Sex on Sunday: non-monogamy, sexless feminists, warped women

diagram by Peppermint

Border Wars: Swinging and Polyamory, by Peppermint

On the one hand, sexual identity is judged in our culture based on behavior. It is sleeping with the same sex that makes you gay, lesbian, or bisexual. It is enjoying BDSM play that makes you kinky. It is having or wanting multiple relationships that makes you poly, and so on. On the other hand, identity is supposed to represent an immutable truth about the person that comes from within, and has all sorts of implications for the person’s past, future, and personality. The result is that people in sexual minority identity categories are forced into a constant struggle to maintain that their behavior places them in their identity, or that their identity actually matches their behavior. And this is not some sort of abstract struggle, but a question that strikes to the core of their being.

Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the Twentieth Century, by Sheila Rowbotham, discussed by Max Dunbar of3:AM

Towards the end of the nineteenth century working class feminists would sit in New York cafes debating politics into the night. To avoid the wrong kind of attention they wore plain and shapeless clothing. An acerbic bystander coined the stereotype that has haunted Western feminists to this day: ‘pallid, tired, thin-lipped, flat-chested and angular’ women, living in an ‘atmosphere of tea-steam and cigarette smoke’. . .

Warped Women: Strange Love Stripped Them of all Decency! Once over the line they could not stop!

Patient note: my surname is spelled Agustín, not Agustine, Augustine or Augustin

2 thoughts on “Sex on Sunday: non-monogamy, sexless feminists, warped women

  1. Clarisse Thorn

    Did you ever catch the swinging vs. poly analysis from Boston last year? It’s a bit more accessible than the one you linked.
    polyinthemedia.blogspot.com/2009/12/polys-vs-swingers-as-viewed-from-2010.html

    Reply
  2. Pingback: Love Bites: Clarisse Thorn | Time Out Chicago » » Swinging vs. polyamory, the showdown

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