Some speculative psychologizing about the Aella hate
Why is there a bottomless pit of resentment for loudly polyamorous people in a monogamous world?
In case you missed it, there was a big twitter blowup last week when the notorious rationalist-adjacent twitter personality Aella_Girl1 announced her breakup with what seemed like her primary partner, and pontificated on her dwindling prospects for marriage and family, given her lifestyle and preferences2:
It sounds like having kids was never in the cards for this relationship—and that was fairly obvious throughout—but without being inside Aella’s head I can speculate that maybe the bandwidth this relationship required logistically and/or emotionally was hindering Aella’s search for a long-term partner with which she could have kids, non-monogamy notwithstanding. It also might just be that the closing of this chapter threw into greater relief where she was in life and what her prospects for marriage/childbearing going forward might be.
Some responses to the post were supportive, including from various accounts that had very different positions on polyamory as a lifestyle but nonetheless extended sympathy for the painful situation Aella found herself in. The plight of women approaching middle age without children has been in the news recently, and Aella was treated by a lot of commenters as an idiosyncratic instance of an increasingly common phenomenon. But a lot of responses were very negative, and downright gleeful. It’s hard to track down responses to a deleted post, but here are a few examples of the countless low-effort dunks:
There are plenty of straightforward reasons why various shades of normies might react to Aella’s lifestyle with so much vitriol:
People vary in disgust sensitivity, and to some people, sexual promiscuity of any kind is totally gross and ick-inducing.
People who are very religious or have traditional sexual morality for other reasons are horrified by someone whose lifestyle is so alien to their own.
Women who object to promiscuity in other women because it violates the collective female sexual cartel, as if they were strike-breakers crossing a picket line.3
The canned response from less thoughtful poly/ENM people is that society is just generally judgmental of people who are different, that their marginalization is just one of various interchangeable examples of sexual minorities being mocked, excluded, or otherwise mistreated. But it’s interesting how much of the hate is coming from men, the more sociosexual gender, who we might expect to be more predisposed towards non-monogamous relationship styles (sociosexuality is an academic term to describe an individual’s tendency to engage in sexual behavior outside of committed romantic relationships).
Maybe it’s resentment
Building and sustaining long-term romantic relationships is hard, and people often have to make significant sacrifices to do so. Maybe someone changes their career goals for the sake of their family/spouse, maybe they need to move to another state or country, maybe they have to sever friendships or parental relationships because of friction with their spouse, etc. But one other element that monogamous people have to sacrifice for the sake of a long-term relationship is sexual variety and short-term mating opportunities.
To be clear—plenty of people don’t view this as a sacrifice at all. Lower sociosexuality people place little value in casual sex or reject it entirely, and so this tradeoff doesn’t exist for them at all. But plenty of people in monogamous relationships, or seeking them, have a taste for short-term mating opportunities as well, and might have complicated feelings about particularly visible examples of people doing polyamory/ethical non-monogamy because of their own internal conflicts.
Men and women who value short-term mating opportunities and consciously choose not to pursue them for the sake of their relationships might have envy or resentment of people who seem to be “having their cake and eating it too”
Men (almost exclusively men) who never really had much access to short-term mating opportunities with women in the first place might resent women’s sexual access in general, and Aella is just a caricaturish example of this phenomenon. In many ways, Aella actually lives out the fantasy of high-sociosexuality, low-status men who imagine how they would behave if they woke up tomorrow as a handsome NBA superstar CEO astronaut.
Women who feel like they compromised on their physical standards/sexual compatibility for the sake of commitment, and miss the greater physical attraction/sexual chemistry they had with earlier, short-term partners, might resent Aella et al. for trying to pursue long term committed relationships without giving up their sex lives
Women who consciously avoided adventurous sexual exploration despite craving it, because they feared it would threaten their prospects for long-term commitment later in life, might feel it is unfair for sluts to find long-term commitment without making the same sacrifices they had to
Aella is loudly and emphatically rejecting these sacrifices by living a polyamorous lifestyle and still earnestly seeking long-term commitment and a family. She is the perfect totemic symbol of sex positivity: moonlights as an escort, has an onlyfans, had a very public birthday orgy, the list goes on and on. Being a bay area rationalist who embodies a lot of the dorky qualities charmingly and often gratingly associated with stereotypes of polyamorous people is just the icing on the cake.
Coping mechanisms and psychological fictions
It is not clear how Aella’s personal life will ultimately develop, and she might have unrealistic standards. There are plenty of examples of attractive, successful women pricing themselves out of the market as they hit their 30s and beyond.4 It’s possible that polyamory/ENM is an unsustainable relationship style for everyone, and that everyone who thinks they’re “successfully poly” is lying to themselves. But it’s not relevant what is actually possible—what is relevant is what people need to believe is possible.
Men and women who hate missing out on sexual variety and short-term mating due to a monogamous relationship need to believe that a long-term romantic relationship like the one they’re in wouldn’t be possible without this sacrifice
Men who are priced out of the casual sexual marketplace need to believe non-monogamy is inherently unstable, sinful, or otherwise bad to avoid contemplating whether their long-term partners would be physically intimate with them at all in a sexual free market
Women who passed up short-term mating opportunities in their past because they anticipated the resulting slut-shaming would threaten their prospects for a long-term relationship in the future need to believe their sacrifice was not in vain
Men and women who suspect their partner might be interested in polyamory/ethical non-monogamy if sexual norms were relaxed need to reinforce the stigma against these lifestyles, especially towards women
And of course, Aella and her fellow polyamorists need to believe that achieving their lifestyle and relationship goals are possible without compromise
These are all psychological copes. They are statements about how the world *is* or how the world *will remain* for the sake of assuaging personal feelings and fears. But they can’t all be right.
Non-monogamy as a threat to the monogamous sexual marketplace
I propose that the reason flame wars get so heated and people get so passionate when polyamory/ENM is invoked in online spaces is because people are *not* arguing about personal preferences, they are obliquely arguing about how the sexual marketplace functions and ought to function. A lighthearted debate about the merits of chocolate vs. vanilla ice cream might not stay so lighthearted if ice cream was so expensive that changes in aggregate flavor preferences affected your ability to afford your preferred flavor, or to afford ice cream at all.
The dating/sexual marketplace changes in significant ways when non-monogamy is more or less socially stigmatized. We do not know what percentage of men might be non-monogamous in a sexual marketplace with more abundant female casual sex partners, but if the rate of non-monogamy in the gay community is anything to go off of, it’s non-trivial5. Men in this camp who lash out at Aella and polyamorous people in general might be dealing with their own personal frustrations at how limiting heterosexual dating norms are for their sexual preferences. Women in the dating market who struggle to secure monogamous commitment from the men they desire might see greater tolerance of non-monogamy as just another obstacle in their way6, and as a result, might want to push back against efforts to reduce stigmas around non-monogamous lifestyles.
Even people in relationships or marriages aren’t safe. After all, wedding vows have yet to be updated to include “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, whether non-monogamous lifestyles become more socially accepted or not,”. The answer to whether their partner would keep their relationships monogamous if sexual norms were different is something a lot of anxiously attached monogamous people who are insecure in their relationships would probably rather never find out. There are plenty of people who would remain completely tradpilled and monogamous even as members of Berlin’s art scene, and there is a small but mighty minority of people who would find their way to non-monogamy in 1950s Kansas. But most people aren’t risk takers and are influenced by the social norms of their community, so their willingness to act on their non-monogamous urges might hinge on just how taboo doing so would be. And then there’s the darker reality that even if women became a lot more promiscuous and the market imbalance between men and women’s aggregate sociosexuality was improved, there will still be low-status market participants who stand to lose out in a freer sexual marketplace: low-status men who get laid less than they even do now, and monogamous women who don’t have social norms helping them get the commitment they want from men.
In any case, I hope these highly speculative musings help the reader understand some theories as to why Aella’s personal preferences and lifestyle choices elicit so much sturm and drang from the online masses.
Aella is known for her twitter account, substack, surveys, and interviews. She has worked as an escort and onlyfans model, is openly and outspokenly polyamorous, and tends to lean into online controversy around relationship styles and sex positivity.
This twitter thread is now deleted
See the Contrapoints video on envy, transcript here:
Men often slut-shame because they want to control female sexuality. And by female sexuality, I do mean male sexuality. Because often what they're really struggling to control is their own desire. But slut-shaming is also done pretty viciously by women to each other. And that's a complicated thing, it's more than just envy. Sometimes it comes from a sense that a woman who's having casual sex with a lot of men, is compromising the collective sex-withholding power of the group. Almost like she's crossing a picket line.
Various sources cite the rate of non-monogamy within gay relationships as anywhere between 40 and 77 percent, compared to an overall population rate of ~4%. It is probably the case that gay men are higher sociosexuality than straight men on average, but it’s not a stretch to imagine that a lot of that disparity is downstream from the sexual scarcity imposed on the heterosexual dating marketplace by women’s relatively lower sociosexuality.
Especially in big cities with gender skews unfavorable to women, it is becoming increasingly common to see monogamous women struggling to find monogamous men, or men who don’t change their minds about monogamy later on.