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Hi, everybody. My name is Anne. Um I like to say thanks to all the other speakers today. And thanks to the organisers, it's a good conference. Um, I just want to put a slight trigger warning on my work. It will have some. It's gonna touch on subjects like rape, domestic violence and suicide, like not in detail or anything, but I thought I'd give a heads up for it. Um, I wanted to start by talking a bit about the marriage equality campaign, since [00:00:30] this is the beyond Marriage forum. And it was quite a frustrating campaign for a lot of us to watch for various reasons. Because for many queer people, it felt like quite a strange and privileged priority within queer activism. Because if you you know, if you're getting kicked out of your home for being lesbian or or denied healthcare to transition, if you're a trans person, then worrying about whether you call your hypothetical partner wife seems a little beside the point. [00:01:00] Um, but what was also a bit frustrating about the marriage equality campaign was this blanket assumption within it that marriage was something that all of us wanted and that if queers got married. It would be best for society. And it's best for us to try to fit into that society. Or, as Cassie put it in a chant 2468 What? Let's all just assimilate. Um, so we were to understand that everyone was aiming [00:01:30] for a long-term committed, monogamous sexual partner with whom we'd eventually legalise our love. Um, this is what I like to call a Macklemore and discourse for. For those of you. For those of you who don't know, Malcolm Moore is a straight white rapper who did a song called Same Love About, um it was basically telling off the black hip hop community for being homophobic, and he made a lot of money off it. Um, it's kind of a dick, but this discourse [00:02:00] was coming from with inside the campaign as well. A lot of the campaign's politics held dominant culture up in a lot of different ways. It was quite white ableist, um, cis normative, uh, middle class, possibly sexist. I haven't really looked into that. Um, but you could find people from within all sorts of oppressed demographics that were very supportive of the campaign. Like in new Zealand. Louisa Wall. She's a Maori woman, and she was quite [00:02:30] far to the front of it. But the one place where ardent supporters of marriage equality seemed almost uniformly normative in in their politics was this total lack of critique of how we're doing our relationships, what sort of relationships we're fighting for within this legality and what relationships mean in society as a whole. So the campaign was, I said, was quite intent on only showing this one kind of love, [00:03:00] um, exclusive monogamy. But it's quite obviously not true. Not everyone is aiming for marriage, er, non monogamous people everywhere and people who are single or celibate by choice. Um, and not by choice as well. But, um, these kind of love are still treated as deviants. You know, if you're single, you've failed at some aspect of personhood, and you're just waiting to be paired with the right person with your other half. If you're a monogamous, you're a kind of faceless degenerate [00:03:30] slut. Basically, I, I, um I noticed this recently myself because I I put up on Facebook that I was in an open relationship and, um, people didn't say, you know Oh, great. just, you know, congratulations. The only comment I got was YOLO. Um, you know, and I was like, Yeah, you You only live once. You may as well have a nice relationship, but it was kind of this, you know, wacky experiment that's never going to work. And eventually I'm gonna default to my rightful place [00:04:00] of exclusive monogamy. Um, so you know, it has a guess that most of us in this room are quite used to seeing society through a political lens, how it's structured by things like, um, racism, classism, sexism, and so on. But when it comes to things like sex, love and romance, it's quite a blurry picture is presented where love is, love is love and you you can't critically analyse it. And indeed, to do so would spoil the mistake. But [00:04:30] it's this very discourse, among other things, that's preventing us from seeing that the way we do relationships is highly political, um, and represents what I call relationship ideology. So I I would suggest that we're not going to make much progress with the liberation of queer relationships or any relationships until we take relationship ideology out of the background, where it's kind of settled as just the way things are examine it and how it interacts with other parts [00:05:00] of culture and work out ways that it might need to change. So if we're gonna do that, I suppose the first question is, what is a relationship? And to my mind, the word itself is quite ideological because it's primarily used within, at least within Western culture, to refer to a sexual and emotional agreement between at least two people. And, of course, not every sexual bond you have is going to be a relationship. You know, you could have your buddy, your friend with benefits or [00:05:30] your whatever. But it's quite rare that you see an explicitly non sexual agreement defined as a capital R relationship. I mean, people may do this with their personal lives, like I have certain platonic friends who I have referred to as, you know, being you know, it. It feels like a relationship to me. But I wouldn't have a lot of luck if I said, you know, come to the love party of me and my bro and spend lots of money on us, or you should let me immigrate to um, Venezuela so [00:06:00] I can hang out with my friend and so we can flat together. It's not gonna happen. Um, so this forms half of relationship ideology for me. The idea that sexual relationships should be privileged over other kinds at, you know, at interpersonal social levels, but also at very material and institutional levels that we meant to structure our lives around these sexual emotional commitments. The way we live together, the way we share finances, Um, who [00:06:30] gets to visit our death beds and so forth. Um, an obvious reason for why sexual relationships would be privileged over others is that within heterosexual context, they're the kind that reproduce Children. So we I mean, we need sexual relationships to survive as a species. But, um, the idea that we should then raise these Children within a nuclear family kind of structure where you just have your man woman [00:07:00] partnership, or what have you or lately, if you even if you have your you know, two queer people, it's quite arbitrary, really. It's specific to particular societies at particular times. Um, I don't really I'm not able to speak to this in detail, but I'm to understand that, um, that in New Zealand. Exclusive monogamy is an import of colonisation. I don't think that it was a Maori construct at all. [00:07:30] Um, another example of doing relationships in a really radically different way to how we do it here is, um, the Moss ethnic group in the Himalayas. Um, the way their agreements with lovers work is that women I know that they're quite a matriarchal society. Um, in many ways, and their their relationships work that a man will go visit the woman's household. He will stay there for the night, and the only rule [00:08:00] is that he has to leave by sunrise. Now, this man may continue to visit the same woman every night for the rest of his life. But the commitment doesn't go beyond that night. And if any Children are produced from this, then the mother's family looks after them, and a child's uncles may be much more important than the father. You don't necessarily even know who the father is, because it doesn't matter. Um, so non monogamy is quite, you know, it's not, um, uncommon within S. I'm not sure how moss deal with queer [00:08:30] relationships. That would be quite an interesting area of research. But this does show that exclusive monogamy is by no means universal. And in the West we're quite keen in binding people into a long term committed, you know, a commitment of a relationship. It's, you know, I don't think many of us can imagine structuring all our relationships in a way where they only last a night. And this kind of commitment means there's not much room within dominant [00:09:00] relationship culture for a a wax of Wayne and love and and sex drive and so forth. And so, if your partner wants to have sex with someone else or or just not spend time with you for a while, then you have to break up with them. You know, it has to be a permanent rupture, or we have to otherwise kind of threaten them materially, like I'll kick you out of my house, maybe just in order to keep them nearby, because this is your one allotted supply of love and you have to hold on to it. Otherwise, you are going to be alone forever. Um, so this construct [00:09:30] of of relationship kind of becomes a third party within people's agreements that they have to be loyal to and in marriage. This is an explicit signed contract, and you'll do things to save the marriage or save the relationship rather than necessarily just to You know what will make you guys feel good at the time. These commitments, of course, aren't always harmful, but it does end up kind of making the idea of consent [00:10:00] and you know it. It's consent as mediated by something else. Um, and this forms the other half of relationship ideology to me is the idea that if you're sleeping with someone or if you're in a relationship with them, then you have a right and a duty to control their behaviour. And in extreme circumstances, this is why that until recently, if you were married to someone, you couldn't charge them with rape because it couldn't happen. You had consented to every sexual act because you signed this contract [00:10:30] to basically, This is why the marriage equality campaigns, you know, focus. That marriage was just about love. Kind of mad maddened me. I remember seeing someone saying legalise gay marriage everywhere in the world, and I was like, Oh, including the 38 countries where marital rape is still legal, you know, how do you like your same love now? Macklemore E. Even besides, right, there's a lot of quite horrific violence done in in the name of love. Like domestic violence between partners is [00:11:00] often referred to as a lover's tiff. It's kind of inevitable, really. Um, and if you know, if some if someone murders their partner, it's It's a crime of passion rather than just a crime. Um, so this is tied up with things like patriarchy and capitalism. But the fact that, um, such domestic violence happens in similar ways within queer relationships as well shows that it's kind of in a category of itself. Um, [00:11:30] and this is the fact that it's not uncommon when relationships break up for people to kill themselves or to want to kill themselves. And these also are treated as sort of just, you know, it's just part of relationship culture, like Romeo and Juliet. Their story is not treated as tragedy because relationship addiction is really disturbing, but because just love hurts. And, oh, wasn't it sad that their relationship didn't work out? Um, [00:12:00] and we are reinforcing this kind of thing when we have a culture that tells people that if they're single, they are alone. If they're single, they've failed somehow. Um, there's also state violence that gets involved with the construction of relationships because in places like Indonesia, sex, sex, external to marriage is punishable by a jail sentence. So this is enforced. This violence within relationships is enforced at lots of levels of society, and we [00:12:30] have. So basically, we have this aspect of control and domination built into the into the ways that we do relationships. And in recent times, one of the solutions to this problem being positive is is polyamory. You know, this movement of having many lovers, Um, but my problem with this sort of framing of relationship politics is that it treats it. You end up treating stuff as though polyamory [00:13:00] is good and monogamy is bad. Um, and polyamory is kind of inherently, you know, having many lovers is inherently ethical and great and interesting, and but there's only one kind of monogamy, and it's buttoned down and boring and oppressive. Um, but you can, of course, have situations where polyamory is hugely unethical and nonconsensual and and does all the bad things that monogamy can do. Um We don't often see this at a [00:13:30] societal level, but there was in, um, in Germany in the 19 seventies, there was a thing called the Friedrich So commune, uh, which was run by a guy called Otto Mu. And the rules were that you had to be completely pros promiscuous. You had to have basically, everyone in the commune had to have sex with each other. And predictably enough, this white male kind of took over things and eventually started. Um, you know, deflowering every new girl that came to the commune [00:14:00] and he was jailed for child sex offences later on. So that's an example of polyamory gone bad. Now a lot of people would say, but those aren't polyamory because polyamory is nice, but there's two. I think it's too difficult to kind of work out. What's good polyamory and what's bad polyamory to claim it as an overall movement. And of course you do. Actually, you know, the problem is, you can have really healthy, consensual, [00:14:30] monogamous relationships, and they're fine. You know, maybe some people just don't want to have more than one love or they don't have time, so we need a framework of understanding that has room for both of them. And I think that the problem with the society that we've built on exclusive monogamy is the exclusivity part. You know, the idea that you can say to your partner No, you you are not allowed to have sexy feelings about someone else or you're not allowed to make out with them. What have you [00:15:00] So what we need to dismantle within this is kind of in in this construct is twofold. So we've got to get rid of to some degree or at least look at the idea that sexual relationships follow completely different ethical rules to other ones. And the second that these relationships involve this kind of power and control that I actually prefer the term free love. It's, um [00:15:30] I mean, who you know, freedom and love. Who doesn't like these things? Really? Um, you can kind of treat it like a verb, as though free, you know, freeing love. It's a It's a process that you constantly update and, you know, trying to involve it with ethics and consent and so forth. Um, so that would mean that rather than having you're either in an open relationship where you fuck everybody or you're in a closed one Where you you know, you're not even allowed to [00:16:00] look at other people. You can put stuff on a spectrum. So, you know, I have quite a few people say to me, Oh, I couldn't do an open relationship But what does that mean? Like, my relationship is open in lots of ways, but it's not open to everything. Um, and I would assume that other people's relationships aren't close to everything, either. You know, Like I said, there's not one monogamy or one polyamory. So it means you could take stuff in baby steps like you might be cool with your partner, um, sleeping with someone else, or you might be [00:16:30] only cool with them making out. Or you might at this point just want to talk about it. Um, and once you start trying to free love within your intimate relationships, you have to start doing it elsewhere as well. So it's not much good us faffing around talking about, um, jealousy within relationships when people can't pay their rent or when they're stuck in a war zone, there are more pressing problems than working out which of you gets to, you know, see the other partner on a Friday or what have you? [00:17:00] Um yeah. So you've got to remove power and control from everywhere, and it bothers me that a lot of polyamorous community don't seem to understand how to do this. A A lot of people who identify as polyamorous are privileged gits. I remember, um, meeting this. I remember meeting this kind of cisgender white Polly man who had seven relationships because he didn't have a job and didn't like, didn't need to work. And he was saying, It's all about love And I said, [00:17:30] Well, yeah, I agree on principle. I think it's more complicated than that because it's quite hard to love when you're being oppressed. And he was like, Yeah, but there aren't really any oppressive systems in New Zealand. And then I kind of laughed in his face. And later that night, he greeted me by slapping on the arse. And I was like, Oh, well, the thing is, I think there's quite a danger. If we do structure our movement around polyamory that it's going to get the debate is going to get diverted into things like, um legalising polygamy, which is specifically [00:18:00] polyamorous marriage. And I can guarantee that it's going to be the same boring classes stuff that the marriage equality campaign was. And it just, you know, polyamory will just become another movement that Oreos can market to, um, warriors, Oreos, You know, the craft Oreo thing for gay marriage, or it just be like lots of Oreos. And they're all good or something. Warriors like via in the Mario series. Oh, OK. I don't know. Maybe they want [00:18:30] to expand and market it to that, Um, because there are ways that people who specifically practise polyamory are oppressed. Um, like, if you don't get visitation rights at the hospital, there is a problem. Um, and there was one woman in the US who lost custody of her Children because she was polyamorous. But overall, they're not really an oppressed minority. There isn't massive violence being done against poly identified people. Um, and I think [00:19:00] a lot of polyamory community, they're quite aware of the violence that can take place within relationships in terms of things like jealousy and and control. But they're not aware really of the violence that they can do themselves within being racist or being quob or ableist and so forth. So there's, you know, there's lots of different types of freedom and love that we need to enable for everybody, not just within our relationships. Um, [00:19:30] yeah, I suppose that's basically me. I just want to say there's no, you know, we're not gonna have queer relation. We're not gonna have queer liberation without relationship liberation. And we can't have relationship liberation without queer liberation. So we've got to find a way to synthesise all those together. It was really interesting. [00:20:00] Um, yeah, a lot of that sort of informs what I had to say, but I want to take it at a different angle. I like most of us. I'm more interested in love than marriage. But I want to consider the connections and antagonisms between love and marriage. Today. I don't want to attempt a precise definition of love here because, uh, well, I'm not meaning merely deep caring or a close friendship or fully of affection or companionship. [00:20:30] Those things are necessary and important and a best source of personal security. Very often. But what I wanted to talk about is passionate sexual love and love in this sense and marriage. Both have long histories in Western culture and beyond, going back thousands of years, but they are almost entirely separate. Histories. Love and marriage have, quite simply, had nothing to do with each other. Uh, even the fiction [00:21:00] that love and marriage should somehow be combined is rather recent and unevenly applied. Marriage has always been about status and property, even in the last 200 years, when marriage is attempted to appropriate love for its own purposes. It's a debased, deformed kind of love. That marriage is sought to incorporate a love where the perfect match involves celebrity and power and money, and where your grandmother tells you it's as easy [00:21:30] to fall in love with a rich woman as with a poor one. The ideal marriage requires you to love a millionaire, a film star or preferably a prince. Uh, all of whom are probably pretty unlovable. Hm. Uh, the, um, pet shop boys are not exactly right. That love is a bourgeois construct. Uh, it'd be more true to say that love is a feudal construct because [00:22:00] the modern ideology of love is primarily shaped by the ideals of nightly chivalry in the middle ages. Uh, and of course, love under chivalry was always outside marriage and about either unfulfilled yearning or unadulterated adultery. Marriage was about it. Power and property and love was counterpose to it. Uh, now, if Love penetrated the ruling classes during the age of chivalry, [00:22:30] it did have a a prehistory, which was largely unwritten. But before chivalry, love was confined to the lower orders. Uh, citizens in Athens and Rome didn't love their wives, though They may have been infatuated with a slave girl or a boyfriend. Uh, but servants and shepherd boys whose lives were mostly unrecorded because they didn't matter, uh, were able to love each other and love [00:23:00] intensely and the records sparse. But there are traces inevitably left in in song and verse. Now, we live in a cynical age, and intelligent people are not supposed to believe in love. Uh, however, there are hints and traces AAA, and there's an anthropological studies of prec class societies. And actually, we can see the patches or incidents or explosions of love have formed in [00:23:30] the most different kinds of social arrangements that our species has tried out. We can see that love is sometimes capable of great heroism, uh, against the predominating institutions of society. And we can see that love has been most widespread where power and status and property are weakest. Indeed, I want to argue here that love can appear in many environments, has extraordinary potential for disruption. But if love is to transcend [00:24:00] the exceptional and the episodic, if there's to be a generalised freedom to love, then class society has got to be dismantled. Now, of course, the spontaneity and diversity of forms of love, it's passion and sheer joy don't sit easily beside the authority and hierarchy necessary to run a class society. Uh, so marriage has become a tool for the organisation of love. [00:24:30] Love is a danger, and marriage is put into service for its moderation and debasement and to render it uniform. So heterosexual marriage is the standard against which all other relationships are measured. Parental expectations, housing policy, architecture, family law, popular music. All these things pushed toward a marriage like form. Uh, and to the extent that a relationship is in the nature of marriage uh uh, heterosexual marriage [00:25:00] only to that extent is it judge successful. So we have the modern nuclear family uh, under capitalism as an instrument for the mass organisation of domestic tasks and reproduction and for the discipline training of the workforce. The ideal where in love and marriage are combined has a dual function. Uh, it's meant to bureaucratize and routinize love and to render it socially harmless. [00:25:30] And it's meant to spice up marriage to make it acceptable. Now, that's not to say that, um, there is no real love in the world today. I think many of us get a taste of genuine love, and some get a full serving. But the commercial mass media, love industry and the attempts to tie love to the institution of marriage have profoundly miss it. The pursuit of love is combined with the pursuit of money, power and fame. Uh, [00:26:00] A. And the experience of love is twisted by crass commercialism, showy weddings and legal and social controls, which define marriage. No is is to say that marriage at an individual level is necessarily a betrayal of love. Uh, each of us has got to to make their way as best they can in a in a broken world, and marriage helps many of us negotiate that path. But as a cultural institution, [00:26:30] marriage is fundamentally conservative. So that's the context, I think, in which we came to the struggle for same sex marriage rights. And it's AAA situation, which has emerged with remarkable historical speed on a global basis. Very recently, when I was a young man fighting for homosexual law reform in 1985 86 gay marriage was not something [00:27:00] that we thought of as a possibility to even be considered. Uh, so in the context of the way marriage is actually carried out and its social role and its debasement of love, it's really not surprising that radical queers looked on this movement for, uh, marriage rights with great suspicion. Why would we want to buy into the process whereby the creative, disruptive, [00:27:30] passionate power of love was tamed to fit the conservative straitjacket of marriage? But marriage is not going to be transcended by maintaining the limitations and constraints on it by but by opening it up by freeing it at the compulsions which surround it compulsions which are ideological and legal and material. So most of us took a deep breath and supported [00:28:00] marriage reform. We supported quite. It's quite simply because legal prohibition is not an instrument of liberation. Many of us don't want to join the army, don't want to join the police force or to become truck drivers or to adopt Children. But we want the same rights to do those things as anyone else. The point about the fight for the right to get married was not that we were advocating. All queer people should actually get married. That should we [00:28:30] should be allowed to get married now. There were some attractions in the argument that we want the right to be different and not merely to be the same as the dominant forces in society. Uh, but the truth is the fight against oppression, whether it's sexual or religious or national or economic oppression is always a fight for equal rights. The right to be the same separate but equal is not equal. Where Muslims and atheists [00:29:00] do not have the same rights as Christians, they are pushed to make their beliefs about religion invisible. Where queers do not have the same rights as straight, they are pushed to make their queerness invisible. It's only through winning the right to be the same that we really have the right to be different. So most of us supported the campaign for equal marriage rights. But it was hardly an earth shattering episode. And [00:29:30] although our little victory in that campaign was quite satisfying, mostly because I suppose we don't get the experience of many victories, uh, it wasn't exactly a turning point in history. The campaign was an occasion from for some highly reversible mass consciousness raising, and possibly it laid the groundwork for the more important struggle to protect queer kids from bullying in high schools. But the [00:30:00] objective and concrete achievement of this campaign was actually just a tiny logical extension of bourgeois democratic rights, which will have very little impact on our real lives. And in the end, it simply wasn't a big deal when the celebrations died down. Queer and Trans people still faced discrimination and oppression in families and schools and workplaces. As we always knew, we would, uh, [00:30:30] in my counselling practise, I see heteronormative pushing people to the brink of death. I see very high levels of stress and addiction among queers. I see the independent youth benefit denied to adolescents who have nothing, no family, no accommodation, no job there are in fact extraordinary levels of unemployment among among young queers. Right now, I see health professionals refusing [00:31:00] to take seriously the problem of queer and trans suicidality gay boys bullied at school. Trans teenagers kicked out of their homes. Sometimes it feels like we're in a battleground and in the context of the trauma that surrounds us, the lesser but still urgent and and and also the the other, uh, practical needs. In that context, our imagining [00:31:30] a utopia of polymorphous perversity seems a bit indulgent. We might want a world where the privileges of monogamy are dismantled, where there is a culture celebrating diversity and a universal validation of relationships of many different shapes. But right now we have to concern ourselves with the fact that many all queer and trans [00:32:00] kids grow up in fear of bullying at school, and a significant number want to kill themselves because they've been kicked out of home with no resources. What I'm wanting to argue is that we shouldn't separate, but rather we should link the struggle for immediate needs and the struggle for a more profound liberation. Indeed, it's only in the struggle to meet the [00:32:30] immediate needs that we can lay a path to profound change and a fundamentally better society. Now I want to explain that in a concrete way and use the example of housing. It's clear that an abundance and variety of subsidised housing would be an enormous step in meeting immediate needs. It would help counter the effects [00:33:00] of poverty. It would take a lot of the sting out of family transphobia and homophobia. Even if modest housing were immediately accessible, it would take much of the stress and conflict out of adolescent coming out crises. There are depressions which would lift and suicides that wouldn't happen. In fact, it wouldn't just be queer and trans adolescents who need access to accommodation separate from their parents. [00:33:30] I think most families with adolescents at certain points need more housing options and as well as addressing immediate needs. And this is the point of adolescence. Good accommodation options would also address the needs of married people when their marriages were in trouble or merely need a little space where it's a question of domestic violence, frustration about the relations coming to stay [00:34:00] or a new sexual configuration disturbing the equilibrium of a household access to housing would remove one of the most important constraints, which too often turns a marriage into a prison in Practise one of the compulsions, which enforces a continuing marriage when there are Children, which make it difficult to escape when it's past its use, by [00:34:30] date is the expense of setting up accommodation, which allows genuine co parenting. People are forced to stay in the marital home in order to keep connected to their Children. Uh, or alternatively, they've got to simply leave the marriage and the family and thereby leave most of the parenting to one of the former partners, usually the mother. Decent accommodation options for families which are coming apart would remove one of the compulsions [00:35:00] which shape marriage today. So while it's true that family law and fairy tales and Hollywood are important forces in shaping and maintaining the institution of marriage, actually it's often too often simply the absence of an alternative place to live, uh, or even to stay temporally that keeps a marriage going or determines its shape. [00:35:30] Uh, along with housing, you could use similar arguments about decent child care, which care which, um, we should be fighting for, too. It would move remove another set of compulsions which keep in place. Uh, the marriage system and gender inequality. Now a programme to remove those largely economic compulsions and see what people would make of their lives without them seems a far more sensible way of approaching [00:36:00] the world of the future than to try to imagine in advance how it will look, because that's something we simply cannot know. We can't know the future of marriage, but we can fight against the constraints on current marriages and and current relationships. If there were true material security, the compulsions which today hold marriage and the current family system together, those [00:36:30] constraints would be removed with material security can come enormous sexual freedom and diversity of our domestic relationships. Now we are told that the system simply cannot pay for decent housing or child care. And I guess the people who say that actually know the system, and I guess they're right. The system can't pay for decent housing and child care. So much the worse for the system. We got to throw it away. [00:37:00] And so the struggle for domestic freedom is indivisible. From the struggle for socialism, the running costs of capitalism are simply too high. There's an awful lot of corruption and free loading involved in capitalism, an awful lot of paperwork, all of which eats up human life without getting anything back. There's the human effort wasted wasted on financial shenanigans. This whole [00:37:30] industries which add very little to the sum total of human happiness, banking, insurance, advertising capitalism is simply profoundly wasteful. But nevertheless, even with this waste, the resources exist. There's a study on the basis of data for the year 2000. United Nations World Institute for the Development of Economic Research reports that the three richest individuals in the in the world [00:38:00] possess more financial assets than the lowest 48 nations combined. The richest 1% in the world own 40% of the global assets. So the programme for a world beyond marriage must be a programme which addresses the obscene inefficiency and inequality of the [00:38:30] capitalist system. Only a programme of socialism can create the conditions for transcending marriage. And how will we live under socialism? I don't know, but we can't know what will replace marriage and current family arrangements, but we can suspect that where issues of material security are behind us people's personal preferences will trump any considerations of family [00:39:00] pressure or popular prejudice. We can expect that our domestic arrangements will be extremely diverse. Ok, um I have Yeah, a little bit to say. I both really enjoyed your best talks. Um, one thing I would his the first comment, uh, would be to agree with the immediate need, [00:39:30] um, and the overall, uh, liberation things as being our main kind of focus for the future of that combined thing. Um, absolutely. There's a lot of other social and cultural considerations that we want, but they are not as pressing. Um, I, I think so. I really wanted to to replace that, um, another thing I wanted to say, I think was, um that while monogamy and polyamory, [00:40:00] for example, because those were the two that were brought up quite strongly. And while there are two forms of relationship or ways of being, I think also making really, really clear that there's a lot of ways of existing under those two labels, uh, particularly, um, the understanding and the definitions provided of those two were contrary to a lot of to a lot of definitions that I that I've heard and also quite contradictory. Um, I think on that note, just on [00:40:30] an in particular, um, I think it's really problematic and potentially something that I found quite full on, um, to say that poly armoury as a whole was not an oppressed minority. Um, particularly because while a group is may not be violently, uh, physically, violently acted against, um, exclusion and invisibility, Uh, also forms of violence and structural violence. Um, so I think that and [00:41:00] poly people, um, that can include that should not necessarily. I do. I totally agree that that should not be where queer should go and where the queer struggle should go. In some ways, that's even separate. There's straight people who are identified that way. There's a million different variations on that, Um, and it's definitely not a utopia or any ideal like that. And I think that's quite acknowledged. Um, in at least, um, many of the, uh, current kind of ideas [00:41:30] in in that now, um, but I would say that, um, yeah, just that invisibility thing is really, really important. And also the fact that, um, people operating outside or inside monogamy but in outside the conventional definitions also experience their lives as, uh, a wide range of oppressions, biases and privileges. Um, for example, they could, uh, as myself, um, identify as a queer white cisgender woman. Um, so there's a lot of privilege [00:42:00] and also, uh, oppression and bias in that sentence. And that's the same with polyamory. Like you could say all of, like, just phrasing it and that some are idiots. Some people are idiots. It's not really a useful kind of way way to deal with that. And it's also kind of, uh, in some ways generalises What? What it is, um, and also, yeah, just child like legal rights are also quite, um, [00:42:30] and just one final thing, and then I will stop. I promise. Um, I just Yeah, I just I think that because people can be oppressed in many different ways and by many different aspects of their identity, um, which feed into each other, Um, that it's unhelpful to discount them. And yeah, it's just a common. Yeah. And, um, yeah, cultural invisible invisibility [00:43:00] of polyamory. It sucks, and it's quite damaging. And I think actually, yeah, the invisibility of polyamory as an option is a real problem because people don't know. They're just like if I'm attracted to someone else while I'm with a partner, then I'm wrong, you know, like because monogamy is the only way. I suppose what I meant by privilege in that sense was that a lot of poly I people, I don't know that they can be quite privileged [00:43:30] because it's a under capitalism. It's quite difficult to find even one person to form a nice relationship, let alone many. You need a lot of things like time, and it's difficult to structure around that to structure that around things like child care and so forth. Can I just say one thing? Just get that? Um, it's just because, like Poly Army and things that exist, that could be labelled as Poly Army, so different from monogamy has existed for time [00:44:00] periods and for many different, um, economic, social and cultural ways. So and talking about it is it's specifically framed under capitalism. Yeah, absolutely. Maybe the parents is a economic asset, but then also talking about it to existing in a lot of minority populations and a lot of other places and time periods and maybe just yeah, and I and I think it is important that that is a as well. Is that like because I think a lot of people like when a lot [00:44:30] of people come to polyamory, newly or you know sometimes can be for a while, and it's as though it's this magical thing they've just invented. Whereas it's it has been across all cultures all times. And I think there's a lot of cultural, you know, this invisibility of other cultures within a polyamory movement. Because, I mean, I think it's a thing of like when we, you know, when other cultures are colonised. We colonise their romantic lives as well, and I think that's [00:45:00] something often not taken into account within certain politics. Think one thing that possibly hasn't been discussed is the multiple meanings of polymer. I think that polyamory is identity is basically people defining themselves in opposition to mainstream monogamous relationship styles. Um, and I think that that's quite different from what is often meant by people you know, acting polyamorous, which just literally means [00:45:30] having lots of relationships at once. So it's what I interpreted Anne's meaning, which perhaps is not what she meant, but when when polyamorous people aren't impressed directly. It's because there there is the diff. It depends what you mean by being polyamorous. So if you if you are in long term committed relationships, yes, you will get marginalised. If you just happen to be one person who has multiple relationships at once, that's it's such a diverse [00:46:00] group of people that you perhaps can't group them together into a think absolutely. And I think that's just one thing I just wanted to put out there that polyamory like is not only a political kind of thing and people who are being then, as you say, um, it also means it's like an umbra term anyway. Like, um, it means many, many different things to people and that that's all I wanted to say. I do think there probably is a lot of value in I. I quite like the word free love. [00:46:30] And this is something we've talked about but as having that as a as a political identity, that implies you have put sort of this this societal criticism on how you approach relationships and you're not necessarily thinking that everything has to be as open as possible. But, yeah, I think, I think because has got too many meanings. Possibly a new word is needed at some level. The same. Yeah. Yeah, I did it. I was thinking about [00:47:00] it. But, like, um, I do polyamory sometimes. You know, at the moment I'm in an open relationship and, you know, just just one. And, you know, sometimes I'll see other people, Um, and like, maybe if I were in a triangle or what have you, then I might I might identify as polyamorous. But it's not for me. It's not a permanent identity. It's It's something that I do sometimes, I mean, [00:47:30] yeah, I don't know. It's perhaps worth noting in that vein as well that the idea of, um, queer sexualities as identities of a person is quite a recent phenomenon. Like the word homosexual was only invented in 18 69 and heterosexual while after bisexual somewhere along the line. Um, so kind of prior to that you did you know, you might perform homosexual acts or heterosexual acts, but didn't say anything about who [00:48:00] you were as a whole. Um no love Scott. Comment I. I mean, II. I wonder if if, um, sexuality will be important in people's identity. at all in the future. Sex might be, but, um, fucking life. Yeah. [00:48:30] I mean, I suppose there's, um you know, people often kind of want to say like, Oh, I don't identify as feminists because I don't like labels or I. I don't You know, I don't identify. Quit because I don't like labels. And for the moment, I think we actually, you know, because of how society works. We often need those labels because to differentiate different experiences, um, and so forth or to demonstrate what you believe. But, you know, I think ultimately we might. We might want a society that didn't have those kind of labels. So [00:49:00] And someone said to me that like, Why do you need to call it free love? Why does not you know why? Name it at all, and it's like, Well, we'll have to call it free love because we don't have a society that values free love at the moment. And we may never like I. I don't know if we're ever gonna reach this sort of magical utopia where everyone, um, you know, gets to fuck whoever they want. And no one bats an eyelid. Um, and especially I find it discouraging. I don't think we're going to get there, because I think climate change is gonna probably wipe all of us out, which was [00:49:30] really depressing. I'm like, Oh, what did I mean? I knew I wasn't gonna live to see the I knew I wasn't going to live to see the movement fulfilled, but I hoped it might happen in the future. And fucking apocalypses. I don't know. Sorry. That was kind of a sad point entirely. Oh, I mean, like, stuff like climate change is affected by this sort of stuff as well. Like, if you're having everyone live in their separate nuclear family houses and buying 20 vacuum cleaners rather than one, you are going to do damage to the planet. So the [00:50:00] socialisation of housework is actually quite an important part of that, isn't it that, um, by by in a system society where, um, where people do work collectively? Um, they have jobs. They have jobs, but in fact, their jobs are not like today of 60 80 hours a week. Um, they're not jobs that, um some people [00:50:30] earn Megabucks and other people earn peanuts. Um, when you have that sort of a society, then the possibilities of relationships, how it's or how you organise the relationships. What happens with Children, the domestic chores and things like that are are are done in order to enhance our lives. Whereas today they are to control our [00:51:00] lives. Right. So, um, you know, I agree with With what? With what? Bill was actually arguing that you know that we need that, you know, talking about freedom and under this and this sort of a way society is organised is sort of weird, because we're not really free to do very much at all. And when you've got no money, you've got very little freedom at all. [00:51:30] And we need to create a society where people have real choices. Not for the privileged few who happen to be, um, financially able to do it, or the strength of character to breach the norms of society. But real choice. That's what we have to be fighting for and what all those real choices will be sexually. Um, [00:52:00] if we have a society that's built on collaboration, not on profit, we don't know. We can't predict because it's it's well, it's open ended. Yeah. Um, yes, I was I was thinking about Oh, I talked to this woman. I kind of believed in free love. And And she she was like, what? Because she was thinking of the kind of Woodstock free love, which is a sort [00:52:30] of it's a sort of freedom of like, I can fuck whoever I want and you can't say anything. Um, which, you know, obviously ended up privileging, um, primarily men over people. So that sort of free love kind of sucks for a lot of people. And so I think we've got to not have this definition of freedom as a sort of, um, just a licence to do whatever you want, because No-one can, you know, not everybody can do that. You can have some people do it. You can't have everyone doing it at once because, [00:53:00] you know, one person's freedom ends up being another person's prison. And the definition of freedom I really like comes from David Foster Wallace, who was talking about the kind of freedom that education gives you, and it's it's the kind of freedom so that when you're waiting in line at a supermarket, you don't have to think that, you know, this person in front of you is just there to annoy you. Um and you know, isn't it terrible that I'm in a supermarket line? And that's all you can think about? When when you're educated, you can take [00:53:30] yourself out of the immediate context you're in, so you can you can. Sorry, I'm paraphrasing his speech really badly, But, um, you can remove yourself mentally from that sort of state and you it's a freedom to empathise with other people and, you know, so when they do something to you, it's not specifically to hurt you. It's about, you know, so you can try and imagine their sort of perspective. And he said, that kind of freedom involves, um, discipline and effort and the ability to sacrifice [00:54:00] for other people without it being bad for you. And you can do you can do that kind of sacrifice because you care about them. And I think that's a real freedom, and it's a sort of freedom that we should be striving for within politics. I mean about this political movement. I don't know how long, but do we end up like that? OK, can I just make one point? Um I don't know if it's been raised that much yet, but how religions work, I think, will always be [00:54:30] subject to a culture and an ideology like even in in radically, you know, communal communal societies from all over the place that they they're always going to be functioning differently. So I think well, certainly the removal of capitalism will will allow a huge amount of liberation. I think it's a bit naive to say that relationships will suddenly start working without an ideology which will have taught people how to do things. So I think I think that while you're talking about free love you [00:55:00] as well as as well as condemning capitalism and and marriage, you have to deliberately prop with something else. And and if this is the removal from inherent exclusivity, or at least exclusivity being the norm of a relationship, I think it's it's very important to have this this positive ideological part of of what you're you're talking about. Nothing, Nothing. II. I think you're right. But I think that you exaggerate this in that [00:55:30] exclusivity is much, um, it is privileged in all sorts of ways, by all sorts of material things which are going on around like the the housing question. Where the fuck are you gonna do it? Um, I I is an important thing which helps build exclusivity. Uh, and, um, you know that there's all sorts of actual material things [00:56:00] which make the exclusivity work. Now, I'm not saying that the ideology of exclusivity plays no role in this. I am saying that sexual desire is su is strong enough to overcome the ideology of exclusivity in the context of the disappearance of the material props to that ideology. [00:56:30] One of the things that, um, that I think get mixed up in so called democracy is that if I look at all the demo, um, democratic countries as such, they are all oligarchies, but their governments and those who control them, if we ever become educated enough [00:57:00] as a people to actually realise this because what they keep, um, then things will happen. But while they can keep feeding us magazines on Starlight starlets and these people have this and you can't and you get this whole It's like Valium to so many people. I. I see people at work they go through. Oh, wouldn't it be wonderful this is capitalism because we have this and I said, Yeah, but [00:57:30] you don't have any of it. You don't have any of them. But it's that dream of the life happily ever after and that type of thing. Now the thing about with that with you talking about Poly An in most countries where it was done and in it was done for very good reasons, mainly mainly because of the way population was actually, um, how how it was actually distributed. [00:58:00] And in those countries where I've been to where that's practised as they are not particularly wealthy, those people and what we've done in the West again is taking something that has worked politically for a people and said we'd like to try that. But we don't always have the constructs to make it. So, um, in a place where polygamy polyandry is, P is practised. If you have a look at the social [00:58:30] content of those places, it is almost necessary for that to happen. And I know with polyandry uh, polyandry. If the land was is was that poor, then it was better to have more men or one woman to marry a a group of men to actually get that land to work. So it wasn't It was often done or not. [00:59:00] I should say it is done. It is done because of survival and polygamy. Um, in most cases of my study of it and with people, I know who When I've lived in countries where that is done, it was done because the country still gets. The thing is that it is dangerous for women to go out. [00:59:30] Hopefully that will change. And I know in Saudi Arabia now, they, um they're just passing a law that women and why it may not seem great to us can actually practise law in the courts there for the first time ever, because they're trying to actually slowly change it. I think you said something about the Maori, and in many cases I think you're right. But among [01:00:00] the aristocrats, No, you're my I come from, um my grandparents. They were arranged marriage. My mother's first marriage was an arranged marriage. It worked out well when you come from a little village where there's only 25 or 30 people, when you come to the city and you realise there are thousands of people and you have a choice. But I remember with my mother that choice was almost too much coming [01:00:30] from one society where you've been brought up, Um, where she knew as as a youngster she was going to be married at a certain age and then coming into the city and saying is, Hey, it's different. It's different here. My grandparents on my Maori side never really got over that, that there was this choice. But what they couldn't get over was that people could then divorce if [01:01:00] it didn't like, because my grandparents on my mother's side were married for political reasons. Now I'm not saying it was right, but I'm just saying, Is that political reasons that happened for us again? It was about land and what bills talked about, too, about actually, what works socially, and what worked socially for my mum and for my grandparents was it was to actually make sure that there was enough land. There were enough gardens [01:01:30] for things to work so there would be enough food for the offspring. So I'm just saying is when we throw things around and say, Oh, this or this or that without looking at where it actually comes from and why it is in a society we actually do another form of colonisation, of saying It's, Oh, we'll try this But without [01:02:00] the political constraints that actually have happened in those societies, I'm not saying it shouldn't happen or it will happen or it won't. I'm just saying That's the way it is. But I do repeat, we live in an oligarchy and it is no different now than it was at the beginning of the 20th century or the late 19th century, with the czars and the royal families and the billionaires owned most of the places. Today [01:02:30] there are more people in service as butlers and all those other things and households around the world than there was in Edwardian England, which is just a mind blower for me. But within the marriage and those things 01 other thing is, yeah, I. I don't want the sexual thing to be a a thing that we're still having to fight. I suppose we will. But I also know that as soon as we get that as equal and we'll find, [01:03:00] society will find something else to suppress. It always does, and people say, Oh, I'm not racist or anything. But the arguments about suppressing us and our sexuality are the same arguments that were used with about with people with mixed marriage. The same argument that was used with people, um, who were thought themselves better than others. The arguments haven't changed. Just where they've actually pointed the bullets [01:03:30] are Has I love life. Thank you. It was pretty helpful. I think I might think one takes to reply. Um, is that when you were talking about poly or or polygamous societies requiring it, [01:04:00] um, requiring it because that's that's how the land is working. That was that was what they do to survive. I think the flip side of that which you touched upon, but perhaps, I don't know, I felt like I was making connections in my life. Maybe I wasn't was Is that in in our society right now, we very, very, very much do need, um do need monogamy because this is sort of nuclear families, which which are easier to control and train people, as as Bill was saying, and I think that that was largely true under [01:04:30] basically, basically, as long as capitalism has been a thing and and in feudalism in in any of the tiers of society that owned anything. So I think I think very much the flip side is that in all of these rather nasty forms of government, or you know these ones which need a lot of improvement, they've relied on monogamy. So? So to say that polyamory is the other is only from a matter of perspective. Um, yeah, I don't know if that would meant anything, [01:05:00] but I think it becomes a complicated thing. Which do we do first? Because then it's like, Well, I would love to remove all the material constraints that are on people forcing them into prescriptive monogamy or polyamory or whatever, but, um, but then, you know, do you do you wait until all those are done before we address relationships? Or do you do it the other way? It's We can't do anything until we've done doesn't necessarily have to be a queer issue like it might be some part of the [01:05:30] polygamy or polyamorous queer community might wanna push that and might wanna, you know, gain that. But it doesn't like I mean, that's gotta come from. I think it's a false dichotomy Of course, we are for the right, for anyone who wants to to be polygamous or anything else. And, um, we're also for the right. For people who think polyamory is, um is is the way to go and good [01:06:00] fun and it meets their needs. And they know that there are other people whose needs it would meet who don't know about it. Who could join. Of course, they're going to say, Hey, polyamory is great. And why don't you come along and be polyamorous and I defend to the death their right to to advocate that, um and I? I have a sympathy sympathy for a lot of the the psychology that's behind that, Um, but we also better know [01:06:30] that it will be a very minority sport in the current society that it requires quite a lot of privilege to be able to maintain a po polyamorous life for very long I. I mean, I'm sure it's possible for a few years for a large swath of the population, but it would require quite a lot of resources to be to be polyamorous with, [01:07:00] uh, you know, a career and kids and all that kind of thing. I'm not saying it can't happen. It does happen. It happens very successfully. Uh, but it's exceptional, and it will go on being exceptional. Um, And so whilst popularisation of polyamory and popular popularisation of an identity as polyamorous is something which is great at the same time, it is important to be fighting to stop the [01:07:30] suicides. Uh, it's to to to be addressing the actual material conditions, uh, of of kids, uh, and and other people who are just in in, in, in, in ghastly situations, you know, and and and And when I I say that it's sometimes like you're you're you're in a war zone. It really feels like that. It's OK dealing with with with with one or two, suicidal kids. But if you get three or four of them at the same time, [01:08:00] um, life becomes actually quite difficult to handle for the people who are trying to look after them. And how much more difficult is it for them? Uh, a AAA And and And the, you know, the there are political solutions which will undermine this as a problem. And they're hard to fight for. But we do in in in in small ways. Get make progress, uh, and and And that that it It seems to me that we can do both of these things. They're not. [01:08:30] It's not an either or thing. I wanted to go back a little bit because, you know, um is very rarely practised by the very rich. You know, all these princes and things. They've all got their mistresses. They've all got their illegitimate Children who are dukes of this and da da da of that, you know they can't. We can't get abortions. But rich women have always got [01:09:00] an abortion, right, you know. So that's is that we have to see that monogamy has a special role in society. And even before nuclear families, when there was the extended family, it still worked the same way as being oppressive. It's there for a reason. We are taught. We have to be taught how to behave and what orientations we should have. And I just [01:09:30] agree with you about what Romeo and Juliet is about. But it's, you know, there it is. It's clans, right? And a girl has fallen in love with the wrong clan. That's what it's about. It's about which family is going to control their female. Um, so monogamy is really for the middle and lower classes. Um, abortion [01:10:00] is not to be had because it means you'll be sexually free contraception. You'll be sexually free. And you know, free love is, you know, you think of Woodstock and all the rest. It's all very fine. But when you wake up and you find that you're actually pregnant, it's not such free love after all. Um, so you know, we need a society where these things aren't an issue, and then people's sexual expression is able to be accommodated regardless of what it is. That's what we want. [01:10:30] Yeah, I think I'm just Where are we? We're not technically running out of time to. There's nothing afterwards, but a long time. I think, Um, what I didn't mean to touch on within the speech is that I think a material reason that historically I think to different degrees. But that sexual relationships are often considered in this sort of like compelling yet terrifying separate category is that [01:11:00] having sex for much of history is something that feels awesome and can straight up kill you like through the spread of disease or through pregnancy and death and childbirth and all. It's an extreme support. Really? So I think, um, yeah, it's possibly I mean, you know, we saw the way that society changed after the in the invention of the pill and and so forth. You know, it's a, um I think touch on [01:11:30] what some of what Bill was saying is that, um, you know, there's this guy, Paul. If you ever know who said that it would be nice to assume that we could sort of just improve society by teaching everyone to do it better. But there's actually a material basis for ideology, which kind of reproduces and reproduces itself. Um, so, yeah, remove certain material constraints here will change the I change the ideology a lot faster. Cool. [01:12:00] We're done it. We done. Have we sold it all? Yeah, Yeah, everything. You can all go home. There are some fantastic things that should happen, but they're not going to because we're going to drown and feed it by hurricanes. Um, yeah, maybe we can delay it a little bit. [01:12:30] Thank you, guys.
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