[Angel Donovan] Janet, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. It's great to have you.
[Janet Hardy] Delighted to be here.
[Angel Donovan] Great. What I'd like to do first is talk a little bit about your background so the audience can understand where you're coming from. You've had a very interesting life, from a polyamory, and all of that, aspect.
So, could you talk a little bit about how did this all happen, the full biopic? I imagine it's pretty long, but brief summary. How did you get into it, and how did you start educating about it?
[Janet Hardy] Well, in terms of polyamory, I came of age in the late 60s and early 70s when a lot of experimentation with alternatives to monogamy...
And moreover, I was at UC Santa Cruz, which is still kind of a hotbed of experimentation. So during my late teens and early adulthood, I was very happily sort of opening myself up sexually, and having sex wherever it looked good to me.
And then I met this guy, and we fell in love. And we sort of defaulted to monogamy because we didn't really think about it. At no point did someone say, "Okay we're monogamous now," we just kind of were.
Fast forward thirteen years and here I am, married and raising two kids, and living in the suburbs. And slowly I started to look around me and go, "This is not a choice I made. It was not a considered choice. It doesn't feel good. I don't like this."
I was starting to come out into BDSM at the time, and that was not a good fit for that marriage. So the marriage ended, although it ended in a very friendly way.
Once I was out of that marriage, I decided I was not going to promise monogamy to anybody again. And I haven't, and won't. It's just not the way I want to live my life.
So my next relationship after that was a very actively poly relationship, in which both of us were seeing other people, usually separately, occasionally together. It was great. It was awesome. I loved it. And that relationship ended too, although not for poly reasons, for other reasons.
And I moved on and started teaching along with Dossie, other people, about how to lead an effectively poly life with having maximum fun and doing minimum harm.
And we wrote a book in 1997, and did a second edition in 2009. It turned out to be a runaway hit. Now I travel the world teaching poly stuff, and Dossie does too.
[Angel Donovan] That's great. Your book, The Ethical Slut, is referenced always whenever the topic of multiple long-term relationships, or multiple relationships, or polyamory comes up.
[Janet Hardy] Yeah.
[Angel Donovan] It's hard to escape that book coming up.
[Janet Hardy] Yeah, it is, and we love it that way. We did not expect it to be the hit that it is. We got very lucky in terms of catching the wave as it was just starting to crest, and riding the wave. So our timing was great.
The title did us a lot of favors, although we were terrified of it in the beginning. It just kind of caught fire. We had no idea it was going to do that, although we're thrilled that it did.
[Angel Donovan] Yeah, that's great. So how old are you now, and where do you live?
[Janet Hardy] 59.
[Angel Donovan] Okay, and you're in Oregon, I think?
[Janet Hardy] Yeah, Eugene.
[Angel Donovan] So, are you in a relationship today? What's your lifestyle like today?
[Janet Hardy] Very, very quiet, compared to my earlier wildness. I'm married to a bisexual man. We're both kind of bi, we're both of kind of gender bent, and we're both kind of celibate these days. It's just where our lives have gone.
Sex isn't very important to us right now, because we've both had an awful lot of it back in the day, and kind of saw that elephant, and now we're very domestic. He's involved in local politics, I sit home and go tappity-tap on the keyboard. For people with as wild a background as us, we look very much like a middle-aged suburban couple.
[Angel Donovan] That's nice! Do you think it's due to age and biology, or it's due to your experience? As you said, you've kind of explored a lot of the topics pretty aggressively. If you think about your whole life, you've done a lot of different things.
[Janet Hardy] I think it's both of those to some degree. Certainly my libido is not what it once was, but it's not like I never get horny, I do. However, I have the solution to that problem at the end of my right arm, so that's convenient.
It's partly that I had my journey, and I went where I wanted to go. And now I've been to the end of that journey and I don't feel any pressing need to travel that road again. Life goes on, and you have to kind of stay open to what your life is telling you it wants to be at any given time. And that's kind of what's happening for me now.
It could be that next week I'll wake up and want to be the sweetheart of the Seventh Fleet again, and that's cool too. I've built a life where I can certainly make that change if it's what presents itself. So far it hasn't, but it may.
[Angel Donovan] Great, great. So how many relationships have you had over your lifetime? And do you put those into different categories, or how do you look at it?
[Janet Hardy] Well, yeah, you'd have to define "relationship" first, and that's a really interesting problem. If you mean, "How many lovers have I lived with?" Three. However, I would certainly count my relationship with Dossie, my co-author, as a long-term and very dear relationship, in spite of the fact that we've never lived together.
We've been lovers off and on for nearly thirty years now. We've created five books together. It's a terribly important relationship, and so the minute you start counting relationships as the ones that are about living together, and sharing a joint checking account, then right away you start leaving out so important a relationship as that.
So when you start counting people that I've loved, a lot more. Some of them I've loved for two hours, some of them I've loved for ten years. I don't know where to define the edges of your question.
[Angel Donovan] Right, right. Do you make a difference between the love chemistry versus the longer-term love? How do you look at that?
[Janet Hardy] Not so much anymore. The longer I spend my life writing about things like sex and love, the harder a problem I have drawing the lines between them. Certainly the kind of love that you have when you've been through thick and thin with someone, that doesn't necessarily have that sharp edge of excitement and lust to it, is different than what you feel towards someone that you're just getting to know.
But each of them has some of the other in it, and when I start thinking about the kinds of love I have with someone I've lived with for a long time, that we've been through problems and difficulties, and death and all the rest of it, it feels like the love I might have for a dear friend. It's hard for me to tell the difference anymore.
[Angel Donovan] That's a great perspective you're giving us there. So, obviously you've been through the polyamory community, and you've had extensive experience in writing about it. So how do you look at it?
For people who haven't been exposed at all to the polyamory communities, do you put into different categories, different communities? If you're looking at the whole thing, what kind of opportunities, or what kind of background is there to all of this?
[Janet Hardy] Well, there's as many different ways to do poly as there are people doing poly, really. There are folks who are in the sort of long-term multi-partner relationship that looks pretty much like a marriage, only it has more than two people in it.
So you have three or four people, or more I suppose, who are all under the same roof, raising their children, if they have any, together. Sharing expenses, things like that. That's one model.
Another is what's probably the commonest model, which is a core couple with outside lovers. There are circles of sexual friends who all know each other, and none of them live together, but they're all friends in a sexual way.
There's any number of ways to do it, and I'm not big into... You're probably getting it by now.. Drawing lines between things, taxonomizing things. A lot of people like to make a lot of rules about, "Well this is polyamory, and this is open relationships, and this is polyfuckery, and this is..." I'm... not so much.
I'm not so much into grouping things together and putting labels on them, because I'm not sure of a reason for it. What there is, is when I meet someone new, what might develop between us. And if I try to force that into a model, then I'm not really opening myself to the possibilities.
[Angel Donovan] Right, right. So one way of thinking about this is some of these communities, like ESM, BDSM, leather and so on... In a way, they can be gateways into polyamory, I think.
[Janet Hardy] Absolutely.
[Angel Donovan] People who're interested in different types of sex... So that kind of drives them to go and look for this stuff, and then they get slowly involved in polyamory.
But what kind of gateways have you seen, or are you going to say again, there's many millions of ways... But are there main ways that people get involved in this, and get introduced to it?
[Janet Hardy] Any place where people like to think about alternative realities, you're likely to find a poly community. Which is why we see so much overlap between poly world and, say, the science fiction world. The creative anachronism world, the Ren fairs and so on. Those are kind of hotbeds of polyamory.
BDSM certainly is, because once you start questioning what sex is, which is... BDSM may not include genital sex, but it's certainly erotic, if not sexual... Then when you find out that you don't know what the edges of sex are, then whether you like it or not, you have to start negotiating the boundaries of poly.
Likewise tantra has a fair amount of overlap with poly for the same reason. Once you've reached orgasm by breathing with someone, you kind of get it very viscerally. You think you have no idea what sex is, or isn't. And when you have to start negotiating things like, "Is it okay if I go breathe with John?" then that's poly!
[Angel Donovan] Have you seen a change over time? You were talking about in the 70s, obviously that was a very specific time period.
[Janet Hardy] Yes. I think what we're doing in these times is... You know, back in the 70s, I think the reason people tried to do free love and didn't stick with it, is because there were very few models.
If you're in a monogamous relationship and you run into difficulties, there's a therapist in every town. There's a bookstore on every corner with centuries of received wisdom about how to keep a monogamous relationship going.
Before our book, there was very little about how to keep a non-monogamous relationship going. These days, there is a lot more books, many more books. There is poly group meetups, and groups, and support. There are websites. There's all this support for people who are trying to make their poly relationship work.
And that's important, to have role models, to have guidelines, to have wisdom from people who have tried it and failed. Wisdom from people who have tried it and succeeded. How it worked for them. That's what helps when you're in tough times.
[Angel Donovan] Yeah. I know there's a lot of discussion online now, with the Internet. Things have changed a lot in terms of who open things are.
[Janet Hardy] Yeah, absolutely. Many more people are out as being poly than have ever been before, and the social consequences... There are still plenty of social consequences, don't get me wrong, but they are not nearly as intense as they were when we wrote the first edition back in 1997.
[Angel Donovan] Yeah, so that's an important point. I guess you must have got some feedback about it, and it was probably a bit more shocking at the time. But is it a lot more widely accepted these days? You don't get negative feedback so much?
[Janet Hardy] Well we still get plenty of negative feedback. A lot of people are still very hostile toward poly, but it isn't the way it was in 1997, for sure.
When we first did the book we were doing a lot of radio talk shows, and people were really angry. We were sort of startled. We had already written two SM books, and we thought after writing about something as outrageous as SM, writing about polyamory would be much milder.
No. People got angry in ways we had never encountered before with the SM books. It seemed that people took it a lot more personally.
[Angel Donovan] Is it mostly religion-driven, or is it more general?
[Janet Hardy] Certainly religion plays a role, but I don't think it's the primary driver of the anger that we encountered. I have to think, based on just my read of some of the anger I've received, is if I were getting on in my life and I had been in a monogamous relationship that was not very happy for a very long time, and nobody had ever told me that there were any other options, and then this broad came on the radio and said, "No you don't have to be monogamous. It works fine other ways too."
I would be furious. And the person that I would be furious toward would not necessarily be the one who had told me that monogamy was my only option. I would be furious at the woman who had upset my world view. That's kind of my guess about why people were as upset as they were.
[Angel Donovan] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense for sure. Talking a bit more in terms of practicality here, if someone... They're listening to this, and they're interested in learning about this. They've been monogamous for a long while, and a bit like you, maybe they've had some doubts about it being the right kind of lifestyle for them.
What kind of practical things would you say they should do to reach out and get involved somewhere, and reach out to people? Are there easy steps they can take to get involved in this?
[Janet Hardy] Certainly starting with some of the good books out there would be a good jumping-off place, just to get kind of the values and principles and vocabulary.
Not just ours. Ours is lovely, but there is Tristan Taormino's Opening Up. I just wrote the foreword for a brand new one called More Than Two. There's a new book of interviews with different poly people which would be great for giving someone who was new an idea of what the possibilities are, called The Polyamorists Next Door.
There's a lot of poly literature out there that would be a great place to start. And just kind of see where, or if, you might sit in the world of poly.
And then many towns and cities have a munch now, which is a social gathering of people with an interest in poly, with no expectation of any interaction beyond the social. You can just go and have a meal, and meet other poly people and chat, which is great. None of this existed back when I first came into poly.
[Angel Donovan] So to find that, would you google, "Polyamory munch," and then your city name? Like San Diego, or whatever?
[Janet Hardy] Yeah, exactly. Google the name of your town, or the nearest town of any size, and "Polyamory" and "Munch" and see what turns up. Failing that, try "Polyamory support" with the name of your town. See what appears in that regard.
Here in Eugene, which is a small city... I think it's about 150,000 people... There is a polyamory discussion group that's hosted by one of the local poly families.
[Angel Donovan] I guess some people would be kind of nervous about what it means, because sometimes they'd maybe compare it to swinging. You hear about the swinging clubs, and things like that. Is one of these Munches very different to that?
[Janet Hardy] Yeah. That's a good thing to emphasize. Nobody is going to touch you without your consent at a poly support group meeting, or a poly munch. People are not going to be groping each other or anything like that. It's intended to be a place for new people to be safe. It will be talking, and eating. That's about it.
[Angel Donovan] So, in terms of common social rules, or common culture... You know, you're talking a bit about the vocabulary and the rules, and you're talking about safety just now. What kind of polyamory behaviors are there that are quite typical now?
[Janet Hardy] Lots, and lots, and lots of processing, and discussion, and communication is absolutely the norm in poly. When monogamous people get together, they tend to fall back, as my first partner and I did, on this well-established social custom around monogamy.
Poly people don't have that, which is actually one of the good things about being poly, is that you've got to get it out on the table and talk about it. Monogamous people, I think, run into problems all the time assuming that both partners in the relationship mean the same thing when they say "monogamy".
Then all of a sudden, they run into problems with, say, phone sex, or looking at porn, or any one of the things that one person might define as part of a monogamous agreement and the other might not. In poly, we have to talk about all of that. We have to get it out on the table, because it's going to come up, and we have to deal with it. We don't get to assume anything in poly.
The other thing that is normal in poly, I think, is recovering from misunderstanding, because no relationship can cover all the possibilities. There's always going to be stuff that sneaks through that's going to turn out that one person feels bad about. You've got to pull back from that. You've got to find a way through it, if you expect to hold the relationship together.
[Angel Donovan] Great. So how early are you talking about these discussions people have? So, for instance, if you meet someone who's polyamorous, how is that topic typically going to get introduced to you? Or if you are polyamorous, how would you think it's appropriate, also, to introduce it to someone else?
[Janet Hardy] That's one of the questions that poly people chew on endlessly, is when do you bring up the possibility of poly? And everybody has a slightly different answer. There seems to be consensus that before clothes come off, before anybody starts heading for a bed, this one has to come out on the table.
It's not something that comes up very often for me, in fact it's not something that comes up ever for me, because I've got my name on the cover of a fricking book! So pretty much I'm out before I step in the room.
But for people who do not have their names on the covers of books, the people I talk to seem to say maybe not in the first conversation, or the first date. But by the second, you don't want anybody to build up hopes or expectations of an exclusive relationship before you've had that conversation.
You have to give them the freedom to say, "No, that's not for me," and step away before they get emotionally involved. So whatever that looks like in your own relationship.
[Angel Donovan] Is there any way to tell if someone's polyamorous? Are there any signs, like people could...
[Janet Hardy] No, there's been attempts at coming up with a little symbol that people can wear. Some groups use a little parrot, you know, "Polly the Parrot," but I don't think they're well recognized anywhere. It's not like being able to wear a rainbow flag, or even the BDSM symbol. There is no universally recognized poly symbol.
[Angel Donovan] But as you were saying, I think... I mean, this is what I've seen a lot of... If they're more sexually adventurous, they're more likely to be within that world. So if you're talking about sexual topics and so on, and they seem very open and very free about it, and have had a variety of experiences, maybe you could think, "Ah, maybe this is a polyamorous person."
[Janet Hardy] They may not in fact be a polyamorous person, but they're not someone who's going to slap you when you say you're polyamorous. If they're open about other kinds of alternative sexualities, and sex in general, they're certainly likely to be aware of poly and not judgmental about it, even if they've decided it's not for them.
[Angel Donovan] You were just talking about recovering from misunderstandings. What are the typical misunderstandings that come up in these relationships?
[Janet Hardy] It's usually, "But I thought we had agreed on X."
"No, I didn't get that. I thought our agreement said Y."
Nobody is a perfect communicator. Communication is imprecise. And so a common one... A lot of poly people, novice poly people, start with an expectation that it's going to be just about sex, that it's okay to have sex with other people, but you don't get to get emotionally involved with them.
That's not an agreement. Dossie and I suggest... We think that it's going to happen sooner or later. In fact, closing yourself off to the possibility of emotional involvement is not the way I want to move through my life, and probably you don't either.
But it does happen, and one person thinks that the relationship is going to be casual, and a fling, and then it turns out not to be. And the person whose expectation was of the fling begins to get insecure because it's turning into more than that. And then there's work to be done.
[Angel Donovan] Yeah. In your book you talk a lot about insecurity as opposed to jealousy, I found.
[Janet Hardy] Our feeling about jealousy is that people talk about jealousy as if it were a monolithic emotion, that all jealousy is the same. And that's not what our experience has been. For some people jealousy is insecurity, for other people it's sort of territoriality and possessiveness. For other people it might be fear of loss, or sort of anticipatory grief.
Any given person can know what jealousy feels like to them, and if you try to treat territoriality as though it were insecurity, it's not going to work very well. So part of the process of experiencing jealousy is kind of teasing it apart and seeing what it is that you're angry, or sad, or afraid about, and then looking more directly at that, rather than just saying, "I'm jealous."
Jealousy is basically a projected emotion. In monogamous culture, me saying, "I'm jealous," means I want you to change your behavior. In poly, that's not the assumption. When I say, "I'm jealous," it's mine to figure out what to do about, possibly with your help.
I can ask for help, certainly, but it's not usually considered okay to ask someone to stop doing the thing that triggered the jealousy, because that's sort of denying yourself a chance to learn from it and get stronger and move on.
[Angel Donovan] That brings up the kind of question, "Is this nature, or nurture?" Are people kind of destined, biologically, because that's kind of the way they're made up, to be polyamorous? Or do you think this is really a journey, and anyone can start it, and anyone can get better at it, and manage their emotions, and change the way they feel about things over time?
Or do you think it's got a lot to do with... From what you've seen, as people come into this type of relationship, then there's some things about them that aren't going to change that much, and they're going to fit in somewhere better than other places. Maybe some of them, they're going to find eventually that they can't deal with polyamory.
[Janet Hardy] Yeah. I'm not a big believer in biological predetermination. We don't even know the answer to that question about something as relatively straightforward as who you want to have sex with, what gender. So we can't possibly know the answer to something as complicated as poly.
I think that certainly people who are adventurous and not terribly risk-aversive are more likely to be drawn to poly. Also, we see a lot of overlap between people who don't fit in to conventional culture very well being drawn to poly.
I think if conventional culture treats you very well, you know, if you're pretty, and successful, and popular, and all of that, you don't have much reason to question it. And so poly may not be one of the things you're interested in, because what you've got is working fine. So what poly tends to draw is people for whom the mainstream isn't working very well, who want to look at other possibilities.
[Angel Donovan] I've noticed, over time, that there's quite a few profiles on OkCupid... I'm guessing you know what OkCupid is?
[Janet Hardy] Oh yeah. I'm there.
[Angel Donovan] Okay great. So there's quite a few profiles on there where the women openly state that they're polyamorous, and they're not interested in anything monogamous. But I've had many discussions, and met some of these women, and the interesting thing I've found about all of them is that they don't show pictures of their faces. They'll have discreet photos all the time.
[Janet Hardy] There are two possible reasons for that. Probably more than two, but at least two that I can think of. One is that we do not live in a slut-positive culture, and they could be putting things that they value, like their jobs or their kids, at risk if they put their faces out there as being into poly. That's one possibility.
The other is that they may not be conventionally attractive. As I say, poly tends to draw people for whom mainstream culture has not worked terribly well. So we do have more than our share of people who don't look like magazine models. I certainly don't. You've got my headshots, you know I don't look like that kind of person. Dossie doesn't look like that kind of person.
Most of the people I know in poly do not look like that kind of person, because happy people, contented people, don't change the world. People who are unhappy with the way that things are change the world.
[Angel Donovan] Right, right. I also found them quite kind of slow in the pace of conversation. Kind of careful. And I think it goes back to your first point about we're not in a slut-positive culture, so there can be issues that come up in your work, and other aspects of your life.
So does that mean that most people who are polyamorous, they keep this as kind of like... Not a hidden part of themselves, but they don't bring it up unless they feel pretty comfortable about it?
[Janet Hardy] I would say that there's a couple things going on there as well. One of them is what you say, it's self-protection in a world that can do damage to people who have unconventional sexualities.
But I think part of it is that there's a lot of folks out there who think that because you say you're poly, that means that you are easy, that means that you want to have sex on the first date, that means that you want to have group sex. And those are not necessarily the case.
There are certainly people in the poly community who want those things, but not everybody by any means. Even if that's something that you do want, if you're a woman you want to set the pace. You don't want to be pushed into it. The fact that she wants to have lots of wild sex with lots of interesting people does not necessarily mean she wants to have it with you now!
[Angel Donovan] For the woman, it can be a safety issue as well?
[Janet Hardy] Yeah, absolutely. It absolutely is.
[Angel Donovan] Does polyamory tend to draw a few wackos? I know that's not...
[Janet Hardy] All alternative sexualities draw their share of people who are not in it for what I would consider healthy reasons. I'm not going to go to wacko, but the people who have very little to do with building a healthy relationship, or a bunch of healthy relationships.
In poly, the way that often plays out is the set collector, the guy or woman who wants notches on the bedpost, and who does not connect with lovers as people. It's a very singing kind of way to relate it.
[Angel Donovan] Right, so it's a very withdrawn, where it seems like most polyamorous people are more into in-depth relationships, like actually a lot more than most monogamous people tend to.
Because if you think about it, like, they don't talk about a lot of the issues that are under the skin in monogamous relationships, because they have this structure which is just there, so they don't talk about it. But as you were saying, in polyamorous relationships it's a lot more varied, so it's a bit more of a complex scenario, so it forces you to talk about it.
So it sounds like, from your perspective, a lot of the women involved, they're looking for at least some kind of emotional aspect?
[Janet Hardy] Yeah. If they weren't looking for an emotional connection, they wouldn't be on OkCupid promoting themselves as poly. They'd be in Casual Connections on Craigslist looking for one night stands.
Which is fine to do, and I do know some women who work that one very happily, and have their one night stands. And I've been there myself, and there's nothing wrong with it.
But it's not what a woman is saying when she's saying she's poly. There's that overlap a little bit, but they're not similar. They're not identical.
[Angel Donovan] Great. An aspect of sexual safety is STDs, sexually transmitted diseases, which, if you're multiplying your partners by, whatever the number, it multiplies your risk. So how do you deal with that in the community?
[Janet Hardy] There are different ways that different people deal with it. One is not to have high-risk sex with anybody except perhaps one core partner. To do other things that people can do together sexually that have fewer risks of disease transmission.
[Angel Donovan] Could you give us a few concrete examples?
[Janet Hardy] Play with toys. Play with hands. Mutual masturbation. Phone sex. Very, very difficult to get a disease doing phone sex! I've never yet had a person who did it.
There are a lot of ways to have a fabulous time with sex without putting tab A into slot B, as one of my gay friends says. And those are less risky and probably better to stick to, at least during the early stages.
The other thing that a lot of people do is what's called fluid bonding, which is a very common arrangement in poly circles, where when you're in what you think will be a long-term, committed, relationship, the two of you get tested, and when you test clean, you agree that you'll have unprotected sex with one another, but sex with all your outside partners needs to be protected with barriers.
And then if a barrier fails, then you have to go through the six month thing again while you wait to make sure you're both clean. That's the commonest arrangement, and you really have to do...
You know, I'm not big into saying, "Have to," about poly. I think people can do pretty much what they want. But one of the things you have to do is decide for yourself what the risks are and how to protect yourself.
One of the real rules of poly, and again I'm not big into rules, but one of the rules of poly is that in terms of sexual health, the more conservative person wins. You don't get to try to argue a person down from their own standards of safety. You have to go with the more conservative.
[Angel Donovan] Right, that makes sense. And I think an important point you brought up is you have to understand what kind of risk you're comfortable with. A lot of people maybe kind of ignore the topic, and they don't think about it too much.
[Janet Hardy] Yeah. That's what you don't get to do. You have to go do the homework on the kinds of sex you like to have and what the risks are, and decide what you personally are okay with. And then if it turns out that the person you're hot for is comfortable with something a little less than you're comfortable with, then they win. You go with their standards, not yours.
If there's a kind of sex that doesn't do anything for you, then for God's sake don't have it! And don't worry about those risks. You know, if you're not personally into anal, then don't do it. It's pretty high-risk, in fact very high-risk, and there's no reason why you should take the risk unless it's something you like.
But you know, speaking universally, what kinds of sex do it for you, and you need to know what risks you're paying in exchange for having those kinds of sex.
[Angel Donovan] So, we've come across the topic a little bit about boundaries. You discuss that. That's a topic that comes up a lot when people are talking about this. It comes up more so in relationships now, but why is it that boundaries become more important in polyamorous relationships?
[Janet Hardy] Because there's stuff pushing up against them all the time. The more people you interact with, the more... If you picture each person as a person with a bubble around them, "That's things that are mine and that's things that are yours..." If you are monogamous, the bubbles are only touching at one point, but if you're poly they're touching at three, or four, twenty points.
And you have to manage all of those boundaries. Each person that you interact with is going to want things that wouldn't have occurred to you to want, and you're going to have to decide if you're okay with them or not, and to what degree you're okay with them.
That's what we mean when we say boundaries. The choice to be poly is the choice to work those boundaries with more than one person.
[Angel Donovan] A typical model that men use today is that they'll be polyamorous without telling the women, or being very, how would you say? Very discreet about it. They don't talk about it much.
Do you see that a lot in polyamorous circles, where people come in and then they're doing it in a different way, or have you got commentary on that?
[Janet Hardy] Well, one of the places that Dossie and I differ a little bit from some other poly educators is in general the received wisdom in poly is that Don't Ask Don't Tell relationships don't work very well. My own experience is that I have seen them work, and I don't argue with things that seem to be working. So if Don't Ask Don't Tell is working, then fine, blessings on you.
I think it's cutting yourself off from some very strong connections. I think being friends with your lover's lovers can be extraordinarily fabulous. You know, some of the dearest people in my life are people that I met because they were lovers of one of my lovers.
More than the sex, that's what really draws me to poly, is that possibility of community that you lose when you do Don't Ask Don't Tell.
[Angel Donovan] Right. Do you feel also that it limits the relationship with that person? Because you're kind of saying these are our areas of our lives that are secret.
[Janet Hardy] Yeah, it's a little bit like being in the closet, when you have other lovers that you can't talk about. You have to sort of self-censor all the time.
"Wait, did I tell him about this, or am I supposed to be being quiet about this? If I talk about the movie I saw the other day, is he going to ask who I saw it with? And then I'm going to have to talk about something I don't want to talk about." It's not a comfortable, relaxed way to be. I personally prefer to live a life where I don't have to do that.
[Angel Donovan] Right, right. And this is where the ethical part of the slut comes. For me I understood that it's really about having healthy mindsets and behaviors towards polyamory and how you deal with it.
[Janet Hardy] Each pair of poly people has to decide between them how much disclosure they're comfortable with. And this is another issue that comes up a lot in polyamory, is when one person wants to hear everything and another person wants to hear very little. How do you work that?
It may be that one person gets to hear everything, and the other person doesn't have to hear much. But when one person really loves to disclose... I saw a couple break up about this not too long ago.
One half of the couple really loved to talk about what he had done with his other partners, and the other half of the couple really hated hearing about that. And they couldn't find their way around that, so that was the thing that ended a relationship.
[Angel Donovan] That's kind of interesting. How do you see polyamorous relationships end most often? Is that the typical scenario, or?
[Janet Hardy] They end for about the same reasons that monogamous relationships end most of the time! My last long-term poly relationship ended primarily around issues of money and work, which, you know, that ends monogamous relationships too lots.
[Angel Donovan] It's great to hear you guys are human too!
[Janet Hardy] Yeah, yeah exactly! We fight about housework like you do. We fight about housework like monogamous people do. We fight about childrearing. We fight about pets. We fight about all sorts of things. The things that monogamous people don't necessarily have to fight about are things like, "I have a date for Tuesday night, and you made arrangements that require that you use the car. How do I get to my date?"
I had a fight with a partner once because I was having sex with another partner in the bedroom, and he had forgotten to get his bedroom slippers out first, and his feet were cold. And he was sitting outside the bedroom feeling left off, and with his feet cold, and getting poutier and poutier about it. And then by the time we came out, he had worked up a good old mad and we had a big fight.
You know, that's not a problem that mainstream people have much, but it's the kind of thing that comes up in poly.
[Angel Donovan] So, we've talked a little bit about how some people might just feel that they're this way inclined, or they want to experiment with it. What would you say people can learn from polyamory, as opposed to normal relationships? What kind of upside is there in terms of experience?
[Janet Hardy] Oh, huge.
[Angel Donovan] Experience of life and relationships?
[Janet Hardy] Huge things to be learned from poly. One of the comments we get most about The Ethical Slut is that this isn't necessarily just a book for polyamorous people. Everybody could learn things from this book.
And we really think it's true. We just think that there's plenty of other good books about how to be monogamous, and we don't need to re-cover that ground. However, things like not making assumptions about what's been agreed to and what hasn't. That's a poly skill. Things like manipulating boundaries.
[Angel Donovan] What is manipulating boundaries?
[Janet Hardy] I should say "managing boundaries". Handling what you want and what you don't want, as opposed to what the next person wants and doesn't want.
How do you work that when multiple people and multiple needs are all around you, and sometimes they're in conflict with one another? That's what I meant, managing the needs of multiple people without losing yourself in their needs.
[Angel Donovan] Yeah. I think a very typical scenario that I've come across many times is where the other person isn't happy with your boundaries, and so they'll push against your boundaries constantly. For example, you're polyamorous, and they want to be exclusive, monogamous. Or it could be the other way round.
Is that one of the very common... Where people have kind of acknowledged what the boundaries are, but they're not going to stick with it, and they tend to keep pushing because, you know, it's in their nature. They actually want it some other way.
And is the better decision to say, "Okay, well this is just not going to be a good relationship." Which kind of things do you see go down a lot, and which way do you advise people to deal with that?
[Janet Hardy] It's very common, in fact I'd say it's almost universal, that when two people decide to go into poly together, there's going to be one that's the more adventurous person, and one that's the more conservative person. Often the male is the more adventurous person and the female is the less adventurous person in a hetero relationship, but that's not universal by any means.
And my rule of thumb is that if you're working it right, if the agreement is right, the adventurous person should be feeling like they're being held back a little bit from where they want to go, and the conservative person should be feeling like they're being stretched a little bit.
So everybody should be a little uncomfortable, but within their tolerability range. One person being constricted, one person being stretched, and both of them a little uncomfortable, but okay. That's what I call a good agreement.
[Angel Donovan] So that brings up, going back to something we were talking about a second ago, that polyamorous relationships actually can have the opportunity to help you to grow in ways that you didn't think of, because you're entering into relationships with people who're a bit more open.
And they're going to be used to, or want things, that you're not used to, and tend to push you a little bit to be open towards that, and testing it. Is this one of the main reasons it has the ability to let you grow more, and experience potentially a bit more about life and relationships in general?
[Janet Hardy] Absolutely. If you walk into a relationship with the assumption that if anything in this makes me uncomfortable, the other person will change for my comfort, which is really what we're saying when we say monogamy in many cases, then we never learn how to survive that kind of discomfort.
One of the things I love about being poly is if you want to know what you don't like about yourself, experience jealousy a few times. See what triggers it, and there you have the roadmap of what you don't like about yourself, every time.
[Angel Donovan] Do you still get jealous? Just to give us an example.
[Janet Hardy] There's little in my life right now to trigger jealousy, but if there were, yeah, of course.
[Angel Donovan] So it's not something you can work out completely?
[Janet Hardy] It's something you can get better at. I think if something triggered my jealousy now, I would have a really extensive toolkit for dealing with that, that I didn't have twenty or thirty years ago when I first started being poly. So I've survived jealousy so many times that I now know how to handle it a lot better. That said, it's still going to come up, right?
I just had coffee the other day with a woman friend who's been poly for a million years, and her spouse is in a new relationship, and for some reason this one is triggering her in a way that none of the others have done.
And she's really struggling. And in her case, it had to do with some feelings about aging, and some things she hated about aging, and the fact that the new partner is young.
There it goes again. What is it you're not liking about your life? See what triggers your jealousy. Unfortunately aging is not something we get to opt out of, except for suicide, which is not a good solution!
[Angel Donovan] Not yet. There are some people working on it!
[Janet Hardy] Yeah I know, and I've talked to some of them, and I have mixed emotions about that. But that's a different area.
[Angel Donovan] Yeah, definitely. So we've had porn stars on this podcast before. Marcus London, you may have heard of him. And it didn't seem like he got jealous, because, you know, obviously they're very polyamorous in their traditional relationships, but it seemed like his wife did sometimes.
Is that a typical dynamic? Do females tend to get more jealous, or it really can vary? Can the females be very non-jealous?
[Janet Hardy] I might be... Again, assuming heterosexual relationships... I might be willing to generalize that men's jealousy is more often territorial, and women's is more often insecure.
There have actually been some studies showing that men are more likely to get jealous when a woman is sexual with someone else, and women are more likely to get jealous when a man is emotionally intimate with someone else. So to me that points to territoriality versus insecurity.
[Angel Donovan] Right. And that fits with evolutionary psychology.
[Janet Hardy] Yeah. I'm not a big fan of evolutionary psychology, so you're going to have a fight with me if we try to go there! But that's the way we defend culture.
Everything about traditional male-female relationships has a long, long history of property, and that's not a thing that we overcome in a century. It's built into the culture. It's built into the fairy tales we read when we were kids. It's built into the language. We just can't get past it that fast. So it's not surprising that men and women would split along that line. It's just something to be aware of and work on.
Some people are more prone to jealousy, and some less. I was just reading a Facebook friend of mine who was talking about watching a sad movie with her spouse, and she was sniffling, and blowing her nose, and crying, and he was looking at her like she was insane.
Some people are more prone to that kind of crying in the movies than other people are. And in the same way, some people are more prone stumble over jealousy often, and other people just don't very much.
[Angel Donovan] I think I'll just bring up my interesting experience. Maybe you'll be able to relate to it, or maybe I'm strange, I don't know!
When I've been in multiple relationships for a while, for me, just because I don't want to be a hypocrite, I seem to be able to just turn that side off of me. Especially if I've been the one who's kind of set the rules, and if the girl's kind of just accepted them, then I haven't really had a problem with jealousy.
But sometimes, if you put it in the other scenario, where you're exclusive, then I can get triggered by these kind of feelings. And it seems like it's based on the way I'm looking at the relationship. Is that something common for men, or for women? That it depends on the type of relationship they have?
[Janet Hardy] Yeah, it's a matter of expectations. If you're in a relationship where there's an expectation of a particular kind of availability, then finding out that that's not necessarily the case is likely to be a jealousy trigger.
So if you've been expecting you guys are going to sleep in the same bed every night, that's one that people often do in fact, and then it turns out that, no, some nights she's going to go be in somebody else's bed, then yeah, you might get a little triggered. And you're going to have talk about that. Figure out if there's an agreement that needs to be made.
[Angel Donovan] Yeah. So again it comes back to down expectations. So it seems like you link your whole idea of jealousy... You're linking it to expectations that have been broken in some way. So, would better communication, and the things we've been talking about, like discussing boundaries ahead of time, they compensate for jealousy a lot of the time.
[Janet Hardy] You can forestall that kind of problem most of the time. There will be times, we call them landmines, where sometimes something is going to happen that you had an expectation about, it turns out they didn't realize there was an expectation there. That's when you have to sit down and discuss it.
Some of the fights happen, or it may just be that, "Well, gee, I didn't know you expected that. Yeah that's not a problem, let's do it that way."
[Angel Donovan] So you're talking about fights, and obviously in your book it comes across as more healthy, and you kind of should avoid having arguments, and you should sit down and talk about things.
How does it tend to be for most people in these situations? Are there still lots of people fighting and shouting a lot, or have a lot of people come to terms with discussing these things more calmly?
[Janet Hardy] It's just a matter of, to a large degree, cultural background. The fighting skills that people have learned along the way, that they saw modeled for them growing up. In some families there's a lot of shouting, and slamming of doors, and general loudness, and abruptness, and harshness. And that doesn't mean violence by any means, it just means a different way of expressing disagreement.
And in others, it's very common reasons. There can be problems when there's a mismatch there. There can be big problems when there's a mismatch there. But they're all communication styles, and it's just a matter of finding ones that work. I'm a very conflict-averse, very calm person. I don't lose my temper easily, so my arguing style tends to be a certain amount of crying! But a lot of rational talk.
[Angel Donovan] That's an interesting one, crying. Can that sometimes be emotionally manipulative? Like a response? Like when the argument comes up, you start crying, and it's conjuring up a situation in the relationship.
[Janet Hardy] I don't think it's usually meant... In my case I know it's not meant to be emotionally manipulative, it's just when women, again, in culture, get overwhelmed with emotion, it tends to come out our eyes. It's like too much to hold, and so that's where it comes out.
Men more often it comes out with banging things and yelling things, and being loud. But it's the same thing, it's just too much emotion to hold at the time.
[Angel Donovan] So is there anyone that shouldn't do this? Like, would you say... Are there people that you would say, "Polyamory's not for you." Or, like, if you're think about in certain ways, it's maybe not for you. Have you seen any, kind of, darker side things that maybe people would want to avoid?
[Janet Hardy] If you're happy with your monogamous life, then poly isn't for you. There's no earthly reason you should try it unless you're drawn to it. It's a fair amount of work, and a fair amount of social sanction, and, you know, why should you? If monogamy is working, then do monogamy for God's sake.
If you're not interested in a certain amount of self-examination, looking at what drives you, and what upsets you, and what you want, and what you don't want, then you're not going to be very good at poly, because it asks for a lot of that.
And some of what you find out may not be stuff that you like, and then you have to work on that, and it's a lot. So if that is uncomfortable for you, it's probably best for you not to do poly.
[Angel Donovan] Well the way you're talking about it right now sounds a lot like self-help, self-growth.
[Janet Hardy] It can be.
[Angel Donovan] Doing work on yourself to make yourself better.
[Janet Hardy] But the fact that my co-author is a therapist, and I'm a therapist, comes out pretty strongly in our writing and speaking, I think. But yes, it certainly does have self-helpy issues. There's a lot of overlap between the language of self-help and the language of poly.
Because sometimes talking about poly reminds me a lot about the talking I do about SM, in that we're consciously and intentionally going into things that we know are going to be difficult, and making the commitment to get through them and be stronger at the end.
[Angel Donovan] I think it's a great reason to be involved in it, because I've certainly grown from mine. One of the reasons I don't do it anymore is because I found it very distracting.
[Janet Hardy] That's the other thing, it's if you have already a very busy and full life, there are genuine time commitments involved in poly that are not just the time you're spending in bed with all these different people.
There's a lot of processing time, a lot of time that you want to spend with them not in bed, so that they feel like you want them for something besides their genitals. It's a time commitment, and an energy commitment. And if you're working on your doctoral dissertation, now may not be a good time for you to be poly!
[Angel Donovan] That's a great point. So I'd like to know a bit more about you as a person. Is there any aspect of sexuality in relationships you've yet to explore that you think you'd like to one day, or anything like that that you haven't approached yet? Or maybe even write about?
[Janet Hardy] Well, as previously mentioned, I'm bearing down on my sixtieth birthday, and I've spent the last thirty years of my life exploring sex as pretty much an avocation, and to some degree a vocation. So I pretty much have had my shot at the kinds of sex I want.
I can't right offhand think of anything that interests me that I haven't tried. Certainly if something were to come up, then I would go try it. But as I sit here right now, I can't think of anything that I am yearning to do that I haven't had a shot at doing.
[Angel Donovan] That's great. That sounds like satisfaction!
[Janet Hardy] Yeah! I'm not unhappy about it!
[Angel Donovan] What was your worst experience over those thirty years? Or your best experience? Have you got a couple of examples of things that you thought were particularly great?
[Janet Hardy] Oh God, so many lovely experiences. It's hard to pick out the good ones. The bad ones...
[Angel Donovan] Or the one that changed you the most?
[Janet Hardy] There's one. I've written about it, and it'll be in the new book, but it hasn't been in a book yet.
When Dossie and I were working on our most recent book, which is a book called Radical Ecstasy, which is about the spiritual aspect of BDSM, we were exploring tantra together.
And in the process of exploring tantra together at a workshop, I had what some people call a kundalini awakening, where I was overwhelmed by the energy and swept up, and out of control, and screaming, and just utterly out of myself.
And it changed everything. Which, again, that's a subject for a whole other interview. I could talk for hours about the things it's changed. But that was the thing that changed everything for me, and I don't even know whether to call it one of the best experiences or the worst, because it was both.
[Angel Donovan] Okay, great. So that was tantric sex, and kundalini?
[Janet Hardy] What most people would call sex. We were sitting in each other's laps and breathing together.
[Angel Donovan] Sure, sure.
[Janet Hardy] If that looks like sex to you...
[Angel Donovan] Right, right. Like, tantra's a bit of a wide area.
[Janet Hardy] Yeah.
[Angel Donovan] That's interesting. I actually did read your article you wrote on that, which I found interesting.
[Janet Hardy] I'm hoping to write about it at more length in the new book.
[Angel Donovan] Yeah, sounds like a big marker in your life.
What is your greatest conflict? Are there any conflicts in this area of your life, relationships and sex, that you haven't managed to resolve over time?
[Janet Hardy] This is going to sound terribly mundane, but what have I paid for this life of mine? Before I started down this path, I was an advertising copywriter on my way to becoming a creative director.
If I had stayed on that path, I would probably have a whole lot more money than I do now. Whereas now the mundane issues of money, and housing, and all of that, are still an ongoing struggle with my life, as I move on from middle age into old age.
And, you know, I don't know any sex educators who have gotten wealthy doing it, we just don't. So that would be the conflict for me, is the fact that following this path... Which I think has been terribly important, and I'm glad I did it, and a lot of other people are glad I did it... But that's what I paid for it.
[Angel Donovan] Yeah, great. I mean, it's an endless debate. I left a corporate career in management consulting to do other stuff. I made the same decision, and I'm happy with it. And other people will sit on different sides, and they'll always look at the grass is greener on the other side.
Often I think most people kind of wish they took your route, the creative route, at the end of the day. So, I know you're working on your book now. Is there anything particularly exciting about that for you?
[Janet Hardy] The writing is hard and glorious. I'm trying to keep it at the highest possible level. There's a lot of, sort of, dominatrix memoirs coming out right now, and I'm not really interested in writing another one. So I'm not interested in doing the kind of book that's, "Well then I beat this guy, and then I fucked this other guy."
I'm trying to write about the essence of what BDSM did for me, and why I did it. And that's hard stuff, because nobody really understands why we do BDSM, we just do. Some of us are drawn very strongly to it for no reason that anybody knows, and I'm trying to sort of get at those reasons, which will not have anything to do with anybody but me. But yeah, that's the reasons for me, and that's really hard, really inward work that I can only do for a little while at a time.
[Angel Donovan] That sounds very interesting. Who, besides you... You actually mentioned a few people already earlier in the interview... But I was wondering who, besides yourself, would you recommend for high quality advice in this area. Polyagony... Polyamory?
[Janet Hardy] Polyamory... Polyagony, I like that!
[Angel Donovan] I said polygamy, but I didn't... Pronunciation... Maybe it was a Freudian slip, who knows!
[Janet Hardy] Well I think I mentioned Tristan Taormino's Opening Up is very highly regarded. Jenny Block did a good memoir, especially for people who are living a fairly conventional life and still drawn to poly.
Her memoir is about sort of being a conventional wife and mom, getting into poly from that viewpoint. And Dossie and I have been sort of dropouts from mainstream culture for many years, but Jenny wasn't, and isn't.
Likewise Pamela Madsen's book, Shameless, is a fabulous book about exploring the outer realms of sexuality while maintaining a core relationship.
I have not read Elisabeth Sheff's The Polyamorists Next Door, but from everything I've heard about it, it's terrific, and I think it's a badly needed book. Start talking about how people actually implement polyamory in their own lives.
Wendy-O Matik's Redefining Our Relationships. Anthony Ravenscroft's Polyamory: Roadmaps for the Clueless & Hopeful. You know, there's a lot now.
[Angel Donovan] Yeah, that's a great list there. Thank you very much.
[Janet Hardy] Sure.
[Angel Donovan] So, the last question. We ask everyone this...
[Janet Hardy] Oh, Deborah Anapol's classic book, I should mention. Deborah wrote the first poly book, which was at that time called Love Without Limits, and I think now it's called Polyamory: The New Love Without Limits.
Hers is more about the kind of poly where multiple people live together for a long period of time. That's kind of a specific model of polyamory, but it's really good about that.
[Angel Donovan] Great, thank you for those. What would be your top three recommendations to men, to help them if they're interested in this area, polyamory. Or maybe they're already involved in it, but how could they improve it? What would be the kind of recommendations you would make to them?
[Janet Hardy] I can't remember who I'm quoting when I talk about this radical proposal, that women are human beings! It's a sort of classic feminist quote.
The men I see who make themselves unpopular in poly circles are the ones who don't open themselves to connection, who are in it for the status of lots of notches on the bedpost, or the status of banging the hottest chick in the room, instead of the vulnerability of opening yourself to different people.
I think any sex that you have from ego, is not going to be very good sex. Sex is about vulnerability, and ego is about invulnerability.
That's a very self-helpy recommendation, but that's really my recommendation for men who're getting into poly, is to come into it with as much openness, and humbleness, and vulnerability as you can. Which does not mean losing yourself in any way, it means being yourself as much as you can.
[Angel Donovan] That's a great quote, I'd never heard anyone call ego about being invulnerable before, but it makes total sense. That's a great way to put it.
Thank you very much for those Janet, it's been a really great discussion. I've enjoyed it very much, and, yeah, thanks for making the time to be on the show.
[Janet Hardy] Absolutely. Will you send me the link when it's up?
[Angel Donovan] Of course!
[Janet Hardy] Okay. Alright, thank you so much Angel.
[Angel Donovan] Alright. Have a good day, bye-bye.
[Janet Hardy] Bye-bye.
