Polly Isn't In to Polyamory

Yesterday Minx of Polyamory Weekly posted a response to an advice column by Amy Alkon, regarding her use of the term "polyamory" in her recent column "Along Came Polyamory". Not long after, she posted a followup: the response she received from the column's author. The excerpt Minx posted was:

Thanks, but I know all about polyamory, and I know you're a pal of another humorless polyamorist, Amy Gahran. Read my blog and you might learn something

Having heard of neither Alkon nor Gahran before this, I decided to follow the links. Here's a link to Alkon's blog, here's a link to poly blogger Gahran's post (as well as her main blog). Go, read up.

I'd have to side with the majority of the poly community on this one. No matter Alkon's intended irony, some people are too dense to understand every intended reference of humor or tongue-in-cheekiness. Gahran (and Minx) wrote to Alkon out of concern for the use of the word, namely that people who don't understand polyamory will take the content of Alkon's column and think that's what polyamory is, completely sidestepping all the good, positive aspects of it. In journalism, you should always be writing to the lowest common denominator. In this case, it's people who've not heard of polyamory before. Not people who've seen the movie "Along Came Polly" (which, btw, I haven't seen nor even remembered, so I didn't get the reference and my personal reaction was "that's not polyamory!").

From my perspective, no one who initially wrote to Alkon about her use of the word was calling "insult" or such. They simply want people--especially public figures--to be well-informed; polyamory is a growing, and thus still misunderstood, community. Yet Alkon really took it to the next level. She posted on her blog about Gahran's contact, made all sorts of implications as to her intelligence and character (a.k.a. "defamation"), and deamed the email response a stupid, humorless one. Yet hiding behind obvert, malicious humor doesn't seem to be an appropriate response. Her blog post was a personal attack against Gahran (but not the poly community).

Alkon's cookie cutter replies to "offending" persons ("I know all about polyamory, thank you, now you should look up irony") implies that she never really cared to give anyone a considerate, thoughtful reply. Every time someone said, "Actually, I'm worried about your use of the word and how it portrays positive polyamory" she seemed to become offended at the assumed slight against her intelligence, choosing instead to insult that person's intelligence. From my perspective Amy Gahran's posting of this issue wasn't because she's being a "poly nazi" about the use of the word polyamory (she already took polite steps to make sure Alkon was informed on that), but was the way Alkon responded: rude, slanderous, and insulting. It's one thing to have an online/printed persona that is cynical, snarky, and diva-riffic; it is something else entirely to not be able to leave that behind in favour of intelligent discussion.

There's no reason Alkon could not have just replied, "I'm aware of how you might have perceived the relation between my column's title and content, but please know that these are my original intentions with the column and feel free to let people know I do not intend it as an insult against polyamorists." There was a nice way to respond that would not have created so much negativity. But Alkon's chosen words that yes, fit her "style", but do nothing for open communication, are what have caused me to support Gahran's responses on this matter.

At this point a lot of people who've found Alkon's post(s) regarding these emails have left comments on her blog calling her names or insulting her practices. Name calling is an unfortunate side effect of two sides of a topic clashing; I'm sure that if Gahran's LJ account did not have the "only friends can post comments" option enabled, she'd have a great deal more negative comments than positive. I can read that Gahran, at least, is more than open to productive discussion on the matter, and has done so in her post's comments. The thing here is that when one side starts out the unnecessarily public discussion with obvious hinting that someone is ignorant and in the wrong from simply trying to correct a very common misconception, or that the person is "starved for attention"... that is a bit of an overboard response.

Yet in all of this, don't forget: one of the things advice columnists love most is talking about things that push people's buttons. It gets readership, it gets traffic. I'd never heard of Alkon before this, and now I've gone to her site at least twice to read the column and comments. I'm sure she and her editor are really loving the spike in traffic and interest (good or bad) her column has garnered. But also know that after reading how she's responded, I certainly don't intend to ever offer support for her writing career. People like that just don't interest me.

Please know, I'm not friends with either Gahran nor Alkon, and know no more than what has been posted in public blogs and comments. I could be missing some vital fact that would clue me in to why these people are responding so energetically.