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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   31631 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025

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It seems lately that within the rationalist / post-rationalist diaspora on twitter and elsewhere, polyamory is starting to come into the crosshairs. I've seen a few 'big' accounts in the tpot space come out against polyamory, but the biggest one has to be the recent post that Kat Woods put on the Slate Star Codex subreddit, Why I think polyamory is net negative for most people who try it.

I wont summarize the whole article, but recommend you go read it. The TL;DR is:

  • Most people cannot reduce jealousy much or at all
  • It fundamentally causes way more drama because of strong emotions, jealousy, no default norms to fall back to, and there being exponentially more surface area for conflict
  • For a small minority of people, it makes them happier, and those are the people who tend to stick with it and write the books on it, creating a distorted view for newcomers.

Also, a rather hilarious quote from the middle:

When your partner starts dating a new person, that person can’t just have drama with your partner. They can have drama with you. And your partner can have drama with their other partner.

It gets complicated fast.

I remember once I had drama caused by my boyfriend’s wife’s boyfriend’s girlfriend’s girlfriend (my meta-meta-meta-metamour)

In general, I think this is a continuation of the vibe shift against social experimentation within the rationalist communities, trying to push them back a bit more towards 'normal' social standards. It has been happening for quite a while, and I'm not surprised it continues to happen. My basic view is that while the experimentation and willingness to shrug off societal norms led to a lot of fascinating and good new ideas within rationalist groups, unfortunately, as always happens with these sorts of things, issues arose that reminded people why these ideas were fringe in the first place.

For those not steeped in rationalist lore, there have been many 'cult-like' groups that have hurt people arising in the rationalist and especially EA space. Some of the early and notable ones were Ziz, the whole Leverage fiasco, and then of course later on you have the highest profile issue with SBF. But these are just the most notable and even news worthy. On top of these there are dozens, probably hundreds, of smaller scale dramas that have played out in day to day life, similar to what Kat talked about above.

I actually think her point about drama scaling with more surface area in polyamory to be quite salient here. In general one of the purposes of societal norms and rules is to make sure everyone knows how they and others are supposed to act, so that arguments over constraints and less annoying and difficult. When you throw out major parts of societal norms, things get complicated very quickly.

Of course the whole polyamory issue ties into the broader culture war in many ways - notably the push back we've seen against wokeism, and the radical left more generally. I think overall the appetite people have for radically changing social norms has shrunk dramatically over the last few years. Sadly, I am not sure that necessarily means we'll go back to a healthy, stable balance. Looking at the people on the conservative side, the loudest champions of a traditional moral order seem to be grifters, or at least hypocrites where they say one thing, and do another in their personal lives.

That being said, I am hopeful that the uneasy alliance between the new conservative, Trumpian movement and traditional Christians is finally fracturing. To bring in another CW point, Trump recently posted an AI generated image of himself as the Pope. This understandably pissed off a lot of Christians, and led to them ending their support for Trump's antics. (I happen to be one of them.)

To which his response is, basically, "why can't you take a joke?"

Anyway, I am curious to see where all these social norms shake out, especially with regards to relationships and dating.

Unless one is a superior being (read: top 1% in IQ, conscientiousness, compassion etc. etc.) the only form of polyamory which works is a harem.

Despite it being such a loaded term, smaller harems can be pretty functional for people in their pre-kid life. I think women (people?) are generally much more comfortable with this sort of arrangement than most expect.

Uh, can a harem work in a society which cares about how the women involved feel about it? All the historical examples are societies which didn’t.

Yes. It's shockingly functional.

I know that there is that one family in Hokkaido that is explicitly a harem, but otherwise I’m kind of drawing a blank.

Unless we are counting the “rich/hot dude screwing multiple women and not committing to any one of them” as similar…?? I don’t think it’s the same though.

I’d appreciate if you could elaborate.

I think polyamory works best if everybody involved is bisexual, and therefore everyone in the polycule can loosely be dating everybody else.

Or if the circle is/stays very small? Then you can have two bisexual + one straight person.

Oh, all sorts of configurations can work. But in your configuration the straight person might still feel jealous when one of the bisexuals is sleeping with the other instead of the straight one. The jealousy problem is however obliterated if everybody's screwing everybody.

He meant that, if you have 1 heterosexual and 2 bisexuals of the opposite sex, everyone can still sleep with everyone else. If there's nobody else of the same sex being heterosexual doesn't affect the number of combinations.

I think this works with one straight man and two bisexual women, but might not work with the average straight women and two gay men. I think jealousy is much more likely if your partner is having other sex to which, by definition, you're not invited - sex the very thought of which might enrage you. If you're all bisexuals, and your other two partners are doing nothing together that they haven't also done with you in the mix - who's counting? But a straight woman with no interest in watching Boyfriend One sodomize Boyfriend Two might get upset if they're spending too much time together instead of on her.

I mean, straight women fucking love seeing hot men railing each other, so this doesn’t seem like that much of a problem to me.

Do they? Last time I saw data on this I thought it said straight women didn't really consume gay porn.

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I don't see how bisexuality changes that. If you're a woman with two bisexual boyfriends, how does being interested in other women affect whether you're "by definition not invited" to M/M sex? Without adding a girlfriend you're not having sex with women either way. Bisexuality isn't required for a woman to be interested in two men having sex, as seen by (for instance) the market for yaoi.

Bisexuality isn't required for a woman to be interested in two men having sex, as seen by (for instance) the market for yaoi.

You misunderstand- yaoi isn't quite a match for yuri since most of the appeal (and remember, that's why it's called yaoi) comes from self-inserting as the bottom [edit: this isn't entirely what happens, but I think it's a useful first-approximation in this case].

So the attraction from an otherwise-straight woman seeing two dudes having sex would generally be that self-insertion. If her husband is the bottom, he's assuming her role, and women don't tend to like that very much -> "feels like you're not invited".

If that was another woman instead the dynamic is instantly and instinctively different, since she by definition isn't going to be topping the man and the "invitation" comes in the form of "watch his attractive might and dominance without being replaced". The distaff/mirror counterpart would be if a woman brings a boy home (as in: young/inexperienced enough to dominate [and not replace the man's role in the relationship], cute enough not to be aesthetically repellent), but the average age of such a participant quickly creates practical problems [it ain't the '70s no more].

Two women doing it, from the male perspective, extend the "invitation" by "come and watch the show" (and the other woman gets some variety out of it that the man himself cannot provide- women are generally more aesthetically pleasing than men are when naked), which is why MFF/MmF threesomes are inherently stable if all the participants are nominally straight, but MMF/MfF threesomes are not (the latter inherently replacing the woman's submissive role).

Not even then; being the mother of the current sultan was highly influential and powerful position, so all the wives/concubines competed to make sure their son was the chosen heir. This included killing off other wives/concubines, killing off their kids, engaging in conspiracies, faking conspiracies to get rid of rivals, etc.

Being the favourite of the sultan or emperor meant the concubine or wife's family cashed in on the opportunity to gain power, status and wealth; in the Tudor court of Henry VIII, the great families jockeyed to put their daughters before him as possible mistresses and potential queens, and their fall could be as spectacular as their rise.

An ambitious concubine could even work her way up to being empress in her own right.

So it was never as simple as "guy on top gets to bang all the hot chicks", and even under systems where men could have multiple wives, that didn't prevent jealousy or power struggles - see the story of Dhruva, famous devotee of Vishnu. Even though he was heir to the throne, his father's preferred second wife drove him away in favour of her son.

See also the current dramas playing out with Elon and his various concubines.

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