modern China, etc. -- is what biologists call "polygyny", one male mated to more than one female. In most (all?) traditional societies, polygynous marriages are legally a set of overlapping monogamous marriages: the man is married to each woman separately. The co-wives do not inherit from each other, they do not get custody of each other's children, they cannot sell each other's property.

In recent decades there's been some development of the concept of polyamorous marriages: multiple-partner marriages in which all parties are considered married to each other, regardless of gender. Property is held in common, but I don't know what the usual arrangements are for child custody, powers of attorney, inheritance, and so forth, or if there *are* any consistent patterns being developed.

I know of no culture in which this kind of egalitarian polyamory is traditional. The examples that spring to mind are all in science fiction. In fact, as I sort through examples in my mind I'm coming up with more egalitarian-poly sf cultures than traditional-polygyny cultures -- can anyone think of an example of an sf or fantasy novel with traditional polygyny where it is *not* presented as something to be fled? I'm drawing a blank. Does Orson Scott Card ever show polygamy? As a Mormon, his view is liable to be more textured than most, because it's a volatile religious issue either way and because he probably saw polygamy in action while he was growing up.

I was a big fan of books about polyamory while I was young -- Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Donald Kingsbury's Courtship Rite are two examples that spring to mind -- but as I get older and more realistic (you might think "jaded" or "cynical") I see the crucial aspects of poly marriage that they don't explore.

Take "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress", for example. The protagonist, Manuel, is part of a "line marriage": the married group adds younger spouses over the decades, alternating sexes, so that the marriage does not end.

Heinlein emphasizes the sexual & emotional benefits of this kind of marriage, but he doesn't really go into what I now see as the core issues of marriage: property and status. The great benefit of line marriage would be that the property never has to be broken up: there is no generational transfer. The marriage becomes a kind of corporation, a way to concentrate and perpetuate wealth.

In TMIAHM one of the daughters of the family is married back into the line, which Heinlein presents as both reasonable and romantic. What he doesn't present is how this makes her the only true heir to the family wealth & influence, how it cuts the other children of the family out. Normal human behavior predicts that there would be a bitter struggle among the spouses to have one's favorite child be the heir, and it could easily lead to hellish levels of incestuous pimping.

Even without that, I don't know that the poly community -- or even the religious polygynist communities -- have got a handle on the issues that are the core of marriage as a legal institution. The legal issues aren't about how people live and sleep and work together, but more about transitions: medical decision-making, inheritance, insurance payments, child support.

Our current marriage law is *barely* able to deal with the complexities that arise when a marriage has only two partners, and that despite hundreds of years of experience dealing with traditional (inegalitarian) two-partner marriages. I know of no long-running legal tradition with egalitarian poly marriages, or even inegalitarian marriages but where the wives are legally married to each other. Without this kind of experience, we don't know how these relationships would "play out" legally. I don't think we can or should have legalized polyamory until polyamorists have built up legal structures & experience with them.

I don't know how well-organized this is, and there are other thinky thots I wanted to work in, but I shall stop now because it's probably the last warm Sunday afternoon of the year and I'm going to clean up my garden OR ELSE.