Norwescon

I spent most of this weekend at NorWesCon, which has mostly been an exercise in frustration as it seems to have somehow missed having a writer's track. Usually there are so many writer's panels that I'm hard-pressed to get to many of them. This time there were so few that it was theoretically possible for me to go to all of them, if not for one other consideration: there was no KidCon this time. The 'con has shut it down, apparently due to insurance costs, which would have made it financially impossible. Apparently the regulators fear that KidCon amounts to an unlicensed daycare facility.

And so parents of all kinds, and there are a lot of us in fandom these days, were without a place to park the children for an hour here, an hour there, where they could do convention-level things on their own, while the adults went to panels about how to maim your characters effectively.

Still, I'm grateful for fallenpegasus for taking Kouryou-chan for one hour while I went to a panel.

I briefly stopped by the DAW Publishing room party, which was actually too crowded and noisy for me to accomplish anything or meet anyone. Besides, I really don't like Greg Bear's work. It has always impressed me as pretentious.

The hall costumes were gorgeous, as were the people who occupied them. Norwescon has a serious masquerade track, and there were people wearing hot orange and making it work, which I think is one of the reasons why modern clothing is so boring to me: I've seen so much better clothing at conventions.

I ran into so many people it's hard to enumerate them all: tabbifli, ivolucien, mevima, javagoth, shemayazi, animegothgrrl, and the list just seemed to go on...

I haven't gotten much writing done this weekend, which disappoints me. I suppose I've been too busy and having Kouryou-chan and Yamaraashi-chan, while fun in its own right, does make for a bit an anchor.

Gay marriage, yes. Legalized polyamory, no.

Oh, good. Jonathan Rauch has finally written a response to Stanley Kurtz's argument that if we extend marriage rights to homosexuals, we have no social-policy grounds under which to deny them to polyamorists. Rauch's argument is compelling and echoes my own: indeed, he uses the same material I did last year, adding to it more recent examples from the current Chinese experience.

The argument is a simple one: if you grant legal recognition to polyamorous households, then the ones to take the most advantange of the system will not be liberal SF-con-going women with two husbands but rabidly Christian and Mormon harem-collectors. Households with a surfeit of wives will easily outnumber households with multiple husbands. We don't live in a perfect world, and there's not much we can do to change human nature such as it is. In our world, the one where policy writers have to live, if you grant legal recognition and the transfer of marriage rights to polyamorous households, you will soon arrive at a state where you have a large underclass of men who have no chance to marry.

History records no state that was not monagamous that succeeded as a liberal democracy. Rauch misses making an important point: polygamy is a powerful tool for conservative *women*; with more than one woman in the household, they can exert more influence over the man (provided, of course, that the women all have a common agenda), and women will have the power to "marry up" into high-status households. I think that's a point worth holding onto: in a society where polyamory in the norm, you'll have a group of women who are monogamous precisely because they can't marry up. Polygamy leads to a stratification based upon criteria liberal democracies don't want to face.

But the point inevitably comes back to the real world argument that legalized polyamory would benefit households with many wives, and those with many husbands would be rare. In such a world, there would be a class of subalterns, subordinate men with no hope of ever enjoying the stabilizing effects of marriage. Rauch concludes:

Polygamy is, structurally and socially, the opposite of same-sex marriage, not its equivalent. Same-sex marriage stabilizes individuals, couples, communities, and society by extending marriage to many who now lack it. Polygamy destabilizes individuals, couples, communities, and society by withdrawing marriage from many who now have it.