Mononormativity and Polyamory: Dr. Ellie Anderson
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- čas přidán 9. 06. 2022
- At Pomona College's March 2022 Hen Talks event, Philosophy professor and Overthink podcast co-host Ellie Anderson talks about the problems with the default expectation of monogamy, and why open relationships and polyamory can be liberating for individuals and communities. She addresses Michel de Montaigne's monogamous view of friendship, Simone de Beauvoir's existential philosophy of love, and Clayton Echard on ABC's reality show the Bachelor.
How are these videos so good but the comment sections so ugly?
The monogamists feel that their way of life is being threatened. Actually, most monogamists can at least understand and respect that some people might want to do relationships differently than the norm. What I'm seeing in this comment section are religious nutjobs who think that anyone who's not monogamous is inherently evil. They can't just let people live they way they want because they are control freaks
another provocative bunch of thoughts from Prof Anderson. I'd only add that the sooner the new narrative considers the invention of monogamy as conferring a reproductive advantage for the group, not the individual, the sooner we get outside this box in which we rattle around trying to figure it out why the individual would sign up for it. the answer lies in between the individual and their particular milieu, another mutual constitutive form.
We have become consumers in every sense of the word. We have this notion that being free is to experience endless variety, that freedom means having a vast range of people, ideas, and experiences to sample, as if the universe didn't also occur in William Blake's grain of sand. Perhaps this is where the expectation that monogamous partners be "everything" to each other comes from. It is a peculiarly modern expectation, in any event.
So talented professor I love your organized presentation.🙋🙋🙋🙋🙋🙋🙋
More people need to be talking about this!
But they don't....
interesting talk, maybe polyamory gives so much greater freedom than mononormativity that people can't simply hanlde the responsibility that comes with such greater freedom. And this might be the reason why mononormativity is exercised by so many people since it takes off much of the responsibility, since everyone else apart from the chosen partner becomes a no-no, thus making everyone else not a possible encounter for the person. Monormativity entails limited possibilities in terms of the number of people one is in contact with and, presumably, in terms of the experiences one has with people.
But that's an interesting point to ponder about, since one might argue for a more enriching experience with just a single person than with a multitude of persons. And in order for this enriching experience to happen, one might have to stay with that person for a long time without having to bracket other experiences with other persons. If the criterion here, which prof Anderson also follows, is the quality of the experinece one has with someone else, then being monoamorous needn't be as bad as it is presented in the video.
Maybe a synthesis of those two is what we are looking for after all, that is mononormativity seen as a special case of polyamory. In this way, one gets the benefits of both without having to resort to either.
Yeah,
thats utter b.s. and literally just shows you WANT these things to be equal.
I stopped reading at “can’t simply handle the *noun* that comes with *abstract noun.*” yeah, you definitely have a nature, well thought out idea. SIKE!
Mature, well thought out idea*
@@user-pi9pi3gy8h what exactly are you disagreeing with?
This question could be rephrased as: is it acceptable for older women to date younger men / older men and who it benefits asking the question what are we, because if you never ask that, what difference is what you have from dating? Whose position is worse off in society that reaassurance of fidelity could benefit them?
This is a brilliant class. Thank you!
“Overthink” or “Underthink”?
Perhaps if you made an argument instead of an insult, some might think you had a reasonable point.
The channel raised the question by its title.
Assuming that romantic relationships are fundamentally romantic is a major category error. There are political, business, legal, diplomatic relationships. There are non consensual relationships. I am obligated to attend schools, pay taxes, serve in the military, etc. Why would one assume that romantic or sexual or marital relationships ought to conform to casual friendship? Historically, marriage has been a mix of economic, political, religious, and romantic.
To put this another way, sexual/romantic/marital relationships exist on a spectrum between the casual/idiosyncratic and the religio-political/dutiful. Where they lie on that spectrum can be debated and experimented with, especially after the advent of birth control, but an intellectual ought to remain aware that they are playing with fire.
It's so incredibly unfair that the norm of heterosexual couple has so many advantages. And anything else is STILL seen as weird, or worse. Including just being freaking single. Not to mention how expensive it is.
Yeah,
but Heteronormativity is a valid Word, while Mononormativity is not.
Heteronormativity is that way because it has an objective function, which is easily knowable.. it's creation of life make it superior regardless if people like it or not.
I’m 31 and live in eastern US, single, in a van because an apartment is not something that the average single person can actually afford anymore.
Heterosexual couples are the only ones that can reproduce, hence why they contribute to society and have more "privileges".
dr ellie droppin philosophies 🎉
Well, that _is_ her job after all.
This argument is not new to me. If I can love more than one pet, more than one child, and more than one friend, why can't I love more than one romantic partner? Here is why; the feeling prohibits it. When a person contemplates a second pet, there is no feeling that informs his conscience of a violation against the first animal. In fact, one may think a second pet may increase the joy of the first. Same with a child. No mother is so enamored with her child that she thinks that another one would be horrible. If anything, her joy over the one will probably encourage a second. Friends are no different. If one companion is a good time, then many will only multiply that prospect. So why are we condemned to one romantic partner? Romantic love is characterized by an involuntary rapture of the other. If it is not all consuming, then it is not romantic love. A secret crush or passing flirtation is not romantic love. How many people go too far in their romantic relationships by even cutting off friends and family without the prompting of the betrothed? This impulse can not be thought out any more than chemistry can be workshopped. Polygamists consider everything except the feeling that animates the phenomena. Now some will say this is infatuation. When this falls away you have "real love". Here is the problem with that analysis; platonic love is not romantic love. You don't want to gift your significant other with a base love that can be meted out to a crew of friends. Imagine if I were to instruct someone to love their friend without fondness. There is a love that is without fondness. This is the love of strangers. If you see someone in distress, you may be moved to pity, but don't have any specific affection catalyzed by experience or cherished personality traits. You just hate to see a person go hungry, and so you feed them. That is not friendship. That is kind. It is possible to love enemies in that you do not return evil for evil. That is not fondness. Removing the key ingredient is not allowed. Rapture demands a singularity of commitment and focus. You can't have fourteen callings in life. You can have many interests in life, but an interest is not a calling.
Consider dissatisfaction. A woman can be so angry or disappointed with her boyfriend that she may leave him indefinitely. How many mothers would be so angry or disappointed in their child that they would leave them indefinitely? We have to be super careful with comparisons. Parallels are good for ballpark understanding, but not deep investigation. Hail is like snow because it falls from the sky and is cold. Yet snow has never cracked a windshield.
Leopard King,
Thank you for this moving account of the merits behind monogamy.
I was having a crisis of sorts about monogamy. Though I felt drawn to it, I couldn’t make it “make sense.” It was endlessly conflicting. I was beginning to think I soon would be needing to confront & break my social conditioning and embrace polyamory, or at the very least embrace the notion of open relationships.
I see now that romantic love must be singular, for romantic love is distinct from its counterparts. What a relief.
@@porphyrogenita_ This was an unexpected pleasure. I am glad to have restored your trust in the impulse toward monogamous relationship. Not that I would judge if you chose otherwise. Also, life is not perfectly rational. I like sorbet. I have no idea why. If I tell you it is because I like sweet things, I can also point out sweet things that I don't enjoy. If I tell you it is because I love fruit, I can pick one or two fruits that repel me. If I say it is because it is smooth, I can think of food with a smooth texture that I distain. My dialectical mind fails me in this pursuit. I have no idea why I like sorbet, but it is enough to like it.
Not at all. I told my best friend we should be exclusive. He agreed, and we both broke up with all the other friends we had at the time.
I find it interesting that LGBT people are automatically grouped into the non monogamous category and the value of monogamous relationships seems underrepresented. Talking about property, resources seems to be dangerously material in it's dialectal analysis. Jealousy isn't so easy to quantify, IMHO. The Bachelor is REALLY stupid. The contestants are morons who reject intellectual curiosity. Using it as any kind of evidence even as an outlier is unnecessary.
Ideologies and morals asside, assuming a couple is not forced into it, monogamy has to offer, lower rate of STDs and higher rate of trust. Both, seem to be good for survival
Children?
No mention of marriage, children, the high incidence of child abuse by stepparents, nor why colonial countries with Judao-Christian monogamy have flourished. Young people often think it's cool to push the boundaries- be novel, new, unique, famous.
It seems that you have a worldview strongly biased toward white supremacy and Christianity.
The concept of “step parents” only exists because we limit parenthood based on genetics. Colonial countries have thrived by oppressing everyone who isn’t a cis/het white man. This is such a white male boomer take, it couldn’t be that there are multiple ways of being, you’re not out of touch. The kids are wrong!
So many insecure straight men in these comments, love your video Doctor Ellie!
That's not my observation, having looked through the comments a bit myself.
Why do we assume that monogamy was a result of colonization or patriarchy EXACTLY?
Why do we assume that you you can LOVE multiple people? How do you differentiate love and lust within polyamory as described here?
Why do we assume that intimacy is good, no matter the context?
Why do we assume that polyamory is the solution to monogamy?
Why do we assume monogamy is bad or incomplete?
Why do we assume suffering in romantic relationships is inherently a fault of culture?
This whole lecture isn’t truth seeking. It has a goal (end point) and it’s making logical leaps of faith and deception (essentially) to serve the argument! It’s propaganda! It’s lobbying! It’s pernicious persuasion! It's intellectual dishonesty!
A lot of these "assumptions" are based on real experiences and feelings that people actually have in their relationships. We know it's possible for a person to love multiple people because there are people who really do love multiple others.
Physical contact with others is good simply because it makes us FEEL good. It's not an assumption, it's a real experience that even you can have if you try it yourself.
As for liking more than one person at a time, I for one can attest to having multiple crushes all at once! In fact, it's possible for me to pass 10 beautiful women on the street and find every one of them attractive all at the same time. And I also love multiple people; I love my family and friends deeply.
I can understand how this talk would seem strange to you if you truly are only capable of loving one person at a time and if you've never felt the joy of physical contact, but I'm sorry to say that most people are not like you. Most people understand these things intimately and directly from experience, no "assumption" necessary.
absolutely agree
All lectures are 'propaganda'. A lecture is a passing on of knowlege not a dialoge.
That said, I can agree that monogamy seemes to be many peoples honest feelings. What I disagree with is that all people are monogamous. It's a diffrence in how you expirence love. Some people love people in a way that's unconstraient by the type of focus monagomus people seem to feel.
Intimacy is good, because it itself is good. In itself the love and connection is good, there's no wrong context
@@catsaresocute650 you're falling into the naturalistic fallacy: just because some people feel a certain way naturally doesn't mean that it is right. Schizophrenia is natural...but we all know that the ramblings and perceptions are wrong.
On the first point: that is so warped and twisted. Is 2+2=4 "propaganda"? Let's get real. Don't overthink, it's a disease.
Absolutly insane. Normalizing polyamory will ruin a society. She should know this as a professor. “Mononormativity” my a**.
You would think this would be obvious, but apparently not :/
Intellectuals tend to fall in love with their own “intellect” (not to be confused with the Truth; They rarely overlap!)
Could you explain how polyamory would ruin society?
@@jonahbranch5625 everything is described in the work 'Sex and Culture' by anthropologist J. D. Unwin. From his research he found out that sexual constraints led to a flourishing culture. Also monogamous societies that didn't allow sex before marriage flourished the most. Conversely, societies that allowed sexual freedom would always collapse within 3 generations.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_Culture
@@andersandersen5134 interesting reference. I wonder how well it holds up almost 100 years later. I'm still skeptical as he only looked at 6 civilizations to draw his conclusion, and the way he measured the "success" of a society is how efficient it is at growing and colonizing it's neighbors. I just skimmed the wiki, but from what I can tell, his rational is that cock-blocking the younger generation and utilizing their sexual frustration to fight wars was beneficial for society. This could be true but I doubt that this definition of success is even desirable to most people these days. Technology is so efficient that we don't have to work 40 hours a week anymore to sustain ourselves. In the past, 90% of the people had to farm and just barely sustained themselves (at least in the case of Rome), but today, one farmer can feed a small city.
Regardless, I don't think I want to live in a autocratic society which dictates when I have sex. I'd much rather have a flourishing love life than go to war so that my government can genocide our nearest neighbor for some land. Maybe they collapsed for good reason. Rome was built on slave labor but we don't praise slavery just because Rome was successful. Even though slavery was useful for society, we can't justify it's use. In the same way, if there's some benefit to monogamy, we can't justify forcing it onto people.
We have too much technology today for someone's sexual habits to have any noticible effect on the well-being of society as a whole. I mean, since the time the book was written we have almost completely abolished the need of physical labor by the use of natural gases. The effect of machines thousands of times stronger and more efficient than a human body surely has a larger effect on GDP than some horny young adults.
Extremely banal.
Love is a limited asset, like everything else that characterizes us. As usual, the proponents of polyamory are the ones who benefit more from it. All the rest is the usual bullshit talk about being more open etc. etc. The fact is, that modern relationships are extremely fragile, and partners are seen just as expendable goods. This is what you get when egoism in unchecked.
I don't understand. Polyamorists are polyamorous because they benefit from it? I don't know about you, but I only do things that I benefit from. Even monogamists are monogamous because they benefit from monogamy.
Also, polyamorous people only date other polyamorous people. People want to be in polyamorous relationships and people often enjoy such arrangements. No one is forcing you to be polyamorous, you only do it if you want to, and only with other consenting adults. What's so bad about that?
@@jonahbranch5625 real monogamists benefit from monogamy, but they don't see their partner as expendable. They value their family and often make sacrifices for it. Keep in mind that serial monogamy is not real monogamy.
Nowadays a number of people break marriages because they "discover" that they are poly, and expect their partner to go along with it, otherwise facing a divorce. There's nothing inherently wrong with polyamory, it's just the lastest shallow trend driven by compulsive comsumerism. To each their own
Love isn't a limited asset, but time and resources and engery are. Putting the effort into a poly realtionship would mean the effort of having two+ entire relationships. Not that many people can make this effort.
And modern relationships are hard bc we've never devloped the culture for having leaving an option, where the choice to be in and leave are so free. I think that's alright, we just need to commit hard to our relationships then those aren't a problem. But ofc you do need to commit to those thogether
Jealousy is insecurity. It is not love. There is no love between people who are jealous.
@T B Terrirorial imperative is a trait of inferior mammals. Sapiens are supposed to have a cortex, especially the frontal and prefrontal. There's no such thing as an "illegal immigrant". No one owns the land, the Earth. It belongs to ALL of us. But what has territorial got to do with jealousy? Oh, yes, of course: slavery, indebted servitude, Feudalism and business, neoliberalism and disaster capitalism and Putin-omics, racism, bigotry and in a word "Brexit". Sorry, I forgot about territory. Nationalism IS war.
@T B Of course, jealousy is also "normal".
@T B Then we have a different definition of "Love". (Surprise Surprise ). I'll go with a "Love ethic " as defined and described by bell hooks.
@T B yes, there's Love between jealous people but it is a very inferior kind of love, so inferior that I see no real love there at all. Insecurity is not love.
@T B Straw man? How so? Do you know what the straw man fallacy is?
Presupposition: Intimacy is a good thing.
Well damn, you think a philosopher, who is worth their salt, would at least demonstrate the validity of such a foundational pillar of their argument. That statement is so glaringly naive. This kind of argumentative sleight-of-hand is the sort that belongs to a philosophizing magician (deceiver) rather than a magical philosopher (truth revealer)!
What I realize from ingesting this channel’s videos is: how important it is to pair honesty (a reverence and admiration for the divine truth) with your intellectual endeavors! There is so much dishonesty presented here. We pay thousands of dollars to universities not for education, but indoctrination!
@@manlikeJoe1010 yes! A philosopher’s capstone on their value hierarchy should be Truth! Unfortunately, many so-called philosopher’s capstone is Power, or Compassion, or Pride, or whatever other lesser “virtue”. They’ve lost their way and they lead their flock off the path.
Nice speech. Next time, bring some evidence, and then you'll have the start of a basis for an argument.
@@thepubliusproject here come the white knights...
@@SonnyWane ah yes, insults instead of arguments. The last refuge of the second grade.
Let me know when you have an answer to offer, as opposed to the tantrum you gave.