Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Cohousing vs intentional community

[areinert (areinert]

Been following the long thread on acceptance/pointed avoidance, etc of 
non-standard living styles, polyamority (-orousness?) the prime example.  
I'll just comment that lots of us don't talk (endlessly) about our sex 
lives, psyches, or other sociopsychological babble because were just not 
interested.  You live your way,fine, I'll live mine.  Now about the 
chores that need to be done...  

What I feel uncomfortable with is if cohousing, or cohousing meetings,
keep turning into encounter sessions. Obviously, there can be times when a 
members behavior, attitudes, or whatever, "impacts the community"; i.e. 
bothers enough people (or a person enough) that someone feels it needs to 
be addressed, but mostly, I'm not so much uncomfortable as uninterested 
and exasperated with group discussins focusing on intangible 
philosophical questions.  If you can't get join, or are being evicted 
from, a group because your lifestyle or whatever offends other members, 
and you feel that it shouldn't, THEN it becomes a real tangible issue for 
discussion within that group.  But if it's effectively just abstract 
philosophizing, not everyone is as interested.  

I picked this thread up at where someone had suggested mildly, casually, 
that discussions of the, um, ethical considerations of polyandry might 
prudently be held on other usegroups, as being not particularily 
pertinent to practical cohousing considerations and perhaps attracting 
destructive attention from potential enemies who might confound cohousing 
(alternative real estate development/local government/community 
organization) with Sodom and Gommorah, and he got accused of censoring 
the practice of it.  Remember that?  Meanwhile, there's been interesting 
ideas like how to develop a very large community on difficult site, how 
to convert military industrial compounds, and others, which I am more 
interested in. 

Okay, okay, I don't have to read them, but the point I'm trying to make 
is not everyone feels it is such a large, important issue as others.

Arne Reinert