Polyamory Is Just Cheating With Progressive Branding
Lindy West's FU brand of feminism met a man's ultimatum. And she caved. Her new book "Adult Braces" is a sad tale of self-erasure dressed up as progressivism.
I hadn’t heard of Lindy West until I read the reviews or more aptly titled “criticisms” of her new memoir Adult Braces: Driving Myself Sane. I probably should have heard of her. She was, apparently, once a leading voice in fat positivity and 2010s feminism. West built her career calling out body-shaming, rape culture, and misogyny in comedy and media. Or so I’m told.
Given my bordering on obsessive interest in popular culture and why a particular thing resonates at a particular moment in time — especially back in the early aughts and 2010s (I’m less interested now) — I’m not sure how I missed her.
Here’s a bit about her which I gleaned from reading reviews of her new book:
She is a columnist known for her work at Jezebel, The Guardian, and The New York Times. She is also acclaimed for her memoirs Shrill and The Witches Are Coming.
Her 2016 memoir Shrill — later a Hulu television series with the lead played by Aidy Bryant of SNL fame — celebrated unapologetic fatness as resistance, positioning her as a loud and brazen champion for women who refuse to shrink.
In her writing, she went after everything from sexist comedians to diet culture. West was, apparently, the embodiment of bawdy, defiant “feminism.”
The tone of I’m fat, I’m a badass, I don’t give a shit so go fuck yourself always bored me which is why I probably evaded her. It always felt to me like such an annoying, screechy brand of fake feminism. And a bit of thou doth protest too much.
I guess that’s why I wasn’t an avid reader of Jezebel. It seemed dumb to me. Fuck you isn’t feminism. It’s fatalism.
I’m all in on the notion that women’s worth is not in how we look. But could you be less annoying? It’s like your challenging me to like you and want to listen to you as a way to say like me or else you’re a sexist. No, you’re just really grating. And what value are you providing other than rage bait? What are you doing to show that women’s value is not tied up in how we look? Zero.
Anyway, this is not a book review. I haven’t read West’s new memoir and I’m not going to. But I have read a lot of the criticism. They aren’t book reviews so much as indictments of this era of supposed feminism for which West was a poster girl.
So you’re aware, the general plot line seems to be that West is coerced into a threesome/throuple style relationship by her husband. Because she doesn’t want to be perceived as not being progressive — which is how he frames the open marriage and relationship he already has with a girlfriend — she goes along. After a bout with van life, the three now live together in a remote cabin in the woods. And while West claims to have found happiness, her self-abnegation and sadness seeps in at every turn. That’s how I’m reading the criticisms anyway.
Helen Joyce in The Atlantic wrote that the book is:
“. . . a reminder to be grateful that your partner hasn’t talked you into a throuple with a much thinner woman. It is also the tombstone for Millennial Feminism — that swirling brew of Media Twitter, blog snark, the Great Awokening, whaling on Lena Dunham, fat positivity, and boring straight people identifying as queer through accounting tricks. To read Lindy West is to gaze backwards in time, to an era when it was acceptable to write welp! in copy.”
Michelle Goldberg’s piece in The New York Times is titled “She was a famous millennial feminist. Her polyamory memoir is heartbreaking.”
Goldberg rejects the framing by some (such as Joyce) that the memoir is an indictment of West’s own leftie beliefs. Goldberg sees it as the same as it ever was style patriarchy. Left, right — don’t matter. Women erase themselves at the behest of men’s demands. A shame Goldberg doesn’t see the entire “trans” movement as such — men demanding women set aside their own boundaries.
Framed as a solo cross-country road trip from Seattle to Key West, the book chronicles West’s mid-life unraveling — depression, creative burnout, and a marriage strained by her husband Ahamefule “Aham” Oluo’s long-standing desire for non-monogamy. What begins as his hypothetical “I don’t want to be totally monogamous” evolves into an ultimatum she accepts. Reluctantly.
West describes crying through the initial conversation, devastated at the prospect of sharing him. She agrees anyway, later forming a throuple with Aham and his girlfriend Roya. By the end, she portrays domestic bliss in a cabin with her husband and his (now their) girlfriend — an extra set of hands for chores and an emotional buffer for her depression.
Critics have called the whole shebang coercive polyamory: Aham’s “request” reads as a not so veiled threat, especially given West’s candid insecurities about her body. She worries that a fat woman can’t hang onto a partner without making this compromise.
Online discourse describes the whole story as sad, not empowering — a supposedly fierce feminist giving in to her husband’s sexual demands out of fear of abandonment.
West’s insistence on happiness only fuel accusations of cope. Much like I would have read her fat positivity if I’d known about her back in the day.
No one really wants to be fat as we now see with so many formerly fat influencers and stars taking the shot and wasting away. See Meghan Trainor as exhibit one.
Yes it is a terrifically valid point that our value is not in our looks or our weight and no one should be labeled “bad” because of their weight. But/and, that doesn’t mean we need to make fat virtuous and empowering and healthy. It’s not. Call me a fattist or fat-phobic if you want. It’s just true.
And the vast majority of people do not want to share their partner either. And it’s not just women who feel that way, though I do think, more often than not, it is the men shaming women into accepting their desire for an “open relationship” as unenlightened.
A brief story . . .
Years ago (maybe 10), I went to visit my brother with my family. He lives in Silverlake, that bastion of hypocritical progressivism often known as “Brooklyn of California.” We stayed in a house a few blocks away from him, a friend’s who was out of town.
My brother told me the story of the owners. The wife in the couple came to her husband and said she wanted an open relationship. She was interested in the nanny for their children. He consented, seemingly out of apprehension in being seen as possessive and unenlightened. He wasn’t thrilled though. The relationship was supposed to be open meaning he could pursue his own outside relationships. But he didn’t. The wife, however, did. She entered into a same-sex relationship with the nanny. Unlike West’s situation, he was not invited to partake. The wife went off for hours and sometimes days at a time, leaving him with the kids, so that she could pursue her love affair with the nanny.
That was the status at the time of the telling. My brother didn’t judge. He accepted the husband’s word that this might just work. I said: No way. They won’t be together in year.
The wife did eventually leave him not too long after the whole thing started. So there you have it.
Polyamory in many — not all (there are the swingers which is a weird thing unto itself) — is a pitstop on the way to ending the relationship. It’s cheating dressed up as progressivism. And it guilts the less than excited partner into going along for fear of appearing hopelessly lame and traditional. And losing the partner entirely. In West’s story, that fear seems exacerbated by her fatness which leads her to believe that she is undeserving without making this compromise.
Coercion by any other name is still coercion. Just like a man in a dress is a still a man and he’s violating our boundaries by entering our private spaces. He can accuse us of being transphobic because of our boundary setting all he wants. The guilting is the way to take advantage and get what they want.
West’s experience highlights this broader pattern with polyamory. Marketed as progressive honesty (often by men) — cheating but enlightened — it often functions as retrofitted permission for one partner’s wandering eye.
Couples who “agree” rarely start from equal enthusiasm; one is typically coerced or guilted into it, convincing themselves it’s virtuous to avoid seeming possessive or uncool.
Anecdotally and statistically, most poly arrangements collapse under the weight of good old fashioned infidelity. Every “open” couple I’ve known followed the same arc: initial excitement or reluctant consent from the less-enthusiastic partner, mounting resentment, and eventual breakup. The progressive branding papers over the same old pain — abandonment, betrayal, eroded trust — while claiming moral superiority.
Polyamory isn’t liberation even if the youngsters and Democratic Socialists say it is. It’s the pervy male yoga instructors pressuring students into sex and being a plain old womanizer only with a progressive man bun costume.
In a marriage or supposedly committed relationship, the polyamory “request” is frequently a slower, more performative way to dismantle the relationship.
West’s memoir seems to be more of a cautionary tale of self-abnegation sold as self-discovery. And it’s a stark reminder that some compromises cost a whole lot more than they deliver.
I used to read her pieces circa 2010 buuuut with her having said stuff like this https://www.jezebel.com/transphobia-is-a-goddamn-embarrassment-to-us-all-5975828 I just can't feel sorry for her.
Oh, don't forget, apparently part of how he guilted her into this was convincing her that it would basically be slavery and white aupremacy if she insisted on monogamy.