Quietly alarmed by the uptick in anti-polyamorous sentiment I’m seeing in the circles I frequent. I’ve never seen fandom events banning polyamorous content before the last few months, and it’s coincided with posts calling polyamorous narratives in fiction a “booktok thing” and accusing polyamorous people of invading queer spaces.My girlfriend and my fiancé and my boyfriend and my boyfriend’s boyfriend and I are just sitting here, man. Just chilling. I know these sentiments cycle in and out of fashion. I’m ace and I’ve seen the rise and fall and rise and fall of ace exclusionism too. This feels like an unusually high level of vitriol and it’s making me a bit anxious. It’s hard enough not being able to be honest about my relationships in real life. I don’t need this online too.
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Polyamory has never been widely accepted. I have a friend who got hate for writing Harry/Draco/OC over a decade ago.
Its acceptance in queer spaces comes and goes – often, there’s tolerance for the “free love, swinging” approach of “no actual romantic ties; people can have sex with whoever as long as it’s consensual” but less tolerance for “actually more than 2 of us are in a long-term relationship.”
It overlaps with the prejudice against bisexual people (although there are cis-het polyam people) and is one of the reason a lot of us fight for “queer” instead of “LGBTQ+” as a label. (Maybe polyamory fits under the “plus” but it gets tedious to have to keep explaining that.)
If you’re seeing high levels of vitriol – that’s probably the specific social areas you’re inhabiting. It’s always been there; it occasionally gets louder. And of course, it ties into the whole “purity police” trend that’s currently very vocal. The idea that every person has One True Soulmate and that they should be chaste and demure until they find that one person, and then only have any form of physical affection or sex after they are married and presumably in private…
Polyamory directly clashes with that worldview and approach to relationships, so it gets hate when the purity-pushers notice it.
But it’s not new, just recycled hate.
Within fandom, this also all gets mixed up with some people’s kink for extreme monogamy on the part of their OTP.
I really wouldn’t read too much into this. People can be assholes about it, sure, but plenty of people who think it’s perfectly normal to date multiple people over the course of one’s life still like their romance novel content to be chock full of soulmates and virginity kink. (And boy do I notice it because it is a massive squick for me. Give them past partners! Aaaaaaaah!) They might pitch a fit about OT3s because they hate polyamory, but it might just be typical “MY OTP OR ELSE!!!” fandom bullshit.
It does sound like anon has run into some jerks who need to be blocked though.
It’s weird, actually. People in my main fandom LOVE the chosen family trope. But only when everyone is a “sibling” or “child”. The characters get fitted into some peculiar nuclear family structure where people in their 30s are regarded as the “parents” of people in their 20s, and it’s really quite bizarre to me.
My idea of chosen family has always been more like “me and my partner, and my partner’s partner, and my partner’s ex, and my other partner”. Maybe one or two adopted “siblings” but that’s never been a major emphasis for me, in real life or in fiction.
So I have an OTP and an OT3, which is a superset of the OTP – as well as enjoying several other poly groupings of my OTP plus another character. It seems entirely normal to me. If adults are adopting each other into a chosen family, why wouldn’t they be partners?
Queerplatonic partners are just as valid as mutually adopted “siblings”.
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