I think we should see other people.” “Are you breaking-up with me?” “No, I just think we should see other people.”

The open relationship. Non-monogamy. She’s dating other men, and you’re free to date other women. You can even sleep with thes

e other people. In a way it’s like any other relationship, two people joined together in the search for passion, inspiration and fulfilment. Only this time the backdrop is richly coloured, varied and nuanced, never blurring in the traditional tumble-down, head-over-heels…it’s like the sun is shining just for you but from a thousand little lamps, blinking out across the city, an ocean of pleasure awaits.

Then you discover the pit of your stomach, explore it, feel it grow and tingle, constantly reminding that out of sight is not so easily out of mind. What do these other people have that you don’t? How long must you keep up this experiment, which every day feels less and less like a mere (a safe) pretence? What if your partner meets someone they like better?

Thus we have a composite of experiences of, and expectations about, non-monogamy, drawn from conversations with over a dozen individuals and couples during the past eight months. The impetus for this exercise was this writer’s own experiments with non-monogamy, as what were initially casual chats – have you ever done this before? – quickly snowballed into much more substantive discussions.

First, let’s get clear what we mean by non-monogamy: not a single man or woman dating around, with or without sex. What we mean is some kind of committed relationship, characterized by feelings of affection and respect. The sort of relationship where you would describe the other person as your partner, boyfriend or girlfriend.

Alice and Paul are a good example. (Not their real names.) They have been living together for a few years, during which time both have taken several lovers. (Did you know there is an iPhone application that tracks a woman’s menstrual cycle? Alice uses it to make her rendezvous doubly safe, it’s one of their rules. The other is perfect honesty.) They tell each other all about their lovers, what sorts of feelings or emotions led to the attraction, and in the process learn a huge amount about each other. Alice and Paul are the most ‘in love’ couple I have ever seen.

Alas, Alice and Paul are also amongst a very small minority of people with positive views of non-monogamy. Ask around Oxford (or even New York, my former home) and one is much more likely to encounter uncertainty, suspicion, even hostility.

“I think it makes sense in theory, but there’s no way I would be comfortable with that.”

“I could do it, but I know my partner wouldn’t be able to handle it, so I’ve never raised the question.” (How could you know this if you’ve never asked? “I just know.”)

“No.” (While shaking an index finger back and forth.)
Why so much negativity about non-monogamy? After all, from an evolutionary perspective, non-monogamy seems to make a lot of sense: the chances of successful reproduction are enhanced, for both males and females, by taking multiple sexual partners, and scientists have documented a huge range of species that behave accordingly. (This includes humans, incidentally, who demonstrate a surprisingly consistent cross -cultural penchant for cheating, extra-marital affairs and divorce.) What’s more, to the extent monogamy benefits child-rearing (two are better than one in this expensive and time-consuming process), the impetus here is clearly temporary (even for humans), and in any event can be (and often is) satisfied with less-than perfect monogamy.

More to the point, ‘parental responsibility’ is just not the reason most people give if you ask them why they dislike the idea of non-monogamy. Instead, appeal is made to a wide-range of influences and norms, including: religion (“It is against the Ten Commandments, it’s sin, it’s just not on.”); culture (“It has a lot to do with out-dated ideas of manliness.”); social (“Girls aren’t allowed to date any of the guys their friends like. People can stake claims.”); even personal experience (“Every time I’ve tried it, the end result is everyone getting hurt.”)

Of course, regardless of what one thinks about the persuasiveness of these reasons, the fact is no one really needs to justify their practice other than to their partner. (More than one person made this point in the course of conversation with this writer. Point taken.) But what about that? Assume your partner would derive some kind of different pleasure or fulfilment from some other person. Possibly this includes a sexual relationship, but not necessarily. Would you want your partner to ignore this impulse and remain ‘faithful’ to you?

“Well… I think that’s an interesting question…”
Really? Isn’t that an easy question? If it means anything to love another person, surely it means to want for them their greatest happiness.

“Yes, but why should that happiness come at the cost of turning my world upside down?”

Why does this have to be the end of the relationship? Oh, right. See above. So much drama, but I wonder how much of it is really necessary. It’s just not clear that all those good things about relationships are zero-sum propositions. Surely we would all be better-off not throwing our feelings up like glass houses all over town. More pointedly, is the right reaction to your partner finding some more or different happiness, to wish away that happiness? Is that what you would have them wish for you?

Unless you maintain that being in a committed relationship means no longer finding other people as attractive, monogamy raises some difficult questions about the expectations we must have for the behaviour of those whose happiness we purport to care most about. It also seems that the only good answer to those questions involves thinking seriously about some kind of honest, open relationship. Time to board the non-monogamy train.

Zoe Margolis has a lot to say about sex. Having it, wanting it, fantasising about it, and most of all, not denying that she has a lot of it. In her famous and now published blog, Girl With a One Track Mind, she writes about her variety of sex-related experiences with complete frankness and clarity. Intercourse, oral sex, threesomes, masturbation, it’s all there, with no explicitness left out. As Zoe herself says, “it’s graphic, but then, that’s shagging for you – it’s a sticky thing, no matter how you approach it.” But there’s one f-word she makes no apologies for using – feminism. She is unafraid of calling herself a feminist, and clearly sees her writing as more than one blogger writing about her (albeit incredibly interesting) sex life. On behalf of the Women’s Campaign, I invited her to speak at the Moser Theatre in Wadham to an audience of men and women, and interviewed her on her blogging, and social attitudes to sexuality.

I ask Zoe how her sex-blogging differs from the huge volume of sex-related writing out there in our sex-saturated media. “I had to try to create a different space, because I thought women’s magazines were incredibly restrictive in terms of how they portrayed women and female sexuality – it was always about making yourself the object of desire to men, rather than about owning that desire and desiring men. The other alternative to women’s magazines seemed to be the idea that you get liberation through selling your body for sex. I wanted to be able to talk about sex in a really open and honest way, and say “Yep, I want sex, I have my own desires and I’m happy about that, you can call me what you want – I don’t give a shit.”” She certainly was called a whole range of names, from “slut” to “seedy” to “shameless”, and those playground epithets appeared in newspapers as mainstream and respectable as the Times. “The only reason I still have confidence, after all that, is because I get emails from young women saying the book helped them. I think well, that’s what it’s all about – letting young women look at their sexuality in a different way.”

It’s clear that spreading the message that women can be active in sex and in their desire is very important to Zoe. “It’s not said often enough or loudly enough, but there are a lot of us out there, I know. When I first started writing, I got thousands and thousands of emails saying “we feel the same””. But it’s even more astonishing that this is not a mainstream idea for women’s media. “I recently pitched an idea to a very well-known women’s magazine, about masturbation for women, about owning your pleasure, and they said – can’t you just write a piece about how to give your man pleasure in bed? It’s always about positioning women’s desire in terms of men and not in terms of their own pleasure. It’s so undermining – I wanted to be able to say, I have my own desire, and I want to express it myself.” Surely, I say to her, this bizarre view of passive desire is counterproductive on the part of women’s magazines – surely women want to know about pleasure as much as men do, because pleasure is so central to a sex life? “I hope more women begin to realise that the way sex is talked about can be so undermining of female pleasure. If you take it all in, it’s almost like brainwashing, and you start to see yourself as an object rather than the subject of desire.”

I ask Zoe how she thinks the mainstream discussion of sexuality is changing. She isn’t optimistic. “I’m desperate to separate out the conflation between sexual desire and the sex industry, which has started to emerge. My work is about making it easier for women to express their desires about sex, rather than trying to persuade them to become a stripper or sell their bodies. There’s the freedom to sell your body, but that’s not the same as the freedom to express sexual desire. The sex industry is often falsely talked about as liberating – it may be liberating in a financial way, but it’s not liberating in a sexual way, and those are very different things.”

Zoe talks on a whole range of issues, from the way female bodies are always presented in the media from a male point of view, to the lack of pornography made for the female perspective, to the need for better and more open sexual education in schools. There is a real feeling that Zoe is saying things that are both true, revealing and important about the way we treat sexuality in society, and the men and women in the audience burst into applause several times. Towards the end of the talk, one audience member asks how we, in the student community, can create a better social attitude of understanding one another’s sexualities. Zoe responds, “I say aural sex is the most important part of sex – the ability to listen to what women and men want and need. People don’t listen enough and talk enough. Men want love as much as women want sex, but it’s unmasculine or unfeminine to admit to those things. By talking about them honestly, we can challenge those stereotypes, and have better relationships, both sexually and emotionally. We need spaces to do that in, in which we can be open about our wants and needs.” This is why Zoe’s writing is not just about one woman and her sex life – she is trying to show us an alternative voice, a voice that says that women desire sex in so many different ways, and it’s okay to talk about that.

Zoe Margolis is the Author of Girl With a One Track Mind: Exposed, published 5th March 2010 (Pan Macmillan £7.99)

Antonia and Natalya look at the confusion at Cardinals’ Cocktails, the Sexbridge blogger (as well as the sexless at Oxford blogger) and violence at Oxford.

They then take a cheeky peek at the centrespread on Chatroulette and fill up on their weekly dose of Fit College and Blind Date.

Link to Sexless at Oxford blog: http://sexlessatoxbridge.blogspot.com/