Ethically non-monogamous relationships
Wow! It seems that I was ahead of my time. I practiced for years a version of what is described below. And it had the consequence warned of below too.
Although I have had good sexual relationships with many women over the years, I am actually not very sexy. I can take it or leave it and often leave it.
I was aware that my girlfriend had good juices, however and that my loss of interest in sex with her distressed her. But other aspects of our relationship were very good so I told her that what she did when out of sight of me would be fine, as long as I was spared the details.
So she did have sexual relationships with other men while remaining emotionally attached to me. So for years we were both happy with that arrangement.
It was however an inherently risky arrangement and after a while that risk became reality. She eventually found that one of her lovers suited her better than me in important ways so she shacked up with him. I was distressed to lose her company but we have remained friends, as what she did was within our agreement
By Jana Hocking
I learnt a very interesting fact over the past week: many of you cheeky things are in an ethically non-monogamous relationship … with a twist.
Last week, my column was on ENM (ethical non-monogamy) and I queried whether I could participate in this craze without jealousy rearing its ugly head and decided that long-term the need to be exclusive would ultimately win.
It was roughly five minutes after the article went live that many people got in touch with their own experiences with ENM. My DMs were filled with essays and my phone pinged with friends who felt comfortable enough to share their own stories.
Let’s just say, my mind was blown!
First of all, good lord there’s a lot of you choosing to step outside society’s idea of a ‘normal’ relationship. And it’s not just the spicy couples you assume would be in these kind of relationships. Oh no. There were teachers, plumbers, stay-at-home mums, bankers. It seems the ENM life does not discriminate.
Secondly, I was chuffed that people felt they could share with me, knowing that I am a judgment-free-zone.
I have to admit, following these juicy confessions, I found there to be one stand out feature in these stories. Many (and I mean MANY) people are non-monogamous, they just don’t discuss it with their partner.
That’s where the ‘ethical’ part of this new dating trend becomes a bit hazy. You see, it turns out when you’ve been in a relationship for, what feels like, a million years, sometimes the need to remain exclusive dwindles.
At lunch this weekend, I found myself deep in a debate about ENM and one friend exclaimed: “We’ve been married for so long, I genuinely couldn’t give a hoot who he hooks up with. As long as he comes home to me and doesn’t forget to mow the lawns!”
Another friend happily fantasised who she would hook up with first if given the chance to go non-monogamous.
My DMs were even juicier. One particular bloke shared with me that he and his wife have an unspoken agreement that “what happens on the road, stays on the road.”
Both travel extensively for work, and while in the early years of their marriage they tried to stay monogamous, life on the road can get pretty dull and the mind starts to wonder.
He said it makes him slightly paranoid at the end-of-year Christmas parties, as he tries to guess who she may have hooked up with while away, but believes feelings are spared by just not knowing.
Another person in my DMs said being ENM works for himself and his partner, but rules must be enforced for it to work.
“Rules?!” I questioned, “I thought the whole point of being ENM was that you could be wild and carefree?!”
Nope, because you see I was missing one key fact: when two people connect intimately together, they are running the risk of developing feelings. So, this gent and his partner agreed that they are allowed to hook up with people but not allowed to sleep with the same person more than once, therefore avoiding ‘catching the feels’.
Then I remembered a TED talk I watched recently on ‘The brain in love’ with Dr Helen Fisher, a Senior Research Fellow at the Kinsey Institute. She revealed just how easy it is to fall in love with someone during a one-night-stand.
“Any stimulation of the genitals drives up the brain’s dopamine system, which is basic to feeling intense romantic love. Then, with orgasm, there’s a flood of oxytocin and vasopressin – brilliant chemicals that are associated with attachment,” said Dr Fisher.
“So, when you have sex, you can go over the threshold into falling in love thanks to dopamine – and, after orgasm, feel a deep attachment to them.”
Well that’s slightly petrifying!
I took a trip down memory lane and concluded that, yes, this fact is 100 per cent correct. There’s a certain bloke I’ve done the doona dance with who just has a gift for ‘hitting the spot’ and I’m completely bonkers for him. Science, hey!
So, I think what we can all take from this new trend is that you really are playing with fire if you partake. Boo, why do all fun things have to come with a clause?
****************************************************
Standing up for real women
I was pregnant, single and in the Arts. I probably should have kept my head down. But once the penny dropped on what was happening, I had to voice my concern on trans ideology.
It was late 2020 when YouTube suggested I watch a podcast titled, ‘Trans Women Aren’t Women’. It was a jolt to read. I wasn’t supposed to say Trans Women Aren’t Women. I was supposed to believe that trans women are women.
The provocatively titled episode of Trigonometry stared at me for several days before I finally watched it. At the time of writing this article, it has amassed over one million views.
The guest was Posie Parker, also known as Kellie-Jay Keen. Her insistence on the truth was spellbreaking. Thank goodness for brave people. I saw that Parker was absolutely right to reject trans ideology.
The ‘Trans Women Are Women’ mantra is effective in preventing people from thinking critically about this. That, and the fact that anyone who dares to question it will be intimidated into silence. As Posie says in the podcast, ‘If I’m not allowed to talk about this, then this is obviously very serious and I need to talk about it as much as I possibly can.’
In the eighteen months since watching the podcast I have started talking about it, too. Perhaps it’s because I’m more aware of it, but it seems like there are growing number of people willing to admit they are skeptical of babies being born in the wrong bodies and men who insist that they are literally women.
I have girlfriends who thank me for posting articles on this issue. Some of them admit that they are too scared to speak up. They are right to be afraid. Women like Posie Parker, JK Rowling, Maya Forstater, Kathleen Stock, Helen Joyce, Megan Murphy and many more are all fighting for women who can’t speak up, and encouraging those who can.
Since coming out as pro-woman, for want of a better label, I’ve been asked things like, Why do you care so much? Why can’t you just let them be? What’s it to you?
It’s heartbreaking. Why can’t I just let men obliterate women in sports? Why can’t I just let men self-identify as women to get into women’s prisons and shelters? Why can’t I ignore the fact that it’s cruel to tell gender non-conforming children that they were born in the wrong body? Why can’t I just go along with a lie?
By the way, you can call me anything you like. Gender critical, TERF, bigot. I don’t mind.
The first time I posted anything, I simply took a photo of some stickers I’d bought from Parker’s store, www.standingforwomen.com . The stickers read ‘I heart JK Rowling’. It is telling how worried I was to post a photo of some stickers but once Parker broke my brain with the truth, I had to stand up for women, too. Courage begets courage. Not offending some delusional blokes in dresses was far less important than spreading the word for women and children. I always felt a little nervous, and the posts didn’t get many ‘likes’, but no backlash came.
Then, weeks after giving birth, I received a message about my bigotry from an old friend. It was awful that she thought I was such a bad person she was compelled to tell me. Having had a daughter, and swimming in a sea of post-natal hormones, I reacted fiercely by posting more stories, more memes, more accounts of detransitioners. All expose this movement for what it is: a misogynistic worldwide medical experiment.
That did not go well. I found myself at the bottom of a social media pile on, and my real world fell apart. I deleted Facebook and left town with my baby. But it doesn’t matter where you are, the trans right’s activists will find you. A trans man tried to cancel my show at the Adelaide Fringe Festival earlier this year. She implored my venue to cancel my run and publicly atone for booking a ‘violent’ transphobe.
Thankfully the complaint was dismissed and I was free to do my comedy. In places like Canada, America and the United Kingdom you can be jailed, fined or lose your children for standing up to the gender cult.
So why do I care? Because at this point I can’t not care. Putting the feelings of men over the safety of women and children is wrong. Telling children that they could have been born in the wrong body is wrong.
I firmly believe that if I had been born ten years later, I would have caught this social contagion. I was born in the late eighties and I grew into a bit of a tomboy. I loathed the thought of puberty. I started dieting at 13 to prevent getting a period. I hated my breast buds and imagined a machine that would suck the new flesh away, leaving me with a flat chest forever. I even wished I had been born a boy.
But wishing you had been born a boy is very different from being told you might be a boy.
I follow a lot of gender critical thinkers and writers who articulate the danger of this movement but I keep the balance and also follow some trans rights activists. Their arguments are no doubt persuasive to very impressionable young people. Even adults are seduced by the social status points you gain in admiring the emperor’s new clothes. Who wouldn’t want to be on the side of ‘kindness?’
But it is not kind to lie to children. It is not kind to affirm delusions. My prepuberty dieting evolved into bulimia. I was convinced I was overweight when I wasn’t. Imagine if the kind thing to do was to affirm that my self-perception was correct? That I was fat. Maybe I had a fat soul? Should I have identified as obese?
What the ‘be kind’ brigade omits from their message is the ‘or else’. The kindness of these people is conditional on your total fealty to the church of crazy. If you question anything, they’ll come after you.
Thank goodness I was born in the eighties, when girls threw up their food instead of cutting off their breasts.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/07/gender-heretic-in-church-of-crazy/
***************************************************Eagle Forum Rallies Conservatives To Oppose Democrats’ Same Sex Marriage Bill
Our friends at Eagle Forum have issued a clarion call to conservatives to defend religious liberty against the demands of Democrats who wish to force churches and other religious institutions to participate in blasphemous same-sex marriages.
The letter, addressed to the Members of the United States Senate, demands that Senators hold hearings on the House-passed “Respect for Marriage Act” (H.R. 8404) and that Senators vote no on this egregious intrusion into the religious liberty and violation of the First Amendment.
While we reproduce the text of the letter below, we want to highlight two key points made by our friends at Eagle Forum.
The first point is that H.R. 8404 is little more than a vehicle to empower homosexuals and other gender ideologues to engage in lawfare against churches and religious institutions. The bill creates a private right of action that may be brought by “any person who is harmed by a violation” of the Act “against the person who violated” the right or claim. This would empower homosexuals and their well-funded lobby to sue the Catholic Church or any other church or religious institution that refuses to perform same-sex marriages.
Secondly, Eagle Forum explains that there is one glaring absence from the so-called Respect for Marriage Act and that is any language referencing the religious liberty rights of those whose religious tenets do not consider same-sex marriage to be the equivalent of traditional marriage. Federal recognition of same-sex marriage without a religious exemption could violate the conscience protections of Americans who morally disagree with this notion. As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his dissent in Obergefell, “[the] decision . . . creates serious questions about religious liberty. Many good and decent people oppose same-sex marriage as a tenet of faith, and their freedom to exercise religion is – unlike the right imagined by the majority – actually spelled out in the Constitution.”
Conservatives must oppose this latest intrusion of sexual politics into the religious life of Americans. We join Eagle Forum and other conservative leaders and organizations in urging CHQ readers and friends to call their Senators (the Capitol Switchboard is 1-866-220-0044) to demand they vote NO on the Democrats’ inaptly-named Respect for Marriage Act.
Text of the Eagle Forum letter follows:
Dear Senator,
As the Senate is being urged to quickly consider and pass the Respect for Marriage Act (H.R. 8404), Eagle Forum and the thousands of families we represent are writing to voice our opposition to this bill as well as a request the Senate Judiciary committee hold a hearing on this matter before it is brought to the floor for a vote.
A brief recap of the timeline: in 1996, Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down Section 3 of DOMA as unconstitutional in U.S. v. Windsor. In the Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) decision, the Court required all states to perform and recognize same-sex marriages as equal to those of opposite sex couples. On June 24, 2022, the Court handed down the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that returned the issue of abortion to the States. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a concurrence in Dobbs in which he reiterated his longstanding view that, “‘substantive due process’ is an oxymoron that ‘lack[s] any basis in the Constitution.’”[1] Justice Thomas was clear in stating, “[t]he Court today declines to disturb substantive due process jurisprudence generally or the doctrine’s application in other, specific contexts. Cases like . . . Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U. S. 644 (2015), are not at issue. . . . Thus, I agree that “[n]othing in [the Court’s] opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.”[2]
Despite the forceful nature of Justice Thomas’s statement that the Dobbs holding does not affect Obergefell, and the fact that no other Justice signed onto his analysis of substantive due process, the left has used his concurrence as the impetus to bring forward legislation such as H.R. 8373 (Right to Contraception Act) and H.R. 8404 (Respect for Marriage Act). H.R 8404 was introduced on July 12, 2022 and quickly passed the House of Representatives seven days later on July 19th, without a single hearing.
This legislation clearly repeals the Defense of Marriage Act, a law that was technically repealed by the Obergefell and Windsor decisions. In addition, it codifies the holding in Obergefell that requires States, and the federal government, to recognize same-sex marriages validly performed in any State, allows the Attorney General of the United States to enforce that right and creates a private right of action that may be brought by “any person who is harmed by a violation” of the Act “against the person who violated” the right or claim.[3]
There is one glaring absence from the so-called Respect for Marriage Act and that is any language referencing the religious liberty rights of those whose religious tenets do not consider same-sex marriage to be the equivalent of traditional marriage. Federal recognition of same-sex marriage without a religious exemption could violate the conscience protections of Americans who morally disagree with this notion. As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his dissent in Obergefell, “[the] decision . . . creates serious questions about religious liberty. Many good and decent people oppose same-sex marriage as a tenet of faith, and their freedom to exercise religion is – unlike the right imagined by the majority – actually spelled out in the Constitution.”[4]
The House and Senate Democratic leadership has chosen not only to bring up this legislation without protections for religious believers but without a single hearing to determine what the effects of legislation will have on the Constitutional rights of Americans to act pursuant to those deeply held religious beliefs. We ask that the Senate Republican leadership and Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee demand that the Judiciary Committee hold hearings on this important issue before the bill is allowed to come to the Senate floor for a vote. The American people deserve an explanation of the contents of the bill, why the Religious Freedom Restoration Act is not explicitly applied in this bill, and why this legislation is more important than other topics currently affecting Americans such as inflation, rising gas prices, and border security.
Once again, we urge you to call for a hearing on the Respect for Marriage Act (H.R. 8404). Please reach out to me at Kris@eagleforum.org with any questions.
*********************************************************
The Left is winning the language wars
Judith Sloan
Once upon a time, we – or most of us, at least – knew what words meant. Needless to say, from society’s point of view, this was very useful – we were all working from the same page.
If someone had used the term economic rationalism, the typical response would have been to query the need for repetition. Yep, economics is about making trade-offs and who would sign up to irrationalism? What happened, in fact, was that economic rationalism became a term of derision, the message being that economics is a heartless discipline that should be ignored by both politicians and concerned persons.
While the term economic rationalism has luckily gone out of fashion, the connotation lives on. Social justice was another term that became wildly fashionable a while back. I’m not sure who is against social justice, but hands up all those who know what social justice actually means. The main point is that social justice is just a short-hand term for everything that progressives regard as important and woe betide anyone who disagrees.
There are plenty of murky, even meaningless, words and terms that have been captured by the Left to throw stones at those who disagree with them. To describe economics as neoliberal makes no sense at all. But it is a way of casting economics as a callous discipline based on absurd assumptions. The fact that right-minded economists don’t ever describe themselves as neoliberal is irrelevant to activists pushing greater government intervention.
Extraordinarily long-serving economics editor at the Sydney Morning Herald, Ross Gittins – succession planning is clearly not the long suit of the editors – is always at pains to distance himself from neo-liberalism. As he puts it, ‘economics has many useful insights to offer the community. It must be rescued from neoliberalism because neoliberalism is simply bad economics.’ We can’t be sure why it’s bad economics because we don’t know what neoliberalism is – well apart from it being bad.
Austerity is another term purloined by the Left to attack any politician who attempts to cut government spending. Actually, make that cut the growth of government spending. Where once austerity might have been interpreted as responsible behaviour, particularly after a period of excess, these days it is another abridged term for merciless pruning of government expenditure.
Recall those 365 economists who wrote to the Times in 1981 complaining about Maggie Thatcher’s economic policies. They were confident that the fiscal and monetary tightening that was being implemented ‘will deepen the depression (sic)’. They even went as far as to suggest that Thatcher’s 1981 budget would ‘threaten social and political stability’. As events panned out, inflation came under control and unemployment began to trend down. Oops for the ‘experts’ (another misused term).
The Australian Labor party also has form in terms of misrepresenting austerity and spending cuts. At recent elections (but not 2022), Labor would claim that the Coalition had plans to cut spending on education, health and other areas. Who could forget the vacuous Tanya Plibersek making this claim when in fact federal government spending on education under the Coalition had increased and was forecast to increase further?
The trick was for Labor to foreshadow ridiculously rapid increases in spending and judge Coalition plans against this fabrication. Of course, there were always fine words attached to Labor’s plans like removing the impact of socio-economic background on educational outcomes. Yeah, right! But the point is that Labor was able to misuse language to score political points. Arguably, this tactic forced Tony Abbott to agree, during the 2013 election campaign, that there would be no cuts to education, health or the ABC (!) under a Coalition government.
Nimby – not in my backyard – is another term that has been snaffled by the Left to push for any of their preferred developments while denigrating those who oppose them. The objective is to delegitimise any preferences that locals have in order to achieve ‘progressive’ objectives. (Yes, there’s another word that’s misused – progressive.)
The Grattan Institute has long promoted high-rise developments in inner and middle suburbs as a means of providing housing for a rapidly growing population, the latter mainly the result of very high rates of immigration. For people living in those suburbs who object to these developments – gosh, doesn’t everyone want a 30-storey apartment building next to their freestanding house? – the argument is that they should be ignored as selfish, privileged buffoons.
Because Nimby-ism is bad, so the Left’s argument goes, governments should be able to ignore the preferences of locals and simply force through new developments. It’s like China’s modus operandi, when you think about it. Nimby arguments are reaching a crescendo in some regional areas. Proposals to build massive transmission lines across farms or close to cities or towns are understandably causing disquiet among locals.
Recently, there was a well-attended protest in Ballarat objecting to the construction of huge pylons in western Victoria. This has put local federal member, Labor’s Catherine King, in something of a quandary, particularly as she is also minister for infrastructure. Weirdly, two state shadow ministers from the Victorian Liberal party turned up too, notwithstanding their party’s bizarre embrace of net zero by 2050 and a 50 per cent cut in the state’s emissions by 2030. Who ever said politicians needed to be consistent?
There is also a great deal of disquiet about a solar farm proposed for the outskirts of Goulburn, with many locals unhappy that a large chunk of the Gundary Plain should be used for this purpose. Apart from the loss of land, there is anxiety about glare from the panels and the ambient heat effect. Energy behemoth, BP, is a partner in the project.
The broader point about the promotion of renewable energy is that those living in regional areas are expected to bear the external costs of developments with any objections being written off as mere Nimby-ism.
So language matters. But the sensible centre-right has been totally outgunned and has completely lost the contest.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/07/weaponising-words/
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
******************************************
/>
Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
No comments:
Post a Comment