Today, I want to talk to you about the impact of personal narratives on leftist politics. Wait, don’t go! Look, here’s a Salon piece with a splashy title about having two husbands. It’s scandalous; stay, stay!

I’ll cut to the chase here. I don’t mind navel-gazing personal essays. Navel-gazing is the very crux of the personal essay; to be a virtuous personal essay, a piece must relentlessly navel-gaze. And personal narratives about sexuality tend to do that with a vengeance. That’s fine by me. But when it comes to lefty personal narratives about sexuality — especially unusual sexualities — the navel gazing seems to be more a matter of function than form. That is, I think we see in the lefty personal essay (in this case on the topic of sexuality, though this trend is by no means limited to that subject matter) the tendency of a formal convention, e.g. navel-gazing in the personal narrative, to affect the very function of the narrative, e.g. leftist political goals.

Let me illustrate using the above Salon piece. Throughout the essay, we’re treated to the utter banality of the first-person narrative; some individual had a relationship, wanted another, got it, fin. We find that the author met her second longterm partner through their shared “dedication to leftist organizing and social justice.” When confronted with spurious accusations that her polyamorous lifestyle is dangerous somehow to her daughter, the author responds:

I often talk to her about the fact that society frowns on families like ours, and whenever I mention the claims that polyamory is bad for children, she rolls her eyes and says, “Oh no, kids having more people to love them! How horrible!”

She adores my boyfriend, and his relationship to her is like that of a stepparent, or maybe the fun live-in uncle. They play video games and do Mad-Libs together, and they laugh a lot. When I think about the number of kids with an absent parent, I think it’s pretty great that my daughter has three adults in her life to give her time and attention and care. And with all the varieties of loving, blended families in the world, I fail to see why mine should be considered any differently.

Our author has a lot going for her that tends to sport gravitas on the left: first of all, she identifies as a leftist; second, she has unusual sexual proclivities; third, she went to grad school. She writes in the essay about home shopping and studying, and the challenges thereof. And, being a proper leftist, she rightly identifies the variety of loving families in the world…

…that is, right after she totally denigrates poor families in the previous line. I mean literally, her argument goes like this: how can polyamory be so bad for children when it entails more adults in a child’s life, and what’s really bad is fewer adults in a child’s life, as in single parenthood? Just under 50% of single parent households are impoverished in the USA. Because so many single parents struggle to provide for children financially and thus end up spending a tremendous amount of time working, it is true that they don’t necessarily have the time to commit to playing Mad-Libs with their children that this author and her spouses might. This should be an indictment of a system that, by choice, systematically deprives persons of a living wage, among other wellness-related services like affordable childcare and healthcare.

Instead it devolves into a snide little humblebrag. This author, who has gone to college and grad school — which we know to be markers of relative wealth — and is now shopping for a house, takes a moment to point out that while we may look askance at her lifestyle, she’s at least doing better by her child than those poor folks who just can’t put in the time, attention, and care that she and her spouses can. This might seem benign, but it isn’t. Why?

1.) Because single parents, especially black single mothers, are disproportionately and unfairly blamed for the insurmountable challenges that poor children face, and this rhetoric feeds into the line of reasoning that identifies single parenthood as a cause of bad childhood conditions rather than another symptom of poverty, which incidentally causes terrible childhood conditions.

2.) Because it attempts to achieve acceptance for a category of persons — white, educated, articulate individuals, in this case — who are already privileged at the expense of persons who are already seriously disadvantaged in many cases.

3.) And because by putting the interests of single parents and polyamorous persons at cross-purposes, it leads to the type of fragmentation we saw at Occupy Boston, where the interests of people concerned about sex offenders clashed perilously with the interests of people concerned about problems in the criminal justice system.

I know this seems nitpicky, which is why I return to form. The left is dominated by the story, especially the personal narrative. As I pointed out, the personal narrative is inherently given to self-centeredness; that’s sort of the point. But self-centered evaluations of privilege and oppression tend to lead to the elevation of one’s personal interests over the broader interests of a whole movement, which leads to the sort of fragmentation and continued denigration of certain groups (especially poor people) that I’ve indicated above. The personal narrative model of activism and discourse encourages us to think in tiny, tiny terms, and it fuels the kind of tunnel vision that results in really troubling off-handed remarks like the passage I cite here, as well as annoying tendencies like student fetishism. The form, in other words, appears to have bled into the function.

My solution is pretty simple: think in bigger terms, outside the personal narrative.