Polyamory Under Late-Stage Capitalism with @femmmeow and @antimononormative
How is polyamory influencing current and future generations under late-stage capitalism? Join myself and Nayeli (@antimononormative), who are both Gen Z, and younger millennial Sky (@femmmeow) as we talk about how modern monogamy is influenced by the commodification of intimacy under capitalism, colonialism and heteropatriarchical forces. We discuss:
- Sky's upbringing in the Scientology cult and how her embracing her queerness led her to question monogamy and relationships
- Nayeli's radical abolitionist stances on basically everything, and her coining and explaining the terms "late-stage mononormativity" and "mononormativity reformist"
- How the rise of non-monogamy was directly caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and was not a coincidence!
- How we are all absolute stans of Esther Perel and her work
and much more.
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transcribed by Khanh Tran
Leanne: Welcome to Happy Polydays, a series of intimate conversations about polyamory, sexuality, identity, and relationships, hosted by me – Leanne Yau of the Poly Philia blog.
Leanne: Welcome to Day 9 of the Happy Polydays series. Today I am joined by Sky, who goes by @femmmeow, and Nayeli, who goes by @antimononormative on Instagram. Sky is a bi-demisexual femme, content creator, and digital artist who edits vintage pulp novel covers to make them modern and queer, and Nayeli’s account focuses on anti-colonial perspectives on polyamory, relationship anarchy, and all that good stuff. So, welcome to the Happy Polydays series, Nayeli and Sky. And my first question for you is: what motivated each of you to start your respective pages? Nayeli, you can go first.
Nayeli: Okay. Hello. Thank you for having me. So, first off - I think I forget to mention this quite often - my actual little background as a person. I’m also queer and Indigenous - I should put that on my bio sometime. And I really just made my account in an effort to get more conversations going about non-monogamy and just the whole structure of mononormativity, the whole social institution from a very political perspective. Because I feel like there is a lot of missing context for the history of how our relationships became stigmatised in the first place, and I really wanted to just start more conversations about that.
Leanne: That’s great. And Sky, what about you?
Sky: My page is just like a chaotic meme page that developed from my personal account in 2019. But I think it’s really beautiful because it chronicles my coming out and deprogramming from growing up in an oppressive cult. So I would not say that I am an educator like Nayeli. I love her stuff and I learn from her. But I’m more just making memes, processing and recounting my experiences in polyamory.
Leanne: So, I would love to hear more about your polyamory/relationship anarchy/non-monogamy origin story. I know both of you have very, very different perspectives coming into this, so I would love to hear more about how you came across it, what were your early struggles - or not even early struggles, current struggles - what have been the benefits and drawbacks of practising non-monogamy for you? And what are your anchoring reasons for doing it? Just generally sharing your personal stories in however much detail you feel comfortable.
So, Sky, I’d like to start with you because you talked on your page before about how you grew up in Scientology. Could you also explain what Scientology is for some people who don’t know, and talk about how you moved from that to where you are today?
Sky: Yeah. My parents were not involved in the church at all. I ended up getting into it in a roundabout way. You have to remember that I am 29. Forget Tom Cruise on the couch and all the crazy stuff that we know about Scientology now. The Internet wasn’t really even a thing back then. It was just this kind of weird religion that people are, “Okay, it’s kind of weird but innocuous.” And my mom got a job at this company that was run by and staffed primarily with Scientologists. So her friends ended up being Scientologists, and they had kids my age, and I ended up going to school with them. So I ended up getting into, they don’t call it a Scientology school, but they use study technology and teachings from L. Ron Hubbard, who is the founder of Scientology. Even though it was not intentional indoctrination, the fact that 90% of the staff is Scientologist and most of the student body is, it still very much rubbed off on me. And there were just little things. It was absolutely implied that homosexuality was, as L. Ron Hubbard puts it, “an aberration against nature” and Dianetics, his first book, blew up, and it was basically what led to him founding Scientology. It’s a crock of shit, literally just psycho-psychiatry with aliens and no foundational knowledge, like no legs to stand on. It’s absolutely been debunked multiple times.
But as I got older, in my senior year at this school that I was at, I specifically remember being in a debate team. We were debating abortion and gay marriage, of course. It’s 2007. And the teacher allowed - because she was a Scientologist so of course she allowed it - one of my other classmates to cite Dianetics in this debate as proof that abortion should be wrong and homosexuality is an aberration against nature.
Leanne: Woah.
Sky: L. Ron Hubbard believes in, I call it sci-fi evangelicalism. I’ve just been talking to @puritytopolyamory about that. I’ve got a lot of common with Christian people because they believe the same shit, just with more cuckoo alien sci-fi shit.
[Leanne laughs]
There’s all these rules about pregnant women. Like on campus, if any of the teachers were pregnant, you were not allowed to talk around them in certain ways. You’re not allowed to touch them because they believe that the fetus is hearing and taking in everything.
Leanne: Oh my God.
Sky: So that’s like the reasoning for being super anti-abortion. And then, for being anti-gay, his justification is that he believes that gay people are covertly hostile. So there is a tone scale in Scientology, and 4.0 is the top of the tone scale, it’s called “total intention”, I think. And they believe all Scientologists strive to be at tone 4.0.
Leanne: Like a GPA.
Nayeli: Structured homophobia. Interesting.
Sky: Yeah, it’s structured homophobia. That’s how they also rationalise that mental illness is not a real thing and it can be cured with Scientology auditing. Anxiety and depression, they don’t call it anxiety or depression, is on the tone scale. So, if you find yourself there, and I was just describing basically symptoms of anxiety, I didn’t even know what that was, then you just need to get auditing.
Leanne: Auditing?
Sky: Auditing, yeah. That’s when you’re sitting there with cans - it’s also a crock of shit - and it’s supposedly measuring your energy and somebody’s sitting across from you. It’s like a whole other thing.
Leanne: Oh wow.
Sky: We used to do auditing at this school. But they had just stopped doing auditing at that school not that long before I went there. But yeah, they believe that homosexuality can be cured. They believe that queer and gay people are at 1.1, which is “coverly hostile”, so that we’re not genuine people. We’re sneaky and evil, basically. That’s what I was taught. So, my best friend, when I was living in California, his older sister, I don’t know what they had found, maybe porn or something, and she - I think it’s really funny. I knew I was queer very early on and I think it’s funny that queer people can sense each other. And I remember meeting her and being like, there was a kinship there.
Leanne: (chanting) One of us!
Sky: I thought she was fucking cool. She was definitely more masc. And I was like, “She’s cool.” It came out that she was gay and then she was whisked away and nobody really talked about it. They don’t have conversion camps, but essentially she was getting intense auditing.
Leanne: Oh my god.
Sky: Months and months on end, in order to try and cure her. Then, I think that my friend whose older sister, I think that he is bi or queer, he was just very, very frustrated. He had a lot of emotional problems. And I think he was queer and wasn’t able to explore that. And then it came out that his younger sister too, who also went to this school, was also caught with lesbian porn on her phone. So she got kicked out of the school too.
Leanne: Wow. So, it’s there’s this epidemic of queer people being kicked out or whisked away or taken away around you, and you were also questioning your identity, and you were like, “Oh my god!”
So, how does all of that - growing up in Scientology, all of these beliefs are pushed on you, making you fear who you were, fear things about yourself, hate yourself even - how did that influence your beliefs about your sexuality, identity, relationships? How did that come into it, and more importantly, how did you break out of that eventually?
Sky: I don’t know if I ever did, because there is not just Scientology programming. It’s social programming too, like I was talking to @puritytopolyamory. I mean it still exists, but especially in the 90s, the misogyny and gender roles and all that bullshit, and Disney. I grew up with Disney, so just getting that Disney indoctrination. And Scientology is super sexually repressed, and sex-negative. For me, the card that pulled where everything else just crumbled was fully accepting my queerness. Because once I accepted that, then you start questioning everything else. You know what I mean?
Leanne: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Sky: And I was in an abusive relationship when I pulled that card. I don’t know if you follow my content, but I was groomed by a 31-year-old man when I was 19, and that was like 5 years in that relationship. And it’s really shitty that my origin story into polyamory is really traumatic and born out of abuse, but it was really my only way to escape that relationship. I had divulged, “I don’t think I’m straight.” He was open about that and supportive of that, which of course most men are because they are low-key fetishising it.
Nayeli: They do.
Sky: And he was like, “Yeah, if you want to explore that, let’s do an open relationship.” And we didn’t do a joint account. I was like, “I want to do this on my own. Fuck you, I hate you. I would break up with you if I could but I can’t. So here I am,” and I made accounts. And this was back in the early days, I ran out of women, I was really frustrated with unicorn hunters and people looking for friends. So I ran out of women, and I’m like, “Okay, I guess I’ll look for dudes. And then you find dudes. It was just so easy. But I lied to him all the time and broke our rule. It was not agreed upon that I would be talking to men. It was just women.
Leanne: Yeah.
Sky: So I lied about that and started being super reckless and going out and having lots of sex with lots of different people. It was a very chaotic time in my life but I had never been able to do that, to just explore and be free. That was the card and it really did just feel like everything started crumbling. I ended up finally leaving him. I fully came out and I just started to question everything. I was having these great connections with people and I was like, I don’t wanna choose, I don’t wanna do this again, I don’t wanna live with somebody, I don’t want to do the whole dating and saying I love you. I’m so tired of it.
Leanne: Yeah.
Sky: And I think that was because I was in that super oppressive, restrictive environment for so long. I am not saying that I won’t live with somebody again, but it’s a hard no for me right now. So that’s how solo polyamory and relationship anarchy is where I’ve landed.
Leanne: Yeah, for sure.
So Nayeli, I know you generally identify as a relationship anarchist and a lot of your content is really spicy, which is why I love it so much. You’re getting into the hard-hitting things. I’m personally guilty of this myself. Me and a lot of other content creators, whenever we are talking about, “Is monogamy a choice? Is polyamory a choice? What is natural or unnatural? Is it a political identity or is it just a relationship style?” And then I think a lot of us really try to skirt around it because this is difficult to talk about. But, no, you just get right to it and are like, “Here’s all the info. Die mad about it.” And I love it. And I think your voice is so important and just cuts through the bullshit. So, what’s your origin story? Was there a “pulling the card” moment for you like there was for Sky? Was it always something that felt natural to you? What’s your story?
Nayeli: First of all, thank you because I do strive to be the one asking the spicy questions. I created this account specifically to ask people to engage in discussions that I don’t normally see.
So I think I have a rather unique story with getting to polyamory, just because I still have never technically been in a long-term relationship with anyone. And that’s super uncommon in polyamorous spaces because people assume like in order to be polyamorous, you have to be in a relationship with multiple people at the same time. And for me, I identify as polyamorous and that’s affected my dating life for the past 2 years. I’m currently 22, I just turned 22. And even though I haven’t had multiple partners at the same time, I still have had that shaping my dating life. Like I meet someone and I’m like, “Hey, I don’t wanna do monogamy ever, for political, personal reasons.” And they’re like, “K, bye.” It’s just an ongoing cycle.
Leanne: I remember you made a TikTok where you were like, “Everyone’s like, I’m an anarchist and all that stuff, but they don’t want to share their love? Like the one thing that they always - ” [Laughter]
Nayeli: Exactly! Especially with my generation or just Gen Z in general, everybody was just starting to question capitalism and the long-term effects of colonialism. They are all for that, anti-racism, anti-capitalism, but nobody wants to bring these ideas to their personal life. And I’m like, “Very interesting.” On one the hand, I understand why people do it. If you look at the structure of mononormativity, the whole reason why it was created was, in a way, to just commodify human intimacy.
Sky: That right there. I love that. Like. Hello!
Nayeli: I think there’s a reason why. Mononormativity. I think I wrote it on a Post-It the other day. I have really good ideas and I just write them down and find them later on and be like, “Yes, this will be really good for an infographic.” But I think the way I started thinking about mononormativity had to do with just my observations as a single person for most of my upbringing.
So while I was in high school, I was the kind of person who just never really dated anyone. I did kind of want to, but I struggled with it in general. It’s funny when I look back on it now because it’s not even that I had a lot of crushes, I just didn’t connect with them. I struggled with just having crushes on people. What’s the big deal? What’s the hype behind monogamous relationships with people in your hometown? I just really didn’t understand it.
And I think it also has a lot to do, also, with the fact that I consider myself to have undiagnosed ASD. I’m still very careful about how I talk about autism because I know there’s a huge contextual - I saw an infographic about it today. Somebody talking about the reasons there should be more people talking about undiagnosed ASD and how not everyone has access to diagnoses. In general, I have a lot of colonial critiques about the whole institution of Western science and medicine under capitalism, so I could go into that in a whole other episode. But in general, I do consider myself to be neurodivergent, and I think that has a lot to do with the way I struggled with certain kinds of socialisation growing up. The more that I was not actually engaging with monogamous relationships, it gave me the time to just reflect on whether that was actually something that I wanted.
So I think by the time I got to my last year of high school, that was when I came out, and also my experience with coming out as queer was like - I feel like a lot of people talk about, “Oh yeah, there was one moment when I was just thinking about girls, and I was just like, yes, that’s amazing!” Like, I did have those moments throughout the years. But I feel like, for me, it was really more of this realisation that the only reason why I thought I was straight all those years was because people told me that was the default. So I was like, “Wait, I feel like I’m pressuring myself to even have crushes on men. This doesn’t even feel right.” So I think once I got the language for that in recent years, I realised it was just me questioning compulsory sexuality. So I think it’s more like I think I’m equally attracted to everybody. Or gender is not the determining factor. It was where my queerness manifested itself.
And with polyamory, it was more of me realising that monogamy just didn’t quite make sense. It was the experience of seeing it not work for everybody around me. Obviously, the structure itself isn’t inherently bad. Monogamy can work, and people can be in lovely romantic relationships with monogamy. It was just more like the way people just blindly go into it, even though the outcomes are always very similar. And I was like, “Why does everybody keep doing this?” And then I started learning about the historical reasons why people got into the family structures that we have now. So the whole history of settler colonialism trying to commodify human beings and put them into different family structures because it was easier to manage bodies that way, specifically with Black and Indigenous people in the US, too. They experience a very unique erasure of their ancestral family structure through that.
Leanne: Yeah, for sure.
Nayeli: So I think in college, as an undergraduate, I was studying Critical Gender Studies, and that also really changed things for me. Because that was when I really encountering this history first-hand, and having discussions with people about it. And even though we never actually talked about polyamory, we would discuss the history of people getting put into families, that monogamy was the centre of all of that, and capitalism in the US was also relying heavily on the way people would build families. They would encourage general reproduction between people. And in order to reproduce, you need heteronormativity. Like everything’s just connected. And I think what I have been doing in the past few years is thinking about heteronormativity and mononormativity in very similar ways. And I don’t disconnect them from my anticapitalist and anticolonial critiques.
So it just kind of happened. I am polyamorous. I think I would be solo poly if I had any partners at the moment. Right now, I just live in a city where I don’t really wanna date anyone here, so maybe in the future I think, maybe once I move to a different city, things will change. But right now I’m just here, I’m just vibing, I like to critique things, so that’s me.
Sky: You can still call yourself solo polyamorous even if you don’t have other partners! I mean that’s why I liked it. Because I was single for so long and when people would be like, “You are polyamorous but you don’t have other partners?” I’d just say, “I’m self-partnered. Always.” Like, I’m my own partner. Always.
Nayeli: For sure. I think people need to talk about their relationships with themselves and how that developed. Because I think even when I will have more partners in the future, I still think my own relationship with myself, how that developed, is still like the most important relationship that I’ve had so far.
Leanne: Self-love!
Sky: That’s why I love fucking with monogamous people. Because they’ll be like, “Oh, I’m monogamous.” I’ll be like, “Well…but you have the relationship with yourself, still, first. So, technically, you’re not.”
Nayeli: That’s true.
[Laughter]
Sky: I think a lot of monogamous people get into relationships and do just become this blob, this homogenous structure. And I”m like, “You two are still separate people. You’re still your own thing!”
Leanne: It’s really interesting. Because I definitely relate to some bits of your story, Nayeli. I didn’t have this big realisation about being queer. I was just like, “Oh…I like guys.” And then at one point, I was like, “Maybe I like girls too.” Then I go to try that out, and I did and I was like, “And, oh I like them too. Cool!” And that was just it, I didn’t have a whole [gasp] moment. My family is definitely really homophobic. My mom is still very much in the camp of, “I accept but I don’t agree,” which is not really accepting at all. But it is what it is. But I was very fortunate to have been - I watched a lot of American TV growing up in Hong Kong, and even though my school was pretty homophobic, and my family was pretty homophobic, the media I immersed myself in was very much not. So, I didn’t develop as much internalised homophobia as I feel I would have otherwise. So coming out for me was just like, “Okay, this is a thing. Cool, I guess.”
Which is not to say that I’ve not had difficulties after that. Obviously, we still live in a heteronormative society. But in terms of dealing with the internal stuff, self-acceptance and all of that, I think I’m very privileged to have avoided most of that because of how I isolated myself. I watched a lot of TV, and read a lot of fanfiction. And in a way just shielded myself. [Laughs]
Sky: That excites me so much for Gen Z and the next generations. My partner’s - I guess it’s his second cousin, actually, but they’re like nieces and nephews, is 12 and she’s very much queer. I’ve kind of just adopted her.
[Leanne laughs]
Nayeli: Love that.
Sky: But she didn’t have to come out to her mom. I was like, “Sky, do you realise how lucky you are?” I know I sound like a boomer right now but it’s amazing. I’m so jealous of you, that you just got to come home and tell your mom, “Oh, I have a crush on this person,” and didn’t even disclose the gender of the person. That wasn’t a thing. You knew it isn’t gonna be a thing. I just had absolutely no media representation, no escape, no hope for anything. And so it makes me so happy to see you. Yes, write that gay fanfic. Put it out there! I wish I would have had that growing up! I think I did, I just wasn’t on Tumblr.
[Laughter]
Leanne: I wrote gay fanfics. I wrote gay fanfic when I was 13. I was reading it when I was 11 and was writing when I was 13.
Sky: Mine was just in my mind.
[Laughter]
Leanne: Yeah, I think the internet provided me with some great spaces to explore that. Even though I didn’t really realise I was queer until I was 18 - I was like a very enthusiastic ally until I was 18. But I definitely was in an environment where I could explore it, and I do hope that to be the case for people younger than me.
Me and Nayeli, we are both on - well, I’m on the cusp of Gen Z. You’re firmly in Gen Z. I’m 23, you’re 22. I’m a 1998 baby. (turns to Nayeli) You’re 1999, right? But culturally, I’m very GenZ, definitely more so than millennial. Although there’s definitely slang and stuff I don’t get and have to look through TikTok trends and go like, “What the hell are they saying?” But I have a lot of hope for the future.
But on the flip side though… Sky, I know that one of the reasons why we decided to do this particular episode was because of a trend you have been noticing in your TikTok comments from younger teenagers, Generation Alpha, as you call it. Would you like to talk more about what you’ve observed?
Sky: Yeah. So I guess older Gen Z people are just pretty solidly Gen Z. I did see this awakening, having the realisation that Nayeli was talking about, bringing that anarchism into relationships and just queering your entire life, pulling that queer card so it just applies to everything. But this younger and younger generation, I find is very anti-polyamory, pro-monogamy and in a really, “If you’re spending time with this person, then you're not spending time with that person - “ I feel it is like a kind of capitalism, again, the commodification of time. I got into a conversation with somebody where I was like, “I’m trying to understand what you are coming from. Do you equate - like, what is a portion of love to you? Like is an hour spent to you equals like, this amount of love? How are you measuring that in your brain? I genuinely was trying to understand cuz I don’t work that way. I am also neurodivergent. It was like another awakening for me after I had my first queer relationship. I was like, “That was only 2 months, and it was deeper and more profound than my 4-year relationship with a man.” So, just this fixation on time and energy. It goes hand in hand with - We are selling our time and labour and bodies to capitalism, so of course, we are bringing that thinking into love.
It’s not so much a moralistic thing, maybe a bit, but it was that 180, again, we’re getting back to, “Oh, I could never do that. Oh, I value commitment, so I could never love multiple people. Oh, I believe in not sharing my partner.” Like that kind of rhetoric is showing up in my comments from very young people. I don’t debate them because they are 12 years old.
[Laughter]
But it’s really disturbing and I really hope that they just come out of that. I was a dummy at 12 too. We all are. We’re 12 years old. You shouldn’t have internet access at 12 years old, but -
Leanne: Hot take.
[Laughter]
Sky: It’s really interesting for me that you guys, like Nayeli was talking about, didn’t fall for that monogamy bullshit in high school and I love that for you. I definitely did. I used my boyfriends as a way to solidify my straightness and as social capital. Definitely.
I don’t know if you guys ever heard that Esther Perel quote, where she said, “Monogamy only exists in reality, it doesn’t exist in the past and it doesn’t exist in our minds”? And I kinda remember having that moment in my mind, that I have been indoctrinated with the Disney indoctrination, and I have witnessed all these people getting divorced around me in my entire adolescence. And in high school, everyone is just fucking everyone, and it’s completely normalised! So it’s okay that you waited 2 weeks before dating Britney, and then moved on to Ashley but why couldn’t you have just done that at the same time? You know? So that’s the thing that cracks me up about monogamous people, but I’m hoping that that sets off some lightbulbs. Plus, the influx of better representations of non-monogamous relationships. I’m hoping that will help but yeah, it’s a very weird trend to see.
Leanne: Yeah, and I remember in the creators’ group chat, when you brought this up, I was like, “Woah, that was so interesting.” And then Nayeli, you said something along the lines of how because of the climate emergency and all of this general global unrest that has been going on. I think that has a big impact on the psyche of young teenagers today, and maybe that’s kind of influencing their beliefs. I’m not gonna speak on your behalf, though, Nayeli. Can you just basically say what you said back then? Because that was really an interesting point.
Nayeli: Honestly I don’t even remember exactly what I said last time. I feel like all my ideas are just connected somehow. But in response to what Sky just said… Honestly, I’m not really too worried about these young kids. Everybody talks shit about things when they’re 12, they’ll be fine.
[Laughter]
Just wait until they actually have to move out of their parents’ house and reality hits them, they’ll change their minds. Which is also why Gen Z gets so radical. Once you’re confronted with the reality of late-stage capitalism, some lightbulbs go off.
But I do think it’s interesting how I feel like, each generation, their whatever ideas about what relationships should look like their parents had and how they fit into that narrative of whether their family is broken, and if they see it as a broken family, or if they just see it as not traditional but they don’t see it as inherently flawed. That totally shapes what you are going to think about relationships. Cuz I feel like a lot of younger kids right now don’t understand the full structure of why everybody’s relationships are a disaster. For me, I understand it’s because, in a way, we’re also in late-stage mononormativity, honestly.
Sky: Oh, that’s a spicy take!
[Laughter]
Nayeli: We’re starting to realise that the structure of mononormativity also doesn’t benefit us in the long-term resistance against all these other oppressive structures that we are trying to undo. So I think as more people start to realise the mechanisms of all that, you’ll start seeing how your decisions in your personal life are also connected to everything else. And if people don’t understand the larger picture, they just see like, “Oh, I see that my parents are divorced, and that’s really shitty, and that affected me as a child.” My parents are also divorced, I’m saying that as an example. People see like, “This is what my life looked like and historically, from what I know, the solution to this is that my parents should have stayed married, or they should have picked better people to stay married to. But in reality, that’s just conforming to the standards and a way to reform an inherently oppressive system which is mononormativity.
Sky: Yes!
Nayeli: That’s another thing. I’m gonna make an infographic about that sometimes, I feel like modern monogamy is technically a reformed version of really ugly human commodification of bodies, specifically femme bodies. A really horrible version of monogamy that was established many years ago. In a way, you can’t just get rid of the original dynamics of it. At the end of the day, a lot of people started normalising monogamous relationships because they needed a way to build patriarchal structures. They needed to know that, “This child is my biological child,” and there’s just so many other factors. The patriarchy does rely on monogamy in a way, so that’s another thing to think about.
Sky: Yeah, I talked about it too. I did a TikTok on how capitalism loves monogamy, specifically toxic monogamy. Can you guys imagine? Just think of all the media that is created that’s centred around toxic monogamy. All those rom-coms, those big cinematic gestures -
Nayeli: All those songs on the radio.
Sky: Every song. And also, feeling that insecurity in us to buy more things, to do more things to compromise, in my opinion, to be loved and to buy into that dream. And then: you’re buying a house together, buying a bunch of shit together, and then you have a kid and you buy a bunch of stuff for them, and then if you get divorced, you buy another house. And it’s just…
Nayeli: Why so much buying? Why so much consumerism?
Sky: Why so much buying?
[Laughter]
Nayeli: Why aren’t we sharing resources?
Leanne: And Valentine’s Day, we could talk about Valentine’s Day!
Nayeli: Yes.
Leanne: All that stuff. It’s wild. It’s super wild. When you mentioned Esther Perel, Sky, you reminded me of something else that I wanna address. We’re gonna be talking about the current state of affairs and what’s gonna be going on in the future.
As I’m sure you both noticed, this year has been a very big year for polyamory, in terms of getting awareness of polyamory into the media, into the zeitgeist. There have been way more articles about non-monogamy and opening up your relationship, and all that kind of stuff this year than there has ever been.
Sky: And a lot of them are bad.
Leanne: And unfortunately, a lot of them are bad. But it is something, right?
Sky: They try.
Nayeli: They come from psychologists too, which is -
Sky: I know, such a bummer.
Leanne: Yeah, but it’s been like a huge cultural moment, I feel. I mean, I started my page a year ago, and in the year I have been running this page, so many new pages have popped up in that time talking about this stuff. I do think it’s no coincidence that it happened at the same time as the late-stage pandemic, I guess. [Laughs] Late-stage capitalism, late-stage mononormativity, late-stage pandemic.
Sky: What year are we in of the coronavirus now?
Leanne: But I don’t think it’s an accident that as countries have been opening up, relationships have been opening up. It reminded me of the phrase that Esther Perel said one time. Because her work is informed by her experiences growing up in a town that was affected by the Holocaust, and people still having a lot of that intergenerational trauma from that experience. Something that she talked about was how - because a lot of her work is based in infidelity and why people cheat, about desire in long-time relationships, and how to cultivate and how monogamy isn’t the best structure for quite a lot of people and that kind of thing. One of the things that she said was how infidelity was in some ways “an antidote to death”. And while she was specifically talking about infidelity, in this case, I do think that a lot of the wisdom she says about cheating can be applied to non-monogamy and polyamory. Because she says things like, “When people seek an outside connection,” outside the the pair bond, the dyad, whatever, sometimes it’s not so much that they’re looking for another person but they’re looking for “another version of themselves”.
Sky: (simultaneously) They’re looking for themselves.
Leanne: Exactly. And regarding what she said about the “antidote to death”, she noticed that amongst her clients, a lot of the people who came to her with cheating stories. Usually these stories happened immediately after someone in the family died, or someone experienced an illness, someone developed terminal cancer. And the infidelity was a way for them to feel alive again, almost. Because the shadow of death made them think like, “Is this it? Is this who I am gonna be with for the rest of my life?” And that makes them question everything, and that’s why they cheat. Which is really tragic, it’s super tragic. And that makes me think, right? I wonder if this is what this is. The pandemic, people are dying all around us, and it’s making people go, “Wow, I’m in this marriage and this is it. I might die in a month, or less than that. What’s gonna happen?” That instability is making people go, “Oh shit, are there other options?” It’s so weird, it’s really weird. And I think, also, a good amount of it is just, maybe people are stuck in lockdown with their spouses and realising they hate them.
Nayeli: Yeah.
Leanne: Yeah. I think there’s a lot of that as well.
Sky: I think it’s like the perfect storm and I’m so excited to see it. I’m such an Esther Perel stan.
Leanne: Same.
Sky: I absolutely love her. Her TED Talk on cheating, I don’t want to give her too much credit, but at least for me, I think it was a cultural card in the house of cards, because I’m like, “Finally, we are fucking talking about it.” Can we talk about the fact that cheating is so normalised and so stigmatised and how it’s a symptom of a broader issue like the problem with toxic monogamy? It just needed to be said. Everything she said in that TED Talk, I was just like, snapping the whole time.
Leanne: Genuinely, it’s just like, mind blown every 5 seconds. Geuinely. Yeah.
Sky: And on her podcast too, which is one of my favourite podcasts ever - she posts recordings from her sessions - I think it’s so earth-shattering to hear other couples be so vulnerable and have those realisations in real time, talking about what the affair meant to them, acknowledging what it meant to the other person, and…I just don’t think we talked about relationships that way. It’s always been this understood taboos, like yes, cheating is a thing, but we can’t condone it, or we can’t question, “Why is this happening so much?” I credit her so much with how we are having these tough discussions now, and opening the door for monogamous couples to even have those discussions. Because of toxic monogamy, that’s what I say when I’m talking about cheating. People are put in this impossible situation, because you can’t even have that conversation with your partner. It’s a betrayal and a shattering of self even to admit that you’ve experienced attraction for someone else.
Leanne: Exactly. Exactly.
Sky: Because then you’re telling them, “Our relationship doesn’t matter, I don’t love you at all, nothing that we did mattered, XYZ.” All this bullshit. And it’s just not true. So a lot of people who are cheating are not bad people. I have cheated, and I have been cheated on, and both feel, not equally shitty, but shitty in their own ways. Because you’re doing this in order to protect your partner but you know that it’s wrong and you know that you’re hurting them. It’s just this impossible situation.
Leanne: You know, I’ve got a - related to that, Sky. I think it’s actually very pertinent that you brought this up. I’ve got a post coming up. It’s already on my Twitter, but I usually post my Instagram posts much later than when I put out my tweets. I wrote a thread about the one time that I cheated in a relationship, and how I’m not proud of that choice but I do feel that it was a justified, necessary evil. And it’s definitely spicy. It’s definitely a really spicy thread.
Sky: Yeah. You’re definitely gonna get some hate on that one.
Leanne: Ohhh, yeah. But I definitely want to bring light to how cheating is a very multifaceted issue, it’s not so black-and-white. And I think one of the most [explosion noise] things that Esther Perel said in her talks was “the victim of the infidelity is not necessarily the victim of the marriage”. And how some people use infidelity as a way to take back agency.
Sky: Yeah, distancing ourselves from - yeah. She talks about how it’s important to not have the binary of victim and perpetrator. We need to just get rid of that, and look at it like the multifaceted situation that it is.
Leanne: Absolutely. Anyway, we’re all Esther Perel stans. She’s great. I think if there is one person -
Nayeli: Although I do -
Leanne: If there was one person who -
Sky: (to Nayeli) What? No! Please! No!
Leanne: (to Nayeli) What?
Nayeli: I was going to say, I do appreciate Esther Perel’s work, although I do see Esther Perel as more of a mononormativity reformist and not an abolitionist.
Sky: Yeah. I know. She’s such a Bernie.
Nayeli: But that’s where Kim Tallbear comes in, though. Because Kim Tallbear is full-on, like, we need to abolish this. So I do relate a little bit more, a lot more, to Kim Tallbear’s work. But I do think that Esther Perel’s work is really good at introducing people into thinking about these concepts, in a great way.
Leanne: I think you need people on all sides. If you chuck people in the deep end, a lot of people are just gonna be like, “Ugh, no!” But then I think Esther Perel, while I completely understand what you mean by mononormativity reformist, I think she straddles that middle point to get people to sit on the fence a little bit more, and then we chuck them to the other side. [Laughs]
We had that same discussion. Remember when I posted that right-wing article -
Sky: Yeah, the article.
Leanne: - from Quillette or whatever it was, in our chat? And then we were all just collectively losing our minds over it, because there was this right-wing person talking about the benefits of polyamory, but from a very pro-natalist and heterosexual perspective. Just going like, “Yeah, you can still have your dyadic marriage, and also have these things that will benefit the dyad.” And it was just like, “Why are we focusing on the couple still? What is going on?!” [Laughs]
Sky: I think that Nayeli and I can probably relate to that too. Why I am so turned off by most polyamory content, or even main accounts, because they are all either dyads or triads. The language and everything is very mononormative and it’s still the same.
Nayeli: It’s still very reformist, I agree. A lot of times, I think the media’s obsession with triads is all about just trying to reform polyamory into mononormative standards.
Leanne: It’s like monogamy plus one.
Nayeli: Yes, exactly! They’re still perpetuating a lot of the same capitalistic and colonial ideas about having ownership over people’s bodies, if it’s like an exclusive toxic thing. So it’s not that different. But also the media would never actually talk to any of us about these things, so -
Sky: It’s been normalised but in a really mononormative way! I was at a party, a social gathering, with friends of my partner, friends of friends. She’ss not really that close with her, and I say that because I just really don’t like her that much. [Laughs] And I was overhearing this conversation, she’s very - a “monog” - and she doesn’t like me either, because I’m [squeals] queer, polyamorous, fuck everything. And I know that’s a threat to a lot of people’s self-concept.
Anyway, I was overhearing this conversation and she was, “Yeah, Brad and Kimberley” - or whatever the fuck their names are - “opened their relationship. But it makes sense. They’re doing it the right way. They have a contract. They are not allowed to do this, they’re not allowed to have sleepovers, she has to approve everyone,” blah blah blah. And she was listing all these things, just veto power, unhealthy rules and restrictions, and I had to say something. I was like, “That is immoral. What they’re doing is wrong, and it’s not going to last and they’re going to break up.” [Laughs]
Leanne: Oh my God.
Sky: She was just like, “No, it’s really healthy! and blah blah blah. And I kept overhearing. And yeah. She has this new partner, and it’s total New Relationship Energy. She’s getting lost in it, and her partner is getting upset, and she has already broken all those rules [laughing] on their stupid love contract. And I was like, how many times do you guys need to do this?
Nayeli: It’s giving unethical non-monogamy.
Sky: It’s giving unethical non-monogamy.
[Laughter]
Leanne: There’s definitely so many things where like - Okay, you can have agreements, but the moment you try to set rules around feelings, you are setting yourself up for failure.
Nayeli: Yeah.
Leanne: That’s what I realised. My first non-monogamous dynamic was your standard open relationship, sexually open but not romantically open. And over time, I very quickly realised that I didn’t want to have meaningless hookups and one-night stands all the time to avoid building a more emotional, romantic connection.
Sky: [sneezes] Sorry!
Leanne: What I realised eventually was just, “Why am I getting my knickers in a twist over my partner also having a deep connection with someone else? It’s fine, literally fine. So I moved from general non-monogamy to polyamory over time, because I was just like, “This is silly. Why are we worried about this?” I know so many couples who have a sexually open dynamic, and they only engage with other people at sex parties. Or you can go on dates but you can only go on three and then you never see them again.
Sky: That rule blows my mind. That’s where my asexuality comes in because I could just never do that. I need an intimate connection with somebody before I sleep with them. So that rule will never work for me.
Leanne: Absolutely. But I think that currently, everyone is questioning a lot of things. Throughout the pandemic, when people have not much to do and they are stuck at home and they’re lost in their thoughts. So many people. I had three friends come out as trans to me in the same week. [Laughs] And so many people are realising that they are neurodivergent because their routines are crumbling around them and they’re like, “Fuck!” And they don’t have the same coping strategies they did anymore. A lot of people questioning monogamy going like, “Oh my god. We’re in this global crisis, and stuff needs to change, because clearly -
I think monogamy is very rigid in some ways; when circumstances change, it doesn’t allow for a lot of flexibility. I definitely think that non-monogamous dynamics, they offer more flexibility, and versatility, and resilience through various circumstances in a way that, I personally feel, monogamy does not.
Sky: Yeah. I feel like it’s really interesting when people say that monogamy feels more secure to them, because it just feels the exact opposite to me.
Nayeli: Yeah. I like to use this analogy.
Sky: And I hate that phrase - oh, wait, I want to hear your analogy. Because I hate saying, “putting all of your eggs in one basket”. It’s icky.
Nayeli: I use a table analogy actually.
Leanne: Go on.
Sky: I want to hear yours.
Nayeli: So I like to describe it as: if you think of your partners as your support system, your emotional support system, who fill all of your needs, let’s say that’s how you sustain yourself. If you are a table and your partners are the legs. If you ever encounter a situation where you lose part of your emotional support system, you lose one of the legs on the table, and you have three other legs on the table who could be your other partners, you will be okay. If you lose one of the legs, you can still sustain yourself. That’s a much more sustainable structure. But if you are in a monogamous relationship, where you have one person fulfilling all of your emotional needs, and something happens, something happens to that one leg of the table, the whole thing comes down.
Leanne: And I think it’s particularly the case if you are in one of those monogamous dynamics where you’re not allowed to have close friendships outside of it, because, for fear of “emotional cheating” and all that kind of stuff. The common joke is like, “He’s got a girlfriend now. We don’t see him anymore. He doesn’t come and hang out with the bros!” And then, if that relationship blows up, and he doesn’t have any friends. This is so common. This is so common.
Sky: I think that plays in, again, to late-stage capitalism and why we’re all so fucking lonely. And that was what really radicalised me, and why my polyamory and relationship anarchy are absolutely part of my politic. Because at this point in time, the last thing that we need to be doing is isolating. We need to be forming intimate connections of all kinds, and relating to people so that we can fucking organise and overthrow capitalism.
Leanne: That’s so right.
Sky: It’s just so upsetting to me that - it was the closest to heartbreak that I felt in a really long time, and it was not a romantic relationship or anything. It was just a guy at work, and we were just chatting and bonding, and I was like, “We should grab a drink sometime. I like hanging out with you!” And this look came over his face, and he was like, “I don’t think my girlfriend would like that.” And I was like, “Oh god, what?”
Nayeli: Subtle ways mononormativity breaks your heart on a regular basis.
[Laughter]
Sky: Right, and I was just like absolutely devastated and I almost went into this thing, too, where I was like, “First of all, I’m gonna assume that you guys have some stupid rule that you can’t hang out with girls. Well, I’m not really a girl. Like, I am, in a really queer way that your girlfriend and probably you don’t understand.” [Laughter] So technically, we are outside of that gender role, as it is, but -
Leanne: That’s the most neurodivergent response I have ever heard.
[Laughter]
Nayeli: “Technically, I’m not opposite gender, so…”
[Laughter]
Sky: But I just want to shake him, you know? and be like, “I know you wanna hang out with me too. How is this not hurting your soul to say that? How are you not having this realisation? How oppressive that is?” It’s just really upsetting for me.
I always joke with monogamous people. “Are you really monogamous or are you polysaturated with one person, because we have no free time under late-stage capitalism?” And I think a lot of people are getting radicalised by that. Because they’re like, “Girl, I don’t have enough time for even one partner,” and I’m like, “Why?”
Nayeli: Yes, exactly.
Sky. “Because I have to work so much!” and I’m like, “Why?” Okay. There we go. The politics, the anti-capitalism.
Leanne: And I think it’s super telling that whenever I talk to people about monogamy - sorry, polyamory - the main kind of justifications that people have for saying that’s why they are practising monogamy or that’s why they don’t practise polyamory - they always say, “I could never share my partner,” or “I would get too jealous.” So, notice that both of these things are to do with their partners having other partners. Right? Both of these statements are to do with, “I could never deal with my partner having other partners,” but notice that they don't say anything about whether they would be able to handle multiple partners.
This is my hot take and I have been saying this for a very long time: I think most monogamous people are almost coerced into monogamy, because they themselves want to have multiple partners, but because they don’t want their partners having the same freedom, then they force themselves into monogamy to coerce their partners to also be monogamous.
Nayeli: Yes.
Leanne: Most people aren’t monogamous because they actually only desire one partner. That’s why people cheat. Because they wanna have that, but they don’t want their partners to have the same freedoms. That’s my hot take.
Nayeli: Exactly. And historically, that’s exactly how it was reformed too. Like, oh, women couldn’t have multiple partners so now I’m going to have my man also not have multiple partners. Like, that’s literally how the whole transition historically happened. It’s just having men - holding them to the same standards.
Leanne: And it’s funny because we should have gone in the opposite directions. Instead of women going, “We had to be monogamous this whole time, so you have to be monogamous as well.” And it’s like, “No, I want the same freedoms you do!” Give me all of them!
Nayeli: Yeah! Exactly!
Sky: And Nayeli, do you feel like it was the advent of modern birth control for women that shifted things, or…?
Leanne: I think that was probably a factor, yeah.
Nayeli: Probably. Although, it’s also how under settler-colonial governments, how they wanted to build our families. Even if we didn’t have birth control today, if we have a matrilineal, communal way to support our children, things would still look really different. We wouldn’t have such a focus on monogamy either. Birth control plays a factor, but if we reimagine all the other aspects of our society, that also wouldn’t even be an issue.
Leanne: Yeah. Hence on @remodeledlove’s page, a common question that Jess gets quite a lot is, “Who is the father?”
Sky: “How do you know that that’s your kid?” Yeah.
Nayeli: Why does it matter who’s the father though?
Leanne: It’s just like, why is everyone focusing on this?
Sky: Why does it matter? Yeah.
Nayeli: Like shouldn’t you care about every child in this society anyway? Why does it matter that they have your blood? Don’t you just want them to have a house, be happy, not have any emotional neglect? Why do you only care about your biological kid anyway? We need to shift to non-biological kids.
Leanne: For sure. Well, I think that’s all we have time for today but we covered so much in this hour, you guys. Oh my God. We talked about Scientology. We talked about late-stage mononormativity. We talked about how the pandemic’s influenced all of this stuff. Oh my God. This has been such a rich conversation. Thank you for joining me on this.
So, Nayeli, where can people find you on various platforms?
Nayeli: Yes. I have Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. My Instagram and TikTok are @antimononormative, and my Twitter is a slight variation because I could not fit it into the character limit. But you can find the link to my Twitter on my Linktree, on TikTok and Instagram.
Leanne: Okay, and Sky, where can people find you and your art?
Sky: So my art account is @femmmeowpulp, like pulp novels, and that’s also my Twitter handle. On TikTok, I’m femmmeow_ and then my meme shitposting account is just @femmmeow.
Leanne: Okay, beautiful. Thank you so much and have a great day!
Leanne: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Happy Polydays series. If you’d like to support my work, consider becoming a Patreon subscriber at patreon.com/polyphiliablog. You can also follow me at @polyphiliablog on Instagram, Tiktok, Facebook, and Twitter, buy my polyamory merch at polyphiliashop.redbubble.com, or book a peer support session with me on my website polyphilia.blog. Until next time!