“Young” (i.e., immature) being the key word there.
I’d like to think that most guys mature a bit after the age of 18 or so.
:eek::eek:
Words fail me…and I’m not even going to ask how you stumbled across that site 
but are we assuming that both partners are into this? How often is it the wife doing the beating? Are there ground rules for the spanking? How hard, how many slaps? Can you use instruments besides your hand?
“the husband as the head of the household, and the wife as his helpmeet.”
Looks like someone could use a proofer-mate. (Also, I originally read the word as “helmet.”)
Was that statement made as a universal? Or did he say that polyamory was more honest for him, and then other people started claiming that it was supposed to apply to everyone?
I’m not gonna go dig through the other thread to find it, so please cite your claim.
Helpmeet is the original term, if that’s what you’re referring to.
On a quick perusal:
- Yes, the site is emphatic about this.
- Never, the site is emphatic about this too - they take a certain fundamentalist attitude to the different roles of male and female. If you’re into being switches, they recommend you look elsewhere, and good fortune attend you.
- Yes, they have “play spanking”, “maintenance spanking” and “punishment spanking”, the last of which is seen as something to be avoided, and they take pains (heh…) to distance it from domestic violence, which is rightly seen as abhorrent
- , 5) How long is a piece of string?
Seriously? I assumed it was a typo for “helpmate.” What the fuck is a “helpmeet”?
Do they, though? I was actually pretty impressed by the way it was structured, at least on the front page–“this is what we believe; we ask that you only post here if you believe the same things; but if you don’t, there are many other resources for you, which we encourage you to seek out” was more or less the impression I got.
I think they’re dead fucking wrong about a lot of things, but I’ll defend their right to live as they want so long as it’s consensual and they don’t try to force it on me, too.
A helpmate.
It’s actually kind of a neat word. It was a mistake based on a translation that said that God made a “help meet” or maybe a “helpe meet” for Adam. And then people started thinking it meant a “helpe-meet” for Adam. Helpemeet. Helpmeet. Whee!
But “meet” just meant “fitting.” So, it just means a helper who is fitting. Eve was meet for Adam (not meat!) 
Later, people started changing it to “helpmate” probably because it just kinda looked like it should be helpmate.
Anyway, that’s what I remembered, and I looked it up and am not crazy! Um. Not crazy for remembering it that way, at least.
The things you learn when you read novels set in the middle ages, and the internet!
Foolish jsgoddess: there *was *no internet in the middle ages.
Only because the messenger pigeons were too slow…
They sent specially-trained flocks of messenger pigeons, each carrying part of the message. Though they might take different routes to their destination, by the time they arrived, they would carefully sort themselves so that the segments of the message would be read in the order that they were sent in.
These were actually the progenitors of the birds used for PigeonRank.
Well, they’re not obnoxiously evangelical about it, but they still think that God says (all) women should be submissive to their husbands, and that the high divorce rate is the fault of the damn’d feminists with their devil’s talk of gender equality. I think that’s enough to say that they believe everyone should follow their One True Way, even if they’re being nice about it.
I don’t care if they think I *should *follow their One True Way. I think everyone should follow *my *One True Way–after all, it’s mine, so it *must *be right. The only thing that concerns me is if they try to *make *me follow theirs, and I see that nowhere on their agenda.
Oh, I’m not concerned about them at all, and although I may look at them a bit askance for believing that all women should be submissive, I’m hardly outraged about it. It’s just a notable difference between their site and what I’ve seen on BDSM sites that support similar relationships, where there’s usually a strong emphasis on “This is a lifestyle that we have chosen, but it’s not for everyone.”
That’s because BDSM is based in personal preferences, while this site is as least ostensibly based on a religious text. It’s logical that the former wouldn’t want everyone to be like them while the latter would.
One may nitpick away at this but I have a problem with using the term polyamorous to refer to the OP. Hedonistic I could see.
Polyamorous implies that some form of love is involved (there’s the nit-picky part) and also suggests that love and sex are not mutually exclusive. Yet I can think of a number of people I love whom I’d never dream of having sex with.
Indescriminate use of polyamorous is a careless way to label strictly sexual relationships.
Sorry about the very late response, in a potential fit of irony I was on vacation with my wife for our anniversary.
Yes, and no. Lemme lay a bit more definitions–and admittedly, this may be idiosyncratic to the poly message board that I frequent, so that’s your disclaimer right there, I know of an online community of a few hundred people who work this way: a “primary relationship” is someone you share finances and living space with. You can have more than one, if you have a stable triad or quad that shares a house (interestingly, stable triads of either polarity (MMF or FFM) seem to be the most common poly relationship in the long term). A “secondary relationship” has some form of commitment to emotional intimacy but no implied or overt sharing of housing or finances. A “tertiary relationship” is pretty analogous to an “open marriage” sort of thing–you’re dating, but that’s that, with no implied emotional intimacy beyond friendship.
The other thing is this–there’s nothing that expressly prohibits moving between levels. Anyone who would be a second primary relationship for me would have to have been in a “secondary” status for quite some time–only natural, given that I was dating my wife for two years before we even got engaged.
Absolutely, and I typically allow secondary partners the same courtesy (since they’re people who are around for years, in the ideal case).
I find that it’s really hard to find “poly relationships” in the wild, there’s a lot of disapproval out there about them. The ones I come across when I’m not specifically looking inside the little online poly community I frequent are more likely to be as you describe.
This is one of the reason the community I’m in differentiates between primary and secondary and tertiary relationships as a rule of thumb–it’s the level of commitment and support you’re prepared to offer. For obvious reasons, I’d think, most poly folk I know are far more scrupulous about birth control (multiple methods are the rule) and such. As for the care and support thing, I don’t think it’s that entirely too big a deal–even in normal monogamous life, there’s no guarantee your dad and you dad-in-law won’t both get prostate cancer at the same time (to pull a random example). Most people are capable of dealing with multiple crises effectively, I think.
Ultimately the rule is the same as in any other kind of sexual relationship–you don’t have sex with someone without accepting the risk (whatever it is) that pregnancy will happen. We go out of our way, as above, with multiple contraceptive methods, and given that she’s prepared to accept the consequences if the stars align infavorably. It works the same from her end, and that’s roughly how we would have dealt with it had she become impregnated… we’re both poly, after all, although she made a personal choice while we’re trying for a baby ourselves to not seek out new sexual relationships while her birth control was not active–again, something a mono person might do as well. At least part of the timing of us having children was that she had no ongoing other relationships at the moment, for that matter. While we’re on that subject, I know a poly quad with four kids. You might be able to guess which two parents produced each of them, but it’d be impolite to do so out loud, and they’re being raised as siblings.
I note most people who are successful in poly relationships tend to be low-maintenance. I wouldn’t be surprised to see that it correlated highly.
I would completely concur with you, and agree that “polyamorous” requires that there be a loving, intimate relationship that goes beyond sex (And doesn’t, strictly, have to include sex at all) vs. the open/swinger “hedonistic” thing, which I’m personally not really into (even if I was in college, but wasn’t everyone?).
To be sure, the number representing their order was written in illuminated ink, which is where the IP (Illuminated Pigeon) address comes from.