Best Sex Writing 2013: The State of Today's Sexual Culture (6 page)

That isn’t what she ever wanted. In fact, since reading Dossie Easton’s polyamory primer,
The Ethical Slut
, in college, Jessica de- cided that she wanted to impose a cooperative, communal model on her own romantic life, without being a total freak. Although her current relationship with John is her first real foray into poly- amory, Jessica said it’s something she always wanted. She’s cer- tainly not inured to jealousy—no one is, she argues—but she’s

found ways to sublimate it. And she feels that the returns are well worth the sacrifice, adding that she’ll probably never go back to old one-on-one style partnership. “I
like
being a slut,” she insisted. And Jessica’s not alone. Over the past decade, polyamory has gone from being a fringe trend to a bona fide scene to a relation- ship model that’s widespread enough to almost be socially accept- able. The scene has its own canon, which includes texts like
The Ethical Slut
and Christopher Ryan’s
Sex at Dawn
(coauthored with his wife, Cacilda Jetha). Plus it’s got celebrities like alt-weekly sex columnist Dan Savage, who coined the word
monogamish
and turned open relationships into a cause célèbre. He’s currently shooting a late-night advice show for MTV. Some would even argue that the proliferation of social networks and dating sites— namely, Facebook and OKCupid—has turned us into a more open culture. The Bay Area in particular, with its long history of free love, its vast network of Burning Man enthusiasts, and its overall progressive ethos, is a natural hotbed for the alternative sex scene.

It’s a place where avid polyamorists can bring just about anyone into their fold.

Sort of. It turns out that, no matter how successful they’ve been at negotiating relationships, many polyamorists still have one foot in the closet. And in a world where monogamy is not only well entrenched but vital to the workings of a property- based society, their scene may always remain marginal.

That realization has caused many “ethical sluts” to treat open relationships not only as a lifestyle but as a social cause.

Christopher Ryan has spent most of the last ten years combating what he calls “the standard narrative”: that man’s nature is to al- ways be concerned about paternity. He started writing
Sex at Dawn
about eleven years ago as a PhD dissertation. At that time, Ryan

was studying psychology at Saybrook University and working at a San Francisco nonprofit called Women in Community Service. “It was all women, except for me and one other guy,” Ryan said, “and they were all lesbian-feminist Berkeley types.”

Ryan was in the midst of reading Robert Wright’s
The Moral Animal
, which uses evolutionary psychology to figure out whether men are congenital cheaters. Ryan had a major hard-on for the book. He’d recap Wright’s theories for anyone who would listen, including the women at his nonprofit—who mostly dis- missed them. “They said, ‘That sounds really Victorian and phal- locentric,’” Ryan recalled. He didn’t take their criticisms as in- sult. Rather, he decided to go back and explore some of Wright’s original research.

And that led him to the bonobos. Ryan contends that if you want to challenge the standard narrative of human sexuality, you can’t just start at the beginning of civilization—you have to go all the way back to our primate ancestors. He explained it thus to a crowd of roughly a dozen acolytes at San Francisco’s Center for Sex and Culture: “If your dog shits on your bed, and you want to know why, you’re not going to study birds. You’re going to look at wolves, and foxes, and coyotes.” Similarly, if your girlfriend sleeps around, and you want to know why, take a look at the female bonobos at the San Diego Zoo. As Ryan’s friend Carol Queen pointed out, you’ll see a lot of parents at the zoo covering their children’s eyes: bonobos love to hump.

There’s really no way to answer an essential question about human evolution without resorting to conjecture, so Ryan and his coauthor (and wife) Jetha tried to have some humility about it. They also tried to incorporate data from as many disciplines as possible—primatology, archaeology, nutritional biology, psy- chology, contemporary sexuality, pornography, you name it.

They drew some interesting conclusions: first and foremost, that monogamy really began with the advent of agriculture. That’s when we became concerned about ownership and possession. That’s when men decided that the only way to uphold a property- based society was to control women’s bodies. In Ryan’s estima- tion, it didn’t take that long—evolutionarily speaking—for us to invent the phrase “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.”

But there’s more. Ryan and Jetha also discovered some inter- esting and oft-maligned facets of female sexuality that were borne out in bonobo research. Namely, that women are raving perverts, that they’re way more “bisexual” than men, and that they make a lot more noise during sex. Even more importantly: we’re all per- verts. Or, as Ryan would put it, we’re “promiscuous” beings— promiscuous not in the sense of prurience, but in the sense of wanting to mix, being fiercely egalitarian and wanting to have sex with as many different people as possible.

We’ve been taught to think in terms of competition and scar- city, Ryan says, meaning that we’re told if we don’t ensnare one partner within a certain time frame, our chance at reproduction will run out. He contends that this line of thinking is culturally imposed, and that in reality, we’re not thinking about procre- ation every time we have sex—we’re doing it for pleasure. “Think about the number of times you’ve had sex,” Ryan said to the au- dience at Center for Sex and Culture. He paused, allowing us to mentally calculate. “Now divide that by the number of kids you have.” A few people chortled, though some hid their faces un- comfortably. Point taken.

Ryan isn’t particularly doctrinal—he purposefully left the pedagogical, thumb-sucking, “Where to go from here” chapter out of
Sex at Dawn
. But his book, which quickly landed on the
New York Times
bestseller list, has become a de facto bible in the

polyamory community. John and Jessica both invoke his theories when trying to define their relationship. “Monogamy automati- cally assumes all these rules,” Jessica said. That’s why, when you desire someone besides your one life partner, it’s called “cheating.” John would venture even farther, arguing that open relation- ships are actually a more natural state than marriage and the nu- clear family. “Okay, like ten percent of people in this society say they’re gay, right? I think about the same amount of people are naturally born monogamous.” He continued: “But from day one, as a society, we’re immediately routed toward monogamy. This shit starts right when you get out of the womb, man. Wrap that colored blanket around them, put the mother and father on the

birth certificate. Boom.”

He’s rankled about that. “The whole ‘It takes a village’ thing? It shouldn’t be a foreign concept.” John added that Ryan’s book merely validated feelings he’s had for years. “It helped me find words to express how I function.” John will readily admit that his parents were monogamous, and that he grew up without any kind of progressive, open relationship model to use as a reference point. Nonetheless, he says he’s been poly his whole life.

One of the people who attended Ryan’s lecture was Polly Whit- taker, a slender, freckled blond who is a veritable Johnny Apple- seed of the local polyamory community. Whittaker is one of those rare people who can flaunt her sexual preferences without com- punction, since she works in the alt-sex world full time. Born in the United Kingdom and raised in a fairly permissive family—her parents were both sex therapists, and her mother “turned a blind eye” to her father’s multiple affairs—she started going to fetish clubs as a teenager, immersed herself in the “sex underground,” and entered her first open relationship after immigrating to the

United States in 1999. “The first weekend I came was the Folsom Street Fair,” she said. “It was amazing. I was like, ‘Yay, this is my town, I’ve arrived.’”

Some people only recognize Whittaker by the costumes she wears at sex parties, which involve a lot of pink wigs and cor- sets. In person, though, she’s polite and down-to-business, and exudes a surprisingly small amount of sexual energy. In fact, she looks like a grown-up version of the Swiss Miss hot chocolate logo: cute, fair-skinned, and much younger in appearance than her thirty-six years. She says that by day she’s focused on writing; her partner, Scott Levkoff, is a puppeteer.

The couple launched their organization, Mission Control, in January 2001, after leasing a second-floor walk-up in the Mission. Whittaker already had her own fetish party, but she wanted to increase the clientele. “I was inviting some raver-Burner types, as well,” she said, indicating that the idea of mixing those subcul- tures was still a little outré at that time. “Those communities re- ally hadn’t crossed yet. It was like the goths were the fetish people and the ravers were the ecstasy people. There was no crossover.”

Whittaker took it upon herself to bring the disparate tribes to- gether, if only for the sake of throwing better parties. The result, she said, was fantastic: “colorful, costumed, sex-positive, Burning Man-oriented (but not Burning Man). We just created this space where people felt like they could explore.”

The club now hosts seven different play parties, in addition to a monthly art salon. John said it runs the gamut: fairy nights, ladies’ nights, heavier play nights, lighter play nights, trans nights, fetish nights, sex club–oriented nights. Most events cost thirty to thirty-five dollars and entail a mandatory dress code. Some require all participants to bring a buddy. “You know,” he said, “they want to keep the riffraff out.”

John explained that when sex parties aren’t properly policed, they can attract a bad element—i.e., “dudes in sweatpants who like to jerk off while watching trannies fuck. I mean, not that it’s bad to watch trannies fuck—that’s hot,” he said. “Sweatpants? Not so hot.”

Mission Control’s flagship party is called Kinky Salon, which is kind of an omnisexual catchall. It’s not polyamorous per se, but you have to be poly-friendly to go, given all the exchanging of partners that happens there. According to people who go, it looks nondescript from the outside—just a grate and a door-tender. But the inside is all razzle-dazzle: wood paneling, a smokers’ porch, tapestries, a dance floor with a stripper pole and mirrored disco ball, bartenders who hold your drinks (Kinky Salon has a BYOB policy and no liquor license), baskets full of condoms and lube, a back room full of beds and box springs and futons, people walking around in various stages of undress. Every iteration of the party has a theme (e.g., “woodland creatures,” “superheroes,” or “San Fransexual”).

John has a fairly sunny view of Kinky Salon, at least in terms of its ability to attract a wide and representative swath of the poly- amory subculture. Yes, more than half of the folks who attend are white, college-educated people in their thirties, he said. But they constitute the scene’s demographic majority. “It’s definitely a have-your-life-together-but-are-still-having-tons-of-fun kind of crowd,” he said, adding that in general, the racial makeup pretty much mirrors that of San Francisco.

Jessica’s read is a little more cynical. She’s been to two Mis- sion Control parties and says they definitely stand out in a scene that’s become larger and more diffuse—in the last decade, so- called “pansexual” and “alternative adult” clubs have cropped up all over San Francisco, and many of them are a little less discrimi-

nating, in terms of the crowds they draw. All the same, she finds the crowd to be pretty specific, not so much in an elitist way as in an isolationist way. And generally, it’s dominated by nerds. “You know, Burning Man people, Renn Faire people, people who are really costumed,” she said. “They’re older. They’re not really people I’m interested in fucking.”

She continued: “There’s this back room where you go to have sex, and there’s always this weird pile of people going at it in the middle of the room. But it’s way less creepy than it could be.”

Ned Mayhem, a PhD student in the sciences and second-gen- eration polyamorist (his father also has an open marriage), would agree with that assessment. He and his partner, Maggie Mayhem, have a porn website based around their “sex geek” personae. They even invented something called a PSIgasm, which uses sensory devices to measure the strength of orgasms. (They’re trying to get money to develop it, but haven’t been able to work within normal fund-raising apparatuses—Kickstarter snubbed them.) Mayhem said that a lot of the people he meets in the so-called “sexual underground” are nerds in other parts of their lives—grad stu- dents, engineers, costume-party types, bookworms, live-action role players. They tend to be open-minded and well educated, but always a little to the left of what mainstream society would consider “sexy.”

Perhaps that explains why polyamory has formed such a flour- ishing, albeit circumscribed subculture. It’s a scene where square pegs and misfits can reinvent themselves as Lotharios, where a self-described “socially well-adjusted” person like Jessica feels like an outlier.

Certainly, not all polyamorists attend sex parties or engage in kink—many who subscribe to the “open relationship” philos- ophy still consider themselves fairly vanilla. But the fact that San

Francisco has such a vast and well-networked sexual underground benefits them, too, since it makes for a more tolerant environ- ment. It also shows that the alt-sex scene, and by extension, the polyamory scene, isn’t just a countercultural fluke.

At the end of the day, though, it remains marginal. And if you buy into Ryan’s argument that an ownership-based society orga- nizes itself around monogamous relationships, then polyamory may never really become mainstream. It’s a fringe movement by its very definition, and some adherents would prefer that it stay that way.

In fact, there are two main obstacles facing the polyamory movement. One is that, like it or not, we’re a morality-obsessed culture, and in many ways we’re still a doctrinal culture. A 2009 Gallup poll showed that 92 percent of Americans think that having an extramarital affair is morally wrong. That’s about twice as many as those who condemn gay and lesbian relation- ships, and three times as many as those who oppose the death penalty. Which is to say that as a culture, we’re intractably wedded to the idea of a solid matrimonial bond. We’re more amenable to the idea of legally killing someone than the idea of wrecking a marriage.