The Thoroughly Bourgeois War on Monogamy

Consensual nonmonogamy, or “CNM,” is on the rise among the meritocratic elite. A 2016 survey of about 9,000 single American adults showed that one in five had previously been in a CNM relationship. A 2017 survey in Canada discovered similar results. The BBC in late March offered a sympathetic portrayal of CNM—such as a gay threesome with two children in San Diego—in its “work life” section. Even Amy Dickinson of “Ask Amy” fame is normalizing the idea of having more than one partner.

While conservatives are rightly fighting attempts to impress transgenderism on our nation’s children, the inheritors of the sexual revolution are further pushing the sexual boundaries of progress (or regress, as it were). “Multiple non-monogamy-geared dating apps make it easy to find others looking for multiple partner relationships or sexual experiences,” notes the BBC. On the app Feeld, for example, 60 percent of couples are looking for a third to share the love. The Massachusetts municipalities of Somerville and Cambridge have both voted to recognize polyamorous domestic partnerships. There are pro-CNM podcasts and glossy pro-CNM books.

Unsurprisingly, legacy media is promoting CNM by bringing in the heavy artillery: the credentialed, peer-review published expert. Amy Dickinson, for example, cites sociologist Elisabeth Sheff, who comforts older, somewhat wary liberals by telling them that acceptance “doesn’t have to be all or nothing,” and involves small steps of educating oneself about CSM (sometimes also called, a bit risibly, “ethical nonmonogamy”). In other words, tolerance, acceptance, open-mindedness, and communication are the keys to overcoming our personal concerns with polyamory and other “nonmonogamous” relationships.

Yet to call this the normalization of sexual deviancy doesn’t quite describe the phenomenon. Rather, it is the tactic of making polyamory and “other forms of CNM” just another manifestation of bourgeois society. One can perceive this even with the application of new scientific-sounding terminology. “Consensual nonmonogamy” sounds so clinical and official. If the experts of the academy, the professional gatekeepers, and the informed columnists say this is a perfectly acceptable form of human behavior, and even a human identity with concomitant rights, who are we to disagree? The DSM-5 is their socially-accepted Bible, and we are the uneducated laity.

Those who feel a sense of discomfort or disapprobation towards such sexual identities and behaviors thus evince a psychological weakness—perhaps that pesky “unconscious bias”—that requires its own therapeutic, professional counseling to address and overcome. In the same way that the therapist empathizes with the patient’s social or psychological weaknesses and helps him or her to develop coping mechanisms, the health professional affirms our discomfort with CNM as understandable. Perhaps our reticence stems from being raised in a prejudiced, close-minded family or a bigoted, backwards community. Don’t worry, we simply require new behavioral habits and thought patterns to accept and celebrate what we have ignorantly feared.