Polyamory and the Ruling Class: A Response to The Atlantic
By Brett Chamberlin
Executive Director, OPEN
A recent article in The Atlantic titled “Polyamory, the Ruling Class’s Latest Fad” attempts to offer a wide-ranging criticism of polyamory and those who practice it. What it ultimately delivers is a deeply incurious, consistently sour, and occasionally downright contemptuous critique which betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of contemporary American polyamory.
Before addressing the actual thesis of the article, it’s worth spending a moment on its framing, which the title captures quite succinctly. Indeed, the article’s criticism is addressed, the author declares, towards “anyone eager to valorize the latest lifestyle fad that is little more than yet another way for the ruling class to have their cake and eat it too.” As the founder of an advocacy organization dedicated to advancing rights and acceptance for polyamorous and non-monogamous families and relationships, I am perhaps professionally obligated to take the bait and do some valorizing.
Is polyamory indeed a fad of the ruling class? The question has been asked and answered: more than one in five American adults have practiced some form of consensual non-monogamy throughout their life, and “this proportion remained constant across age, education level, income, religion, region, political affiliation, and race.” If only participation in the ruling class were as evenly distributed as polyamory is!
Whether something is a fad is perhaps more difficult to answer; in the end, only time will tell. Polyamory is certainly having its moment in the media spotlight, as demonstrated by “the current raft of polyamory coverage” that seems to have so raised the ire of the article’s author. Yet stepping back, we find more evidence of a rising tide than of a passing wave.
A recent article in TIME magazine noted that American “polyamory’s roots reach back at least a century to the Progressive Era, if not further,” while the term “polyamory” itself was coined in the early 1990’s. Two new books, American Poly: A History and Fifty Years of Polyamory in America each offer glimpses into the rich history of the movement. Looking ahead to rising generations, a 2023 YouGov poll found that almost half (48%) of people aged 18-29 describe their “ideal relationship” as something other than “complete monogamy.” Once a “fad” has been around this long without any signs of receding, perhaps it should no longer be called a fad.
To whatever extent we are willing to forgive opinion writers who fail to make even a cursory attempt to substantiate their claims with actual data, the author can perhaps be forgiven for his erroneous assumption that polyamory is a phenomenon of those who reside on “gilded pedestals.” After all, it is true that much of the recent coverage of polyamory has centered individuals with privileged identities and class position. In large part, this is more a reflection of access to media representation than of the underlying demographics of polyamory.
Yet this also reveals something important about the nature of the polyamorous experience. Put simply, polyamory––and non-monogamy overall––is a marginalized practice (or identity; people hold varying opinions on which is more fitting). That same 2023 YouGov poll found that more than half of American adults consider polyamory “morally wrong,” with only eighteen percent considering it “morally acceptable.” Various studies and surveys have found that about half of non-monogamous individuals reported experiencing prejudice or discrimination on the basis of their non-monogamous identity across a range of areas including employment, housing, healthcare, mental healthcare, immigration proceedings, and custody disputes, not to mention family and community acceptance.
Despite the recent introductions of nondiscrimination protections in the cities of Somerville and Cambridge Mass., and, as of April 16, Oakland Ca., being open about one’s polyamorous identity can have real consequences. In most of the country, “relationship structure” is not a legally protected category; firing an employee or denying a rental application on the basis of someone’s non-monogamous identity is entirely legal. This lack of protection and its resultant risks are perhaps why public visibility is largely reserved for those who have achieved a degree of economic security and do not hold intersecting marginalized identities.
To provide a particularly illustrative example, the Uniform Code of Military Justice––which governs the conduct of members of the US military––prohibits “adultery,” making no distinctions for consensual relationships outside of marriage. So while the “ruling class” is free to be open about their polyamory, those who carry out their orders would face dishonorable discharge were they to do the same.
Only now can we turn to the article’s actual thesis, that “the present interest in polyamory more broadly … is the result of a long-gestating obsession with authenticity and individual self-fulfillment,” which the author calls “therapeutic libertarianism.” Thus begins the author’s tragic loss of the plot entirely. While he may offer some valid criticisms of a certain self-obsessed self-improvement culture, the connection back to polyamory is tenuous at best. Nowhere is this more evident than in his reference to Jordan Peterson as a right wing example of “therapeutic libertarianism,” a man who famously prescribed “enforced monogamy” in a 2018 interview.
Turning to the Left, the author writes that “what gets termed ‘wokeness’ is indissociable from self-help.” In fact, quite the opposite. While the Right lazily uses “woke” to condemn anything with BIPOC or LGBTQ+ representation, any sincere definition of the term––which originates in Black culture––understands it to mean an awareness of structural racism and inequality. Structural problems, it follows, demand structural solutions. Approaches to these issues which do resemble a self-help model––as best exemplified by the book White Fragility––may retain some favor among neoliberal corporate DEI consultants but are largely dismissed by the Left.
Looking at polyamory through such a warped lens, it’s no wonder that the author’s conclusions are so distorted (how, for example, could one look at the cover of the recent NYMag issue on polyamory and see “groping” cats?). Nowhere is this more clear than in his allegation that “therapeutic libertarianism,” of which he seems to consider polyamory a symptom, “applies market logic to human beings.” This is an astounding assertion, given the myriad ways in which the market logic of scarcity and ownership is so deeply embedded in monogamy, not polyamory. One need only look into the concept of “coverture,” wherein a woman was denied a separate legal identity, making her, in effect, the property of her husband. This legal and market subordination persisted until the modern era; only in 1974 did US women gain the right to open a credit card under their own name. Even today, the vocabulary and norms of monogamy preserve that market logic, treating romantic love as finite and possessive: “I’m taken;” “she’s mine.”
By contrast, in polyamory, romantic love is liberated from the enclosure of the suburban picket fence and returned to the Commons. And it is not only love which is liberated from market logic; so too is our labor. Polyamorous families, relationships, and communities are rich with expressions of mutual aid, particularly among queer, BIPOC, disabled, and other marginalized groups. Despite a nod to Jillian Weise’s essay on the intersection of disability and polyamory, the author still asserts that polyamory is a luxury reserved for those with the disposable income to pay a babysitter. He fails to consider that people working two jobs to get by need child care too, and that community––that is, interconnected networks of relationships––has been the most durable and accessible source of the myriad forms of essential care on which societies depend.
As the saying goes: “Monogamy? In this economy?!” One might read this as a wry repartee on the necessity of a three income household to achieve the American Dream™ today. At a deeper level, the meme gestures towards ideas of decommodification, decolonization, and collectivization. Through this lens, we begin to see the hollowness of the author’s critique that polyamory represents a self-indulgent distraction from the overlapping crises of climate change, war, and political instability. Here I find a point of narrow agreement with the author; these are indeed “problems that require real action, real progress.”
Hardly an abdication of political responsibility, polyamory is an expression of political values which place cooperation over competition, connection over consumption, egalitarianism over individualism, and which elevate compassion, communication, and consent. This is the emergent strategy of adrienne maree brown, a practice of intentional change to increase our capacity to embody the liberated worlds for which we long; this is the prefigurative politics of Raekstad and Dahl, the “experimental implementation” of changes we wish to produce in the world through the ways that we live and organize in the here-and-now. These values are put into action every day, in ways big and small, by countless non-monogamous people around the world.
Should this begin to sound like the very navel-gazing that the author maligns, allow me to reground it in a text that appears on countless Poli-Sci 101 syllabi. In Robert Punam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, he establishes the connection between social fragmentation and a decline in civic health, as measured by our capacity to establish trust, exchange ideas and information, and work together to solve problems like those the article’s author names. Networks of polyamorous relationships––and the broader communities that surround them––are fertile ground for the establishment of the social connections once found through the bowling leagues to which the book’s title refers. Within my own non-monogamous community I have seen people not only find jobs or housing, but campaign for political candidates, launch advocacy initiatives, and much more. As the educator and organizer Dr. Ayesha Kanh puts it, “relationship building IS the work of liberation.”
In this way, non-monogamy represents a return to humanity’s true “oldest institution,” which the article’s author misidentifies as being the “monogamous marriage.” No, our oldest social institution is the community, the tribe, the village, the family defined not by blood but by limitless love. Polyamory is a turn away from our atomized and commodified paradigm and a return to an indigenous understanding that everything is in constant relationship with everything else.
So no, polyamory is not an expression of the ruling class’s desire to “have their cake and eat it too.” It is far better understood as an emergent response to the austerity politics of the ruling class which for decades has little more to offer us than “let them eat cake.”
