Polly Ammery
Sep30
I’ll admit, I laughed the entire time I was making this strip. This joke occurred to me months ago, and realizing made me sooooooo goddamn happy.
Polyamory is a real thing, for those who are unused to the concept. Monogamy is not the only way. Many people enjoy having more than one dedicated lover. Even some folks of fairly large celebrity.
So let’s talk about it in the comments!
Aloysius MacPenisdong would be a really silly scene name….
I think I just found my new Fetlife username!
Schlonginus Maximus, Commander of the Penis Legions.
Turgidius Erectus.
Sorry, but I cannot look at that avatar w/o immediately thinking, “Blam!” 😉
Biggus Dickus? From the Monty Python boys.
Biggus Dickus in the room would be fine. But leave Incontinentia Buttocks at home.
“Polyphilia” is fucking WRONG!
God damnit, you people fucking disgust me.
…
It’s “multiamori” or “poliphilia”. Stop mixing your fucking Greek and Latin roots!
Or your Greek and Latin fucking roots.
I’m allowed. My good friend Biggus Dickus told me so.
Isn’t mixing it up kind of the whole point?
Gah dangit, I think you needed to review this before you submitted it. Isn’t your first line supposed to be “Polyamory” is fucking wrong’?
Also, I confess to not being able to pronounce Aloysius.
“Uh loy zee us”, I think.
I would pronounce it “Al-oh-wish-us.” But I also have it emblematized onto my brain after my son watch a Pinky Dinky Doo episode that had an alligator in it that went by that name. My son watched it over and over and over and over and over and over and over. And, yeah, not gonna forget how to say it any time soon.
Motherfucker…
polyamory, monogamy, they all sort of frown of fucking one’s mother. just sayin’. *flees, giggling*
What’s the point in being kinked if you can’t mix things up, eh?
Man ease up. Latin is dead and Modern Greek wouldn’t be understood by the ancient Greeks… Polyamory is an English descriptive term to denote multiple sex partners. (http://www.alphadictionary.com/goodword/word/polyamorous ). Anyway the key word here is ENGLISH. Basically it means Loving more than one. And whole societies ancient, Primitive, and modern accept and even encourage polyamory.
“English” is a bastadisation of multiple languages. Everything you say every day is “doing it wrong”.
I blame you people for everyone at work thinking I’m crazy. Snorting fits of laughter for no apparent reason do that…
I’m generally a little twitchy about mixing Greek and Latin, but I’ve been saying and hearing ‘polyamory’ for so long that it just can’t sound wrong to me any more. (I identify as poly, and generally lean in that direction, but I’m one of those people for whom it’s a choice — I can be happily monogamous with the right partner (I haven’t figured out what made this possible with some of my past lovers and not others) — but poly feels much more natural to me. I generally prefer polyfidelity over anything more casually open (not a rule carved in stone); I just prefer N > 2.)
That said … there are a lot of different ways to be polyamorous / do polyamory!
There are? I thought it was just ‘screw everything that comes close enough.’
Yeah, a lot of variations can be worked in, but the original concept pretty much stays the same.
Nah. I’m poly and I have one partner, and the last time I started seeing someone new was 2.5 years ago (my current boyfriend). I’m sure I could have lots more sex if I were willing to pounce anyone in striking distance (my boyfriend and I live 2,000 miles apart), but I want committed primary-style relationships with people I love.
amen, chica. (also, HOLY CRAP 2.5 YEARS! you’ve made him a happy man. 🙂 )
Aw, thanks. He’s a pretty awesome fellow! How could I not try to do right by him? You know it’s a good relationship when both people think they lucked out.
well…from the outside, as someone who’s known him for a few years, he seems to have won big once you came into his life. 🙂 thanks for making my friend happy.
There are? I thought it was just ‘screw everything that comes close enough.’
See, every day is a chance to learn something new about the world.
Some people, especially when they’re very new to poly, do take it as a license to bed hop, and often indulge their hormones to the detriment of their emotions. I did it myself. (Some people take care of both, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with having lots of partners, as long as one is taking care of oneself emotionally.) And, too, typically it’s the folks doing this that end up being the most visible aspect of poly, so I can see why you might have come to that conclusion. Many people don’t end up doing that. The lass who’s dating two fellows is a lot less on the radar than the guy who has five girls and a new one every other month.
I myself am married (and approaching our 17th anniversary of getting together, 8 dating and 9 married), and until fairly recently, I was dating two other women as well. (13 and 7 years respectively.) And each of my partners had other people as well. Sometimes there was overlap. I had occasional other partners as well, but it wasn’t a continuous hunting expedition looking for new conquests. It’s actually been about 5 years since I had a new partner. I’m certainly not, and most of the poly people I know are not simply “screw[ing] everything that comes close enough”. If for no other reason that not everyone that comes close enough is actually interested. Consent is important.
if i could upvote or “like” this, i would.
the biggest assumption of poly and bi people is we’ll screw anything with two legs, and it’s just not so. thank you and Raven for saying what i can’t without throwing in expletives.
Exactly. My boyfriend and I have been together for 7 and a half years, but outside fun is allowed, as long as we’re honest about it. That being said, neither of us has taken advantage of it for at least two years and don’t intend to. We’re both bi, but we see it as being able to appreciate both sides of the coin of beauty.
Considering that I know more “closed N-ads” (mostly triads, but at least one pentad) than “open relationships” (including semi-open), I’d have to say rather emphatically that ‘screw everything that comes close enough’ translates to “failed to do the research”. And AFAIK that would possibly be more the “original concept” behind the older “free love” movement than the modern “polyamory” movement. (Quotation marks because functionally one can be cast as a subset or special-case of the other, but in this comment I’m looking at different groups distinguished by their labels, rhetoric, and history more than their definitions.)
I’ve been in various sorts of poly relationships, and I’d have to say that for me, closed triads or tetrads are comfy, though the “very strong ‘primary’ relationship with clearly ‘secondary’ relationships around it” model can be nice too, if (IME) a bit less stable. I’ve been in a “fuck anybody as long as I know you’re coming home to me afterward” relationship, and (like monogamy is for me) it’s a “has to be the right partner for that” thing — in general I like more stability than that. Other people have different preferences than mine, and there are variations I haven’t listed. Thus “a lot of different ways to be polyamorous”.
Actually, it’s called “poly” because the difficulty of keeping everyone happy is of polynomial difficulty. O(n^2 + c). Voice of experience here.
Back when I still had time for trolling, I registered as Maximus Fartimus on the forums where I expected to be banned soon.
And then found a home on a forum where it’s damn near impossible to get banned…
love it 🙂 i had an inkling something like this was coming when alex was first introduced.
i myself are pretty new to it – got introduced to the lifestyle thanks to my best friend around new years – i was incredibly lucky to meet my GF in march – she’s also married.
the time schedules can be mad, but no longer am i confused once the NRE has died off – this makes sense for me. 🙂
Well, I’m glad to see that Mick is handling this with maturity and grace. Clearly he has been done a grave injustice and… has conveniently forgotten the part where he was about to commit seppuku for having slept with Heidi?
I hope I was not that annoying when I was new to it, but I probably was. A guy I knew was partnered asked me out. I marched right up to his girlfriend and told her that she should know about this. Feminine solidarity! And she said, “Yeah, you’re cool, it’s fine” and *pop*. Blew my mind. It’s funny now, but it was all interrobang at the time. Heh.
Alex does not seem like the kind of woman who is likely to appreciate Mick’s trenchant wit here.
I could not do polyamory. Nor could my wife.
If you’re not kinked that way, it can be real work. If you *are* kinked that way, it’s as natural as breathing, albeit with some social implications.
Personally, that’s not my kink, but sometimes my kinks introduce some aspects of polyamory when “In Scene.” Especially when dealing with kinks my wife dioesn’t share, but is willing (after suitable negotiation!) to allow me to indulge.
The big difference is that it’s “In Scene,” agreed-to in advance, and lasts only as long as the evening lasts. Full-time, or even large-amounts-of-part-time polyamory would exhaust us.
MaskMan says if you’re not kinked that way it can be work. I say if you’re not kinked that way, it can be a complete disaster.
I know plenty of people who could never be poly and really shouldn’t try, even to please a partner who is poly — if their partner can’t deal with monogamy, the relationship is a ticking bomb
.
And others who’d never be able to make it work for themselves and don’t really want to, but have no trouble accepting that their partner is (and that their partner has other lovers).
And I know people who really can’t be monogamous except by accident — they can seem monogamous during a spell when they just happen to only have one lover for a while, but it’s not really in their nature, and trying to tie them to monogamy will eventually blow up as badly as a Very Monogamous person being pressured into a poly relationship.
And folks like me, who can manage mono or poly depending on whom we’re with.
I very much suspect (but lack hard data to back it up) that mono/poly/either is as much a part of orientation as being [hetero-|homo-|bi-|pan-|a-]sexual is. But with the caveat that even with recent (say last 20 years) increasing awareness of the existence and terminology of poly, this is still a very monogamy-normative culture, so even many people whose brains are wired for poly (or for having a choice) have a lot of unlearning of cultural conditioning to do before they’re ready to identify as poly or act on it.
But back to my main point: some people really are not wired for poly and should feel no shame for sticking to relationships that are healthy and functional for them (in their case, monogamy). And the same goes for folks just not wired for monogamy — best to acknowledge that and find suitable relationships instead of taking a big shortcut to Hurting Somebody (possibly oneself).
“I say if you’re not kinked that way, it can be a complete disaster.”
True. Not always, but certainly the potential is there. Which why one must negotiate. Openly, explicitly, honestly, and in detail. Sounds cold, but it’s not. It’s about establishing the boundaries and trust that allow a relationship to work – Pure vanilla folks can benefit from such open communication, too.
Aaaand… Coding Fail. :p
“can be a complete disaster”
“true. not always”
Uh, yeah, that’s what was in my head — can be (although it isn’t always) — but it didn’t make it out of my head and onto the screen cleanly. Thanks for the correction.
“Sounds cold, but it’s not.”
Yeah, vehement agreement here. What it is, is analytical, which in our culture is way too often mistaken for “cold”. It’s not cold, it’s just being clear. When I’ve had these conversations in relationships that were basically working, the analytical conversations have wound up being very intimate. And as for vanilla/monogamous people reaping the same benefits from the practice, oh Jesus yes — we agree there too. (And it wouldn’t be the only useful thing I’ve seen vanilla friends borrow/adapt from nonvanilla people. If I may veer wildly off on a tangent … I’ve even seen vanilla folk adopt the concept of safewords (both for “our culture defines activity X as ‘normal’ or vanilla but thanks to knowing a lot of kinky people we’ve noticed the power-exchange implicit in it even though we still think of ourselves as vanilla and golly that safeword idea sounds like a useful concept”, and for “in some non-sexual context I want a way to quickly communicate that something is not okay — ‘triggering’ for example, or just I-can’t-cope-with-this-subject-right-now — and everyone in this crowd already knows what ‘safeword’ means”. Many of my vanilla friends have also picked up the useful word, “squick”.) A “Hey, are we on the same page?” conversation every so often in that awkward period between “this is starting to look maybe serious” and “now that we’ve been together for a few dozen years we pretty much understand each other” can be (usually is) a Good Thing all around.
The thing about polyamory is that it’s complicated.
I’ve been married for some eleven years. And frankly, it’s difficult to integrate one other person into your life as a lover and an equal. When you start adding more, it becomes far more difficult and complicated on an exponential or even logarithmic progression, or, as RS says, polynomial.
And I suspect that a fair number of people who are poly don’t integrate all their lovers into their lives as equals. I certainly doubt that Ogre, above, treated either of the women he dated concurrent to his current wife were treated the same as she was.
This leads to the harm: breakups. I’m not one for “Stuff white people like,” but when they said that long-term relationships were basically practice for divorce, they were right. Breakups and divorce are both sources of significant amounts of pain for those involved — especially children. If there is one thing that contraceptives have done that harms society, it is giving people the false presumption that when they have sex, they don’t have to think about what will happen if somebody conceives.
Mick is pulling her leg, right? I mean, I’m about the most staid stick-in-the-mud you are ever likely to meet these days, but even I am familiar with the concept of polyamory…
Not everyone has read Heinlein in their teens. Those poor bastards….
Mick. You dense mother f*cker.
Not so sure it’s dense, in this case, as it’s simple lack of comprehension / education / experience.
I think he’s about to get an education into a part of life he never even imagined existed.
Betcha Omar could clue him in, though. Which would probably end with Mick pouring bleach in his ear.
How the hell does Mick know about Fetlife and *not* know what polyamory is? O.o
Right!?
Omar.
Omar knows FetLife, and I bet Mick has conflated that fact with his opnions about Omar’s sex life to reach a conclusion that FetLife is both sad and disgusting.
Which it can be, if that’s your kink. 😀
IOW, I bet Mick has actively avoided thinking about the subject.
Knowing of a kink site, but not knowing the ins and outs of poly are miles apart. His experience with fetlife poly might have been limited to “DICKPIX”
Having been in 3 poly relationships… it is nice to see it brought to a good comic strip. And Mick needs to calm down.
This should prove interesting.
Can we have a frame of Mick kinda anime-style with the O_o expression when the time arrives? 🙂
(da da da da da – I’m lovin’ it.)
I am now watching this like a soap opera. And I was thinking what Dr. Tranny was. Seeing poly being done in a comic, in a funny way to educate and entertain, is amazing 😀
Ya, Polyamoury is simply loving/committing to more than one partner. Most keep it quiet so as to be undisturbed in their relationships. Personally, the one time I’ve gone monogamous in a long term relationship, I got beats pretty hard and was abused in pretty much every way possible. Once I got out, I vowed to never do monogamous again. There is safety in numbers! Provided the situation isn’t dictated from “on high” in a religious/cultural setting, polyamoury has a lot of out of bed benefits that make life sooo much easier and more fun.
Do not conflate “asshole” with “monogamy.” They are seperate things, and not causally related.
Yeah, there are asshole poly people too. Though on the whole, I would say that poly just seem a bit more accepting of differences, so there is that.
Being ‘different’ from the norm does tend to make one more accepting of other differences. Usually.
I have some poly fiends, and some serial monogamous friends. The poly friends are much less annoying to talk to about partners and lovers.The serial monogamous people seem brain damaged compared to a nice neat polyamory family.
I also have a poly friend that did a class at a pagan gathering on polyamory in entertainment. He started with a few older movies (Paint your Wagon among others) and then moved on to current shows. Books were mentioned with Heinlein getting the most mention. I sent him a link to this comic last week. He said it was “Very cool”. He’s not a gun guy.
Your comment about poly in entertainment reminds me of the time my Mom told me that she was watching “Big Love” and understood my life so much better now. My sister laughed so hard at that that she fell out of her chair. I did a lot of hasty “I’m not doing it like that!” explaining. Poor Mom. She tries.
Mick’s outrage is hilarious… but I do hope he can calm himself for a rational discussion… before Alex tells him off and walks out. Of course, Mick might not be able to handle it.. it’s not for everyone.. but better a rational “I don’t think that’s something I can do”, than a hysteric-ridden “You are an evil slut of death” type thing…
I am happily poly, with a husband and two serious committed partners… and casual relationships from time to time. I also have a love/no sex partner, for those who think it’s all about the bedsports..lol
Thanks, FtF, for allowing the topic to be out there.. and thanks FtF audience, for being grown-ups about the discussion! It’s… refreshing.
Raven
A request for today’s soundtrack?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgkBWZXVLyk
the joke is good… i would laugh harder if it didn’t hit so close to home with a few of my problems… but thats my thing.
got a close friend who is poly, she seems to be doing well with it. i guess if it works for her. its not my thing.
Is Mick the most vanilla creature on the planet? I don’t even want to know what his reaction would be if Alex identified as Pansexual. 🙂
Ahhh that was a fun conversation with my friends.
i’ve been poly for 13, 14 years now. no, longer, since the beastling was 4 and he’s 20 now. had several partners move in and out of my life, marriage failed (due to many factors other than poly), lost two partners to death, when the marriage failed moved back to texas and in with a 10-year partner and we got married, 5 years ago come december. i still have a g/f although it’s been years since i’ve been with her (damn across country moves…hers, not mine).
yay for having a poly-positive comic, even if Dorkus up there hasn’t quite got it yet!
I came here just to post this: http://imgur.com/gallery/TZbx8Mk
How the fuck does having a boyfriend and a girlfriend just slip your mind? So much for communication and open-ness being key in poly relationships. :eyeroll:
Neither one are playing squarely with the other.
Though I think Alex just lost a lot of moral high ground. Then, of course, Mick took what high ground he had, and started excavating with a power-shovel…
I still want to side with Nick here. Someone said in an earlier comment (not today, a few days back) that unless you say you’re in a poly relationship when meeting someone, the assumption is you’re hooking up for a monogamous relationship. And Really, what better time would it be to say “hey, I’m in a polyamorous relationship” than when the other members of the relationship walk into the coffee house?
But that’s my bias. I’m read plenty of pro-poly literature, Heinlen included, but my experience of it in the real world wasn’t good. But I’m trying not to be judgmental about it; not everyone has had my experiences, nor have I had those who think it a positive thing.
I’m also trying to realize sometimes story-telling goes forward because someone does the wrong thing. We’d not be reading this latest comic arc had Mick not fucked up.
“…story-telling goes forward because someone does the wrong thing.”
Yup.
Ah Mick, you just got ran down by a serious bus. I was there once, talk about taking some getting use to the idea of poly. This is going to be great to watch his head explode, come back together and re-explode.
I am sorry J, but I read trough Head Trip and found this… Totally forgot it. Made me cry so hard!
http://headtrip.keenspot.com/d/20120713.html
Cry of laughter I mean. damn cold..
True story.
Yes, in the comments I found the facebook picture. Priceless.
I could never do a poly-amorous relationship. I have a hard enough time remembering one woman’s birthday, and one anniversary.
I both identify with and am pretty mad at Alex right now. I mean, this whole thing started as a fun “get to know a new friend” situation, so I can give her a pass on not saying things right away. But once she realized how naive Mick was (clueless about a play party) she should have looped him in.
That’s a serious case of butt hurt right there try this http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1tm42xQbIl8/TqTIAHGIFCI/AAAAAAAABtw/p_U-uyyU-8k/s1600/Zoidberg_Butthurt-Cream_lg.jpg
Oi… to each whatever…
*dies laughing*
That was good.