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But, more than that, I think it was just that I’m a professional, middle-class, middle-aged white woman. I look “normal” and … well, respectable. I don’t look like a rebel, a rule-breaker, a defier of social norms. I look average. Kind of boring. Paradoxically, I think that’s why I was interesting.
Polyamory is a form of consensual non-monogamy. Non-monogamy because it involves being open to more than one loving partner/relationship and consensual because it’s intentionally chosen by all parties involved (as opposed to cheating, which is non-consensual non-monogamy).
I remember a profile piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It was written by Moira Weigel, a journalist and author I admire. She came to meet me in Vancouver while researching the piece and we chatted on my front porch, went for sushi, then chatted some more. She wrote a strong profile, a little snapshot of me at a moment in time. When I read it, I saw my own reflection in her mind, an image both familiar and strange. A woman who smoked on her patio and wouldn’t talk about one particular topic. Whose dog still smelled of tomato juice after a close encounter with a skunk.
When it was decided that it would be the cover story for the Chronicle Review, the journal sent a photographer to my house to shoot me together with both of my then partners. Now, I am not a natural in front of a camera. Being looked at makes me awkward and self-conscious. It’s not just that I’m nervous about my appearance (although I am), there’s a moral component. Even a passing glance from a stranger makes me feel judged.
The house I lived in at the time was also not easy for a photographer to work with. It was small and dark. Built in the Edwardian era, houses like this are a rarity in Vancouver, but they can make a British export like myself feel homey and nostalgic. Eventually the Chronicle’s photographer settled on the best (or least worst) option – upstairs in the room I used for writing, where there’s a bit of natural light from the window. The photographer posed me by the window, in my writing chair, with my partners standing behind me. Then, to get the best angle, he crouched back inside of a cupboard full of my clothes.
I was intensely aware of my partners’ bodies, peripherally visible to me as I sat in my chair. Both of my partners, in their different ways, seemed so comfortable with being photographed. With being seen. One of Jonathan’s many talents is stage performance – he is an amateur operatic singer with a gorgeous, rich, warm baritone voice that I love hearing around our house. Ray has years of experience in front of a camera, and anyway their entire being constantly radiates a fierce, model-like grace, even when they’re just walking round Save On Foods.
In the photo, we look like a rag-tag team of superheroes. I love it. Ray and I are no longer partners, and so this image has come to bear even more weight, capturing as it does a phase in my experience of love that I once hoped would be permanent but feels strange and distant to me just a few years on.
And then there it was on the cover of the Chronicle Review, emblazoned with the headline: “Can Carrie Jenkins make polyamory respectable?” You know, no pressure.
Respectable. It’s such a double-edged word. Was I actually trying to make polyamory respectable? Did I even want that? I would love for polyamory and other “weird” relationship forms to be deemed worthy of respect, the way “normal” relationships are. But do I want them to become bourgeois, stuffy, conventional?
There’s an old-established journalistic rule that says: if the headline is a question, the answer is “no.” I think the rule applies here. Nobody does things like that – no individual person. What I am good at is starting conversations and nudging them in under-explored directions. That’s how I see my work as a philosopher.
Anyway, back to why I was sad. When What Love Is and What it Could Be came out, and I started doing all those interviews, well-meaning friends and colleagues would say, “It must be nice for you, with your book getting all that attention!” But it wasn’t nice.
I’m an introvert for one thing. For another, much bigger thing, a lot of the attention was pure hate. Shortly after publication, ABC Nightline made a short news segment on my life and work, broadcast on national US television. They also posted it to their Facebook page. The top comments were “Immoral,” “Odd balls,” “Fucked up,” “Sick,” “It’s stupid,” and “Interesting.” (Thank you, whoever you were, for swimming against the tide.)
Some spend more time crafting their responses. “THIS WOMAN IS A DISGUSTING ANIMAL,” someone posted on one of my old YouTube videos:
A far far left-wing freak that desires to completely overthrow Western Christian Civilization. IT’S WAR ON your ethos Carrie! Every God-loving human on this planet needs to realize WE ARE AT WAR with these commies. End of Story. Oh forgot to add: PLEASE CHOKE YOURSELF CARRIE. Thanks and have a nice God-loving, mom, the flag and apple pie. God Bless America. Let Freedom Ring. Stand up and defend your 2nd Amendment rights. Have happy Christ-centered marriages with lost [sic] of Christian children who hug and feed the poor and …
This continued into several more posts, none of them reassuring.
My mental health took a nose dive. That wasn’t all about the book, to be fair. There was a lot going on in the world at the time. Between the time of writing and the little launch in my university’s bookstore in February 2017, the most powerful nation in the world had elected Donald Trump as its leader. Hate was on the rise everywhere, or so it seemed.
There’s an Islamic hadith (saying) that I like: “If the Day of Judgment erupts while you are planting a new tree, carry on and plant it.” I tried, I really did. But it was a complicated time to get people talking about the intricacies and subtleties of love.
For me personally, the hate just kept coming. Every time an interview or article appeared in a high-visibility venue, a stream of nasty feedback would follow in its wake. The public eye does not look kindly on women with ideas. (This is not a new phenomenon – women have not historically been welcomed with open arms to the pursuit of wisdom. The internet just offers us new ways of burning and drowning our witches.)
At the time it was a bit of a blur. But, in retrospect, the hate fell into three buckets. First there was a bucket of hate for feminists. One time, my Twitter account was drowned in hate after I wrote an opinion piece for the Spanish newspaper El País, the headline of which (possibly the only part many people read) was “Polyamory is a feminist issue.” The article was published in Spanish and most of the reactions were, likewise, in Spanish. I don’t speak Spanish, but I was surprised at how much I could understand.4
The second bucket is for slut-shaming hate. I am a woman who talks publicly about being polyamorous, so I have been called all the derogatory words you can think of for a promiscuous woman. There are no male equivalents for these words. This was predictable, although knowing something’s coming and knowing what it will be like are not the same thing.
I simply wasn’t ready for the third bucket: the racism. My husband Jonathan is half Asian, my then partner Ray is Asian, and I’m a white woman who has spent most of her life with the privilege of having racism largely hidden from me. “Ray and Jon [sic] look like brothers …,” declared one anonymous email. “Are they both Chinese? I bet they cook you nice spring rolls for breakfast but whose spring rolls are better …” One Facebook message – in its entirety – read, “gross! are asians the only men who will f u?”5
I know it’s tempting, but the solution to this problem doesn’t begin with the word “Just …” Just don’t read the comments; just don’t talk about polyamory; just remove yourself from Twitter and YouTube and email and the internet and public discourse. These are not solutions. If I stop talking and stop engaging, the game is up. In any case, these reactions to my work are