By Tammy Ng
Before delving into the reasons why some of the people I interviewed have opinions against polyamory relationships, we must first lay out the context of the people I interviewed. These people are students from UCSC, so generally most people on this campus are very accepting and open-minded. So, there were no hard anti opinions, but rather more confusion and unawareness of the polyamory community.
I had asked a few people two questions, the first one was “How would you define a polyamorous relationship?” and the second one was “Are you pro-poly or not?”. I asked the second question in a more general sense. Whether it be about poly relationships for themselves or others, I wanted to gather information based on why these people have these opinions rather than the opinion itself. Similar to my previous blog post, people answered the first question all similarly saying that it was a relationship with more than two parties involved. For the second question, I will be focusing on the more confused and negative response in this blog post.
Many people voiced their support for the poly community, but also voiced their confusion and internal conflict with whether it was okay or not. One recurring theme that I found throughout was people with religious cultural background, specifically Christianity. “I don’t have an issue with people who want to live that lifestyle, but like, I feel like coming from a Christian background, it somehow feels wrong, like I know there’s nothing wrong with it, but I can’t help but feel judgmental when I hear people talk about it.” Many people had the same conflict as the peer I quoted. Christianity has a deep-rooted history in the rejection of polygamy and all the issues that would come with it, like infidelity, hatred, war, etc. (Kaczor 2016). This framework bleeds into how the U.S. society views polygamy and polyamory, since U.S. society is built on a Christian foundation. Whether a person is religious or not, having a society built on this framework, causes a certain hegemonic thinking (Witte Jr. 2016). There is a reason for why we view certain things a specific way, there are no baseless thoughts.
Another common theme that was brought up was gender. “I feel like gender also has something to do with it, like I try to stop thinking like this, but sometimes I can’t help it, like I feel different when I see a girl with a bunch of partners as opposed to a guy with a bunch of partners, like I don’t know”. This peer brought up the interesting thought of gender coming into play. In a patriarchy, people who identify or appear to be male are generally awarded freedoms that people who identify or appear to be female. Many people that I have interviewed had brought up this concept in one way or another. This is something that I had found very interesting. Even within communities that are oppressed, things like racism or sexism doesn’t just disappear.
There are many conflicting views concerning this topic; however, within recent years we have made progress in gaining rights for not following the hegemonic ideals of a relationship. The main one being, gay marriage rights. Many people are seeing this as a catalyst for other rights, including polygamy, while others see it as two very different things (Friedersdorf 2015). Although polygamy (marriage to more than one person) is different from polyamory (in a relationship with more than one person with all parties consenting), the topic of polygamy has brought polyamory into light and could begin a new social movement.
Breaking Relationship Norms 