Poly in the woods

This past weekend I went to Polywood with Wendy and The Flautist.  Polywood is an event whose name is appropriate and evocative - it is a bunch of polyamorous people getting together camping in the woods.  It has been going for three years though this is the first time I have gone.

The event takes place at Raven's Knoll, a small private camping ground in Ontario.  The grounds themselves were kind of new to me as I am used to provincial parks and backcountry camping but this park was something quite different.  Instead of campsites being really separate and carefully marked it was just a mixture of open grassy areas and woods.  We could set up anyplace we wanted, and that was new to us.  While it was a strange setup, I liked it.  We didn't pick the best spot for our site, but now that we know the location we will do better next year.  Raven's Knoll has a great river for swimming, slow moving and warm, and the weather was absolutely ideal.  Unfortunately the river had a bible camp just upstream so skinny dipping was out of the question.

But all that sort of stuff is background, really.  The interesting bit is what exactly did all those poly people get up to in the wilderness?  From the writeup I wasn't quite sure what to expect.  It was clearly pitched as a family friendly event with lots of talks and socializing, but I have met a lot of poly people and I am definitely not the only one who thought 'orgy in the woods!' when I read about Polywood.

Some degree of hooking up with people happened, I am sure, but the event was really about learning and community, and not about the orgies.

That whole learning and community thing went really, really well.  The best talk I went to was one about Relationship Anarchy, where I learned that RA is pretty much exactly the things I believe.  I suspect I am not a normal looking RA type - being a straight cis man married to a woman who I have a child with isn't really the standard there.  RA is about setting aside the relationship escalator and pushing back on all sorts of relationship norms and rules that society sticks us with.

There is nothing wrong with being married, or being straight, or having kids, or any of that.  The problem (as far as RA is concerned) is the assumption that you should do these things, or that those things are any better than the alternatives.  RA insists that we should refuse to place romantic or sexual relationships first by default, and that we should find our own ways express our feelings rather than simply doing the thing we see in romantic comedies and in greeting card shops.

I love all of that.  Everything in the RA talk seemed obvious, correct, and helpful.  Over and over it said "Figure out what things you want and do those.  Refuse to let societies norms push your relationships into boxes that don't work for you.  By the way, here are a bunch of ways that it tries to do that.  Think about them."  Here is the RA manifesto, if you want a far more complete version of what it is about.

All this made me think that maybe I should relabel myself.  Polyamory does describe me in the sense that I maintain and an open to multiple loving, romantic, sexual relationships at once.  It is accurate.  However, RA is more specific and honestly more precise.  I think my life looks a lot like what people imagine when they think of polyamory, but the philosophy of RA appeals to me more, especially when I consider all the poly styles that I find troublesome.  It is tricky sometimes to figure out what to do in this situation, because polyamory is more useful as a shortcut when discussing with random people (as RA is a more niche term) but among people who really understand both I would rather be known as a RA practitioner.  I intend to think and write a lot more about this in future.

The pushback against assumptions was baked into Polywood in a big way.  When people introduced themselves at talks we all stated our pronouns.  The people running the event stated up front that all gender expressions and identities, all sexualities, and all relationship styles were welcome and accepted.  Consent was talked about often and explicitly.  All of this was superb, and it made the space feel like a spot where people could relax and be themselves.  The pressure to conform, and the pressure of worrying that people were leading with assumptions faded.  It will never be gone entirely, of course, but Polywood was really successful at beating those assumptions back.

It wasn't perfect.  One woman lead off her introduction with an obvious unicorn hunting scenario, and that is all kinds of icky.  There were other views there I wasn't happy about.

But. 

The levels of unhappy I harbored were tiny compared to the rest of society.  It wasn't just a pile of people with identical ideas to my own, and so surely some of those other people disagreed with my ideas just as I disagreed with theirs.  But all of the ideas were close enough to my own to make the space in general feel welcoming and happy.  I learned a lot, met some fantastic people, and I want to go again.

And maybe next year I will see about arranging to combine learning and community building with an orgy in the woods too.  Because I am greedy like that.