Much Love

Polyamory is getting more popular:

Increasingly, polyamorous people—not to be confused with the prairie-dress-clad fundamentalist polygamists—are all around us. By some estimates, there are now roughly a half-million polyamorous relationships in the U.S., though underreporting is common. Some sex researchers put the number even higher, at 4 to 5 percent of all adults, or 10 to 12 million people. More often than not, they’re just office workers who find standard picket-fence partnerships dull. Or, like Sarah, they’re bisexuals trying to fulfill both halves of their sexual identities. Or they’re long-term couples who don’t happen to think sexual exclusivity is the key to intimacy.

Elisabeth Sheff, a sociologist who interviewed 40 polyamorous people over the course of several years for her recent book, The Polyamorists Next Door, says that polyamorous configurations with more than three people tend to be rarer and have more turnover. “Polys” are more likely to be liberal and educated, she said, and in the rare cases that they do practice religion, it’s usually paganism or Unitarian Universalism.

Polys differentiate themselves from swingers because they are emotionally, not just sexually, involved with the other partners they date. And polyamorous arrangements are not quite the same as “open relationships” because in polyamory, the third or fourth or fifth partner is just as integral to the relationship as the first two are.

Miri Mogilevsky praises Olga Khazan’s piece as “well-researched, balanced, and accurate overall,” but takes the opportunity to debunk some myths about the practice. Among them? “Bisexual people try polyamory because it’s not fulfilling to only date a person of one gender”:

Some do, yes. But this also ties into an unfortunate, harmful, and inaccurate myth about bisexual people: that they will inevitably cheat on you because they “need” to be with someone of another gender. Myths like these, in turn, contribute to prejudice and discrimination against bisexual people, who may face such hurtful attitudes both from the straight majority and from gays and lesbians.

For many bisexual people, the gender of their partner isn’t nearly as essential a factor as others seem to think it is. We may notice it, sure, but we don’t sit around thinking, “I’m very glad that I’m dating both Suzie and Tom because Suzie is a girl and Tom is a boy!” It’s just like you can be attracted to blondes, brunettes,andredheads, without necessarily feeling stifled and unfulfilled if you’re only dating brunettes at a given point in time.

The Dish thread “But What If Three People Love Each Other?” is here.

Typos Gone Tawdry

Autocorrect’s tendencies remain filthy as ever:

There is, of course, some legacy prudishness to autocorrect—the tendency, for example, of hell to become he’ll—but for the most part the global menagerie has, in its dish_dyac unflagging vulgarity, produced a linguistic corpus that skews blue. Where [patent inventor Dean] Hachamovitch did away with the scutwork, the new autocorrect introduces the slutwork and the smutwork. When one reads such hilarious-error collections as Damn You Autocorrect, one can’t help but feel skeptical. Some entries beggar the imagination; it’s hard to believe that Volvos could become vulvas as often as they seem to. But even if we assume a significant rate of fraud, we are forced to conclude—given that autocorrect draws from group behavior—that the unpublished typing of our society is more unpublishable than we ever imagined.

(Image via Damn You Autocorrect)

Hangover Helper

Morning-after alcohol misery isn’t so bad, according to Tom Vanderbilt. In a 1995 issue of The Baffler – which opened its archives to the public this week – he reviewed the then-new Skyy vodka “hangover free” advertizing campaign. For him, he says, “the hangover, that much-maligned malady of the engorging classes, [is] the clearest window onto my inner self, the one device through which all my pretensions in the material world are brought to a crashing halt”:

The hangover is a rich but undervalued element in our culture. In the literature of every age it provides a handy narrative device for slowing down the action and bringing the most elevated characters to a place we’ve all been. In Lucky Jim, for example, Kingsley Amis expertly captures the moment as the novel’s cheerfully bumbling protagonist awakens after a sordid escapade:

The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.

Amis, the poet laureate of the hangover, was one of the few to fathom its intricacies and divine its transcendent qualities—to find, if you will, the spiritual in the spirits. The hangover, he wrote once, is no mere physical affliction, but a “unique route to self-knowledge and self-realization.”

This is usually lost on sufferers of the “physical hangover,” obsessed as they are with feeling fresh again. But as they spend the morning shuffling through the Sunday supplements, unable to finish the simplest articles, drinking tomato juice as the sunlight stalks the living room floor, on come those colossal feelings of guilt, inadequacy, and shame—the metaphysical hangover. The best, and really the only, cure for this condition is to simply acknowledge your physical hangover for what it is, rather than attributing these unsettling thoughts to your job or to your relationship. As Amis puts it, “He who truly believes he has a hangover has no hangover.”

Explore The Baffler‘s back issues here.

Animal Kingdom Kink

Eastern Spadefoot frogs dig getting down in the rain:

To avoid predators such as fish, they evolved to consummate their vows in temporary ponds created by heavy rainstorms. “It’s one night of a massive frog orgy,” says [herpetology professor Steve] Johnson. When the downpour starts, male toads emerge from the ground making “vomiting-like” mating calls. The females respond, and the orgy runs through the night, after which the females lay thousands of fertilized eggs in the ponds. Most other toads spend a long time looking for mates, Johnson says, so this behavior is quite unique.

Within a few days, tadpoles hatch in such high numbers that the ponds resemble “boiling water” or a “super-organism that’s moving,” Johnson says. The ponds grow algae the tadpoles feed on. Two weeks after the rainy night, tadpoles become toads, hop away from their birthplaces, and burrow into the ground where they await their turn to party. Johnson says the toads are patient and can wait for the perfect mating conditions for months or years.

Reign Of Terroir

Dwight Furror assesses the war between “terroirists” and “anti-terroirists”:

Few terms in the wine world are more controversial than “terroir”, the French word meaning “of the soil”.  “Terroir” refers to the influence of soil and climate on the wine in your glass. But the meaning of “terroir” is not restricted to a technical discussion of soil structure or the influence of climate. Part of the romance of wine is that it (allegedly) expresses the particular character of a region and perhaps its people as well.

According to some “terroirists”, when we drink wine that expresses terroir, we feel connected to a particular plot of land and its unique characteristics, and by extension, its inhabitants, their struggles, achievements, and sensibility. Can’t you just feel their spirit coursing through your veins on a wild alcohol ride? The most extreme terroirists claim that the influence of soil and climate can be quite literally tasted in the wine. If this strikes you as a bit of, well, the digested plant food of bovines to put it politely, you are not alone. Many in the wine business are skeptical about the existence of terroir claiming that winemakers should make the best wine they can without trying to preserve some mystical connection with the soil. But the issue is an important one because the reputation of entire wine regions rests on the alleged unique characteristics of their terroir, not to mention the fact that the skill and discernment of wine tasters often involves recognizing these characteristics.

Rolling With Vollmann

In a profile of William T. Vollmann, Tom Bissell paints a vivid picture of an author whose interests range from war reporting to sex work to government surveillance (he was once suspected of being the Unabomber). He quotes Vollmann pondering mortality:

Vollmann stressed that in writing Last Stories, he really wanted to face up to death’s psychological challenges. Death, he said, “is nothing, and therefore the only way we can engage with nothing is to personify it … to invent.” For Vollmann, facing up to the inevitability of death involves remembering the orange he ate in his Bosnian rental while his friends sat dead in the front seats. “It was a hot day,” he said. “I was really thirsty. I ducked down and I was peeling one of these oranges and thought, ‘This is probably the last thing I’m ever going to eat.’ ” Twenty years later, when he gets upset about something, he wills himself to remember that orange and the strange reassurance it offered. Any type of permanent consciousness in the afterlife would, he believes, inevitably devolve into torture, and there would be no parting orange to leaven it. Consciousness is to our mortality what beer is to Homer Simpson: the cause of, and solution to, all our problems.

“Where does consciousness come from?” Vollmann asked, and it took me a moment to recognize he really was asking. I told him I didn’t have the faintest idea. Neither did Vollmann. “It makes no sense to me. None of it makes sense. It’s all preposterous, no matter how I look at it.” I reminded him that his first novel, You Bright and Risen Angels, seems to suggest that the collectivist social intelligence of insects might be preferable to the disquieting solitude of human intelligence—and it was possible that Vollmann spent more time alone in his head than any other living American writer. “Maybe,” he said, “it’s not so bad to be a social insect.”

A Short Story For Saturday

Today’s short story, Ann Beattie’s “Eric Clapton’s Lover,” first appeared in the Summer 1976 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review. How it begins:

Franklin Fisher and his wife, Beth, were born on the same day of March, two years apart. Franklin was 39 years old, and Beth was 41. Beth liked chiles relenos, Bass ale, gazpacho; Franklin liked mild foods: soufflés, quiche, pea soup. How could she drink Bass ale? And it was beginning to show on her figure. It wasn’t just beginning to show—it was showing in more places, bulging actually, so that now she had big, fat hips and strongman arms. Her disposition had changed, too; as she got larger, she got more vehement, less willing to compromise. Now she cooked two dinners and ate spicy lamb shish-kebob, smacking her lips, shaking on more salt, while Franklin, across from her, lifted a forkful of unseasoned spinach soufflé.

Things got worse between Franklin and Beth after Franklin Junior (“Linny” to his mother) got married and moved to San Bernardino. Their son’s bride was “learning to drive a rig.” She demonstrated how to turn a truck wheel coming down an incline by leaning forward on their sofa, spreading her legs, and moving her arms in what seemed to be two separate circles. Neither Franklin nor Beth knew what to talk to her about. Franklin Junior said, “Yes, sir!” as his bride-to-be simulated steering the truck, She talked about her rig, drank a shot of scotch, declining water or an ice cube, and left after half an hour.

Read the rest here. For more, check out here Park City: New and Selected Stories. Previous SSFSs here.