- Monogamy. What in the world, why in the world is monogamy such a big deal? What can the history of fidelity and infidelity tell us about the changing rights, duties, social meanings of marriage, why have heterosexual, monogamous marriages been seen as the key to Western civilization, despite the fact that couples who vow I do to monogamy actually don't? Criminal conversation, why does it not refer to talking about crime, but instead refers to sexual intercourse? What does polygamy have to do with same-sex marriage? What's the point, for goodness' sake, of exchanging sex addiction for promiscuity? And how in the world am I going to manage to speak about Hegel and Boris Johnson in the same lecture?(audience laughs) These are just some of the many questions that I'm going to be addressing today, but I'm going to start with a really, really interesting 19th century woman, da-dum, there we go, who loudly decried monogamy at a time when women, of course, didn't really speak so much about those sorts of things. 1848, women's rights reformer, health advocate Mary Gove married writer Thomas Low Nichols. She vowed,"In marriage with you,"I resign no right of my soul,"I enter into no compact," this is her marriage vows,"I enter into no compact to be faithful to you,"I only promise to be faithful"to the deepest love of my heart."If that love is yours,"it will bear fruit for you"and enrich your life, our life."If my love leads me from you, I must go." Mary Gove Nichols aligned monogamy with what she called marital slavery. Alongside her husband, she traveled all around the US preaching a gospel of female wellbeing, dietary and dress reform, celibacy, and free love. You may ask why in the world did she marry, she only married in order to be able to travel with her lover without being arrested under fornication or lewdness laws. The couple wrote books and articles together. The most important one, I think, anyway, is simply entitled

Its History, Character, and Results," 1854, which attacked monogamy. And they published a periodical that attracted 20,000 subscribers, which is a lot for this period. Mary Gove Nichols' semi-autobiographical

Revelations of a Life" came out in 1855, scandalized society. Indeed, she was to become the most influential advocate of free love in mid 19th century America. Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, she argued compellingly that women had a right to say no to husbands and a right to say yes to intercourse outside of marriage. She believed that women had a right of self-ownership, and if this meant that she chooses seven babes by seven men, then what business is it of anyone else's? For he, love was quite simply a religion, and therefore outside the authority of the state. This was heady stuff, as you can image, for mid 19th century America. Even the most progressive feminists of the time, and she identified very strongly with these feminists, but even the most progressive ones considered her views just too extreme, and they shunned her company, to her, obviously, great distress. So what is it about monogamy that just generates such heated responses? Even today, 89% of Americans believe it is morally wrong for a married person to have sex with someone who is not their spouse. To put this in perspective, that same survey found that only 28% thought it was morally wrong for heterosexual, unmarried people to have sex, and 35% disapproved of intercourse between members same sex.

Americans today abhor marital infidelity even more than they dislike abortion, pornography, remember the lecture last time, cloning, and even polygamy. Given such attitudes, it's no surprise, I think, to find that 98% of married, heterosexual Americans claim that they expect to have an exclusive sexual relationship with their spouse. And of course, we all know the irony, sexual exclusivity is extremely unlikely. Of course, the stigma associated with infidelity seriously distorts any statistics that we have, including the ones I just gave a minute ago, but the best statistics that we have show that one in every eight married women and nearly one in every four married men, heterosexual, sorry, are unfaithful, isn't it an interesting term, unfaithful, at some point in their marriage. Other estimates suggest that marital infidelity is actually closer to 60%. The performative vow of I do at a wedding ceremony is no guarantee that the play will end with the same protagonists, so it's really a mystery why such a huge belief in monogamy while the majority of heterosexual people practice adultery, or serial monogamy at best. The insistence, against the odds, of monogamy within heterosexual marriage is even more striking if we consider that just over 1/6 of cultures around the world are polygamous. These are mainly in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. For example, between 10% and 20% of all households in Saudi Arabia and Yemen practice polygamy, as do almost 1/3 of households in many African countries such as Senegal and Tanzania. In contrast to this, 120 cultures in the world either ban or do not recognize polygamy. For more than 2,500 years, legal systems in the West have been founded on this monogamous family. In these regions, the cost of adultery has been high. 11th century England, a female adulteress could be mutilated by having a nose or her ears cut off, 17th century, there were times when it warranted the death penalty, prior to 1857, ecclesiastical courts could require offenders to do public penance draped in a white sheet, in England, prosecutions for adultery only ended in 1970. Today, today, 38 states in the US have laws concerning adultery, it is a crime in 40% of states, and it's a ground for divorce in nearly 2/3. In some states, adulterous spouses forfeit inheritance rights, they get a smaller share of the marital property, they lose custody of their children, and they are refused rights to adopt. Courts have even upheld the rights of employers to fire employees who have strayed, and have allowed landlords to discriminate against fornicators. The paramour of an adulterous partner may also be punished, this is today, by being served with a tort suit for recovery of damages. These so-called heart-balm actions are hoped to soothe the offended spouse's broken heart. So in other words, the state continues to penalize private and consensual sexual relations between a married person and someone other than their spouse. The seriousness with which monogamy is held can also be seen by the fact that a single act of infidelity could be grounds for dissolving an entire marriage. Not surprisingly, of course, there are strong gender disparities. In the West, divorce law rested on Emperor Constantine's constitution, which stated that a husband could divorce his wife if she was an adulteress, a poisoner, or a conspirator, while a wife could only divorce her husband if he was a murderer, a prisoner, or a defiler of graves, eugh.(audience laughs) A husband's adultery, therefore, was not considered a serious enough blow to a marriage to warrant its termination, unlike a wife's adultery. A wife's monogamy was essential to protect the husband's property. The double standard of sexual morality was, of course, explained in terms of the need for confidence over the paternity of any offspring, whom the father would be expected to support financially. But it was mainly due to the principle of coverture, which ruled that once married, a woman's very being, or legal existence, passed to her husband. A husband's entitlements included the right to conjugal affection, it sounds better than it is, conjugal affection. The wife who was not monogamous, therefore, breached her property contract created by their marriage. A wife was allowed to cite her husband's adultery as grounds for divorce, but she was still required to add an additional fault as well, so as an example, not only adultery, but also cruelty. Even when no-fault divorces started to be allowed, 1970s, the costs to a wife accusing her husband of non-monogamous behavior, or being accused herself, was much higher for the wife than for the husband. Accusing a husband could be financially disastrous, being accused, socially damaging. Adultery legislation was not the only way that law enforced monogamy. A husband could seek damages from his wife's paramour, criminal conversation, as it was called, conversation meaning sexual intercourse, was used by husbands to punish their wife's lover. It tells us, I think, a great deal about rights and gender disparities to note that criminal conversation was also used by husbands to recover damages from the wife's rapist. Whether consensual or forced, the wife's services, companionship, sexuality, and body were the property of the husband. In the words of the Supreme Court of New Hampshire in 1916, a husband was entitled to,"the whole of his wife's marital affection"and to the whole of such society and comfort"as her physical state and mental attitude"render her capable of affording him."He who steals any substantial part of that affection"or disables her physically or mentally"from rendering such aid and comfort"is guilty of an infringement of the husband's rights,"and should be required to make compensation," or, in the more pithy words of a 1904 case that went to the US Supreme Court, a husband had a property right to his wife's body, and this right was, "of the highest kind,"upon the thorough maintenance of which"the whole social order rests." These legal understandings of the respective rights and duties of husbands and wives changed very slowly. Starting in the late 19th century, leading judges and jurists began allowing the argument that a wife also had an exclusive right over her husband's sexed body. Legally, marriage was no longer a rigidly hierarchical arrangement in which the wife's body was the property of the husband, but an institution founded on reciprocal emotional companionship. A wife, therefore, was entitled to her husband's society and companionship, so a husband's sexual relations with another person denied her these rights. When that happened, she was entitled to undertake legal proceedings for adultery on the grounds that his affair led to abandonment, loss of support, or alienation of affection. It's really important to note here that this is not the same thing as criminal conversation, since, unlike husbands, a wife could not claim that the person of her husband was her property. This meant that she could not sue her husband's paramour for damages based on the grounds that the affair caused a loss of consortium under the common law. In law, therefore, a husband's breach of monogamy remained a lesser form since paternity was not at issue, and the betrayed wife was not as socially disgraced by her husband's actions. As one attorney explained,"The word cuckold is one of the most disgraceful epithets"that can be applied to a husband,"and the fact that there is no corresponding word"to apply to the wife"meant that the harm to the wife was less." A combination of the belief that, firstly, a wife did not possess her husband's body, and secondly, that male sexuality was naturally less exclusive meant that her disgrace was proportionately smaller. But there was another reason why a woman could sue for abandonment, loss of support, or alienation of affection, but not criminal conversation, and that is that the husband's paramour was considered as having less agency, she might also be the victim of male lusts. Requiring the female paramour to pay for damages was therefore unfair, since it was often assumed that the seducer must have been the husband. It was the view of, of course, female sexuality as inherently passive, fundamentally passive. When, from the early 20th century, courts began to allow betrayed wives to take action for criminal conversation, they did this not on the grounds that a wife had property rights over her husband's person, but on the grounds that infidelity harmed the emotional contract of marriage. As historian Kimberly Reilly explains,"When courts recognized wives' claims"to the consortium of their mates,"they did more than acknowledge the growing centrality"of mutual affection"to the marriage bond."Rather, they conceptualized marital companionship itself"as the property of wives, no less than husbands." It was the result of increased emphasis on sexual compatibility and mutual exclusivity. In Reilly's words,"Monogamy was more than an abstract moral standard,"it was an obligation emerging from the marriage relation"that formed the emotional core of the union,"therefore it was legitimately within the law's reach." I think it tells us a great deal about the increasing fusing of emotional and sexual components of marriage. By allowing, in other words, by allowing wives to sue for criminal conversation, the courts were doing much more than simply acknowledging the emotional suffering of the wronged wife, they were also holding the paramour of the adulterous partner responsible for emotional harm, monogamy had to be mutual. So far in this talk I've explored some of the ways that marital fidelity and infidelity have structured marriage, been central to divorce law, created hierarchies of power and authority centering on the question of property rights over the sexed bodies of a spouse. These were some of the debates that Mary Gove Nichols, at the very beginning, was railing against when she argued that a wife had a right of self-ownership, and the state should not intervene. But I now want to just change tack and take these arguments about monogamy to a more elevated level. After all, monogamy is concerned with much, much, much, much more than individual marriages, with their concessions, compromises, discontents, disappointments, the monogamous marriage is both the subject and the product of politics at the highest abstract level. For philosophers as different as Francis Lieber and Hegel, monogamy was fundamentally the basis of the modern liberal state. For Lieber, who was writing in the mid 19th century, a rather grumpy looking man, I think, I don't know if he was, for him, anyway, social institutions not only reflected ideas about morality, but constituted human moral character. He argued that the family was the most important social institution because it was the unit within which children were taught the central principles on which the state itself actually rested. Within liberal societies, the heterosexual, monogamous family promoted reciprocal dependency, and, by emphasizing the higher notions of love, rather than base sexual desire, both initiated and maintained mutuality and altruism. These traits were necessary for the development and stability of the liberal state. In contrast, Lieber contended, polygamous societies promoted selfishness, sexual lust, and by denying women the exclusive attention of their husbands, undermined their true vocations as homemakers and mothers. In short, monogamous households created liberal democratic states, polygamous ones inevitably led towards a politics that was tyrannical and patriarchal. Hegel's arguments were much more developed, much more intricate than Lieber's. In "Philosophy of Right," 1821, Hegel argued that the liberal state and monogamous marriages were inseparable. Monogamy was, he wrote,"one of the principles"on which the ethical life of a country"depends most absolutely." Individual personalities could only flourish within the confines of the heterosexual, monogamous marriage, since that unit encouraged the surrender of personhood in the interests of other people, with whom the individual forged free and rational ties, both emotionally and economically. This provided the basis from which future generations could develop into active citizens. For Hegel, again, this was a stark contrast to polygamy, which fostered selfishness in the ruler and enforced the subjugation of all the other members of the household. Discord and interpersonal competition were therefore inevitable. The patriarchal politics integral to the polygamous marriage would result, again, in a despotic, patriarchal state. Clearly, these philosophical ideas about the relationship between marital monogamy and the state were highly gendered. For Hegel, women's personhood was passive and emotional, while men's was active and intellectual. As he put it in "Philosophy of Right," I love this quote,"The difference between man and woman"is the same as that between animal and plant."The animal corresponds more closely"to the character of the man,"the plant to that of the woman," that was why men are heads of households. He believed that, quote,"If women were to control the government,"the state would be in danger,"for they do not act"according to the dictates of universality,"but are influenced by accidental inclinations and opinions."In contrast, men attain their position"through stress of thought and much specialist efforts." The disruptive nature of lust was crucial to such arguments. In contrast to base sexual desire, which commentators assumed was at the heart of polygamy and promiscuity, romantic love required individuals to transcend their singularity and recognize that, actually, their individuality was only possible through social unity. This made the romantic, monogamous, heterosexual couple, and their children, receptive to the wider transcendence required by the liberal state. State licensing of monogamous marriage tied love between a couple to citizenship within a state. By allowing for the expression of unruly passions, albeit within the regulatory confines of the monogamous family, sexual urges would be tempered. This was protective for both familial and national institutions. Just as a footnote here, for those of you who want the psychoanalytical thing, the psychoanalytical twist was given to this argument by Freud, of course, when he insisted that the suppression, or inhibition of the two innate drives, aggression and sex, were central to the maintenance of civilization. But whether employing a philosophical or a psychoanalytical frame of meaning, the monogamous family channeled sexual instincts to productive, rather than destructive ends. These debates became even more strident for commentators who were actually primarily curious about polygamy. The one example I'm going to give is Edward Westermarck. His writings on marriage were enormously influential, I mean hugely influential, from the 1890s onwards. And he admitted that, in fact, there were many benefits to polygamy, at least for husbands. A husband, he wrote, did not have to be periodically continent, for example when his wife was ill, or pregnant, or menstruating, a polygamous man could enjoy the attractions of female youth, since, Westermarck contended,"even when a man marries a women of his own age,"he may still be in the prime of life"when the youthful beauty of his wife has passed forever." Polygamy also indulged man's taste for variety, his desire for offspring and wealth, and his disdain for housework. As Westermarck asked,"If I have but one wife,"who will cook for me when she is ill?" However, these benefits of polygamy were far outweighed, he argued, by the needs of civilization, which always tended towards monogamous unions. In "A Short History of Marriage," Westermarck insisted that,"The sentiment of love has become more refined,"and, in consequence, more enduring."To a cultivated mind,"youth and beauty are, by no means,"the only attractions of a woman,"and besides, civilization has given female beauty"a new lease of life."The feelings of the weaker sex are held in greater regard,"and the causes which may make polygamy desired"no longer exist." The anonymous author of"Rational Basis of Legal Institutions," 1923, was less even-handed when comparing polygamy and monogamy, although, like Westermarck, he believed that civilization required monogamous households. He contended that polygamy was an institution of barbarism, and incompatible with a higher civilization. This was primarily because it depended on the subjection and degradation of women, and would lead to the neglect of children, or, at the very least, their inadequate socialization. In contrast, children were given a superior upbringing in monogamous cultures. Monogamous families fostered affections and emotions of the higher type, including altruism of the highest degree. Crucially, and I think this is interesting, actually, crucially, this meant that monogamous marriage, according to him, created fatherhood in the fullest sense of the term, meaning teaching men the value of service and self-sacrifice, strengthening family bonds meant strengthening social bonds, which, in turn, favored the development of higher types of religion and morals. Such views were actually mainstream at the time. Polyandry, that is one wife, many husbands, was said to foster paternal uncertainty and male rivalry, polygamy, one husband, many wives, debases women, disrupts child-raising, leads to authoritarian private and public spheres. In contrast, monogamy signals respect for women, harmony in domestic, as well as public spheres, and political stability. Why do we care about these debates? Why do we care about what they thought in the 19th century, or early 20th century? The reason I think we should care is, and I'll go into the present soon, the reason we should care is because they were integral to colonialist policies. For example, and there's thousands of examples here, but they were really at the center of colonialism, against, for example, indigenous Americans, who were required to adopt monogamous family structures. As the great, wonderful historian Nancy Cott explains,"Both political and religious officials"assumed that indigenous Americans' assimilation"had to be founded on monogamous marriage,"from which would follow the conventional sexual division"of labor, property, and inheritance." Similarly, after emancipation, formerly-enslaved people acquired not only the right to marry but also the duty of polygamy; monogamy.(audience laughs) Wow, what a great slip, monogamy. The Union Army's contraband camps and the programs run, for example, by the Freedmen's Bureau taught former slaves the need for fidelity within marriage, and the husband's obligation to support his family economically. So in other words, Christian monogamy and citizenship were indivisible. The imposition of monogamy also resulted in laws disenfranchising bigamists and members of religious groups such as Mormons, a section of whom supported polygamous marriages. This point was argued in Reynolds versus United States, 1879, when the Supreme Court ruled that a federal law prohibiting polygamy did not violate the free exercise of religion clause of the First Amendment. It ruled that the criminalization of Mormon polygamy was essential if the new state of Utah was to be a free, self-governing commonwealth. Good governance depended on,"the idea of the family as consisting in and springing from"the union for life of one man and one woman"in the holy state of matrimony." This was, the ruling read,"the sure foundation of all that is stable and noble"in our civilization,"the best guarantee of that reverend morality"which is the source of all beneficial progress"in social and political improvement." The other reason we should be interested in these debates is that such discussions continue today. Concerns about the debates about the dangers posed by polygamy to personal, as well as political stability and liberal governance have been employed by homophobes opposing gay relationships and same-sex marriages, most famously Senator Rick Santorum, 2003, saying, "If the Supreme Court says that you have the right"to consensual gay sex within your home,"then you have the right to bigamy,"you have the right to polygamy,"you have the right to incest,"you have the right to adultery." Or, in the words of the Defense of Marriage Act 1996,"Same-sex marriage would lead to the legalization"of bestiality, pedophilia, and incest." These opponents of homosexuality were emboldened by the AIDS crisis, because non-polygamy, or promiscuity, was identified as a key vector of HIV infection. They argued that same-sex couples were more licentious than their heterosexual counterparts, therefore they deserve to be infected with the gay plague. The most notorious, vicious example of this, of course, is evangelist Pat Robertson, when he quipped,"AIDS is God's way of weeding his garden." But even liberal commentators made a distinction between monogamous homosexual relationships, good, and promiscuous ones, bad. As historian Matt Cook, based at Birkbeck, argues, gay men who embraced the respectability associated with coupledom and monogamy were increasingly accepted, those who did not were stigmatized. There was another way that HIV/AIDS influenced debates about sexual relations. Gay liberation movements had tended to reject claims of monogamy and coupledom, instead, there was an emphasis on sexual pleasure and building a sense of shared community. The AIDS crisis led to a questioning of these emphases, as gay men adopted more monogamous pair bonding. This only changed when infection routes became much clearer. But the important thing is what their opponents did, for their opponents, gay promiscuity was to become a central argument against gay marriage. They maintained that allowing same-sex couples to marry would send out a message that sexual relations within marriage need not be exclusive. Once again, the integrity of the heterosexual, monogamous marriage was seen to be essential to political stability, even if, of course, in reality, it was flaunted by a significant proportion of heterosexual couples. Finally, monogamous sex took on new meaning with the invention of sex addiction from the 1970s onwards, becoming particularly prominent in the 1980s and 1990s. While non-monogamous sex remained a problem due to the way it breached moral codes, such behavior was increasingly refracted through a medicalized framework, and it was no minor affliction. The most common estimates that we have, again, there's problems with stats that we can talk about, said that sex addiction afflicts around 10% of Americans. Of course, this was not the first time that men and women who had obsessional urges to engage in sex with as many people as possible had been medicalized. I explored the historical arguments on this in an earlier lecture, and I can see a couple of people in the room at least who were at that lecture, a lecture I gave here, in a different series, Exploring the Body series, it was a lecture on the history of the clitoris and the penis, it's online, and you can get the transcript as well from the Gresham website, so I'm just going to do a couple of sentences,'cause you can see it there. But basically, in the earlier period, this was meant, if I'm boring you to tears, I thought I would, phwoom, in the earlier period, sexually voracious women were diagnosed with nymphomania, and attempts were made to calm their engorged, or irritated clitorises. Treatment included everything from a vegetarian diet and cold baths to clitorectomies. The male equivalent of this was satyriasis, named after the half-man, half-beast Greek satyr. This affliction was widely believed to be a real problem in Victorian society, it was blamed on this modern man who lacks moral willpower. Forensic physician Tardieu famously contended that the erotic delirium of these sufferers puts every woman at risk, or as the famous 19th century physician William Acton explained, it was accompanied by," a maniacal sensuality"that is one of the most awful visitations"to which humanity can be subject." But this historical thing, what we get from the 1970s onwards, the sex addiction of the 1970s onwards is actually a very different beast. It started as a grassroots self-help movement in 1977, with the establishment of Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, now called the Augustine Fellowship, and is now treated by medical health practitioners as an established mental disorder. The sexual dependency unit at Golden Valley Health Center, which established the first inpatient program for sex addicts in 1985, in Minneapolis, defines sex addicts as people who engage in obsessive-compulsive sexual behavior that causes severe stress to addicted individuals and their families. Central to being diagnosed was the idea of largely male suffering. In the words of an "Insight on the News" article in 1998, President Bill Clinton's sex addiction was the result of being abandoned by his mother and having an alcoholic stepfather. The author claimed that Clinton turned to sex to disguise his pain. The sex addict uses sex to deaden and avoid psychological pain and conflict. In other words, this disorder was no longer a matter of sin, it was no longer a matter of degeneration, racial degeneration, or human degeneration, as in the earlier incarnation, but a disruption in the regulatory mechanisms in the brain. What used to be morally inexcusable behavior was turned into an illness to be treated. Since it was a physiological affliction independent of a sufferer's willpower, it was also psychologically excusable. The question I was asking myself here is, how did the fairly unexceptional practice of having sex with multiple people who are not your partner come to be described in this literature as a devastating disease, a form of insanity? The invention, or discovery of hyper-sexual behavior disorder was part of a response to a conservative trend in the 1970s that identified the source of a huge range of societal problems, from crime to AIDS, in terms of a decline in sexual self-control. Promiscuity, pornography, sex work, gay liberation became the central targets. As we have seen in previous lectures, in this series, at least, radical feminists also engaged in these debates, deploring male sex addicts for their casual victimization of women, and accusing female sex addicts of false consciousness, or self-harming behaviors. The heart of all these arguments are the virtues of monogamy. Sexaholics Anonymous informs its readers, and by the way, these are not unusual quotes within the literature, Sexaholics Anonymous informs its members that,"Any form of sex with oneself"or with partners other than the spouse"is progressively addictive and destructive." For the married sexaholic, sexual sobriety means having sex only with the spouse, including no forms of sex with oneself, for the unmarried, freedom from sex of any kind, for all, progressive victory over lust. In other words, even sexual fantasies and masturbation are dangerous, and for married men and women, a form of infidelity, sin is in the mind as well as in the flesh. A sharp distinction, then, is made between good sex, that is heterosexual, monogamous intercourse with a spouse, and bad sex, promiscuous, fantasy-driven, queer. In conclusion, what does this brief sweep through the history of monogamy tell us about what married people expect from their partners? It exposes the double standard of sexual morality of the 19th century to the present, for example, in which the monogamy of wives was much more important than that of husbands. It traces the increasing importance of emotional exclusivity within marriage, and in recent decades, this has spread to virtual realms. For example, an ABC poll, 2004, found that over 40% of women and 1/4 of men believe that visiting a pornographic website is incompatible with a monogamous relationship. In 2009, 1/3, 1/3 of divorces were blamed on virtual infidelity. This emphasis on emotional intimacy between couples changes the very meaning of monogamy, drawing attention away from straying sex organs towards fickle hearts. Its history, I think, reminds us of the huge societal investment in monogamy, it's been central to ideas about property, both human property, is the wife's body hers or is it subsumed under her husband, and material property, how are assets distributed after divorce. The history of monogamy also draws attention to conflicts between laws and ideals and actual practices. Presidents and politicians can be loudly heard condemning the polygamous practices of certain immigrant groups while a blind eye is turned to the serially adulterous practices of, for example, world leaders Mitterand, Roosevelt, Bill Clinton, and Boris Johnson, as well as a sizeable minority of its own citizens. The future of monogamy is less certain. The significantly higher rates of non-monogamous behavior amongst men used to be explained in terms of the parental investment theory, whereby women's greater responsibilities for the care of offspring has meant that they have a higher investment in monogamy, but for women, of course, the costs of infidelity have been rapidly declining in the last few decades, with the rise of birth control, access to abortion, improved employment opportunities, et cetera, et cetera. Recent decades have also seen the rise of polyamory and other sex-positive household structures. Unlike more traditional forms of polygamy, polyamory tends towards more radical, post-structuralist, postmodern approaches to sex. Such relationships often include members of the same sex, or gender-fluid individuals. The legalization of same-sex marriages has emboldened them to press for the legalization of group marriages, as well as to emphasize poly-fidelity as similar to the good monogamous marriage. But whatever turns out to be the future of monogamy, and historians are not soothsayers, its history suggests that what we do with our sexed bodies, whom we touch, when and why we do so, and what it all, for goodness' sake, means will continue to exercise and excite the imagination of people like Mary Gove Nichols, for whom love was a religion, the only true good. As she promised in her marriage vows,"If that love is yours,"it will bear fruit for you"and enrich your life, our life."If my love leads me from you,"I must go." That's it. Just to say, next in the series, abstinence.(she laughs) But actually, seriously here, the next lecture in the series, which is on the 12th of May, please come, and tell your friends, because I'm going to try and do something, firstly, I'm going to critique myself, and I'm going to actually undermine something that has appeared in all of my lectures, and that is this real binary between sex-negative and sex-positive feminists. I want to unpick all that, I want to take it apart, I want to critique my own work. I'll be looking an incels, I'm going to be looking at violence and abstinence, I'm going to be looking at asexuals, and I'm going to tie together and reflect on how all the topics that I have been exploring in this series,'cause this is the last of the series, how they get tied together, so what ties together sexual pleasure, perversion, pornography, sex work, monogamy, celibacy, or abstinence, what are the broad threads between all of these topics. So join me, please, 12th of May, 6 o'clock, abstinence, celibacy, all the good things in life. Thank you very much.(audience applauds)