This is a bit belated, my analysis of sexual relationships in community.
As I explained in an earlier Smoke Trail, secular American intentional
communities are incubators of alternative lifestyles, and sexual mores
that proliferated in certain segments of the counter-cultural revolution
of the 1960s have endured in the modern-day communities movement. While
some may say that my intense interest in the private lives of
communitarians is sensationalist and puts undue emphasis on only one facet
of community life, I feel that it is an extraordinarily important aspect
that mustn't be glossed over.
The liberation of human sexual behaviour from the controlling clutches of
church and state is intimately connected to the liberation of women from
their would-be male masters, but it does not always share a position with
it, or even a direction. The century-old-story of the Oneida community in
upstate New York serves as an example of the complexities and
contradictions that occur when a community consciously charts a new course
on the high sexual seas.
This infamous community was not made up of Oneida Indians, as their name
implies, but rather of Europeans-Americans who settled on what was
formerly First Nations land. They were complete communists who owned
everything collectively, including each other; that is to say, a central
tenet of their sect was the strict prohibition on monogamous
relationships. Every community member was considered to be married to
every other community member of the opposite sex, and was expected to
engage in coitus interuptus intercourse with as wide a variety of them as
possible.
It's definitely for the best that taboos around unrealistic lifelong
monogamy were shattered. It's surely a good thing that their curriculum
included foreplay and that men were taught to hold back their own orgasms
so that the women would be sexually satisfied. And it's probably a
positive development that virile young men were encouraged to devote their
sexual attentions to so-called uglier and older crones, not only the
nubile young maidens. But forcibly breaking up infatuated young lovers is
the abolition of sexual freedom, not emancipation from sexual slavery.
And insisting that the community guru deflower the pubescent girls is
tantamount to legalized alpha-male rape.
Like most other sex-sects, Oneida's socio-sexual reforms were radical in
some ways and reactionary in others, with political leaders skimming more
than a little trim off the top, so to speak. But what about intentional
communities that explicitly oppose hierarchy, that embrace a bottom-up
model of decision-making? Is it possible to allow for the full range of
consensual human sexual behaviour without making people feel forced to
engage in all of it? I believe that Twin Oaks proves that it is, in fact,
possible.
Serial monogamy and long-term monogamy are considered valid life choices,
but they are not rewarded more than any other sexual arrangement, either
economically or socially. Without all the cultural hoo-hah and economic
incentives that accompany 2-person partnerships in our society, people get
in and out of relationships for their own internal reasons. The result of
not granting any special subsidies to straight couples would seem to be a
drastic reduction in the amount of life-long pair-bonds.
But since all members of the community are supported from cradle to grave
by the socialist system, no one suffers as a result. If parents split up
from one another, they don't break up from their babies. Children can go
back and forth between mom and dad at will, and not have to choose between
the two. In fact, some diads and triads are deciding to raise kids
together, regardless of whether or not they ever did have any sexual
relationships with one another. When the nuclear family isn't
artificially propped up like all the other integral components of the
capitalist system, it doesn't mean the death of the family, only the end
of its use as a tool of social control.
