• What Love Is: And What It Could Be Basic Books (New York, NY), 2017

1. What love is : and what it could be LCCN 2016019598 Type of material Book Personal name Jenkins, Carrie, author. Main title What love is : and what it could be / Carrie Jenkins. Published/Produced New York : Basic Books, [2017] Description xvi, 213 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9780465098859 (HC) CALL NUMBER BD436 .J46 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Carrie Jenkins - https://www.carriejenkins.net/

  Carrie Jenkins
  Book
  Reviews
  Podcast
  Writings
  Lectures
  Media
  Live Appearances
  Research
  Teaching and Supervising
  Contact

  All photography on this site is by Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa
  Connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, or sign up for my email list below.

  Name *

  First Name
  Last Name
  Email Address *

  SUBMIT
  I'm a writer and philosopher based in Vancouver. My book What Love Is And What It Could Be is out now.

  My work has recently been featured by:

  The New York Times
  TED
  NPR
  Vox
  CBC The Current
  Elle Canada
  The Globe and Mail
  The Chronicle of Higher Education
  Jezebel
  The Cut (New York Magazine)
  ABC Nightline
  I'm currently:

  Canada Research Chair in Philosophy at the University of British Columbia
  Principal Investigator on the SSHRC funded project The Nature of Love
  Co-Investigator on the John Templeton Foundation funded project Knowledge Beyond Natural Science
  I studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, and have worked at the University of St Andrews, the Australian National University, the University of Michigan, the University of Nottingham, and the University of Aberdeen. For more information about my academic career, see my academic CV.

  I am working towards an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.

  I won one of the 2016 American Philosophical Association Public Philosophy Op Ed Contest awards.

• The Chronicle of Higher Education - http://www.chronicle.com/article/I-Have-Multiple-Loves-/239077

  Skip to main content

  CLOSE
  Home
  News
  Faculty
  Students
  Administration
  Leadership & Governance
  Global
  Technology
  People
  More
  Opinion
  The Chronicle Review
  Commentary
  More
  Data
  Almanac of Higher Education
  Faculty Salaries
  Title IX Investigations
  Idea Lab
  Focus Collections
  Advice
  Jobs
  For Employers
  For Job Seekers
  Special Reports
  Current Issue
  Archives
  Forums
  Video
  On Leadership Interviews
  Blogs
  The Ticker
  Lingua Franca
  ProfHacker
  From Our Advertisers
  Campus Viewpoints
  Academic Destinations
  Employer Profiles
  The Chronicle Store

  SUBSCRIBE TODAY FOR PREMIUM ACCESS
  SUBSCRIBELOG IN

  NEWS OPINION DATA ADVICE JOBS
  SECTIONS
  Search the Chronicle
  Search

  FEATURED:Jeff Sessions on Free Speech Get the Teaching Newsletter A New Liberal Art Your Daily Briefing

  THE CHRONICLE REVIEW
  ‘I Have Multiple Loves’
  Carrie Jenkins makes the philosophical case for polyamory

  By Moira Weigel FEBRUARY 03, 2017

  Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins and I have plans to meet her boyfriend for lunch. But first we have to go home to walk the dog. Her husband, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, is out of town at a conference for the weekend, and earlier that morning Mezzo, their labradoodle mix, got skunked; Jenkins says Mezzo is still feeling shaky. Before I traveled to meet her in Vancouver last June, she told me on the phone that most "mono" people misunderstand the challenges of polyamory — the practice of being openly involved romantically with more than one person at a time.

  "People ask, ‘Tell me about the downsides,’ " Jenkins says. "They expect the answer to be that it’s so hard jealousy-wise. But the most common answer is timing and scheduling. I’m a fairly organized person, so I don’t find it super challenging."

  The claim is easy to believe. In her professional life, too, Jenkins is managing to do several things at once. Since 2011 she has held a prestigious Canada Research Chair in the philosophy department at the University of British Columbia; she has taught 200-person lecture courses in metaphysics to undergraduates and advanced graduate seminars in epistemology. This semester she is co-teaching an interdisciplinary survey on the theme of "Knowledge and Power," introducing students to Freud, Russell, and Foucault in short order.

  Jenkins is also in a band, called 21st Century Monads, in which she and several other academics write songs about the philosophy of numbers. They live in different cities, she says, so "mostly we just email audio files to one another."

  She is also spending more and more time writing for nonacademic readers. Since July 2016, she has been enrolled part time in the M.F.A. program in creative nonfiction at British Columbia. When I visited, she had just finished the manuscript of her first trade book, What Love Is: And What It Could Be, which Basic Books published in January.

  Jenkins wrote about polyamory because she felt she had to. She and her husband were tired of living in the closet. When we arrive at Jenkins’s house, Mezzo rushes, slipping, across the bare wood floor to the front door, and leaps on her. The dog’s black curls still smell like tomato juice.
  "See," says Jenkins, gesturing at the living room as she clips on Mezzo’s leash, "We’re a very boring and respectable couple!" Two sofas, bookshelves, a wire stand displaying a volume of essays co-edited by her husband, also a philosopher at UBC. On the wall hang sepia-toned photographs of someone’s relatives. On the front porch are a swing and a coffee table with an ashtray on it. The ashtray is full, as if they have just had a party, or someone has been sitting out there, for a long time, thinking, while gazing into the street.

  As we walk Mezzo around Mount Pleasant, a leafy neighborhood about 20 minutes away from campus by the green electric scooter that Jenkins drives to work every morning, she starts explaining why she prefers the term "polyamory" to "nonmonogamy."

  "Nonmonogamy can include so many forms," she says. "You could just be ‘monogamish’ " — a term coined by the advice expert Dan Savage for long-term relationships in which partners allow each other to have occasional flings. "You could be swinging; you could have a ‘friend with benefits’ while looking for more-traditional romantic relationships. I sort of switched over to using the ‘polyamory’ label because this really means multiple loves. I have multiple loves."

  Over lunch, she and her boyfriend, Ray Hsu, explain that it took a little while for both of them to realize how deeply they felt for each other. They met in 2012. (Jenkins and her husband married in April 2011; they have always had an open relationship and wrote their wedding vows to reflect this. They made no promise to "forsake all others.") Hsu is a poet who also teaches at UBC. He and Jenkins worked in the same building, but they met through OkCupid. They still communicate primarily through text messaging and social media.

  "I think we broke Facebook," Jenkins laughs, when Hsu brings up how many messages they have sent over the past four years.

  It took about a year, Jenkins recalls, before "I started to realize that I was in love with Ray as well as in love with Jon. And it probably took even more time to acknowledge it." After that, "the poly label started to feel like more of a useful fit."

  Despite the personal clarity that she has gained on these points, socially the relationship has not been easy. Even in liberal settings, where people might not blink at the idea of a friend sleeping around or dating someone of the same gender, Jenkins says that "mononormativity" persists: The ruling assumption is that a person can be in love with only one other person at a time. (She recalls a colleague becoming extremely discomfited recently at her husband’s birthday party, when Hsu introduced himself as "Carrie’s boyfriend.") Still, Jenkins believes that we are in urgent need of a more expansive concept of love. And she believes that philosophy, the discipline named for the "love of knowledge," needs to become more expansive — treating a wider range of questions and addressing a broader audience — in order to help create it.

  J enkins did not set out to become a love expert. After growing up in Wales, she entered Trinity College, Cambridge, and pursued a degree in analytic philosophy; she stayed on to write a doctoral thesis on the philosophy of mathematics. "There’s a tradition of philosophy that I grew up in which is quite narrow in terms of the topics that it would address, in academic journal publications," she recalls. "We were addressing fundamental problems about space and time."

  She published her first book, Grounding Concepts: An Empirical Basis for Arithmetical Knowledge (Oxford University Press), in 2008. According to a review in the journal Mind, Jenkins offered "a new kind of arithmetical epistemology" — one that challenged the unstated assumption that the difference between a priori and a posteriori knowledge was that only the latter involved empirical data from the physical world. On the contrary, Jenkins argued that a priori concepts, such as intuitions of numbers, also relied upon the senses.

  Following that book, Jenkins published a series of articles on theories of explanation. However, she began thinking more and more about love. It seems logical that a thinker who spent so much time re-evaluating the ways in which experience shaped metaphysical knowledge might attempt to analyze her own life using the tools of philosophy. As Jenkins tells it, however, her inspiration came from Bertrand Russell — one of the founding fathers of analytic philosophy and a titanic presence at Cambridge.

  "What I didn’t realize when I was studying his philosophy of mathematics was that he wrote about all these other things," Jenkins recalls. She particularly means his 1929 book, Marriage and Morals, in which Russell advocated for what he called "free love." Jenkins calls the book "a precursor of the contemporary sex-positive movement." She thinks that a lot of Russell’s work on love and marriage was ahead of its time, but that he himself remained blind to its philosophical importance.

  "He just didn’t call Marriage and Morals philosophy," Jenkins says. "And I think that it’s partly fed into the conception of analytic philosophy as a very gendered thing: The mind, the logic, the mathematics is very specifically men’s business, and his work on love, sex, relationships, society — all the ‘women’s business’ — he cordoned out."

  While philosophers trained in the Continental tradition — thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Derrida — have written about love, analytic philosophy continues to dominate North American departments. Increasingly, Jenkins has become frustrated with the way it separates philosophy from "real life" concerns.

  Personal considerations finally drove her to start making this argument in public. Jenkins wrote about polyamory because she felt she had to: She and her husband were tired of living in the closet. In July 2011, shortly after their wedding, they published an open letter about their open relationship in the journal Off Topic. At the time, they were just about to move to the University of British Columbia. They were nervous, they said, but they agreed that they needed to come out.

  The couple was worried about people judging them and their relationship. They had been lectured before, and they were familiar with the accusations against their lifestyle: That it was not healthy, physically or psychologically; that it was not natural; that it was not ethical; and so on. But they had well-reasoned answers to each of those charges.

  "Despite these various kinds of nervousness (justified or otherwise) about disclosure," they wrote, "being closetedly non-monogamous (effectively, mono-acting) has its disadvantages too. We’re ready to be done with it. Academic philosophy is a small world; certain areas of it are very small indeed. What if someone happens to see one of us with somebody else, and assumes (not thinking about the alternatives) that we’re cheating? We each hate the idea of being taken for a cheater, or of being pitied as the spouse of a cheater. And we hate very much indeed the idea of some poor well-meaning friend feeling awful about having witnessed some apparent cheating, and agonizing over whether they ought to say or do something."

  Jenkins and Ichikawa took the most common charges they had heard against nonmonogamy, and they refuted them one by one.

  Jimmy Jeong for The Chronicle Review
  Carrie Jenkins with her husband (right) and boyfriend (left).
  Take, for instance, the claim that it’s unhealthy to have multiple sexual partners. Jenkins and Ichikawa pointed out that this was simply untrue. It is perfectly possible to maintain sexual health with multiple partners; indeed, a person who has openly discussed the pros and cons of opening a relationship with a partner is more likely to practice safe sex than is the frustrated partner who resorts to "drunken flings, clandestine affairs, or other ill-considered hookups."
  What about the assumption that nonmonogamy is psychologically damaging? "Different people are different," Jenkins and Ichikawa wrote. Many nonmonogamous people report that they come to feel less jealousy over time; conversely, many monogamous people complain of experiencing sexual jealousy. In response to the charge that nonmonogamy is "unnatural," Jenkins and Ichikawa pointed out that virtually no species are sexually monogamous, even if they are socially monogamous or pair-bond for life. ("Not even swans.")

  They called their letter "On Being the Only Ones." Soon after they published it, they learned that they weren’t. Strangers, and couples they had known casually for years, started approaching them at conferences, they say, and thanking them for writing the piece. Many said they had quietly lived the same way and felt relieved to be able to speak about it. Emboldened by a new sense that she had an activist mission — that her coming out might help others like her, and that she, as a tenured professor, had the privilege to do so — Jenkins began writing more about nonmonogamy. She wrote about it in The Globe and Mail and Slate. She went on CBC to give radio interviews. But even in contexts in which people were willing to give her an audience, they struggled with her argument that polyamory and promiscuity were not the same thing.

  Throughout history, Jenkins points out, society has sexualized people or behaviors that it considers undesirable or impermissible in order to discredit them. Take young single women who moved to cities in the early 20th century, for instance, or couples who came together across racial lines, or gay men. Jenkins notes that in order to gain respectability, LGBTQ folks have had to adopt lifestyles that look like straight monogamous marriage.

  Which features of love are biological and which social? she asks. What can we control? There is no necessary connection between polyamory and prom­iscuity, Jenkins argues. She thinks like a logician, and to her, this is simply a confusion of concepts. She points out that a person could fall in love with two people at the same time, have only two partners her whole life, and be considered a "slut." Meanwhile, someone can sleep around while dating, or go through a string of brief, monogamous relationships, and have dozens of partners without receiving censure. Still, Jenkins recognizes that most people will struggle with her ideas.
  About a year ago, she gave an interview to Cosmopolitan UK about nonmonogamous relationships. She emphasized the point that polyamory did not mean the same thing as promiscuity. She spoke at length with the writer about the damage that confusing the terms could do, and asked to read a copy of the article before it ran. The author, who had listened painstakingly, seemed to get it. She ran the text of the story by Jenkins, and Jenkins approved it. So when Jenkins received a copy in the mail, she was dismayed. The cover asked, "Is the foursome the new threesome?" Inside, the centerfold blared: "THREE ISN’T A CROWD," beside a photo spread that showed … an orgy.

  "Not a small orgy," Jenkins laughs. "Like maybe 25 people." When she texts me a photograph of the Cosmo issue later, I count 20, but it is hard to tell. They are writhing in a tangle of limbs and haunches like some flesh-toned version of the Indiana Jones snake pit.

  The Cosmopolitan UK spread not only conveyed the opposite of the message that Jenkins had wanted to send. It turned her into a target of abuse online. Like many women who write for the public, particularly about gender or sexuality, Jenkins gets a steady stream of hate mail. Strangers threaten her on Twitter: Why are you acting like this is an ok thing? Get herpes and die, slut. Sharia law looks more attractive by the day. One message she shows me is from someone whose handle contains the name RAMBO and whose feed features pictures upon pictures of guns. Jenkins says that she feels safer living in Canada than she would if she lived in the United States, but who knows? It takes only one angry man.

  Meanwhile, Jenkins has had to contend with harassment within her discipline, too. She declines to offer specifics but says, "Anonymous commentaries in the philosophy blogosphere can be pretty grim." The field has been widely criticized from within by scholars who say that not only is the curriculum male-centric, but gender discrimination is routine. In recent years, several high-profile cases of sexual harassment have further sullied its reputation.

  A paper published last July by Eric Schwitzgebel of the University of California at Riverside and Carolyn Dicey Jennings of the University of California at Merced found that women made up just 25 percent of philosophy faculty at 75 institutions in the United States, Canada, Britain, and Australia. When the researchers took rank into account, they found evidence that women experienced higher attrition rates, lower promotion rates, and lower rates of senior recruitment.

  Jenkins thinks a lot about philosophy’s gender problem. "It’s a complicated situation, and a lot of factors contribute to it and reinforce it," she says. "There’s the stereotype of the philosopher, a genius, as someone who looks like Socrates, with a big white beard. One of the things that’s noticeable is that women leave philosophy, even as undergraduates, even if they’re doing well. One plausible explanation is that we’re not cultivating the sense that this is a field for women."

  Jenkins emphasizes that this image not only affects who is doing philosophical work. It also shapes what kind of work gets done. Elizabeth Brake, an associate professor at Arizona State University who also works on feminist philosophy and philosophies of love, agrees, even as she expresses some measured optimism. "Philosophers have been writing on love and sex since Plato’s Symposium," she says. "And over the past 15 years, especially with philosophers writing on same-sex marriage, the topic has become much more accepted within political philosophy." Still, she stresses that "people writing on new topics face the burden of proving that the topic is philosophy."

  John Corvino, chair of the philosophy department at Wayne State University and author of What’s Wrong With Homosexuality? (Oxford University Press, 2013), says that scholars who work on "applied philosophy" — a term he dislikes — usually have to prove themselves first in other areas: "Jenkins’s first book was on the philosophy of mathematics. Jason Stanley, who recently has done interesting work on propaganda and ideology, made his name in philosophy of language and epistemology. Old prejudices about what counts as ‘serious’ work — and relatedly, who counts as a ‘serious’ philosopher — linger."

  The debate over what kind of philosophy gets rewarded blew up recently in a more specific storm, in which Jenkins found herself at the center. It started as a set of disputes surrounding Brian Leiter, a University of Chicago law professor who founded the Philosophical Gourmet Report, and ran it until recently. The Gourmet Report ranks philosophy departments, based on surveys filled out by hundreds of academic philosophers every year, and enjoys enormous influence within the field. It has also caused consternation among critics who have questioned its methodology and say it is biased against philosophy departments with a Continental orientation or an Asian one.

  "There are many reasons, feminist and otherwise, to be concerned about the Gourmet Report," says Jennifer Saul, a philosophy professor at the University of Sheffield, who runs the blog What Is It Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy? In 2012, Saul published a paper arguing that Leiter’s publication encouraged the perpetuation of "pernicious biases that hinder the accurate evaluation of work and that perpetuate stereotypes and unjust inequalities." It was one of several critiques of the Gourmet Report that prompted a flurry of online and email exchanges between Leiter and his critics, and preceded a statement that Jenkins published in the summer of 2014 pledging to behave with civility in her professional life.

  Many in the field, including Leiter, read the statement as an attack on him. He responded by sending Jenkins a derisive email and tweeting that she was a "sanctimonious arse." When Jenkins made the email public, other philosophers rallied to her defense. They circulated a "statement of concern," eventually signed by 600 faculty and students, saying that Leiter’s actions had harmed Jenkins’s health and ability to work, and refusing to participate in the Gourmet Report’s surveys until he stepped down as the editor. Leiter published a series of posts complaining of a "smear campaign" and that October stepped down, though he remains on the Gourmet Report’s advisory board. Later that year, he threatened to sue Jenkins for falsely portraying him.

  Jenkins refuses to speak about the Leiter controversy. Last summer she — along with Jennings and two other vocal critics of Leiter’s — each received an envelope full of human feces. Leiter denied sending the packages and has attributed them to someone who must be trying to embarrass him, noting, for example, that one or more of the envelopes used his law school's return address.

  I n contrast with these dramas, Jenkins’s book What Love Is reads calmly. It is not a how-to book — unlike The Ethical Slut, which remains the most widely read manual on polyamory. But it is not a dry philosophical argument, either. The book opens with an autobiographical anecdote. ("The first draft began with a list of definitions," Jenkins says with a laugh; her editor pointed out that this might not be the most gripping opening for a general audience.) Jenkins reflects on how the experience of feeling in love with both her boyfriend and her husband led her to question what love was. Could she be in love with both? Was she mistaken about her own feelings? Or was it that the definition of romantic love was in error and needed to expand?

  "We are creating space in our ongoing cultural conversations to question the universal norm of monogamous love, just as we previously created space to question the universal norm of hetero love," Jenkins writes. "I’m personally invested, as are you. Just as we all bring our experiences with us, and just as we are all biased, we are all personally invested. Nobody is agenda-free."

  The central goal of What Love Is is to abolish what Jenkins calls "the romantic mystique," a deliberate allusion to Betty Friedan’s classic second-wave text, The Feminine Mystique. "On the one hand, we’ve accepted the idea of love as a tremendously significant social force: something that shapes and reshapes the entire trajectories of lives and serves as a focal point for all kinds of values," Jenkins writes. On the other hand, "we have simultaneously normalized the idea that love is a mystery: something hard or impossible to comprehend."

  RELATED CONTENT

  Diversifying a Discipline PREMIUM
  Female Philosophers Shake Up Their Field PREMIUM
  The Man Who Ranks Philosophy Departments Now Rankles Them, Too
  In characteristic fashion, Jenkins rejects the aversion to reflecting on love for fear of destroying it, professing to be "more worried about the tangible dangers of underthinking than the putative dangers of overthinking." And so she proceeds to examine how experts, including philosophers — from Plato to Nietzsche to Russell, and to her contemporaries, like the University of Miami’s Berit Brogaard — have defined romantic love, and works to break down common assumptions about it. Some of those, like Nietzsche’s assertion that a woman "wants to be taken and accepted as a possession," are easier to refute than others, like the idea that "if you’re not in romantic love, or at least looking for it, then you’re doing life wrong" — an idea Elizabeth Brake calls "amatonormativity."
  "While I don’t agree with that on an intellectual level, the internalized attitude is hard to dislodge," Jenkins writes. "In the same vein, I can’t just stop caring about monogamy norms because too many other people care about them. And last but not least, it’s impossible for me to stop caring about whether my situation counts as a genuine case of romantic love because I know that its being recognized as such could be a powerful way of convincing people to take my relationships seriously."

  Key to that campaign is Jenkins’s exploration of whether romantic love is primarily a biological drive (a theory ascendant today) or a social construct. While most feminist theorists and humanists and social scientists in general have been inclined to treat the two in opposition, rejecting biological essentialism or conceiving of romantic love as a social expression of a biological phenomenon, Jenkins is not satisfied with either. Which features of love are biological and which social? she asks. What can we control?

  Ultimately, she argues, love is both: "ancient biological machinery embodying a modern social role," not unlike an actor embodying his character on stage. Jenkins is not alone in this new openness to biology, history, and sociology — which have often been bracketed from philosophy. Brake remarks that to write well on a topic like love, "you have to be empirically well informed. It’s important to know about history of marriage law, rates of marriage, policy and statistics." In 2015 the feminist philosopher Elizabeth A. Wilson argued in her book Gut Feminism (Duke University Press) that feminist theorists needed to learn to account for scientific data in their arguments.

  While Jenkins criticizes those who are too quick to call "insufficiently examined ideology … ‘natural’ or ‘biological,’ " she also emphasizes that recognizing the biological elements of romantic love can have socially emancipatory effects. For instance, brain scans that showed similar neurological activity in gay and straight subjects expressing love played an important role in compelling scientists and the general public to recognize same-sex love as legitimate.

  "Let’s not forget that it took many years of serious scientific research to convince (most) people that there is no biologically superior race or gender," writes Jenkins. "Getting a proper grip on the biology of love may help us unravel the idea that there is one biologically superior way to love."

  Moira Weigel is completing a Ph.D. in comparative literature and in film and media at Yale University and will join the Harvard Society of Fellows as a junior fellow in 2017. She is the author of Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).

  Corrections (2/9/2017, 12:13 p.m.): An earlier version of this article erroneously described the allegations of a Statement of Concern about Brian Leiter. It also mischaracterized the timing of his threat to sue Jenkins, and mistakenly referred to the Philosophical Gourmet Report as a "blog." And it incorrectly described John Corvino as a co-author of What's Wrong With Homosexuality? He is its sole author. The article has been revised to remove those inaccuracies.

  A version of this article appeared in the February 10, 2017 issue.

  Questions or concerns about this article? Email us or submit a letter to the editor.

  TRENDING NOW
  photo_83817_wide_325x163
  THE CHRONICLE REVIEW
  An Antidote for American Amnesia PREMIUM
  photo_83814_wide_325x163
  ADMINISTRATION
  Inside the Free-Speech Case That Caught Jeff Sessions’ Eye
  photo_83820_wide_325x163
  ATHLETICS
  Basketball Scandal Highlights the Power of the Assistant Coach — and the Limits of Oversight PREMIUM

  Get Teaching
  A newsletter with insight on what works in and around the classroom

  Sign Up Now
  JobsonChronicleVitae
  Browse by Position Type
  All Types|Faculty/Research|Administrative|Executive|Jobs Outside Academe
  Search by Keyword
  All Types
  Keywords
  Search
  Top Jobs
  ADJUNCT FACULTY, MANAGEMENT AND TECHNOLOGY...
  New York University School of Professional...
  Post a Job
  In print and online today

  photo_83781_cover_320x426
  This Week's Issue
  Get must-read news and trusted insight.

  Read This Issue
  From the Chronicle Store

  Academic Workplace

  Select product:

  2017 (Print), $29
  Purchase
  Learn more about this product
  The Future of Enrollment: Where Colleges Will Find Their Next Students

  Select product:

  The Future of Enrollment (Print), $179
  Purchase
  Learn more about this product
  See All Products

  Chronicle of Higher Education Subscribe Today
  1255 Twenty-Third St., N.W.
  Washington, D.C. 20037
  Twitter
  Facebook
  Log In
  Get Newsletters
  Events
  About The Chronicle
  Advertise
  Contact Us
  Help
  Site Map
  Privacy Policy
  User Agreement
  Copyright © 2017 The Chronicle of Higher Education
  Skip to main content

  CLOSE
  Home
  News
  Faculty
  Students
  Administration
  Leadership & Governance
  Global
  Technology
  People
  More
  Opinion
  The Chronicle Review
  Commentary
  More
  Data
  Almanac of Higher Education
  Faculty Salaries
  Title IX Investigations
  Idea Lab
  Focus Collections
  Advice
  Jobs
  For Employers
  For Job Seekers
  Special Reports
  Current Issue
  Archives
  Forums
  Video
  On Leadership Interviews
  Blogs
  The Ticker
  Lingua Franca
  ProfHacker
  From Our Advertisers
  Campus Viewpoints
  Academic Destinations
  Employer Profiles
  The Chronicle Store

  SUBSCRIBE TODAY FOR PREMIUM ACCESS
  SUBSCRIBELOG IN

  NEWS OPINION DATA ADVICE JOBS
  SECTIONS
  Search the Chronicle
  Search

  FEATURED:Jeff Sessions on Free Speech Get the Teaching Newsletter A New Liberal Art Your Daily Briefing

  THE CHRONICLE REVIEW
  ‘I Have Multiple Loves’
  Carrie Jenkins makes the philosophical case for polyamory

  By Moira Weigel FEBRUARY 03, 2017

  Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins and I have plans to meet her boyfriend for lunch. But first we have to go home to walk the dog. Her husband, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, is out of town at a conference for the weekend, and earlier that morning Mezzo, their labradoodle mix, got skunked; Jenkins says Mezzo is still feeling shaky. Before I traveled to meet her in Vancouver last June, she told me on the phone that most "mono" people misunderstand the challenges of polyamory — the practice of being openly involved romantically with more than one person at a time.

  "People ask, ‘Tell me about the downsides,’ " Jenkins says. "They expect the answer to be that it’s so hard jealousy-wise. But the most common answer is timing and scheduling. I’m a fairly organized person, so I don’t find it super challenging."

  The claim is easy to believe. In her professional life, too, Jenkins is managing to do several things at once. Since 2011 she has held a prestigious Canada Research Chair in the philosophy department at the University of British Columbia; she has taught 200-person lecture courses in metaphysics to undergraduates and advanced graduate seminars in epistemology. This semester she is co-teaching an interdisciplinary survey on the theme of "Knowledge and Power," introducing students to Freud, Russell, and Foucault in short order.

  Jenkins is also in a band, called 21st Century Monads, in which she and several other academics write songs about the philosophy of numbers. They live in different cities, she says, so "mostly we just email audio files to one another."

  She is also spending more and more time writing for nonacademic readers. Since July 2016, she has been enrolled part time in the M.F.A. program in creative nonfiction at British Columbia. When I visited, she had just finished the manuscript of her first trade book, What Love Is: And What It Could Be, which Basic Books published in January.

  Jenkins wrote about polyamory because she felt she had to. She and her husband were tired of living in the closet. When we arrive at Jenkins’s house, Mezzo rushes, slipping, across the bare wood floor to the front door, and leaps on her. The dog’s black curls still smell like tomato juice.
  "See," says Jenkins, gesturing at the living room as she clips on Mezzo’s leash, "We’re a very boring and respectable couple!" Two sofas, bookshelves, a wire stand displaying a volume of essays co-edited by her husband, also a philosopher at UBC. On the wall hang sepia-toned photographs of someone’s relatives. On the front porch are a swing and a coffee table with an ashtray on it. The ashtray is full, as if they have just had a party, or someone has been sitting out there, for a long time, thinking, while gazing into the street.

  As we walk Mezzo around Mount Pleasant, a leafy neighborhood about 20 minutes away from campus by the green electric scooter that Jenkins drives to work every morning, she starts explaining why she prefers the term "polyamory" to "nonmonogamy."

  "Nonmonogamy can include so many forms," she says. "You could just be ‘monogamish’ " — a term coined by the advice expert Dan Savage for long-term relationships in which partners allow each other to have occasional flings. "You could be swinging; you could have a ‘friend with benefits’ while looking for more-traditional romantic relationships. I sort of switched over to using the ‘polyamory’ label because this really means multiple loves. I have multiple loves."

  Over lunch, she and her boyfriend, Ray Hsu, explain that it took a little while for both of them to realize how deeply they felt for each other. They met in 2012. (Jenkins and her husband married in April 2011; they have always had an open relationship and wrote their wedding vows to reflect this. They made no promise to "forsake all others.") Hsu is a poet who also teaches at UBC. He and Jenkins worked in the same building, but they met through OkCupid. They still communicate primarily through text messaging and social media.

  "I think we broke Facebook," Jenkins laughs, when Hsu brings up how many messages they have sent over the past four years.

  It took about a year, Jenkins recalls, before "I started to realize that I was in love with Ray as well as in love with Jon. And it probably took even more time to acknowledge it." After that, "the poly label started to feel like more of a useful fit."

  Despite the personal clarity that she has gained on these points, socially the relationship has not been easy. Even in liberal settings, where people might not blink at the idea of a friend sleeping around or dating someone of the same gender, Jenkins says that "mononormativity" persists: The ruling assumption is that a person can be in love with only one other person at a time. (She recalls a colleague becoming extremely discomfited recently at her husband’s birthday party, when Hsu introduced himself as "Carrie’s boyfriend.") Still, Jenkins believes that we are in urgent need of a more expansive concept of love. And she believes that philosophy, the discipline named for the "love of knowledge," needs to become more expansive — treating a wider range of questions and addressing a broader audience — in order to help create it.

  J enkins did not set out to become a love expert. After growing up in Wales, she entered Trinity College, Cambridge, and pursued a degree in analytic philosophy; she stayed on to write a doctoral thesis on the philosophy of mathematics. "There’s a tradition of philosophy that I grew up in which is quite narrow in terms of the topics that it would address, in academic journal publications," she recalls. "We were addressing fundamental problems about space and time."

  She published her first book, Grounding Concepts: An Empirical Basis for Arithmetical Knowledge (Oxford University Press), in 2008. According to a review in the journal Mind, Jenkins offered "a new kind of arithmetical epistemology" — one that challenged the unstated assumption that the difference between a priori and a posteriori knowledge was that only the latter involved empirical data from the physical world. On the contrary, Jenkins argued that a priori concepts, such as intuitions of numbers, also relied upon the senses.

  Following that book, Jenkins published a series of articles on theories of explanation. However, she began thinking more and more about love. It seems logical that a thinker who spent so much time re-evaluating the ways in which experience shaped metaphysical knowledge might attempt to analyze her own life using the tools of philosophy. As Jenkins tells it, however, her inspiration came from Bertrand Russell — one of the founding fathers of analytic philosophy and a titanic presence at Cambridge.

  "What I didn’t realize when I was studying his philosophy of mathematics was that he wrote about all these other things," Jenkins recalls. She particularly means his 1929 book, Marriage and Morals, in which Russell advocated for what he called "free love." Jenkins calls the book "a precursor of the contemporary sex-positive movement." She thinks that a lot of Russell’s work on love and marriage was ahead of its time, but that he himself remained blind to its philosophical importance.

  "He just didn’t call Marriage and Morals philosophy," Jenkins says. "And I think that it’s partly fed into the conception of analytic philosophy as a very gendered thing: The mind, the logic, the mathematics is very specifically men’s business, and his work on love, sex, relationships, society — all the ‘women’s business’ — he cordoned out."

  While philosophers trained in the Continental tradition — thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Derrida — have written about love, analytic philosophy continues to dominate North American departments. Increasingly, Jenkins has become frustrated with the way it separates philosophy from "real life" concerns.

  Personal considerations finally drove her to start making this argument in public. Jenkins wrote about polyamory because she felt she had to: She and her husband were tired of living in the closet. In July 2011, shortly after their wedding, they published an open letter about their open relationship in the journal Off Topic. At the time, they were just about to move to the University of British Columbia. They were nervous, they said, but they agreed that they needed to come out.

  The couple was worried about people judging them and their relationship. They had been lectured before, and they were familiar with the accusations against their lifestyle: That it was not healthy, physically or psychologically; that it was not natural; that it was not ethical; and so on. But they had well-reasoned answers to each of those charges.

  "Despite these various kinds of nervousness (justified or otherwise) about disclosure," they wrote, "being closetedly non-monogamous (effectively, mono-acting) has its disadvantages too. We’re ready to be done with it. Academic philosophy is a small world; certain areas of it are very small indeed. What if someone happens to see one of us with somebody else, and assumes (not thinking about the alternatives) that we’re cheating? We each hate the idea of being taken for a cheater, or of being pitied as the spouse of a cheater. And we hate very much indeed the idea of some poor well-meaning friend feeling awful about having witnessed some apparent cheating, and agonizing over whether they ought to say or do something."

  Jenkins and Ichikawa took the most common charges they had heard against nonmonogamy, and they refuted them one by one.

  Jimmy Jeong for The Chronicle Review
  Carrie Jenkins with her husband (right) and boyfriend (left).
  Take, for instance, the claim that it’s unhealthy to have multiple sexual partners. Jenkins and Ichikawa pointed out that this was simply untrue. It is perfectly possible to maintain sexual health with multiple partners; indeed, a person who has openly discussed the pros and cons of opening a relationship with a partner is more likely to practice safe sex than is the frustrated partner who resorts to "drunken flings, clandestine affairs, or other ill-considered hookups."
  What about the assumption that nonmonogamy is psychologically damaging? "Different people are different," Jenkins and Ichikawa wrote. Many nonmonogamous people report that they come to feel less jealousy over time; conversely, many monogamous people complain of experiencing sexual jealousy. In response to the charge that nonmonogamy is "unnatural," Jenkins and Ichikawa pointed out that virtually no species are sexually monogamous, even if they are socially monogamous or pair-bond for life. ("Not even swans.")

  They called their letter "On Being the Only Ones." Soon after they published it, they learned that they weren’t. Strangers, and couples they had known casually for years, started approaching them at conferences, they say, and thanking them for writing the piece. Many said they had quietly lived the same way and felt relieved to be able to speak about it. Emboldened by a new sense that she had an activist mission — that her coming out might help others like her, and that she, as a tenured professor, had the privilege to do so — Jenkins began writing more about nonmonogamy. She wrote about it in The Globe and Mail and Slate. She went on CBC to give radio interviews. But even in contexts in which people were willing to give her an audience, they struggled with her argument that polyamory and promiscuity were not the same thing.

  Throughout history, Jenkins points out, society has sexualized people or behaviors that it considers undesirable or impermissible in order to discredit them. Take young single women who moved to cities in the early 20th century, for instance, or couples who came together across racial lines, or gay men. Jenkins notes that in order to gain respectability, LGBTQ folks have had to adopt lifestyles that look like straight monogamous marriage.

  Which features of love are biological and which social? she asks. What can we control? There is no necessary connection between polyamory and prom­iscuity, Jenkins argues. She thinks like a logician, and to her, this is simply a confusion of concepts. She points out that a person could fall in love with two people at the same time, have only two partners her whole life, and be considered a "slut." Meanwhile, someone can sleep around while dating, or go through a string of brief, monogamous relationships, and have dozens of partners without receiving censure. Still, Jenkins recognizes that most people will struggle with her ideas.
  About a year ago, she gave an interview to Cosmopolitan UK about nonmonogamous relationships. She emphasized the point that polyamory did not mean the same thing as promiscuity. She spoke at length with the writer about the damage that confusing the terms could do, and asked to read a copy of the article before it ran. The author, who had listened painstakingly, seemed to get it. She ran the text of the story by Jenkins, and Jenkins approved it. So when Jenkins received a copy in the mail, she was dismayed. The cover asked, "Is the foursome the new threesome?" Inside, the centerfold blared: "THREE ISN’T A CROWD," beside a photo spread that showed … an orgy.

  "Not a small orgy," Jenkins laughs. "Like maybe 25 people." When she texts me a photograph of the Cosmo issue later, I count 20, but it is hard to tell. They are writhing in a tangle of limbs and haunches like some flesh-toned version of the Indiana Jones snake pit.

  The Cosmopolitan UK spread not only conveyed the opposite of the message that Jenkins had wanted to send. It turned her into a target of abuse online. Like many women who write for the public, particularly about gender or sexuality, Jenkins gets a steady stream of hate mail. Strangers threaten her on Twitter: Why are you acting like this is an ok thing? Get herpes and die, slut. Sharia law looks more attractive by the day. One message she shows me is from someone whose handle contains the name RAMBO and whose feed features pictures upon pictures of guns. Jenkins says that she feels safer living in Canada than she would if she lived in the United States, but who knows? It takes only one angry man.

  Meanwhile, Jenkins has had to contend with harassment within her discipline, too. She declines to offer specifics but says, "Anonymous commentaries in the philosophy blogosphere can be pretty grim." The field has been widely criticized from within by scholars who say that not only is the curriculum male-centric, but gender discrimination is routine. In recent years, several high-profile cases of sexual harassment have further sullied its reputation.

  A paper published last July by Eric Schwitzgebel of the University of California at Riverside and Carolyn Dicey Jennings of the University of California at Merced found that women made up just 25 percent of philosophy faculty at 75 institutions in the United States, Canada, Britain, and Australia. When the researchers took rank into account, they found evidence that women experienced higher attrition rates, lower promotion rates, and lower rates of senior recruitment.

  Jenkins thinks a lot about philosophy’s gender problem. "It’s a complicated situation, and a lot of factors contribute to it and reinforce it," she says. "There’s the stereotype of the philosopher, a genius, as someone who looks like Socrates, with a big white beard. One of the things that’s noticeable is that women leave philosophy, even as undergraduates, even if they’re doing well. One plausible explanation is that we’re not cultivating the sense that this is a field for women."

  Jenkins emphasizes that this image not only affects who is doing philosophical work. It also shapes what kind of work gets done. Elizabeth Brake, an associate professor at Arizona State University who also works on feminist philosophy and philosophies of love, agrees, even as she expresses some measured optimism. "Philosophers have been writing on love and sex since Plato’s Symposium," she says. "And over the past 15 years, especially with philosophers writing on same-sex marriage, the topic has become much more accepted within political philosophy." Still, she stresses that "people writing on new topics face the burden of proving that the topic is philosophy."

  John Corvino, chair of the philosophy department at Wayne State University and author of What’s Wrong With Homosexuality? (Oxford University Press, 2013), says that scholars who work on "applied philosophy" — a term he dislikes — usually have to prove themselves first in other areas: "Jenkins’s first book was on the philosophy of mathematics. Jason Stanley, who recently has done interesting work on propaganda and ideology, made his name in philosophy of language and epistemology. Old prejudices about what counts as ‘serious’ work — and relatedly, who counts as a ‘serious’ philosopher — linger."

  The debate over what kind of philosophy gets rewarded blew up recently in a more specific storm, in which Jenkins found herself at the center. It started as a set of disputes surrounding Brian Leiter, a University of Chicago law professor who founded the Philosophical Gourmet Report, and ran it until recently. The Gourmet Report ranks philosophy departments, based on surveys filled out by hundreds of academic philosophers every year, and enjoys enormous influence within the field. It has also caused consternation among critics who have questioned its methodology and say it is biased against philosophy departments with a Continental orientation or an Asian one.

  "There are many reasons, feminist and otherwise, to be concerned about the Gourmet Report," says Jennifer Saul, a philosophy professor at the University of Sheffield, who runs the blog What Is It Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy? In 2012, Saul published a paper arguing that Leiter’s publication encouraged the perpetuation of "pernicious biases that hinder the accurate evaluation of work and that perpetuate stereotypes and unjust inequalities." It was one of several critiques of the Gourmet Report that prompted a flurry of online and email exchanges between Leiter and his critics, and preceded a statement that Jenkins published in the summer of 2014 pledging to behave with civility in her professional life.

  Many in the field, including Leiter, read the statement as an attack on him. He responded by sending Jenkins a derisive email and tweeting that she was a "sanctimonious arse." When Jenkins made the email public, other philosophers rallied to her defense. They circulated a "statement of concern," eventually signed by 600 faculty and students, saying that Leiter’s actions had harmed Jenkins’s health and ability to work, and refusing to participate in the Gourmet Report’s surveys until he stepped down as the editor. Leiter published a series of posts complaining of a "smear campaign" and that October stepped down, though he remains on the Gourmet Report’s advisory board. Later that year, he threatened to sue Jenkins for falsely portraying him.

  Jenkins refuses to speak about the Leiter controversy. Last summer she — along with Jennings and two other vocal critics of Leiter’s — each received an envelope full of human feces. Leiter denied sending the packages and has attributed them to someone who must be trying to embarrass him, noting, for example, that one or more of the envelopes used his law school's return address.

  I n contrast with these dramas, Jenkins’s book What Love Is reads calmly. It is not a how-to book — unlike The Ethical Slut, which remains the most widely read manual on polyamory. But it is not a dry philosophical argument, either. The book opens with an autobiographical anecdote. ("The first draft began with a list of definitions," Jenkins says with a laugh; her editor pointed out that this might not be the most gripping opening for a general audience.) Jenkins reflects on how the experience of feeling in love with both her boyfriend and her husband led her to question what love was. Could she be in love with both? Was she mistaken about her own feelings? Or was it that the definition of romantic love was in error and needed to expand?

  "We are creating space in our ongoing cultural conversations to question the universal norm of monogamous love, just as we previously created space to question the universal norm of hetero love," Jenkins writes. "I’m personally invested, as are you. Just as we all bring our experiences with us, and just as we are all biased, we are all personally invested. Nobody is agenda-free."

  The central goal of What Love Is is to abolish what Jenkins calls "the romantic mystique," a deliberate allusion to Betty Friedan’s classic second-wave text, The Feminine Mystique. "On the one hand, we’ve accepted the idea of love as a tremendously significant social force: something that shapes and reshapes the entire trajectories of lives and serves as a focal point for all kinds of values," Jenkins writes. On the other hand, "we have simultaneously normalized the idea that love is a mystery: something hard or impossible to comprehend."

  RELATED CONTENT

  Diversifying a Discipline PREMIUM
  Female Philosophers Shake Up Their Field PREMIUM
  The Man Who Ranks Philosophy Departments Now Rankles Them, Too
  In characteristic fashion, Jenkins rejects the aversion to reflecting on love for fear of destroying it, professing to be "more worried about the tangible dangers of underthinking than the putative dangers of overthinking." And so she proceeds to examine how experts, including philosophers — from Plato to Nietzsche to Russell, and to her contemporaries, like the University of Miami’s Berit Brogaard — have defined romantic love, and works to break down common assumptions about it. Some of those, like Nietzsche’s assertion that a woman "wants to be taken and accepted as a possession," are easier to refute than others, like the idea that "if you’re not in romantic love, or at least looking for it, then you’re doing life wrong" — an idea Elizabeth Brake calls "amatonormativity."
  "While I don’t agree with that on an intellectual level, the internalized attitude is hard to dislodge," Jenkins writes. "In the same vein, I can’t just stop caring about monogamy norms because too many other people care about them. And last but not least, it’s impossible for me to stop caring about whether my situation counts as a genuine case of romantic love because I know that its being recognized as such could be a powerful way of convincing people to take my relationships seriously."

  Key to that campaign is Jenkins’s exploration of whether romantic love is primarily a biological drive (a theory ascendant today) or a social construct. While most feminist theorists and humanists and social scientists in general have been inclined to treat the two in opposition, rejecting biological essentialism or conceiving of romantic love as a social expression of a biological phenomenon, Jenkins is not satisfied with either. Which features of love are biological and which social? she asks. What can we control?

  Ultimately, she argues, love is both: "ancient biological machinery embodying a modern social role," not unlike an actor embodying his character on stage. Jenkins is not alone in this new openness to biology, history, and sociology — which have often been bracketed from philosophy. Brake remarks that to write well on a topic like love, "you have to be empirically well informed. It’s important to know about history of marriage law, rates of marriage, policy and statistics." In 2015 the feminist philosopher Elizabeth A. Wilson argued in her book Gut Feminism (Duke University Press) that feminist theorists needed to learn to account for scientific data in their arguments.

  While Jenkins criticizes those who are too quick to call "insufficiently examined ideology … ‘natural’ or ‘biological,’ " she also emphasizes that recognizing the biological elements of romantic love can have socially emancipatory effects. For instance, brain scans that showed similar neurological activity in gay and straight subjects expressing love played an important role in compelling scientists and the general public to recognize same-sex love as legitimate.

  "Let’s not forget that it took many years of serious scientific research to convince (most) people that there is no biologically superior race or gender," writes Jenkins. "Getting a proper grip on the biology of love may help us unravel the idea that there is one biologically superior way to love."

  Moira Weigel is completing a Ph.D. in comparative literature and in film and media at Yale University and will join the Harvard Society of Fellows as a junior fellow in 2017. She is the author of Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).

  Corrections (2/9/2017, 12:13 p.m.): An earlier version of this article erroneously described the allegations of a Statement of Concern about Brian Leiter. It also mischaracterized the timing of his threat to sue Jenkins, and mistakenly referred to the Philosophical Gourmet Report as a "blog." And it incorrectly described John Corvino as a co-author of What's Wrong With Homosexuality? He is its sole author. The article has been revised to remove those inaccuracies.

  A version of this article appeared in the February 10, 2017 issue.

  Questions or concerns about this article? Email us or submit a letter to the editor.

  TRENDING NOW
  photo_83817_wide_325x163
  THE CHRONICLE REVIEW
  An Antidote for American Amnesia PREMIUM
  photo_83814_wide_325x163
  ADMINISTRATION
  Inside the Free-Speech Case That Caught Jeff Sessions’ Eye
  photo_83820_wide_325x163
  ATHLETICS
  Basketball Scandal Highlights the Power of the Assistant Coach — and the Limits of Oversight PREMIUM

  Get Teaching
  A newsletter with insight on what works in and around the classroom

  Sign Up Now
  JobsonChronicleVitae
  Browse by Position Type
  All Types|Faculty/Research|Administrative|Executive|Jobs Outside Academe
  Search by Keyword
  All Types
  Keywords
  Search
  Top Jobs
  ADJUNCT FACULTY, MANAGEMENT AND TECHNOLOGY...
  New York University School of Professional...
  Post a Job
  In print and online today

  photo_83781_cover_320x426
  This Week's Issue
  Get must-read news and trusted insight.

  Read This Issue
  From the Chronicle Store

  Academic Workplace

  Select product:

  2017 (Print), $29
  Purchase
  Learn more about this product
  The Future of Enrollment: Where Colleges Will Find Their Next Students

  Select product:

  The Future of Enrollment (Print), $179
  Purchase
  Learn more about this product
  See All Products

  Chronicle of Higher Education Subscribe Today
  1255 Twenty-Third St., N.W.
  Washington, D.C. 20037
  Twitter
  Facebook
  Log In
  Get Newsletters
  Events
  About The Chronicle
  Advertise
  Contact Us
  Help
  Site Map
  Privacy Policy
  User Agreement
  Copyright © 2017 The Chronicle of Higher Education
  ShareThis Copy and PasteSkip to main content CLOSE Home News Faculty Students Administration Leadership & Governance Global Technology People More Opinion The Chronicle Review Commentary More Data Almanac of Higher Education Faculty Salaries Title IX Investigations Idea Lab Focus Collections Advice Jobs For Employers For Job Seekers Special Reports Current Issue Archives Forums Video On Leadership Interviews Blogs The Ticker Lingua Franca ProfHacker From Our Advertisers Campus Viewpoints Academic Destinations Employer Profiles The Chronicle Store SUBSCRIBE TODAY FOR PREMIUM ACCESS SUBSCRIBELOG IN NEWS OPINION DATA ADVICE JOBS SECTIONS Search the Chronicle FEATURED:Jeff Sessions on Free Speech Get the Teaching Newsletter A New Liberal Art Your Daily Briefing THE CHRONICLE REVIEW ‘I Have Multiple Loves’ Carrie Jenkins makes the philosophical case for polyamory By Moira Weigel FEBRUARY 03, 2017 Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins and I have plans to meet her boyfriend for lunch. But first we have to go home to walk the dog. Her husband, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, is out of town at a conference for the weekend, and earlier that morning Mezzo, their labradoodle mix, got skunked; Jenkins says Mezzo is still feeling shaky. Before I traveled to meet her in Vancouver last June, she told me on the phone that most "mono" people misunderstand the challenges of polyamory — the practice of being openly involved romantically with more than one person at a time. "People ask, ‘Tell me about the downsides,’ " Jenkins says. "They expect the answer to be that it’s so hard jealousy-wise. But the most common answer is timing and scheduling. I’m a fairly organized person, so I don’t find it super challenging." The claim is easy to believe. In her professional life, too, Jenkins is managing to do several things at once. Since 2011 she has held a prestigious Canada Research Chair in the philosophy department at the University of British Columbia; she has taught 200-person lecture courses in metaphysics to undergraduates and advanced graduate seminars in epistemology. This semester she is co-teaching an interdisciplinary survey on the theme of "Knowledge and Power," introducing students to Freud, Russell, and Foucault in short order. Jenkins is also in a band, called 21st Century Monads, in which she and several other academics write songs about the philosophy of numbers. They live in different cities, she says, so "mostly we just email audio files to one another." She is also spending more and more time writing for nonacademic readers. Since July 2016, she has been enrolled part time in the M.F.A. program in creative nonfiction at British Columbia. When I visited, she had just finished the manuscript of her first trade book, What Love Is: And What It Could Be, which Basic Books published in January. Jenkins wrote about polyamory because she felt she had to. She and her husband were tired of living in the closet. When we arrive at Jenkins’s house, Mezzo rushes, slipping, across the bare wood floor to the front door, and leaps on her. The dog’s black curls still smell like tomato juice. "See," says Jenkins, gesturing at the living room as she clips on Mezzo’s leash, "We’re a very boring and respectable couple!" Two sofas, bookshelves, a wire stand displaying a volume of essays co-edited by her husband, also a philosopher at UBC. On the wall hang sepia-toned photographs of someone’s relatives. On the front porch are a swing and a coffee table with an ashtray on it. The ashtray is full, as if they have just had a party, or someone has been sitting out there, for a long time, thinking, while gazing into the street. As we walk Mezzo around Mount Pleasant, a leafy neighborhood about 20 minutes away from campus by the green electric scooter that Jenkins drives to work every morning, she starts explaining why she prefers the term "polyamory" to "nonmonogamy." "Nonmonogamy can include so many forms," she says. "You could just be ‘monogamish’ " — a term coined by the advice expert Dan Savage for long-term relationships in which partners allow each other to have occasional flings. "You could be swinging; you could have a ‘friend with benefits’ while looking for more-traditional romantic relationships. I sort of switched over to using the ‘polyamory’ label because this really means multiple loves. I have multiple loves." Over lunch, she and her boyfriend, Ray Hsu, explain that it took a little while for both of them to realize how deeply they felt for each other. They met in 2012. (Jenkins and her husband married in April 2011; they have always had an open relationship and wrote their wedding vows to reflect this. They made no promise to "forsake all others.") Hsu is a poet who also teaches at UBC. He and Jenkins worked in the same building, but they met through OkCupid. They still communicate primarily through text messaging and social media. "I think we broke Facebook," Jenkins laughs, when Hsu brings up how many messages they have sent over the past four years. It took about a year, Jenkins recalls, before "I started to realize that I was in love with Ray as well as in love with Jon. And it probably took even more time to acknowledge it." After that, "the poly label started to feel like more of a useful fit." Despite the personal clarity that she has gained on these points, socially the relationship has not been easy. Even in liberal settings, where people might not blink at the idea of a friend sleeping around or dating someone of the same gender, Jenkins says that "mononormativity" persists: The ruling assumption is that a person can be in love with only one other person at a time. (She recalls a colleague becoming extremely discomfited recently at her husband’s birthday party, when Hsu introduced himself as "Carrie’s boyfriend.") Still, Jenkins believes that we are in urgent need of a more expansive concept of love. And she believes that philosophy, the discipline named for the "love of knowledge," needs to become more expansive — treating a wider range of questions and addressing a broader audience — in order to help create it. J enkins did not set out to become a love expert. After growing up in Wales, she entered Trinity College, Cambridge, and pursued a degree in analytic philosophy; she stayed on to write a doctoral thesis on the philosophy of mathematics. "There’s a tradition of philosophy that I grew up in which is quite narrow in terms of the topics that it would address, in academic journal publications," she recalls. "We were addressing fundamental problems about space and time." She published her first book, Grounding Concepts: An Empirical Basis for Arithmetical Knowledge (Oxford University Press), in 2008. According to a review in the journal Mind, Jenkins offered "a new kind of arithmetical epistemology" — one that challenged the unstated assumption that the difference between a priori and a posteriori knowledge was that only the latter involved empirical data from the physical world. On the contrary, Jenkins argued that a priori concepts, such as intuitions of numbers, also relied upon the senses. Following that book, Jenkins published a series of articles on theories of explanation. However, she began thinking more and more about love. It seems logical that a thinker who spent so much time re-evaluating the ways in which experience shaped metaphysical knowledge might attempt to analyze her own life using the tools of philosophy. As Jenkins tells it, however, her inspiration came from Bertrand Russell — one of the founding fathers of analytic philosophy and a titanic presence at Cambridge. "What I didn’t realize when I was studying his philosophy of mathematics was that he wrote about all these other things," Jenkins recalls. She particularly means his 1929 book, Marriage and Morals, in which Russell advocated for what he called "free love." Jenkins calls the book "a precursor of the contemporary sex-positive movement." She thinks that a lot of Russell’s work on love and marriage was ahead of its time, but that he himself remained blind to its philosophical importance. "He just didn’t call Marriage and Morals philosophy," Jenkins says. "And I think that it’s partly fed into the conception of analytic philosophy as a very gendered thing: The mind, the logic, the mathematics is very specifically men’s business, and his work on love, sex, relationships, society — all the ‘women’s business’ — he cordoned out." While philosophers trained in the Continental tradition — thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Derrida — have written about love, analytic philosophy continues to dominate North American departments. Increasingly, Jenkins has become frustrated with the way it separates philosophy from "real life" concerns. Personal considerations finally drove her to start making this argument in public. Jenkins wrote about polyamory because she felt she had to: She and her husband were tired of living in the closet. In July 2011, shortly after their wedding, they published an open letter about their open relationship in the journal Off Topic. At the time, they were just about to move to the University of British Columbia. They were nervous, they said, but they agreed that they needed to come out. The couple was worried about people judging them and their relationship. They had been lectured before, and they were familiar with the accusations against their lifestyle: That it was not healthy, physically or psychologically; that it was not natural; that it was not ethical; and so on. But they had well-reasoned answers to each of those charges. "Despite these various kinds of nervousness (justified or otherwise) about disclosure," they wrote, "being closetedly non-monogamous (effectively, mono-acting) has its disadvantages too. We’re ready to be done with it. Academic philosophy is a small world; certain areas of it are very small indeed. What if someone happens to see one of us with somebody else, and assumes (not thinking about the alternatives) that we’re cheating? We each hate the idea of being taken for a cheater, or of being pitied as the spouse of a cheater. And we hate very much indeed the idea of some poor well-meaning friend feeling awful about having witnessed some apparent cheating, and agonizing over whether they ought to say or do something." Jenkins and Ichikawa took the most common charges they had heard against nonmonogamy, and they refuted them one by one. Jimmy Jeong for The Chronicle Review Carrie Jenkins with her husband (right) and boyfriend (left). Take, for instance, the claim that it’s unhealthy to have multiple sexual partners. Jenkins and Ichikawa pointed out that this was simply untrue. It is perfectly possible to maintain sexual health with multiple partners; indeed, a person who has openly discussed the pros and cons of opening a relationship with a partner is more likely to practice safe sex than is the frustrated partner who resorts to "drunken flings, clandestine affairs, or other ill-considered hookups." What about the assumption that nonmonogamy is psychologically damaging? "Different people are different," Jenkins and Ichikawa wrote. Many nonmonogamous people report that they come to feel less jealousy over time; conversely, many monogamous people complain of experiencing sexual jealousy. In response to the charge that nonmonogamy is "unnatural," Jenkins and Ichikawa pointed out that virtually no species are sexually monogamous, even if they are socially monogamous or pair-bond for life. ("Not even swans.") They called their letter "On Being the Only Ones." Soon after they published it, they learned that they weren’t. Strangers, and couples they had known casually for years, started approaching them at conferences, they say, and thanking them for writing the piece. Many said they had quietly lived the same way and felt relieved to be able to speak about it. Emboldened by a new sense that she had an activist mission — that her coming out might help others like her, and that she, as a tenured professor, had the privilege to do so — Jenkins began writing more about nonmonogamy. She wrote about it in The Globe and Mail and Slate. She went on CBC to give radio interviews. But even in contexts in which people were willing to give her an audience, they struggled with her argument that polyamory and promiscuity were not the same thing. Throughout history, Jenkins points out, society has sexualized people or behaviors that it considers undesirable or impermissible in order to discredit them. Take young single women who moved to cities in the early 20th century, for instance, or couples who came together across racial lines, or gay men. Jenkins notes that in order to gain respectability, LGBTQ folks have had to adopt lifestyles that look like straight monogamous marriage. Which features of love are biological and which social? she asks. What can we control? There is no necessary connection between polyamory and prom­iscuity, Jenkins argues. She thinks like a logician, and to her, this is simply a confusion of concepts. She points out that a person could fall in love with two people at the same time, have only two partners her whole life, and be considered a "slut." Meanwhile, someone can sleep around while dating, or go through a string of brief, monogamous relationships, and have dozens of partners without receiving censure. Still, Jenkins recognizes that most people will struggle with her ideas. About a year ago, she gave an interview to Cosmopolitan UK about nonmonogamous relationships. She emphasized the point that polyamory did not mean the same thing as promiscuity. She spoke at length with the writer about the damage that confusing the terms could do, and asked to read a copy of the article before it ran. The author, who had listened painstakingly, seemed to get it. She ran the text of the story by Jenkins, and Jenkins approved it. So when Jenkins received a copy in the mail, she was dismayed. The cover asked, "Is the foursome the new threesome?" Inside, the centerfold blared: "THREE ISN’T A CROWD," beside a photo spread that showed … an orgy. "Not a small orgy," Jenkins laughs. "Like maybe 25 people." When she texts me a photograph of the Cosmo issue later, I count 20, but it is hard to tell. They are writhing in a tangle of limbs and haunches like some flesh-toned version of the Indiana Jones snake pit. The Cosmopolitan UK spread not only conveyed the opposite of the message that Jenkins had wanted to send. It turned her into a target of abuse online. Like many women who write for the public, particularly about gender or sexuality, Jenkins gets a steady stream of hate mail. Strangers threaten her on Twitter: Why are you acting like this is an ok thing? Get herpes and die, slut. Sharia law looks more attractive by the day. One message she shows me is from someone whose handle contains the name RAMBO and whose feed features pictures upon pictures of guns. Jenkins says that she feels safer living in Canada than she would if she lived in the United States, but who knows? It takes only one angry man. Meanwhile, Jenkins has had to contend with harassment within her discipline, too. She declines to offer specifics but says, "Anonymous commentaries in the philosophy blogosphere can be pretty grim." The field has been widely criticized from within by scholars who say that not only is the curriculum male-centric, but gender discrimination is routine. In recent years, several high-profile cases of sexual harassment have further sullied its reputation. A paper published last July by Eric Schwitzgebel of the University of California at Riverside and Carolyn Dicey Jennings of the University of California at Merced found that women made up just 25 percent of philosophy faculty at 75 institutions in the United States, Canada, Britain, and Australia. When the researchers took rank into account, they found evidence that women experienced higher attrition rates, lower promotion rates, and lower rates of senior recruitment. Jenkins thinks a lot about philosophy’s gender problem. "It’s a complicated situation, and a lot of factors contribute to it and reinforce it," she says. "There’s the stereotype of the philosopher, a genius, as someone who looks like Socrates, with a big white beard. One of the things that’s noticeable is that women leave philosophy, even as undergraduates, even if they’re doing well. One plausible explanation is that we’re not cultivating the sense that this is a field for women." Jenkins emphasizes that this image not only affects who is doing philosophical work. It also shapes what kind of work gets done. Elizabeth Brake, an associate professor at Arizona State University who also works on feminist philosophy and philosophies of love, agrees, even as she expresses some measured optimism. "Philosophers have been writing on love and sex since Plato’s Symposium," she says. "And over the past 15 years, especially with philosophers writing on same-sex marriage, the topic has become much more accepted within political philosophy." Still, she stresses that "people writing on new topics face the burden of proving that the topic is philosophy." John Corvino, chair of the philosophy department at Wayne State University and author of What’s Wrong With Homosexuality? (Oxford University Press, 2013), says that scholars who work on "applied philosophy" — a term he dislikes — usually have to prove themselves first in other areas: "Jenkins’s first book was on the philosophy of mathematics. Jason Stanley, who recently has done interesting work on propaganda and ideology, made his name in philosophy of language and epistemology. Old prejudices about what counts as ‘serious’ work — and relatedly, who counts as a ‘serious’ philosopher — linger." The debate over what kind of philosophy gets rewarded blew up recently in a more specific storm, in which Jenkins found herself at the center. It started as a set of disputes surrounding Brian Leiter, a University of Chicago law professor who founded the Philosophical Gourmet Report, and ran it until recently. The Gourmet Report ranks philosophy departments, based on surveys filled out by hundreds of academic philosophers every year, and enjoys enormous influence within the field. It has also caused consternation among critics who have questioned its methodology and say it is biased against philosophy departments with a Continental orientation or an Asian one. "There are many reasons, feminist and otherwise, to be concerned about the Gourmet Report," says Jennifer Saul, a philosophy professor at the University of Sheffield, who runs the blog What Is It Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy? In 2012, Saul published a paper arguing that Leiter’s publication encouraged the perpetuation of "pernicious biases that hinder the accurate evaluation of work and that perpetuate stereotypes and unjust inequalities." It was one of several critiques of the Gourmet Report that prompted a flurry of online and email exchanges between Leiter and his critics, and preceded a statement that Jenkins published in the summer of 2014 pledging to behave with civility in her professional life. Many in the field, including Leiter, read the statement as an attack on him. He responded by sending Jenkins a derisive email and tweeting that she was a "sanctimonious arse." When Jenkins made the email public, other philosophers rallied to her defense. They circulated a "statement of concern," eventually signed by 600 faculty and students, saying that Leiter’s actions had harmed Jenkins’s health and ability to work, and refusing to participate in the Gourmet Report’s surveys until he stepped down as the editor. Leiter published a series of posts complaining of a "smear campaign" and that October stepped down, though he remains on the Gourmet Report’s advisory board. Later that year, he threatened to sue Jenkins for falsely portraying him. Jenkins refuses to speak about the Leiter controversy. Last summer she — along with Jennings and two other vocal critics of Leiter’s — each received an envelope full of human feces. Leiter denied sending the packages and has attributed them to someone who must be trying to embarrass him, noting, for example, that one or more of the envelopes used his law school's return address. I n contrast with these dramas, Jenkins’s book What Love Is reads calmly. It is not a how-to book — unlike The Ethical Slut, which remains the most widely read manual on polyamory. But it is not a dry philosophical argument, either. The book opens with an autobiographical anecdote. ("The first draft began with a list of definitions," Jenkins says with a laugh; her editor pointed out that this might not be the most gripping opening for a general audience.) Jenkins reflects on how the experience of feeling in love with both her boyfriend and her husband led her to question what love was. Could she be in love with both? Was she mistaken about her own feelings? Or was it that the definition of romantic love was in error and needed to expand? "We are creating space in our ongoing cultural conversations to question the universal norm of monogamous love, just as we previously created space to question the universal norm of hetero love," Jenkins writes. "I’m personally invested, as are you. Just as we all bring our experiences with us, and just as we are all biased, we are all personally invested. Nobody is agenda-free." The central goal of What Love Is is to abolish what Jenkins calls "the romantic mystique," a deliberate allusion to Betty Friedan’s classic second-wave text, The Feminine Mystique. "On the one hand, we’ve accepted the idea of love as a tremendously significant social force: something that shapes and reshapes the entire trajectories of lives and serves as a focal point for all kinds of values," Jenkins writes. On the other hand, "we have simultaneously normalized the idea that love is a mystery: something hard or impossible to comprehend." RELATED CONTENT Diversifying a Discipline PREMIUM Female Philosophers Shake Up Their Field PREMIUM The Man Who Ranks Philosophy Departments Now Rankles Them, Too In characteristic fashion, Jenkins rejects the aversion to reflecting on love for fear of destroying it, professing to be "more worried about the tangible dangers of underthinking than the putative dangers of overthinking." And so she proceeds to examine how experts, including philosophers — from Plato to Nietzsche to Russell, and to her contemporaries, like the University of Miami’s Berit Brogaard — have defined romantic love, and works to break down common assumptions about it. Some of those, like Nietzsche’s assertion that a woman "wants to be taken and accepted as a possession," are easier to refute than others, like the idea that "if you’re not in romantic love, or at least looking for it, then you’re doing life wrong" — an idea Elizabeth Brake calls "amatonormativity." "While I don’t agree with that on an intellectual level, the internalized attitude is hard to dislodge," Jenkins writes. "In the same vein, I can’t just stop caring about monogamy norms because too many other people care about them. And last but not least, it’s impossible for me to stop caring about whether my situation counts as a genuine case of romantic love because I know that its being recognized as such could be a powerful way of convincing people to take my relationships seriously." Key to that campaign is Jenkins’s exploration of whether romantic love is primarily a biological drive (a theory ascendant today) or a social construct. While most feminist theorists and humanists and social scientists in general have been inclined to treat the two in opposition, rejecting biological essentialism or conceiving of romantic love as a social expression of a biological phenomenon, Jenkins is not satisfied with either. Which features of love are biological and which social? she asks. What can we control? Ultimately, she argues, love is both: "ancient biological machinery embodying a modern social role," not unlike an actor embodying his character on stage. Jenkins is not alone in this new openness to biology, history, and sociology — which have often been bracketed from philosophy. Brake remarks that to write well on a topic like love, "you have to be empirically well informed. It’s important to know about history of marriage law, rates of marriage, policy and statistics." In 2015 the feminist philosopher Elizabeth A. Wilson argued in her book Gut Feminism (Duke University Press) that feminist theorists needed to learn to account for scientific data in their arguments. While Jenkins criticizes those who are too quick to call "insufficiently examined ideology … ‘natural’ or ‘biological,’ " she also emphasizes that recognizing the biological elements of romantic love can have socially emancipatory effects. For instance, brain scans that showed similar neurological activity in gay and straight subjects expressing love played an important role in compelling scientists and the general public to recognize same-sex love as legitimate. "Let’s not forget that it took many years of serious scientific research to convince (most) people that there is no biologically superior race or gender," writes Jenkins. "Getting a proper grip on the biology of love may help us unravel the idea that there is one biologically superior way to love." Moira Weigel is completing a Ph.D. in comparative literature and in film and media at Yale University and will join the Harvard Society of Fellows as a junior fellow in 2017. She is the author of Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). Corrections (2/9/2017, 12:13 p.m.): An earlier version of this article erroneously described the allegations of a Statement of Concern about Brian Leiter. It also mischaracterized the timing of his threat to sue Jenkins, and mistakenly referred to the Philosophical Gourmet Report as a "blog." And it incorrectly described John Corvino as a co-author of What's Wrong With Homosexuality? He is its sole author. The article has been revised to remove those inaccuracies. A version of this article appeared in the February 10, 2017 issue. Questions or concerns about this article? Email us or submit a letter to the editor. TRENDING NOW THE CHRONICLE REVIEW An Antidote for American Amnesia PREMIUM ADMINISTRATION Inside the Free-Speech Case That Caught Jeff Sessions’ Eye ATHLETICS Basketball Scandal Highlights the Power of the Assistant Coach — and the Limits of Oversight PREMIUM Get Teaching A newsletter with insight on what works in and around the classroom Sign Up Now JobsonChronicleVitae Browse by Position Type All Types|Faculty/Research|Administrative|Executive|Jobs Outside Academe Search by Keyword All Types Search Top Jobs ADJUNCT FACULTY, MANAGEMENT AND TECHNOLOGY... New York University School of Professional... Post a Job In print and online today This Week's Issue Get must-read news and trusted insight. Read This Issue From the Chronicle Store Academic Workplace Select product: 2017 (Print), $29 Purchase Learn more about this product The Future of Enrollment: Where Colleges Will Find Their Next Students Select product: The Future of Enrollment (Print), $179 Purchase Learn more about this product See All Products Subscribe Today 1255 Twenty-Third St., N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037 Twitter Facebook Log In Get Newsletters Events About The Chronicle Advertise Contact Us Help Site Map Privacy Policy User Agreement Copyright © 2017 The Chronicle of Higher Education Skip to main content CLOSE Home News Faculty Students Administration Leadership & Governance Global Technology People More Opinion The Chronicle Review Commentary More Data Almanac of Higher Education Faculty Salaries Title IX Investigations Idea Lab Focus Collections Advice Jobs For Employers For Job Seekers Special Reports Current Issue Archives Forums Video On Leadership Interviews Blogs The Ticker Lingua Franca ProfHacker From Our Advertisers Campus Viewpoints Academic Destinations Employer Profiles The Chronicle Store SUBSCRIBE TODAY FOR PREMIUM ACCESS SUBSCRIBELOG IN NEWS OPINION DATA ADVICE JOBS SECTIONS Search the Chronicle FEATURED:Jeff Sessions on Free Speech Get the Teaching Newsletter A New Liberal Art Your Daily Briefing THE CHRONICLE REVIEW ‘I Have Multiple Loves’ Carrie Jenkins makes the philosophical case for polyamory By Moira Weigel FEBRUARY 03, 2017 Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins and I have plans to meet her boyfriend for lunch. But first we have to go home to walk the dog. Her husband, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, is out of town at a conference for the weekend, and earlier that morning Mezzo, their labradoodle mix, got skunked; Jenkins says Mezzo is still feeling shaky. Before I traveled to meet her in Vancouver last June, she told me on the phone that most "mono" people misunderstand the challenges of polyamory — the practice of being openly involved romantically with more than one person at a time. "People ask, ‘Tell me about the downsides,’ " Jenkins says. "They expect the answer to be that it’s so hard jealousy-wise. But the most common answer is timing and scheduling. I’m a fairly organized person, so I don’t find it super challenging." The claim is easy to believe. In her professional life, too, Jenkins is managing to do several things at once. Since 2011 she has held a prestigious Canada Research Chair in the philosophy department at the University of British Columbia; she has taught 200-person lecture courses in metaphysics to undergraduates and advanced graduate seminars in epistemology. This semester she is co-teaching an interdisciplinary survey on the theme of "Knowledge and Power," introducing students to Freud, Russell, and Foucault in short order. Jenkins is also in a band, called 21st Century Monads, in which she and several other academics write songs about the philosophy of numbers. They live in different cities, she says, so "mostly we just email audio files to one another." She is also spending more and more time writing for nonacademic readers. Since July 2016, she has been enrolled part time in the M.F.A. program in creative nonfiction at British Columbia. When I visited, she had just finished the manuscript of her first trade book, What Love Is: And What It Could Be, which Basic Books published in January. Jenkins wrote about polyamory because she felt she had to. She and her husband were tired of living in the closet. When we arrive at Jenkins’s house, Mezzo rushes, slipping, across the bare wood floor to the front door, and leaps on her. The dog’s black curls still smell like tomato juice. "See," says Jenkins, gesturing at the living room as she clips on Mezzo’s leash, "We’re a very boring and respectable couple!" Two sofas, bookshelves, a wire stand displaying a volume of essays co-edited by her husband, also a philosopher at UBC. On the wall hang sepia-toned photographs of someone’s relatives. On the front porch are a swing and a coffee table with an ashtray on it. The ashtray is full, as if they have just had a party, or someone has been sitting out there, for a long time, thinking, while gazing into the street. As we walk Mezzo around Mount Pleasant, a leafy neighborhood about 20 minutes away from campus by the green electric scooter that Jenkins drives to work every morning, she starts explaining why she prefers the term "polyamory" to "nonmonogamy." "Nonmonogamy can include so many forms," she says. "You could just be ‘monogamish’ " — a term coined by the advice expert Dan Savage for long-term relationships in which partners allow each other to have occasional flings. "You could be swinging; you could have a ‘friend with benefits’ while looking for more-traditional romantic relationships. I sort of switched over to using the ‘polyamory’ label because this really means multiple loves. I have multiple loves." Over lunch, she and her boyfriend, Ray Hsu, explain that it took a little while for both of them to realize how deeply they felt for each other. They met in 2012. (Jenkins and her husband married in April 2011; they have always had an open relationship and wrote their wedding vows to reflect this. They made no promise to "forsake all others.") Hsu is a poet who also teaches at UBC. He and Jenkins worked in the same building, but they met through OkCupid. They still communicate primarily through text messaging and social media. "I think we broke Facebook," Jenkins laughs, when Hsu brings up how many messages they have sent over the past four years. It took about a year, Jenkins recalls, before "I started to realize that I was in love with Ray as well as in love with Jon. And it probably took even more time to acknowledge it." After that, "the poly label started to feel like more of a useful fit." Despite the personal clarity that she has gained on these points, socially the relationship has not been easy. Even in liberal settings, where people might not blink at the idea of a friend sleeping around or dating someone of the same gender, Jenkins says that "mononormativity" persists: The ruling assumption is that a person can be in love with only one other person at a time. (She recalls a colleague becoming extremely discomfited recently at her husband’s birthday party, when Hsu introduced himself as "Carrie’s boyfriend.") Still, Jenkins believes that we are in urgent need of a more expansive concept of love. And she believes that philosophy, the discipline named for the "love of knowledge," needs to become more expansive — treating a wider range of questions and addressing a broader audience — in order to help create it. J enkins did not set out to become a love expert. After growing up in Wales, she entered Trinity College, Cambridge, and pursued a degree in analytic philosophy; she stayed on to write a doctoral thesis on the philosophy of mathematics. "There’s a tradition of philosophy that I grew up in which is quite narrow in terms of the topics that it would address, in academic journal publications," she recalls. "We were addressing fundamental problems about space and time." She published her first book, Grounding Concepts: An Empirical Basis for Arithmetical Knowledge (Oxford University Press), in 2008. According to a review in the journal Mind, Jenkins offered "a new kind of arithmetical epistemology" — one that challenged the unstated assumption that the difference between a priori and a posteriori knowledge was that only the latter involved empirical data from the physical world. On the contrary, Jenkins argued that a priori concepts, such as intuitions of numbers, also relied upon the senses. Following that book, Jenkins published a series of articles on theories of explanation. However, she began thinking more and more about love. It seems logical that a thinker who spent so much time re-evaluating the ways in which experience shaped metaphysical knowledge might attempt to analyze her own life using the tools of philosophy. As Jenkins tells it, however, her inspiration came from Bertrand Russell — one of the founding fathers of analytic philosophy and a titanic presence at Cambridge. "What I didn’t realize when I was studying his philosophy of mathematics was that he wrote about all these other things," Jenkins recalls. She particularly means his 1929 book, Marriage and Morals, in which Russell advocated for what he called "free love." Jenkins calls the book "a precursor of the contemporary sex-positive movement." She thinks that a lot of Russell’s work on love and marriage was ahead of its time, but that he himself remained blind to its philosophical importance. "He just didn’t call Marriage and Morals philosophy," Jenkins says. "And I think that it’s partly fed into the conception of analytic philosophy as a very gendered thing: The mind, the logic, the mathematics is very specifically men’s business, and his work on love, sex, relationships, society — all the ‘women’s business’ — he cordoned out." While philosophers trained in the Continental tradition — thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Derrida — have written about love, analytic philosophy continues to dominate North American departments. Increasingly, Jenkins has become frustrated with the way it separates philosophy from "real life" concerns. Personal considerations finally drove her to start making this argument in public. Jenkins wrote about polyamory because she felt she had to: She and her husband were tired of living in the closet. In July 2011, shortly after their wedding, they published an open letter about their open relationship in the journal Off Topic. At the time, they were just about to move to the University of British Columbia. They were nervous, they said, but they agreed that they needed to come out. The couple was worried about people judging them and their relationship. They had been lectured before, and they were familiar with the accusations against their lifestyle: That it was not healthy, physically or psychologically; that it was not natural; that it was not ethical; and so on. But they had well-reasoned answers to each of those charges. "Despite these various kinds of nervousness (justified or otherwise) about disclosure," they wrote, "being closetedly non-monogamous (effectively, mono-acting) has its disadvantages too. We’re ready to be done with it. Academic philosophy is a small world; certain areas of it are very small indeed. What if someone happens to see one of us with somebody else, and assumes (not thinking about the alternatives) that we’re cheating? We each hate the idea of being taken for a cheater, or of being pitied as the spouse of a cheater. And we hate very much indeed the idea of some poor well-meaning friend feeling awful about having witnessed some apparent cheating, and agonizing over whether they ought to say or do something." Jenkins and Ichikawa took the most common charges they had heard against nonmonogamy, and they refuted them one by one. Jimmy Jeong for The Chronicle Review Carrie Jenkins with her husband (right) and boyfriend (left). Take, for instance, the claim that it’s unhealthy to have multiple sexual partners. Jenkins and Ichikawa pointed out that this was simply untrue. It is perfectly possible to maintain sexual health with multiple partners; indeed, a person who has openly discussed the pros and cons of opening a relationship with a partner is more likely to practice safe sex than is the frustrated partner who resorts to "drunken flings, clandestine affairs, or other ill-considered hookups." What about the assumption that nonmonogamy is psychologically damaging? "Different people are different," Jenkins and Ichikawa wrote. Many nonmonogamous people report that they come to feel less jealousy over time; conversely, many monogamous people complain of experiencing sexual jealousy. In response to the charge that nonmonogamy is "unnatural," Jenkins and Ichikawa pointed out that virtually no species are sexually monogamous, even if they are socially monogamous or pair-bond for life. ("Not even swans.") They called their letter "On Being the Only Ones." Soon after they published it, they learned that they weren’t. Strangers, and couples they had known casually for years, started approaching them at conferences, they say, and thanking them for writing the piece. Many said they had quietly lived the same way and felt relieved to be able to speak about it. Emboldened by a new sense that she had an activist mission — that her coming out might help others like her, and that she, as a tenured professor, had the privilege to do so — Jenkins began writing more about nonmonogamy. She wrote about it in The Globe and Mail and Slate. She went on CBC to give radio interviews. But even in contexts in which people were willing to give her an audience, they struggled with her argument that polyamory and promiscuity were not the same thing. Throughout history, Jenkins points out, society has sexualized people or behaviors that it considers undesirable or impermissible in order to discredit them. Take young single women who moved to cities in the early 20th century, for instance, or couples who came together across racial lines, or gay men. Jenkins notes that in order to gain respectability, LGBTQ folks have had to adopt lifestyles that look like straight monogamous marriage. Which features of love are biological and which social? she asks. What can we control? There is no necessary connection between polyamory and prom­iscuity, Jenkins argues. She thinks like a logician, and to her, this is simply a confusion of concepts. She points out that a person could fall in love with two people at the same time, have only two partners her whole life, and be considered a "slut." Meanwhile, someone can sleep around while dating, or go through a string of brief, monogamous relationships, and have dozens of partners without receiving censure. Still, Jenkins recognizes that most people will struggle with her ideas. About a year ago, she gave an interview to Cosmopolitan UK about nonmonogamous relationships. She emphasized the point that polyamory did not mean the same thing as promiscuity. She spoke at length with the writer about the damage that confusing the terms could do, and asked to read a copy of the article before it ran. The author, who had listened painstakingly, seemed to get it. She ran the text of the story by Jenkins, and Jenkins approved it. So when Jenkins received a copy in the mail, she was dismayed. The cover asked, "Is the foursome the new threesome?" Inside, the centerfold blared: "THREE ISN’T A CROWD," beside a photo spread that showed … an orgy. "Not a small orgy," Jenkins laughs. "Like maybe 25 people." When she texts me a photograph of the Cosmo issue later, I count 20, but it is hard to tell. They are writhing in a tangle of limbs and haunches like some flesh-toned version of the Indiana Jones snake pit. The Cosmopolitan UK spread not only conveyed the opposite of the message that Jenkins had wanted to send. It turned her into a target of abuse online. Like many women who write for the public, particularly about gender or sexuality, Jenkins gets a steady stream of hate mail. Strangers threaten her on Twitter: Why are you acting like this is an ok thing? Get herpes and die, slut. Sharia law looks more attractive by the day. One message she shows me is from someone whose handle contains the name RAMBO and whose feed features pictures upon pictures of guns. Jenkins says that she feels safer living in Canada than she would if she lived in the United States, but who knows? It takes only one angry man. Meanwhile, Jenkins has had to contend with harassment within her discipline, too. She declines to offer specifics but says, "Anonymous commentaries in the philosophy blogosphere can be pretty grim." The field has been widely criticized from within by scholars who say that not only is the curriculum male-centric, but gender discrimination is routine. In recent years, several high-profile cases of sexual harassment have further sullied its reputation. A paper published last July by Eric Schwitzgebel of the University of California at Riverside and Carolyn Dicey Jennings of the University of California at Merced found that women made up just 25 percent of philosophy faculty at 75 institutions in the United States, Canada, Britain, and Australia. When the researchers took rank into account, they found evidence that women experienced higher attrition rates, lower promotion rates, and lower rates of senior recruitment. Jenkins thinks a lot about philosophy’s gender problem. "It’s a complicated situation, and a lot of factors contribute to it and reinforce it," she says. "There’s the stereotype of the philosopher, a genius, as someone who looks like Socrates, with a big white beard. One of the things that’s noticeable is that women leave philosophy, even as undergraduates, even if they’re doing well. One plausible explanation is that we’re not cultivating the sense that this is a field for women." Jenkins emphasizes that this image not only affects who is doing philosophical work. It also shapes what kind of work gets done. Elizabeth Brake, an associate professor at Arizona State University who also works on feminist philosophy and philosophies of love, agrees, even as she expresses some measured optimism. "Philosophers have been writing on love and sex since Plato’s Symposium," she says. "And over the past 15 years, especially with philosophers writing on same-sex marriage, the topic has become much more accepted within political philosophy." Still, she stresses that "people writing on new topics face the burden of proving that the topic is philosophy." John Corvino, chair of the philosophy department at Wayne State University and author of What’s Wrong With Homosexuality? (Oxford University Press, 2013), says that scholars who work on "applied philosophy" — a term he dislikes — usually have to prove themselves first in other areas: "Jenkins’s first book was on the philosophy of mathematics. Jason Stanley, who recently has done interesting work on propaganda and ideology, made his name in philosophy of language and epistemology. Old prejudices about what counts as ‘serious’ work — and relatedly, who counts as a ‘serious’ philosopher — linger." The debate over what kind of philosophy gets rewarded blew up recently in a more specific storm, in which Jenkins found herself at the center. It started as a set of disputes surrounding Brian Leiter, a University of Chicago law professor who founded the Philosophical Gourmet Report, and ran it until recently. The Gourmet Report ranks philosophy departments, based on surveys filled out by hundreds of academic philosophers every year, and enjoys enormous influence within the field. It has also caused consternation among critics who have questioned its methodology and say it is biased against philosophy departments with a Continental orientation or an Asian one. "There are many reasons, feminist and otherwise, to be concerned about the Gourmet Report," says Jennifer Saul, a philosophy professor at the University of Sheffield, who runs the blog What Is It Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy? In 2012, Saul published a paper arguing that Leiter’s publication encouraged the perpetuation of "pernicious biases that hinder the accurate evaluation of work and that perpetuate stereotypes and unjust inequalities." It was one of several critiques of the Gourmet Report that prompted a flurry of online and email exchanges between Leiter and his critics, and preceded a statement that Jenkins published in the summer of 2014 pledging to behave with civility in her professional life. Many in the field, including Leiter, read the statement as an attack on him. He responded by sending Jenkins a derisive email and tweeting that she was a "sanctimonious arse." When Jenkins made the email public, other philosophers rallied to her defense. They circulated a "statement of concern," eventually signed by 600 faculty and students, saying that Leiter’s actions had harmed Jenkins’s health and ability to work, and refusing to participate in the Gourmet Report’s surveys until he stepped down as the editor. Leiter published a series of posts complaining of a "smear campaign" and that October stepped down, though he remains on the Gourmet Report’s advisory board. Later that year, he threatened to sue Jenkins for falsely portraying him. Jenkins refuses to speak about the Leiter controversy. Last summer she — along with Jennings and two other vocal critics of Leiter’s — each received an envelope full of human feces. Leiter denied sending the packages and has attributed them to someone who must be trying to embarrass him, noting, for example, that one or more of the envelopes used his law school's return address. I n contrast with these dramas, Jenkins’s book What Love Is reads calmly. It is not a how-to book — unlike The Ethical Slut, which remains the most widely read manual on polyamory. But it is not a dry philosophical argument, either. The book opens with an autobiographical anecdote. ("The first draft began with a list of definitions," Jenkins says with a laugh; her editor pointed out that this might not be the most gripping opening for a general audience.) Jenkins reflects on how the experience of feeling in love with both her boyfriend and her husband led her to question what love was. Could she be in love with both? Was she mistaken about her own feelings? Or was it that the definition of romantic love was in error and needed to expand? "We are creating space in our ongoing cultural conversations to question the universal norm of monogamous love, just as we previously created space to question the universal norm of hetero love," Jenkins writes. "I’m personally invested, as are you. Just as we all bring our experiences with us, and just as we are all biased, we are all personally invested. Nobody is agenda-free." The central goal of What Love Is is to abolish what Jenkins calls "the romantic mystique," a deliberate allusion to Betty Friedan’s classic second-wave text, The Feminine Mystique. "On the one hand, we’ve accepted the idea of love as a tremendously significant social force: something that shapes and reshapes the entire trajectories of lives and serves as a focal point for all kinds of values," Jenkins writes. On the other hand, "we have simultaneously normalized the idea that love is a mystery: something hard or impossible to comprehend." RELATED CONTENT Diversifying a Discipline PREMIUM Female Philosophers Shake Up Their Field PREMIUM The Man Who Ranks Philosophy Departments Now Rankles Them, Too In characteristic fashion, Jenkins rejects the aversion to reflecting on love for fear of destroying it, professing to be "more worried about the tangible dangers of underthinking than the putative dangers of overthinking." And so she proceeds to examine how experts, including philosophers — from Plato to Nietzsche to Russell, and to her contemporaries, like the University of Miami’s Berit Brogaard — have defined romantic love, and works to break down common assumptions about it. Some of those, like Nietzsche’s assertion that a woman "wants to be taken and accepted as a possession," are easier to refute than others, like the idea that "if you’re not in romantic love, or at least looking for it, then you’re doing life wrong" — an idea Elizabeth Brake calls "amatonormativity." "While I don’t agree with that on an intellectual level, the internalized attitude is hard to dislodge," Jenkins writes. "In the same vein, I can’t just stop caring about monogamy norms because too many other people care about them. And last but not least, it’s impossible for me to stop caring about whether my situation counts as a genuine case of romantic love because I know that its being recognized as such could be a powerful way of convincing people to take my relationships seriously." Key to that campaign is Jenkins’s exploration of whether romantic love is primarily a biological drive (a theory ascendant today) or a social construct. While most feminist theorists and humanists and social scientists in general have been inclined to treat the two in opposition, rejecting biological essentialism or conceiving of romantic love as a social expression of a biological phenomenon, Jenkins is not satisfied with either. Which features of love are biological and which social? she asks. What can we control? Ultimately, she argues, love is both: "ancient biological machinery embodying a modern social role," not unlike an actor embodying his character on stage. Jenkins is not alone in this new openness to biology, history, and sociology — which have often been bracketed from philosophy. Brake remarks that to write well on a topic like love, "you have to be empirically well informed. It’s important to know about history of marriage law, rates of marriage, policy and statistics." In 2015 the feminist philosopher Elizabeth A. Wilson argued in her book Gut Feminism (Duke University Press) that feminist theorists needed to learn to account for scientific data in their arguments. While Jenkins criticizes those who are too quick to call "insufficiently examined ideology … ‘natural’ or ‘biological,’ " she also emphasizes that recognizing the biological elements of romantic love can have socially emancipatory effects. For instance, brain scans that showed similar neurological activity in gay and straight subjects expressing love played an important role in compelling scientists and the general public to recognize same-sex love as legitimate. "Let’s not forget that it took many years of serious scientific research to convince (most) people that there is no biologically superior race or gender," writes Jenkins. "Getting a proper grip on the biology of love may help us unravel the idea that there is one biologically superior way to love." Moira Weigel is completing a Ph.D. in comparative literature and in film and media at Yale University and will join the Harvard Society of Fellows as a junior fellow in 2017. She is the author of Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). Corrections (2/9/2017, 12:13 p.m.): An earlier version of this article erroneously described the allegations of a Statement of Concern about Brian Leiter. It also mischaracterized the timing of his threat to sue Jenkins, and mistakenly referred to the Philosophical Gourmet Report as a "blog." And it incorrectly described John Corvino as a co-author of What's Wrong With Homosexuality? He is its sole author. The article has been revised to remove those inaccuracies. A version of this article appeared in the February 10, 2017 issue. Questions or concerns about this article? Email us or submit a letter to the editor. TRENDING NOW THE CHRONICLE REVIEW An Antidote for American Amnesia PREMIUM ADMINISTRATION Inside the Free-Speech Case That Caught Jeff Sessions’ Eye ATHLETICS Basketball Scandal Highlights the Power of the Assistant Coach — and the Limits of Oversight PREMIUM Get Teaching A newsletter with insight on what works in and around the classroom Sign Up Now JobsonChronicleVitae Browse by Position Type All Types|Faculty/Research|Administrative|Executive|Jobs Outside Academe Search by Keyword All Types Search Top Jobs ADJUNCT FACULTY, MANAGEMENT AND TECHNOLOGY... New York University School of Professional... Post a Job In print and online today This Week's Issue Get must-read news and trusted insight. Read This Issue From the Chronicle Store Academic Workplace Select product: 2017 (Print), $29 Purchase Learn more about this product The Future of Enrollment: Where Colleges Will Find Their Next Students Select product: The Future of Enrollment (Print), $179 Purchase Learn more about this product See All Products Subscribe Today 1255 Twenty-Third St., N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037 Twitter Facebook Log In Get Newsletters Events About The Chronicle Advertise Contact Us Help Site Map Privacy Policy User Agreement Copyright © 2017 The Chronicle of Higher Education ShareThis Copy and Paste

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrie_Ichikawa_Jenkins

  Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins
  Alma mater Trinity College, Cambridge
  Era Contemporary philosophy
  Region Western philosophy
  School Analytic
  Institutions University of British Columbia, University of Aberdeen
  Main interests
  Epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of logic, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mathematics
  Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins holds a Canada Research Chair[1] and is Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia.[2] She is also a Professor at the Northern Institute of Philosophy, University of Aberdeen.[3] Her primary research areas are epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of logic, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mathematics.[4] She is one of the principal editors of the journal Thought.[5]

  Contents [hide]
  1 Education and career
  2 Research areas
  3 Selected publications
  4 References
  5 External links
  Education and career[edit]
  Jenkins holds BA, MPhil and PhD degrees in philosophy from Trinity College, Cambridge.[4]

  She has held teaching and research positions at the University of St Andrews, the Australian National University, the University of Michigan and the University of Nottingham.[4] She was head of the department of philosophy at the University of Nottingham from 2010 to 2011.[4]

  Jenkins was awarded a Canada Research Chair by the Canadian Government in 2011.[1]

  Jenkins is also a member of the philosophy-themed musical group The 21st Century Monads.[6]

  Jenkins became involved in a dispute with Brian Leiter, a professor at the University of Chicago and then editor of the Philosophical Gourmet Report. His e-mailed remarks about Jenkins led to hundreds of philosophers refusing to provide data for the report, and ultimately led to his stepping down as its editor.[7][8]

  Research areas[edit]
  Jenkins is the author of Grounding Concepts: An Empirical Basis for Arithmetical Knowledge, published in 2008 by Oxford University Press.

  Grounding Concepts has been described as an ‘important book’,[9] ‘an original treatment of the epistemology of arithmetic that is clearly articulated and carefully argued’,[10] and a 'key work' in its field.[11] Reviewers have said that ‘at each step Jenkins offers new ideas, or interesting twists of the traditional ones, or exciting polemics and criticism’,[12] and that "Grounding Concepts" ‘adds a genuinely new option to the philosophical landscape.’[13]

  Jenkins has also published over thirty articles in philosophical journals and edited volumes.[4] In 2013, she was a keynote speaker at the annual conference of the Western Canadian Philosophical Association.[4]

  Jenkins’s work on the philosophy of flirting has been described as ‘ground-breaking’.[14] She is currently leading a research project on the metaphysics of romantic love[15] and is well-known as a defender of polyamory.[16]

  Selected publications[edit]
  Grounding Concepts: An Empirical Basis for Arithmetical Knowledge (OUP, 2008, ISBN 978-0-19-923157-7)
  ‘The Philosophy of Flirting’: http://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/25/14443302/1444330225.pdf
  ‘Concepts, Experience and Modal Knowledge’: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1520-8583.2010.00193.x/abstract
  ‘Romeo, René, and the Reasons Why: What Explanation Is’: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9264.2008.00236.x/abstract
  References[edit]
  ^ Jump up to: a b "Canada Research Chair – Profile". chairs-chaires.gc.ca.
  Jump up ^ "Carrie Jenkins – Department of Philosophy". ubc.ca.
  Jump up ^ Northern Institute of Philosophy Archived March 26, 2014, at the Wayback Machine.
  ^ Jump up to: a b c d e f http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2480139/CV.pdf
  Jump up ^ "Thought: A Journal of Philosophy – Wiley Online Library". wiley.com.
  Jump up ^ "The 21st Century Monads". the21stcenturymonads.net.
  Jump up ^ Schmidt, Peter (September 26, 2014). "The Man Who Ranks Philosophy Departments Now Rankles Them, Too". Chronicle.com. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Archived from the original on September 26, 2014. Retrieved September 30, 2014.
  Jump up ^ Andy Thomason (October 10, 2014). "Controversial Philosopher Will Step Down as Editor of Influential Rankings". The Chronicle of Higher Education.
  Jump up ^ J.R. Brown, Platonism, Naturalism, and Mathematical Knowledge, Routledge Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 2011, ISBN 978-0415872669, p. 67
  Jump up ^ "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2014-04-23. Retrieved 2014-04-21.
  Jump up ^ "Apriority in Mathematics". philpapers.org.
  Jump up ^ Nenad G Miscevic. "On C. Jenkins_Grounding Concepts:". academia.edu.
  Jump up ^ ENR // AgencyND // University of Notre Dame. "Grounding Concepts: An Empirical Basis for Arithmetical Knowledge". nd.edu.
  Jump up ^ "Dating – Philosophy for Everyone: Flirting with Big Ideas". wiley.com.
  Jump up ^ "The Metaphysics of Love". The Metaphysics of Love.
  Jump up ^ http://www.chronicle.com/article/I-Have-Multiple-Loves-/239077
  External links[edit]
  Personal website
  The Metaphysics of Love Project
  Interviewed at Aesthetics for Birds
  Interviewed for Philosophers on Film
  Categories: 21st-century philosophersAcademics of the University of St AndrewsAlumni of Trinity College, CambridgeAustralian National University facultyCanadian philosophersEpistemologistsLiving peopleCanadian logiciansPhilosophers of languagePhilosophers of mathematicsUniversity of British Columbia facultyUniversity of Michigan facultyAcademics of the University of NottinghamCanadian women philosophers
  Navigation menu
  Not logged inTalkContributionsCreate accountLog inArticleTalkReadEditView historySearch

  Search Wikipedia
  Go
  Main page
  Contents
  Featured content
  Current events
  Random article
  Donate to Wikipedia
  Wikipedia store
  Interaction
  Help
  About Wikipedia
  Community portal
  Recent changes
  Contact page
  Tools
  What links here
  Related changes
  Upload file
  Special pages
  Permanent link
  Page information
  Wikidata item
  Cite this page
  Print/export
  Create a book
  Download as PDF
  Printable version
  Languages
  Add links
  This page was last edited on 22 September 2017, at 02:37.
  Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.
  Privacy policyAbout WikipediaDisclaimersContact WikipediaDevelopersCookie statementMobile viewWikimedia Foundation Powered by MediaWiki

• Quartz - https://qz.com/907640/a-polyamorous-philosopher-explains-what-we-all-get-wrong-about-romantic-love/

  OBSESSIONS OUR PICKS LATEST POPULAR
  LOVE BITES
  A polyamorous philosopher explains what we all get wrong about romantic love
  A Palestinian woman looks at Valentine's Day gifts at a shop in the West Bank city of Nablus February 14, 2010.
  We're selling a harmful social script around romance. (Reuters/ Abed Omar Qusini)
  SHARE

  WRITTEN BY

  Olivia Goldhill
  OBSESSION

  Life as Laboratory
  February 11, 2017
  Valentine’s Day isn’t the only time we’re bombarded with pink hearts and heteronormative expectations. Those societal prompts are everywhere. Pop songs, rom-coms, and awkward dinner table conversations around the world convey the expectation that, once you reach a certain age, you’ll find your “other half,” fall madly in love, and settle down to a life of commitment and monogamy and children.
  But as Carrie Jenkins, a philosophy professor at the University of British Columbia, points out in her recently published book, What Love Is, that concept of love is actually the product of a very narrow social script.
  Jenkins’ critique of romance is shaped by her own polyamorous relationships, but she argues that the flaws in contemporary society’s version of romantic love are relevant to everyone. “It’s harming people,” she says—not just those who, like herself, do not fit the conventional script of monogamy and marriage.
  Though the social script of romantic love today has recently expanded to allow for same-sex romance, it still expects everlasting couples who stay together till death do you part. Such expectations are damaging for those who don’t wish to follow such a narrative, argues Jenkins. This applies to those in polyamorous relationships but also single people, and those who don’t want children. There’s so much pressure that some couples have kids because it’s seen as the inevitable right thing to do, she says, which is harmful for both the kids and parents.
  Love is a hugely messy concept, and Jenkins argues that it incorporates both a biological side and a socially constructed side. The biological element refers to the physical behavior (the fluctuating hormones and shifts in brain activity) of those who are in love, and is a reflection of our evolutionary need for such ties. But it’s the social script that shapes our norms and expectations of romance, such as the contemporary belief that true love will be permanent and monogamous.
  Though this social construct can shift over time, Jenkins says, that doesn’t happen easily. “Some people think it’s made up like fiction is made up, but I’m trying to say it’s made up like the law is made up,” says Jenkins. “We made it, but now it’s real.”
  Ultimately, this means that Jenkins cannot truly consider her polyamorous relationships to be an example of romantic love. Though she may feel love—and has the hormones and brain activity associated with that feeling—Jenkins’ relationships simply do not fit the social definition of romance.
  Our notion of romantic love is also harmful for those in heterosexual monogamous marriages, says Jenkins, as the contemporary concept of love itself is very sexist. For example, the “Cinderella story,” in which a woman is rescued by a more wealthy, powerful, high-status man, is still a prevalent tale of what’s considered romantic.
  “This idea that it’s very romantic to be swept off your feet by a Prince Charming figure and rescued from a life of poverty or whatever by a wealthy man, is feeding into these gendered stereotypes,” she says. “This is built into our ideas of who we find attractive, what it is to have a romantic story attached to your love life.”
  It remains very rare for women to earn more than their husbands and, even when they do, women still tend to do a greater share of the household chores (it’s hypothesized that high female earners take on more housework in a bid to compensate for the threat their salary poses to the gender roles.) Jenkins believes that this disparity is a reflection of our Cinderella tales of romance.
  It’s impossible to predict exactly how the social script around love will change in the coming decades, says Jenkins. There are early signs that the importance of permanence in romantic love is starting to fade, with talk of short-term renewable marriage contracts. More people seem to believe that a romantic relationship can be successful even if it ends by choice, rather than one partner dying.
  Jenkins believes that opening up the social construct of romantic love will ultimately be positive for everyone, even those who end up following the traditional script.
  “If you give people more choices and they choose to be monogamous, then that’s great. It means they’ve looked at all the possibilities and made a conscious choice to be in that kind of relationship,” she says. “I think it’s better to do things with awareness rather than because it’s the only option available.”
  In other words, Jenkins argues, true romance needn’t look anything like Cinderella’s love story. But if you do want to get married until death do you part, it’s much more romantic to do so out of choice—rather than because it’s the only acceptable option.
  MOST POPULAR

  Reported Shooting At Mandalay Bay In Las Vegas
  Photos: The Las Vegas shooting from the perspective of survivors and first responders

  https://qz.com/907640

  CIRCADIAN RHYTHM
  The Nobel Prize in medicine goes to three Americans who deconstruct biological clocks
  Thomas Perlmann, Secretary of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, announces the names of Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young as winners of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
  A triple win for the US. (Reuters/TT News Agency)
  SHARE

  WRITTEN BY

  Aamna Mohdin
  @aamnamohdin
  October 02, 2017
  The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash, and Michael W. Young.
  The trio won the prize for their discovery of “molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm.” In short, the researchers were able to “peek inside” the biological clocks of living organisms—which help to regulate sleep patterns, feeding behavior, hormone release, and blood pressure—to better understand how life responds to the Earth’s rotation.
  View image on Twitter
  View image on Twitter
  Follow
  The Nobel Prize ✔ @NobelPrize
  Our biological clock helps to regulate sleep patterns, feeding behavior, hormone release and blood pressure #NobelPrize
  4:36 AM - Oct 2, 2017 · Stockholm, Sweden
  39 39 Replies 2,485 2,485 Retweets 2,895 2,895 likes
  Twitter Ads info and privacy
  This year’s Nobel prize for medicine is a triple win for the US, which boasts the most Nobel prize winners. Hall was born in New York in 1945 and performed his seminal work at Brandeis University (he is now retired). Rosbash was born in Kansas City and carried out his work at Brandeis University, too, where he remains a member of the faculty. Young was born in Miami in 1949, and has been on staff at Rockefeller University in New York since 1978.
  The researchers and were able to isolate a gene in fruit flies that controls the daily biological rhythm. They were able to show how the gene encodes a protein that builds up in cells at night, but then degrades during the day. The researchers also identified other protein components involved in this process, highlighting the minute mechanisms governing the clockwork inside a cell. The winners have raised “awareness of the importance of a proper sleep hygiene” said Juleen Zierath of the Nobel academy.
  When the Nobel committee told Rosbach that he won the prize, he reportedly said: “You are kidding me.” The excitement might make for a sleepless night.

  https://qz.com/1091769

10/2/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506969901840 1/5
Print Marked Items
Jenkins, Carrie: WHAT LOVE IS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Nov. 15, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Jenkins, Carrie WHAT LOVE IS Basic (Adult Nonfiction) $26.99 1, 24 ISBN: 978-0-465-09885-9
In her first book, Jenkins (Philosophy/Univ. of British Columbia, Vancouver) examines romantic love as a phenomenon
at the intersection of biology and social convention.Midway through the first page, the author tosses in an aside that
hints at her unique perspective on the subject. "On the mornings when I walk from my boyfriend's apartment to the
house I share with my husband," she writes, "I sometimes find myself reflecting on the disconnects between my own
experience with romantic love and the way romantic love is normally understood in the time and place in which I live."
To a certain extent, the book is a defense of polyamory, which Jenkins views as the next social frontier now that
romantic love between same-sex couples has become more socially acceptable. Taking a historical perspective, the
author explores the battle between those who believe that biology is the fundamental force determining the experience
of romantic love and those who think that the experience is shaped by social forces. Unfortunately, this is such an
abstract discussion that just what experience she is referencing is unclear. Though Jenkins often achieves a
conversational tone, she also has a fondness for academic language; words like "amatonormativity" ("the idea that
romantic love is ideal and a default for everyone") pepper the volume and make it less than fully accessibly for general
readers. The author's cheerful exhortation to "choose your own adventure" may inspire some readers, but she has taken
on such a broad, and familiar, subject that it's hard to find much new in her analysis. Perhaps if she had confined herself
more narrowly and specifically to her own experience, she could have arrived at more significant insights. Those who
don't already have a good idea what love is before beginning the volume won't have gained one by its conclusion.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Jenkins, Carrie: WHAT LOVE IS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA469865719&it=r&asid=3b1705dfa22fe14f46552a4714e928a8.
Accessed 2 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A469865719

---

10/2/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506969901840 2/5
Jenkins, Carrie. What Love Is: And What It
Could Be
Laura Hiatt
Library Journal.
141.20 (Dec. 1, 2016): p97.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text: 
Jenkins, Carrie. What Love Is: And What It Could Be. Basic. Jan. 2017.224p. notes, index. ISBN 9780465098859.
$26.99; ebk. ISBN 9780465098866. PHIL
Jenkins's (philosophy, Univ. of British Columbia, Vancouver) book is a quick meditation about love. She begins with a
brief survey of the traditional dominant theories of love: as a biological phenomenon or a socially constructed
incidence. Her argument is that focusing exclusively on this either/or dichotomy misses much of the nature of love, and
that instead love should be considered dual-natured, encompassing both biology and societal/cultural constructs. This
dualism serves to move the subject away from its present standing of an unknowable mystique and toward one that can
be veritably studied and better understood. Only in this manner can we even begin to fathom love's complicated and
interesting aspects. While the surveys of the biological and social construct arguments are almost too brief, the
substance of this book comes with Jenkins's argument about the dual-nature. This new focus, she argues, allows our
concept of love to change to include seemingly alternative parameters (such as same-sex marriage) and lead to a better
understanding of its biological foundations. VERDICT More work needs to be done in this area, a factor that Jenkins
touches upon, but her book offers a provocative start to a complex subject.--Laura Hiatt, Fort Collins, CO
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Hiatt, Laura. "Jenkins, Carrie. What Love Is: And What It Could Be." Library Journal, 1 Dec. 2016, p. 97+. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472371215&it=r&asid=1774ba5adca503a2fa1c78f8882341d8.
Accessed 2 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A472371215

---

10/2/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506969901840 3/5
What Love Is: And What It Could Be
Emily Dziuban
Booklist.
113.7 (Dec. 1, 2016): p4.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text: 
* What Love Is: And What It Could Be. By Carrie Jenkins. Jan. 2017. 224p. Basic, $26.99 (9780465098859). 128.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Jenkins's first book posits her theory that love is dualistic yet nonoppositional. She works to correctly attribute love's
various characteristics, biological and social, to their origins. Misidentification of the social for the biological or vice
versa, such as claiming women are "naturally" more monogamous, has disastrous and dangerous consequences.
Jenkins' manifesto is, Proceed with interest and caution. Her book is required reading. She reveals early that she is
polyandrous, engaged simultaneously in long-term relationships with a husband and a boyfriend. But autobiography
ends there. She instead takes the reader on a survey of historical philosophy about love, using the scientific method to
identify which ideas are useful and which are flawed. Equally important to its subject matter, the book is a master class
in how to think and why. Jenkins researches, questions, unpacks, considers, and examines. A philosophy professor,
Jenkins uses her readable book to advocate for thinking both critically and in great depth as a form of self-protection
and self-advocacy. Tolerate no one admonishing you for overthinking love, she advises. Love is an "extreme sport,"
and we need parachutes. In so arguing, she empowers her readers in regard to not just their love lives but also their
whole lives.--Emily Dziuban
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Dziuban, Emily. "What Love Is: And What It Could Be." Booklist, 1 Dec. 2016, p. 4. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA474715433&it=r&asid=3101fb49b955eede51fa7f36711e0562.
Accessed 2 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A474715433

---

10/2/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506969901840 4/5
Challenge the way you think about love
Sarah McCraw Crow
BookPage.
(Feb. 2017): p16.
COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text: 
Valentine's Day. If those two words inspire dread rather than desire, take heart; a new crop of books offers advice and
wisdom, whether you're out there looking for The One, long married and bored with your sex life, or downright
heartbroken.
The qualities that we usually look for in a partner--sense of humor, charisma, beauty, good family, intelligence--are
often red flags in disguise, write Michael Bennett, M.D., and Sarah Bennett in F*ck Love: One Shrink's Sensible
Advice for Finding a Lasting Relationship (Touchstone, $19.99, 288 pages, ISBN 9781501140563). Dr. Bennett, a
Harvard-trained psychiatrist, and his daughter Sarah, a comedy writer, teamed up for a previous book, F*ck Feelings,
in which they advised that paying less attention to feelings helps you manage life better. The Bennetts write in an
irreverent, sometimes profane style--for instance, each chapter, devoted to a red-flag trait, includes F*ck in its title:
"F*ck Beauty," "F*ck Charisma" and so on. Despite the irreverence, the Bennetts' advice is sincere and sensible. They
explain how and why readers should seek partnership qualities (common goals, shared effort when times get tough)
more than the red-flag traits. Though it includes advice for readers in relationships, this book is most useful for those in
the dating world.
THE RIGHT MATCH
Susan Quilliam's How to Choose a Partner (Picador, $16, 192 pages, ISBN 9781250078698) covers some of the same
material as the Bennetts' book but takes a quieter, more meditative approach. She refers to classic novels like Jane
Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd for anecdotes. A British psychologist,
author of 22 books and advice columnist, Quilliam also teaches classes on love and sexuality. "We now approach
partner choice with bigger expectations, deeper confusion, and heavier pressure than ever before," she writes, offering
advice on meeting potential partners (aim for a "slow river": put your energy into groups that offer a steady flow of
different people) and what to look for in a partner. Quilliam emphasizes partnership qualities, breaking these down into
goals, values and personality traits. The book has a straightforward style, with appealingly quirky illustrations.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
SPICE IT UP
Sex is the glue of marriage, writes Dr. Kevin Leman, a psychologist and author of more than 50 books about marriage
and parenting. In Have a New Sex Life by Friday: Because Your Marriage Can't Wait Until Monday (Revell, $17.99,
288 pages, ISBN 9780800724139) Leman notes that what happens outside the bedroom affects what happens inside
the bedroom, and readers need to consider the different ways that women and men communicate and process emotions.
The book follows a five-day structure, considering a different aspect of sex (why women need sex, why men need sex,
10/2/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506969901840 5/5
get your mother out of the bedroom) each day. This book is not for everyone; Leman writes from a Christian
perspective for married, heterosexual couples. That said, his advice on how to talk to your partner about sex, and how
to incorporate new sex positions and more "spicy" techniques into your routine, is frank, openhearted and sensible.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
Carrie Jenkins' What Love Is: And What It Could Be (Basic, $26.99, 224 pages, ISBN 9780465098859) is not a selfhelp
book, nor is it a collection of heartwarming essays. Instead, Jenkins aims to come up with a definition of romantic
love that suits her as both a philosopher and a human being. A professor of philosophy at the University of British
Columbia, Jenkins walks the reader through theories about romantic love past and present, drawing from classical
philosophy, science and literature. This might sound dry and academic, but Jenkins adds fun with pop culture
references and vivid images. She explains biological arguments (humans fall in love because it leads them to
reproduce) and societal arguments (romantic love is a product of social expectations and traditions), and she posits that
love has a dual nature. She shows how our understanding of romantic love has changed over time, and she hopes it will
come to include polyamory, because she's married, with a long-term boyfriend. I wish Jenkins had revealed a little
more about her personal life, which she refers to in the book's prologue:
"On the mornings when I walk from my boyfriend's apartment to the home I share with my husband, I sometimes find
myself reflecting on the disconnects between my own experiences with romantic love...." I'd love to know what else
she reflects on, as she goes from one partner to another.
HEALING FROM HEARTBREAK
Meditation teacher and Buddhist practitioner Lodro Rinzler takes on heartbreak in Love Hurts: Buddhist Advice for the
Heartbroken (Shambhala, $12.95, 184 pages, ISBN 9781611803549). Rinzler offers ancient Buddhist wisdom in a
youthful, playful style. The book's opening lines: "If you're reading this, you're probably heartbroken. I mean, why else
would you pick up a book about heartbreak? I'm sorry you're heartbroken." For this book, Rinzler met with dozens of
people who shared their stories of heartbreak, not just romantic heartbreak but all sorts of loss--giving up a child for
adoption, losing a parent, losing family members. The book is made up of about 50 short chapters, and Rinzler
suggests readers flip to the chapter they need at the moment ("If You Feel Like You Will Never Love Again," "If You
Are Feeling Angry," "If You Need to Hear a Less Bizarre Joke"). It also offers a primer on mindfulness meditation, and
on the concept of love in the Buddhist tradition --which includes loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and
equanimity--"we include in our heart the people we like, the people we really don't like, and the vast number of people
we have never even met," Rinzler writes. As to why our hearts break, Rinzler is succinct: "Your heart breaks because
life isn't what you thought it would be." Love Hurts is a wise, funny companion and a reminder that we can move
through loss and beyond it.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
McCraw Crow, Sarah. "Challenge the way you think about love." BookPage, Feb. 2017, p. 16. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479076914&it=r&asid=2648e651fb2e90e42e135185a83ed72d.
Accessed 2 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479076914

"Jenkins, Carrie: WHAT LOVE IS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA469865719&it=r. Accessed 2 Oct. 2017. Hiatt, Laura. "Jenkins, Carrie. What Love Is: And What It Could Be." Library Journal, 1 Dec. 2016, p. 97+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472371215&it=r. Accessed 2 Oct. 2017. Dziuban, Emily. "What Love Is: And What It Could Be." Booklist, 1 Dec. 2016, p. 4. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA474715433&it=r. Accessed 2 Oct. 2017. McCraw Crow, Sarah. "Challenge the way you think about love." BookPage, Feb. 2017, p. 16. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479076914&it=r. Accessed 2 Oct. 2017.

• Los Angeles Review of Books
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/illuminating-love-on-carrie-jenkinss-what-love-is/#!
  Word count: 3299

  CHANNELS

  REVIEWS
  ESSAYS
  INTERVIEWS
  SECTIONS
  BLARB
  PRINT
  AV
  ABOUT
  DONATE
  SUPPORT LARB
  SIGN IN

  Illuminating Love: On Carrie Jenkins’s “What Love Is”
  By Skye C. Cleary

  25 0 4

  JANUARY 28, 2017

  THESE ARE JUST A FEW TIPS from the ancient Roman poet Ovid — five things you can do now to cure your broken heart: stop eating onions, take a vacation, keep busy, humiliate the one who has scorned you, or criticize their weight.
  Indeed, love potions and cures have enchanted humans for thousands of years — and yet it’s debatable how much closer we are to discovering love’s secrets. These days, some patch their problems over with sexual desire “dysfunction” and “disorder” medication such as Viagra and Flibanserin. Others pursue Band-Aid solutions — internet clickbait articles that promise quick fixes, self-help books, secret porn, couples therapy, sexy lingerie, and infidelity — to keep relationships on life support long after the plug ought to have been pulled. Others resign themselves to lifelong relationship boredom.
  In What Love Is: And What It Could Be, Carrie Jenkins argues that it’s about time we give up on these pathetic and “desperate” solutions and, instead, think more expansively and inclusively about relationships. Arguing that lifelong monogamy isn’t natural and doesn’t work for everyone, Jenkins challenges the “normatively prescribed” but elusive romantic ideal that funnels lovers into the “cereal-box nuclear family.” Jenkins, a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia, published her first book on the philosophy of arithmetic. “I never planned to work on love,” the author explains, “But love snuck up on me and wouldn’t let me drop it.” On the first page of What Love Is, she describes how love seduces her:
  On the mornings when I walk from my boyfriend’s apartment to the home I share with my husband, I sometimes find myself reflecting on the disconnects between my own experiences with romantic love and the way romantic love is normally understood in the time and place in which I live (Vancouver, Canada, in 2016).
  Jenkins’s analysis of love springs from her lived experience. The problem she faces is that she feels as if she has the biological machinery of romantic love with her husband and boyfriend simultaneously; but because her experience doesn’t fit neatly into the monogamous nuclear family model, she’s not sure if she can call it romantic. She points to this as one of the most alarming problems in our society; that is, we don’t know what love is, we treat it as something too mysterious to question, and we’re afraid that if we do question it, we’ll destroy it. Yet, since many people make major life decisions based on their romantic feelings, not to try to better understand is perplexing if not downright dangerous, since, as Jenkins suggests, we might end up in relationships and with families that we did not actively choose.
  There are many different biological, social, and philosophical theories of romantic love, but Jenkins proposes that none can explain it entirely. Biology is tackled first, and celebrity anthropologist Helen Fisher — famous for her fMRI brain scans of lovers, TED talks with millions of views, and books such as Anatomy of Love — is Jenkins’s primary target. Jenkins disagrees with Fisher that the dopamine-fueled intense rush of the early stages of romantic love defines it exclusively. Oxytocin, Jenkins argues, though normally associated with the calm phase of attachment and affection, should be just as valid an indicator for romantic love: “It seems possible for romantic love to be calm and stable from the outset; why not?” According to Jenkins, romantic love is like a daiquiri. Most have rum, sugar, and citrus, but variations abound: frozen or on the rocks; strawberry, banana, kiwifruit, or any other flavor; and they can be made without rum, too. Just as daiquiri recipes vary, Jenkins suggests, “There is no one way to have a human biology. Romantic love is no exception to the rule.”
  Helen Fisher also argues that monogamous romantic love was an evolutionary solution to “female neediness”: once women became bipeds and, arms full, could no longer carry babies on their backs, we needed males for protection. Because men couldn’t protect whole harems of women, heterosexual monogamous nuclear families emerged as the norm. With swift and graceful logic, Jenkins points out that this is highly unlikely, primarily because,
  if over 1 million years passed between the arrival of bipedalism and the evolution of love, then there must have been other solutions to the problem of having one’s hands full of babies that worked well enough to keep hominid evolution going for over 1 million years […] And if bipedalism posed such a problem for female ancestors specifically, how come we didn’t end up with male-only bipedalism?
  Jenkins considers other theorists as well — such as Anne Beall and Robert Sternberg — who describe romantic love as a social construct. For example, romantic love in Victorian England was based on respect and admiration for the beloved, rather than sexual desire. In our contemporary society, the script of love tells us that we are expected to fall in love, marry, have children, and be monogamous for life. We get tax breaks for doing this, and are punished for choosing otherwise, which is why divorce is such a messy business, and why anyone who deviates from the norm is ridiculed, if not shamed. Those who indulge in too much love or sex are unfaithful, adulterers, cheaters, or sluts. Those who do not indulge enough, preferring to be alone, are discriminated against on the basis of “amatonormativity” — the idea that being single is abnormal.
  After assessing these and a few other biological and social theories of love, Jenkins turns an antagonistic gaze toward philosophy, which she describes as: “a frankly embarrassing catalogue of pompous people tripping over their own assumptions.” Likening philosophies of love to a junky garage sale, she picks out a few “gems” in need of a really good wash. The work of rebel thinker and Nobel Prize winner Bertrand Russell is one such diamond in the rough. She describes his work Marriage and Morals as “intoxicating if a bit dodgy” because he advocated for open relationships and sex positivity, was fired from the College of the City of New York in 1940 for his radical views, although, to Jenkins’s disappointment, “he still thought that sex without love was of ‘little value.’ And he still ultimately presented extramarital sex and love as inevitable and forgivable rather than as things people might actively choose and prefer for their own sake.”
  A passing nod is given to, among others, Plato, Simone de Beauvoir, Lucius Outlaw, Charles Mills, bell hooks, Berit Brogaard, as well as popular authors such as Dan Savage. Simon May’s Love: A History is jettisoned because it focuses on the views of 12 white men and treats women as subjects of contemplation rather than as thinkers. Schopenhauer is criticized for reducing love to heteronormative and sexist stereotypes. The author’s cool attitude toward philosophers of love seems, in some cases, overly hasty; for example, when Nietzsche is flippantly dismissed primarily on the basis that Jenkins finds him to be ambiguous: “And even before I knew there was such a thing as philosophy, I learned from my mother — who learned it from her grandmother — that there comes a point when you have to say what you mean and mean what you say.”
  ¤
  Just like Jenkins’s vision for more inclusive relationships, so too can we have a more inclusive theory of love. Jenkins explains that she has “custom designed” one of her own that mixes the best parts of the biological and social approaches in a philosophical way. The crux of her “dual theory” is that “[s]ome of our ancient, evolved biological machinery — a collection of neural pathways and chemical responses — is currently playing a starring role of Romantic Love in a show called Modern Society.” Romantic love’s “biological machinery,” which has evolved over millions of years, includes natural and universal chemicals such as dopamine or oxytocin. The “show” is about the nuclear family and gender roles. We should, however, abandon the mistaken idea that romantic love is naturally monogamous and tear up Modern Society’s romantic script that channels us into nuclear families.
  Rather, Jenkins proposes that biology of romantic love evolved simply to encourage us to socialize and cooperate and that the monogamous nuclear model does not, and should not need to work for everyone. “As a species, modern humans are a romantically diverse bunch. What ‘comes naturally’ to us varies: our infinite variety cannot be reduced to one or two standard models” and “[i]f I know anything about romantic love by now, it’s that it’s not a one-size-fits-all phenomenon.”
  Yet, to be able to call a relationship “romantic,” we do need to be able to check both the biology and social boxes. Operating systems (computers, phones, robots) — like “Samantha” (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) in Spike Jonze’s Her — may play the right social role in a romantic relationship; but because Samantha lacks the relevant brain chemicals, Jenkins concludes that she does not qualify for romantic love. Conversely, lesbians in the 18th and 19th centuries may have had romantic chemicals swirling about in their brains, but because they could not play the social role, were unable to express affection publically, marry, have children, or parent, they, too, were ineligible for romantic love. However, just as the biology of love persisted, the social script evolving to include queer relationships into the norm, so does Jenkins hope that society will evolve to be accepting of those who do not marry or procreate, those who love more than one person at a time, and those who reject romantic love altogether.
  The book culminates with chapters devoted to the future: what we can change and what we need to do to make changes happen. While neuroscience might well have answers for us in the future, the discipline is still relatively new. Even if manipulating love’s biology does become possible, Jenkins advises that we ought to proceed with great caution, since “[o]ur track record is not a shining example of humanity’s ability to wield medical technologies with competence and compassion.” Purported “cures” to homosexual love — such as “chemical castration” and “conversion therapy” — are examples of how medicalizing love can be ethically problematic.
  The social side of romantic love is “malleable,” Jenkins argues, and acceptance of new relationship forms is high on her wish list for creating a new picture — what she calls new “contours” — of romantic love in modern society. While rejection of marriage, refusal to procreate, and singledom might seem so ubiquitous in the 21st-century Western world to be of little concern, Jenkins points out that polyamory is particularly controversial because it rocks the boat of patriarchal oppression: it threatens “paternity control through the sexual restriction of women and the conception of a romantic partner as one’s private property.” This may go some way to explaining why gender stereotypes persist — such as the idea that women ought to earn less and do more housework than men even if they work more — and that the highest ideal of love is for women to be obedient and loyal to husbands. Jenkins rightly points out that such stereotypes can perpetuate discrimination, oppression, and abuse. For example, it’s perfectly normal to be a serial monogamist; but “[i]f you have two permanent relationships simultaneously, you are ‘a degenerate herpes-infested whore.’” In some places, polyamory is punishable by death. There are anti-adultery laws in the United States, too, although Jenkins points out that the last time this law was tested was in 2004 and the punishment was community service. Overturning such outdated laws and leaving behind damaging stereotypes and stigmas would, Jenkins suggests, be good first steps toward reshaping the future of love for the better.
  ¤
  Jenkins does not explicitly encourage those who don’t fit into the nuclear norm to “come out” and risk the tyranny of the majority. Although she proposes that “[i]t’s time we got to choose our own adventures,” she does not think it’s achievable in the near term. The book’s immediate call to action is for readers to “think about love for yourself.” This is where using herself as a case study works to her advantage: she lets readers in on some personal secrets, thereby creating the feeling that the book is a safe thinking space. Her personal approach also humanizes her argument because it gives readers concrete examples about the aggressions, judgments, and discriminations to which she has been subjected.
  Nonetheless, it’s a risky philosophical move to use oneself as a case study. Jenkins justifies it by acknowledging that it’s difficult — if not impossible — to be completely objective in one’s thinking but that all we have to do is be honest and acknowledge the baggage that we bring with us. The problem is that she writes as if polyamory is a kind of utopia — if only it weren’t for everyone else being so judgmental. Jealousy is a non-issue; there is no discussion of the emotional and psychological intricacies of creating and being in polyamorous relationships. Simone de Beauvoir is one of the few philosophers that Jenkins admires; yet, there is no acknowledgment that de Beauvoir herself wrote extensively about juggling her many long-term love relationships. The book acknowledges, briefly, that polyamorous and polyandrous cultures have existed, but there are no insights into how those societies worked, in what ways such structures were successful, what the obstacles were, and why they didn’t survive. If Jenkins has not herself experienced these issues, this reveals a major limitation of using only herself as a case study. If she has come across these kinds of complications, and omits them to paint an idealistic picture of polyamory, then the book does not reflect the “careful, rigorous, honest thinking” that she aims for.
  Jenkins also glosses over arguments about romantic love and overlooks important thinkers. For example, it’s unclear why Simon May is singled out for criticism, while other contemporary philosophers of love, sex, and marriage — such as Harry Frankfurt, J. David Velleman, Roger Scruton, Irving Singer, and Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins — remain untouched. She does not consider religious arguments for monogamy — for instance, the view that love unites two individuals to one other, to nature, and to God. Then, too, she applies the term “romantic” very broadly, to relationships that might more accurately be described as passionate, erotic, or conjugal. Because she wants to assume that romantic love dates back millions of years, the fact that love wasn’t described as “romantic” until the Romantic Movement of the 18th century doesn’t register as an issue. As Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins, for example, point out in The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love, romantic love emerged specifically as the alternative to arranged marriages with the rise of Western individualism and capitalism.
  For the Romantics, romantic love was built on a foundation of sexual desire. For Jenkins, it is not. The omission of sexual desire from her theory could be part of a broader strategy to divert the focus of polyamory away from sex. In July 2016, Jenkins published a piece with The Establishment critiquing the media for its propensity to publish articles about polyamory with pictures of multiple sets of feet under a white duvet, thereby implying that “polyamory is all about having sex with lots of people.” Sexual desire and the dopamine rush that Helen Fisher attributes to romantic love are optional add-ons in Jenkins’s theory: all we need is oxytocin, the chemical that seems to fuel affection and attachment. But since attachment and affection describe all kinds of love, it’s unclear what makes love romantic in Jenkins’s dual theory.
  To her credit, Jenkins foresees this criticism — that romantic love might become indistinguishable from other forms of love. She writes:
  I don’t see that this would be a common problem; often a selection of the optional extras would be present, helping to determine that the love involved is romantic. But in an ideal world — where we have ceased privileging romantic love as the norm for everybody — who cares?
  However, it’s not at all certain that we will be able to identify love as romantic from an infinite buffet of possibilities. How will we know if it’s friendship or romantic love? Ultimately, what we call a relationship doesn’t matter to this author: “If it’s a close call whether a relationship is romantic or platonic, the people in the relationship could just call it how they want it. Why not?” Nevertheless, since Jenkins has spent the book arguing that we need to get rid of the “romantic mystique” in order to understand what romantic love is, declaring that it’s whatever we want it to be — and does whatever we want it to do — risks creating even more confusion and mystery.
  However, despite these limitations and the author’s penchant for frivolous rhetorical questions such as “who cares?” and “why not?”, the book does give an exceptionally clear and easily readable account of the current research into romantic love and ideas for how we might think differently about it. It’s a warm and friendly sort of book; the tone is bubbly and chatty, as when she aptly promises: “it’ll take us into the realms of medicine, magic, queerness, wisdom, dopamine, gender, Romans, rainbows, rationality, Sappho, soul mates, politics, and, of course, human nature. Buckle up!” and when she introduces the challenges of thinking about love:
  Answers are not going to appear neatly tied up with a heart-shaped bow. We can and should trace out the broad-brush contours of love, but if we go looking for sharp edges — a tidy, simple theory — we are bound to be disappointed. Trying to state the nature of romantic love with precision is like trying to nail some Jell-O to a wall made of Jell-O, using a Jell-O nail.
  In her prologue, Jenkins proposes that “[l]ove is an extreme sport, and we don’t skydive without parachutes.” While love (in general) does survive the leap herein, romantic love is at risk of being theorized out of existence. Nevertheless, if one takes What Love Is in the spirit in which the author intends — “not to passively absorb my ideas but to question, challenge, and ultimately push these investigations far beyond anything I can imagine right now” — if we can have a conversation about our assumptions and expectations and how we exercise our agency in relationships, perhaps we will eventually find ourselves more accepting of the alternatives and of those who choose them.
  ¤
  Skye C. Cleary PhD is a philosopher and author of Existentialism and Romantic Love. She teaches at Columbia University, Barnard College, and the City College of New York.

  What Love Is

  And What It Could Be
  By Carrie Jenkins

  Published 01.24.2017
  Basic Books
  224 Pages

  BUY THIS BOOK
  NONFICTION SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
  RECOMMENDED

  On Emily Witt’s “Future Sex”
  By Madeleine Watts

  Applied Existentialism
  By Skye C. Cleary

  Love’s Inequality
  By Will Clark

  On the Kinds of Love We Fall Into: Polyamory in Theory and Practice
  By Emmett Rensin

  START TYPING...
  PRESS ENTER TO SEARCH, OR ESC TO EXIT

Word Count