by Meghan Daum
But since I was a girl, I had dolls. People gave them to me, though Baby Drowsy was unquestionably subject to the most abuse. Something about the word “drowsy” struck me as flaccid, even masochistic; it was as if drowsy was baby talk for “drown me,” and the beatings seemed to emerge out of a sense that she was asking for it. The handful of other dolls had the luck of being simply ignored. I had a Raggedy Ann, whose stuffed-animal-like properties redeemed her enough so that she would occasionally be placed next to—though never in the pile with—the dogs and bears. My mother, perhaps worried about whatever maternal instincts were failing to develop in me, spent several years trying to find a doll I might actually like. With chubby baby dolls clearly out of the question, she tried to introduce me to more sophisticated dolls, older girls in higher quality plastic, dolls with hair to be brushed and tasteful clothes to be changed. Nothing amused me. I loved my animals, furry, long-tongued creatures who were safe from the hair-braiding, cradle-rocking proclivities of playmates, some of whom had the hubris, not to mention the bad sense, to bring their own dolls with them when visiting my house. By the time I was old enough to enter into the world of Barbies, my mother’s quest to make a nurturer of me was subsumed by her feminist impulses. I was given no Barbies and received stuffed animals every Christmas until I was approximately twenty-seven.
While it might seem that my intense dislike for dolls is simply a dramatic manifestation of my intense affection for animals, I suspect that the whole doll issue is part of a larger semiotic equation, an entire genre of girlhood—and childhood in general—that I could just never get with. While I can’t say that I had an unhappy childhood, I was unhappy being a child. Just as there has not been a morning of my adult life when I don’t wake up and thank the gods that I am no longer a kid, there was hardly a day between the ages of three and eighteen that I didn’t yearn for the time when I would be grown-up. Aside from the usual headaches of being a kid—the restricted freedoms, the semi-citizenship—what really ailed me were the trappings of kid-dom: the mandatory hopscotch, the inane cartoons, the cutesy names ascribed to daycare centers and recreation programs, like Little Rascals Preschool and Tiny Tot Tumbling. Why was a simple burger and fries called The Lone Ranger? Why did something as basic as food have to be repackaged to resemble a toy? Even as a child I resented this lowbrow aesthetic—the alphabet-block designs on everything, the music-box soundtrack, the relentless kitsch of it all.
Dolls are the ultimate symbol of childhood; they are toy children. Though I realize that playing with dolls is supposed to mimic the adult act of caring for children, playing with dolls always struck me as nothing more but childhood squared, a child doing a childish thing with a simulacrum of a child. It was like some hideous vortex. Adults think it’s cute when girls burp their dolls. We buy them dolls that cry, and dolls that pee. I think there’s even a doll that spits up. Most people see this as endearing, even healthy in a biological imperative sense. I see it as an exercise in narcissism. But I suppose that says more about me than about the doll-buying public or the doll-diapering girls who are supposedly doing the thing that comes naturally to them but just didn’t to me.
I read somewhere that women who choose not to have children are more likely to have grown up preferring stuffed animals to dolls. Though I’m probably still too young to make pronouncements about my wish to forgo motherhood, I must say that, at thirty, my desire for children is all but nil. Though it’s not impossible for me to enjoy other people’s kids, my biological clock seems to reside permanently in a time zone to my west. Babies amuse me only mildly, toddlers not at all, and children of the talking, television-watching, Happy-Meal-eating variety fill me with a kind of queasy empathy. When I see a mother with her child, I identify not with the adult but with the small person who, in my mind, seems trapped in a world governed by romanticized, consumer-driven notions of childhood. I see a kid and I think to myself, “I’m sorry you have to be a kid right now. I’m sorry you have to play with Legos. I’m sorry you have to ride in the back seat.”
A psychiatrist would see this as regressive. A lot of other people would argue that childhood is about as pure as anything gets, that the preadolescent mind enjoys some kind of blissful exemption from adult concerns, and that little girls and, when given the opportunity, little boys, gravitate naturally towards dolls. Dolls, say the experts, are merely objects on which to practice the care-giving skills we need to survive as a species.
Though I can understand that, I still can’t relate to it. To me, a child with a doll is a child who has been railroaded by the trappings of childhood. She has already acquired her first accessory, an inanimate version of herself, one that possibly even requires batteries. She has already tied up one hand, already spent more time looking down than looking around. You might ask how I make a distinction between the dreaded doll and the adored stuffed animal. Why is it that I can smile at the child with a bear but always end up pitying the child with a doll? Perhaps it’s because animals are more closely connected with the imaginative world than dolls are. They are ageless, genderless, and come in colors that defy nature. To play with a stuffed panda, or, in my case, to telepathically communicate with one, is a creative act. To play with a doll is to stare yourself in the face, to gaze at an object that is forever trapped in infancy. Maybe that’s why dolls frighten me so much. Forever trapped in babyhood, they threaten the very essence of life’s possibilities. They’re my greatest nightmare come true. They never, ever grow up.
ACCORDING TO THE WOMEN I’M FAIRLY PRETTY
I have always had a problem with science fiction and fantasy enthusiasts. Of all the subcultures that, for various neurotic reasons, provoke my disdain, none seem to bridle me quite as much as those comprised of people who appear to have forfeited real life for something they’re likely to characterize as “a quest.” Granted, my scope is limited. My associations with people involved in fantasy games and other pagan-oriented pursuits are confined to certain members of the high school science-fiction club who wore “Question Reality” buttons and the Society for Creative Anachronism types at my college who reenacted medieval battles on the grass outside the dormitories. These groups provide what is perhaps the only example of social harassment that actually gets worse as you get older. In the high school lunch room we merely laughed behind the sci-fi kids’ backs. In college, I once stood idly by as someone poured beer out a fourth-floor dormitory window onto the velvet cape of a jouster who called himself “Leaf Blackthorn” and felt no guilt.
This wasn’t supposed to be a story about geek love. This was supposed to be a story about a group of people in northern California who practice a way of life known as “polyamory.” As any seventh grade Latin student could probably infer, polyamory means “many loves.” Polyamorous people, or “polys,” as they call themselves, love many, many people. And a poly doesn’t just love those people, he or she has sex with them, even when some of those people live in the same house and are married to still other people in that house, many of whom the aforementioned poly is already having sex with anyway.
The most public polyamorous family in the United States is called Ravenheart. They took the name Ravenheart three years ago when they were living on a remote California ranch surrounded by ravens. They also invented the word “polyamory,” combining the Greek and Latin roots for “many loves,” and it has since been entered into the Oxford English Dictionary. None of the Ravenhearts are related by birth. In polyamorous terminology, they are known as “a nest,” a chosen family. Today they occupy a large house and an adjacent smaller house (which has four apartment units and often houses friends and other lovers) in Sonoma County, about forty-five miles north of San Francisco. There are three men, all heterosexual, and three women, all bisexual. They have an age range spanning over thirty years. As members of the Church of All Worlds, a neo-pagan religion based on Robert A. Heinlein’s 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, which the eldest family member, Oberon Zell Ravenheart, founded back in
1962, they are allowed to marry more than one partner via a pagan ritual called a hand fasting. And although their coupling arrangements are best outlined with a map or flowchart, a description of whom sleeps with who goes something like this.
Oberon, fifty-seven, has been legally married to his wife Morning Glory, fifty-three, for twenty-six years. In 1996, they celebrated a hand fasting with a man named Wolf, thirty-six, who just this past August formally married a woman named Wynter, twenty-one. Though Oberon and Wolf refer to themselves as each other’s husbands—“I can’t imagine life without my husband Wolf,” Oberon says—and Morning Glory and Wynter consider themselves each other’s wives, only Morning Glory and Wynter have sex with each other, although Morning Glory also has sex with Oberon and Wolf. When Wynter became an official Ravenheart three years ago, she had a brief sexual relationship with Oberon, which has since moved into what Oberon describes as a “mentor/apprentice” dynamic. Oberon also has sex at least twice a week with Liza, forty-six, who is also the lover of Jon, twenty-one. The Ravenhearts get regular tests for STDs and the most enforced house rule is that any sex occurring outside the family must involve the use of condoms.
Before I met the Ravenhearts, my knowledge of them was limited mostly to the above information. Oberon sent me biographical sketches of each family member, which explained more or less who is partnered with whom. I knew that they belonged to the Church of All Worlds, but, as my assignment involved gaining an understanding of polyamory and exploring the feasibility or non-feasibility of open multiple partnerships for the vast majority of us, I more or less ignored the pagan stuff.
But when I meet Oberon, who opens the gate to the privacy fence and greets me with a hug, I see his black T-shirt reading “Never Thirst” (one of the big tropes from Stranger in a Strange Land) and realize that I have stepped into that realm that has long elicited my deepest repulsion. I have stepped into an intersection of science fiction geeks and velvet-caped jousters. And there is absolutely no separating the family’s prolific sexual activity with the fact that they attend ritual events with names like Eleusinian Mysteries and have culled the bulk of their personal philosophies from science fiction novels.
“I never had the slightest glimmerings of monogamy as a personal value,” says Oberon, who grew up in the 1940s and 50s in what he calls an “Ozzie and Harriet” family in the suburbs of Chicago. Oberon talks like Timothy Leary and looks like Papa Smurf. He has long gray hair, a long gray beard, and tends to pepper his philosophical musings with references to popular movies and Crosby, Stills & Nash songs. He says that a lyric from David Crosby’s “Triad”—“sisters, lovers, water brothers, and in time, maybe others”—pretty much sums up his and Morning Glory’s marriage vows. And of course there’s an implicit poly message in “Love the One You’re With.”
“Did you see the movie Pleasantville?” Oberon asks. “I thought it was really excellent. My childhood was very much in that era. But my models were characters in stories, in myths. In science fiction there were all these models, all these alternatives, and all you had to do was choose to live that way. I imprinted my ideas of romance and sexuality not from popular romance and literature, but from science fiction and fantasy, where you could do anything you wanted to.”
“I probably have more sex than your average porn star,” says Wolf Ravenheart. “But it’s not that our drive is higher. Our availability of sexual partners is probably pretty high. Right now there are probably a dozen people who I could go out and have a fling with. My biggest problem that I have is how to say no gracefully. Because according to the women I’m fairly pretty. I get a lot of offers.”
We are sitting around the coffee table in the family’s living room. It has high ceilings, exposed beams, and lots of goddess posters and ceramic figurines, many of which are creations of Mythic Images, the family statuary business. At thirty-six, Wolf looks a lot like what you’d expect someone named Wolf to look like; long wavy brown hair, beard, thick eyebrows growing together in the center. He’s what’s known as a “gamer,” meaning he likes to get together with friends and play games like Civilization and Space 1889, which fall under the larger umbrella of Dungeons & Dragons-style role-playing games. He wears square-shaped metal-framed glasses onto which he clips plastic flip-up shades. When I first meet him he is wearing a T-shirt imprinted with a mythical image accompanied by the words “Winter Is Coming.” I can’t get up the nerve to ask if the words are a winking double entendre referring to his new bride, Wynter. The Ravenhearts have a calendar hanging on their kitchen wall on which they write their “sleep schedule.” It is crammed with names and dates and times, crossed out and rewritten again and again.
“The sleep schedule came out of a desperate need to know where our beds were going to be that night,” says Morning Glory. “We needed some kind of stability. So we had some family meetings where we sat down and kind of broke down the week. We tried to figure out a place where everybody had somebody that they wanted to sleep with at least once or twice a week and that they also got time alone.”
“Typically during the week I will sleep with Morning Glory on Mondays and Tuesdays,” says Wolf. “Wednesdays every other week I’m out of town. I have friends in Sacramento. I game with them and come back Thursday morning. Typically Wynter and I are together Thursday and Friday. Weekends are always chaotic, often there’s a festival or something. I have occasional dates with my girlfriend in San Francisco, about once a month. I try to get at least about one night to myself a week. Otherwise, I go nuts.”
“Monday and Tuesday nights Liza and Oberon are together,” Morning Glory explains. “But Liza and Jon are going away to the Loving More conference this weekend and then they’re going to the Zeg community summer camp so it’s important that Liza and Oberon get some time to spend together. And Wolf has been ill with the flu so he and I have been kind of not together. So normally I would have been alone. But last night Wynter had a date canceled with her outside boyfriend so she came to me and said, ‘Hey, how about we have a date?’”
Sometimes Morning Glory, Wolf, and Wynter get together and have sex. Sometimes Morning Glory, Wolf, and Oberon have sex. Part of the reason family members tend not to inquire about what sex is like between other people is that they know what it’s like. They’ve been there.
“Wynter doesn’t ask me what I do with Morning Glory because she’s been there many, many times,” says Wolf. “There’s nothing I know about sex with Morning Glory that she doesn’t.”
And although a great deal of their conversation revolves around the topic of sex—“For us, sex is like going to the grocery store,” says Wolf—the Ravenhearts don’t come down for breakfast and spill every detail of the previous night’s encounter. “We talk amongst ourselves about our desires and about what turns us on,” says Wolf. “But we don’t just get up in the morning and chew the fat about what went on. Someone might say ‘Hey, it sounds like you broke a chandelier last night,’ but that’s about it.”
It should be noted that the Ravenhearts are not swingers. “The primary difference between the swingers community and the poly community is not so much their sexual practice but that their swinging is a purely discreet sexual activity,” says Morning Glory. “With polyamory, it permeates every aspect of our lives.”
That means that the Ravenhearts have what amounts to scores of in-laws. Their families, for the most part, accept their living arrangement. Morning Glory and Oberon both have grown children, though not by each other. Wolf has an eight-year-old daughter who lives with her (non-poly) mother in Texas. Family relations seem amazingly un-strained. When I visited the Ravenhearts in August of 2000, Wolf’s daughter had just returned to her home in Texas after staying with the family for six weeks. He had given up his room for her, which didn’t cause too much inconvenience since he only sleeps in it one night a week.
All of the Ravenhearts have their own bedrooms, except for Oberon, who uses the Mythic Images office as his personal space and floats from room to room as the sch
edule dictates. The family members stress again and again that the schedule is “fluid,” that if someone is not in the mood for a date with a particular person there’s no obligation to keep it. They’re also allowed to stop sleeping with someone if they want to, although the implication is that they’ll eventually start up again.
“I think someone would just say, ‘I’m entering a nonsexual phase in our relationship for a while and we just need to be in that space for a while,’” says Morning Glory. “And everyone needs to be okay with that if they’re given that message. And what’s nice is that there’s always someone else in the family who can take up the slack so you’re not just totally left out in the cold.”
Not that it happens very often.
“We’re all here because we’ve chosen to be here,” says Morning Glory. “We’ve made a commitment to each other.”
“People talk about commitment and assume that we must not be interested in it, but the thing is we love commitment,” says Oberon. “The hard thing is finding other people who want to make commitments to us.”
* * *
Though the present incarnation of the Ravenhearts was just a glimmer in Morning Glory’s and Oberon’s eyes when they met back in 1973, they made it clear from the start that they wanted such a family. The scene was the third-annual Gnostic Aquarian Festival, a psychic phenomena conference in Minneapolis. Oberon was delivering a lecture on the Gaia thesis. Morning Glory had hitchhiked to the conference from Eugene, Oregon, where she was living on a commune with her husband and four-year-old daughter. Though she had an open marriage—“that was the only way I would have ever agreed to be with anyone,” she says—her husband was less enthusiastically poly than she was. “I had a lot of other lovers and he had occasional ones that I would engineer for him so he wouldn’t be left out,” she says. “But he wasn’t really interested in being with anybody but me.”