Future Sex (18 page)

They avoided the words
boyfriend
and
girlfriend
. When they went for dinner with Wes’s family, Elizabeth was presented as a friend. Spring passed into summer—longer days, more fog, repetitious quotation of Mark Twain to visitors who didn’t bring a wool parka for the cold July nights, leathery-tan nudists twinkling at passersby
in the Castro, stone fruit season at Bi-Rite. Somewhere down in Palo Alto Steve Jobs was on his deathbed, the white aura of the battery light pulsing ever more faint. San Francisco, 2011: the Summer of Emotional Involvement.

That August, Elizabeth went to Burning Man with Brian and took LSD for the first time. When she emerged from her trip she felt she had changed—not by embracing a new enthusiasm
for hippie metaphysics (the scripts she had been raised with about ambition and career remained intact, and one starts to wonder what exactly the hippies claimed to have seen—enlightenment, a new world order, God…). Her conviction upon resurfacing was only that some vital part of human nature could reach satisfaction only in the context of a primal carnival, desert-based or otherwise, that
had elements of uninhibited intoxication, long nights fading into sunrises, trance-inducing music, leather, headdresses. Some countries had ritualized bacchanal into the annual calendar. America had not, and could not see revels without anticipation of atonement, without smug speculation about consequences. Humans were supposed to be silly from time to time, was what Elizabeth now suspected—also that
the anticipated punishment for having too much fun would not arrive like an answer to a question. Punishment might, in fact, never arrive at all.

On the final Saturday of the festival, when the Burning Man was set on fire and tens of thousands of people converged in the expanse of the desert to dance, Elizabeth met a man. He was an engineer, so probably smart. He smelled bad but it was Burning
Man. She was on MDMA, feeling as certain as a plumb line, as constant as neon. The dust was velveteen, the sky concave and luminous, the music circadian. She fell in and out of love on the same roll, but they had sex, and she confirmed a second fundamental principle of the way she wanted to be in the world, something she had felt since the first time she took MDMA. She would not ignore suffering,
because suffering was real, but she had no reason not to be happy. Two things to remember from then forward: happiness as a guiding principle, happiness above all, and what Simone de Beauvoir once called “the fête”—“an impassioned apotheosis of the present in the face of anxiety concerning the future.”

Back in San Francisco, Elizabeth did not yet attach her newfound dedication to a life of heightened
experience with a set of particular plans. It was more like setting aside a vacant room that would be furnished when she had more time or money. For now, her ideas of adult life were unchanged: work as hard as possible; someday get married and have kids. Left to think about it long enough, she could still work herself into indignation that Wes would not “grow up” and fully commit to her.
That fall, he went to London for two weeks for work. In his absence Elizabeth vowed to break up with him. She changed her mind before he boarded at Heathrow for the return flight. She had her work to focus on, especially once she, too, was hired at Google. Now they took the bus to Mountain View and ate in the cafeteria together.

Elizabeth did not describe what she was doing—having sex with two
men on a regular basis over an extended period of time, with the occasional extrarelationship dalliance besides—as polyamory.
Polyamory
was a neologism one absorbed in San Francisco just by breathing the air, but it was also a key term in an extended regional palaver that prompted people from other parts of the country to roll their eyes, not so much at the rejection of monogamy but rather at
the earnestness and jargon with which it was discussed.

The word was still new. When the
Oxford English Dictionary
had added
polyamory
in 2006, it cited as first usage a 1992 Internet post suggesting the creation of an alt.poly-amory Usenet newsgroup. Other sources traced the word to a woman named Morning Glory Ravenheart-Zell, who first used the adjective
poly-amorous
in a magazine article in
1990 about the logistics of her open marriage.

According to
The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft, Witches and Wicca
, Ravenheart-Zell, née Diana Moore, was born in 1948 in Long Beach, California. She changed her name to Morning Glory at the age of nineteen because she felt she could not worship the goddess Diana, whose disciples in ancient Rome had practiced chastity. She met her first husband while
hitchhiking to a commune in Eugene, Oregon, in 1969; she left him for her second husband, Oberon Zell-Ravenheart (né Timothy Zell), in 1973. They fell in love at Gnosticon, an annual meeting of neo-pagans.

From the beginning of their forty-year marriage, the Ravenheart-Zells continued having relationships with other people, including the formation of a triad that lasted a decade. It was at the
behest of one of her husband’s partners that Morning Glory published an explanatory article called “A Bouquet of Lovers” in
Green Egg
, the magazine of the neo-pagan Church of All Worlds. Earlier words that attempted to describe what the Ravenheart-Zells called “the idea of having multiple simultaneous sexual/loving relationships without necessarily marrying everyone,” terms ventured in early Internet
forums and in the pages of the free-love magazine
Loving More
, included
polyfidelity
,
omnigamy
,
panfidelity
, and
nonmonogamy
. Instead of using either the Greek or the Latin translations for “loving many,” which would have resulted in “polyphilia” (sounds like a pathology) or “multiamory” (like a plug adaptor), Ravenheart-Zell, intrepid philologist, combined the two: poly-amory. She also wrote
about the rules her extended sexual network had developed to manage their relationships. One rule was the “Condom Cadre,” an agreement among five people to use condoms with everyone outside their circle.

Morning Glory Ravenheart-Zell died of cancer in May 2014, long after the word she coined had outgrown its New Age roots. From free spirits who discussed the existence of unicorns the word had
passed quickly into the small Internet newsgroup communities of the early 1990s and out into wider culture. Still, by 1997, the year that guides such as
The Ethical Slut
by Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy, and Deborah Anapol’s
Polyamory
, were published, the notion mainly remained confined to the cities of Northern California where the hippies had resisted mass extinction. Dan Savage, the widely
syndicated newspaper sex columnist whose open-minded advice could serve as a barometer of the concerns of sexually active, freethinking young professionals in America’s major cities, had only a single mention of “polyamory” in a collection of his columns published in 1998, and that was an explanatory definition—an introduction of the term for a person writing in with questions about a love triangle.
Savage wrote that he preferred the term
polyfidelity
.

By the time Elizabeth went to Burning Man for the first time in 2011, the festival included many teach-ins and lectures on managing polyamorous relationships, but the word had accrued cultural connotations for her, of swinging married people or creepy old men who hit on young women. It seemed to her that the word had more to do with how a
certain kind of person liked to present herself to the world, as maverick or on the fringe, than it did with any practicable methodology of managing relationships. Although like most people her age she had friends whose dyadic partnerships allowed for sex with other people, those friends tended to use the term “open relationship,” which was somehow less infused with the stigma of intentional weirdness,
and did not amount to a proclamation of sexual identity.

Still, whatever accidental arrangement she had created, and despite her own enjoyment of her freedoms, by the end of that year the lack of sexual boundaries was causing her no small amount of anxiety. Wes’s crushes from high school were resurfacing. Women on OkCupid were probably sending him winky emoticons by the dozens. To allay her growing
insecurity, she turned to self-help, and read
The Ethical Slut
.

The Ethical Slut
, “A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Adventures,” is a useful but at times overly chirpy book. Its baby boomer co-authors, Janet Hardy and Dossie Easton, trace their inquiry into free love to the utopianism of the 1960s. They begin by questioning the universally desirable outcome of a monogamous
marriage, an institution they see as neither “normal” nor “natural.” The ideal of monogamy, they write, pertained to obsolete agrarian cultures. It now coasts on tradition, especially because people seeking to pursue a sexual life beyond the ideal of marriage face a vacuum of prescribed behaviors and ethics: “We have no culturally approved scripts for open sexual lifestyles,” they write. “We
need to write our own.” They proceed with taxonomies of possible sexual identities and strategies for maintaining health, stability, and “unlearning jealousy.” They revive the word
slut
as a “reclamation,” to mean “a person of any gender who celebrates sexuality according to the radical proposition that sex is nice and pleasure is good for you.”

Co-written by a psychotherapist and a writer, the
book presupposes a lot more unembarrassed discussion than many people may feel capable of having with their sexual partners. Happily proclaiming oneself a “slut” is itself a difficult proposition: the word carries the memory of its negative, gendered history, no matter how flippantly it is repurposed. It seems especially unsympathetic to those people pursuing an alternative sexual ethics out of
resignation rather than enthusiasm. (I did not, for example, think of being single as my choice to “be in a relationship with myself.”) Still, since its first publication the book has sold more than 160,000 copies.

Practicing polyamorists describe a phase they call “joining the book club.” Elizabeth followed
The Ethical Slut
with the evolutionary biology bestseller
Sex at Dawn
, by Christopher
Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, who argue that humans have evolved to enjoy sex with multiple partners as part of our inexorable primate destiny. Then she read Tristan Taormino’s
Living Open
, another guide to managing sex with multiple partners.

Joining the book club gave Elizabeth permission to consider that not everybody had to live the vision of adulthood that she had expected to live growing up.
The monogamous couple, an institution she had always thought of as a default outcome, suddenly took on the appearance of a deliberate choice. Once she saw monogamy as a choice, and not a given, it began to take on the cast of an unreasonable expectation, best suited to people who disliked experimentation—people not like her.

Elizabeth grew up surrounded by Southern Baptists in Virginia. Her father
was a Korean immigrant and her mother was Jewish, the religion in which she was raised. As a child, she had a powerful curiosity about sex. She first tried masturbating in the second grade, after hearing somebody talking about it on television. She had thought of what she did as bad and did not discuss her experiments with any of her friends. By middle school she had decided to educate herself
further by watching Internet porn. It was partially curiosity and partially because it turned her on, but porn also became a way to gauge the extent to which she was attracted to women as well as men. When Elizabeth was in middle school, her dad opened her laptop one day to a video of a rowdy lesbian caper. He deleted the files, closed the computer, and left the room. They never discussed the matter.

Elizabeth had sex for the first time at fourteen, while visiting Miami for a swim meet. Her partner was sixteen, and also a virgin, or at least he claimed to be one. They have stayed friends on Facebook.

She started her first serious sexual relationship at the age of fifteen and started taking the birth control pill. She thinks of herself as lucky: for never having had many negative feelings
about sex, for being comfortable with her sexuality, and for never having been the victim of sexual violence. At college she had sex with three people her freshman year, and made out with several more. While nobody judged her, the way the other students discussed sex in college caused her to police herself. She would watch rumors spread about specific men or women and their sexual histories. She saw
the power such rumors could have. Although she found the gossip backward, she found it easier and more convenient to comply with a sexually conservative façade. Her sophomore year, she saw one man consistently.

More worrisome to her was the prospect of how her sexual behavior could be used against her as she tried to cultivate a professional reputation. In college, she began working as a teaching
assistant to an economics professor, and it became very important to her that her students did not know if she had hooked up with their friends. As she grew older, the stakes seemed only to be higher. She suspected that talking at work about her multiple lovers could sabotage her career. She was confronting, if not a double standard along gendered lines, at least a sort of foundational hypocrisy:
where ambition, curiosity, and a willingness to take risks in one’s professional life was kept separate from the mirage of propriety that governed one’s personal life. Monogamy was assimilated into notions of leadership and competence; other sexual choices came with loss of authority. The fear of falling on the wrong side resulted in a general performance of consensus about what constituted a
responsible life, when in fact there was, perhaps, no center at all.

For almost a year Elizabeth and Wes avoided naming the terms of their relationship. They celebrated the last night of 2011 with friends in the back of a truck, which they had rented for the night and converted into a mobile party, roaming around the city and stopping at bars along the way. They parked the truck before midnight
outside a friend’s apartment. Before going in, and because she wanted to say it while still relatively sober, Elizabeth told Wes she loved him. He loved her, too, but he still wanted sexual freedom. She had already decided she wanted it, too.