Psychedelics, Polyamory, and Post-Capitalism
“Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll” gets an evolutionary upgrade!
Polamory is having a huge media moment. New York Magazine’s recent cover promoting a guide to urban polyamory featured a “polycule” of contented felines all hugging each other, with no sign of claw marks or fangs drawn in jealousy. As is my perverse tendency, I am also enjoying the simultaneous anti-polyamory backlash, as in the recent Atlantic Magazine piece, “Polyamory, the Ruling Class’s Latest Fad,” with the subtitle: "Americans who most reap the benefits of marriage are the same class who get to declare monogamy passé and boring.” This essay sees the elite’s polyamory craze as an example of “therapeutic libertarianism” rooted in the current cult of “expressive individualism,” which remains focused on the self at the expense of society.
As counteractive, I wrote previously about Louise Perry’s polemic, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. Perry argues that, since the 1970s, the sexual revolution has been bad for women. Overall, she believes, it serves the interests of sexually promiscuous or “sociosexual” men. Since the 1970s, Perry believes, these “Type A” men get to abandon their wives and indulge their taste for ever-younger females while breaking the ethical bonds that hold a decent, mature society (I suppose more like England in the 1950s or the Victorian Era?) together. Women are the ultimate losers. The men must be shamed and then stopped.
Perry writes: “Sexual repression is a blunt instrument, but it is not one we can do away with altogether, as the errors of the 1970s show. The radical desires of sexual liberals do not work in a world in which human sexuality is not always beautiful but often wicked and repulsive.” Monogamous marriage and fatherhood, Perry believes, are needed to “tame” ape-like men who will otherwise act like the bastards they often are (due, I suppose, to excess Testosterone combined with an innately more limited emotional range). “A society composed of tamed men is a better society to live in, for men, for women and for children,” she writes1.
My thoughts on this subject still toggle around (shaped, also, by some painful personal experience and past mistakes). For reasons I hope to explore here, I still feel that a more complete form of sexual liberation would be preferable to new societal efforts to constrict or restrict Eros. However, for such a “liberation” to be authentically beneficial, we would need something like a universal reckoning. We would need to integrate a truly authentic erotic liberation into a model of system change, requiring deeper transformation of society, gender relations, and collective consciousness.
As I explored in How Soon Is Now, this is what Tamera, an intentional community in Portugal started by German visionaries, has tried to build. Friends of mine are just releasing a new documentary on Tamera, The Village of Lovers, available for screening now. I will be part of their online summit around the film, A Cry for the Future, next week (free to register - sign up here). I look forward to reconsidering Tamera in another newsletter, soon.
Fifteen years or so ago, I was convinced that sexual liberation — including polyamory and open relating — was part of the necessary, direct path to collective emancipation. I still find this, basically, true today. All around the world, we see dictatorships and Right Wing movements rising up. These authoritarian movements often seek to control women’s bodies and restrict free expressions of Eros (abortion and birth control are battlegrounds, once again, in the US). A lot of life-force energy is bound up in our Eros, and a lot of energy and time gets squandered in pursuit of erotic connection, particularly for young people. I would love to see that life-force energy redirected toward esoteric exploration and system change initiatives, via an intentional, collective journey toward emancipation.
The skyrocketing popularity of polyamory reveals, despite Perry’s warnings, that younger people in particular simply take it upon themselves to break open the old model and experiment, using all the new tech toys and tools (Field, etc), freely and chaotically. But Tamerans would counter that, without a community to support this process, individual liberation will be short-circuited, narcissistic, self-centered. “Polyamory” will be folded back into the Neoliberal consumerist “expressive individualism” trap, rather than impelling people toward new forms of cooperation and mutualism.
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