Intimacy as healing and activism: Averting authoritarianism abed

Sex in the future will be influenced by queer theory spreading to straight people via polyamory spaces on social media, with the internet facilitating this shift in values over decades to come. This shift will contribute to empowering popular resistance against authoritarianism in all its forms, not only against the current fascist backlash, but in the long term, against patriarchal societal structures in general.

The idea that a man's role is to “put his foot down” when things get to loggerheads is one example of patriarchal entitlement to authority and decision power. This entitlement is further backed up by the attitude that men are supposed to be dominant and in charge by their nature, and women are supposed to be submissive and receptive by our nature. This attitude manifests in all kinds of places, even in gendered insults such as “bitch,” which means either that a man is being too submissive, or that a woman isn’t being submissive enough.

Women, by playing a more active role in the bedroom, make room to take a more active role in the relationship—or vice versa. This is more about the dismantling of patriarchal nonsense than the specific order, and the point anyway is that the next step is being more active in society. This was one of the Big Ideas running through my previous series on the feminist future of straight sex, and today I’ll be talking about a hotspot in this process: polyamorous social media discussion spaces.

Unpacking that patriarchal conditioning

Part of the problem of being queer or polyamorous is that queer and polyamorous people don't have the millennia of cultural production that straight people have, modeling how relationships are “supposed to go” in popular culture and instilling values aligned with their cis-hetero-monogamous lifestyle. 

This is because imperialists keep erasing queer history. From the Trump administration scrubbing DEI from dot-gov sites, to the Nazis burning the archive at Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexology, to the scholarly object of the meme-ified “they were roommates” trope, to the mental gymnastics of manosphere chuds grappling with just how overwhelmingly gay Ancient Greece and Rome actually were—queer and polyamorous folks have to struggle to survive within a culture that has repeatedly eradicated our own. Then, adding insult to injury, they have the audacity to say we’re “a fad out of nowhere,” when their One-Ideology-Constrains-All hucksterism is just a big-time con from way back to keep the ruling class in power forever by erasing everything that says we could (and did) live a different way that’s better for everyone except the ruling class. (Values-wise, of course I like AC and internet as much as the next person. It’s the psychos who’d rather rule a trash heap than share prosperity that are the real problem.)

However, the world-shrinking powers of the internet bring these scattered people together on social media, where we can engage in that cultural production at a global and decentralized level never before seen. We are ineradicable, because our so-called “lifestyles” just are another manifestation of the wild variegation of full human nature. Lots of people are straight and monogamous, and some are queer, and some are polyamorous, and all of us are equally valid and equally human, and able to live together in harmony.

I am active in several such polyamory groups, so I won't be linking any of them. I'm in the best ones, in my opinion, so I can't link those—and the ones I'm not in, I can't speak to, so I have nothing to offer in that department. Go find them on your own, if you're interested; this is my personal experience for the day.

What I see in these groups is a lot of straight people and straight-passing bi people, many of whom are married, unpacking their patriarchal and capitalist conditioning under the tutelage of queer and experienced polyamorists. There is vulnerability, openness, encouragement, and growth, all on display. It's sorely needed, because many of the folks coming to these groups for advice are doing so because they face stigma in their local communities, and either don't want to come out, or have no one to turn to for a sympathetic ear. And because the people who weigh in on these groups become invested in the stories, we often get follow-ups—some sad, but mostly positive!

What this means is, individual polyamorists scattered around the globe are able to circumvent disapproval in their communities by turning to allies on the internet. Because it's a lot of married straight and straight-passing bi people, this empowers those people to improve their relationships and thereby provide a healthier environment for their kids, which better positions them to pass on their queer-theory-improved values to successive generations. As they improve their relationships and continue to raise their kids, their communities will see how well these folks are doing, which will help them directly combat that very stigma they use the internet to avoid. 

This creates pockets of acceptance which grow over time, further reducing stigma in local communities because simply knowing marginalized people drives acceptance of them. This is variously called the Contact Hypothesis or Intergroup Contact Theory, and while we know of epistemic and practical limitations that currently make it unfeasible (or at least unwise) to attempt to apply this principle at scale in policy, the mere fact that we know of these obstacles gives us next steps for further research.

Intergroup contact theory

Dr. Bob Altemeyer, inventor of the Authoritarianism scale based on his research in the 70s, speculates in his 2006 book The Authoritarians (chapter 2, p. 67-68) that the “liberalizing” effect of universities comes not from leftist professors haranguing conservatives, but from hanging out with people who are different from you, seeing that they’re regular people too, and sometimes, having sex with them:

“…I think when High RWA [Right-Wing Authoritarian] students get to a big university whose catchment area is the world, and especially if it’s located some distance from mom and dad, they simply begin to meet all kinds of new people and begin to have some of the experiences that most of their classmates had some years earlier. The drop does not come from reading Marx in Political Science or from the philosophy prof who wears his atheism as a badge. These attempts at influence can be easily dismissed by the well-inoculated high RWA student. It probably comes more from the late night bull-sessions, where you have to defend your ideas, not just silently reject the prof’s, and other activities that take place in the dorms, I’ll bet.”

As this effect continues to spread and reduce stigma, people can more freely decide if polyamory is right for them. That's not just speculation; it's happening right now in my life. I've dated long-term cometary partners a state or two away in unaccepting towns. I've participated in open conversations at dinner tables and bars about our relationships. I meet my partners’ partners and kids. I’m active in their lives while I’m part of them. I'm also not some unstable fly-by-night hookup, my relationships typically last for years and I first started dating polyamorously about twenty years ago, so I have a lot of experience in a lot of different long-term relationships. There have been drier periods in my life (some very dry indeed), but I’m typically dating three to five people at a given time, and have been pretty uninterrupted at that level for a few years now. I’m not just “hearing about these stories on the internet,” I’m a living part of these stories in real life.

It is from this firsthand experience that I say this is a form of genuine grassroots sexual liberation, which will continue to percolate through our culture: people directly helping people, by putting in the emotional labor of giving sound relationship advice to those struggling under both cultural stigma and a lack of cultural production. This help, in turn, goes on to become that very cultural production that has been lacking, further empowering the polyamory community to spread and pass on our values. Because straight people can be polyamorous too, the allyship thereby created between straight and queer people will be even more enduring than the already-enduring allyship from queer acceptance groups, for the simple reason that straight people are in this community and not just “care about people who are in it.”

History repeats, but life goes on

We are talking on the time-scale of decades now. I don’t think we’re due for another coherent sexual liberation movement in the USA until the 2060s or so. Right now, we're seeing a repeat of last century’s fascist backlash, first initiated against the queer community in Weimar Germany and culminating in the Nazi Holocaust and World War II. We'll have to deal with this backlash before we can be so openly culturally focused on sex itself again—and I think that will take until the ‘40s, just like last time. But this time, the intervening baby boom and decade of “getting back to normal” will have these ongoing polyamory discussions, uninterrupted and uncontained no matter how far this backlash gets before the inevitable fascist implosion. Life goes on.

This backlash has been brewing for the last hundred years, a toxic stew of ignorance and fear and suspicion that is now boiling over once again. They don't want this cultural shift to happen, and they're willing to fight about it. As for why, I'll once again turn to In Search of a Flat Earth:

“...the unifying theme is a desire for a sort of ‘restorative authoritarianism,’ for a strongman to come in and forcibly put everything back ‘where it belongs.’ Everything else is aesthetic. Like Flat Earth, there is a sympathetic nugget in the anxiety that the world has gotten too complex… but the Q analysis of the problem is that the fault lies with the people outlining the complexity… So how is something like this making the world simpler? Because it takes all this, the chaos… and turns it into a single entity [i.e. a scapegoat]. All the world’s complexity, all the chaos, it’s all the fault of… a single, tangible, identifiable group with a written agenda… And it is that disruption [of protesting injustices and disrupting the status quo], not the underlying injustices, not the underlying conflicts, that make QAnon anxious, that make QAnon feel like the world has gotten too complex. They don’t want those complexities to exist, and by talking about them you make them exist… A disruption of the status quo is seen as a disruption of the natural order. The problem they see is that no one has made those people shut up. That is what they want: someone to come in, and make those people shut up and go away, to put things back ‘where they belong’.”

And that just can't happen, because once again, what they're fighting against is actual human nature, in all its woolly queerness: not to be this way or that way, but to be all of them, and to be allowed to freely determine and be who we are ourselves without undue social stigma. That is liberation, and fascists can fight it, they can set it back, they can suppress it—but they can’t stop it, not in any Once And For All kind of way. People want to be free, and we’ll never stop trying.

So all this—all this authoritarian control, all this patriarchal domination, all this fascist backlash—every awful thing that has happened from a couple hundred years of capitalism and a few thousand years of patriarchy, is a repeatedly-foundering aberration. It's a doomed-to-fail attempt to override reality by forcing people to act as if we all inhabit their version of reality. That is why they need control in every context: they’re trying to patch in a re-skin of the human experience, which only works if everyone goes along with it, which only happens if everyone who doesn’t want to is forced to comply.

But human nature doesn't have to be enforced. You don't need to raise your kids to be straight if they're born that way. You don't need structural incentives to promote productive marriages, if that's what people naturally do anyway. You don't need myths about queer people trying to defy some god or desecrate human nature or destroy society, unless malicious intent is your only cognitively acceptable way to understand why someone would “choose” to be queer or poly in a society that overtly hates us. You would only need social pressure to enforce straight monogamy, if straight monogamy isn't the whole story of what’s natural.

This tension with reality is also why fascists must prioritize loyalty over competence. Fascists have to do some pretty bizarre things to enforce their version of reality upon people, such as presenting a narrative of constant victory to sustain the plebeians’ morale, which requires a revolving door of ready scapegoats to blame, who must in turn be forcibly and visibly dominated for the sake of keeping things going. (They have to keep things going; taking time to stop and think is how they fall apart.) 

As this cycle repeats and escalates, anyone who doesn't see that it's only a matter of time before they're on the chopping block will, of increasing necessity, be a spineless weasel who doesn't believe in anything except unquestioningly carrying out orders. In turn, those orders will become increasingly decoupled from reality, as fascist leaders drink their own Kool-Aid by believing their own propaganda—because only a true believer, or a truly committed charlatan, could possibly keep up the act for that long.

This is why sexual liberation will always be an axis for resistance against fascist backlash, authoritarian control, and patriarchal domination. No matter the manifestation, no matter the form, any attempt to control human nature by convincing people we are anything less than our full wild selves, will always be vulnerable to the most basic reality testing. Trying to stifle that testing more or less amounts to brainwashing, and breaking free of brainwashing will always be possible, both to start and to spread. All them fascists indeed bound to lose, because their anti-reality ideology pragmatically requires them to plant and fertilize the seeds of their own destruction.