Polyamory in the 21st Century: Love and Intimacy With Multiple Partners (10 page)

We still have very little data on the demographics, motivations, and concerns of polyamorous people, not to mention the incidence of polyamory in the general population, although extrapolations from the
Loving More
data estimate that one out of every 500 adults in the United States is polyamorous. Others have speculated that something like 3.5 percent of the adult population prefer polyamorous relationships, which would put the figure at about 10 million, but I predict that by the time a large-scale survey is undertaken, this figure will be found to be much higher.

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T
here is little question that while nonmonogamy has been prominent in most cultures throughout time, polyamory in its modern form emerged in the United States. Although its roots go back to the utopian communities of the nineteenth century, responsible nonmonogamy began to grow vigorously in the turmoil of the sexual revolution of the 1970s. Twenty-first-century polyamory is quite different from these early experiments, but we can understand its origins and evolution by examining its history.

The best known of the nineteenth-century utopian communities is the Oneida Community, founded by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848. Oneida grew to 300 members in its heyday before abandoning the doctrine of complex marriage under legal pressure. In 1881, Oneida morphed to a corporate enterprise, Oneida Limited, which continues to this day as a successful silver-ware company. Noyes, who came from a privileged upper-class background, adopted a number of unorthodox beliefs and practices while studying for the ministry at Yale Divinity School. He later married Harriet Holton, a wealthy and well-connected woman whose support, along with that of his own family, helped establish the community in upstate New York.

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The Oneida Community was a spiritual community that, following the example of the earliest Christians, held all property in common and attempted to overcome traditional gender roles. The most controversial aspect of the whole infamous project was the doctrine of complex marriage.

In complex marriage, all the men and all the women within the community were considered married to each other. Even couples who were already married when joining the community were required to have separate rooms and open their marriage to others. No two people could have exclusive attachment with each other and would be separated and not allowed to see each other for a certain length of time if this were suspected. Men were required to withhold ejaculation during intercourse unless conception was intended, and more mature members of the community were given the task of initiating the younger ones into sexual and spiritual practices.

Oneidans felt that achieving perfection and living without sin required that they abandon traditional marriage. Noyes believed that the spiritual dimension of sex brought partners closer to God as well as each other.

“The new commandment is that we love one another, not by pairs, as in the world, but en masse,” he decreed.1

In theory, complex marriage eliminated jealousy and possessiveness by marrying all the men of the community to all the women and encouraging members to enjoy frequent lovemaking and multiple partners. The strategy of managing jealousy through creating an abundance of partners has continued to be used into the twenty-first century with varying degrees of success, as we will see in future chapters. Oneida men took responsibility for birth control by withholding ejaculation, which was intended to provide Oneida women with greater sexual satisfaction and fewer pregnancies than their contemporaries. This in itself was a huge departure from Victorian standards, which did not support women taking pleasure in sex at all.

Although I have not been able to discover a direct link between Noyes and Tantric teachings, it’s interesting to note that his spiritual doctrine of perfectionism, his emphasis on the sacredness of sexuality, and the sexual practice of nonejaculation for men can all be found in ancient Tantric teachings. Is it a coincidence that many modern-day American polyamorists also mix inclusive love with Tantric teachings?

Despite its shortcomings, Oneida was so far ahead of its time that it’s continued to be a model for polyamorous innovators to the present day.

Twenty-first-century polyamorists have been less inspired by another early experiment in multiple partner marriage that adhered more closely to the patriarchal tradition of polygamy for men only and emphasized traditional
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sex roles and conservative values. Nevertheless, HBO’s popular
Big Love
series is based on the spiritual heirs of Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, who had thirty-three wives and set the precedent for nearly all the elders of the early Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) to follow in his footsteps.

Joseph Smith’s teachings on celestial or patriarchal marriage, which have come to be known as the Mormon Doctrine of Plural Wives, arose in the 1840s. The doctrine was not officially announced until 1852 by Smith’s successor Brigham Young in a special conference of the elders of the LDS. Although polygamy had its detractors even among the faithful, it was widely practiced until officially rejected as Mormon doctrine under federal pressure as a condition for Utah’s statehood. Even today, it’s estimated that 30,000 to 60,000 renegade practitioners still adhere to this form of group marriage, which seems to hold a fascination for many people.

Both Oneida and the LDS church are thought to have been influenced by an earlier Christian preacher named Jacob Cochran,2 who advocated a practice he called
spiritual wifery
, along with communal ownership of property, as early as 1818. Cochran did not consider traditional marriage valid and instead assigned and often shifted couplings as he saw fit, with many of the women paired with him at one time or another. Even though Cochran stayed with the couple concept, his innovations with mix-and-match dyads were too scandalous for nineteenth-century New England, and he was soon imprisoned for lewdness, lascivious behavior, and adultery. After his release from prison, he founded a new community in New York State from which many members were later converted by Mormon missionaries.

New England in the early 1800s was a hotbed of social, philosophical, and cultural dissent. The downside of the industrial revolution was becoming apparent to the intelligentsia, who were eager to explore health-promoting lifestyles. In addition to the previously described communities, New England spawned the Transcendentalist movement, which involved
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well-known literary figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman and was closely linked with another utopian community named Brook Farm.

Started in 1841 by Unitarian minister, Harvard graduate, and social reformer George Ripley and his wife Sophia, with author Nathaniel Hawthorne as one of the original trustees, Brook Farm was initially conceived as an agrarian cooperative that would provide its members a more natural and wholesome lifestyle. Ripley, as well as Emerson, is known to have had large libraries that included European writers as well as translations of Indian and Chinese classics. It’s possible that John Noyes may have been exposed to Tantric and Taoist philosophies through this group, although their own departures from traditional marital and gender roles were less regimented and kept in the background and out of the headlines.

In 1844, Albert Brisbane, who translated the works of French utopian philosopher Charles Fourier into English during his frequent visits to Brook Farm, convinced the directors to become a Fourierist community.

Fourier’s ideas are now largely forgotten, although they reached a wide audience in the United States in the 1840s through Brisbane’s columns in the
New York Tribune
.

In addition to his very detailed prescriptions for the physical structures and agricultural, business, and social organization of these communes, or
phalansteries
, as he called them, Fourier held some unusual views on the subject of monogamy. Fourier asserted that a harmonious society required an awareness of the “laws of passionate attraction.” He believed that each person has a set capacity for the number of lovers he or she can engage with at one time, with a range from zero to eight. Both ends of the spec-trum were thought to be quite rare, with most people naturally falling somewhere in the middle.3 Fourier also took a strong stance on the importance of pleasure and sexual gratification and was an advocate of women’s rights, gay rights, and sexual freedom long before the sexual revolutions of the twentieth century dawned.

EMMA GOLDMAN, FREE LOVE, AND THE

FIRST WAVE OF THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION

Emma Goldman was one of my earliest heroines. A feminist anarchist who devoted her life to organizing support for the independence of women at
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a time when women in the United States had not yet won the right to vote and when advocating access to birth control was grounds for imprison-ment, she was also a passionate supporter of free love. While the scope of her work was not limited to women’s issues, Goldman is often credited with bringing sexual liberty and reproductive rights into serious political conversation.

In the early nineteenth century, the term
free love
, whose creation is attributed to Oneida founder John Noyes, carried a different meaning than it took on in the 1960s. Originally, it implied freedom for women from the ownership of men through the institution of marriage. The Oneidan version of free love could be likened to today’s term
polyfidelity
(which refers to a type of closed group marriage), but Goldman and her fellow anarchists didn’t believe in imposing any kind of structure or rules on the free flow of love. It is this meaning of freedom from legislation or mental constructs, as well as equality for all genders, that inspired my own vision for polyamory as a more heartfelt way to love. It seems ironic that some polyamorous people, as well as monogamous nonheterosexuals, are now clamoring to have their marriages recognized by church and state.

A talented orator and writer as well as a nurse midwife, Goldman had an impact on Western culture that wasn’t fully recognized until long after her death in 1940. She was also ruthlessly honest in revealing her struggle with jealousy arising from sharing her beloved. Her gift for formulating and articulating a critique of patriarchal values gave rise to changes that are still unfolding in the twenty-first century. In 1930, Goldman wrote,

“I demand the independence of woman, her right to support herself; to live for herself; to love whomever she pleases, or as many as she pleases.

I demand freedom for both sexes, freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in motherhood.”4

Emma Goldman, like Victoria Woodhull, another early feminist and free love advocate, did more than theorize about free love. Both women boldly exercised their right to love whomever they pleased at a time when even monogamous sexually active unmarried women were considered sluts.

Woodhull is even known to have openly engaged in triadic love relationships, including one with a prominent Christian minister that caused a national scandal.5

Politically and emotionally, Goldman, the quintessential anarchist who thought that voting was a waste of time, and Woodhull, the first woman to run for the presidency of the United States in 1872, were worlds apart, but
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both created many effective cocreative partnerships with men that merged their intimate and professional needs. This model for harnessing the power of sexual passion in service of social goals is a theme elaborated on a generation later by other key figures in the evolution of polyamory.

SCIENCE FICTION AND THE CHURCH OF ALL WORLDS

If there is any one book that can be said to have kicked off the present-day evolution of polyamory, that book would have to be Robert Heinlein’s
Stranger in a Strange Land
. This novel, with a Martian-raised human hero who finds the concept of sexual possessiveness very peculiar and starts a religion based on sharing, struck a deep chord with the millions who’ve read it since its publication in 1961. Heinlein wrote many other science-fiction novels with polyamorous themes that continue to be widely read today, though none has achieved the popularity of
Stranger
in a Strange Land
.

Polyamory as a model or support system for creating transformation in the larger culture has been a popular topic with many science-fiction and fantasy writers, such as Thea Alexander, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Ernest Callenbach, Spider Robinson, Starhawk, and John Varley. Consensual multipartner relationships have also figured prominently in the books of literary giants such as Anais Nin, Doris Lessing, and Alice Walker.

I vaguely remember reading
Stranger in a Strange Land
as a freshman in college in 1969 and finding it delightful but not earthshaking. Perhaps it did seep into my subconscious mind and influence my future career unbe-knownst to me. When I reread it about twenty years later, I was shocked by the sexist language and dialogue that had slipped right across my pre-feminist radar. Why, I wondered, was this particular book so influential?

We may never be able to fully answer that question, but some portion of its impact may have to do with neopagan leader Oberon Zell. When I first met Oberon, or Otter as he was called at the time, in the 1980s, he had long since founded the Church of All Worlds (CAW) and was publisher of
Green Egg Magazine
, an early neopagan periodical. He and his wife Morning Glory had been in a triad for some years with the magazine’s editor and were later to form a group marriage with three others that incorporated many of Heinlein’s ideas.