Boldly Go: Why I’m No Longer "Poly"
This article just went up over at Boldly Go, a relatively new blog I’ve been reading for a while. A few excerpts:
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I cannot count how many times in many poly communities I’ve come across the ever fun figure of the Poly Patriarch. A white, economically privileged male “ally” of “the gays” who appropriates queer struggles, queer blood, queer death, and queer hatred because if he tells his mean ex-wife about having two girlfriends in their 20s, she might go all harpy on him and tell the courts and he *could* lose custody. While I won’t deny that there are real threats that non-monogamous people face due to slut shaming, misogyny, and general heterosexist cispatriarchical bullshit, I seriously doubt that Poly Patriarch who snorts at mentions of feminism and who probably has never got shit for who he loves in his life is going to be one of the first ones that the hammer falls on. I’m sick to death of “allies” telling me that they have a right to call themselves queer just because they date more than one person, especially when they have lipstick parties in middle class suburbia while queer kids are forced into homelessness, nonconsensual sex work, and death…
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The third huge problem that I’ve run into is something that I see in a lot of communities: the perpetuation of abuse and abusers. This is a similar problem to what I’ve run into with the BDSM community, where people swear up and down that abusers are eliminated by some sort of Darwinistic natural selection within communities – that no one of course would put up with that sort of awful behaviour! And I run across a similar sort of sentiment within poly, except there’s little to no actual acknowledgement about how poly is kind of ideal for abusers…
(via bettacomecorrect)
