Monogamy is Wrong: Hannah McNeely.

and advocates of open relationships will
say well if someone gets hurt or someone feels jealous it just means that that person needs to evolve does nobody get hurt by monogamy is monogamy truly safe does monogamy make you invulnerable to these things she claims an open relationship will make you feel vulnerable to i know open relationships or any other form of non-monogamous relationships allude to this idea of freedom to love without boundaries to go beyond the rules of tradition but in reality this isn't true freedom someone always inevitably gets hurt she started off talking about freedom but then halfway through such a short statement she started talking about vulnerability having the freedom to try something new is not the same as being invulnerable to the consequences freedom and vulnerability or invulnerability freedom and responsibility for the outcomes of the choices you make these things are not mutually incompatible they're mutually inextricable they're not to be confused advocates of open relationships will say well if someone gets hurt or someone feels jealous it just means that that person needs to evolve does nobody get hurt by monogamy is monogamy truly safe does monogamy make you invulnerable to these things she claims an open relationship will make you feel vulnerable to do married people never feel jealousy how high are the stakes and consequences of marriage if it's truly a monogamous marriage if you are a virgin at the time of marriage and then you only ever have sex with that one person for the rest of your life you tell me which is more high risk and which is more low risk which one makes us more vulnerable more prone to disaster and tragedy if it's an open relationship with options and freedom and the possibility of being hurt having hurt feelings sure or if it's committing to traditional monogamy one man one woman no options no freedom till death do us part that's a high risk gamble and if you think nobody gets hurt you're living a lie i think at the core of the polyamorous argument is this misguided utopian idea that the convention of two partners staying together is holding us back from experiencing unbridled sexuality this is ireland exotic far away difficult to imagine ireland isn't it strange how these overly abstract philosophical hypothetical ideas suddenly come into clear crisp focus when we just bring up the historical reality of any particular given example such as ireland have you ever googled the history of marriage and divorce law in ireland have you ever i don't know googled history of gender relations and the status of women in ireland it's horrifying it's been horrifying over the last 50 years it's been horrifying over the last 500 years it's been horrifying for the last 2 000 years and ireland is not the worst example we're not talking about saudi arabia we're not talking about the history of the status of women in china guys it gets pretty dark but ireland is dark enough how is it possible to think there's nothing to be rebelled against in the traditional legal and cultural reality of what monogamy is what monogamy was what monogamy still tries to be yes monogamy does represent an oppressive ideal with an absolutely terrible track record for the last 2000 years of human history in myriad cultures but if we can step away from the faceless abstractions to think about an historical example just one just anyone whether it's ireland or others you can just bring yourself to think from the grassroots reality up instead of from the realm of abstractions in the sky down this is what you're gonna find you're gonna find that a great many of the ideals being presented by both sides of this argument are frankly unbelievable i want to challenge this idea that being married to one person for 50 years means you're going to wake up to one person every day for the rest of your life the truth is if you and your partner are both committed to evolving and continual growth you won't be the same people five or seven years down the line this is so mind-blowingly stupid you're gonna reassure people that if they're married for 50 years it's really gonna be like having sex with a new person every seven years what if what if your girlfriend grew up listening to dmx and she grew up let's just say she had posters on her wall of the rapper dmx of this tall lean muscular black sex symbol and conversely if you're black watching this video let's say you're a black man married to a black woman but she grew up with posters of justin bieber on her wall and fantasizing about justin bieber i can never look like dmx and some dude out there who looks like dmx can never look like justin bieber you can never supply that you can wait seven years you can wait 50 years if you're going to sleep with the same person every day they can never wake up as another person they can never satisfy that curiosity or that interest in you and not all interests are that shallow i come over again and again saying look question yourself when people fantasize the fantasy version of themself very often is much shallower than the reality of who they are and that's why fantasies turn out to be so much less erotic or they're more horrifying in practice than they seemed in your mind's eye you can't be married to someone who's simultaneously an english literature major and yet also a chemistry major i mean there may be different kinds of intellectual and emotional perspectives on life that you want to if you can have that in your life without sleeping with more than one person that's great good for you but if you can have that in your life and also sleep with more than one person why can't we say good for you too i see more discussion about open relationships and polyamorous relationships vibrating throughout social media spaces a lot more than the beauty of monogamous relationships which is likely due to the fact that there's this belief that monogamy is this institution that we have to fight against and question have you ever been to indonesia have you ever been to malaysia do you really think do you really think there's any truth to this claim that monogamy is not an institution we have to fight against um um how about how about a little closer to home how about italy how about any culture that's just steeped in christian or even jewish tradition have you ever once in your life googled how divorce court works in the modern state of israel you're in for a surprise after careful thought and consideration and lots and lots of listening i've come to my own conclusion that open relationships just don't work the only argument she presents is to compare an idealized notion of what the best possible monogamous marriage is like to a cartoonish notion of what an average or awful open relationship is like that's the method she uses throughout the video again and again jealousy is not an indication of weakness being jealous that your partner is sexually intimate with another person is a very normal human response and maybe that response is normal for a reason because jumping into bed with someone else who is not your partner is damaging to your relationship here we have the merely inevitable appeal to nature fallacy right it's natural and normal and therefore good is that the next step is that the next step we're supposed to make a lot of things are natural and normal and evil revenge people desire and yearn for revenge and it's existed in all societies how about slavery how about men wanting to buy and own slaves in part to sexually exploit them have you even read the bible that's existed in most societies throughout most of human history and we have now an extraordinary struggle against human nature in trying to repress limit eliminate slavery and forms of prostitution that come pretty close to human slavery you may well argue that jealousy is natural and normal that doesn't mean it's good that doesn't mean it's optimal for centuries and centuries christians have argued that christian marriage is natural and normal that doesn't mean it's good that doesn't mean it's remotely optimal not just for one individual might it be sub-optimal but when you scale it up for society as a whole it's awful for a whole lot of people it's awful for a whole lot of us living together and in case you forgot in judaism and islam especially but even in christianity people managed to convince themselves that cutting off the human foreskin engaging in so-called circumcision even cutting off the clitoris female services was natural and normal and part and parcel of this tradition of monogamous marriage so if you're wondering just how far human beings can take it going down this natural and normal and inevitable equals good road it's taken a long time for society to shake off the shackles of those hallowed preconceptions personally i think open relationships are a sign that a couple is not willing to do the hard work to access the hot and steamy stuff that monogamy has to offer i think suggesting opening your relationship and your bed to other partners is a lazy way of trying to fix something that is fundamentally broken or is a demonstration of simply wanting to give into desires and distractions remember just because you have the desire or the urge to bone someone doesn't mean you should as human beings we have a lot of desires and urges but it doesn't necessarily mean that they are justified or need to be acted upon okay so let's turn that around and question the other side of the equation what if you have the desire as a man to dominate and control your wife what if you have the desire to control everyone your girlfriend spends time with speaks with and sleeps with and to deny your girlfriend the opportunity to act out this fantasy she's had since she first started listening to hip-hop music which she was 14 years old and she kind of wants to sleep with a guy like dmx just two or three times in her life who knows is that is that a healthy desire for the man to want to repress and control the girlfriend and feel like he's the only man she's ever had sex is it healthy for men to want to marry virgins and to dominate and control that girl as she turns into a woman and a crone and be the only sexual experience that woman is read and vice versa what if a woman falls in love with somewhat nerdy looking jewish guy who grew up in new york city let's just say he was a graffiti artist in new york city he was into hip-hop culture and this guy grew up his whole life watching music videos with these beautiful african-american models and it's always been there at the back of his mind just once in his life just two or three times he's got to have the experience of sleeping with a woman who looks like these icons of beauty that he's known from hip-hop culture but that he has never been able to really spend time with her actually let's say he settles down with let's say he's a virgin when he marries a young woman from new york city let's say she's also jewish and university educated they have a whole lot of other things in common but not this i mean sex by its very shallowness evades all the other considerations that make a marriage good and meaningful and rewarding and people people get married to people they're not attracted to people consciously make the decision to marry someone who's ugly and bad in bed because they have other redeeming qualities that may really be more important and more meaningful but guess what you can never be dmx neither can i and if you're this guy's wife you can never be that hip-hop model from a jay-z video i really think if a couple is considering opening their relationship there's probably something at the core of their relationship that's broken i think suggesting opening your relationship and your bed to other partners is a lazy way of trying to fix something that is fundamentally broken but her assumption and her assertion is that sleeping with another partner is a way a lazy way to try to fix something that's fundamentally broken how dare you you ever heard of bisexuality what if a woman is in love with a man and gets married to a man but she's bisexual a white man can't turn into a black man but much less can a man turn into a woman it seems the biggest draw away from monogamy is this imagined idea that sex with one partner for the rest of your life is inevitably boring are you gonna make the counter argument that it's not boring for anyone ever have you ever known a woman who got married to a bisexual man it's not just about boredom but let's face it even if it were even if it were there's no way any of us can make the dogmatic claim that each and every marriage is not boring that boredom isn't a legitimate problem some some some married couples must have to deal with i i happen to have a very gratifying sex life every time i make videos talking about it i get hate mail i'm not gonna come out here and take my own relationship and my own sex life as a standard of normalcy that i assume anyone else achieves in their relationships in their marriages ever you have to recognize the number of people who could be happy with just one sexual partner is a minority and then within that there's a very small minority of people who happen to be able to get married with someone who is in that way a perfect match for them and we all know why we're all working with a limited talent pool that then gets more and more limited when you think about the facts and factors you require to be in a meaningful relationship with somebody to have a working family life with somebody to have a career with somebody so on and so forth even though we might like to pretend that sexual gratification is the most important factor in choosing a boyfriend girlfriend husband or wife it's not it gets demoted to third place fifth place tenth place real quick i really think if a couple is considering opening their relationship there's probably something at the core of their relationship that's broken people who want to have more than one sexual partner per lifetime we're not saying more than one a week we're not saying more than one a month more than one per lifetime there's nothing broken with them there's nothing that they need to fix to make the magic of monogamy happen monogamy is a broken paradigm inherited from our monotheistic cultural history and forms of prostitution that come pretty close to human slavery i said human slavery because i'm vegan human slavery my veganism is showing