Just so ya know, while I will fight anyone who tries to use ‘relationship anarchism’ as a shorthand for anti-assimilationist polyamory,
I will also fight the disgusting attempts by assimilationist polyamorists to distance their movement from everything sexual and vilify cruisers, gang-bangers, swingers, grindr-hookups and serial one-night stands.
I know you want your mom to accept your polyamory. I understand. But if you shit on cruisers and swingers for it I will jell at you very passionately.
To me honest, half the people I know who use the phrase “relationship anarchy” to refer to their relationship style are remarkably toxic and are using it as an excuse to be lazy in their communication and then put the burden for any misunderstandings on their partner by claiming they’re trying to pressure them into a hierarchical relationship. Its not all of them, but a large enough subset to make me automatically suspicious every time I hear the label.
RELATABLE.
And actually, the person who coined the word wrote a post:
Being a relationship anarchist doesn’t mean you have to fuck more than one person at a time, because relationship anarchy is not about sexual nonmonogamy, even though it is usually inclusive of sexual nonmonogamy. Relationship anarchy is not polyamory sans the obvious hierarchy of romantic partners. It’s about doing relationships with community-centric values, not couple-centric values. Above all, it’s about relating to other human beings without coercive authority in play and without hierarchy in your group of relationships or in any relationship itself.
I fucking cringe when I read about polyamorous people defining “relationship anarchy” using nonhierarchal polyamory’s terms, just as I cringe when I hear stories of men pulling the RA card on their casual sexcapades. Not just because of how unbelievably inaccurate, apolitical, and ignorant it is but because in both cases, “relationship anarchy” is falsely used to describe the kind of romance supremacist, friendship-excluding, sex-centric lifestyles that are diametrically opposed to authentic relationship anarchy.
The capitalist, heteronormative, patriarchal state promotes relationship hierarchies based on romance supremacy and amatonormativity. It endorses treating sex like a product, protects heterosexual men in their consumption of female bodies as sexual objects, promotes the buying and selling of women’s sexualized bodies. The capitalist heteronormative patriarchal state WANTS you to invest all of your free time, energy, resources, and emotion into romantic couplehood, into marriage, into sex. It WANTS you to devalue friendship, to stay isolated from everyone who isn’t your romantic partner, to be a self-interested individual with no ties or commitments to anyone but your spouse. Why? Because friendship could lead to community and community could lead to collective political action, which could turn into revolution.
QueerAnarchism 