“I Don’t Feel Like I’m Really Polyamorous.” Here’s Why You Are.

They talk to me in whispers, in private conversations, in closed chat rooms, these hushed confessions:

“I don’t feel like I’m really polyamorous.”

Sometimes they don’t feel like they deserve the Badge of Poly because they’re solo poly – they just want to date a lot of people and live single in their apartment,and if they’re not seeking a primary partner can they really be poly?

Sometimes they don’t feel like they deserve the Official Medal Of The Polyamoric Experience because they’re in a closed triad, having only dated the same two people for fifteen years, and if they’re not actively seeking new partners can they really be poly?

Sometimes they don’t feel like they deserve to be considered an official Colonel of the Polyamorous Field Wars because they’re asexual and they have deeply romantic ties with several people but there’s not really any physical connection, and if they’re not bumping the bits then can they really be poly?

And the answer is: Yes.

No, I lie: the true answer is Fuck yes.

Because here’s the trick: Monogamy is one very narrow version of how romantic relationships can form – basically, one on one, exclusive. (And there’s a hell of a lot of variation to be had even within that quote-unquote “narrow” version, because humans are complex and the world is large, but the gist of the ideal is pretty much “You eventually find one person to stay with until one of you is dead.”)

But polyamory?

Is literally every other kind of relationship you can have that’s not monogamy.

Saying that polyamory and monogamy are opposites is a terrible definition, because they’re not actually opposed. Monogamy is like New York City – it’s ridiculously popular and influential, and certainly lots of people live in New York City or in places with similarities to New York City….

But “not living in New York City” isn’t actually a well-defined experience. Maybe you live in the farmlands. Maybe you live in the suburbs. Maybe you live in a trailer, or on a commune, or in a geodesic dome.

New York City isn’t the opposite of the world, it’s just an outsized experience that’s given a wildly disproportionate amount of attention. And you don’t see people say “I don’t feel that I’m not really not living in New York City” because they’re living in Saskatoon.

Likewise, all it takes to be polyamorous is to not be monogamous. And monogamy is so omnipresent in Western culture that simply stepping away from that expectation is a hurdle in and of itself.

So the good news: You are polyamorous. You’re valid. The true polyamorous experience is as simple as realizing that monogamy doesn’t entirely fit you, and you need something a little off the rack – and so you’re aiming your relationships, no matter how imperfectly, in that direction.

Admittedly, there are a few doofy One True Wayers who’ll tell you that you’re not really polyamorous unless your poly looks like their poly – which is entirely coincidental, I’m sure – but as always, you can ignore the dorks.

What you’re doing? It’s valid, it’s poly, it ticks all the boxes. Furthermore, it’s probably approaching a good poly, as you’re trying to figure out how to shape a customized experience to fulfill your needs, as opposed to stepping away from the constrictions of monogamy to take up an entirely new set of constrictions.

In short, your experiences with polyamory right now:

• Is polyamory
• Are valid
• Are hopefully healthy for you and your partners, so long as you’re treating everyone with respect.

And that’s all ya need to know.

The Discord Invites Have Gone Out!

On Tuesday, I said “Sign up for my newsletter, where on Thursday I’ll be sending out invites to my new Discord server.”

Well, it’s Thursday, and those invites have been sent. Look for ’em from donotreply@theferrett.com, with the extremely subtle title “The Invite To My Discord Server!” – unfortunately, my newsletter seems to get marked as spam more often than I’d like (like every other newsletter, really), but it should be there.

If you have signed up for my newsletter and your email client ate it, email me at theferrett@theferrett.com with the subject “Lost Discord Invite” and I’ll see what I can do.

If you did not sign up for my newsletter and you want a Discord invite, well, sign up now, because I’ll be sending out another invite next week to celebrate my new book Automatic Reload releasing.

And if you’re in my Discord right now, yes, it’s really busy because, well, we just invited a ton of people. It’ll calm down. I promise. But we’ll be happy to see you.

Did You Want An Invite To My Discord Server?

As mentioned before, I’ve started up a Discord server, and it’s been going pretty well… in part because it’s been invite-only, and the people involved have been extremely cool. There’s been a lot of interesting discussions ranging from Heinlein to Hamilton.

I’ll be sending out more Discord invites this Thursday, but the only way to get that invite is to sign up for my newsletter. (And, ideally, check your spam on Thursday to check it’s there.)

The newsletter is where you can also win the last advance copies of my book Automatic Reload, which is coming out a week from now.

So all I need is an email address, I promise not to spam it (I mean, I’ve sent literally two newsletters in the last six months, but there’ll be a few more thanks to book), and in return you’ll get an invite to a pretty hip chat room.

Anyway. Again, newsletter is here, invites Thursday, that is all.

How Logic’s Supposed To Work/How It Actually Is Used. (Warning: Pointing Out Of Conservative Flaws Ensues.)

The traditional view of logic is that people look at the facts and use them to build a theory that fits all the facts. Which is why logic, when used correctly, is probably the best tool we have for finding the truth.

But unfortunately, logic can be bent to justify emotion – and, I’d argue, that’s how it’s usually employed.

Take masks.

There was a little doubt in the beginning whether wearing masks was useful in preventing the spread of COVID-19, but as time has ticked on the evidence has become increasingly pro-mask. Are masks perfect? No. They’re like condoms. A lot of the success depends on them being used correctly, they do not provide perfect safety even when used perfectly, but in general the more people wearing masks, the slower the spread of the disease.

Now, this is not an attack against everyone who’s skeptical of masks. Some medical professionals have studied the data extensively, come to their own opinions. (Me? I’ve spent roughly 15-20 hours just studying mask efficiency, listening to pandemic-focused professionals, and I’m pretty sure anyone who’s scorning masks now is wrong – but I’m also open to the fact that maybe more information could change the course of my path.) It’s entirely possible to use logic properly and come to two different conclusions.

But if you hated masks to begin with…

Part of the resistance is, of course, political. Modern conservatives, which is to say the ones in power, no longer identify themselves by any stable ideology. They currently define themselves as “Whatever liberals hate,” or, more properly, a philosophy of, “Owning libs” – whatever, or however, bad that may be.

All you have to do to see that is watch the spread of the pandemic. Originally, it was “We must save every life we can,” but unfortunately modern conservatism is so steeped in liberal opposition that joining forces to save lives started to make them itch like a rash. And so soon enough, you had conservatives going, “We can’t be in favor of saving lives because that’s what liberals do!” and sure enough, the message mutated to “People should be proud to die to keep our economy going.”

Likewise: masks. For about four or five weeks, it was like “Hey, wearing masks is good,” but then enough liberals started wearing masks that conservatives came to resent looking like liberals… and, inevitably, there came a backlash of “Muh freedoms!” that led to conservatives shucking their masks to protect their identities as “Not-liberals.”

And what you’re frequently seeing when conservatives try to justify not wearing masks is logic being used to justify emotion. Because you’ll see ’em pulling out all kinds of comparisons that seem logical, but don’t actually function in real life – “The CO2 buildup is toxic!” Yes, that’s why surgeons routinely pass out in the middle of long operations. “The mask is too porous to prevent viruses from passing through!” But it’s not too porous to prevent most drops of spittle from passing through, the spittle in which the virus is contained. And, of course, the inevitable “I can smell farts through a mask, so obviously a mask can’t help.”

These are all facts that seem pretty good at first blush, but each of them are pretty easily disproven. And you’d think that once you dismantled those facts, these folks would acknowledge that they were wrong and change their mind.

Problem is, they’re not using logic to come to conclusions, they’re starting with an emotional conclusion (“I do not like masks”) and piling whatever facts they can find in front of them to justify that conclusion.

You can’t take away their facts. Either they’ll find new facts to justify their mask-hatred, or they’ll probably just ignore your disproving of the old facts because those facts were emotionally useful to them and no amount of logic will take them away.

That’s not to say that this usage of logic is an exclusively conservative one, of course; liberals do it, too. But it gets to be a problem in national debate when the fundamental thought behind conservative philosophy is “If the libs are for, I’m against,” and liberals think “Oh, they’re using logic to come to a conclusion, I’ll just talk them out of it through spirited debate!” Which is what mainstream America would like us to do, but unfortunately, it’s no longer possible.

I don’t have any grand conclusions here to fix America. Right now, the only consistent thing I see convincing mainstream conservatives of anything is “This will totally own the libs,” and it’s hard to have a working country when literally any solution we suggest, or even adopt (like, say, Romneycare, which was the conservative fix for health care) will eventually be reviled.

But in the short scale, what it means is that yes, facts are good. But beware of how people use facts. Because if you disprove a couple of their talking points and their attitude doesn’t shift, well, chances are that they’re actually not reachable.

It sucks, but that’s when you abandon or ban or ignore those folks, because – at least on this topic – you’re not equipped to get ’em out.

And if you’re one of those enraged “logic” users who’s screaming, “WHY IS NO ONE WILLING TO ENGAGE WITH ME?!?!”, well…. ponder that you may be that person, and the people who are blocking/ignoring/abandoning you are actually perfectly logical in refusing to engage with someone who’s never going to have their minds changed.

A Vital Key To Help Y’All Understand Toxic Masculinity

Yesterday, I linked to this article on “What Is It Like To Be A Man?“, which should actually be called “What is it like to be a man indoctrinated in harmful ideas about masculinity?” because holy shit I’ve never been through a third of what this dude has been through and I wouldn’t want to.

Benefits of friending the girls on the fourth-grade playground, I guess.

But at one point, he said something which some of my female friends took umbrage to:

“‘Men don’t have to think about how they look,’ says another coworker, also a woman, and I nod again. Then I realize, days later, that the reason the statement is still bugging me is that I am literally never not sore from the gym, because I am so concerned with looking a certain way.”

To which women said, not unreasonably, that men don’t pay attention to how they look – one in particular said she’d seen dudes showing up at interviews in a grimy hoodie, which was proof that dudes never had to think about appearances in the way that women do.

Which is true. They don’t.

But that doesn’t mean men – or, rather, these types of trad-masculine men – don’t think about appearances.

Because for those kinds of dudes, showing up at the interview (or anywhere, really) with their hair in a lime-green scrunchie or their fingernails painted a bright pink would be horrifying. It would be girly, and terrifying, and they would avoid it in the same way so many of them avoid picking up a package of tampons for their girlfriends because I can’t be seen like that.

(And if you’re readying your commenting fingers to say, “I don’t think like that!” then congratulations, you should recognize come the third mention of “These sorts of guys” that you apparently don’t fall into that category, good work you, but the fact that you’re not like these guys doesn’t negate the existence of these sorts of duderinos.)

For the trad-masculine men, what you have to realize is that they are dressing up to impress other men. They don’t care that much about the opinions of women; they assume that women are out to impress men, and that other men are also out to impress men. And as such, those sorts of dudes virtue-signal in a constant fashion by dressing according to a strict manly method that pretends to be effortless.

And don’t get me wrong: it is much less effort, because unlike women’s fashions the traditional-manly look doesn’t change from season to season. But it is a narrow range of looks, one that does not tolerate certain colors or hairstyles, and you step outside of it you’ll be noticed by the dudes. (Hell, even paying too much attention to your looks risks marking you as a metrosexual, which has an unsavory whiff of girly city boys. Ridiculous and bigoted as that is.)

Yet that’s the key: once you understand that those sorts of dudes are literally living their lives to impress other men, everything else snaps into focus. You’d think the incels could just clean up and get a nice girl, but no – they don’t actually want a girlfriend. What they want is a pornstar-perfect 10 they can parade around in front of other men to signal that they’ve got the status now, and the fact that said women require effort and change to land strikes them as being deeply unfair, in part because they’d have to attempt to impress someone other than men. Which, as noted, is not their point.

And likewise, in the article on that poor tortured dude, note how he’s enduring years of a miserable cross-country high school group where he doesn’t even like the other guys in it, but he’s afraid to be the one guy who drops out.

Note how there’s a lot of guys who get married simply because it’s what society – and by “society,” mean “the right type of guy” – thinks they should do, normally with mediocre results where they offload duties onto a wife and then wonder why their lives are stagnant.

Note how a lot of men don’t form emotional friendships with other men, because it’s hard to be open with someone you’re desperately seeking approval from, and as a result they swallow their feelings back to the point of suicide because the risk of losing whatever approval you had means so much more to them than the hope of connection.

It’s all about courting dudes. Which explains the problem with so much of traditional manliness – there’s only one type of person worth impressing, and that person is also probably fronting hard.

There’s all the other issues, too, and once you get past the grimy bits of this dude’s psyche he starts making some good points about how traditional masculinity claims to protect women, but doesn’t do a particularly good job at it. And so I’d advise a gander if you got it. (I don’t agree with his viewpoints 100%, but his experience is equally telling and unpleasant.)

But when you look at it, remember that this is why traditional masculinity is hard to define, and harder to reform into something that might be useful – it’s an illusion. It’s a shell game where men have been trained to only want to impress a certain type of man, and that man is probably faking it to some significant degree to impress someone else.

If you don’t fall into the category, you don’t count. Even if you’re a potential employer. Or a lover. Or a savior. Your redemption will come when other dudes look upon you and, if you’re lucky, give you a discreet nod.

And that’s all you can hope for. And man, I hope it’s enough for you.

I Hate Condoms, And I Hate Masks.

Yet whenever I don’t want to put on a condom or a mask, I remember something I told my daughter – a philosophy that’s only gotten truer with each passing year:

Being a grownup is largely defined by your ability to do things that you don’t want to do.

It’s true. Filling out my taxes? I don’t wanna do that. Getting up at 8:00 every morning to work out, so my heart doesn’t clog up again? I don’t wanna do that. Having awkward conversations with lovers and friends about problems that will blow up if we don’t discuss ’em? I definitely don’t wanna do that.

But it turns out that learning to do things you don’t want to do makes your life a lot better.

Seriously. If there’s an overpowered skill in the game of life, it’s that. Pouring all your points into “Doing things you don’t want to do” will have you leveling up faster than everyone else. Your car registration will be taken care of, that novel you’ve been meaning to write will get done, you’ll be well-rested because you put yourself to bed at a reasonable hour.

But to get those benefits, you have to abandon the idea that “I don’t wanna” is a good reason not to do something.

So yeah. I’m not gonna bullshit you; sex is slightly less enjoyable for penis-owners with the condom on, and the masks are itchy and hot in the summer. But at the same time, you get to have a lot more, and safer, sex with the condom on, and you don’t risk infecting innocent people with hard-to-detect diseases with your mask and your condom on. (Though hopefully not worn in the same place, that’d be awkward.)

But to get that, you have to get to the point of being a grownup where you realize that “I can’t have everything I want” isn’t the same as “Then it’s not worth doing.” Sex is less enjoyable with a condom, but it’s still insanely fun. Mini-golf with a mask on isn’t as fun as mini-golf without the mask, but on the other hand you don’t have to worry about the putt-putt course being closed down due to a COVID outbreak.

Leave behind this idea that everything must a steady stream of perfectly maximized fun, and take on some goddamn responsibilities. Stop trying to sneak that condom off, or the mask off. Look at the bigger picture than your next shot of joy, and mitigate the risks both for you and for the people around you.

Be a grownup. It’s got benefits. Promise.

I’m Talking About Social Media On The KinkyCast!

Now, technically the KinkyCast is where you go to discuss all the kinky stuff in your life – which I have done in past episodes.

But hey, remember when I announced that I’d be cutting wayyyy back on social media because I didn’t think it was good for me?

Then remember that nasty little bug that waylaid the world, making travel and visiting friends all but impossible for sane people?

Yeah, I’ve been on social media a lot more as of late because that’s the only place I can see a lot of my friends, but I can’t say I’m happy about it – which is the sad point of social media. One of the things I say in this podcast is that if you spend two hours mired in a nasty argument with your relatives on Facebook, tearing apart once-beloved relationships and stressing because you can’t believe your aunt would do that…

All Facebook sees is “Two hours of committed user engagement.”

Social media doesn’t care how you engage, it just cares that you do engage. So what I wound up discussing on this podcast was all the tricks I’ve learned to handle nasty comments productively, how to avoid doom-scrolling, how to interact with people who aren’t actually there to interact.

(And since we’re talking technology, I also discussed my upcoming tech-fest romance book Automatic Reload for a bit near the end.)

Anyway, it turned out to be a really interesting discussion, in part because FetLife – the Facebook for Kinksters – is also experiencing a lot of growing pains because people are coming to realize that kink can’t be separated from politics, not effectively anyway, and that’s causing stress from people who go to Fet to get away from things.

So anyway… here I am. Listen up if you like. I think it’s one of the more interesting conversations I’ve had since the pandemic started.