Polyamory-Related Books

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Marion Zimmer Bradley

Daw

The book is part of a series set on the world Darkover, where variations of polyamory are part of the culture (for example, it's common custom for unmarried women to have sexual relationships with their sister's husband, with all parties consenting). Most sexual relationship variations are represented as normal (same gender sexual relationships are accepted as normal between youngsters who are not old enough for marriage, homosexuality is largely accepted for older men as long as he also takes a wife to fulfill family duties, adult lesbian relationships are either accepted or overlooked depending on a woman's social status, "secondary" wives/mistresses are both commonplace and honored among the higher social classes, and there is no shame in having an illegitimate child as long as the father acknowledges it's his). There are also some interesting non-poly sexual customs, such as not crossing generational lines in sexual relationships (to prevent parent/child incest, because in earlier times children often were raised by foster parents and so may not have actually known who their parents were).

There are well over a dozen Darkover novels; while most of them have polyamorous references, this is the only one that focuses on the dynamics & struggles of a group marriage.

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The High Cost of Living

Marge Piercy

Fawcett

Joreth rates this book a 3 (Bad) and contributes this review:

I am reviewing this book strictly from a polyamorous point of view. My opinions of the book do not reflect the qualities of the book otherwise.

On the back of the book, the summary claims to be about a young woman, Leslie, who has just lost her female lover to another woman and finds herself “involved in a strange erotic triangle” with the two other main characters, Honor and Bernie. The final line claims “Here is a powerful, searing novel of three young dreamers caught up in a lifestyle they can neither accept nor change”. This sounded very promising. It implied that the 3 characters were involved in a multi-person relationship the likes of which they were unfamiliar, yet drawn towards. It implied they might have personal issues or social constructs to overcome in this unique lovestyle and were forced to face them because of the inevitability of their love for each other.

This was not the case.

I tried to take into account the era into which this story was written, the tumultuous ‘70s, a time of woman’s liberation and sexual chaos. Leslie appears to have chosen to be a lesbian, due to the misogynistic, patriarchal view of society (that really wasn’t too far from the truth at that time) that the woman’s libbers had of their culture. She had male lovers before, and was sexually active at a very young age, but her statements about being a lesbian do not imply any natural instinct about it, except, perhaps for one statement where she says she had male lovers “until I was sixteen and knew myself”. For example, during a conversation with another character, Honor has fantasies of a man “sweeping [her] up in his arms and throwing [her] on the bed”. Leslie immediately asks why Honor would want to be raped. In her mind, she sees no difference between a “masterly sort of man” and a violation of her womanhood. Leslie makes several such comments throughout the book.

In a conversation with a gay man, he is explaining how he just can’t get it up for women and Leslie says “if you’re impotent with a woman, you could please her anyhow and maybe better”, explaining that he could still choose to give her pleasure even if he isn’t hard. She seems to completely disregard the idea that some sexual identity may just be hardwired. While, yes, it’s possible to give someone pleasure when you’re not into it yourself, it can become extremely difficult to be good at giving someone pleasure when you’re really just not into that person or even that gender, thereby defeating the ability to give someone “pleasure”. I don’t know about the author, or other people, but if my partner isn’t into the activity for whatever reason, it’s not very pleasurable for me and if they’re not interested in the female form, they’re not likely to be very good in bed, sexual prowess being a learned skill and all.

She remarks another time, when the other character says something about being afraid of being “torn up and used” by a group of “louts” that hang around on the street corner, that a woman can make love to another woman for years without ever being “torn up”. When Honor says she’s read about women raping other women, Leslie says she’s known hundreds of lesbians and never once has a woman tried to force herself onto another woman. At the time, female sexual abuse was unheard of, but we now know that woman are just as capable of men of emotional, physical and sexual abuse and always have been, even if it was unrecognized in previous eras.

So, we have Leslie, the woman’s lib lesbian. Next up is Honor, the young ingénue who dreams of romance and flights of fancy. She’s 16 when we meet her, although she claims to be almost 18. She dresses in filmy dresses and sighs dramatically, forever unimpressed by people her own age, although her overprotected world has prevented her from experiencing anything for herself. At one point, she remarks that she would like the experience of being slapped in the face like she sees in old movies and novels, being a romantic sort of situation, like women having hysterics and the men coming to their rescue or some over-the-top dramatic confrontation. Leslie tells her that it would not feel the way she imagines it would feel, and when Honor finds herself in a situation to be slapped in the face, she discovers she really doesn’t like it at all.

Finally, our third leg of the “erotic triangle” is a young man named Bernie, an ex-street hustler who has recently begun going back to school for his high school diploma and has developed a friendship with Honor. I don’t think we ever really get to know Bernie. We have one long scene that seems to be heart-wrenching and soul-searching where it looks as though we get a good look into who Bernie is, but the novel is told primarily from Leslie’s point of view (although it is third person), and Bernie suddenly turns against Leslie with, what seems to me, irrational, unprovoked reactions.

So, onto the poly aspect.

This was not a story about polyamorous relationships. Leslie, a woman in her mid-twenties, finds herself falling in love with this little chit, Honor, in spite of the fact that Leslie finds Honor to be naïve and silly in her romanticism. Bernie seems to be pretty homosexual, but develops a strong emotional connection to Honor. I do like that the author recognizes non-sexual love as a valid form of “romantic” love, and the book gets points for that. But Bernie doesn’t seem to know what to do with platonic love and keeps trying to turn things sexual, I suspect, because that’s the thing to do when you love someone, a confusion I can understand with our society’s mixed signals about sex. To quote Billy Joel, “They say you can’t sleep alone in a strange place / but then tell you, you can’t sleep with somebody else”. Honor seems to have very genuine loving feelings for both Leslie and Bernie, but completely separates her sexuality from her friends. When discussing her flirtations with a pig of a man, Leslie asks how Honor can stand the thought of him touching her and she asks what liking someone has to do with sex. Leslie and Bernie start out hating each other as rivals for Honor’s affections, but Bernie makes overtures of friendship towards Leslie until they have some bonding moments and become very close themselves, yet another nod towards the power of non-sexual love.

So, it sounds as though this could go the way of a poly love triad with some fluid sexuality. The three of them hang out one evening and Leslie has a “startling urge to make love to both of them”. But then she thinks “the impulse is not real. No, she never wanted to make love to more than one person and certainly not to both of them. In reality it would be complicated and messy … No, she could never desire Bernie, not for an instant. It was preposterous”. She thinks “They looked beautiful beside her and she did itch to touch them gently.” She rationalizes her feelings away, blaming the wine and pot they had before dinner, the “sexual overflow” resulting from her last weekend with her ex-girlfriend, the result of putting off her workout for a week, drinking too much, it’s just silliness.

But just as it begins to have some potential, things blow up rather spectacularly. Bernie and Leslie have a very intense bonding moment and Bernie tries to turn that situation into a sexual situation. Leslie, not trusting him just for being male, backs away. Eventually, she decides that she is in danger of losing her emotional ties to Bernie if she doesn’t clear up the sexual tension. So they make up and Bernie takes it sexual again. Leslie decides to let him get away with it this time and it’s somewhat awkward, but she relaxes a bit. They fall asleep together and Bernie wakes up and tries again. This time, he’s much more forceful and aggressive, everything Leslie hates about men. She does not receive any pleasure and is grumpy when they get up. Bernie takes this bit of grumpiness to heart and storms out of the house, and he and Leslie are enemies for the rest of the story.

Bernie and Leslie go back to being rivals and Bernie embarks on a campaign to turn Honor against Leslie. He spins half-truths and outright lies, which Honor believes and breaks up her friendship with Leslie. Then Bernie starts acting like a love-starved puppy, really more like a stalker, becoming possessive of her time, breaking into her school to leave notes on her locker door, following her when she goes out of the house. Honor finally gets sick of it and calls Leslie for support. Leslie tries to guide Honor into removing Bernie from her life, but Honor vacillates wildly until the end of the story.

Finally, Honor calls it quits and invites Bernie over to Leslie’s apartment for the breakup speech, which strikes me as a particularly stupid idea. The three of them attempt to be civilized, with Leslie serving chocolate cake. But Honor insults Bernie and tells him they’re through. Bernie storms out of the apartment and smears the cake all over Leslie’s wall. Just when Leslie thinks she finally has Honor to herself, Honor announces that she’s having a very torrid love affair with Leslie’s boss, a married man with children who has an “open” marriage, meaning he gets to boff every young co-ed he comes into contact with through his academic position and the wife stays home and takes care of the kids. But he’s honest about it and she appears to agree.

However, when the wife discovers her husband is sleeping with a teenager, she decides it’s time for her to take advantage of the open arrangement and starts sleeping with one of his students … the only one who will risk the boss’ wife, even though their arrangement is supposedly well-known. This student, by the way, just happens to be the obnoxious boyfriend of Honor’s sister, who is the boss’ secretary. Honor waxes poetic about her very romantic affair only to be completely surprised and crushed when he dumps her. She was completely taken in by his line about a “troubled marriage” and he would leave the wife for the girlfriend, which Leslie tried to warn her about. But boss man isn’t so keen on keeping the arrangement now that he learns he has to share his wife too. Instead of overcoming his jealousy and learning to truly, openly and honestly love his wife, he decides to shut down his affairs for the sake of his family. Honor is left devastated and Leslie remains to, yet again, pick up the pieces of Honor’s love life. Bernie, meanwhile, has skipped town, never to be heard from again.

And that’s where the story leaves us. The open marriage arrangement collapses under the weight of the husband’s jealousy and becomes a “traditional” monogamous marriage, the lesbian main character loses her girlfriend for good to another woman (the original breakup took place before the story begins and the final realization that it’s really over happens somewhere in the middle), and switches her affection to a completely unattainable straight teenager who is hopelessly naïve and romantic in the worst sense, the teenager continues to get her heart broken by men, and the main male character turns out to be incurably homosexual and off his rocker to boot. Even Honor’s mother, we learn earlier, is a stifling jealous sort, prone to imagine all sorts of nefarious explanations for her husband’s rather mundane actions.

This is not a story I would recommend as a good poly story. It might be an engaging coming-of-age drama, but from a poly point of view, everyone is miserable. None of the non-traditional relationships are functional and no one has any kind of emotional growth that allows them to overcome their own insecurities, issues, or social pressure. We have a glimpse of a couple of lesbian couples here and there that appear to be functional, but we don’t really spend any time with them to see if they are truly functional or we just happened to peek in during the NRE stage. Leslie never revises her opinion of men as brutal oppressors of women and not worthy of her sexual attraction or emotional love. Bernie never learns to control his emotions and never stops trying to manipulate people, choosing only to run away when he finally loses the battle. Our last glimpse of Honor is of her crying her eyes out over being dumped, swearing that her partner really loves her and must only be remaining with his wife because she has some kind of hold over him (and she refuses to believe that “hold” could be love, or even devotion to family). The boss never learns to overcome his jealousy, choosing instead to manage it by placing limits on his wife’s behaviour (by agreeing to place limits on his behaviour too – not truly believing he is wrong for his sexual activity). The wife apparently never wanted the open marriage but went along with it anyway, and she also never learns to overcome her own jealousy, instead uses their open policy as a weapon designed to manipulate her husband’s behaviour. Honor’s mother never accepts that her daughter is quickly becoming an adult and needs to have some experiences in order to grow into a complete adult capable of functioning in society. And the sister does not break up with her cheating boyfriend (remember the guy the boss’ wife finally had sex with?), instead holds onto him while not trusting him, choosing to limit his behaviour as well.

This is a novel designed to frighten the readers against the perils of relationships. Not a single main character ends up happy, learns something, or well-adjusted. All the relationships, sexual, romantic, platonic, familial, include manipulation, lies, secrets, threats, and the discouragement of personal growth and/or desire to mold someone into who they should be rather than accepting them for who they are. I would not recommend this book to poly folk or poly-curious people and I would like to see it removed from the various poly book lists. It’s no more poly than any other bad soap opera that includes destructive love-triangles and secret affairs.

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