Poly Means Many: What is cheating?

Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month, the PMM bloggers will write about their views on one of them. Links to all posts can be found at polymeansmany.com

This month’s Poly Means Many topic is on relationship ethics, and why what it is we do is not the same as cheating. To me, the answer to this seems fairly obvious, but then I look back to before I knew that poly was even possible, and I realise that perhaps it isn’t. And I think on my experience, and what I consider cheating and I find myself wondering exactly what cheating is.

My first experience of cheating was the breakdown of the relationship from that-one-time-I-was-in-a-mono-relationship-with-a-man-for-five-years. It ended because he cheated on me: to what extent, I do not know, but I know that it happened and I know that our relationship circled the drain for a few months and then ended and I spent a while moping around in a dressing gown crying and eating sweets. It wasn’t so much whatever had transpired physically or emotionally between my ex and that someone else which had bothered me. It was the dishonesty, the refusal to tell me anything.

I also have experienced the other end of cheating in monogamy. I once had sex with someone who was in a monogamous relationship. I knew. I didn’t care.

Have I experienced cheating in poly relationships? It’s hard to say. I once had a partner who had a rather poor attitude towards condom use. We were fluid-bonded, or so I thought–meaning we did not use condoms with one another, and as I understood it we would use condoms with other partners. He didn’t, not always. That was not OK. I sometimes wonder if perhaps I was not clear enough about what exactly it meant, the fluid-bonding, but at the same time he must have known that he was exposing me to risks without ever bothering to even mention it. It echoes back to that first experience of cheating I had: I might not have minded the behaviour itself had I just been given the information to make these decisions. Yes, I did cry in a dressing gown while stuffing my face with sweets for a while after.

What about my own personal set of relationship ethics? I am honest with my partners about what I do. I am less honest about my feelings, a lot of the time, because scars from bad things that happened sometimes tie my tongue and sometimes stop me from saying “Hey, I’m not OK” unless asked. But I’m honest when I’m asked, and I’m upfront about this particular shortcoming of mine and those who love me know to read the signs and check with me if there’s something up. And that’s why I love them. It takes a lot for me to open up to people, and I need handling with care until I am able to trust someone not to break me.

I suppose, as I reflect, I have come to the conclusion that relationship ethics largely boil down to trust, and cheating is a violation of trust through dishonesty, whether by omission or commission. Cheating is not inherent to any form of relationship, and poly people can cheat just as surely as mono people.

But to me, relationship ethics encompass more than mere honesty: my trust in people has been violated through other routes than cheating. Some people have violated emotional and physical boundaries. The bad bit of my brain always blames myself for not adequately enforcing my own boundaries; the rest of me knows this is a nonsense but still finds itself listening to the bad bit. It is honest to say “Oh, you have this boundary, do you? Well, I’m going to cross it, because that’s how I roll,” but it is not ethical.

Trust is a gift. Be careful what you do with it.

Things I read this week that I found interesting

Didn’t read much, because fascists keep showing up and I keep having to oppose them, but here’s some things I read this week that I found interesting, some of it not necessarily written this week. Please drop me more links I may find interesting.

Standing on the shoulders of giants (Reni Eddo-Lodge)- Reni takes us on a journey through the same argument that keeps being had, from Sojourner Truth to Audre Lourde, via bell hooks. Let’s stop this happening now, please.

White privilege? Check (Sam Ambreen)- Sam articulates continuing righteous dismay with white feminists.

Louise Mensch, take a lesson on privilege from the internet (Laurie Penny)- In which Laurie completely schools anti-intersectional commentators, explaining some basics and giving them no excuse to plead ignorance.

The Dictionary and Marginalised People (Womanist Musings)- You know that annoying thing where someone stubbornly rims their dictionary rather than engage in a discussion on social justice? Here’s why that’s bullshit.

And finally, GBC Legal are amazing, and have been doing invaluable work in the last week. They train legal observers and can send them when a protest is happening, provide information about rights and do support for people who have been arrested during political activism. They need money to keep doing the invaluable work they do. Can you help them?

Louise Mensch’s “reality based feminism”: whose reality?

Oh dear. Louise Mensch has been at it again with the Tory feminism. This time, she’s upset about people telling her to check her privilege, displaying a profound lack of understanding of intersectional feminism and the notion of what privilege is and cissexism, all of which she has somehow managed to conflate together because she understands it so little. Also, I think she’s watched The Life of Brian recently. Anyway, for the most part it is the same tedious anti-intersectional twaddle which tends to come from high-profile people who have had their fingers burned by being challenged on some dingleberries they’ve been spouting and lack the basic level of self-reflection to learn from the experience.

However, Louise Mensch has a solution to the problem! She calls for a reality-based feminism, which is basically this:

American feminism gets organised. It sees where power lies, and it mobilises to achieve it. It gets its candidates elected. Feminism here is about running for office, founding a company, becoming COO of Facebook or Yahoo. It is power feminism that realises that actual empowerment for women means getting more money, since money and liberty often equate, and being able to legislate or influence. Hillary Clinton shifted from First Lady to Senator. Before that she was a powerful lawyer.

…

And by the way, reality-based feminism – where you achieve, try to earn lots of money, run for office, campaign for measurable goals like defeating Sen. Todd Akin – is not a province of Conservative feminism alone. When I think of a true feminist of the left that I admire I think of Stella Creasy MP and her campaign against payday loans. She’s doing something. She ran for office. She got involved in the Labour party. She matters immensely. She will change things.

This is apparently what feminism should be fighting for according to Louise Mensch. The tiny number of high-paid positions which are near-impossible to attain due to material and social circumstances. Forget fighting for not having to live in fucking fear every day, forget fighting to be recognised as a human being, forget fighting for survival. In Louise Mensch’s reality, feminism is about getting a well-paid job, and fighting only battles on the lowest difficulty setting with an easy win guaranteed.

And I suppose it’s good for her that this is the only thing that she needs. Good for her that most of her problem is that people say she’s privileged on the internet, because if that’s her problem, then she really is staggeringly privileged. This privilege has bestowed upon her a staggering lack of empathy and imagination, a lack of any ability to see how impossible her vision is for the vast amount of women.

Louise Mensch thinks that everything she did was entirely her own doing, a shocking degree of egocentrism which most people grow out of by the age of three. There is absolutely no consideration that perhaps she lucked out at the life lottery in order to get where she is. She believes it to be possible to anyone, concluding with a somewhat frightening peek at her ideal future.

The picture at the top is of me at school aged 14. Big glasses, nerdy, feminist, ambitious, idolising Thatcher, and determined to be famous, to be an author, and to be rich. I was at private school my parents couldn’t really afford because I bust my ass and won a 100% academic scholarship. I always believed in myself and I had and have no intention of checking my privilege for anyone. I earned it. I hope the next generation of young women feel the same.

Imagine this future, where women squabble like a flock of pigeons, pecking at the scraps patriarchy chooses to throw us. A future utterly devoid of any solidarity, just women kicking down our sisters, piling their limp forms into a ladder to get that executive position. Imagine a future where we no longer dream of better and hope for better, hope for a change to a society which is inherently oppressive, crying out for an end to capitalism and kyriarchy. We would compete to be the chosen ones and turn a blind eye to continuing violence and horrors, never looking back just ruthlessly making sure that it is never us who are victims. Better someone else. It would be Mad Max in shoulder pads.

And if we won, we would mistakenly believe that somehow we earned it all, which is far better than the truth: we got lucky. If we lost, we would be blamed for our misfortune, our inability to play the game correctly.

It would be quaint, Louise Mensch’s belief that there is a pure meritocracy and that circumstances do not affect it, were it not just the stick that is used to beat us again and again and again.

The current state of affairs has benefited Louise Mensch, and so she does not want to rock the boat and enact any sort of change to the system. This is why she wants to maintain her reality, stubbornly attempting to swat away anyone who reminds her that it a hefty heap of luck supplemented her hard work to get her where she is today. She decries those who are not rooted in her reality.

And yet, by insistent focus on how things cannot change, all she betrays is that she is stagnant, and set in her ways. She is disgusted by dreamers, those of us who see that the system is broken and should not survive, those of us who hope for better. We flow like a small mountain stream, clearer and brighter, while Mensch and her ilk are a set of foetid puddles, unmoving and separate. Will we one day roar into a river, we dreamers? I like to hope so, because I have something Louise Mensch does not: hope and a vision that things can be different.

Lose the lad mags: a round-up and something that’s bugging me

UK Feminista and Object unveiled their latest project earlier this week: telling shops to get rid of lad mags, or it might break equality law, constituting sexual harassment. Now, I’m not particularly convinced by the legal argument, with even the lawyers couching their analysis in “may” rather than “does” constitute sexual harassment or discrimination.

I’m also not particularly convinced by the arguments surrounding objectification of women underpinning it, and have similar reservations to those surrounding the No More Page 3 campaign.

However, I’m late to the party in critiquing Lose the Lad Mags. It looks like others have got there first and made some very good points, so I am going to link to a few things which are worth reading.

Dangerous Dolls: ‘Object’ and Lose the Lads’ Mags (plasticdollheads)
Is it cold outside Kat? (itsjustahobby)
Lose the magging sexism (Squeamish Bikini)

All of these cover many of the problems fairly well: that sexism in magazines are not a problem limited to Nuts and Loaded; that objectification arguments are missing the point by focusing solely on image; that lad mags are a symptom of the problem rather than a cause; that banning something isn’t necessarily the best way forward.

I have another quibble to add. The campaigners have made a statement, as have lawyers involved, but there are voices missing: the voices of women who work in shops where lads’ mags are stocked and feel harassed and discriminated against by being forced to handle them. It is their voices which should be front and central in the Lose the Lad Mags campaigns, not those of spokespeople drafting official press releases.

It is their voices, their needs and wants, that matter.

And I suspect my feelings about this campaign would be very different if it weren’t led by lawyers and professional activists. A group of women who work in retail, gathering together to organise against an employment practice that harms them is a different thing entirely to a top-down campaign organised by groups who exist largely to get rid of lad mags. What it feels like here is instrumentalising some possible concerns that workers may have about an employment rights issue, in order to push an agenda. I say “possibly” here because in all the noise, we haven’t heard the voices of workers who may feel harassed here.

There is a world of difference between people who are most troubled by an issue leading on finding a solution, and an edict about how to solve a problem coming from above. Such top-down organisation is inherently paternalistic, smacking of a perception of knowing what is best for those poor little women. Is this really a pressing employment rights issue for women who work in shops? Maybe. We don’t know, because we’re only hearing from activists and lawyers telling us what they think and how they imagine women working in shops should feel.

What this campaign should look like, if it is indeed a major problem affecting workers, is support. These big organisations should not be leading, but quietly providing resources and a microphone, as it is not their battle. This battle belongs to the women workers who feel harassed and discriminated against, who find themselves in already-precarious retail work with little to do. These issues of workers’ rights are all part of the class struggle. Unfortunately, Lose the Lad Mags has not connected these dots, nor has it provided any solutions:  I do not see any offers from Lose the Lad Mags to help with legal fees, no guidance in organising in the workplace in different ways which might work better–after all, with the cuts to Legal Aid a lawsuit is something potentially-affected women cannot afford.

And it is sad, because these may be women who need help, yet are being treated as little more than pawns, potential mouthpieces to legitimise the campaign.

Things I read this week that I found interesting

I read things. I found them interesting. Show me other interesting things, please.

IC a Muslim (Sam Ambreen)- A very personal piece from Sam on being a woman of colour in the aftermath of a terrorism scare.

straight (Linda Stupart)- Linda takes us on a journey to how she embraced her queer identity.

Assault by police (tiredlegs)- Enormous trigger warning for violence. Tiredlegs tells the story of what happened when she reported concerns about sexual assault to the police as a woman with mental health issues.

The bipolar and abortion case (zedkat)- A response to a recent, horrific case in the news, and how it reflects some of zed’s worst fears.

What Do You Desire? (Emily Witt)- A long form piece on BDSM porn and how it is made, and what it all means.

Opinion: I Was A Misogynist Comedian (Michael J Dolan)- Michael was a misogynist comedian. He got better.

Whoremoms – A documentary on Sex Work and the Family Court. (Tanaha Koontz)- A fairly worthy cause for a Kickstarter. Read this story of the experience of a sex worker with the family court system, and donate if you’d like to see it made into a documentary.

On Reverse Cultural Appropriation (my culture is not a trend)- On white people crying reverse cultural appropriation when black people wear suits, and why that’s a nonsense.

Why Do Men Keep Putting Me in the Girlfriend-Zone? (insert literary reference)- A witty antidote to that “friendzone” bollocks.

You can shove your same sex marriage up your arse (riotstarz)- A very lucid critique of same sex marriage.

It’s worse when it’s a woman? (itsjustahobby)- Jem shares a story of women policing other women’s acceptability and ponders why it feels worse.

Corrected (STFU MRAs)- An artistic correction to some liberal bullshit which gets way too much credence.

Nick Ross: Myth Perpetuator (One Woman’s Thoughts)- A speedy response to the latest rape apologist bollocks in the Mail.

On the Swedish “riots” (MegafonenOrten)- All you need to know about what’s going on in Sweden.

The Consent Debate (eumelia)- On the understanding of consent in fandom, and how it’s quite terrible.

Judith Butler explained with cats (Binarythis)- Struggling to understand Judith Butler? Me too. This explanation, with cats, should help.

And finally, 19 cats who just need to check their goddamn privilege.

G4S running rape support. Fuck that shit.

Content note: This post discusses rape and the aftermath

I have written before about why I never reported my rape to the police, and reams about the trail of disgusting fuck-ups the police have displayed in handling of rape. I know that many feel the same way, unable to trust this violent, patriarchal institution to help healing and justice. Yet some do, or at least see going to the police is the best option available. And for some, the police really are helpful. For the rest of us, we look at the police and plot revolution, plot for a day when they are the best option for none as we deal with the entrenched societal problem with rape and let go of models of retributive justice, doing away with this coercive arm of the state.

Getting rid of the police and their role in dealing with the aftermath of rape requires a revolution. It doesn’t require what the state are doing: outsourcing rape support services to G4S. It is reported in the Birmingham Mail that the private security company will be managing sexual assault referral centres in Walsall and Birmingham, where their staff will be present in the centres doing medical assessments and providing advice. The regurgitated press release informs us that survivors will not even have to speak to the police first. Under privatisation, this coded little phrase usually means “because the police will send them there anyway”.

In the context of the state’s continued programme of cutting literally everything that makes life a little more tolerable, they are presenting us with a choice: get nothing for rape support, or have G4S. In a conversation on Twitter last night, I idly wondered which was worse, my own personal thoughts drifting towards it being G4S. A reply from @gherkinette helped put my finger on a lot of the problem: “allowing people to trust you and then fucking up is in my experience worse than no help at all. Others may disagree.”

Once, I told a friend I trusted about the awful things that had happened to me in greater detail than I have ever told anyone else. I was rewarded with a complete lack of sensitivity and unhelpfulness, a nagging sense of not being believed. I am no longer friends with that person, and it was not at all conducive to my own healing process, throwing me into a deep depression and rendering it nearly impossible for me to talk about any of this stuff with reference to my own personal experience. I sometimes beat myself up for putting my trust in that person, even though on a level I know that the fault was theirs and not mine.

So I can only imagine how fucking awful it must be for a survivor to make the decision to report, and be lumbered with G4S and their enormous scope for fucking up enormously. As a private company, they are far less accountable for errors than the police–who have proved, time and time again to avoid accountability at all costs. What we know of G4S is that it was they who were responsible for a cock-up of such magnitude that the Army had to be called in. That they are famous for running prisons and detention centres for immigrants, hardly a sector known for its sensitivity. That they undertake similar work in Israel and Palestine. And now, that the responsibility for sensitively helping survivors of sexual violence is being placed in their incapable hands, all for the sake of a political agenda.

They have ruined many lives already, and the doors have been thrown open for them to ruin more lives in new, different ways.

It is a repugnant state of affairs that this task is being entrusted to G4S. We need that revolution more than ever.

Dear Aiden Russell

Dear Aiden Russell,

You’re a bellend. A big, throbbing, cheesy bellend. You are a suppurating boil on the arse of humanity, a yellow stain on a white vest on a hot day, an eggy guff on a morning commute.

Also, you are a massive bigot. Yes, I said it. I can almost taste your tears from here, and it’s enough to make me want to gag, tasting as they do of wet dogs and anchovy-brine. You don’t like being called a bigot, do you Aiden? I’ve seen your picture of you whinging about being silenced. It must be hard for you, being dealt the cruel hand of being a massive fucking bigot and also not even having a semblance of a clue.

You see, Aiden, you are a bigot. It’s not silencing you to say that. You are free to go about your day, being a bigot. You can go about ineffectually seeking to deny dignity to queer folk all you like, desperately promoting some sort of right to refuse service to us as you and the handful of other bigots try to unionise to an almost-complete public indifference. You can run your sockpuppet account expressing your pride to be heterosexual: goodness knows, you have nothing else to be proud of. And you can try to blame the fact you’re a bigot on Muslims, because you’re probably a racist, too. Bigotry overlaps, you see, Aiden.

You’re more than welcome to do this, Aiden, because of free speech.

But guess what? We’re more than welcome to call you out on it, because of free speech. And you’re homophobic, Aiden. You’re very, very homophobic. You want to deny rights to people because of their sexual orientation. And you’re allowed to think that, but it makes you an enormous, pulsating ballbag.

And as time passes by, your views are becoming outmoded. More and more people are wising up to the fact that you and your ever-decreasing ilk are chatting shit. Hell, even a lot of bigots have evolved beyond your point, moving instead to more insipid ways of oppressing queer folk. You’d be almost quaint, Aiden, if you weren’t such a rampaging nipple.

For someone who has been silenced, Aiden, you are remarkably loud, and this is because you know you haven’t been. You are just, like others of your kind, terrified of accountability and so therefore casting yourself as a victim.

You wouldn’t know hate if it booted you in the head, straight man.

I do not doubt that you will consider the fact people think you’re a gnawing cockcanoe to be more evidence of silencing, but this betrays just how little you understand what free speech is. It isn’t just for you, you see, Aiden. It’s for us. And it’s what lets us speak out against you. Do you hate free speech, Aiden?

Yours, with contempt,

Stavvers