I was kind of fond of this, but it might be too obscure in retrospect. Or it might not translate in english how I intended it too.
Turning ones back/deep end can be taken as…well, never mind. I could have a lot of fun with the ball thing too, but I don’t think that translates the same (ball size is comparable to intellegence…large balls indicate you are stupid).
I remember the thing about the breasts and thinking the same exact thing. lol. Still, the one he did when the boyfriend went out of town and the girlfriend cheated on him, and he compared sperm count (both of the boyfriend before he left, low, the cheating lover, higher, and the boyfriend on return after a week, highest)…not only was it funny, but that seemed pretty telling. I remember something similar in biology/anthropology in school, so he can’t be ALL bonkers (and I believe thats what John is also refering too).
I agree that polygamous relationships ought not be forbidden by law, and eventually should get legal recognition. I prefer to separate them from gay marriage for two reasons:
Allowing gay marriages is as easy as changing a couple pronouns in the straight-marriage laws. The infrastructure is in place, the case law is in place, everything’s in place for allowing it. Polygamous marriages with their more-than-two-people interrelationships are a whole nother kettle of fish and will take quite a while to sort out. By separating the two issues, we allow the simple stuff to go ahead now while we work out the complex stuff later.
Whereas gay couples in marriage can pretty much go for a “one size fits all” set
of legal rights, my perception is that polygamous relationships come in all kinds of different forms, from patriarchal religious settings in which property rights will pass down to male children, to hippy free-love settings in which all children are raised communally and in which the notion of property is itself rejected. Ultimately, there may not be just one polygamous marriage model that we can enshrine in the law and satisfy everyone; we may need to deal with polygamous marriage through private contracts unique to each relationship.
Well, since this debate has been turned on its ear and also seems to be winding down, maybe someone can answer something thats puzzled me for a long time. Why do people feel threatened by such differences like gay marriage or polygamous marriage? From a religious standpoint, don’t they feel that if God disapproves the people will be going to hell anyway? Are there any other angles that people feel threatened by this that aren’t religious based? There must be, but what are they?
Why is it a concern? Why do people seem to care what happens in their neighbors bedrooms when its none of their business? Why is monogamy (and heterosexual monogamy at that) the ONLY acceptable choice?
I’d really like to know this, as I really and truely don’t understand. Anyone want to take a shot at ending my ignorance on this one?
There are a couple of factors I’ve seen involved here; I’m not sure how coherent I can get at them.
One of them is basic xenophobia: different, alien, wrong, scary. This is the sort of reaction that tends to change over time by the different people demonstrating themselves to be just people, with different customs or whatever. (Among those people who are willing to give the consideration of observation, at least.) This is related to the statistics about how people who actually know some gay people are much more likely to be in favor of civil rights for gays, because it’s not “scary alien concept person” so much as “oh, like Bob”.
One of them is basic social norm protecting. It’s not just the gay people and the polyfolks who get this, you see the child-free folks getting this sort of flak, various religious minorities, subcultures like goth stuff, that sort of thing. Fair numbers of people in that situation wind up finding communities where they can establish their ‘thing’ as a social norm; unfortunately, this tends in some cases to lead to an infection with contempt for the mainstream which only strains interactions further. (One of these days I’ll snap and go around beating the holier-than-thou ‘polyamory is more highly evolved’ people to bloody pulps. They’re not helping.)
Then there’s a certain form of lack of imagination. I can illustrate this with myself more readily than anyone else: I fundamentally do not understand how anyone could be attracted to a woman. I just don’t get it. I manage to avoid going socially glitchy on some aspects of this because, well, I’m a woman; if people weren’t attracted to women, I wouldn’t have relationships. So I sort of blithely accept that it’s the case that this is how some people are, and take advantage of that fact. But if I had gotten that different, and fundamentally didn’t understand how someone could be attracted to someone of the same sex, I might have come away with, instead of that blithe, “Okay, that’s different” feeling, a suspicion that people who had same-sex attractions were somehow broken. Because in that case, I couldn’t imagine how it would work that way, right? People are funky like that.
Then you’ve got people who had a bad experience and thus (again, I suppose, this is the same sort of lack of imagination) presume that it’s not possible to have a good experience. I think this is more common as a poly thing than a gay thing, but I wouldn’t count on it – I know people who’ve been hit on by folks who wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. But people who tried open relationships of some form and had it blow up in their face (either because they’re not oriented that way, or because the relationship system was flawed somehow) may wind up blaming the openness of it; people who have been cheated on may likewise feel that the entire idea is one that leaves them open to getting burned.
Then you have . . . well, I guess the best word for it is jealousy. Some people get outraged at folks who aren’t subscribing to particular social norms because they want to break those norms, but never thought they were allowed. So there’s a “How dare they think they’re allowed (when I never thought I had a chance)!” aspect to it. Think of a bi guy who had a potential for a male love-of-his-life who didn’t take it because he was supposed to get married, have kids, what have you. Or a woman who had to make a horrible choice between two people she loved very much, and who’s always regretted having to do so, stumbling across a happy triadic relationship. Imagine getting smacked with “Those things you thought you had to do, you didn’t. You could have made different choices” – a lot of people get pissed off that people made choices that they thought they didn’t have. I guess it’s easier than getting pissed at themselves for not seeing that they had a choice, or something.
It leads me to some deeply weird conversations, though. A friend of mine and I were joking around a few years ago, and she asked me if she could be my husband’s mistress after we got married. (Logic being that he couldn’t have a mistress before he was married.) I mentioned this in a random conversation a bit later and had this response:
“DH, that’s fucked up.”
“. . . would it have been less fucked up if she hadn’t asked, and just gone and done it?”
“Well, yeah.”
I don’t understand humans, y’know? :} I think that one’s social norming – it’s normal to cheat in a monogamous relationship, that’s still playing the monogamy game . . .
Sorry to bring this back up SimonX, but Washington Post, ABC News actually did a poll that investigates how American’s attitudes toward torture divide along political lines: Torture and Physical Abuse: What Americans Will Allow
There’s little crackpot about the idea, which is called self-mimicry. You can see much the same in action on the female shoulders, arms, knees and legs, which tend to be rounded much like buttocks and breasts, and entirely unlike those of males. And of course, there are the lips, which are painted to emphasize them – most frequently, painted red to simulate engorgement of blood on other lips.
Whether buttocks are a result of erect bipedal posture is not really an argument; aside from the fact that the buttocks are quite relevant in primate sexuality (even though many primates exhibit relatively little in the way of buttocks), the similarities between female buttocks and breasts are quite remarkable, and both sets of lovely objects are indeed sexual characteristics and considered strong sexual signals. This is hardly crackpot material, although I have noticed that quite a few women find the concept of self-mimicry somehow insulting.
Early hominids were extremely unlikely to have the sort of breasts or physique we have today, that is true. However that doesn’t invalidate the concept of sexual self-mimicry, which is a pretty strong contender in explaining why human females have full luscious breasts that have taken on characteristics of sexual attraction and that look remarkably like buttocks, especially when compared to other mammals.
But if I had gotten that different, and fundamentally didn’t understand how someone could be attracted to someone of the same sex, I might have come away with, instead of that blithe, “Okay, that’s different” feeling, a suspicion that people who had same-sex attractions were somehow broken. Because in that case, I couldn’t imagine how it would work that way, right? People are funky like that.