It got me thinking.As usual, my first thought was musical: David Wilcox's When You Mistreat Her. But then, again as usual, I began to think my own thoughts, and they veered off to predictable places.
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The more I looked at this, the more it bothered me. Like pretty much everything else in our culture, it's heterosexist, for one thing. Yeah, I'm straight, but it's one of those thought experiments I like to perform every now and again. Listen to popular music and ask yourself how much of it speaks to gay people. Not a whole hell of a lot of it. Quite a bit of it pretends gays don't even exist. "The Game Of Love" (Wayne Fontana, 1965, later covered by a multitude) is a prime example.
"The purpose of a man is to love a woman,
The purpose of a woman is to love a man..."
Imagine being gay and hearing that. Kind of annoying. Imagine hearing that message and variants of it every time you turned on a radio. Not annoying any more--depressing instead.
Nowadays, of course, there are lots of LGBT-friendly songs out there...but still not many that are explicit about it. It was a real scandal in certain circles when when one of them became a hit. There have been other "gay" hits before, of course--and to this day many, if not most people don't recognize the gay content in songs like "Y.M.C.A" -- yeah, it's campy, but do you know why? -- and especially this one, which is a plea to a gay lover to abstain from masturbation and call him instead--a fact that somehow escaped notice in my house growing up...
Pop culture, driven as it is by profit, is exquisitely concerned with conforming to the mainstream. We'd certainly like to think gay and lesbian people are mainstream now...sadly, they aren't. Pop culture proves it: "Same Love" was the first explicitly pro gay marriage song to crack the top 40 in the United States. When you start seeing same-sex couples performing charting hits--without people noticing, or caring--then you'll know they've finally made it.
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That poster above? It's true as far as it goes...or at least it should be. Women (and men, for that matter) don't deserve to be "broken down" by anyone, much less the people who claim to love them. And if they are broken down, they need to discard the person doing the breaking and find someone who will build them up instead.
It doesn't always work that way, of course. In fact, it very often doesn't.
Nobody likes to be alone...but some, perhaps many, people hate and fear the thought, and are willing to put up with abuse rather than face the prospect of loneliness. Still other people are made to feel they deserve abuse, that they've earned every cutting remark and worse. It's disgusting...and disgustingly common.
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I have a minor quibble with "your" woman, as well. It's a possessive, which means it turns her into your possession. Eva may be "my" wife, and I may be "her" husband, but neither of us owns the other. There's no way to make that distinction in English without spelling it out.
And while I consider it a sacred duty of mine to "elevate" the people I care about, what I'm really doing -- I hope -- is making them aware of how "elevated" they already are.
But more importantly...
What if "elevating your woman" made her more available to other men?
(You had to figure this was coming, right?)
Seriously, let's think about this for a second. Keep your monogamy firmly in mind here.
You meet an attractive person of the appropriate sex. You hit it off, you date, you fall in love. He's just incredible. She treats you like gold. Beautiful, sexy, full to the brim of whatever qualities you find desirable.
The cultural construct we live with suggests that this is all well and good...until the exchange of rings. At that point, she's still (of course) insanely beautiful to you, but he must be ugly as homemade sin to absolutely everybody else. Don't believe me? What's your reaction if someone finds your significant other extremely attractive?
Mine is "well, duh". But many other people feel fear and even anger. "You were coming on to him, weren't you?" "I saw you flirting with her!" I've always found this utterly bizarre. The fact that people choose to live this way, without even examining the underlying assumptions, is very strange to me...probably just as strange as my way of thinking is to most of the rest of you. But I can't even wrap my head around how somebody is supposed to be stunningly beautiful/handsome/what have you...only to one person.
I'm not alone in this mindset...although I have to admit it often feels that way. While polyamorous folks have existed since forever--they even have their own superhero!--they're not exactly thick on the ground, in popular culture or anywhere else. "Poly" is still, for the most part, firmly in the domain of science fiction. Robert Heinlein's works are replete with it--that's where I first ran across the concept outside my own head--and you'll also find it throughout Laurell K. Hamilton, among many others. On TV, you'll find poly is pretty much exclusively found on a single trashy "reality" series. We're still waiting for our Jodie Dallas characters: the first polyamorous people to appear as actual characters on scripted television. Music--I've run across numerous poly songs. This one is one of my favourites; this was probably the first poly song in musical history. But though well known artists and groups have recorded poly music, none of it has charted well, or at all. Instead we get songs like Better Dig Two, in which the singer cheerily informs us she'll hang herself if she ever sees you with someone else. Or going way, way back: Don't Sit Under The Apple Tree (With Anyone Else But Me) by the Andrews Sisters (1941). I bet you can name ten others without stopping to think. Jealousy is often presented as a noble trait, and the ugly emotions it inspires certainly don't stop a song from charting at #1.
A long, long way to go. Making allowances for how quickly things are accelerating, I'd suggest it'll be at least twenty years before "poly" even begins to be something that doesn't draw attention.
In the meantime, it's hard to turn off the poly when I'm reading. Why can't Katniss Everdeen have Peeta and Gale, anyway? We all know who Archie chose after 73 years, but why did he have to? Are you Team Edward or Team Jacob? The classics--Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, The Great Gatsby and many, many more--all have love triangles in them. People tend to forget that while Romeo got all the attention, Count Paris loved Juliet first.
Emotions that are so common to most of the rest of the world, common enough to be taken completely for granted, bring me up short and out of the story. Oh, yeah, he genuinely believes that she can only love one person and it has to be him. I confess, I don't even know how to think like that--it's like black is white and 2+2=1.37, or something. Okay, well, if I did think like that, I'd...well, Jesus, I certainly wouldn't kill the both of them. Yeah, like THAT'S rational.
You remove all traces of that jealousy--by recognizing the fear that it is, and getting over it--and what you're left with--well, there are two words for it. One, mudita, is ancient; the other, "compersion", comes from the 1970s. Compersion has the advantage, at least to me, of sounding like it's actually English...but it came from the Kerista Commune and thus may be a suspicious concept to non-hippies. I like to trace my nice emotions back to ancient Sanskrit. It makes me feel a little more bound to this thing called humanity. I need to feel that way, because the pop culture that surrounds me is not a reflection of me at all.
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