Sounds Like A Cult - The Cult of Monogamy

Episode Date: July 2, 2024

Catch Sounds Like A Cult host Amanda Montell, Theydy Bedbug, Rara Darling, and other special guests on tour in Chicago & Minneapolis!!! July 13: Minneapolis, MN — The Big Magical Cult Show at Cedar Cultural Center (buy tickets here!) July 14: Chicago, IL — The Big Magical Cult Show at the DEN (buy tickets here!) DATE & VENUE CHANGE July 29: Seattle, WA — The Age of Magical Overthinking book event at Elliott Bay Book Company (free!) To subscribe to Amanda's new Magical Overthinkers podcast and listen to (or watch!) the rest of today's episode on monogamy, click here :) If we can love our children and friends separately but equally, why not our romantic partners? Such is one of the many compelling thought exercises in favor of polyamory, a relationship structure that is by no means new, but has experienced an explosive recent surge in popular media—everywhere from New Yorker thinkpieces to Succession plot lines to reality shows like Couple to Throuple. Some questions, though: Is polyamory really more "natural" than monogamy? Why do some people make being "poly" their whole personality? Who even has time for multiple partners? (And is it prude to ask such things???). This week's episode is actually a feed drop from the Magical Overthinkers podcast (because host Amanda is *not* a podcasting monogamist ), featuring the brilliant philosopher and host of the Overthink podcast, Dr. Ellie Anderson. Listen for a sparkling discussion of romance, jealousy, history, and media, and consider subscribing to Magical Overthinkers wherever you get your pods! To order Amanda's new book, The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality, click here. Follow us on IG @soundslikeacultpod @amanda_montell @theydy.bedbug @mxraradarling

This is Sounds Like a Cult, a show about the modern day cults we all follow. I'm your host Amanda Montell, author of the books Cultish and The Age of Magical Overthinking. I'm also on tour right now putting on this really wacky, wishy weird, fun live show in Chicago and Minneapolis in July, so I really hope you come to that. Ticket links are in our show notes or at amandamontel.com slash events. Every week on Sounds Like a Cult, we choose a different fanatical fringe group

from the cultural zeitgeist, from Peloton to purity culture, and analyze it to try and answer the big question, this group sounds like a cult, but is it really? This week's episode is going to be a little titty bit different. This was actually supposed to be a dark week. We weren't gonna release an episode of Sounds

Like a Cult this week for the 4th of July break, but I decided to take the opportunity to introduce you culties to a couple of things you may want to know about. Stick around because we're going to get into today's topic, the cult of monogamy, a little bit later. But the first thing I want to share with you on this sticky summer day is this live show that I am currently in the middle of touring. Earlier this year in celebration of my new book, The Age of Magical Overthinking, I went on book tour, but I decided to make it over the top and ridiculous, so I created this variety show called The Big Magical Cult Show. My publisher actually decided to send me back out on tour, and so my two supporting performers, Vady Bedbug and Ra Ra

Darling, who are a drag performer and a burlesque performer, are joining me this month, this July, in Chicago and Minneapolis. And I wanted to invite you to please come if you live in or anywhere near those two cities. Now, even though we've done several of these shows by now and are completely in love with this style of event, it is very difficult to explain. Especially because when ticket sales launched for these Midwest dates, was it last month or in May,

there was like a little bit of a snafu where you needed a pre-sale link in order to buy tickets. That is not the case anymore. The links in our show notes or at amandamontel.com slash events do work. But aside from that, I really just wanted to introduce all of you listeners, not just those of you living in Chicago and Minneapolis, to They-D and Ra-Ra, because they are so unbelievably talented. I can't tell you how much it's meant to me to be able to collaborate with two such kind, brilliant, enthusiastic, like professional, wonderful human beings on a production like this. And so I wanted to introduce them to you and let them tell you a little bit about their work and

also why you should check out the Big Magical Cult Show. Because, and I have to say, when I was on book tour in April and the photos started coming out from the Big Magical Cult show because and I have to say when I was on book tour in April and the photos started coming out from the Big Magical Cult show I had a bunch of friends DM me and be like hey if I knew that there was gonna be drag and burlesque and merch and special weird drinks They were like I would have literally bought a plane ticket and flown to see it But don't take it from me take it from the brilliant Rara and Vady, who were kind enough to get on a last minute

little Zoom with me to share a little bit about themselves and about our show and to hopefully get you to join the cult and come see it. So here's that combo. Oh, and please do excuse the rogue pet noises that you might hear in the background, cats and dogs. Okay, here it is. Let's go.

Oh my God, theydy, rah rah, hello. Oh my God, hello. How are you today? It's Monday, listen, Christ. We are exhausted. It's Monday post Pride weekend we are fresh out of pride we are not proud as only as professional gays my condolences to you both my admiration runneth over. So I asked you to get on this call here today

because I struggle to communicate what the big magical cult show is to my audience. It is meant to be experienced, not explained. Yeah, HTTB had to be there, totally. Yes, HTTB. Basically, it's a book tour, but it's not a fucking book tour. It's podcast-y and high energy, but it's not sounds like a cult live. There's a PowerPoint about parasocial relationships, there's audience particip-ish, there's celebrity gossip. We do name names. It is truly like a fever dream

Wacktastic variety show but could I actually have you to explain it? The thing is that people are going to leave having learned something. They're also going to have a cackled They're also going to have like probably been slightly aroused and maybe even a little confused about their sexuality because it's it's a comedy it's education and our portion of it is we do some burlesque we do some drag We do some disney theme drag burlesque that is also very gay and very naughty Because the thing about your audience, Amanda, is that they are smart, nerdy, sexy people. They are!

It's like queers and queer adjacent folks who love to read and also get it on. Yeah, no, it's like kind of the best people. So it's the target audience. I think your audience needs to come, like actually see you speak and you're funny, you're funny as hell. The whole show is wacky and hilarious. The last couple of shows that we did, no one saw it coming. Even as we talk about it, you have no idea what you're in for. Oh my god,

my parents sat front and center at the first big magical cult show in Brooklyn and backstage watching my mom watch you Ra-Ra and like slowly sip her dirty Anxiety as she did so was an experience I'll never forget. Could you two actually introduce yourselves because Ra-Ra and Dady are the heart and soul of the big magical cult show actually. You know, you might not think, oh yeah, Disney adult coded drag Gillesque for a book tour, but you two make it make sense. I'm Rara Darling. I am a burlesque performer and event producer, but really I'm, am I allowed to say that I'm just like a big whore? I'm whispering, like they can't still hear me.

I will say, Thady will introduce himself in a second, but we are gay married and it is not every day that we get to bring our art forms together. And so this act, even though it's pretty naughty, is pretty sweet and wholesome. And I think that's a big draw of it. My name is Thady Bedbug. I am a drag performer and a drag educator.

So I perform, produce, and I teach drag workshops to kids and teens and adults. So my biggest hope in life is to create spaces where people feel most free to authentically express themselves in their goofy, campy, silly, glamorous, queer as hell expressions. I just want to add something to they'd use bio. They just had an article come out about them, then magazine describing them as Maga Wright's worst nightmare, which I think is pretty fucking epic. There's a lot of dream boats out there, but you know, it pays to be a nightmare. I have to say you both do 100% in your performances encourage everyone in attendance, including me, to want to take more risks and be more myself no matter, you know, what anyone thinks. So all of this said,

why do you think it's important that culties in Chicago and Minneapolis show up for the big magical cult show? Because don't take it from me. Well, you've been gassing us up and I just want to gas you up for a second. And I'm sure your listeners know this, but this experience, you're getting dragged, you're getting blessed, you're getting comedy, but you're also getting like an inside look into Amanda's cuckoo banana's brain.

It's like you're unzipping that skull and looking into your brain. It's research in a really engaging, shiny, funny, fun way. That's so nice. research in a really engaging, shiny, funny, fun way. That's so nice. Actually, you saying that, I have to go back and say that I met Vaidy and Ra-Ra through someone that I went to theater camp with as a wee-type. And I didn't realize this when I DM'd you,

but you were a listener of Sounds Like a Cult which I didn't even know so you fucking get it because you are fascinated by all of this shit by the everyday cults we all follow as much as I am. Wait oh my god are you watching the Dallas Cowboys cheerleader documentary? Oh my god not yet I'm not yet but I will watch it by the time we're on tour together so that we have stuff to talk about because otherwise we'll have nothing to talk about. Oh boy. No, we never do I don't know how this event just makes perfect sense, but it does I Adore you both half the reason why I wanted to go and do more of these shows is because I just was in with the dro

Yeah Yeah, no, that's true though that we were we were fans of the podcast, which means like we're the target audience. So it's like if we were not performing in the show, like we would want to be in the crowd because it was an electric feeling and yes, like there's a plan

of what's going to happen during the show. But there's also so much like improv and spontaneity and so much of it is responsive to exactly who is in the room that like you're picking up on their specific energy and their specific magic. And so no two big magical cult shows is exactly the same. Thank you both so much for just hopping on this quick call to tell the culties about the Big Magical Cult Show

in Chicago and Minneapolis. There has been a date change. So the Minneapolis show is, as it's always been, on July 13th. Chicago is actually now on Sunday, July 14th. There's a venue change. It's now going to be at The Den in Chicago, which is a really cool venue actually. It's more like a dinner theater vibe. And there will be culty merch giveaways to those who buy VIP tickets. If you already bought tickets, don't worry. The venue is working on getting everything sorted out in terms of how to change them over. If you buy tickets from the current link in our show notes, just know that it'll actually be for July 14th at the Den and bring your friends. I'm telling you, like, you have not been to a live podcast and or book tour event like this before. I can say that with confidence. And even bring your parents because my parents

came and it was it was fucking wholesome. This is also a great way to get into the cult. So like bring people who have no idea what this is. Oh, actually though, because there were some girlies who like brought their sort of emotionally little closed off male partners to the big magical cult shows that we did. And by the time they got to the signing line, those boys were buzzing.

I thought you were gonna say they brought their emotional support boyfriends. Which I was No, for sure that. But like some of those boys, you know, probably showed up being like, all right, I'm just here because I was kind of putting in the hours. Yeah, exactly. Putting in the hours. But then by the end of the night, they were like, what the fuck? I'm in the cold. Yeah. Yeah. And then they all got tattoos of your face on their butt. So bring your emotional support boyfriends is the moral of the story. Yeah. Bring everyone you need for emotional support.

Those are the perfect recruits to this night. They'd and Rara, thank you for doing this. And please shout out your your I.G.s so that people can follow you and get excited in the meantime I'm at they'd II dot bed bugs So that's T H E Y D Y dot bed bug the thing you don't want in your bed I'm a mix for our darling. That's MX our a our a Darling, and you have to type in the entire thing because I'm a slut on the internet.

Gorgeous. Okay, now we're going to get into today's episode, which is actually the second thing that I wanted to introduce you culties to. Speaking of general wackiness, I launched a second podcast in May called Magical Overthinkers, which is a show about the confounding, buzzy, sometimes controversial and anxiety-provoking topics we can't stop overthinking about, from imposter syndrome to narcissism. Every other week I interview a brilliant expert guest about the subject at hand to help us overthinkers put our thought spirals to bed once and for all.

I've been interviewing psychotherapists, astrophysicists, authors. The show has been such a joy to do. I get to record in this beautiful studio through the network studio 71 so the episodes are fully on video on YouTube as well. Since it came out in May it's climbed up the charts on Apple podcasts and Spotify and it's doing pretty well so far. So I want to thank you so much for listening and encourage you to check it out if you're a fan of Sounds Like a Cult but maybe you're looking for something a little more earnest, a little less sort of cheeky. Today's episode on the cult of monogamy is actually a feed drop from magical overthinkers. It's an episode in which I interviewed a brilliant philosopher named Dr. Ellie Anderson,

who has her own podcast called Overthink. And in this episode, I interviewed her about monogamy versus polyamory from a philosophical and historical slash sociological perspective, because different approaches to relationship structures can be very culty in their own little way. I certainly know several people in Los Angeles who've made being Polly their whole personality in a way that feels a little culty. And also, you know, staunch monogamy can sometimes be culty. You can probably sense the trepidation in my voice because these are such sensitive subjects and I was really grateful for Dr. Ellie Anderson for joining me for this discussion because she really helped sort of take the temperature down on so much of the ooo tension um and yeah just thought spirals surrounding this topic so

i really hope you enjoy this episode on the overthinking cult of monogamy Welcome to the Magical Overthinkers podcast, a show for thought spiralers exploring the subjects we can't stop overthinking about, from social media comparison to UFOs. If you can relate to the feeling that despite living in the information age, the world only seems to be making less sense. If you can connect to the idea that for some mysterious reason, it just feels especially hard to exist as a human in the world right now, then you're in the right place. This podcast is here to soften the clash between our innate human mysticisms and the overwhelm of this time. I'm your host, Amanda Montell. Today we're overthinking about monogamy.

There's this concept that I write about in The Age of Magical Overthinking that continues to live rent-free in my head. The idea of zero-sum bias, the fallacious tendency to assume that another person's gain directly means your loss. That can be applied to financial scenarios or social ones. Just because another person is beautiful, successful, wealthy, cool, doesn't put your beauty, success, wealth, coolness at risk. There is not a limited quantity of those things in the world.

When I encounter a person who I feel like I can relate to but is superior to me in some way, at least that's my perception, my impulse is to get competitive, to perceive them as a nemesis, and that sets everybody up for failure. Instead I should treat that person as a connection. Their light doesn't dim mine. In fact, I'm no physicist, but I think the way that light works is that with our light combined, everyone burns brighter. That sounds like a corny sentiment or even woo-woo, but that shift in perspective has actually saved me from a lot of suffering.

Becoming aware of how our zero-sum intuitions can actually damage our ability to make friends and professional connections has naturally led me to think about other kinds of relationships. In theory, this more the merrier mentality, this notion that another person's existence is no threat to you, should apply to romantic partnerships. Isn't it technically an argument for non-monogamy? For me personally, that's been a slightly tougher pill to swallow. Over the past few years, conversations surrounding non-monogamy and polyamory have exploded. I learned from a 2024 Huffington Post piece by Kelsey Borison that, according to Google data, the term ethical nonmonogamy has seen more than a 250% increase in search traffic

since 2023. A 2020 YouGov poll of 1,300 American adults found that a third of respondents say their ideal relationship is nonmonogamous to some degree. But polyamory educator Lian Yao told Huffington Post, it's not just a new fad. People have been doing non-monogamy for a very long time. I think people are just talking about it more now. Which brings me to my first thought spiral on the matter.

And it's something that people can get kind of defensive about. Is non-monogamy more natural than monogamy? It's really hard to tell what's natural about human beings in general, but this question somehow feels really high stakes. And there are so many arguments for non-monogamy that I agree with. Here's a great one that a listener submitted. She said monogamy isolates us from our friends and community because it's this concept of like having this one person who you're supposed to be closer to than anyone else. And it kind of inhibits friendships from getting past a certain level, which then means we only have one other person to support us and really understand us and like that we can

really trust. I feel like this is all tied into capitalism and I sound like I'm wearing a tinfoil hat, but I think to some level it's put in place like this to stop collectivism and organization. This is a very compelling argument. If we were all villages instead of groups of two, we would not be required to work as much as we do because we could rely more on each other.

Still, whether it is a trend of sorts or something more natural to the human species, I guess, candidly, I haven't yet seen an example of non-monogamy that I can really relate to or aspire to, unlike all the super successful and aspirational monogamy examples we get everywhere from Disney movies to rom-coms to my own parents' relationship. There's no shortage of those. By contrast, so much of what I see of non-monogamy on TV these days is either shiv from succession surprise announcing to her fiancé Tom on the eve of their wedding that she wants an

open marriage, or, you know, Hollywood types in LA where I live who've made being Polly kind of their whole personality and seem to look down on monogamists as shamefully passé. Growing up in a society that puts romance on this pedestal where cheating is punishable by both God and the law, To me, it seems like our templates, or at least the ones that I've seen of both monogamy and polyamory, are both equally daunting in a way? I guess I'm afraid of doing either one incorrectly or causing harm, so I end up being kind of inert, which isn't good either.

This stuff is so easy to overthink, you know, sometimes I'll consider the simple, not even that deep argument of like, just do you really want to limit your sexual partners for the rest of your life to just one human being? Doesn't that seem kind of arbitrary and imprisoning? And then I'll think, you know, I guess I do want more fun and liberation, why not? But then again, I want a lot of things that I don't know if I should necessarily have and I certainly don't want to hurt this person that I love more than anyone just for the

purposes of fun. But then it's like, is it even healthy for one person to be on such a pedestal? Don't pedestals obliterate our room for error and complexity and humanity? I don't know. I don't know. This is my very problem. Monogamy is a polarizing subject these days, and that makes talking about it openly or asking unfiltered questions difficult because it seems to me like advocating for or even

just quietly embodying relationship structures that are different from what someone else believes to be healthy or maybe they don't even fully believe in their own relationship structure deep down but they have chosen it and it feels too scary to interrogate that. All of this can feel threatening. With today's conversation, I just want to take the temperature down on this discourse to soothe these thought spirals that I think so many of us are having about monogamy. And to help with that, I want to introduce my very special guest, Dr. Ellie Anderson, PhD, who's a philosopher, professor, and one

of the two hosts of the fantastic Overthink podcast. Dr. Ellie is a Simone de Beauvoir scholar who examines both personally and professionally structures of monogamy and non-monogamy through the lens of philosophy, which I thought would be such a fascinating perspective to apply to this topic. Dr. Anderson is a practitioner of non-monogamy herself, one whom I'm personally quite inspired by now, I have to say. Indeed, our conversation has already shifted some ways that I might be approaching my own personal life

in the near future. So I hope you enjoy it. ["The Last Supper"] Could you start by just introducing yourself and your work to the listeners? Yeah, my name is Ellie Anderson. I am an assistant professor of philosophy at Pomona College and I work on philosophy of the self, like who are we, how do we relate to others, and philosophies of love and sex, with an emphasis on feminist approaches to non-monogamy and sexual ethics. I also am the co-host of the podcast Overthink,

and we have a YouTube channel as well. Amazing, Overthink X Magical Overthinkers. Yeah. Gotta love it. I am so excited to apply this philosophical lens to the concept of non-monogamy. But this is a podcast for overthinkers, a concept that you are intimately familiar with.

And so my opening question for you is actually just, what is an irrational thought spiral that is currently living rent-free in your head? I have way too many irrational thought spirals living rent-free in my head all the time. So I feel like deciding which one to focus on now is hard. I feel like I've had a pretty high level when recently I'm working on a book right now.

It's an academic book on selfhood and that's a very challenging topic to write well about. So my irrational thought spiral lately is I have no good ideas, my book's gonna be horrible, an embarrassment, et cetera, et cetera. But I'm a long time meditator. I've been meditating daily for well over a decade and the thoughts spiral still come all the time.

Like meditation helps me deal with them, but it has not stopped them entirely. So it's just a manner of how you deal with it. I love that as a point because in light of my work, sometimes people will ask, like, how do I prevent overthinking or irrationality or how do I cure myself of these thoughts? And that's kind of a futile effort. It's more about how we manage them

through these various techniques, like listening to podcasts or mindfulness. So to get into the topic, could you walk us through, this is like such a big question, but forgive me. I'm new to the philosophy of monogamy versus non-monogamy. I'm new to even the notion of whether or not we should be comparing those as a versus in the first place. But I would love if you could just walk us through the major philosophical perspectives

on monogamy versus non-monogamy and how these philosophies have changed throughout human history. Yeah, that is like a very, very big question. Yeah. But I think the way to start in answering this question is thinking about how philosophers are really divided on the question of whether love, especially romantic or erotic love, is necessarily exclusive. Is it something that humans have only towards one person, or is it something that we can have towards multiple people? And just to say a little bit about what monogamy is, because I think that's important in order

to then define non-monogamy, I'm following my friend, philosopher Justin Clardy here, who has a book called Why It's Okay to Not Be Monogamous in his definition of monogamy. I'm a philosopher, so we love a definition. And according to Clardy, monogamy is a social convention that centralizes relationships between two people that are romantically exclusive. So romantic exclusivity involves both sexual and emotional exclusivity. So when we're talking about monogamy,

we're talking about this way of approaching relationships that treats partners, specifically romantic partners, as central. And this also means that monogamous relationships are defined by what you can't do or what he calls intimacy confining constraints. And that means that you can't have sex with other people, you can't have a certain level of emotional exclusivity or intimacy with other people. Philosophers for a long time have, as you can probably imagine, at least in the Western

world, skewed monogamous in terms of their theories of love. This isn't universally true across the board. There's a lot in ancient Greek philosophy about erotic love as like being temporarily centered around one object, but not necessarily for a long period of time. But I think by and large, when you look at the history of philosophy of love, you mostly get monogamy. You have some philosophers, whether it's medieval Christian theologians or some of the 19th century German philosophers like Hegel and Schopenhauer

talking about how romantic love is something that is shared between two people and results in a union that is usually codified in marriage and results in a child. I just used romantic love there. That's maybe a little bit of an anachronism when we're talking about ancient Greece because they didn't have the concept of romantic love yet. That's an invention from about 300 years ago, but we could say erotic love in that time.

And when you get arguments for why monogamy is sort of the orientation of romantic love or erotic love, there are a few different arguments that specifically come up. One is the idea that monogamy is divinely ordained. And I don't think that's a very popular view today, but that was definitely the view of some of the medieval Christian thinkers and a lot of philosophers in the past. Another is the idea that monogamous relationships emphasize specialness.

And so love is essentially a way of appreciating one other person's specialness and treating them as special. And that is really something you can only have with one other person. Like by relinquishing your ability to have different sexual and romantic relationships with others, you are choosing this person.

Another argument that you sometimes see is that of jealousy being an emotion that humans naturally have, and jealousy is impossible to avoid unless you have an exclusive romantic relationship. Now, I think what we see oftentimes is that it's not possible to avoid jealousy, even in monogamous relationships. But nonetheless, I think people do talk about jealousy as one reason to choose monogamous relationships. Another is that monogamy is natural. You don't see that so much among philosophers because philosophers take very seriously the idea that just even if something is natural, that

doesn't mean it's the way that it should be for humans. Humans have the capacity to move beyond what is quote unquote natural for us. But that is still something you sometimes hear, even though I will say, and maybe we'll come back to this later, that it's not at all clear from evolutionary biology that monogamy is natural. And then another thing that you sometimes hear is the T objection, T-E-A, which is time, energy, attention. The idea that you can only have enough time, energy, and attention to devote to one other partner. And that argument, I think, is pretty easy to object to because even if you have limited time, energy, and attention, it's not necessarily clear that you only have time, energy, and attention enough for one person, right?

Maybe you could have it for two or three people. And I will try and keep this succinct. It was such a big question. I'm finding my answer is long. I am obsessed with this, like, the answer and grateful for it. OK, OK. So just to quickly canvas some of the pro-non-monogamy arguments, I mentioned this one against the T objection,

which is we actually don't have only enough time, energy, and attention for one person necessarily. Another is that loving relationships are goods. And if we love another person, we should want them to have as many goods as possible. And so why shouldn't we want them to have other romantic and sexual relationships, given that those are goods too?

And I think one that's also pretty interesting to me is just that there's nothing specific about romantic love that should limit it to one person. We can think instead of romantic love as being similar or even as a kind of friendship. We don't limit our friends to having just one friend. We accept that we can have many friends. And so why not also do that with romantic love? It doesn't seem like there's anything really constitutively different about romantic love. And I think that's an argument against the specialness objection, this idea that actually, no, you really

don't have to limit your relationships to just one romantic relationship in order to convey somebody's specialness to them. I also really like a community values approach, which takes a notion of kinship as extending beyond the hierarchical couple form that tends to dominate society today. And so I think a lot of people who

are interested in non-monogamy, myself included, are interested in it less actually specifically from a romantic or sexual standpoint and more in terms of imagining what forms of kinship look like beyond a nuclear family, monogamous marriage, couple form, because that's actually a pretty recent development in human history and by no means one that is necessary to humans. Oh my gosh, so much to unpack. I feel like every sort of philosophical perspective and historical perspective you just suggested has like a meme corollary, you know? Like I think in arguing for non-monogamy, you will often hear the example where it's like,

oh, well, in ancient Greece, there were some relationships where sex would be exchanged for knowledge. And you know, that was like a temporary transaction or whatever. And where I struggle with all of this, and the reason why I wanted to include this topic in this podcast,

because I truly can't stop overthinking about it is like I can encounter all of the arguments for non-monogamy in the world. Like that romance as a concept isn't quote unquote natural or the thought exercise of like well you can love all your children separately but equally, you can love all your friends separately but equally, you can love all your friends separately, but equally. Why can't that be the case for your romantic partner, your life partner? And still my intuition is like, no, no, no, I hate it. Which by the way, is an impulse that I'm not even sure

I trust for multiple reasons, which is I guess why we're here interrogating all this today. So I'd actually love to ask how you perceive the portrayal of non-monogamy in contemporary media. It's represented in high-end media like Succession and The White Lotus and, you know, slightly more low-end media like the TV show Couple to Threeple, everybody.

And I wonder what you think these portrayals are saying about us as a culture with relation to non-monogamy and what are they perpetuating, if anything? Yeah, I think for one, just to sort of validate what you said before about feeling that ick factor when it comes to non-monogamy or feeling that sense of insecurity, I think that's really common, very normal. We live in a society that's constantly giving us monogamous messages without our realizing it. And so I think our human feelings are always caught up in social scripts too.

They don't exist independently of them. And so I think it's very common for people to experience that. I feel like that's also been part of my own journey of, you know, practicing this for over a decade now. But then I also, I feel threatened because it feels like my thoughts aren't my own, you know? Like that alone is a tough pill to swallow, that like your emotions only exist within the confines of your social environment and media and who is around you. And by the way,

like I have engaged in non-monogamy. Like I have done it. And in theory, like almost not in a vacuum, but sort of in my own private space, I'm like, actually am more interested in engaging with it. And I just really struggle to square that with what being non-monogamous in 2024 might say about me. I see. And what it threatens about these emotions, which apparently aren't even natural in time. It's not that they aren't yours. It's not that they're inauthentic. I think if all emotions are shaped by culture, that means that there's no other pure emotion that exists outside of that to which we could even compare these emotions.

I think that's really important to keep in mind. I also think it's important to distinguish the idea that culture shapes our emotions from the idea that culture determines them. It doesn't mean that you're not feeling them. It's just to say that there's no core authentic set of emotions that exist in this sort of river underneath the ground of the society that we live in. And so I think the positive side of that is that we can also engage

in shaping our emotions ourselves too. We do have some agency over this. Maybe we can talk a little bit more about what you think monogamy might say about you in 2024. I'll think about the cultural piece and then I'm curious to hear more about that. Oh, I feel so caught between two worlds when it comes to so many arenas of life.

I feel caught between logos and pathos, for one. I feel like a highly emotional person who grew up in a household of scientists and feels very committed to facts, while also knowing that more facts and more information are actually always helpful and don't actually always help you make decisions and certainly don't always help you feel better. So like I'm constantly living in that cognitive dissonance. And then in terms of monogamy versus non-monogamy, I feel like while I am fully a willing participant in

these thought exercises about, you know, loving multiple friends separately but equally, why can't you love multiple partners? And like jealousy exists even within the confines of a monogamous relationship. I'm like, I feel this absurd sketch comes to mind here. Speaking of thoughts not being your own, maybe like my whole attitude is based on this one ridiculous musical comedy sketch by a comedian named Chris Fleming. This sketch is from like, I don't know, 2013. It's so old. But he's dancing around and singing this silly song about like, why are always the people who you don't want to be polyamorous, polyamorous? It's never who you want to be, polyamorous who's polyamorous.

And it's like, oh yeah, it's like, is there just a vocal minority of people who are so hypercritical of monogamy, then they backfire in the opposite direction, where now non-monogamy feels intimidating and like a culture that you have to be all in on, that you can't just dip a toe into. And then I feel a little bit excluded. You know, in the privacy of my own friend groups, and I guess the privacy of this podcast, I sometimes say that like my ideal form of non-monogamy would be to, say, crack a window open in the house

of our relationship, not fling open all the doors. Yeah. Well, I think they're actually in the majority there because there was just a new study that came out at the beginning of this year from match singles in America. And it found that 31% of singles in America have explored consensual non-monogamy, but 49% are finding that their ideal relationship actually is a monogamous relationship. So I think in terms of dipping your toe in, that's a pretty common experience to have. And obviously when I'm talking about 31% of singles in America,

I'm not saying you're in the majority of Americans, right? 31%, not the majority. I can do math, even though I'm a philosopher. But I think in the sense of the majority of people who are exploring non-monogamy or polyamory, I would venture to say that it's really common, just anecdotally speaking. I think certainly the majority of people that I know who have explored non-monogamy have done so for a period or are doing so for a period and aren't really sure what the future holds but might want to ultimately end up in a monogamous relationship. I think that also speaks to us just all navigating these tricky emotions and having a sense of what our ideal might be that may or may not actually end up staying that way over time.

So let's talk TV shows because you mentioned a few of them. I have to say, I find the rise of depictions of non-monogamy on TV compelling in theory, but disappointing in practice. I think in the case of Succession and White Lotus, the non-monogamous relationships that are depicted are quite toxic. And I think you also end up finding that in HBO's Insecure, for instance, the character Molly's exploration of non-monogamy is not really satisfying. And there's a lot we could say about those different relationships. I have not watched Couple of Thrilliple yet,

even though a lot of people have been telling me I should. That reflects well on you. No, no, no. It really doesn't because just wait, I'm gonna talk about equally lowbrow shows. So I find in terms of reality TV, the depictions of non-monogamy in supposedly monogamous shows the most interesting. I'm thinking here about The Bachelor, Love is Blind, and the ultimatum, Marry or Move On.

Because I think what you find in all of those shows is an upholding of monogamy as the ideal, even as the participants are exploring polyamory in practice. And I'm fascinated by the moment in 2016 when Ben Higgins was the first bachelor ever to say, I love you to two women. Do you watch The Bachelor? Yeah. Okay.

I say I watch it without shame. I started watching it in my PhD program with another friend who was working in feminist philosophy. Weird flex, but okay. No, but this was back in 2011. And we were like, we need to be watching this for our research. And now 13 years later, we both just still watch The Bachelor.

And I do not have my critical hat on all the time while I'm watching it. But Ben Higgins was the first person ever to say I love you to two women. Since then, the vast majority of The Bachelorette and I do not have my critical hat on all the time while I'm watching it. But Ben Higgins was the first person ever to say I love you to two women. Since then, the vast majority of The Bachelors and Bachelorettes who've been on the show have said I love you to at least two people. Some have even said it up to three or four people. And I think they're being genuine when they say that. I think they really do love these people. But multiple of them have expressed regret afterward for saying I love you to more than one person, saying like, I didn't really mean it. Recently, you've seen kind of a turn back towards only saying I love you to one person

because in the weird bachelor parlance, you know how they can say, I am falling in love with you. I certainly know. Yes. So Joey, the most recent bachelor has said, I am falling in love with you to three or four women, but he's only said, I love you to, I think one, maybe two. But I did notice him trying to resist saying, I do love you, which is their version of I love you.

They don't say I love you and say, I do love you to multiple women as well. So I think that that show is it's just like it's showing polyamory, but it's within this monogamous narrative. And so I think there's something promising and also something deeply disappointing about that, because it's within this monogamous narrative. And so I think there's something promising and also something deeply disappointing about that because it's almost as though the depiction of polyamory is to stave it off as an actual possibility or as a threat to the show's narrative. That is very interesting that The Bachelor is actually this polyamorous narrative shoehorned

into a monogamous setup for a mainstream American audience. And I actually think that that is only serving to confuse me more about polyamory because I guess of the power dynamics wrapped up in that show. Yeah. So then it's like, just to go back, because when things stop making sense to me, I do like to zoom out to a wider frame of humanity to try and figure out how real is this compared to what people had to say 200 or even 2000 years ago. How did we get here? Like at one point did the conventional wisdom turn from you can have

multiple different partners for multiple different reasons to the prevailing philosophy among people who think for a living being monogamy. And when did the legally binding construction of marriage enter the picture? Yeah, I think this is a place where it's really important for this kind of inquiry to be interdisciplinary because I'm a philosopher, and some of the questions you're asking have really specific historical answers. So I could give a broad picture,

but I do think in my work on love, I think it's really important to be in dialogue with sociology, biology, history, different disciplines that are also working on these issues. So that's just a sort of meta-level overthinking point about this question. I appreciate it. But there's a pretty common narrative coming out

of evolutionary biology that monogamy developed once humans moved to farming in the Neolithic Revolution. So once we became people who predominantly live in stable communities. Now, take this with a slight grain of salt, because evolutionary biology is constantly updating its narratives on this. I think there are reasons to believe that this narrative isn't all there is right now. I'm partway through David Graeber and David Wengros, The Dawn

of Everything, where they're arguing against some of these neolithic revolution arguments. The book's not about monogamy, but it's like a great sort of big history book. And they take issue with, I think, some details on this. But yeah, common narrative is that we moved to monogamy once we started to be farmers because then there was a division of labor that emerged where women stayed in the home more and men went out and, you know, were farming as opposed to living in hunter-gatherer bands where women and men were both doing work. Even if there was a division of labor in the kind of work that they did, oftentimes there was still value that both were producing or finding, discovering.

And once we move into that phase of being more domesticated, we might say, there becomes an incentive for women to maintain a hold, let's say, on men because they're dependent on them. Now another ancient narrative that comes up is that of needing to ensure who the father is of a child. And so- I've heard of that argument in the context of land inheritance. Yes.

Yeah. I mean, I looked into this ever so slightly when working on my first book, Wordslet, because I was interested in examining how certain gendered insults developed. And so much of that had to do with the villainization of female sexuality, which aligns with some narratives about women's sexuality becoming demonized once a father needed to be certain of who their child was in order to leave land and riches to them. That was part of my understanding.

I think that is fair to say. I think that's a pretty compelling narrative for which there is, you know, as far as I understand it, pretty decent evidence because you can imagine that that then leads to a situation in which women's sexuality is policed far more than men's. And indeed, that is what we see throughout much of human history, throughout many, although not all, cultures. The idea that monogamy tends to be enforced more strictly for women than for men. The rationale for that being that there needs to be some assurance of paternity. On the other side, you have some people in the evolutionary biology world saying that

we were all originally polyamorous and then, and it didn't really matter who the father was because we all lived in these big kinship communities. And so there are competing debates about that. Either way, I think a place where I'm a bit more comfortable talking about the history is in the 19th century, because you get a couple of really interesting developments in the 19th century. In Britain, you have the rise of the Victorian era, where the model of the mother who stays at home with the children becomes valorized in the development of the

Industrial Revolution. There's this ideal of the bourgeois woman who doesn't have to work at the factory. She can just be at home taking care of the children. And Victorian sexuality, of course, was very uptight, tended to emphasize sexual monogamy for all married people, although in practice mostly ended up policing the sexuality of bourgeois women. And what you also see a little bit earlier than that period in the 19th century is the wedding of the norm of romantic love with that of marriage.

For a long time throughout human history and many societies, marriage and love didn't necessarily go together. And then you see in the 19th century, in the wake of the romantic movement, which had started in the 18th century, this emphasis on your marriage being an expression of love. I can't believe how late that comes along. We think it's been here as long as gravity, you know?

The idea that marriage and romance and monogamy have always gone together, you know? But it's like, that's only 300 years old? That's wild. At least in the way that we think about it now, right? And so Simone de Beauvoir, one of the philosophers whom I specialize in working on, she talks about how it seems like that wedding of marriage with love would be a good thing,

and it also seems like it would go along with more gender equality, et cetera, et cetera. But instead, at least on her view, it ended up actually being sort of negative for people across the board. Oh, my God. Because romantic love and marriage were taken to be fused in this monogamous situation.

She thinks that eroticism and marriage are better actually kept apart. And she was living and writing in the 20th century, especially around the mid-20th century, and was famously in an open relationship for her entire adult life. Oh my god. Everybody who's currently married to someone they're not attracted to is like, I feel validated. I'm doing it right. But she never got married. So I think her, I think her idea would actually just be abolish marriage. That's actually huge to learn because I have historically been, I guess I'm just cringed out by everything and because I'm confused and I'm overthinking it because while I feel intimidated

by poly culture as it's manifested from my perspective over the past few years, I'm also completely averse to the institution of marriage. I find it an absurd construction. I find it offensive. I did propose to my long time partner who is male. Congratulations. Thank you but like I feel ambivalent about it because of what marriage means culturally.

I want us, and he has agreed, lovely man that he is, to sort of define it on our own terms because I certainly don't appreciate what it has been for the past hundreds of years. But yeah, I guess this is just like another example of me feeling like squirmy and irresolute about this whole idea. So sorry, Simone de Beauvoir.

No, I think that squirminess and irresoluteness is something that she was intimately familiar with. She actually struggled and talks about this in her early diaries with pressure to marry from her family, a bourgeois family living in Paris, and her desire not to marry. And I think she also struggled throughout her life with the open relationship that she had with Jean-Paul Sartre, a very famous existentialist as well. So they had this kind of power couple philosophical relationship, but it was not all sunshine and roses all the time, even though they were very committed to it. And when I say it wasn not all sunshine and roses all the time, even though they were

very committed to it. And when I say it wasn't all sunshine and roses, it's also important to point out that it was profoundly unethical in certain ways, in ways that have caused people, especially recently, to reassess their legacy. Because for instance, they had relationships with students, and there was a book that one of their Rolada wrote about their relationship in and it seemed like it was quite exploitative for her. So I'm not saying that there were these existentialists that you should model your life after because they had the perfect marriage.

It's more to say they were really trying to experiment with love, and there were some really beautiful aspects of that, and there were also some really destructive aspects of that. KULTIS KULEKARNASKYI So Kultis, I'm actually going to stop the episode here. There's about half an hour left of this episode. It's called Overthinking about Monogamy, and you can find it on the Magical Overthinkers podcast wherever you listen to your pods on any major podcast platform. Again, there

are also full video episodes on YouTube. You can find all those links in our show notes to finish listening to this episode, to buy tickets to the Big Magical Cult Show. Thank you so much for being here. This weird culty cinematic universe is ridiculous, but it means a lot to me, and your presence here is so valued. I will be back with a totally normal, traditional, up to expectations episode of Sounds Like a Cult next week, and in the meantime, stay culty, but not too culty. After years of fine print contracts and getting ripped off by overpriced wireless providers, if we've learned anything, it's that there's always a catch. So when I heard that for a limited time, all Mint Mobile wireless plans are $15 a month when you purchase a

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