{"id":57,"date":"2007-06-03T00:00:11","date_gmt":"2007-06-03T05:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.polyamorousmisanthrope.com\/?p=57"},"modified":"2007-06-03T00:00:11","modified_gmt":"2007-06-03T05:00:11","slug":"im-okay-you-suck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/polyamorousmisanthrope.com\/wordpress\/2007\/06\/03\/im-okay-you-suck\/","title":{"rendered":"I\u2019m okay, you suck"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As is often the case, I had my cranky pants on during an Internet discussion and started ranting about how fringe groups often like to get self-congratulatory about what better people they are.  This ain&#8217;t a polyamorous phenomenon, mind.    As far as I can tell, it&#8217;s part of the Human Experience.<\/p>\n<p>It does drive me up a freakin&#8217; wall, however, and I boggled in my personal blog about why this should be so.   It must serve a need or people wouldn&#8217;t <span style=\"font-weight: bold\">do<\/span> it.<\/p>\n<p>I got this back from the author of  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.polyamory.org\/~joe\/polypaper.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><strong>What Psychology Professionals Should Know About Polyamory<\/strong><\/a>: (And check that out, it&#8217;s good!)<\/p>\n<p style=\"margin-left: 40px\">&#8230;fringe isn&#8217;t better, it&#8217;s simply equal. But, since there often isn&#8217;t equality, people look for the added security of bolstered pride. Poly is no better than mono; it&#8217;s worth fighting for equal rights for, but not because it&#8217;s better &#8211; just because it&#8217;s ok, and should be seen as ok.<\/p>\n<p>I loved this.<\/p>\n<p>Oh yeah, sure, be a credit to your kink and all.  That&#8217;s great.  Go for it and <strong>be<\/strong> a good person if that&#8217;s your heart&#8217;s desire.  I don&#8217;t go back on that, and yes, the more poly people who have their shit together, the better.<\/p>\n<p>But poly isn&#8217;t better.  It&#8217;s <em>okay <\/em>&#8212; just like monogamy is okay.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s often a compensation syndrome going on, and I do understand that.  When OLQ<sup>1<\/sup> was together, I can recall all four of us discussing the pressure we felt to be Very Good Parents because of our lifestyle. Not that we&#8217;re not motivated to try to be as good parents as we can for our kids&#8217; sake, but we did feel a lot of pressure <em>from the outside<\/em> to keep from being judged.  We were concerned that screwups would be attributed to the lifestyle, rather than the fact that we&#8217;re bloody human.<\/p>\n<p>You get it with other things, too. There&#8217;s a tendency to blame every damn&#8217; thing that goes wrong on lifestyle.  Sometimes&#8230; Well, sometimes your relationships <em>do<\/em> suck and you need to get your head out of your ass.<\/p>\n<p>Sometimes&#8230;  Well, sometimes it&#8217;s Just Life.<\/p>\n<p>I do look forward to the day when fringe groups in general are judged by the same standards are the rest of the world.   The internal motivation to be a credit to your kink, or be the best person you can be is great.  The thing is, it&#8217;s that external pressure to be<em> more<\/em> together\/a better parent\/more loving\/whatever isn&#8217;t really productive, nor does it promote honest equality.<\/p>\n<p><sup>1<\/sup>Our Little Quad.  I used to live in a group marriage and that&#8217;s how we referred to ourselves on the internet.  Be careful how you name yourself, &#8217;cause that shit can stick \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As is often the case, I had my cranky pants on during an Internet discussion and started ranting about how fringe groups often like to get self-congratulatory about what better people they are. This ain&#8217;t a polyamorous phenomenon, mind. As far as I can tell, it&#8217;s part of the Human Experience. It does drive me&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-polyamory-community"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/polyamorousmisanthrope.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/polyamorousmisanthrope.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/polyamorousmisanthrope.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/polyamorousmisanthrope.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/polyamorousmisanthrope.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/polyamorousmisanthrope.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/polyamorousmisanthrope.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/polyamorousmisanthrope.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/polyamorousmisanthrope.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}