Even racist comments about Jonathan and me are directed to her. I receive a fraction of the online hate that Carrie does. The way I experience most online hate seems to be distinctively aimed at the intersection of my non-monogamy and my gender. I’ve been called most of them, as well as receiving plenty of other hateful-sometimes even violent-online abuse that relates to my gender. There’s a long list of colorful words that are specifically used for women who break the monogamy norm. Well, I get targeted online for specific forms of misogyny that are related to my being a poly woman. What about abuse? As the internet has made polyamory more visible, do polyamorous people encounter specific forms of hate online? But something as basic as the ability to identify as different categories, and to choose different ways of searching for others, challenge mononormativity by allowing people to move beyond tacit, unspoken norms. Not all technologies challenge mononormative bias equally. But obviously there’s still a long way to go.
I do think this has contributed to visibility and normalization in some circles. Last year, OkCupid announced support for an official “Open Relationship” status. On OkCupid, if you said you were in a relationship but also looking for dating, you’d show up as “Available” instead of “In a Relationship.” This lumped together cheating with ethical non-monogamy. When I first started using dating sites ten or fifteen years ago, “Single” and “Available” were treated as synonymous by most. Visibility can be a positive thing: greater cultural representation of non-normative possibilities for love is, in my view, a key mechanism through which our “scripts” can be changed and challenged.īut when the representation is of a single, typically hyper-sexualized, stereotype-or when we are presented for public consumption as a new kind of “other” to gawk at or be outraged by-I feel like we’re moving backwards rather than forwards.
This varies wildly across different kinds of coverage and their various audiences. Online access to poly people and their lives-via media coverage but also through people putting themselves out there on social media-make it possible to satisfy that public demand efficiently.īut beyond that, everything depends on how we are represented and perceived. There is certainly huge public interest in polyamory. I’m not sure if they’ve made it more “mainstream”… it’s complicated. How have new technologies challenged the bias toward mononormativity in our culture? Have the internet or mobile apps helped make polyamory more mainstream?
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