Reflection on Abortion & Euthanasia, Take 3, P2: Making my meandering way to the heart of the matter
Channel: Ari R pronouns she or they
Date: 2021-06-23

So this description adds more to the reflection more than it describes the video. If you're familiar with my work, I'm sure you're not shocked.

Today would have been the birthday of the person to whom I was closest who succeeded where I failed, and I share this work in his honor. He was my friend, my favorite person, and someone I hoped would become my non-exclusive life partner. While I seek to honor him, my sharing this story may seem cruel to (at least some of) his family if it should find its way to their attention. And as Killer Mike and El-P say in Yankee and the Brave, I don't mean no harm but I truly mean all the disrespect to his parents. I no longer speak to them, and both before and after his death, they treated me with oppressive politeness instead of empathy and respect.


Link to the RTJ lyrics: https://genius.com/Run-the-jewels-yankee-and-the-brave-ep-4-lyrics

In Take 2, I came out publicly as polyamorous and pansexual. Neither of these are opinions or lifestyles. Attraction is a feature of emotion, not thought (opinion) or action (lifestyle). My lifestyle is slutty, and since I HAVE continued to make the conscious choice to live, I have been trying to learn for over a decade to love my slutty self for who I am without harming others in the process. My life partner gifted me a copy of The Ethical Slut several years ago. I claimed at the time it should be my new sacred text (I DID use the term bible then), and then because I read so abysmally slowly and was actively working on a PhD in clearly still way-too-conservative NC, I prioritized graduate school projects over reading and internalizing the text as I should have to work toward more ethical sluthood.

One of the passages from The Ethical Slut that stuck out to me as I've been re-reading:  

 We are now hearing people refer to certain of their lovers as "friends with benefits." A euphemism, perhaps, but an interesting concept. Why shouldn't we share sex with our friends, making sex a natural part of the love and honor and faithfulness and openheartedness that we already share with friends? 
 ... Relationships take their own shapes, but the best ones tend to share some basic principles: good boundaries, mindfulness, and a mutual desire for the well-being of everyone involved. 
 As you can probably guess, we don't much like the idea that a relationship commitment specifies anybody's right to anything beyond mutual respect and caring for each other.(191-192)

If the whole book is a bit much for some of you, the most relevant part for learning to accept and respect the freedom and joy some of us find in expressing our polyamorous orientation through sex with multiple partners over a sustained period of time, the parts on Couples (Ch. 18), Unlearning Jealousy (or all of Ch. 13), and Infinite Possibilities (Ch. 6) should be particularly useful. After the icky break-up with the guy I dated in middle school who was 10 years older than me (who I'm pretty sure now was a white supremacist, which, as usual, disgusts me far more than his willingness to date an interested and consenting 13-year-old), I did form a sex-with-friends-only boundary, and I had sort of forgotten that I did that. At one point in time, sex WAS a potential benefit for anyone I considered a friend.

Dating the 23-year-old is one of those decisions I think of as unwise, but, again, due to white supremacy concerns, NOT the statutory-rapeyness.

And the folks at the Multiamory Podcast interviewed one of the co-authors 3 years ago. I wish I had found the podcast then... but I will share the link with you now. One of my least favorite parts is when Janet admits we've probably still got a generation and a half before polyamorous people experience anything approaching an appropriate level of acceptance. Considering the damage we've done to the environment through climate change, this dims my hope that we'll ever get there at all.

Link to the episode: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuoWSeQpn_8&t=26s 


Obama (can I still call him President Obama?) reminds me hope is an audacious endeavor, though, and I'll keep working on it as long as I keep choosing to live. I'll probably finish reading The Ethical Slut before I finish The Audacity of Hope, though. That's also in my stack of "got distracted halfway through" texts. With Danse Macabre. 

Okay. Let me save some character space for once I've reviewed the video. Damn!

LMFAO at my proofreading in hindsight. It was apparently correct without the conjugation. Good work, me. I still like it and am still glad to have done it. :)

Also, some reasons monoamorous people might choose to live a polygamous lifestyle, I guess: out of politeness (BAD reason!), out of respect for a polyamorous partner as a willing adventure (GOOD reason), as a social justice effort to improve the lives of poly people (not at the expense of being and loving yourself, please!).