Women get sucked in by the promise of more healthy communication and emotional needs being met. Men get sucked in because they think they will be living like a sheikh with a harem of nubile barely legal women that will do all the degrading acts he wants but not expect him to be monogamous.

Yes, women are sadly the architects of our own destruction much of the time. Poly is one example, gender ideology is another. I'm sure there are more. It sucks. Men go around rampaging and trying to stick their johnsons into everything and somehow come out winning like 90% of the time. Sigh.

I'm pleasantly surprised to see that reddit has largely peaked on poly! In 2018 it was universally proclaimed as the evolved and mature thing to do... but the same problems kept creeping up. I used to read and post on the poly subreddit, and boy was I getting black pilled on it fast. 50 posts per day that followed the same scripts.

Scrote: "How can I manipulate my girlfriend/wife into poly?" gets called out in the comments for being manipulative, tries to play the victim, boo hoos and whines. Posts again in a week saying he wants to bail on his relationship because his partner is "too controlling and small minded" to let him chase his dong all over town.

Scrote: "Omg, please throw me a pity party, I'm a poor oppressed victim! I just now realized I'm POLY and my wife and mother of 4 is oppressing me by not consenting to me going on the prowl for pussy!!!!"

Then there were women posting, totally confused about why their enlightened New Age Guy (married to another woman) is treating her like a Pocket Pussy; I thought we were going to be sharing our emotions all the time? Why does he roll through, blow his load, then disappear until the next time he does that? Super confusing!

And the bitter males posting about how he arm twisted his young attractive girlfriend into poly, and now he sits at home flogging his shrimp while she is out getting railed by a different hot guy 4 nights a week. And he is MAD but somehow can't verbalize why. I mean he got what he wanted. Turns out the pool of women for him to pick from have substantial mental health problems (BPD ahoy!) and/or have 20 men on rotation and he can't compete with those guys, so it's him and Rosy Palmer as a dynamic duo.

Poly sucks, pass it on.

Before, guys used to say, "I like you a lot, but I need to see other people." Now they want a committed bang maid while they pretend they can have sex with an unlimited number of women .

I think that’s how it starts out… and eventually evolves into 80 year old dudes marrying 13 year olds.

Look, even with prostitution there are theoretical scenarios which are OK. There certainly are libertines who love sex who might want to get money for it when someone they are into it offers… no harm done, right? Except that the vast majority of prostitution isn’t like that, and by accepting one you let in the other.

Same with polyamory. A few horny libertines doing their thing is fine. But acceptance leads to expectations and pretty soon people are being pressured into situations they don’t want.

"level of communication and emotional labor from your partners that you don't normally get in monogamous relationships"

I have found that everyone I've ever known who practiced polyamory was unable to sustain the lifetime, or even relatively long-term, communication and emotional labor of a relationship with one other person. When it gets difficult, they can't take a break with someone else.

I remember this discussion thread on polyamory where one guy was asking if he should tell other members of the polycule about one partners' STD diagnosis. Consensus was no if condoms were used. Preserving that person's privacy was judged to be more important than everyone else's safety. Or more accurately, disclosing it would have put a stop to all "fun" activities for a month or two while everyone got tested. I find, despite all their protests, the sex matters more than any supposed emotional support to those people.

In theory, it's fine. In practice, it's mostly couples looking for female unicorns. I find that too often with couples, one partner is dragged reluctantly towards that lifestyle. That communication they keep bragging about is often lacking. Plus regular men are already bad communicators. They don't get better with polyamory. Women are barely above men on that scale I personally find.

Men don’t do the emotional labour or communication, though. They just want something to fuck and will say whatever it takes to get it.

Other women are trying to get ahead by pandering to men because they get special favours when they do. The minute they stop, or get too old/ugly/educated/powerful/etc, men will refuse to play along and another woman will sadly step on her to take that role up. Women never win. It’s all about the men.

Yes and a ton of those same hip, respectable, intelligent women will argue that they are really enjoying their BDSM lifestyles, that it allows them to “process” their rape trauma by reliving it with their boyfriends night after night, and that having bruises and bleeding at the hand of someone who’s supposed to love them makes them orgasm harder.

Stockholm syndrome is not just effective on stupid people.

The women pushing poly were also told they just needed to be more “open minded” and they took the negging to heart. It may have started with men saying it, but once they roped some women in, those women had no choice but to repeat it to other women or admit they’d been duped and it was not a good way to live.

But I guarantee if you told them there was a button they could press, where they would be assured to get the same amount of “emotional labor and communication” and love from one partner who was faithful to only her instead, they’d smack it before you finished the sentence.

There are of course going to be straight women and lesbians who are into it as a fetish, just like there are gay men who are into swinging and orgies. They are a separate issue.

As to the men who supposedly don’t have extra partners while the women do - these men are either the trope of the scrote who thinks he can get women all day and fails, or they’re just lying about it like the men in monogamous marriages. They get off on the deceit.

I unfortunately ran with too many non-monogamous people myself due to where I lived and worked. It was the same story every time and yep the women were the ones pushing it themselves. It was like if they could convince me and other women around us to join their “lifestyle”, they were somehow validated and didn’t have to face the music of how miserable they clearly were.

I think it’s the same as the current “trad wife” trend. Trying to convince other women they shouldn’t work and should just have children on command and serve a man all day, so they can feel like they are right. You see some men trying to spew it, but the majority are just getting women they’ve already brainwashed to recruit others.

From what I can tell, it goes one of two ways and for the same reason but both men and women perpetuate it.

Men are bored of their other half/not in love/take her for granted/think lowly of her and open the relationship up or ask for threesomes (only with other women of course) and USUALLY what happens is the woman gets more offers and he ends up being bitter about it and wants to then close the rs back up again.

OR

Women are bored with their other half/not in love/know he'll put up with anything/want to explore their sexuality (the man agrees to this one because lesbian experiences aren't "real") and it's usually a case of the man sticking around through all of this because he's in love with her but eventually she leaves him for another man or woman who she actually falls in love with.

I see the same story all the damn time and it always boils down to a broken relationship, where one half is simply not in love or as in love and treats the other person like a security blanket or back up which inevitably leads to resentments.

Not a lot to add, except I can say that various counterculture groups pushing for it goes back to at least the 19th century (the Kristiania Bohemians were one group, 1880s Norway, overwhelmingly men but it seems like interestingly the push was to abolish marriage and relationship restrictions...but not cross class barriers). A lot of the same arguments we see recycled today about jealousy and that whole sense of superiority and enlightenment... and didn't seem to work any better in practice then. And in the same time period in the English-speaking world in the mainstream, there were massive double standards regarding things like extramarital affairs, where it was expected from men but largely unacceptable in women (although mileage varied, depending on whom).

There is a lot to criticize in polyamory, but one of the central tenets is an inordinately high degree of communication and emotional processing...The books seemed to offer that you could get in non-monogamous relationships a level of communication and emotional labor from your partners that you don't normally get in monogamous relationships

Since this post is about accountability, I hope you don't mind my asking: why would this be true? Even on a purely hypothetical level, what led you to believe that this was plausible? I'm not not connecting the theoretical dots.

I’m not a naturally monogamous woman. In my youth up until after 22/23 I stayed on the path due to not having much experience and still believing in fairytales, but I eventually came to hate sexual restriction once I learned what I liked and seeing middle age around the corner I now know that I only tolerate monogamy because of the relative rockyness of being “in the streets” as they say. You don’t magically have better options just bc you’re poly. You’re right back in the exact same piss pool of people you just left after you found your primary partner. I don’t want to continue to expose myself to nonsense by a factor of many multiples based on each new person I try to hook into a rotation and I don’t want to expose myself to STD risk. I don’t think I could have a viable poly life unless I was some kind of very well positioned , traveling CEO or something like that with the best quality pool of options and a strong exit hatch, but to relate this back to the actual point of your post, I learned early on to not grandstand about poly and mostly only discussed non-monogamy with like minded women. I figured out very early that it’s batshit to try to export this relational model to a general population. Unless someone says it’s what they already have done I don’t bring it up in a one on one conversation. I hate to come off as one of those who think they have it figured all out and are more enlightened than others.I’m not. I just have a different tolerance level for gnawing uncertainty and potential disaster, and can’t lie that the potential for disaster has a healthy probability .