Polyamory is Not for Boys

The fear that opens this essay is a familiar one: that patriarchy will co-opt polyamory the way it hollowed out yoga, streetwear, and nearly every other countercultural thing it noticed. Then a celebrity breakup, Megan Thee Stallion leaving Klay Thompson after he tried to reframe cheating as non-monogamy, becomes the hook for the opposite argument. Patriarchy can't actually colonize polyamory, because the two are built on incompatible relationships to consent.

The case is clean. Polyamory needs emotional vulnerability and genuine respect for women's autonomy, since informed consent is impossible without treating women as full people whose choices matter. Patriarchy trains men to avoid exactly that, to read vulnerability as weakness and sex as conquest rather than mutual connection. So the patriarchal man isn't being a bad polyamorist; he's structurally unable to do it.

The piece then traces compulsory monogamy back to the agricultural shift, when lineage and inheritance turned women's sexuality into something to be managed. It's a sharp reframe: the thing patriarchy wants from polyamory is the one thing polyamory won't give it.