290 - Is Polyamory Feminist? With Laurie Penny

Full transcript available

Laurie Penny, polyamorous writer and feminist

Laurie Penny, our guest this week, is an author, journalist, and screenwriter from the UK, as well as a staunch feminist and practicer of polyamory. They have written seven books, the most well-known of which are Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults and Unspeakable Things.

“Womanism is essential to the modern day polyamorist. Polyamory asserts the notion that women have the same rights as men.”

—Cheri

In this episode, Laurie goes into detail about their stance on polyamory and feminism, addressing the following topics:

• Their personal experience as a feminist writer who is also polyamorous.

• Complaints about polyamory and the idea that it’s sexist or entrenched in privilege and/or patriarchy.

• Equating polygamy to polyamory and related issues.

• Is polyamory cool?

Listen to the full episode to get Laurie’s unique, sharp perspective on polyamory and feminism. You can join their Patreon here and follow them on Twitter at @pennyred, and be sure to check out their books via the internet!

Transcript

This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.

Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory podcast, we're addressing some important questions that we've seen come up more and more over the past few years. These are questions about polyamory and sexism and feminism. For this discussion, we're super excited to have author Laurie Penny joining us. Laurie is an author, journalist, and screenwriter from London that's known for Bitch Doctrine, a fantastic book as well as Unspeakable Things and many others and probably more soon in the future. Laurie, thank you so much for joining us today.

Laurie: Hey. Thanks. It's great to be here. Really exciting.

Dedeker: It's awfully hard to introduce you because, honestly, you're just so prolific as a writer. It feels like you've worn many, many different flavors of writer hats if I'm allowed to mix really weird metaphors. You have so many hats.

Laurie: It's funny when a lot of writers describe their job, actually, you hear them go it's like, "I'm an author, screenwriter, columnist." That's just different words for writer. You have professors. Well done. You know many different words.

Emily: It's all-encompassing.

Laurie: I see that will be useful in your job which is a writer. I'm out here in LA at the moment doing screenwriting part of the time, at least. I'm still working on the political articles and all of the stuff. They feed into each other a lot these different kinds of work. I'm still very much keeping to feminist politics and all these activist stuff I've been doing since the start. It's really exciting to come and talk to people like you who think about it a lot.

Dedeker: To bridge that, mostly you've been known as a journalist, as a feminist writer. You've also identified as polyamorous and practiced polyamory for several years. Why don't you just go ahead and tell us a little bit about that?

Laurie: This is great. I don't often get to have this conversation when I'm sober.

Laurie: Sorry. I started doing polyamory properly when I was I think 21. I'm 34 in a couple of weeks. That is quite a long time really. I've been poly most of my adult life, certainly almost all of my dating life. I've also done poly on several different continents because I've moved around a lot. I've had some experience. Lots of the different developed world places, at least. Lots of different places in America. I lived in Boston for a bit. I lived in New York, I lived in San Francisco, and now in LA. Also been in Berlin for a while. London is where mostly I've lived. It's been interesting looking at how poly is different in all those different places.

I would say I may be biased, but London is pretty good in terms of the poly thing in London. Honestly, I think the reason for that is that we don't take ourselves seriously.

Laurie: My friend Quinn Norton, one thing she says is the internet is turning everybody into Californians and you're qualified. It's strange. Honestly, I think all British people could stand to be a bit more Californian and vice versa.

Emily: What does California entail versus Britain?

Dedeker: I need you to explain that very clearly which pieces of being Californian because I don't know if you want all of it?

Emily: That's true.

Laurie: Americans, you take yourselves very seriously which is in many ways a good thing. It means that you're not afraid in the way that at least British people often are, of looking silly. One of the things that happens with that is that sometimes you do look silly. The other thing that happens is that you make a lot of daring art and culture. All of the things that people don't do for fear that they will look silly are much easier to do in America which is one of the good things about Americans take themselves seriously. However, with some kinds of, what I'm just going to call hippie nonsense, which is very much where I lived the whole of my life. I lived with hippies, I love hippies.

I'm for some reason still not really hippie. I'm resolutely identifying as a GAF. Some hippie nonsense could do with a little bit of British not taking themselves so seriously some of the time particularly when it comes to gender politics and the politics of sexuality. There are some bits of any dating culture which are inherently silly. Everything's just a lot better if you learn to laugh at that. We've all met a guy with eight girlfriends.

Somebody really just needs to sit him down and say, "Just because you have got eight girlfriends, just because you can doesn't necessarily mean you should." It's like the atom bomb. We were so concerned with wondering if we could, we never stopped to think if we should. It's like, "Maybe you shouldn't."

Emily: Thank you Jeff Goldblum, yes.

Dedeker: I definitely have felt that for a long time. I've been itching for who's going to be the right comedian for this particular community. I think there's definitely been people who've gotten close to that. Before we started recording, we were talking about Chris Fleming and his amazing song about polyamorous people and things like that.

Laurie: Just because I have bad hair doesn't mean that I'm polyamorous. My sister who is not polyamorous sent me that video. It was a savage, savage burn. It's entirely accurate.

Emily: It's a classic for sure.

Dedeker: I'm curious to ask, you talked about when you were young first learning about feminism that for you it started with reading feminist theory. That was a very important step before actually learning about how does this actually play out in practice? How does this play out in my life? How does this play out in the community? I'm curious about if it was a similar journey for you with polyamory. Did you start from a place of reading like I did, read The Ethical Slut first and foremost, and Sex at Dawn and dive into the theory and then see how it plays out in my life? Was it similar for you there as well?

Laurie: Not at all. Actually, the way it started was I was 21. My then partner told me about it and I was like, "Oh, there's a word for the thing I want to do. Thank goodness," because obviously previously, actually when we talked about this at first, I thought, "Awful thing." When I was 20, for the first and the only time in my life, I cheated on someone.

It was somebody I had just got together with. We were all monogamous. We'd just got together.

I cheated on somebody and was also the cause of cheating. I felt terrible about that. I also felt that there must be a better way of doing this stuff. As soon as I heard about poly, I was like, "Oh, this makes so much sense." It's like, "It seems like this will be a much better fit for me." I've never really seen myself in a situation where I want to have just that one person in my life fulfilling every single role ever. As soon as I heard that that was a possibility, I went after it.

I started reading some of the theory. Honestly, the theory books have never really spoken to me. Most of them, at least. My favorite one is Meg-John Barker's book, Rewriting The Rules. I'm sorry if this is me, it is partly just because Sex at Dawn and The Ethical Slut are lovely but they are terribly Californian. Terribly Californian. Oh my goodness.

Emily: They take themselves way too seriously.

Laurie: It's adorable. The trouble with hippies is they're right. They're right about almost everything. Sex at Dawn, I think I got the chapter where he-- Actually, I don't know which of them wrote that chapter. It was describing maybe we all make sex noises because bonobos have to signal to each other, something about baboons. I was like, “Oh, for goodness sake,” or maybe pornography. What I like about it certainly in terms of that feminist thought and feminist theory is-- I spent the first five years of being poly hearing a lot about bonobos, everybody wants to talk about bonobos.

Jase: They were still hot 10 years ago, yes.

Emily: Yes, super hot.

Laurie: Bonobos are totally hot.

Dedeker: It’s funny because in Sex at Dawn, the chapter that gave the very detailed descriptions of the relative penis, and testicles side of different primates was one of my favorite diagrams in that book.

Laurie: You don't really need a reason to like a diagram like that.

Emily: Penises and testicles?

Laurie: Yes, of the various sizes.

Emily: There you go.

Laurie: You love what you love. I’m really interested in evolutionary biology, what's sociobiology, and the way people relate the theory of evolution to people's real lives, so much of it. One of the things you can get if you read the introduction to Sex at Dawn, one of the things they're saying is, look, a lot of this is pretty circumstantial and some of it is silly and doesn't make sense. It makes no less sense and it's no less silly, or circumstantial than any of the other things that people use to justify why men are supposed to want to shag everything that women want to commit, women don't even like sex blah, blah, blah.

I did a couple of courses in biotechnology. Basically, the line is that we don't see animals as they are, we see them as we are. The idea that you can read anything that is “natural” about human behavior from looking at how the primates behave, I think it deserves unpacking. Taking that as read doesn't really work for me as a feminist thinker and as somebody who is doing poly in their daily life.

I understand why it's important to people to believe that something is “natural” because we live in a society where natural is synonymous with good or is synonymous with what Jesus wants. I don't do polyamory because it's natural, I do it because it works for me and it works for the people I love, and it's the way I can get the most fun, experience, and adventure out of life whilst hurting people and myself least. I'm not sure primates make that calculation. Maybe they do.

Dedeker: Not that we know of.

Laurie: Maybe, maybe not.

Jase: That's something that we've definitely talked about on this show before. I do think is so important when people get into that debate about what's natural and what's not. It happens with everything, it's like The keto diet it's more natural so therefore better, or non-monogamy or more patriarchy, or whatever it is making this argument, like you said, that it's natural therefore, it's good it's just so absurd.

I think that it sucks because what they're saying in Sex at Dawn I think is so valuable to people who feel like they've been taught monogamy's natural, and yet they struggle with it so something must be wrong with me. I think poking holes in that is so key but if we just try to turn it around into like, “No, this is the natural thing.”

Laurie: Yes, of course. I absolutely get the reason for it. It's the same with different sexual identities, sexual preference especially when you're trying to establish yourself as an interest group and establish your authority in the cultural landscape. You often find people starting out saying, “We were just born this way. It is natural to be like this, we can't help it.” It's very understandable, a way to justify the way you are to yourself.

Exactly like you said, if you've been taught that this thing is natural therefore good and therefore you are unnatural, and therefore wrong, I totally get it. The born this way argument only takes you so far. One of the things that is even more threatening to the status quo is the idea that, for example, someone might not be born a assigned male birth person fancying men, they might just decide they'd like to shag a bloke one day, and that might be fine. That explodes all the categories that we have for how humans should do sex, and love each other even more so, at least right now.

I don't know how much any of my sexuality is “natural,” it's certainly a choice to me to be ethically non-monogamous. For me, so much of poly is not just about who you sleep with, and who you date. It's about how you treat the people you sleep with and the people you date. For me, I’ve definitely not got this right all the time but the driving force has been to be a decent human and to not hurt people.

I just felt that what might be more “natural” for me is to want to sleep with lots and lots of different people. That means I have to pay attention and it means that if I want to do that ethically I have to have systems in place and actually pay attention to people's hearts, and everybody else involved. I was really lucky that I found a community and different systems for making that possible at a quite young age.

Dedeker: Yes. It makes a huge difference I think coming to it relatively young for sure. 21 was also about the age that I first started going on this journey as well.

Emily: Oh, really? Jeez.

Dedeker: Yes. Actually, myself and Laurie, I think our dates almost line up as far as when the polyamory journey began. I think we could have a whole separate conversation on how the community feels different from back then as how it feels now. I do think that having access to that when you're 21 or finding your way towards that when you're 21 makes such a big difference.

Laurie: Now I have a lot more data points and I’ve experienced different versions of poly communities, I can compare each thing too. One thing I wanted to share actually is, if we're talking about gender and what people think is natural and normal. A few years ago, I lived in a big poly group house where almost everybody in the house was both polyamorous and some form of bisexual. It was lots of fun although we did have a light guideline, maybe don't sleep with housemates. That's recipe for some trouble. We mostly stuck to it. It was about half assigned male people, and a half assigned female people.

We had a conversation over dinner one day about coming out to your parents. It turned out that almost universally people who were girls when they come out to their parents as bi that was not really a problem. When they come out as poly that was a problem. For the boys, it was the opposite. For the boys, the idea for their parents or for other people in their social circle that they'd be shagging a lot of people was fine but the idea that they might shag a boy was not fine at all. For the women, the idea that you might maybe kiss a girl was okay because that's not threatening to patriarchy. Of course, if you're bisexual, you end up with a man anyway obviously. That's the social idea.

The idea that you might be having lots of sex with different people, certainly, when I talk to my family about it, at least initially, they were very worried about me. I think it took them a long, long time to understand. I hope that they now understand that this is not something that is putting me in any danger. A lot of the women and assigned female people I know who are polyamorous have had similar conversations with friends and family members where the assumption is that you're being exploited. Even if you don't think you're being exploited, you are.

Dedeker: Yes. That's funny that you point out the assumption of danger, 100% I think that tracks with my experience for sure.

Emily: Yes. Jase and I opened up right around the time that we were doing this or the year before, seven years or so.

Jase: Yes. More than seven years ago.

Emily: Yes, exactly. Definitely, my mother was like, “This is his idea,” and blah blah blah. Iit is always that assumption.

Jase: Right.

Emily: Yes. We had Cheri and Chanee from Black Poly Pride on our show. When was this? This was 30 episodes ago.

Dedeker: Lots of times.

Emily: It was a little while ago.

Dedeker: You could have said 30 years ago and I would have believed it.

Emily: Time this year is out the window. Cheri said-- I wrote down a bunch of quotes from that specific episode because it was really great. She said womanism is essential to the modern-day polyamorous. Polyamory asserts the notion that women have the same rights as men. I wondered if you could talk about that a little, if you agree with that sentiment. I know you write about feminism a lot and so I'm interested your intersection with that and polyamory what you think about that.

Laurie: I think feminism and womanism are absolutely essential to really any community that you want to build with any sense of universal human agency and healthy boundaries and actual community. I don't think that you have to be poly to be a feminist, absolutely not because not everybody is. Really not everybody is. I did go through the very brief phase when I was a 21-year-old baby poly, like, "Everybody's polyamorous."

Jase: Everyone has to go through it.

Dedeker: Everyone goes through the phase of really waving the flag and thinking they know everything and they've solved relationships and then you get the rude awakening in the face at some point.

Laurie: The only polyamorous people who are allowed to say that are baby polys. The next time I hear some 50-year-old poly dude trying to tell me or anyone else that, "Everybody's poly really. Don't you know?" "Shut up Gregory." No, they're not. I really have met people who are just monogamous and they've tried to knock me but that's just how they are. Firstly what is essential to womanism is the idea of sexual agency however you come across that, whatever that means in your life. Some people are asexual but those people are entitled to sexual agency as well. It just means asserting your boundaries and it being okay to not want certain things in your life.

Polyamory for me, I don't want to put a negative spin on it, it's as much about what you don't want in your life as what you do. For me, at least, it's about not wanting the tradition forms of kin making and family making that I've been told are the expectations on me to do that as a woman. I very much never wanted that. Polyamory is a way to not have that but still have something else, have something bigger and freer, and more networked. I always felt that the pressure specifically to be a girlfriend because I'm sadly really quite straight, I have no idea how it happened.

The pressure to be a girlfriend in the disaster of modern heterosexuality was a really big pressure that was too much for me. Polyamory lets me not have to be everything. Particularly the freedom to not have to be everything to any of the millennial 20-something men I have known and loved has been a real gift in my life. I think a lot of women and femmes, particularly young women and femmes, feel a lot of pressure to do that girlfriend work, to be doing the emotional labor, the domestic labor. Sex can be part of that emotional labor because it is so keyed into status and self-worth, particularly for straight men.

I think for me, poly has been a way of hacking that system. I'm going to use that because one of my exes really, really hates it when I use the phrase hacking to describe anything that isn't fixing your computer. It's like, "You don't like it when I language, do you?" "Shut up."

Laurie: I think for me I have certainly done my very, very best to do polyamory in a feminist way. It's not essential for my feminist theory but it's essential for my feminist practices in that it's a big part of my life. Also, honestly, it's been a way for me to build community with women. Again, maybe this is just me being starry-eyed but one of the things I hate most about monogamous heterosexuality and really any heterosexuality is the way it pits women against each other to compete for the attention of men. That's still the case in a lot of poly communities obviously.

One thing I've always consciously done and is a personal rule for me, I will not date anyone or sleep with anyone who has a female partner who doesn't know me. I will always reach out to the partners unless there's some specific reason why I shouldn't or at least ask people to be given the heads up. I'm not saying that everybody should do it that way. It's really important for me that my female metamours, that there's some solidarity there. Honestly, I've met a lot of my best friends that way.

Emily: That's great.

Laurie: There's some men out there in general who while they may not be bastions of sexual ethics themselves, they have fantastic taste in women, just fantastic taste in women. Honestly, I was writing a different thing about some of my friends. It's just a piece about who I've been keeping in touch with over quarantine and how we've been speaking. I was going through I was like, "There's this person and we met because we both dated this guy. Then there's this person we met and we both engaged to this person." I was like, "Hang on, there's a pattern here."

Obviously, a lot of my close friends are people I've met like that. Sometimes I don't speak to the guy anymore. For me, I've tried to do it in a way that is first and foremost about building female solidarity within a situation because polyamory doesn't make structural power imbalance magically disappear. I hate it when people try to pretend that it does, but it does make it easier to reach out to people and to build community. That's been really important for me. Honestly, if I had not done that, I probably would have got laid a bit more. I don't mind.

Dedeker: Yes, it's funny. I think the way that I've always come down on it is feeling-- If we're taking this question of do you have to be feminist to be polyamorous or do you have to be feminist to be a good polyamorous or things like that. I know the way that I've always squared it in my mind is you don't have to, of course, but it just feels like at the end of the day, you're going to have more fun maybe, and probably going to be easier to a certain extent if you are living out in feminist principles but also practicing polyamory as well.

Laurie: Absolutely. Personally, I don't sleep with people who don't see me as a full human being. I require a certain level. Honestly, I had almost a fight with a friend the other day when I said to her I just don't sleep with right-wingers. I just never do. A friend who's also what I myself define as slutty. Another slutty left friend. Isn't that prejudice? This is what she was saying. She was genuinely shocked. She was like, "I just thought you were really open and welcoming of all kinds of people. I would never close myself off to anyone like that."

I was equally shocked that she would even consider going to bed with somebody who didn't believe in abortion rights. Even if they were, they'd have to be really hot. Look, you don't have to have read all the feminist texts back to back. You don't even have to call yourself feminists. A lot of people live by feminist principles. Feminist is something you do, it's not something you are. I don't like to sleep with people who don't think that women and femmes are really people partly because they're generally terrible in bed, really bad in bed.

Emily: Sounds about right.

Laurie: Even some of the people who are self-professed feminists can be real bad in bed because everybody has this internalized patriarchy can really do a number on your head. It can be a real boner killer and everybody's had to wrangle that kind of stuff. I just don't and I wouldn't. I can't honestly say what it would have been like to do polyamory in a non-feminist way in terms of who I relate to because I've generally selected my partners quite carefully on that basis. Not always but generally. It turns out that there are actually quite a lot of decent, kind, feminists or generally feminist affiliated people out there. You can really get laid really quite a lot without putting that selection filter on.

Dedeker: I think that's actually a good segue into what I want to ask about. I want to ask about contradictions that exist within the intersection of feminism and polyamory. I think that in the world that we're living in now where we're consuming so much content and so much interaction online, I think that, as a species, we've just become so uncomfortable with gray areas and contradictions.

Emily: It's one or the other.

Dedeker: We wanted to be one or another. Of course, there's the argument out there that while polyamory is inherently feminist, if you look at the community, there's so many women and femmes who are in positions of leadership, who are speaking, who are writing, it prioritizes the sexual and relationship agency for everybody versus, of course, also the argument polyamory it can't be supported and driven by the patriarchy and by privilege and by these power structures and stuff like that. The weird thing being that it's of course, we can point to very real-world examples of both of those being true at the same time. I would definitely love to hear your thoughts on that.

Laurie: Yes, absolutely. Again, I think it is so true. I think we always want to think that everything is either completely good or completely bad. One thing I often say to people when I'm trying to explain why I'm polyamorous to them is that the problem with polyamory is the same as the problem with monogamy. It's the same as the problem with any rule system for how people relate which is there is no perfect system that is going to guarantee that everybody will be decent to each other and nobody will ever break their heart ever again.

That's the delusion of both systems which is people thinking, "Oh my God, if you're upset or if you got your heartbroken, then you must just not have followed the rules properly. Let's pay more attention and do the rules better." There is no system, no way of interacting that guarantees an end to human malice and moral cowardice and people being lazy, selfish, and stupid.

Polyamory makes it easier to talk about those things and it gives you more options to design your own way of interacting, which is one of the reasons I think polyamory is inherently queer, if it's nothing else. I really don't want to appropriate stuff but in a lot of different ways and in a lot of different communities I've been part of, polyamory has functioned a little bit like queerness for straight people. That's a really big generalization.

Jase: Interesting.

Laurie: It's a way of exploding the binary, normative, traditional, monogamous partnership family system whilst still having straight-type sex. All of the things that come along with straight sex in the world don't have to and I think polyamory is part of acknowledging that. One thing I have seen, and this has been part of some communities I've been part of and not others, the best communities I've been part of have often started out with mostly straight people.

Over time, not just the women but the men as well have started to open up and experiment. You don't often see that in lots of communities. I feel that polyamory opens the door for lots of different things like that. If you can hold space not just for women to experiment but also for men to experiment, which I think is a lot harder because of internalized homophobia, I think that's a sign that things are working or at least something is working.

Jase: It's funny that you mentioned that because I think that I've seen that being used both as the reason why look, obviously polyamory is this horrible thing that's destroying the moral fiber of our people.

Laurie: Good.

Jase: Right, good. Versus on the other side, I would see that as a positive. As a man, if I want to experiment. Maybe I could be sexual with men. I'm not sure. I've always thought maybe I could but I've also liked women. That's just easier and everyone tells me that's what I should do and I'll do that then. It's like if I wanted to try that, it feels like, "I've just got to decide I'm all the way gay. What if I don't end up liking it as much? Then I'm stuck and I'm just gay."

Laurie: You're caught in your cards. Exactly.

Jase: I think that this happens too to a lesser extent with women too, where it's just such a big step to go, "I'm going to go by myself with a guy and have sex." That's terrifying if that's not something I've done before. I do think polyamory, it adds a little bit of this safety net. It has some other options, ways to get in and try that.

Laurie: There's the idea, isn't there? In culture that dick is so bewitching that once you've tried it you'll never go back. Never, never. The end.

Dedeker: Bewitching.

Dedeker: Maybe, why not?

Laurie: Yes, exactly. The idea that you can't even touch even one because you'll never go back. At the same time, female sexuality and lesbian sexuality is continually just thought of as not a thing. Women want to experiment. That's fine. They're not serious anyway. They're probably just doing it to show off.

Emily: I think it's intimidating though to people. I found that in my own journey of being bisexual and coming to terms with that and coming to terms with knowing that I have to talk about it and to exude that in a way and dating women and stuff. I feel like, for some of my partners, it's been intimidating for them. I don't know why.

Laurie: Really?

Emily: Yes. At times, they'll be like, "Yes. Okay, no problem. That doesn't bother me." Then at times, they'll be like, "Actually, it's hard because I am not that. I have a penis." It's an enigma.

Laurie: It feels like, within poly, there is more of an acceptance that you might not need to be absolutely every single thing that your partner wants and needs out of life. In fact, that's too much to put on any relationship. Again, that doesn't account for human hearts.

Jase: The stereotype, is that within a heterosexual or monogamous relationship that if the woman was like, "Oh, I want to fool around with other women." It's like, "Hell, yes. That's awesome. That's super hot." The irony there, Emily, with what you're saying is that I could see that if you're in a monogamous relationship and that person is feminist enough to get that that's a real relationship too, then suddenly it becomes threatening. It's almost ironically--

Laurie: Yes, absolutely. You're completely right.

Dedeker: Yes, like you were saying, Laurie, it's for so long I think female sexuality, especially queer female sexuality has been offered up for the consumption of men. I feel like I encounter a lot of straight men where it's maybe they don't even consciously have that thought of, "Yes, I consume female sexuality." Maybe they're just like, "Whatever, that's cool. It's not threatened to me. I'm fine with that. I can support that. Maybe that's even part of me being supportive of my queer friends and stuff like that is supporting my queer female friend's sexuality."

Once it makes the switch to, "Wait, this is actually for my partner for their enjoyment." I mean "Consumption" for lack of a better term, it's not for my consumption. That's what I've seen a lot of straight guys really focusing on.

Laurie: Yes, absolutely. When you understand that some things are not for you.

Emily: Yes, when it doesn't include them specifically.

Dedeker: Oh, gosh. That sentiment, some things are not for you, that's been bouncing around my head for a lot of things in regards to things like thinking about cultural appropriation and appropriation of marginalization. It's okay if something's not for you.

Emily: Yes, you don't need to have it all.

Laurie: Absolutely. When I was in my mid-20s, I was in a triad with a guy and another woman. This guy given he was 24 at the time.

I remember this one-- we were walking back through London, and the three of us together and we saw this couple straight couple, white couple, on a bicycle riding through the streets of Soho and it was like a scene from like, Before Midnight, all of those films. She was sitting on the handlebars and her hair was-- Neither of them were wearing helmets. It was very dangerous but like, if they were laughing, the hair, it was like a commercial and we just watched this picture go by and my male partner was like, "Huh, well, I've got two women, so there."

And me and this other girl just turned, we did not, we get in such shit for a couple, and I think-- I'm sure a lot of cismen coming into poly stuff for the first time encounter this, it's like, it's a classic thing but the reality of having two girlfriends, people who all sleep together is different than what you think it is. Because if you do it right, like there are lots of times when we hang out and talk about him, not in a non-Bechdel test way.

If he ever does something to upset one of us, the other one is going to have something to say about it and it was I think, a little more threatening. I think it's fair to say that, than he'd anticipated, and it tends I mean, that relationship, part of the reason it ended is because I just am not gay enough to make that an equal part of my sexuality. I really did try but me and this person we're still good friends. She describes it as-- Have you seen Pacific Rim?

Jase: Yes.

Laurie: She says we're drift compatible with men.

Jase: That's great, I love that.

For all the fellow nerds out there, they'll be like,-

Laurie: Just compatible.

Jase: - "Oh, yes, it makes sense." That's great. I like that. Gosh, there's so much more we want to talk about but we're going to take a quick moment now to talk about how you can support this show, keep this growing and keep this podcast available to everyone out there for free.

Dedeker: Laurie, as someone who's also written a book, I hate it when people read quotes from my own book to me, but I hope you can handle it. This is actually related to what we were just talking about, where you're sharing the experience of, the reality of having two girlfriends maybe being not quite as fun or not quite as glamorous, as we're led to believe that it might be. And there's this quote from your book, Bitch Doctrine, "Polyamory is a great many things, but it's not cool. Talking honestly about feelings will never be cool. Discussing interpersonal boundaries, and setting realistic expectations wasn't cool in the 1970s and it isn't cool now. It is however necessary." That is funny.

I mean, I definitely know that all three of us have experienced doing interviews about polyamory or people asking all their billion looky-loo kind of questions that it's sometimes hard to sell someone on, "Well, I mean, I'm having arguments about the dishes with two different people now."

It's not quite the endless orgies as maybe you think-

Laurie: Sometimes it is.

Dedeker: - that it is but I'm definitely curious about it, your thoughts on that. Sometimes. Sometimes, yes.

Laurie: The couple of times I've talked in public about being poly, once I got called a sexual tourist in The Guardian it was brilliant. A sexual tourist and by another woman.

Dedeker: Graphic for The Guardian.

Jase: Put that on a business card, sexual tourist.

Laurie: Yes, I know. It's like the of a life long dream, to be honest. But the idea

Jase: Laurie Penny, sexual tourist.

Laurie: Sexual tourist, The Guardian. One of the things I get told often also about being genderqueer is that I'm doing it to be cool, "She's just doing it for the attention and because it's the now thing," I'm like, "Look, have you met polyamory? It's not like--" We were having a discussion before this started about the universal polyamorous trousers. Every polyamorous man I've ever met seems to have a version of those trousers and if you are a polyamorous person listening to this, you know exactly which trousers I mean. Don't pretend that you haven't seen them. You may even be wearing them right now. Sometimes they're Paisley.

Dedeker: Well as my British partner says, "Paisley, Paisley makes the girls go crazily."

Emily: Wow.

Laurie: I might know that guy.

Emily: Okay, Alex.

Jase: That's fantastic, I haven't heard that one before. That's really good.

Emily: Alex, if you're listening to this

Laurie: Yes, polyamory is not cool. Most polyamorous communities have been part-of. There's a low bury amount of deeply nerdy, deeply dorky people, which is part of why I love it because I think nerds are really sexy but the idea, if you want to be ethical, and if you want to have serious conversations about grownup stuff, which is what polyamory kind of requires, in order to do it in any way, right, then you can't really have a "scene". Any polycommunity I've encountered where it's more about the scene, San Francisco-- Sorry.

What was I saying? Anyway, I'm burning mad. It's going to have problems because honestly, I'm sure this has been discussed before but I think there's a reason that I'm going to say both nerds and people who are neuroatypical, often wind up in polyamory. I'm neuroatypical and it's a way of having a system of rules, a system of rules, that's subject to change, and amendment, and optimization that allows you to actually treat people better, and allows you to maybe not hurt people.

What I deeply appreciate about polyamory, particularly as a British person, is that you have to talk about things. One thing I found very hard, always have, and I've only recently worked out that, I may be neuroatypical and I'm going through the diagnosis process right now, I really don't like subtext. I really like it when I am able to say exactly what I need and what I think to someone and I like it even more when somebody tells me their expectations with their words and then we have a talk about what boundaries we have, what it means. I really, really like that.

It makes me feel safe. It makes me feel safe to have adventures and to experiment and I think the best polycommunities have been part of make that easier because in Britain, really, it is true about British people that yes, there's a lot of not talking about-- I was saying to somebody the other day, the whole idea of going out on dates when I was in my early 20s, it just wasn't a thing. It still isn't really a thing in the UK. They're like, "What did you do?" It's like well, "You get drunk, and you sleep together and then you work out if you like each other the next day." That's just how it's done.

Emily: Interesting, wow.

Laurie: Yes. Now with the apps, British people have had to learn how to go on dates, and it's hilarious.

Jase: Wow.

Dedeker: Oh, yes, jeez. I do feel that yes, it's interesting. We've definitely talked on the show before about how there's so much overlap between very deep, deep, nerdy communities and nerdy subcultures, as well as with polyamory and things like that and it is really interesting, on our side of things that because we've been creating content around it for a while and that we've kind of positioned ourselves to be like, somewhat visible, that like when journalists reach out to us or somebody's producers reach out to us or things like that, there's a lot of people trying to find--

Laurie: Yes, it's not cool. It's never going to be cool.

Dedeker: To make it cool for a TV show, it's got to also be really dysfunctional, usually, and maybe hyper sexy, and things like that and I think it's going to be interesting to see from here because as far as what we can see, the trend just keeps on keeping on where more people are feeling more comfortable exploring alternative relationships and exploring anything non-monogamous that eventually, we're going to get more of a push for us to become a market for capitalism.

Emily: It's getting there.

Dedeker: It's going, it's happening, and I'm just really curious to see how that's going to play out because I feel like to market to somebody you have to make your product seem cool to them, and they have to seem cool also. I just don't know how it's gonna happen. I'm very curious to see.

Laurie: One thing I have found talking about polyamory to non-polyamorous people, particularly in Hollywood, where I work now some of the time, is the assumption that, if everything's going right in poly world, if we're all polyamorous, then there'd be no conflict, there'd be no interest, no drama. How can you write an exciting love story if the idea of cheating is not part of it? I'm like, "No, polyamory just provides different ways for humans to bounce off each other and I assure you that there is still drama, so much drama, so, so much drama. There's a whole untapped goldmine of drama that you can write endless stories about, if you wanted to dive into poly world, and how it might work."

Yet our narratives about how romance happens, and the drama of romance are so keyed into monogamy, that we don't tell talking about how stuff can be difficult and go wrong is part of romance. It's part of the story, it's part of human drama, and I feel that obviously, I like it when I see very very rarely when you see representations of polyamory. Sometimes you seem them as very idealized, and that's good. Positive representations are good, but I'd like to see people working through the real issues that often happen.

It's in BoJack Horsemen somebody has eight dads.

Emily: I love that show. Right.

Laurie: Hollyhock's eight dads. That's fantastic. That I love it when you see them have a little fight, that was wonderful. Because, of course, they do, there's eight of them.

Jase: Yes, it reminds me two of the same thing that we saw with any mainstream media portrayals of people being gay. It was like the plotline was just about being gay.

Laurie: Yes. Exactly.

Jase: Like it wasn't really about the relationships, and I think the same thing is true with most of the representations we see, except for some of those side characters like that. Where it's like the polyamory story is the becoming polyamory story, and that's the only one we know how to do.

Laurie: Exactly. It's still the case with homosexuality and bisexuality as well. I was recently relaunching Years and Years, a brilliant Russell T. Davies show.

Emily: Great show. Great show.

Laurie: Russell T. Davies is still one of the only screen writers out there who portrays real gay relationships where the drama isn't just like you said there, "Oh, look they're gay." There's a wonderful scene between a guy and his soon-to-be ex-husband, where they're sitting in the car together. He's like saying, "Look, can you sign these divorce papers." They're just sitting in the car, one of them's got coffee and he's like, "I've got your coffee. It's how you like." They hadn't seen each other for a few months, and it's a beautiful little scene where they start teasing each other over little-- You can see that there was friendship there, they were together for a reason.

Then it turns, and you work out why it is that they're no longer together. It's like, all of that drama could have been played in a very similar way between two straight people, but you'd never have, "Oh, look the drama is that they're straight."

Jase: Right. Exactly.

Laurie: The sexuality itself isn't part of the drama, exactly. I would love to see that. It's not just about normalizing, it's about humanizing, and humanizing involves reminding people that it's not always perfect, because people are people.

Emily: That's true.

Jase: That just reminds me of, I was a guest on YouTube show, True Tea. That's a show and I was the guest to talk about relationship anarchy. She asked her listeners for questions about that and stuff, and she told me, she's like, "One of the questions I got was, can you ask him why he's such an asshole?"

Laurie: What?

Jase: Wait, you specifically or-- All they knew was, we're having on a guy to talk about relationship anarchy, what questions do you have? Their question was, "Why is he such an asshole?" It was super interesting. I was like, "Yes, I can see where they're coming from, depending what their experience was with people using that label." Part of that conversation, part of what we had was this conclusion of, it really doesn't matter what type of relationship you do, you can still be an asshole.

Laurie: Oh yes.

Emily: For sure.

Jase: No relationship style's going to stop some people from being assholes. I think that's what you're getting at there too. It's like no relationship style's going to take away just the drama of people trying to get along with each other and communicate with each other.

Laurie: Absolutely. I think the one thing that does happen within poly world, and I think people are just more awake and aware of this now, is occasional straight guys using polyamory as an excuse for misogyny. In most communities I've known and been part of, that is now phasing out because you can only say that for so long. Honestly, I've been lucky enough that's just really not been the case with most poly people I've known. Most of the people who I've known who have behaved like that, it's like you're not really doing polyamory at all, you're just cheating.

One of the things that is true is that, if you have a person who just gets off on power, and gets off on lies and humiliating people, it's in some ways easier sometimes to see that within poly, because it becomes very clear that if you wanted to do this in an ethical way you really could. You really could. Nothing is stopping you sleeping with multiple people if you want. What is clear but there are some-- Because power imbalances are literally eroticized within straight sexuality, there are some people who just get off on being an asshole, and I think sometimes polyamory is used as an excuse for that, but sometimes it makes it easier to weed out, at least in my experience.

Jase: I do find that yes, I think a lot of guys who come along with that sort of attitude just fairly quickly end up having a not very fun time in the polyamory community because people talk to each other, people communicate, and-

Laurie: They really do.

Jase: - all of us, and especially women and female presenting people in that space, are so like keyed into that too. Like if I catch even a whiff of it, I got to run because I've had too many bad experiences. It's like you're just in a community of people who are already looking for people like you to be doing this, and they're wise to it, I guess.

Laurie: That's absolutely true, and yes, back to what we were saying at the start. Like there is something very simple and powerful and deeply threatening to patriarchy about just women talking to each other. Just women comparing notes. That's all it takes. Sometimes about you, and that's scary. Somebody said, what you see in, what is it, the bogart, what the bogart turns into a Harry Potter, your worst fear. Is that I know so many guys the bogart is just going to turn into your ex-girlfriends talking to each other. It's pretty powerful.

Jase: Yes, that used to be something that terrified me.

Dedeker: Really?

Jase: If ex-girlfriends of mine, like in high school, talk to each other, I was like, "Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. Oh God." Yes, and it's very different now, I'm like, "Yes, let's all hang out." If you've talked to each other, or you're friends already, or I met you through each other, or whatever it is, so different.

Emily: It's like that time when all of us were in a room, and we were like, "What do all of us have in common? Oh, yes. We've slept with this person."

Dedeker: this person or that person, and things like that.

Laurie: Sometimes it is awkward. There have been a couple of times when I've been that person in the room. It's like, "How do we all know each other? Oh, wait." It's not as fun as you think it might be.

Jase: To be that person, yes.

Laurie: It's like, "Oh, dear."

Jase: Oh, boy.

Emily: Yes, definitely.

Laurie: Yes, you're all my favorite, really.

Jase: I remember a really fun night. During a really hard and dark and not very fun time in my life, having an amazing karaoke night out, with all other guys who had dated Dedeker in the past. It was just wonderful.

Laurie: Amazing.

Emily: Was I in this?

Dedeker: No.

Emily: What? That's sad.

Jase: This was just me and three others guys, who were-

Laurie: This is helpful.

Jase: -somehow very close with Dedeker at some point, and we have this amazing night out just the four of us at karaoke. It was wonderful. That always sticks out to me as this like, "What do we all have in common? How do we know each other? Well--"

Emily: Oh yes, it's Dedeker.

Laurie: Yes, that's lovely.

Emily: Beautiful.

Dedeker: I've shared this in interviews and on the show before, that like some of my just best ex-- Because people always ask the question of like, "What are you getting out of this? Why do you like this?" They're really hoping that you're saying that it's sex or things like that. I tell people that yes, some of my best memories are going to a house party and I have both partners there, and they have their partners there. Also an ex of mine is there, and his new partner, and it's not weird.

It's like this close sense of just like having people around you that care about you, big or small, in a particular way. It's like, that has been opened up to me, and I've had many more opportunities to connect to that way more, since I've been polyamorous than I ever did when I was monogamous in more traditional relationships.

Laurie: Exactly. I think one thing I have found in terms of like honestly just friendship with guys, and this is not universal, but just as-- It's a problem in culture where some straight men just find it much much easier to be open and intimate with people they've slept with, right?

Jase: Absolutely. Yes.

Emily: In like an emotional

Laurie: And sometimes--

Jase: 100%.

Laurie: Honestly sometimes sex with men for me has been just a part, a literal, as a part of friendship. It's a getting to know you thing and sometimes some of my best friendships with men, in fact probably most of them are with people who I have in the past slept with because that whole thing is dealt with. That question is answered and it allows a form of intimacy that straight society doesn't often allow between men and women. Not that that's the way that everybody should necessarily conduct their friendships with their platonic friendships. I found it useful and fun.

Probably not sustainable in the long-term with every single friend but you know, sometimes it's not people I've slept with. Sometimes it's with people my friends have slept with. So you know.

Jase: That's another good one. Like, "Are you sleeping with my friend? Let's talk."

Laurie: Yes, you must be nice.

Jase: It's just something to share about. That's great. We're coming up about at the end of our time now and I just wanted to say, Laurie, thank you so much for joining us. I'm glad this finally happened. It's been a long time coming.

Laurie: Thank you. It was so much fun. Thank you for your time, everyone.

Jase: Laurie, for our listeners who want to check out more of your stuff, where is the best place for them to go to get more of that?

Laurie: You can go to my Patreon which is just /lauriepenny or you can just search me and you can go to my Twitter, which is @pennyred. I don't post a lot on Instagram but I am on there, I guess or you can just honestly, you can just Google me. My books will come up. Just bother me on the internet anyway you'll find