"So, what's a Poly Planet?" asked Anton Diaz when he interviewed me at Daka/Dakini back in October, 2009. This blog is about the multiple answers to that question.
My life's work is about the social and cultural forces that can create the paradigm shift toward a poly future where humanity is at peace with our gracious hostess, planet Gaia. These forces include the sexual freedom movement; the global peace, health and ecology movement; the poly movement, the bi movement, the holistic health movement, the dissident science movement, the pagan movement, and many other forces that seek to co-create an integrated sense of love and life on the third planet.
This blog will host all kinds of contributions to that discourse, including news, reflections, debates, reviews, dialogs, interviews, videos, comments, and more. Why am I doing this? The task is challenging, to say the least! The reality is that many years of research across disciplines, cultures, languages, and discourses have persuaded me that, for our species, there is either what I call a 'Gaian future,' or no future at all. So allowing all those interested access to this knowledge isn't just an option among many--it's a sheer necessity.
Sex and the environment don't make obvious bedfellows
"Sex and the environment don't make obvious bedfellows," claims Tinamarie Bernard, a top-rated writer of sex, conscious love, intimacy, and relationships from the SF Bay Area, as she reviews my latest effort, Gaia and the New Politics of Love, for Modern Love Examiner,
Yet if there is value in sharing environmental resources, Bernard reckons, there must also be value in sharing 'amorous' resources, because love is as necessary for life as life is for love.
"Saving the planet" is just a euphemism for saving ourselves, since no other species is capable of destroying the web of life that makes our own existence possible. If we humans want to make peace with Gaia, therefore, we must become more symbiotic. And that's the point of this blog: creating a collaborative discursive space where the current paradigm upon which conventional knowledge is based can be interrogated--including the nature of love, life, health, evolution, and symbiosis, on a personal, community, interspecies, and planetary scale.
Please post your comments! As we post content, all of you are invited to respond. I tell my students that the word, argument, verbal conflict, are all tools of peace because if we can hear each other when we disagree we won't need to resort to blows, or puños, as they say in Spanish. At the same words can divide since listeners understand them in different ways. The blog will be a safe container for diversity of opinions and styles of expression. What's the purpose of a blog if not presenting complex ideas in a simple way? To that end, we encourage vernacular genres, beginning with dialogs, which is the style I chose for my G Tales.
Feminist humanities professor Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio has woven together fact and theory from widely disparate fields to present a strong case for the value of polyamory and other non-normative sexualoving expressions to save humanity from extinction. She views polyamory as a school for love which teaches a way of feeling and thinking which is crucial for our survival as we enter the 21st Century. I’m so glad she wrote this book because now I don’t have to! People have been asking me for years to elaborate more on what I meant when I said in my 1992 book, Love Without Limits, that polyamory is good for the planet. Serena has done a masterful job of fully explaining exactly what this statement means.
One of the central themes of her Gaia and the New Politics of Love, is the utility of the hypothesis originally put forth in scientific terms by James Lovelock and widely adopted by eco-feminist philosophers, neo-pagans and others, that Planet Earth or Gaia is not mere inert matter but has a consciousness like an animated, self-regulating organism. This point of view has been pervasive among indigenous people the world over for millennia and is the basis for all nature based spirituality. Anderlini-D’Onofrio traces the development of modern religious and scientific thought which view Earth as an inert object. This world view happens to correlate with both the rise of monogamous marriage as the only legitimate sexual expression, and as many observers have noted, with the increasingly life threatening destruction of our environment.
The value of accepting the Gaia hypothesis, she asserts, is that it moves us away from a course of irreversible environmental destruction and human suffering and toward greater justice and eco-social sustainability. In her words, “Hypothesizing Gaia in our era is like hypothesizing heliocentrism in Galileo’s. It helps the world shed needless fears from current dogmas, like the idea that love is a crime or a disease, or that we need to fight preventative wars against terrifying enemies, and it gets us to look reality in the face.”
Another major theme for Anderlini-D’Onofrio is the concept of symbiotic reason. She defines symbiosis as a way of sharing bodies in which both host and guest benefit. In biology this refers to phenomenon such as beneficial bacteria found in the digestive tract of many species. We might also apply the term to the presence of humans and other species living in the body of Gaia. Symbiosis classically describes the relationship between a pregnant woman and her fetus. In Freudian psychoanalytic thought, the term symbiotic refers to pathologically dependent maternal relationships carried beyond the appropriate developmental stage. Instead, Anderlini-D’Onofrio argues for a new understanding of symbiosis as “the wellspring of a mode of reasoning that appreciates the sharing of bodies as resources for fun and pleasure and does not diagnose it as unhealthy or perverse.” Symbiotic reason is not only crucial to sustainability, she says, it’s closely related to the practice of polyamorous love.
Patriarchal values have placed independence and logic above symbiosis or interdependence and direct bodily awareness with disastrous results. Rational science has been revealed as lacking the objectivity on which its alleged superiority is based. Symbiotic reason, which leads us to think in terms of the whole, rather than isolated parts, is the cure according to Anderlini-D’Onofrio and countless other contemporary thinkers. As she expresses it:
"I believe that the political problem of today is a problem of love because only hatred and fear can cause people to construct enemies that do not exist while they ignore the most serious and impending issues. I propose holism as an ecologically sound approach to biopolitical issues that heals the thought system that causes anxiety, rather than attacking the enemies this system constructs. Love is therefore the problem that is also the solution of modernity’s diseases and the absurd position these diseases put us humans in. In homeopathic terms, love is the disease that is the cure. Indeed, if as humans aware of being mere cells in Gaia’s organism we could love as selflessly as the two unicellular organisms who die to merge into one larger symbiotic being, we could perhaps cure ourselves of modernity’s diseases."
Anderlini-D’Onofrio takes this line of thought a step further by emphasizing the mutual sharing of oxytocin mediated bonding in symbiotic styles of love, which, by her definition, include polyamory. Oxytocin is a hormone well known for its role in bonding a breastfeeding mother to her newborn infant. More recently, the action of oxytocin in promoting bonding of sexual partners, at least temporarily, has been highlighted. Oxytocin produces feelings of calm, love, and connection. Could it be the antidote to the anxieties of modern life still driven by the adrenaline driven fight or flight syndrome? At the risk of over-simplifying, this is the famous slogan of the 1960’s peace movement, “Make love, not war” in terms of neurotransmitters.
Polyamorous people, Anderlini-D’Onofrio asserts, have developed practices that allow the establishment of gradual levels of intimacy, including playful touch, cuddling, snuggling, spooning, and inclusive sexual play. “Because of their heavy reliance on touch, connectedness, nonviolence, and a subtle knowledge and practice of intimacy, the styles of love invented by bi and poly people promote the activation of the hormonal cycle of oxytocin.” Of course, these practices are not limited to the polyamorous, but they are often avoided, particularly in group settings, by those who are fearful of temptations to stray from their monogamous vows.
Serena Anderlini-D'Onofrio, PhD will be presenting workshops based on Gaia and the New Politics of Love in Puerto Rico and other locations. Her book will be presented at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez, on February 11th, 2010. Contact her at serena.anderlini@gmail.com for further information.
Deborah Taj Anapol, Ph.D. is the author of Polyamory: The New Love without Limits and The Seven Natural Laws of Love. Her new book, Polyamory in the 21st Century, will be published in 2010. Dr. Anapol coaches singles and partners on sex and relationship issues by phone and has led relationship and sacred sexuality seminars all over the world - next one is March 11-14, 2010 in Bermuda. Email her at taj@lovewithoutlimits.com or visit her in cyberspace at www.lovewithoutlimits.com
GAIA & the NEW POLITICS of LOVE: NOTES for a POLY PLANET
by Sasha Lessin, PhD
You must read Serena Anderlini-D'Onofrio's GAIA & the NEW POLITICS of LOVE.
This electrifying work will be seen as a turning point, on the order of The Aquarian Conspiracy, The Greening of America, The Earth in Balance, as a seminal turning point in the paradigm with which we as a species face our existence on Earth.
Gaia and the New Politics of Love presents a meticulous philosophical and critical review of Western thought that bridges the dichotomies–energy-matter, competition-symbiosis, war-peace, male-female, postmodern-neomodern, abundance-scarcity, allopathic-holistic, WASP-colored, indigenous-techno, human-nonhuman, hope-fear, subject-object, sacred-practical, mind-body and love-hate–that have led us to the brink of extinction. Anderlini's analysis points the way to center ourselves among these dichotomies, to embrace these apparent opposites that, processed discerningly, can enhance one another. In the discerning centering she proposes we find a path that can save our species and the planetary ecosystem from destruction.
Anderlini identifies LOVE as the overall panacea for humanity’s crises. Love, she shows, can be expanded from application of the methods developed in the polyamorous and bisexual communities. These communities, she demonstrates, have developed ways to engage in safe, consensual, mutually-enhancing, respectful ways of relating and celebrating personal choice as well as common welfare that evolve individuals and groups to ever-more inclusive and loving behaviors. She advocates the generalization to these evolving psychotechnologies and the ethos they imply to all humanity for its survival and contribution to the planet.
I cannot too highly recommend this book. It'll change the way you and all who read it view our world and its possibilities.
Sasha (Alex) Lessin, PhD (UCLA)
Co-Chair, World Peace, Tantra and World Polyamory Associations
Sign up for the World Polaymory Association - June 25-27, 2010 Conference where Serena, the author of Gaia and the New Politics of Love will give a keynote on her vision of how polyamory can help humanity can make peace with our hostess planet.
Camilla Raznovich: Good evening, Serena Anderlini, theorist and practitioner of polyamory, a topic about which she has written many books. So, I’d like to understand how you figured out that you had a tendency to love more than one partner at the same time.
Serena Anderlini: I figured it out because I loved the people with whom my partners fell in love. If they fell in love with them, I fell in love with them too, and so I wanted to transform the negative energies of hatred, envy, jealousy, into a positive energy in which I was able to share this love. It was a rather long path because one cannot easily transform a negative sentiment into a positive one, one has to go though a whole process of inner transformation, a spiritual process that makes one capable of embracing a type of love that is not possessive. For me this is comparable to a father, or a mother, who have twelve children. Will the twelve children be less loved? No. At times in these big families people love each other a lot, so why can’t this multiplicity also happen also in the area of partners, why? Why is love for our children supposed to be altruistic and love for one’s partners egotistic? Why?
CR: And at this time, how many partners do you have?
SA: I didn’t come here to tell you that. It’s none of your business. (Applause.)
CR: But you have more than one at the same time?
SA: Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t.
CR: Ok. But actually I’m sure you realize that if you don’t, then there is no reason for you to be on the show. That is, you either are willing to share from your experience or, to put it quite bluntly, I don’t know what to tell you.
SA: Well, yes, you see, in polyamory one gives time to each partner, which is to say that one emphasizes the relationship, and not “recreational sex.” I’m not opposed to recreational sex per se, but in polyamory the relationship is emphasized so that each partner becomes a person with whom there is an amorous relationship, an emotional relationship. And so to every relationship one has to devote a certain time. Then comes the time when one can be together with all of one’s partners, or the time when they are together among themselves, for example, when I’m not around. But there always has to be balance.
CR: The new thing then is the simultaneity of these relationships?
SA: Yes. And also, how can I put, it’s a bit like when one is cooking, if one puts too many pots on the fire at the same time, then something gets burned. So one only manages as many relationships as one can afford to invest in.
CR: I know you are a mother. How do you tell about this lifestyle to your daughter?
SA: Well, through my books, for example. In my biological family, my daughter has been the person who has read my books most carefully. We have talked about them together, I have seen her intelligence, I have seen the way she has approached a world that she does not know very well because we live quite far away from each other. And I dare say that I believe that for her it must be a source of pride to have a mother who experiments with her own life. She has also made her own choices in her own life, and no one has disapproved of them. If she had grown up in a family where there is only one way to do things right, her choices too would have been . .
CR: And beyond your daughter, is there anyone in your family who has criticized you, who has been opposed to your choices?
SA: I dare say that since my family of origin was atheist, we’ve never suffered from a Catholic monopoly over spirituality. So since there wasn’t a prescribed style of spirituality, everyone has found his or her own way toward it. And so we have not been in the way of each other in these matters. Not the slightest bit. I dare say that when for the first time I found out about the bisexual aspect of myself, and I talked about it with my father, who was still alive then, that was the time when we became friends again, friends like when I was a little girl. It was the time when he found his daughter again.
CR: Michela Marzano, we’ve heard that even though sexual promiscuity has happened historically, now one can have also relationships, and so in the case of polyamory, several loves coexist without promiscuity. These loves are experienced with much courage, in the light of day, and simultaneously.
MM: Yes. Well, I must admit that I am, I wouldn’t say perplexed, since, naturally, I listen, I’ve listened with much attention. Let’s say I’m almost in admiration of the energy that manifests, because I know that to manage a relationship with only one person absorbs a whole lot of energy. One has to give a lot of oneself to get to establish a connection. At the same time, it appears to me that the vision here is a bit idealized. It appears as if everything is good, the relationship with the father, with the daughter, with society. Now, it’s extremely difficult to be able to satisfy all of one’s exigencies, all of one’s needs, and love several persons at the same time without having someone suffer. This is what strikes me. What is the effect, what is the impact of this will to go beyond the egotism of possession, what’s the impact on others. Because jealousy can certainly be pathological, but at the same time jealousy is sometimes the sign of attachment, of the fact that I love the other person, and I don’t want this person to be simply the object of attention of a whole bunch of other persons.
CR: Marzano, hold on till we get Anderlini to respond.
MM: Just one more point. Because in relation to the interview with Jacques Attali, there is one thing that I found interesting, and that is the fact of making a parallel between affective and economic relationships. In economic relationships, there actually is an exchange, as when I buy or sell something. In emotional relationships, to be able to build something, one gives something of oneself, something deeper that cannot simply be sold or exchanged. In my view, there is a difference in quality between the simple exchange of merchandises, and in the fact of putting oneself at stake in the relationship with another.
CR: Anderlini?
SA: It is the transformation of one’s inner landscape, the transformation of emotions, and this is something that is done via spirituality, via meditation, some do it via prayer, there are many ways to do it. In any event, it is an effect of the inner landscape, and it is something that happens gradually, also in poly communities. For example, if a person is new, it is understood that this person will have a process of transformation. If then at some point the person decides that polyamory is not for him or her, the person can pick another lifestyle.
Ricky Tognazzi: In Italy, people simply say that “two is company, three is war,” guerra,” or “guera” as they pronounce it here in Rome. You know what I mean. In particular, I am the child of the sessantottino generation, the generation that powered the revolution of 1968. Free love, stuff . . . it was a massacre, something scary, we hurt each other a lot. But I’m not talking about liberated sex, because that was actually quite amusing. I’m talking about the implications of faithfulness, not only a faithfulness not practiced, but also expressed as such, a declared non-exclusivity. The great sincerity of couples: “we have to tell each other everything, but on the other hand, if we cannot be together all the time, each should be free to make his or her experiences as long as than . . . “ To make a long story short, something terrifying, we hurt ourselves and each other, so, I mean, how do we get past this point?
SA: It depends on how you do it. For example in the polyamorist communities that I know there are people our age, but also older, people there are admitted at any age, even eighty, and such senior participants actually exist.
RT: So, I’m still on time there . . .
SA: Yeah, you’re still on time (giggles).
RT: I cannot participate with the people of the Castle Party (only under 40), but I can . . .
SA: Yeah, and it’s not so expensive. What happened is that at the time you’re talking about, these experiments where done brutally, people did not know the arts of loving. And what I claim is that, in our culture, love has become a pathology or an instinct. We have forgotten that in many cultures love has been an art, an art that can be learned. As I learn how to paint, so I learn how to love. And I learn how to love also the love of the other. I learn to respect the feelings of these other persons.
MM: I would like to interject because I feel there is another important point. I perfectly understand that we need to get out of the myth according to which the “other” person can stand for the totality. The other is never the totality. In order to affirm myself in life I need a series of different spheres because there is a difference between the love we bring to our children and to our lovers/companions. Love for our children has a tender core, a softness. We project toward our children a whole series of expectations, therefore we operate in a gift mode. In a couple’s relationship, there is something that is rather related to reciprocity: I give and at the same time I expect. And to be able to give there is the precondition of being available to give, that energy has to be present. What really strikes me in what we’ve heard so far is that it is as if we were in a dream of omnipotence. I can love everyone and I can love them at the same time.
La reconocida estudiosa de temas culturales, Dra. SERENA ANDERLINI-D'ONOFRIO, finalista del Premio Lambda, autora y editora de muchos libros, y proponente de la debatida Teoría de Gaia en el estudio de las humanidades, ofrecerá una CONFERENCIA MAGISTRAL el jueves, 11 de febrero, a la HORA UNIVERSAL (10:30-12:00), en el ANFITEATRO FIGUEROA CHAPEL.
La conferencia, títulada ¿COMO PUEDE LA HUMANIDAD HACER LA PAZ CON NUESTRA AMABLE ANFITRIONA, EL PLANETA TIERRA? presentarálos temas del mas reciente libro de la conferenciante GAIA & the NEW POLITICS of LOVE: NOTES for a POLY PLANET publicado en 2009 por el editorial North Atlantic Books, Berkeley.
La introduccion de la conferenciante es a cargo de la Dra. DIMARIS ACOSTA, Departamento de Biologia, RUM.
"Nuestra especie aparece estar en guerra con el planeta que ha desarollado el ambiente natural consono a la vida humana, con el calentamiento global como el mas reconocido ejemplo de tal hostlidad. Las teoría científica conocida como Gaia nos indíca que esta guerra no la podemos gañar, ya que el precio seria derrumbar el mismo sistema de vidas interconnectadas que nos ha dado hospitalidad.¿Como podemos lograr la paz? Es necesario un cambio en el paradígma cultural. La conferencia presentará las nuevas políticas del amor que ayuden a realizar este cambio, así como las aplicacions prácticas que le pueden corresponder."
La conferencia de TEMA INTERDISCIPLINARIO se presenta como parte del CICLO DE HUMANIDADES. Se seguirápor un animado debate moderado por el Dr. HECTOR HUYKE, Departamento de Humanidades, RUM.
QUE PARTICIPEN SIN FALTA Y QUE ANIMEN A TOD@S SUS ESTUDIANTES EN PARTICIPAR. ¡NO PUEDEN PERDERSE ESTA UNICA OPORTUNIDAD!
QUE EXTIENDAN LA INVITACION A MEMBR@S DE LA COMUNIDAD Y ORGANIZACIONES INTRA- Y EXTRA-MURALES INTERESADAS.
¡¡¡GRACIAS!!!
La Dra. SERENA ANDERLINI-D'ONOFRIO es catedrática en el Departamento de Humanidades, RUM. Además del libro presentado, es autora de Eros: A Journey of Multiple Loves (2007), y de The 'Weak' Subject (1998); es editora de Plural Loves (2003), Women and Bisexuality (2003), y de Bisexuality and Queer Theory (2010); y es traductora de In Spite of Plato (por la filosofa italiana Adriana Cavarero, 1995) y de A Lake for the Heart (por el politico italiano Luigi Anderlini, su defunto padre). Ella ha sido invitada a dar conferencias magistrales en California, Filadelfia, y Londres.
COPIAS del LIBRO presentado estarán disponibles para l@s interesad@s.
¿Del Otro Lao?: Perspectives on Queer Sexualities UPR Mayaguez, March 2-4, 2010
¿Que es el poliamorismo?
Serena will be presenting the ideas, practices, organizations, styles of love and amorous relatedness, and movement that characterize polyamory in our time, including 'compersion,' 'responsible non-monogamy,' 'expanded families,' 'diads,' 'tirads,' and 'pods,' the World Polyamory Association, Loving More, Polyamory Weekly, National Poly leadership, and the paradigm shift in which polyamory participates.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010, 3:30-3:45PM This event is free of charge and open to the public Edificio Chardon, Anfiteatro Figueroa Chapel Come in early to secure your seat!
, will be published in 2010. Dr. 
