Rebecca Kukla: belief

Transcript context

…No, you can. So you’d have a thicker market, right? But you might have less informed or less well-specialized people doing it, and which of those is more important? I think one of the reasons right now why polyamory works very well for a lot of the people who do it is — and this is directly addressing what I think you’re getting at — is because since it’s a small, nonstandard community, people really — in order to make it work — they have to do a lot of critical self-reflection and studying to figure out what the norm should be. You can’t just fall into polyamory right now. If you’re going to do it, you have to explicitly sit there and think, “What am I trying to get out of this?” And then you have to explicitly negotiate with partners and future partners, “What are our shared norms? What are our expectations?” Nothing can just be taken for granted the way it can for traditional, heterosexual, monogamous, or purportedly monogamous, relationships. I think that, for most straight, monogamous people, there’s very little thinking about what their fundamental relationship and sexual values and norms are and what their boundaries are. They just sort of go with the flow. Or to get back to your . . . Heidegger would say they just find themselves thrown. They just find themselves in the midst of the norms and carry on. So your question about scaling — it super depends on how it’s scaled. If it became a thing that everybody did, and in the meantime, what had built up and become the unreflective norm were a bunch of crappy, misogynistic, exploitative practices, then it would be worse. If it scaled up, and it scaled up in such a way that the unreflective, widespread norms were better and thoughtful and more enlightened, then it would be better. I don’t have an in-principle question to whether scaling would make it better or worse. To me it’s all about how those norms would end up developing organically and through reflection and discussion, and what kind of sexual ecology we would end up with. I think the sexual ecology we have right now in the broader culture is pretty messed up in a lot of ways. We could end up with a better one, or we could end up with one that recreated a lot of those forms of being messed up and just turned out to be exploitative. It’s very hard to guess in advance. In some game theoretic models, having groups of three people is especially destabilizing. In four, five, six people, you can have more cooperative outcomes. Do you agree with that or not?…

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