The Lifestyle (36 page)

Straights coming across such sentiments in poly literature beside the cash register at their local New Age bookstore might suspect that the poly movement has a distinctly “feminine,” if not feminist, feel to it. That’s the case across the board. Of the seventeen contributing writers in
Loving Mores
summer issue, eleven were women. The emphasis in all the articles was on love and relationships, personal growth and relating, self-awareness, and intimacy through “family expansion.”
Loving More’s
logo features three hearts in a row running perpendicular to the tagline “New Models for Relationships” (in contrast to the bitten apple of the North American Swing Club Association).

And that brings us to one other important feature of the poly people. If there are questions as to whether women “drive” the swinging lifestyle, there should be fewer questions about who runs the poly movement. Women seem to. It was women, Butler wrote, who “tended to put talk into action… developing a real, multifaceted relationship that evolved into a group marriage.”

When you attend their rites you find that many poly women reach back beyond their “science fiction fandom,” their beat and love-commune heritages, and see themselves as descended from prehistoric “copartnership societies,” in which women may either have ruled or lived as full equals to men. There was certainly one thing you couldn’t help noticing at the Loving More seminars, from the opening talk to the closing ceremonies. Many of the poly leaders were high-level female professionals in the straight world, and many of their expanded families were polyandrous—that is, the husbands
outnumbered the wives. In most of these group marriages, the women had activated the expansion.

Take Ryam, for instance. She literally wrote the book on polyfidelity:
Loving More: The Polyfidelity Primer
. The day before the lecture by Audrey, Lewis, and Mitch, I’d sat with Ryam and six-month-old Zeke by the hot-spring pool, just after she had conducted her ninety-minute “Women’s Circle.”

Ryam is a conservative lady. It was a hundred degrees in the eucalyptus shade, but she was covered neck to sandaled feet in a bib dress. She had plain brown hair, a bright, healthy face that never sees makeup, and the strong, sure hands of a new mother. In that summer’s issue of
Loving More
she’d printed a proud family picture of Barry, Allan, Brett, herself, and Ruth sitting demurely at a picnic. They were all around age forty and the men looked as straight as preachers. Brett had his hands on Ryam’s shoulders, Barry had his hands on Ruth’s, Ryam and Ruth were holding hands, and Allan—in the middle—had his hands on his thighs. “For many people, their first area of interest in polyfidelity is the ‘sex part,’” Ryam had stated in her
Primer
. “Can it be a healthy desire and ecstatic experience to be physically and emotionally intimate with more than one person at a time? Can you experience the feelings of specialness, passion, and in-loveness with more than one? Based upon the direct experiences of many people, the answer is ‘Yes, of course!’”

“A lot of people in this movement—especially women—say, ‘Okay, well, I’ve always been this open, loving person,’” Ryam explained to me, hoisting the squirming Zeke to her shoulder. “They know that about themselves from early on. But, as with me, I didn’t really have the words for it, I didn’t know there were other people doing it. There’s something
about being more open in the way you view relationships that’s almost never talked about in polite society. Like I say in my book, it’s usually portrayed as illicit, insane, or illegal, and always temporary. But cheating is okay so long as no one finds out.”

I asked her if she’d found herself drawn to having more than one husband from childhood, as a sort of sexual orientation.

“I think there are a lot of people,” she replied, “not so much that they are ‘drawn’ to it, but that they have a tendency that way, and suddenly they meet a couple who give them words for it, introduce them to other people doing it. For me it was in the late seventies with my husband Barry; it was sort of like, ‘Oh, I’ve discovered I’m poly!’ I finally came to that realization. So we had an open marriage for a few years, but we found it wasn’t quite what we were looking for. We wanted something more stable and with bigger roots for a family. So at the time I was in love with Allan, and we brought him in and we were in a polyfidelity triad for thirteen years. Three years ago, Brett entered the picture. I got into a loving relationship with him and we went from being a polyfidelity triad to being a family of four.”

“You and three men.”

“That’s right. And a year and a half ago, my legal husband Barry met Ruth and she joined—so that’s all of us who live together now. I think it’s not people
becoming
poly, it’s sort of like a blossoming; everything was already there, but now they know. It’s a realization kind of a thing.”

“So then it’s not just another orientation?” I asked.

“Well, I think all humans are poly. I don’t think humans are biologically monogamous. I suppose, if you’re talking about orientation, it’s the orientation to go against the grain and be natural about it. It’s the orientation to be who you are naturally. Why not? It’s natural to love many brothers and sisters and cousins. It’s natural to love lovers.”

“Jealousy’s natural too,” I said.

“Oh yes, of course, but there’s a word we use, ‘compersion,’ it’s the opposite of sexual jealousy—it’s where you have positive feelings when you see your loved ones enjoying their relationship with each other. Poly people had to invent that word because they invented the relationship in which it came to be.”

I pondered the significance of that for a moment. There really was no word in English, or in any other language for that matter, to describe that “warm emotion” Ryam experienced watching Barry happily in love with Ruth. Could it be because no one in the history of humanity had ever felt such an emotion, and so it had remained unnamed? Would it ever enter the language as a “natural” feeling that was experienced often enough to need a word to describe it? Throughout her book, Ryam had stressed that “polyfidelity is a
new
marriage form.” It was biologically normal, she said, but it was not based on economics or religion or the dominance of one sex over the other, as other forms of monogamous or polygamous marriage had been in the past. “Instead,” she wrote, “polyfidelity is based on individual choice…an egalitarian family that comes together voluntarily…. A new form for a new millennium, polyfidelity is in its infancy at this very moment. It encompasses the highest evolution of the sound ideals of individual choice, voluntary co-operation, a healthy family life, and positive romantic love. It embraces sexual equality, a nonpossession orientation towards relationships, and a widening circle of spousal intimacy and true love.”

“What did you talk about at the Women’s Circle?” I asked.

“Well, a lot of people said they were intellectually and emotionally poly for a long time, but the direct experience of it brought up all kinds of negative feelings they’d never been raised as children to deal with—not with the fairy tales we read. And we talked about how the only way through it is to live it, to work with it. There are ways to make it easier, and
we shared techniques and ways of looking at the world from this fresh perspective with each other. And we gave each other support that we’re not crazy because we live this way. These are our natural instincts; the natural instinct is to love more than one person. We as women know this about ourselves. So what we’ve found in this lifestyle is a very attractive arrangement to feel close and warm. When it’s working it’s a very high, loving way to live.”

“So you have to invent new fairy tales to tell little girls?”

“That’s right—nonmonogamous fairy tales,” she said, smiling, kissing Zeke.

I pictured one of those fairy tales. Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Prince Charming, Tarzan, and Aladdin all in one poly house.

The poly world would probably say that without compersion you couldn’t get them to live happily ever after.

While waiting for the start of a Human Awareness Institute seminar called “Opening to Intimacy: Authentic Connecting,” I thought about a basic poly belief that employed a metaphor from
Stranger in a Strange Land
to encapsulate their lifestyle: unless the world learned to “share water,” we were doomed. Sharing water is the central allegorical rite of the Church of All Worlds, derived from the brotherly ritual of Heinlein’s Martians, brought to earth by Valentine Michael Smith from a desert planet where water was in such scarce supply that, rather than fighting over it, the aliens made apportioning it a daily act of loving communion among all beings. Literary snobs scoff at the sci-fi symbolism of Heinlein, but nobody can deny that, writing in 1961, he was decades ahead of evolutionary psychologists in his central theme that men have fought wars since the beginning of time because they couldn’t share women.

A brief retelling of
Stranger in a Strange Land
helps clarify this poly-mix of metaphors so crucial to Utopian lifestylers. Valentine Michael Smith (whose first name should not be lost on you) was an orphaned Earthling born on Mars and raised by Martians. Some decades after World War III, a pod of the four smartest and most worthily monogamous couples on Earth were sent on the spaceship
Envoy
to colonize the red planet, and were not heard from again. The Earthlings met a fate very similar to that which befell the mutinous crew of the
Bounty
in 1789: fifteen men left Tahiti with twelve women and landed on the isolated Pitcairn Island. When the group were discovered years later, only one male was left alive: within a short time they had murdered each other over the women. In the case of the Earthlings on the
Envoy
, after Valentine’s birth his mother and her lover were murdered by her husband, who then killed himself. We are led to believe the others were murdered as well.

Interestingly, Heinlein’s native Martians were immune to fighting over sex because they were all born female and then matured into males. They were also advanced enough to be in almost continuous touch with God through a super-mundane, LSD-like experience of total understanding they called “grokking.” The Martians raised Valentine with the knowledge of grokking but with no knowledge of sexual jealousy. That was the way he was delivered into the hands of a rescue party from Earth when he was in his twenties. Christlike, sexually innocent, he winds up on the estate of a famous writer named Jubal, who is surrounded by female secretaries. Valentine begins to teach them all the ritual of sharing water, which immediately becomes synonymous with sharing sex, the hoarded commodity that had led to war on the
Envoy
. After grokking every bit of intellectual book knowledge on earth, Valentine, like a latter-day Siddhartha with the last name of an Everyman (Smith), decides to learn what the real world is
about. He and his lover Jill eventually wind up in Las Vegas, where Jill gets a job as a stripper. Though ridiculous, this is a crucial juncture in the story, at least as far as understanding both wings of the lifestyle in North America. Remember the excitement of husbands at watching their wives with other men in the Annex? Remember the joy women took in being the glamorous objects of men’s attention and their thrilling “urge to help” when their husbands engaged other women? It’s all here in Heinlein’s book—exquisitely heightened because Valentine, whom everyone now calls Mike, is telepathic, and he can at one and the same time read the thoughts of the men in the audience, project them to Jill, and invite her into his mind so she can perceive his arousal at the other women stripping on stage with her.

The poly people eventually gave a name to that sensation: erotic compersion.

“She posed, and talked with Mike in her mind….
‘Look where I am looking, my brother. The small one. He quivers. He thirsts for me.’

“I
grok his thirst…. We grok him together]
Mike agreed.

‘Great thirst for Little Brother
.

“Suddenly she was seeing herself through strange eyes and feeling all the primitive need with which that stranger saw Her…. But she was amazed to find that her excitement increased as she looked through Mike’s eyes at other girls.”