I think it’s safe to say that polygamy has been a national obsession for quite some time now. In fact, Esquire declared this to be the case two years ago. For the past four years, I have been religiously watching each and every episode of Big Love and anticipating each and every one of New York Magazine’s recaps the following day. Currently I have read exactly half of the 600 pages in The Lonely Polygamist, Brady Udall’s descriptive saga a family with one husband, four wives, and 28 children. The book was released last May and there was a very lengthy wait at my local library, which is why I just received the book last week. Apparently, other people in my area are just as obsessed with polygamy as I am.
The question is, why are we so obsessed with polygamy? In my personal experience, it could be because I’m an only child and the idea of having 20+ siblings frightens me. More specifically, I can’t imagine anyone in a household that large having any sort of privacy. It could be because I don’t know any polygamists and the entire lifestyle is vastly different from my own. It could be because we are drawn to what we perceive as unnatural, bizarre, or repulsive. (See also: the long-cancelled Fear Factor and the ever-so-successful Hoarders). There are numerous memoirs of women who escaped polygamy with catchy titles such as God’s Brothel and Stolen Innocence. I’ve never actually read any of the memoirs so I can’t accurately compare them to a work of fiction, but based on the summaries they all seem to focus on the unhappiness of the women in these marriages.
This is the main reason why I am so fascinated with polygamy; I’m curious about the lives of women who are married to the same man. Are they happy? Are they sad? Do they get along with the other wives? Do their children get along with each other? Do the children get along with the other mothers? Is there an intricate rotating sleeping schedule involved?
Big Love is in its fifth and final season and the three main women — Barb, Nicki, and Margene — have never been happy. Barb has a sense of entitlement because she was the first and original wife, Nicki has an inferiority complex because she isn’t the first wife and is manipulative to the other two, and young and naive Margene is essentially the result of Bill’s mid-life crisis and raging libido. These women are likable, relatable, and repugnant at the same time. The four women in The Lonely Polygamist are no different. Although I am still reading the book, I am torn between liking and hating each wife. Beverly is as controlling as Barb, Nola is Beverly’s nemesis, Rose-of-Sharon has mutism and a ridiculous name, and Trish is young and horny like Margene. It seems as if there are no positive portrayals of these women. Not to mention, the aging matriarch versus the young sex kitten seems to be very cliché, even if it is occasionally true.
In a blog post for the Huffington Post, Author Brady Udall explains that the obsession with polygamy is solely about sex.
In 1998 I was commissioned by Esquire magazine to write a piece about contemporary polygamy. Though there was polygamy in my family history, and I knew more about the subject than most, I went into my research expecting what most anyone would expect: megalomaniacal men with their hair greased back and their shirts buttoned to the collar married to cow-eyed women in pioneer dresses and ostentatious meringue hair-dos. You can imagine my disappointment, then, when the people I met turned out to the regular, everyday sort of folk you’d run into at the post office. People who wore jeans and running shoes and drove minivans. People who lived in suburban townhomes and watched television after work. People with reasonably conventional hair. People like you or me.
Only they weren’t like you and me, because you and I don’t have six wives or thirty-eight children. These were normal people, sure, but they were living in an exceptionally abnormal way.
I was fascinated by the contradictions in such a lifestyle, and it was one of the biggest reasons I decided to write a novel about polygamy. And I was not alone in my fascination: Big Love came on the air, salacious polygamy stories started running with regularity on the evening news, and very soon polygamy became a national obsession.
Why the obsession? It has to do with sex, of course. Everything we are obsessed about has something to do with sex, and polygamy is no exception.
While I am sure some of us are curious about their sex lives, I think others are more curious about their lives overall. The memoirs aren’t successful because they talk about sex; they are successful because they satiate our curiosity about an unknown and secretive lifestyle. What do you think about the obsession with polygamy and the portrayals of women in polygamist families? Do you think their flaws exist to make them relatable to the average family? Would people not watch Big Love or read The Lonely Polygamist if the women members of functional families as opposed to dysfunctional families?
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The NPR show This American Life did a program a while back about sister wives. This was before the whole “Big Love” and reality show phenomenon brought polygamy front and center.
Speaking for myself, I’m fascinated with the way our society seems to be super interested in polygamy but freaked out by polyamory or other forms of relationships that involve more than two people. Why is it, I wonder, that the one-man-and-multiple-women thing is such a cultural fascination?
If people love each other, truly love each other, then how many of them want to be married is no business of mine. It only becomes my business or society, business when it is forced marriage, or nonconsensual, or abusive.
Thanks Anna! I about to listen to this now. I recently started listening to This American Life so I wasn’t a regular listener when this aired. This entire episode is very interesting.
I agree with Newt that it’s really none of my business provided everyone’s a consenting adult. Yes, I have major problems with the theology and patriarchialism of polygamy (all polygamy, not just FLDS polygamy). But I have those same problems with traditional, church-sanctioned monogamy, too.
Like foureleven, I’m fascinated by that lifestyle because of all the questions it brings up about interpersonal relationships and power dynamics among women. I’m less fascinated with the sex thing than Brady Udall would imagine but that may be because non-traditional sexual relationships don’t scandalize me all that much anyway.
@annaj: I wonder if the fascination with polygamy has to do with the cultural stereotype that men must just looooove having a free pass to bed lots of women without the stigma of infidelity.
The site is loading all wonky for me, so I can’t see part of some comments (I can read the original post, though).
Anyway, I am interested in polygamy more than I am interested in polyamory. I am more freaked out by polygamy than polyamory, mostly because when I think of polyamorists I think of people who are making a specific and non-normative choice to do what they need to do to be happy, and are generally resisting the dominant expectation of relationship. Polygamists are generally raised in polygamist cultures, so it’s not really subverting any cultural expectation.
But I am interested in polygamy because I feel like it’s a patriarchy hothouse. Like it’s all these assumptions about women and men and love and sex and relationships and parenting all compressed into one family unit. And I’m interested in the way those issues–which I think we all have to deal with in various ways–are navigated by the women to survive. That’s why I like Big Love.
One question: “It seems as if there are no positive portrayals of these women”
Is this a reference to the book you’re reading, or Big Love, or both? Because I feel like the portrayals of women on the show are exceptional. Complex and flawed, yes, but overall incredibly positive. Especially last season, when Bill’s megalomania was getting out of control and all the women were trying to mitigate the fucked up shit he was doing, and also a lot of the crazy behavior (mostly of Nicki) was being cleared up and explained in consistent and revelatory ways. But I could be wrong.
Cimorene – I was referring to both the book and the show. I agree that the women on Big Love are very complex and flawed, which is why they sometimes seem negative in my opinion. Margene’s character bothers me the most because it seems as if the writers are trying to make her as naive and sexual as possible. It reinforces the stereotype that you have to be young and attractive to secure a man, in this case an older man in a position of power. However, I did like the plotline with her and Ben a while back because she is closer in age to him and the other children than she is to Bill.
I’m not sure. Like Becky and Newt, as long as everyone’s consenting, it’s none of my business. But I feel like it could be too easily abused, too easily manipulated into abuse. It seems like the spouse everyone’s sharing would have an uncomfortable amount of control over the other spouses.
But these are purely observations, I am very far from being an expert on any of this.
foureleven, can you change “is a mute” to “has mutism”? Thanks.
I’m fascinated with Mormonism and FLDS more than just polygamy. The psychology of Joseph Smith really interests me– he basically created a religion designed to alleviate all his biggest fears and insecurities, and I can totally see the appeal, particularly the part about families being sealed together forever– it’s a very comforting idea.
The polygamy fascinates me because I can see how parts of it would be appealing. I think the closeness of the families, the shared housework, and the sort of sisterhood between the wives is very appealing. I told my husband I’d like a sister wife who wasn’t allowed to have sex with him. His response: “So, basically you want a live-in maid?” Yeah. Basically. A friend jokes that he’ll be my sister wife– as a single gay man, he finds my settled monogamy very fascinating, like zoo animals mating in captivity or something. He said he’d live with us, eat my food (I cook way too much for just the two of us), play with our dogs, and is not in the slightest interested in sleeping with either of us. It might just be the perfect arrangement.
I think when Udall says “we” he means “men.” Men want to know how the sex works. That’s always going to be there first question whether dealing with polygamists or paraplegics.
I have neither watched Big Love nor read any of these books. But I was raised Mormon and the attitude of why this was once ok in their eyes but is now considered abhorrent is very interesting – especially when you start talking about prophecies etc. I also recently read Mariama Ba’s “So Long a Letter” about Sengalese women dealing with their long time husbands taking a new, young wife.
I took a class on gender dynamics in Africa and polygamy was a big topic. One day we watched a video on African polygamy in which they interviewed a lot of men with multiple wives (most of whom were came across as entitled and meglomaniacal) and then their wives (who pretty much just complained about how much polygamy sucks). Since cultural relativity ran rampant in this class (“FGM ain’t so bad” could have been the subtitle for this class), the students were very quick to talk about how it’s ok because that’s their lifestyle and culture and it’s just different from ours and shouldn’t be judged. Then we watched a film on the faux mormon polygamists – and they embodied exactly what Udall expected to find. These women talked endlessly of their happiness and security. The man, while obviously a creepy religious nutbag, seemed to be very respectful of his wives. The class exploded into how these women had been brainwashed and how awful it was and someone needs to save these women. The teacher hugged me when I pointed out that we seemed to be expecting a lot more out of white Americans. I guess I don’t have a point just an interesting anecdote.
Polygyny.
I know it’s a nitpick, but if it was truly polygamy, there would be some examples of women with multiple male spouses too.
It’s interesting to me that while polygamy is such a fascinating-repulsive idea to most Americans (I mean, we outlaw it … and no one in the mainstream is really arguing it should be incorporated into our current ideas of marriage), there are ways in which we could alleviate some of the problems of polygamy as a cultural institution that are even MORE upsetting to people.
For example, as outrageous as a man with multiple wives is to the majority of Americans … suggesting we make plural marriage gender-neutral? Unthinkable! We could make the sexual jealousy thing a moot point by saying that all partners within the plural marriage could be sexually active with one another. Again: People get weirded out by that.
I think possibly polygamy as a cultural IDEA has such a hold on our imagination because we (as a society) see it as less threatening than same-sex marriage (because fewer people support it actually becoming legal), yet its existence raises a lot of the same questions about the meaning of marriage, gender roles, human sexuality and sex difference that same-sex marriage calls into play. So it’s a safe playground, as it were, to ask those loaded questions without seeming like you’re condoning something that is “obviously” outlandish.
@Ms. M – Changed!
@AmBam – That is an interesting anecdote. I would have hugged you too.
Anna – Ooh, such a good point about polygamy being less threatening than same-sex marriage. That seems like a post in and of itself.
wondering: Yes, exactly. We’re not culturally entranced by polygamy. It’s polygyny that we endlessly dissect and/or drool over.
I haven’t read or watched pretty much any of the things referenced, but the increasing cultural fascination with polygamy (of the traditional, religion-based sort) seems very interesting.
I wonder why there hasn’t been any (that I’m aware of) such focuses on polyamory, considering that seems to be an increasingly popular lifestyle with a lot more interesting configurations than one man, multiple wives. You’d think a tv network or publisher would grab onto that at some point.
I love ‘Big Love’ and really enjoyed ‘Under the Banner of Heaven.’ I wish that they dealt with sex more on the show; I really loved in the first season how Bill was shown taking Viagra to try to keep up with all of them, because the assumption is, “3 wives? Sex gold mine!” and in reality, his desire/ability to perform wasn’t enough and I appreciated the women all being shown as having desire and it wasn’t about Bill trying to get a new piece of tail.
When I was in the US around Christmastime, I watched a marathon of ‘Sister Wives’ on TLC. I thought it was fascinating – but as foureleven says, not so much because of the sex as to see a) how they organised their lives, which must be a logistical nightmare and b) the dynamics between the different wives and the husband, on an emotional level.