Hello and welcome back to The Overthinker’s Guide To Sex, a sex and relationships newsletter by journalist Franki Cookney.
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Welcome to Links and Overthinks! This is your monthly round-up of things I’ve seen, heard, read, or talked about in the last few weeks. Got a suggestion for something you think I should check out? Let me know!
I, A POLYAMOROUS PERSON AM OFFICIALLY BORED OF TALKING ABOUT POLYAMORY
Yet another think piece in The Atlantic this month, off the back of Molly Roden Winter’s More, which we briefly touched on in Links & Overthinks last month. The essay is a critique of ethical non-monogamy as a journey of self-actualisation and the hyper-individualism of these kinds of memoirs which love to frame personal exploration as social progress. And, to be fair, I have some time for that. There’s a balance to be struck, isn’t there, between embracing the idea that the “intimate sphere is replete with resistance,” as Sophie K Rosa set out in last week’s letter, and going full Main Character Energy? But I didn’t end up reading the whole piece because I simply did not have the will to do so. However, if you do and you have thoughts you want to share with me, please do!
THE NOMENCLATURE OF NON-MONOGAMY (IS ALSO BORING)
Wednesday Martin wants us to stop saying “ethical non-monogamy” because, she says, it’s an oversimplification of the ways people come into and experience non-monogamy which, inevitably, is not always ethical. I don’t really have a problem with this, it’s a good point and I’ve been thinking for a while that calling it “ethical” non-monogamy is a bit superfluous, like I don’t describe myself as doing “ethical journalism” or “ethical parenting”, the fact that I am living my life in an ethical way would, I hope, become apparent to people as soon as they started interacting with me. So fine. But I do bristle a little bit at the framing of it. “We need journalists, therapists, and experts who communicate about non-monogamy to use accurate and unbiased terms,” for example, completely ignores that fact that many journalists, therapists and experts who communicate about non-monogamy are themselves non-monogamous and therefore perfectly aware of the differences between ethical non-monogamy, however we define that, and other kinds of non-monogamous behaviour and relationships and have plenty of ways to communicate that already. This obsession of trying to find the perfect term for things is very dull (although obviously I think conversations about language and what it means to us are interesting), as is the slightly preachy attitude.
EMBRACING POLY-CHAOS
Speaking of which, Shelby Lorman of Awards For Good Boys and the
newsletter wrote a newsletter last month about how she wants to banish polyamory because it takes what should be FUN and turns it into an obsession with “micromanaging the minutiae of a relationship, taking the joy and whimsy of loving someone(s) and turning it into a maniacal Stanford prison experiment”. Of course, she doesn’t mean non-monogamy as a relationship style should be banished (she herself is non-monogamous), only that the polyamory industrial complex is out of control and the discourse is exhausting. And I think that, even though I started this newsletter saying I was bored of reading about polyamory and have now written three separate posts on polyamory, I agree. I am not bored of conversations about non-monogamy so much as I am bored of the joyless pontification and moralising around it.DO YOU HAVE AN UNCONSCIOUS FEAR OF GOOD SEX?