Greetings, all, I’m Myca!
Hi there.
With Ampersand stepping down from his lofty blogging throne, he’s asked me to make the leap from moderator to co-blogger, so although most of you have more or less known me for some years now, I thought an introductory post would be a good idea.
SO: I’m a long-haired, polyamorous, feminist, agnostic, Mac-using, role-playing, Gaiman-reading, left-wing, philosophy-studying, theater-attending, computer-gaming, kinky, sexually dominant, art-film loving, ren-faire participating, quirky, outdoorsy geek dreamer. And I’m a white guy.
I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, so that type isn’t as uncommon as you’d think.
My primary interests are feminism, leftist politics in general, geek culture, civility of debate, and sexual freedom issues, so that’s mostly what I’ll be posting on, but I’m of course always interested in learning more about things I know little about, so you may see the occasional “Huh, this is confusing to me,” post too.
EDIT: Oh, hey, the blogs I regularly read:
Feministe
Pandagon
Bird Brains (The IDT Weblog).
Cassandra Says
I shame the matriarchy
let them eat pro-sm feminist safe spaces
The Washington Monthly
Philosoraptor
EDIT the second: I’m crossing out polyamorous, since I’m in a monogamous relationship sort of. *grin* Long story.
Hi Myca–
Given your intro, you also ought to know about Sex In The Public Square, which is both a blog and a community website.
Interesting stuff, Richard. I’m adding it to my bookmarks now, thanks!
“I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, so that type isn’t as uncommon as you’d think.”
Which is one of the main reasons why we’re all willing to tolerate the fog and the ridiculous rents in order to stay here.
So you’re officially a co-blogger now? Congratulations!
hi myca! congrats on hitting the bigs!
Hi Myca!
(my, that was a creative comment, no?)
That list means I’m probably two degrees of separation from you at most, not counting Ampersand. I used to live in the Bay Area. Fortunately it’s not the only such place.
Yesterday we were in the emergency room (it was one of those “alarming minor symptom” incidents, which turned out to be a false-alarming minor symptom) and a nurse asked myself and the Otter what our relationship was to the patient. I looked at her for the answer because I usually disclose too much, too much of the time, and didn’t want to inadvertently make some crucial error. She has much more of a sense of discretion.
She said, “Spouses.” I nodded, relieved, and blurted out “–this is Portland,” in case more explanation was necessary.
The nurse didn’t even do a single take.
Hi Myca,
“I’m crossing out polyamorous, since I’m in a monogamous relationship sort of. *grin* Long story.” – toally feeling that. Hope you’ll expand one day?
Myca, I feel weird that I know alot about your sexual orientation and nothing about how you identify racially. It would be valuable for me as a person of color to know that you’re open about your racial identity, since discussions around race are often why I come to this blog.
I realize you’ve probably stated it in previous posts, but I can’t remember.
Would you mind adding it to your description of yourself?
Of course, and actually, I think the fact that including it didn’t occur to me is a perfect example of white privilege. Good catch, Katie.
—Myca
Congratulations, Myca. Based on what I’ve seen here, it’s well deserved and you’ll do a fine job.
I’m looking at the list of blogs you posted, and went out to a couple of them. It leads me to a question that I welcome you to ignore if you think it’s a thread hijack. Do you ever take a look at any blogs from “the other side”?
Also; perhaps it should be blindingly obvious, but nowhere in your introduction do you state your sex/gender.
Heck yeah I will. I’m actually sort of trying to figure out right now whether being in a monogamous relationship means I should eschew the ‘polyamorous’ identity or not.
—Myca
I’ve had that discussion with someone – I say I’m mono because I’m basically in that kind of relationship (it’s complicated… of course it’s complicated, it’s always complicated), but I’m polyamorously inclined. I’m close to a poly couple… ah, it’s complicated! Would be very interested to hear your story.
I’m actually sort of trying to figure out right now whether being in a monogamous relationship means I should eschew the ‘polyamorous’ identity or not.
I’d say so. If you were “really” poly, you’d be in a poly relationship or no relationship. But (I’m guessing here, although I bet accurately) your current partner wanted a monogamous relationship and you assented because you wanted them more than you wanted to do the poly thing. That means you’re just a guy who wants a relationship; you might PREFER to have a poly thing going on, but it obviously isn’t a deal breaker.
I am speaking descriptively, here; you can use whatever words you want to characterize yourself but an outside observer doesn’t care about your self-labels, they care about your observed behavior. You’re not behaving polyamorously, just amorously. ;)
Hold on, Robert…does that mean that if my SO breaks up with me, I’m automatically back to being monogamous with my husband? That makes no sense. It’s not just today’s behavior that defines us.
Myca, you count as polyamorous to me. You’ve voluntarily agreed to *act* monogamously, and I know other polyamorous people who have done that.
I do, but I generally don’t have them bookmarked. Tacitus is okay, I read Feminist Critics from time to time, that kind of thing.
Ahh, yep. I’m a dude, and it’s listed now.
—Myca
Robert, Kai, and Lina, this is precisely the debate I’ve been having mentally.
I have to agree with Karl on this. It’s kind of like saying you aren’t gay until you’ve shagged someone of the same sex – what Robert is saying reminds me of that debate. I don’t think it is necessarily what you practice. One might be in a mono relationship but if one is poly. inclinded, one naturally is very aware of that. That awarenss perhaps alters the dynamics.
I don’t know….. Labels are a pain in the arse, innit?
People become intensely focused (fixated?) on labels, even though such labels don’t define who we are, they just put us into categories where the fit may or may not work. If you’re polyamorous, it means you’re disposed to fluid or open dynamics. You might be bisexual, too, but that doesn’t mean you’re fucking someone of the same sex. We obsess about these things and then at some point, they no longer matter. You’re poly if you’re comfortable with multiples.
Hold on, Robert…does that mean that if my SO breaks up with me, I’m automatically back to being monogamous with my husband? That makes no sense. It’s not just today’s behavior that defines us.
True. So what do you do when the SO kicks you to the curb? Go and find another one? Or stick with hubby? The answer will determine the label I’d stick on you.
I take your point, of course, and I might not be able to TELL you’re a poly person at a particular point in time (like ten seconds after SO says bye-bye). But I think your behavior over time means much more than your self-labeling does. The “straight” guy with fifteen ex-boyfriends is kidding himself, but he’s not kidding anybody else. ;)
I WOULD go for the idea of someone being poly (or what have you) without the accompanying behavior if there are constraining circumstances. “I am polyamorous but I live in Okra, Arkansas, population 18, and I’m 15 years old so I’ve never actually dated ANYONE” – OK, you can be poly if you want. But when you get to New York you’d better start slutting it up, missy.
It’s kind of like saying you aren’t gay until you’ve shagged someone of the same sex
Well, how could you be for sure? You might be wrong. Desire is a squishy thing (so to speak) – it’s possible to get it wrong. I thought I liked skinny blondes for a long time, but it turns out that was the Playboy talking.
Robert,
polly = slutty?
that’s kind of rude to Myca (and others) isn’t it?
“Well, how could you be for sure? You might be wrong”
Hm, I think that if you think you’re a lesbian or bisexual, then you are because the fantasising suggests an inclination. That’s a very firm way of putting it, I suppose, and it’s ultimately fluid. Like fantasies, the reality can be a great deal different. But I think really I do believe that (bi-curiosity aside), if you’re attracted to the same sex or you’re attracted to being poly then that in itself is enough.
It’s too complicated to be that black and white though, there are exceptions, I agree.
It’s kind of a tricky issue, because the ‘poly bible’ for years has been ‘The Ethical Slut.’ Personally, I’m none too fond of the book, but it’s popularity is widespread enough that I don’t take offense at Robert’s comment. Plus, I think he was poking a little fun, which I can take.
Were he to argue that polyamory seriously equals slutty in some sort of ‘not-taking-back-the-word’ way though, I’d disagree.
—Myca
It’s safe to make fun of poly folk for being slutty, because they’re too busy ****ing to ever read your remarks.
In other words, I was just giving Myca a little joshing.
I’m not buying Robert’s logic here. either. An orientation or inclination is what it is – the fact that a person chooses to limit the expression of that orientation or inclination in order to accomodate a particular partner doesn’t change who that person is on a fundamental level.
Example – I’m bi. I’m in a monogamous relationship with a man. That does not mean that I have somehow become straight. If Mr. Cassandra and I broke up tomorrow and I was looking for someone to date, I’d be looking at both men and women.
Like I said, orientation is what it is.
It does seem to me that there are two different things being discussed here:
1. Someone who has acted on her or his orienation/inclination and then chooses, consciously, not to, which is what CassandraSays is talking about.
2. Someone who feels he or she is a certain way–gay, bisexual, polyamorous–but has never acted on it.
In neither case does outward behavior necessarily reveal inwardly defined identity. As well, I am wondering about what I think I hear as the implication by some in this discussion that the defining moment of any of these identities is the sex one has. I mean, do we say about someone who has not yet had heterosexual sex, who not only desires members of the opposite sex, but also exhibits behaviors conventionally recognized as heterosexual, that they are “heterosexually inclined?”
For myself, I’ve had many polyamorous relationships, I think polyamory works well, and I do not feel that I’ve turned away from polyamory in general.
As Robert guessed back in comment #13, though, the person I’m interested in does not have room for polyamory in her romantic paradigm . . . and being with her is more important to me than being in a polyamorous relationship right now (or theoretically ever, I guess).
But for me the key thing behind polyamory has always been the idea that the best way to build a relationship and to figure out the rules for a relationship is for you and your partner (or partners) to figure out the rules that work for you together, rather than just accepting an assumed, socially dictated set of rules.
If I were deciding all on my own how my new relationship would work, I’d probably choose for us to be open to multiple relationships, but I’m not deciding all on my own, and I wouldn’t want to be.
—Myca
Robert: I think the thing you’re failing to grasp here is that polyamory is an orientation — not, always, immutable, but a part of identity.
Just because I’m not having sex with two people at this very moment as I type doesn’t make me less polyamorous or less queer. And if I were, you could expect a lot more typoes. There was a period in my life when I was having sex with a number of different people; there was another period in my life when I was having sex with no one but myself; I’ve been conscious that I’m polyamorous since about the age of sixteen.
I don’t believe that sexual orientation is *always* immutable, either; I think that people have a far higher likelihood of trying to override their orientation and failing than of overriding their orientation successfully, but that in the odd instance where someone finds that going the other way works for them, it’s simply invisible, unless the people in question make it visible.
I think many of us have encountered the story of a person who dates entirely heterosexually until they meet the right MOTSS and fall head over heels. Similarly the other way — but there’s likely to be more social visibility in the case of, say, a lesbian who finds exactly *one* man she wants to have a relationship with and stays with him: because “straight” is default, is majority, and once you’re in a minority relationship you simply, silently lose your majority status, but someone with a long queer history is likely to have invested their identity in queerness, and be unwilling to lose that identity even in a het relationship.
Richard wrote:
I see your point. But just as a point of thought, why should we assume that the way we think about heterosexuality is the way we should be thinking about sexuality in general? Maybe the way we think about heterosexuality is wrong.
I think it would make sense to say “right now’ with any descriptions of any sexuality. And to be more specific.
For instance, why not replace “heterosexual” and “homosexual” with “gynosexual” and “androsexual”? So what we now call lesbians and straight men would be gynosexuals, and what we now call straight women and gay men would be androsexuals. (Bisexuals would continue to be called bisexuals). That just seems to make more sense.
So “what is your orientation?” “Well, I’m androsexual for now, but of course we’ll have to see what the future brings.” I’d rather live in that world.
Edited to add: But even that is too limiting, because “androsexual” and “gynosexual” assume that sexual orientations must have to do with sex and gender. What about someone who is indifferent to sex and gender, but who is strongly attracted to long-haired math geeks of either sex? There should be vocabulary for that.
Amp, have you read Trouble on Triton by Samuel Delany?
You’re absolutely right. There’s ‘bisexual’ which would be technically accurate, but wouldn’t speak to the actual preferences in question.
—Myca
Mandolin, I haven’t. It’s embarrassing to admit, but I haven’t read any Delany at all.
Hey, Myca!! and, what’s all this about Amp dethroning? clearly I haven’t kept up…
Ampersand: I’m amused by your example because I know several actual, bonafide longhairedgeeksexuals.
“Gynosexual” and “androsexual” wouldn’t always work for the ways I find myself expressing attraction. I sometimes think I’m heterosexual but bi- or multi-gendered — which is to say that I find masculine-feminine gender dynamics most compelling but I’m willing at different times and with different people to occupy a masculine or a feminine slot. This is not to be confused with topping or bottoming, either. Butch/femme is closer, but there are butch/femme dynamics that are like the type of interaction I’m talking about and others that aren’t.
I think one of the things about gender relations is that they’re almost impossible not to oversimplify.
Congrats, Myca. I’ve appreciated your moderation style and I look forward to your posts.
And here we are, at your introductory post, already engaged yet again in a Robert-instigated thread derail about his hair-splitting definitions instead of having more commenters roll out the welcome wagon for you. Great. The reason why I rarely comment here.
– Bonnie
Bonnie, with all due respect, this has been a fairly friendly thread up until now. Why try to mess that up by flaming Robert, and by implication slamming me for my moderation style in years past?
I like you and your posts. But save it for a different thread, please.
Interesting discussion.
Certainly there have been a life’s worth of “mistakes” and I doubt I’m alone: I think I’d like to be with someone who ____ and I don’t. Or I think I’d hate to be with someone who _____ and I end up falling madly in love with her. It’s probably better to say “bad guesses” than “mistakes” though.
But I think it’s important to distinguish between someone who has NO experience and someone who has SOME experience. So if you’ve been both polyamorous and monogamous, then you presumably know enough about both to be more informed when you say “I define myself as polyamorous.”
That’s way different from my saying the same thing. (Ignore that I’m happiliy monogamous for a moment.) Because while I might think I’d like it, I could be 100% mistaken. OTOH, while you might be mistaken in some respects–you might fall in love with a single person and settle down forever–you’re not going to be nearly AS mistaken, because you’ve been there. And done that.
Gender identity as straight/bi/gay doesn’t seem to require actual sex; most folks have “tested” their identity through masturbation/fantasies/non-sexual encounters with the opposite sex before they have actual sex. The average seventeen year old het male may not have had any sexual encounters beyond a kiss, but if he spends 83% of his free time fantasizing about women then chances are pretty damn good he’s heterosexual.
But polyamory (like all detailed relationships) seems to be a lot more difficult to predict than most folks think. I have no experience with it, but it’s gotta be hard; even monogamy is incredibly difficult. Sort of like saying “I want to be with someone who likes to debate” can be a good guess… or backfire horribly. For polyamory, I think you have to at least have tried it to profess that you like it.
And if you HAVE tried it (like Myca) and you think it’s for you… then heck, you’re polyamorous. If you want to be.
Well, that’s reasonable.
I guess it comes down to whether you view polyamory as an identity/orientation, per AJ, or as a behavior, per me. It seems to me that behaviors that can be so easily thrown off can’t be “orientation”; orientation implies a permanence or a stability. I believe the gay man who tells me that he just can’t bear the thought of sexual contact with a woman; I don’t believe the polyamorous man who tells me that he just can’t bear the thought of only having sex with one woman. I believe both of them when they say they’d be unhappy if social mores forced them to engage in the undesirable pattern; I believe the levels of unhappiness are pretty different.
I guess I end up favoring a gunpoint test using emotional distress/stress as the measured factor: if the person is coerced or incented into the desired behavior, how much trauma does it cause them? I suspect that the gay guy would be pretty upset; we already have the testimony of the poly guy who seems to be managing the stress of not being true to his “orientation” pretty well.
That differentiation in emotional response seems significant to me.
Oh, and just in case it wasn’t clear from context: Myca is free to call himself what he wants as far as I’m concerned; it isn’t my business. But he seemed to invite a discussion of the theoretical, abstract question, and it is an interesting question to discuss.
Amp –
Not meant to be a flame; merely an expression of frustration. [Not that it matters, I guess, but my partner’s grandmother’s 92 year old boyfriend died recently and I’d just returned from the funeral and from supporting grandmother for 3 days on my own, no other family there until the day before the funeral – family who does not accept me, partner, or our relationship. I loved the boyfriend – he still had his mind and was a remarkable person. The past 6 days have been very difficult.]
My apologies all around.
– Bonnie
Also, Myca, if I’ve been a drag on your coming-out party here, please accept my apologies.
– Bonnie
Hey, Bonnie, I’m sorry you’ve had such a difficult week, and I’m sorry for your (and your grandmother’s) loss. I hope things improve for you soon.
Myca, (and others)
But for me the key thing behind polyamory has always been the idea that the best way to build a relationship and to figure out the rules for a relationship is for you and your partner (or partners) to figure out the rules that work for you together, rather than just accepting an assumed, socially dictated set of rules.
For me, that’s pretty much the key factor of what poly is. (And I am starting to hate the word poly, just because it has so much screwy baggage separate from that.)
Rather than assuming a default, poly is the idea that working out rules that work for you and your partner(s). If what works for the two of you is to be sexually exclusive, you are still poly in my book.
So if you MUST label yourself, I’d go for polyamourous (or multiphiliac) in a monogamous relationship.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. (I have lately gotten the feeling that far too many poly people are invested in having the identity of poly – and defining that as meaning they MUST have more than one person in their lives – than investing in the health of their relationship(s).)
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