Big Love and Polyamory: Aesthetics, Policy, Law, Wingnuttery
By - An emailer asked if I stuck around after The Sopranos to watch Big Love this week. I did, and while I liked it maybe a little less than Ezra I thought it was pretty good. I thought the scenes with their daughter and her Mormon friend at the fast-food restaurant were particularly strong, and there are a lot of good actors. Whether it will be worth sticking with, I dunno. Cold aesthete that I am, my first reaction to Jessica’s claim that it’s “glamorizing” alpha-male misogyny because it’s relatively sympathetic to Paxton’s character is to say that she must really hate the sympathetic portrayal of the psychopathic, racist mob boss that precedes it (and, of course, I suppose some people do, but for reasons I’ve discussed many times I just can’t fathom that way of looking at art.) But, in fairness, one difference between the great and the merely good is that one generally worries more about that kind of stuff. I wouldn’t say that the show is good enough to watch even if it you think you’ll find it intolerably creepy.
- About the politics, I’ve written about this before, but even if I thought the show would lead to the legalization of polyamorous relationships it wouldn’t bother me very much. The strongest argument against it is that bigamous relationships have indeed been sites of serious patriarchal repression. The obvious problem with the argument is that the same has been historically true of ordinary two-partner marriages as well. (Are two-partner heterosexual marriages in the Mormon communities that practice bigamy considerably better for women?) I don’t see why polyamorous marriages would be inherently more patriarchal than two-person ones.
- On the legal argument, I think this is pretty much right. Existing privacy doctrine doesn’t require the state to call any relationship “marriage,” but I agree that it quite clearly does (and correctly) make laws like Utah’s, which ban even informal polyamorous relationships, unconstitutional. Current equal protection doctrine, however, doesn’t compel the state to confer privileges polyamorous marriages (although had O’Connor’s equal protection rationale–which some people, like Jeffrey Rosen, erroneously consider to be “narrower” because it would have had slightly narrower implications in the low-stakes field of sodomy laws–been accepted in Lawrence, things might be different.) If sexual orientation is considered a suspect class, that would of course change things, but…
- I also agree with both points made by Matt here. I agree that the politic “gay marriage doesn’t require us to go any further down the slippery slope” argument is true as a matter of formal logic, although myself I wouldn’t consider it much of an argument even if I thought it was true. But what really puzzles me is the claims of people like Stanley Kurtz that if polyamorous relationships were legally recognized, they would become the social norm. As with wingnut obsession with discussing homosexuality in schools–which seems predicated on projected (and, of course, misogynist) assumptions that no man would ever consent to have sex with a woman if he was aware that there was any alternative–it’s odd how little value they see to individuals in the social institutions they believe the state should use a great deal of coercive authority to preserve. In most states, after all, nothing stops people from engaging in informal polyamorous relationships, but it’s not terribly common. Do you really think that it’s just the stigma of legal recognition that keeps people from desperately wanting to be in long-term familial relationships with multiple erotic partners? Might people actually see value in monogamous relationships? Cultural reactionaries have such a strange view of the world.