This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
***
These days, a flagship news publication running a fawning story about polyamory is about as surprising as a sports section running box scores. So I wasn’t at all shocked when I saw the latest entry in the New York Times’s “Modern Love” series was titled “Lindy West Thought She Couldn’t Handle Polyamory. She Was Wrong.”
Still, the piece was worse than I could have imagined.
That’s because West, a writer and cofounder of the “Shout Your Abortion” campaign, is married. It was her husband, Ahamefule “Aham” Oluo, who proposed their arrangement. West, meanwhile, “envisioned a classic, happy marriage” and “thought we would probably have a baby.”
Not so Oluo, who told West early on in their relationship that he did not think monogamy was “healthy” for him. Twice divorced by 27, he attributed the failure of those relationships to “possessiveness and jealousy.”
Like any normal person, West cried and felt “devastated.” Now, I’m no marriage guru, but if you propose something to your wife that makes her break down crying, you probably should abandon it — especially if that proposal is “I want you to support my infidelity.”
Oluo didn’t do that. In fact, he told West it was racist that she, a white woman, didn’t want him to have sex with other people. He eventually moved across the country to be with his girlfriend, at which point he essentially made West date the both of them. West grew to accept the arrangement in what she credits as a therapeutic breakthrough, but which is very clearly an acceptance of Stockholm syndrome.
To add insult to injury, West — who describes herself as having “a fat body” — says that Oluo’s girlfriend is “tiny, little, beautiful … very much an inverse of me.”
This obviously sounds horrendous to anyone with a mostly functional moral compass. But let’s strip away all the New York Times-approved therapeutic language and tell this story in plain English: A man who ended two marriages before turning 30 because he presumably refused to stop cheating marries a woman, cheats on her with a more attractive person, and bullies his wife until she thinks she’s the lucky one for being a part of her husband’s relationship with his mistress.
Twenty years ago, that would have been too implausible for a Lifetime movie. Today, it’s a Wednesday human interest feature in the paper of record.
How did we get here? It’s not that this particular kind of sexual deviance is new. “Swinging” is basically synonymous with the 1970s and, as Gay Talese chronicles in “The Neighbor’s Wife,” has been something Americans have practiced since at least the 1930s. Nor is it that we’ve simply started discussing a once-taboo thing: The first season of “Friends” features an episode where Chandler dates a woman in an open marriage.
The problem is that we’ve essentially let the swingers win. It’s not that we’ve normalized it — if a typical American couple moved a girlfriend into their house, they’d certainly scandalize the neighbors — but we’ve all but accepted that these are things people will do. We say “polyamory” instead of “swinging” or “freaky nonsense.” And we write think pieces about “polyamory” like it’s a new kind of generational slang instead of something deeply, deeply strange.
I am not the first conservative writer to lament the total absence of shame in American society, and I’m not here to launch a moral crusade. Someone else can do that. No, my goal is much more modest. I’m not sure we can stop this nonsense altogether, but we can absolutely make the swingers retreat back to their Vermont compounds to live out their postmodern harem fantasies under the cover of darkness.
It’s time to make weirdos embarrassed again.
Let’s go back to Lindy West’s prince of a husband. This guy sucks. If you get divorced twice before 30, you need to hang it up and spend the rest of your life thinking about what you did wrong. The fact that this walking red flag managed to get another woman to marry him and then convinced her to let him get a girlfriend is insane.
Ideally, this guy would’ve gone to church or gotten shoved into a locker and not grown into such a terrible person. Barring that, West should have heard “two divorces” and run for the hills. And as an absolute last resort, the second he proposed “non-monogamy,” she should’ve used her sizable platform to shame this loser and make him completely undateable in Brooklyn or Portland or wherever else smelly lotharios go to manipulate women with art degrees.
We may never be able to put this particular genie back in the bottle — the days of shocking exposés about swingers are probably behind us — but we can absolutely get back to the kind of society that produced the “Friends” episode where the swinger was both clearly a bad person and a punchline.
In fact, I think it’s important we don’t try to overshoot on this one. While there are some genuinely disturbing offshoots of “polyamory” — I’m thinking of Daniel and Grace Lavery, both transgender-identifying, who formed a “throuple” with a biological woman they somehow got pregnant — this is, by and large, not a serious moral crisis that needs to be battled. It’s a farce perpetrated by bad people who think they’re smarter than everyone else, and it needs to be mocked.
If you feel like I feel, join the cause. The next time the New York Times publishes one of these articles, don’t read it. If you ever meet a man who tells you he’s polyamorous, tell him he’s a bad person. Most importantly, get married and have kids and do normal things like coach Little League and have movie nights and — I cannot stress this one enough — do not cheat on your wife with an ethnically ambiguous performance artist and then try to intellectualize it so a bunch of Vassar grads tell you you’re a hero.
Just be normal. It’s easier than all this woke nonsense, and certainly more rewarding. And if enough of us do it, we can send these hippies back to the commune once and for all.
***
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
[#item_full_content]
[[{“value”:”
This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
***
These days, a flagship news publication running a fawning story about polyamory is about as surprising as a sports section running box scores. So I wasn’t at all shocked when I saw the latest entry in the New York Times’s “Modern Love” series was titled “Lindy West Thought She Couldn’t Handle Polyamory. She Was Wrong.”
Still, the piece was worse than I could have imagined.
That’s because West, a writer and cofounder of the “Shout Your Abortion” campaign, is married. It was her husband, Ahamefule “Aham” Oluo, who proposed their arrangement. West, meanwhile, “envisioned a classic, happy marriage” and “thought we would probably have a baby.”
Not so Oluo, who told West early on in their relationship that he did not think monogamy was “healthy” for him. Twice divorced by 27, he attributed the failure of those relationships to “possessiveness and jealousy.”
Like any normal person, West cried and felt “devastated.” Now, I’m no marriage guru, but if you propose something to your wife that makes her break down crying, you probably should abandon it — especially if that proposal is “I want you to support my infidelity.”
Oluo didn’t do that. In fact, he told West it was racist that she, a white woman, didn’t want him to have sex with other people. He eventually moved across the country to be with his girlfriend, at which point he essentially made West date the both of them. West grew to accept the arrangement in what she credits as a therapeutic breakthrough, but which is very clearly an acceptance of Stockholm syndrome.
To add insult to injury, West — who describes herself as having “a fat body” — says that Oluo’s girlfriend is “tiny, little, beautiful … very much an inverse of me.”
This obviously sounds horrendous to anyone with a mostly functional moral compass. But let’s strip away all the New York Times-approved therapeutic language and tell this story in plain English: A man who ended two marriages before turning 30 because he presumably refused to stop cheating marries a woman, cheats on her with a more attractive person, and bullies his wife until she thinks she’s the lucky one for being a part of her husband’s relationship with his mistress.
Twenty years ago, that would have been too implausible for a Lifetime movie. Today, it’s a Wednesday human interest feature in the paper of record.
How did we get here? It’s not that this particular kind of sexual deviance is new. “Swinging” is basically synonymous with the 1970s and, as Gay Talese chronicles in “The Neighbor’s Wife,” has been something Americans have practiced since at least the 1930s. Nor is it that we’ve simply started discussing a once-taboo thing: The first season of “Friends” features an episode where Chandler dates a woman in an open marriage.
The problem is that we’ve essentially let the swingers win. It’s not that we’ve normalized it — if a typical American couple moved a girlfriend into their house, they’d certainly scandalize the neighbors — but we’ve all but accepted that these are things people will do. We say “polyamory” instead of “swinging” or “freaky nonsense.” And we write think pieces about “polyamory” like it’s a new kind of generational slang instead of something deeply, deeply strange.
I am not the first conservative writer to lament the total absence of shame in American society, and I’m not here to launch a moral crusade. Someone else can do that. No, my goal is much more modest. I’m not sure we can stop this nonsense altogether, but we can absolutely make the swingers retreat back to their Vermont compounds to live out their postmodern harem fantasies under the cover of darkness.
It’s time to make weirdos embarrassed again.
Let’s go back to Lindy West’s prince of a husband. This guy sucks. If you get divorced twice before 30, you need to hang it up and spend the rest of your life thinking about what you did wrong. The fact that this walking red flag managed to get another woman to marry him and then convinced her to let him get a girlfriend is insane.
Ideally, this guy would’ve gone to church or gotten shoved into a locker and not grown into such a terrible person. Barring that, West should have heard “two divorces” and run for the hills. And as an absolute last resort, the second he proposed “non-monogamy,” she should’ve used her sizable platform to shame this loser and make him completely undateable in Brooklyn or Portland or wherever else smelly lotharios go to manipulate women with art degrees.
We may never be able to put this particular genie back in the bottle — the days of shocking exposés about swingers are probably behind us — but we can absolutely get back to the kind of society that produced the “Friends” episode where the swinger was both clearly a bad person and a punchline.
In fact, I think it’s important we don’t try to overshoot on this one. While there are some genuinely disturbing offshoots of “polyamory” — I’m thinking of Daniel and Grace Lavery, both transgender-identifying, who formed a “throuple” with a biological woman they somehow got pregnant — this is, by and large, not a serious moral crisis that needs to be battled. It’s a farce perpetrated by bad people who think they’re smarter than everyone else, and it needs to be mocked.
If you feel like I feel, join the cause. The next time the New York Times publishes one of these articles, don’t read it. If you ever meet a man who tells you he’s polyamorous, tell him he’s a bad person. Most importantly, get married and have kids and do normal things like coach Little League and have movie nights and — I cannot stress this one enough — do not cheat on your wife with an ethnically ambiguous performance artist and then try to intellectualize it so a bunch of Vassar grads tell you you’re a hero.
Just be normal. It’s easier than all this woke nonsense, and certainly more rewarding. And if enough of us do it, we can send these hippies back to the commune once and for all.
***
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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