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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   27790 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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Back when I still hung out on SSC, Scott had an anecdote about a situation with one of his patients; IIRC the story was that a gay couple was having relationship issues, and had come to him for counseling. One of the guys was upset that the other was running around behind his back, flirting and cheating on him, and Scott laid out his general counseling strategy. If my recall is to be trusted, it was something along the lines of helping him get over his feelings of jealousy so they could properly enjoy an open relationship, and in passing Scott mentioned that of course the jealousy was just getting in the way, because no one really expects or values monogamy/fidelity. The offhand comment shocked the hell out of me and several other commenters, and there was a back-and-forth about it that confirmed that we had not misunderstood him, this was really what he thought. It blew my mind at the time, and fundamentally changed how I looked at Scott, his writings and the community generally.

That was so wild. Here's the article. Somehow I recall Scott coming down much harder on Adam's side, which is strange. Besides that, it was just fascinating to watch marriage get redefined in real time.

Adam made the following proposal: he knew Steve was not very kinky, so Adam would go do his kinky stuff at the club, with Steve’s knowledge and consent. That way everyone could get what they wanted. Sure, it would involve having sex with other people, but it didn’t mean anything, and it was selfish for a spouse to assert some kind of right to “control” the other spouse anyway.

...

Yeah, marriage usually implies remaining monogamous, but that was all legal boilerplate. He had wanted to get married to symbolize his committment to Steve – committment that he still had! – and he hadn’t realized he was interested in fetish stuff at the time or else he would have brought it up.

Scott then says,

I’m not personally very good at feeling jealous, so wanting your husband to never go to a club, even if he doesn’t tell you about it, or make you think about it, or even agrees only to do it when you’re away on a business trip in another city – seems a bit odd. Honestly I would be tempted to take Steve aside and ask him whether he’s sure that he couldn’t deal with Adam going to this club, and whether maybe he wants to give it a chance, and whether maybe he just wants what’s best for Adam even if that makes him a little uncomfortable.

Just so wild to me that people think this way. Sounds like he and others have decided to take marriage, separate it out into what they believe to be its component parts, and then only pick the ones they like while abandoning the others. Maybe, they think, you can keep the positive commitment of marriage, without the stifling confines of sexual exclusivity.

There are just so many problems with this approach.

  • People are not robots. We find it easier to self-police when there are hard rules in place set a safe distance away from truly dangerous behavior. Break a rule once, and it becomes much easier to break that rule again, or break it harder. It's much easier and safer to simply never try meth than to only try it once, even assuming that single try definitely won't get you addicted. The rule "I will never try meth" is so, so much easier to mentally enforce than something like "I will only take meth on Mondays in July". It's very easy to modify the latter rule whenever you'd like until you are taking meth every day. "I will never sleep with anyone besides my spouse" is an easy rule to defend, while "I'll only sleep with others at the fetish club" can so, so easily become "OK our relationship started at the fetish club" and then from there it can burgeon into a full second relationship. This kind of rule-breaking is guaranteed given human nature.

  • People are not robots. We are all affected by society and culture. Marriage has ideas and values fundamentally associated with it, and if you decide you can pick and choose which of those to honor, that decision is final. If you write into a contract the clause "the terms of this contract can be changed by any party at any time" then of course the contract doesn't mean as much as it would without that clause. There's a reason these gay men have decided to get "married" rather than "committed" and it's because they see something good in heterosexual marriages and want to emulate it. They are not geniuses, though, and cannot arbitrarily reinvent an ancient institution to fit their own needs, no matter how well they think they understand themselves.

  • People are not robots. Sex generally does (and should) lead to feelings of romantic commitment, and vice versa. People frame casual sex as "physical but not romantic", but I think in truth good physical relationships always lead to romantic attachment and feelings of intimacy, and being promiscuous is not so much preventing those feelings from forming as it is denying and dismissing them once they have formed. In other words, you are working hard to cheapen romance itself, in your own mind, by regularly making a deliberate effort to deny its meaning.

  • People are not robots. We are weak, and sexual exclusivity is protective. Most marriages go through hard periods, which is when commitment is tested. Sure, Adam is committed now, but if he continues to sleep with randos at the club while his relationship with his husband suffers, I can't imagine his commitment will be helped by the arrangement.

I could go on, but I think that's enough of an unprovoked diatribe for now.

Now, I don't actually think Adam and Steve are real people. Scott includes a note at the end:

Speaking of culture wars, an apology to gay people. I always obfuscate details about my patients to disguise their identities, but I feel particularly bad about making this couple gay because it reinforces the stereotype of gay people as hypersexual and bad at committment. I made them gay anyway, because when I tried to write them hetero, their gender seemed to skew the problem too much to one side or another – for example, when Steve was a woman, he was the poor innocent wife wronged by a horny husband who insisted on thinking with his crotch. I worried that if I made the couple hetero, my readers for one reason or another would bring their own baggage and wouldn’t be able to see it as the difficult and evenly-balanced problem it seemed like when I was in the office with them.

which I think strongly implies that the couple was actually hetero, but that he was worried this would make the correct answer rather obvious (don't let the guy cheat on his wife).

which I think strongly implies that the couple was actually hetero, but that he was worried this would make the correct answer rather obvious (don't let the guy cheat on his wife).

Could have been a woman wanting to cheat on her husband - less likely, but still possible. The interesting bit there is that by implication ("one side or another") Scott's saying that that would make the answer obviously "controlling husband should loosen up", whereas e.g. most of the future members of theMotte would have started worrying about the potential for cuckoldry.

Good point, and again just so crazy.

Somehow I recall Scott coming down much harder on Adam's side, which is strange.

That probably comes from this comment:

Yeah, my particular reason for giving [the marriage contract] low weight is that I don’t think people mean it. It’s like banning people from leaving America because they pledged allegiance to the flag and to the republic for which it stands in fourth grade. Or banning doctors from doing surgery because they swore the Hippocratic Oath which includes a part about leaving that to barbers.

Some rituals take the form of binding contracts, but the parties to the ritual don’t necessarily intend or even think about the contract terms. If the two parties explicitly did something like a covenant marriage, or said in their vows “By the way, we really personally mean the stuff about being monogamous, we’re not just saying that because we’re supposed to,” I would have a lot less sympathy for Adam.

HAHA yeah that might have been it. There's a kernel of truth there, exaggerated way out of proportion. What a crazy perspective.

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