For centuries, women have been encouraged to turn on each other, rather than the men who wronged them.

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I n northwest England in 1292, Alexander le Wood cheated on his wife, Almaria, with another woman named Almaria (apparently he had a type). His wife discovered this and, according to legal records, “was enraged.” But instead of lashing out at her husband, she hired two women and a man to kill Almaria #2 in exchange for a gift. The team of killers — colorfully named Ellis of Skelton, Lettice Greathand, and Goda Hurlepot — carried out Almaria #1’s wishes and killed Almaria #2. They put her body in a sack and took her on horseback to a moor, where they buried her. Almaria #1 was arrested, paid a fine, and went free on bail. The legal record does not say what happens to her.

What strikes me about this case — in addition to the love triangle, the fact that both women involved with the same man have identical names, and one woman’s hiring of two female killers to kill another woman — is its emphasis on female jealousy and women’s rage. Almaria #1’s actions are clearly named in the legal record as motivated by fury — “commota” in Latin, related to the English word “commotion” — against Almaria #2.

The case illustrates women’s anger expressed as violence against another woman, showing how women have long directed their fury at one another instead of the men who have wronged them.

I was reminded of the two Almarias when I served as an alternate juror in a criminal trial in Philadelphia. Two defendants, a man and a woman in their twenties whom I’ll call Ellis and Almaria, were on trial for allegedly attacking the woman’s ex-boyfriend Alexander — the father of her two young children — and his new girlfriend, Alice.

On the first day of the trial, the District Attorney for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania drew a diagram of the complicated relationships among everyone involved. He was tanned and handsome and douchey in his well-tailored suit, wearing a Fitbit on one wrist and an expensive watch on the other, a gleaming tie clip holding his pink silk tie in place. He told us that Almaria had two children with Alexander. After they split, he started dating Alice, although he continued to hook up periodically with Almaria. She became pregnant with a third child and told Alexander that he was the father, only to confess that it was actually her co-defendant Ellis’s when the baby was two months old, invoking the stereotype of the sexually transgressive woman who deceives men about her baby’s paternity. In addition to having similar first names that start with the same letter, the two women shared the same last name, although they were not kin. The lawyers mixed up their names repeatedly throughout the trial, reinforcing the connections between them.

The trial centered on a violent incident involving both couples. As Alexander and Alice stood outside one summer evening, a white van with its headlights off circled the block twice. The third time, it stopped, and Almaria and Ellis emerged. Another car pulled up, carrying Almaria’s sister and her two best friends. A group of men also appeared. The four women began to beat Alice, while the men attacked Alexander. Someone allegedly said, “Fuck it, get the gat,” and bullets began to fly. A parked car was shot full of holes. Almaria, Ellis, and their friends fled the scene.

A police officer testified that he stopped them shortly thereafter, Ellis sweating and shirtless, Almaria’s three small children in the backseat. We were shown photos of Alice’s scratched and swollen face, mascara dripping beneath her eyes, a large bruise darkening on her temple. I thought back to the medieval Almarias — women with similar names fighting over the same man, sexual jealousy and infidelity, and an angry woman marshaling other women to attack her sexual rival with violence.

Throughout the trial, both sets of lawyers drew repeatedly upon the trope of the angry, competitive woman whose jealous fury against her sexual rival incites her to violence. This narrative goes back to Medea in Greek mythology, sending a deadly poisoned robe to her husband Jason’s new wife after he abandons her. Each side invoked it for their own purposes: The D.A. wanted us to believe that Almaria’s anger at Alice was so great that she attacked her with brass knuckles and was willing to kill her, while the defense lawyers sought to convince us that Alice’s anger at Almaria prompted her to file false charges after a mutual fight. They repeatedly emphasized the fact that Almaria had two children with Alexander, while Alice had none.

Millennials Are Embracing Anger – And That’s A Good Thing

“Do you have any children with Alexander?” asked Ellis’s lawyer when Alice took the stand.

“I lost two babies,” she said.

“I’m very sorry to hear that,” he said, although he did not sound sorry at all.

“And were you angry when Alexander told you he was having another baby with Almaria while you were with him?” he asked.

“I was angry with Almaria for messing with him,” Alice replied, as though Alexander had no role whatsoever in impregnating his ex girlfriend, as though he was utterly helpless when faced by a calculating woman who wanted to sleep with him. The two women glared at each other across the courtroom.

This toxic narrative is pervasive in our language — for example, there is no male equivalent term for “homewrecker” — and in popular culture: After Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck, as well as Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale, announced their separations within several weeks of each other, both couples quickly became the focus of a flurry of tabloid stories about Affleck’s and Rossdale’s respective infidelity with their children’s nannies. But rather than focusing on the husbands’ transgressions, the coverage blamed the nannies and focused on the conflict between wife and nanny. Meanwhile, the philandering men were painted as hapless victims, even though data shows that nannies, who are often low-income women and women of color, are disproportionately vulnerable to sexual harassment and assault by their male employers.

Ask Ijeoma: Is The “Other Woman” Free To Do As She Pleases?

“Ben Affleck’s Nannygate Scandal — Is He a Villain or Victim?” asked one headline, accompanied by a photograph of an unshaven, anguished-looking Affleck tenderly cradling a golden retriever puppy in his arms. Similarly, coverage of the Stefani-Rossdale divorce blamed the nanny and created narratives of jealousy and competition between the two women: “Nanny Who Allegedly Broke Up Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale’s Marriage Gives Birth,” proclaimed one headline several months later; another asked, “Gwen Stefani Jealous? Hot Family Nanny Linked to Ex Gavin Rossdale Has Baby, Engagement Ring.”

The cases of the two Almarias, separated by over seven centuries, illustrate how easy it is for women to hate one another in a woman-hating society, where the misogyny is ancient and toxic and pervasive like lead covering our pipes, our walls, our windowsills. We ingest it day by day until it slowly poisons us, until we are so sick that we cannot even identify who or what is responsible for our harm. It coats the quotidian spaces we inhabit, affecting how we think, shaping our behavior, afflicting every system and organ in our bodies, storing itself in our bones.

These cultural fictions of masculine haplessness and feminine culpability, which we absorb like poisonous water and dust left behind by long-dead builders, have tangible results in cases featuring women’s real-life anger and violence directed against other women instead of the men responsible for their harm.

Alexander, the man involved with both women, finally testified, sauntering insolently to the front of the courtroom. The jurors craned our necks in anticipation, eager to see this prize of a man worth fighting over. He had wispy sideburns and a bright red lipstick kiss tattooed on the right side of his neck.

Several grim-faced women of various ages sat in the back row of the courtroom with their arms crossed throughout the trail. Many had tattoos on their chests, and one had very elaborate bangs. All of them swiveled their heads to glare as one, like a many-headed Fury, at Alexander as he took the stand. This group of women challenged the lawyers’ narrative about female antagonism, as they banded together to support Almaria and directed the full force of their wrath at Alexander.

“So were you seeing Alice at the same time you were seeing Almaria?” Almaria’s lawyer asked in a raspy voice.

“I wasn’t seeing anyone. I was talking to Almaria, and I was talking to Alice,” he said defensively. The grim-faced crowd of Furies looked as though they would rend him limb from limb.

After closing arguments ended, the judge dismissed the alternate jurors. We went to the Chili’s next door to drink margaritas from blue plastic tumblers and gossip about the case, our lips flecked with salt. A large group of the courtroom Furies, now smiling and jolly, entered the Chili’s and sat down together, but they did not see us.

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/is-love-infinite-a-polyamorous-roundtable-on-jealousy/ Fri, 17 Nov 2017 22:08:40 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=8374 Read more]]> ‘I’m happiest when my support networks are as wide and tribe-like as possible, and a lack of jealousy makes that easier to sustain.’

Is monogamy a choice or a societal steeping? Is it romantic, a sacrifice, an expression of devotion, glorified claustrophobia, Puritanical backwash, or some good old fashioned cultural evolution? Or…something different altogether?

I think many folks (myself included) intellectually understand how fraught monogamy is—one person satiating every sexual desire for 50+ years?!—but in the more reptilian facets of our brains we can’t handle the sickening jealously of even thinking about sharing the person we love.

It feels too messy, too complicated; it can feel like desiring more than one person is greedy or predicated on that person not being “enough.”

While it would seem that poly folks have seemingly banished the green-eyed monster—after all, who would voluntarily subject themselves to that sensation?—it’s actually, like so many theories in life, exponentially more complicated than that. Poly folks aren’t impervious to jealousy, but instead engage with it as yet another emotion to wrangle, another salient data point in how they’re relating to the world, themselves, and intimacy in their lives.

The Est. asked four poly folks to talk about their relationship with jealousy, the beauty of shared romantic love, and what they’ve learned along the way.

Holly Francis on the fostering of implicit trust:

To love and be loved: This is the fundamental state most yearn for. Humanity has long been looking to prophecy, divination, and the essence of the human experience to figure out how to live the very best life. For some, the answer comes in the form of polyamory and the practice of ethical non-monogamy; but how do we approach the seemingly inherent jealousy of human relationships in a way that is nurturing, rather than destructive?

A common theme in polyamory — especially for those newly embracing the lifestyle — is how to quash seemingly rebellious feelings of anger at betrayal and fear of being cast aside. Trying to hide insecurities works most effectively in settings where those insecurities are never challenged, but the dynamic interplay between jealousy and successfully navigating polyamory isn’t one of those settings. Challenging the status quo handed down in the form of monogamy and navigating the emotional upheaval of a standard way of life requires immense trust, communication, ownership, and respect.

The secret? Polyamorous people can, and do, get jealous. Rather than being a negative trait, though, it can be the impetus for introspection and the critical examination of how to more effectively deal with challenges. Jealousy lets us know when something needs to be addressed, and it rather frequently seems to come back to a fear of neglect or abandonment. As with any relationship, learning and growing with one partner can be difficult — in a relationship with multiple partners and multiple considerations it can feel impossible.

Trusting your partners have your best interests at heart, fostering effective communication that addresses concerns before they spiral out of control, taking ownership of one’s own feelings and actions, and respecting the choices and limitations of others are among the standards of success in polyamory.

“Well, it’s just not for me. I could never do that.”

And that’s fine. One of the best parts of poly, for me, is that no one is trying to force their approach to relationships on others — it’s a matter of basic respect. Exploring the reason why you “could never do that,” however, is vital to the idea of personal ownership. In the searching for an answer to the question of why jealousy is so uncomfortable and the idea of sharing is so abhorrent, many people start finding the idea of polyamory more relatable. These questions don’t have to be asked within the confines of a monogamous relationship, but in any search for love and how to be loved.

How do we approach the seemingly inherent jealousy of human relationships in a way that is nurturing, rather than destructive?
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Jealousy is indeed an often green-eyed monster that turns some into a nervous or even aggressive wreck. It’s uncomfortable and it brings up feelings we’d rather not deal with. If you don’t trust your partner around others, but you posit that you trust them, the reality is that you don’t actually trust them to be in control of themselves when presented with opportunity. Perhaps you’ve been hurt in the past, and can’t tolerate your significant other speaking with exes and thus try and limit their autonomy — you become sick to the core at the thought of sharing your partner with others and so you do not. You tell yourself you can’t. But what happens to your relationship when you remove the limitations you never even created to begin with and place real, implicit trust in your partner?

Allison Elliot on odious comparisons:

Having multiple relationships means navigating a host of feelings — feeling both good and bad. For me the link between compersion — the feeling of happiness for your partner’s relationship with another person — and jealousy, is all about comparison.

Compersion happens naturally for me at the beginning of my relationship with a new partner. I admire the love that that person has with their other partner (or partners) and feel genuinely happy that that love exists in their life.

As the relationship progresses, however, I begin to compare my relationship with my partner to their relationship with their other partner. What once made me happy suddenly makes me feel like my partner and I don’t go to the movies enough, they don’t text me enough, or they text too much during ourdates — every difference I perceive in my relationship versus their other relationships becomes a potential problem, and I grow jealous.

“Enough” becomes this inexact measuring stick I begin using to gauge my emotions in an effort to make the good in my relationship equal to the good of the other relationships that I’m perceiving.

While comparisons can be odious, I’ve realized that these comparisons can lead to positive outcomes; for example, feeling jealous after my partner goes to the movies with their other partner has lead to me simply realizing that I just want to go to the movies with my partner. The feeling doesn’t actually extend beyond that.

Comparison-caused jealousy grows particularly difficult when my self-esteem isn’t as intact as I’d like it to be or my relationship with my partner is struggling. If my partner wasn’t feeling up for sex during our last date, but they had sex with another partner days later, my brain makes leaps — it makes connections and conclusions before I can take a breath.

My brain tells me my partner had sex with someone else because of my flaws, because our relationship is rocky or not as good as the others in their life. I force myself to reiterate, again and again — “their sex is not about me” — to try and dispel all the dangerous and damaging conclusions my brain is trying to draw from that sequence of events. I remind myself of the bottom line: Comparison is unfair, unhelpful, and unhealthy. It’s also bullshit, obviously, because “their sex is not about me” is absolutely true.

Also, their relationship isn’t about me either, which makes even a seemingly positive concept like compersion exponentially more complicated. Because compersion allows an individual to mentally insert themselves into a dynamic they are actually not a part of, good feelings can quickly give way to bad ones. And at that point, thinking about yourself in the context of other peoples’ relationships becomes unreasonably self-centered.

While not all polyamorous people experience these emotions, I think the trick to all of this is conceiving of your relationship with your partner as though it were on its own — is it good alone, without comparison?

Zephyr Schott on undermining the patriarchy:

Eight years ago I told one of my closest friends I felt a tremendous amount of bottled-up affection for the people in my life who wanted to be closer to me; I told them I wished I could clone myself so that I could give all of them the care and appreciation they wanted from me. I was in the middle of a four-year monogamous relationship at the time and the thought of anything outside of that familiar and exclusive relationship structure had not even occurred to me.

Monogamy was so assumed, ingrained, and automatic that the thought of cloning myself occurred to me before any notion of dating more than one person. I was steadfastly loyal to all my monogamous partners for years and felt pangs of jealousy when my ex-girlfriend flirted with other people, when my high school ex-boyfriend went to prom with someone else while I was sick and stuck at home. I also felt that my jealousy was unwarranted and never brought it up with either partner. But looking back my real mistake was not discussing those feelings openly with them and stewing in my insecurities instead.

A couple of years later I found myself in a new relationship with someone incredibly jealous. He would check my text messages and even my receipts to make sure that my conversations were not too friendly and to check that I was being honest about my location at any given time. Yet the main feedback I got about this relationship from my friends and family was that they were so happy to see me with someone who cared about me so much. I was miserable, confused — I felt trapped and isolated.

After we broke up I joined a Rocky Horror Picture Show cast and started to date someone I liked and trusted a lot — they were also poly and preparing to move to the other side of the country after graduating from university. I’ll admit that having felt trapped in my last relationship, having the upcoming physical distance gave me a sense of safety.

Knowing that I was new to a nonmonogamous relationship structure, this partner was extremely caring and conscientious about checking in with my feelings. At first I did feel uncomfortable and jealous, but I largely tend to approach even the most personal experiences from an anthropological and rational perspective. Rationally, the philosophy behind ethical non-monogamy made a lot of sense to me and I recognized monogamy as being the kind of authoritative and hierarchical construct that I am generally opposed to.

Monogamy was so assumed, ingrained, and automatic that the thought of cloning myself occurred to me before any notion of dating more than one person.
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When my emotions did not match up with my thoughts I started asking myself what I was afraid of and why exactly I was feeling these pangs of jealousy. What were those feelings grounded in and were my assumptions based on empirical evidence or enculturation? I talked to my partner about my feelings and slowly became friends with some of the people he was involved with, which was really helpful. I started to realize that going on dates with and sleeping with other people did not reduce his feelings for me; I began to realize that jealousy was an unnecessary and even a counterproductive emotion. I realized I could just feel happy that someone I cared for was happy.

I started to experience a paradigm shift and my emotions started to align with my rational thoughts. He seemed surprised at how content I was to just sleep with him and let him have multiple partners of different genders as long as he was safe about it. He was a bit concerned that I wasn’t dating or sleeping with anyone else, but I explained this was just due to the simple fact that there weren’t other people who I felt like dating at the time.

And while I’m not impervious to pangs of jealousy, every time I feel it, I ask myself why and it almost always results from some kind of internalized insecurity. But the more I communicate openly and critically reflect on my emotions, the more natural poly relationship dynamics have become for me, the more I feel that I am living in alignment with my values of autonomy, consent, open and honest communication, and in opposition to property or hierarchy.

Molly Stratton on the dangers of the lizard brain:

I don’t get blindsided by jealousy very often, but one of my most intense pangs to date was in response to one of my partners telling me he’d been reading science-fiction short stories aloud to his primary. But even then, the sensation was pretty short-lived — I couldn’t help laughing at myself: This is what sets me off?

I used to think practicing polyamory would somehow make me a more empathetic person, but experience has shown me again and again that I can still be just as confused and anxious while poly as I am in any other relationship configuration. I just happen to be unbothered about “normal” relationship jealousies — like who sleeps with who and how often — and honestly? I still don’t have a good theory as to why.

Perhaps it’s because I was lucky enough to fall into a close-knit group of friends before we started boinking each other, and watching two people I’ve already known for six years engage in PDA is as jealousy-inducing as knowing that they snore or that they’re allergic to apricots. Or maybe it’s simply that my personality is so intensely nerdy that it isn’t sex but the (in my experience) much rarer shared interest in Golden Age sci-fi which trips my jealousy meter.

Other times, I think of my lack of jealousy as a sort of queer survival mechanism. I’m an only child from a tiny family, with no desire to marry or have children of my own. But I’m happiest when my support networks are as wide and tribe-like as possible, and a lack of jealousy makes that easier to sustain. Poly people don’t actually all sleep with each other all the time, but the fact that it’s a possibility can ironically help us relax and see each other as people, rather than competition for affection. (I knew I had “made it”, relationship-wise, when I found myself not only having regular dates with my partner, but regularly playing Zelda with his wife.)

Interestingly enough, when people talk about jealously creeping in, I find myself thinking not of my romantic relationships, but of my friendships. When my longest-running fandom friend confirmed that she had, in fact, been talking to a Tumblr mutual longer than she had me, my lizard brain immediately wondered if the other person was somehow “better.” When my best friend moved an hour away, I felt as intensely about it as I had as a lonely grade-schooler. And every time I plan a party, I have to stop myself from speculating on how the number of guests reflects my likeability as a person.

Maybe it’s because (irrationally), I see romantic relationships as something people will move mountains for, whereas a friendship can be derailed by a busy schedule, a new job, or simply discovering you don’t have the same fandoms in common anymore.