One thing I wonder about how this book is titled and marketed is that what it is actually about is buried, not stated.
The title is OPEN and the subtitle reads,AN UNCENSORED MEMOIR OF LOVE, LIBERATION, AND NON-MONOGAMY–A POLYAMORY MEMOIR
Yet the main story of the book is a dominant/submissive relationship.
Specifically one of a very patriarchal structure that played with the roles of Daddy-Little Girl (LG). To me this is the main story and conflict of the book; the need of Adam to play Daddy and the younger Rachel going alone with it until Opening, learning, and realizing, the distortions of equality inherent in the power structure of such a way of sexual play that bled into daily domestic couple cohabational living.
I don’t understand how this type of stark powerplay is sustainable in a relationship. I can see how it could work as an occasional role play thing, a “let's pretend” for the night that one is the dom and the other is the submissive, but in the relationship of Adam and Rachel it is a constant backdrop setting in their daily lives.
She is submissive to how Adam wants things in the home, even to the extent of how the toothpaste tube is maintained to inny or outy of the toilet paper roll. All this is the major drama of the story, the older Adam is the leader, the teacher, and Rachel is there to receive instruction in a system of punishment and reward. This is flat out apparent domestic patriarchal control.
There are views of human social development that hold that the dominant patriarchy emerger with notions of ownership, property, out to the move from hunter-gatherer structures into agriculture.
“My land, my crops, my wife, my children” all of which are subject to exchange as value in the marketplace. This is the root and basic structure of modern living for the past few centuries; the core of the extremes of capitalism that we are trying to live with today with results that vary. (Some say no one is happy in this, living with this type of tension, that what is mine must always be built, must grow, and must be protected from the others who have less, but who don’t understand that they need to have less for the whole of this to work. It’s biblical even “The poor are always with you.” so don’t even try to change it because that is the way God wants it, even though these poor get to want and need and must always be kept under control and not in the way of growth and progress of the rich which if they are lucky in post-scarcity have something “trickle down” to their benefit.)
So while Adam and Rachel are modern liberal/progessive in their ideation of themselves, in the core of their primary relationship they want to play rich/poor, daddy-owner/little-girl-owned (“My Girl”) as if these role are basic, real, and how a life should be structured.
This seems to me well beyond the role-playing that goes on when I corporate powerman who occasionally needs to go to a BDSM dungeon to take on a submissive role under a hired dominate before returning to his daily life of having to maintain the structures around lord and master of his domain.
I heard Rachel Krantz on a few podcasts. On one she suggested that people listen to the audiobook version of her book. Then the reader/listener can more easily get more out of what she is trying to say through her self-reading voice. That may be so but it makes it harder to underline, make notes in the margins to be referenced later in looking back on the experience of the book like I’m trying to do now.
Toward the end of it she says that earlier test readers of her text told her that they hated the Adam character and that she didn’t want that.
That is the way I felt about him myself. I’m not one that goes in for dominant, know-it-all masterful characters, be they ones in our media stories, the stark and cartoonish Donald Trump, or the slightly lesser Elon Musk or whomever (and yes, they are always MEN).
I come away from this wondering what is the deal with the Adam character. Why does he not want to progress? I know that many of us males who came up out of the 20th Century were socially conditioned to accept patriarchy as just the way it is, and further, ought to be. But don’t we want to grow beyond that into something more just, equitable, and righteous, rather than just accepting and living by these conditioned artificial structures? Isn’t that the inner and outer work of one, male or female, who wants to build a better world. So what is the deal with someone like Adam who continues to want to play patriarchy daily in his home, wants to dominate, while at the same time seeing himself as intelligent, thoughtful, and progessive? Is it all in service of sexual erotism, of keeping a tension, to keep the other in a role that makes his cock hard because of the way he learned out of the Playboy Generaltion?
Rachel can be excused as the innocent in the horror movie with the audience saying, “No, don’t open that door!!” But what of the dom Adam? Why does he continue to behave in this way and not try to push himself beyond his conditioning?
On to the OPEN part of the story, the polyamory.
Personally this is easy for me having been involved for decades, my entire life with polyamouus activity and assumption that these structures are normal and even as it should more naturally be. Like in the matriarcal sexuality of bonobos, etc.
Yet in the book even some of the poly-play areas are in the control of patriarchy. Adam and Rachel explore old school patriarchal based “Lifestyle” “Swinging” where is it OK and encouraged that women openly have sex with one another, even for the entertainment of the men, while the males must never exhibit even the vague desire or curiosity for same-sex, male on male play. Krantz tells us that some of the men she has played with in these Lifestyle spaces later feel safe privatedly to reveal that they do have some interest in sex with other men. Yet this must be strictly out of view and closeted in these “swinger” set ups. Will we ever be able to progress beyond that?
Something about the book struck me as just sad in my hopes for progress here. We continue to be stuck in this male dominated structure that only will have it a certain way. Does each generation have to learn this themselves rather than build on the experience of previous revolutionary activity?
