The Decolonizing Love Manifesto

Unlearn Hierarchical Thinking

Colonial culture organizes all relationships through hierarchies. Man over woman. Parent over child. White person over person of color. Rich over poor. Able over disabled. Thin over fat. Young over old. Couple over community.

Decolonizing love means rejecting what we can call the Dumontian lie. Louis Dumont was a French anthropologist who argued in the 1960s that society functions better when everyone simply knows their place in a rigid hierarchy. His ideas gave intellectual cover to inequity by saying that natural human differences produce a natural hierarchy.

We reject relational hierarchies.

Egalitarianism is humanity's oldest relational tradition. Coercive domination is the true aberration: a cultural virus that first infected our species at the dawn of the agricultural revolution.

Challenging this mindset requires looking at our daily realities: it means examining whether we make collective decisions in our workplaces, and questioning if dynamics in our bedroom like BDSM also normalize a hierarchical mentality.

Our collective liberation begins the moment we stop structuring our relationships around pathological, coercive domination and its relational hierarchies.

End Compulsory Monogamy

Monogamy is neither humanity's romantic default structure. It is one relationship form among many but has been an important weapon for colonialism.

Compulsory monogamy serves patriarchal capitalism. It shrinks vast care networks into isolated nuclear households, replaces extended kinship which provide resilience with dependency on a single partner, and produces loneliness and vulnerability on an industrial scale. Before European colonialism, most societies in the world practiced plural and communal forms of romantic and familial love that strengthened peace, cooperation, and collective survival.

When people are taught there is only one legitimate way to love, they interpret their own natural relational diversity as a personal failure. They then feel compelled to shrink themselves to fit a monogamous mold.

We refuse to shrink.

Liberating ourselves from compulsory monogamy is to be in touch with our authentic selves. It frees us from structures built for social control rather than human flourishing. We demand the right to define our own love practice.

Build Intentional Community

Humans are not meant to live in isolation.

Isolation produces suffering. Isolation produces codependency. Isolation produces control. But that is the point: to atomize us. To exhausts us. It keeps us vulnerable and too depleted to organize, resist, or dream.

We will build villages.

The central unit of a healthy society is not the couple or the household, it is a web of interdependent relationships. We will nurture neighborliness. We will revive collective care. We will not outsource belonging to the state or the market. We will learn repair that is rooted in transformative justice. We will make space and give to each other.

Reclaim Sexuality from Domination

Colonial sexuality frames sex as conquest because, under colonial logic, everything in nature is a place to exercise domination, including sex.

We reclaim sex as a site of spirituality.

We refuse scripts that conflate harm with intensity and that insist the greatest orgasm comes from total domination. We demand a sexuality rooted in ongoing consent and genuine encounters. Our bodies are not territories to be conquered.

Reject Desirability Hierarchies

White supremacy shapes attraction. So does ableism. Fatphobia. Ageism. Patriarchy.

Desire is not simply a personal preference, it is political. Colonialism engineered false scarcity into the erotic imagination to keep people insecure and compliant. When people believe they are undesirable, they become easier to exploit and sell to. When people worship the image of the oppressor, they give over their power. Pedestalling the white gaze, while devoting everything they have to earn the man's favor.

We will not do it.

Decolonizing love demands that we interrogate the sources of our attractions, not to shame but to free us. We will teach where these sexual hierarchies come from. We will dismantle the beauty standards that serve supremacy.

End Patriarchy

Colonialism begins at home.

Patriarchy normalized domination inside the family first. The word family traces to the roman famulus meaning slave.

There has never been a matriarchal imperialist system.

Because patriarchies exist only to violently hoard power, they do not prioritize nurturing children and caring for the vulnerable. Ending patriarchy transforms everything: how we parent, how we partner, how we build community, how men relate to their own humanity. Healthy masculinity is relational, accountable, and fiercely protective of life, not controlling of it. We demand a return to a matriarchy, guided by the stewardship and wisdom of elder women.

Return to Indigenous Relational Knowledge

Decolonizing is inseparable from indigenizing.

Across the world, Indigenous societies developed sophisticated relational systems rooted in reciprocity, dialogue, and collective responsibility, systems that colonialism worked violently to erase precisely because they created people resilient to colonialism. These traditions are the antidote to the colonial mind virus. They hold knowledge about how humans lived before coercive domination became the cultural standard.

We will approach Indigenous wisdom with humility.

We will learn from, respect, and support Indigenous peoples, and we will acknowledge Indigenous leadership. And we will ask ourselves:

Who were we before colonizers trained us to dominate life?

The answer is not just behind us, it is ahead of us.

It begins with reconnecting to ourselves, remembering our ancestors, healing the epigenetic wounds we carry, and anchoring back to our ancestral lands, community, and spirit.