A Typology of Insecurities in Non-monogamy

Be jealous. Make demands. Want more.

Here's to a passionate nonmonogamy where things aren't always fair and people are needy.

What You Lose When You Gain a Spouse

What if marriage is not the social good that so many believe and want it to be?

Testosterone causes both prosocial and antisocial status-enhancing behaviors in human males | PNAS

Although popular discussion of testosterone’s influence on males often centers on aggression and antisocial behavior, contemporary theorists have p...

Against the Couple-Form | LIES Journal

Libidinal flows cut through the social world. Amorous and sexual relations do not exist in some domain safely taped off from the rest of society. Rather they are constituent elements of nearly every aspect of social life. Desire flows and circulates amongst places of employment, intellectual debates, political organizing, artistic circles, playgrounds, and cemeteries. The elderly patient grabs at the breast of a nurse hunched over him. A governmental official strips his newly hired intern down to her leopard print thong during an important briefing in his office. The incarcerated man holds his hand up to the glass of the visiting booth, attempting to touch his wife after twenty years of their bodily separation. These flows of libidinal desire operate within and amongst broader social mechanisms, such that they help animate the dynamics of economic and political life. Often a locus of politics, desire permeates the so-called ‘public’ terrain.

Beyond Equality—Non-Monogamy and the Necropolitics of Marriage

‘Marriage equality’ has been a widely used slogan and mobilizing concept for LGBTQ+ rights’ movements across the globe striving for formal recognition for ‘same-sex’ or ‘same-gender’ marriages. In this article, we critically interrogate the terminology and political rationality that have given shape to ‘marriage equality’ campaigns. We demonstrate the structural erasure of non-monogamous relations and populations from the changes hoped for and envisioned in these mobilizations. The lack of any genuine and substantial concern with consensual non-monogamies (CNMs) from most of the literature in the field highlights the close entanglement of marriage with monogamy. As a result, ideas are scarce about how meaningful and adequate legal recognition and social policy provisions for a wide range of intimate, sexual, familial, and/or caring bonds or constellations on the CNM continuum could look like. We argue that the critique of the mononormativity inherent to marriage is fundamental to understanding the role of this in the 21st century. We identify the roots of the mononormativity of marriage in its governmental role as a necropolitical and biopolitical technology, evidenced by its ‘civilizing’ function in white settler colonial projects. Because of this, an expansion of the call for equality to include non-monogamous populations does not resolve but rather aggravates the problem. We conclude that any truly queer politics of CNM consequently needs to be anti-marriage.

Effective Altruism Has a Hostile Culture for Women, Critics Say

Seven women connected to effective altruism tell TIME they experienced harassment and worse within the community

Relationship Anarchy - LGBTQIA+ Wiki

Relationship Anarchy (abbreviated RA) is the belief that relationships should not be bound by set rules, aside from the rules the individuals involved mutually agree...

Testosterone eliminates strategic prosocial behavior through impacting choice consistency in healthy males

Neuropsychopharmacology - Testosterone eliminates strategic prosocial behavior through impacting choice consistency in healthy males

Advancing the Understanding of Phenotypic Mimicry in Men’s Conspicuous Consumption

Two studies advance the understanding of phenotypic mimicry in consumer products. Product features mimicking more prominent male secondary sexual characteristics are associated with men’s behavioral strategies which are higher in mating effort and lower in paternal investment in offspring, in parallel with reproductive strategies across species and within the human population. The first study demonstrated a continuous relationship between the sizes of luxury brand logos and perceptions of the owners’ life histories. Two partial replications reproduced Study 1 results. Study 2 demonstrated that a manipulation of coloration, another fundamental dimension of variation in secondary sex characteristics, generates a similar pattern of results. In both studies, men owning shirts with more prominent sensory characteristics were believed to use authority and intimidation as strategies for advancing social status, whereas men owning shirts with less showy characteristics were believed to demonstrate useful abilities and foster cooperative alliances. Participants also recognized the strategic use of luxury display properties across social contexts.

Against The Concept Of Telescopic Altruism

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Reflective and Impulsive Determinants of Social Behavior - Fritz Strack, Roland Deutsch, 2004

This article describes a 2-systems model that explains social behavior as a joint function of reflective and impulsive processes. In particular, it is assumed t...

The problem isn’t that the women are unattractive.

Misogyny masquerading as social critique.