Thread by @SharpSweetBella

It sounds like he’s talked before about how monogamy isn’t natural. But all of this also sounds exactly how monogamous, nosy neighbors & friends would judge & discuss public displays of nonmonogamy to the press. Gossip columns create scandals to reinforce monogamous “norms”.

https://twitter.com/MirrorCeleb/status/1315993186179973120

I’m also sensing a familiar tale. Consider how you’d perceive it if:

a) they had a relationship agreement on par with DADT
b) he or they have been seeing other people for years
c) he violated the agreement by being photographed
d) she’s devastated about the press situation.

All of this is just my speculation - but if I had been saying “monogamy isn’t natural” in press junkets for the past 5 years, it couldn’t be a clearer signal that perhaps one day I might suspend my magical belief in monogamy and might

*gasp*
try nonmonogamy

*gasp*
in public!

In my first years of polyamory - friends and family were constantly hand wringing over my “abuse” of my husband by making him ensure my dating & kissing of others. The day I was outed my husband was devastated not because I was “caught” but because I had been smeared for my love.

Gossip columns will talk to whoever they need to get the sexy, scandalous scoop, to sell more click bait riches for their advertisers. All to reinforce the social norms/control of monogamous culture.

But what has me upset is that nonmonogamous people are using this story to judge and critique. They’re doing it to highlight their own higher ethics. Ethics that were adopted after their own oops moments where they broke a relationship agreement and had to redress harm.

We don’t know that Dominic West and his wife are on a nonmonogamous journey - nor do we know that they’re not. Either way it literally is none of our business.

But as someone whose poly life was outed by the press before I was ready, I promise you don’t know the full story.

Also? if someone were truly a friend to me, as they claim to be to his wife, they wouldn’t say shit to the press about me or the situation, especially if I had been cheated on. Making something a bigger story by using me to reinforce monogamous norms isn’t friendship.

I’m not sure what “making him ensure” was supposed to be before auto correct mangled it.

We’ve been polyamorous for 16 years now. Within 2 yrs I had been outed, my career path punished for living my life with honesty. People speaking about me to the press. It was a non-story.

While reinforcing monogamous norms might not be in their mission statement, but gossip columns thrive on weaponized shame. If they aren’t exposing someone’s shame, they’re creating it. If they aren’t creating it, they’re implying it.

And all of this comes down to how we view and consume social deviance. Deviance from the “norm” is often accepted without critique and yet, “norms” tell us that loving or kissing more than one person is bad.

When we consume news like this uncritically we reinforce the “norms”.

We’re voting with out clicks that this subject matter is important enough for us to click through and encounter their horrific ads so we see the juicy shit.

I’m just kind of done with that. This culture is what caused me to be outed and go through 14 years of PTSD. Fuck that

Also, these two things are very interrelated. Gossip promotes and weaponizes shame, often based on opinion, judgment and speculation without facts. Someone is married to someone else and is seen kissing another, we immediately go to “it’s a scandal”.

Related thread:

https://twitter.com/sharpsweetbella/status/1316047163093377026

My story also was informed by “friends” at the Capitol who spun a wild tale because they were so incensed that I had the courage to live a nonmongamous life with honesty while they were still skulking in the shadows cheating.

“How dare you do what we aren’t brave enough to!”

Private information was shared to make it appear I was unethical. So much so that I had to explain to the bar examiners the full circumstances of how I left that job. It was validating when my old boss, also an attorney, wrote a letter to them telling them I did nothing wrong.

There are always motivations for people to self-aggrandize, to project, to make their lives seem better by shaming someone else’s even if they did nothing wrong. We accept or reject people based on how much we allow them to deviate from the norms we’ve passively internalized.

I stand for a world where we can make our own autonomous decisions, especially about our intimate lives, free from the presumed, entitled scrutiny of others. The era of relationships in default mode is coming to a close. We each can customize & personalize our relationships.

The queer & trans communities face intrusive inquiries into how and why we sex. The straight, mono community struggles to conform to an strict code of expectations that are both rigid and amorphous in its refusal to celebrate true transparency.

None of this is okay.