18 years ago I came to a decision. I would never go into another monogamous relationship. I would make it clear from the start that I didn’t expect whoever I was with to switch off her sexuality with anyone else but me and vice versa. This was after years of struggling with the conflicts between my personal belief system and conventional ’morality’.
I’ve never regretted that decision. I felt incredibly liberated by it. The True Will is exactly that.
Looking around for a word to describe the opposite of monogamy, I had difficulty at first. Polygamy?, polyamory? They just didn’t sound right and contained concepts within them that I wasn’t altogether happy with. Then a bit of thinking and googling turned up the word Panogamous. ‘Pan’ as in ‘many’ and ‘Pan’ the God. Perfect.
The truth is I’ve never understood it, this idea that one’s sexual expression should be confined to one person. How many people really never find themselves sexually interested in someone other than their partner? It’s part fear and part posession. It’s a kind of trade-off - “I’ll shut down my genitalia with other people and you do the same, that means we’re safe and proves we love each other.”
Nonsense.
I’m reminded of the following passage from Robert Heinlein’s wonderful
Stranger In A Strange Land, an essential book. Read it, if you haven’t already:
‘the ethics of sex is a thorny problem. each of us is forced to grope with a solution he can live with - in the face of a preposterous, unworkable and evil
code of so-called ‘Morals’. Most of us know the code is wrong, almost everybody breaks it. But we pay Danegeld by feeling guilty and giving lip service. Willy-nilly, the code rides us, dead and stinking, an albatross around the neck. . .
. . .I see the beauty of Mike’s attempt to devise an ideal ethic and applaud his recognition that such must start by junking the present sexual code and starting fresh. Most philosophers haven’t the courage for this; they swallow the basics of the present code - monogamy, body taboos, conventional restrictions on intercourse and so forth - then fiddle with details . . . even such piffle as discussing whether the female breast is an obscne sight!
But mostly they debate how we can be made to obey t
his code -ignoring the evidence that most tragedies they see around them are rooted in the code itself rather than in failure to abide by it’I couldn’t put it better than that.
Insecurity plays its part. We may worry that our other half will have a better time in bed with someone else. So what? Mocuar has had a hell of a lot more sexual experience than I have. The law of averages says that many of those men were younger than me, better looking than me, better fucks than me and had bigger dicks than me. But she chooses to be with me.
If what you have between you is right, that’s all that matters. You don’t need conventional morality to prop it up, any more than a sound building needs huge external beams to support it.
Ah, but sex is intimacy, it is said. Oh yeah? I have female friends who’ve seen me at my lowest and most exposed, have heard about my deepest feelings, helped me through bad times, and I’ve done the same for them. Is that really less intimate than a fuck?
All this came together when I discovered Sex Magick, in particular, Thelemic Magick. As it says in
The Book Of The Law:
‘The word of Sin is Restriction. O man! Refuse not thy wife, if she will! O lover, if thou wilt, depart! ‘
Notice it says ‘Refuse not
thy wife if she will’.
This is the key to Panogamy. Before you can embark on it, you must be totally happy with the idea of your other half having fun with it. Totally happy - not just put up with it because it means that you get your jollies in return.
It’s first and foremost about freeing others and bringing positive sex-magickal energy into the world.It isn’t a libertine’s charter, I’m sometimes amused by the reaction of people I talk to about it. The usual pattern is disbelief followed by the assumption that we must both be rampantly promiscuous. We’re not. If it happens, it happens.
There are those, and I pretty much agree with them, who believe that the reason why sexual freedom is so ruthlessly suppressed is that it may be the key to other freedoms. A sense that if people are allowed to fuck who they like, when they like and in a way that they like, it will somehow make them less controllable. Mocuar once said “We’re not truly free until we’re sexually free” That’s why every totalitarian regime or puritanical religious system in history has always clamped down on sexuality. The greatest con-trick in history was when people were persuaded to collude in their own misfortune, to see it as moral, because the clergy or the government says so. And to attack, sometimes savagely, anyone who said there could be another way.
I’m not setting Panogamy up as some moral absolute. I’m certainly not saying that everyone should practice it. If a couple are genuinely happy with a monogamous arrangement and are truly uninterested in others, then fine.
But how many really are?
