Infinitely Mad
Polygamy is not a joke. It is not funny. It is an illegal practice in the United States. It is NOT something you make an HBO show about. Full story here.This new show that HBO is starting makes me infinitely mad. Many women, here in the US, are born into sects where they are raised or brainwashed or forced into polygamous relationships. Since polygamy is illegal in the US, these marriages are kept secret = cloistered, uneducated women about their rights and the world outside of their sect. Women are beaten, psychologically tortured and emotionally devastated by this practice. Incidentally, incest is often an exploited resource because it is hard to recruit women who are not already part of the sect.
Women have very few options when it comes to getting out of polygamous sects and relationships, because normally this means abandoning everything about their life, including friends and family, that they know. They are also penniless, jobless, and for the most part uneducated.
TV has extraordinary power over the masses. I think that a show about a happy family with three wives makes polygamy look attractive, hip and fashionable. A TV show about a successful illegal practice has the effect of glamorizing that practice. When in truth, it is illegal and potentially very harming!
I know that not everybody who watches the show will instantly become polygamous. I understand that there are rights about free speech… But it is disgusting how people will use those rights to make a quick buck on a controversial subject instead of doing something beneficial for society.
4 comments:
Yeah, cable comedies should only be about funny topics, like death and the mafia.
(This is in no way an endorsement of polygamy.)
The Soprano's, while entertaining, certainly doesn't glamorize mafia life (from the few episodes I've seen) So anyone with HBO or netflix can jump in and correct me. I think the issue is that Big Love is not going to address polygamy topics like trading your daughter to your uncle, or abandoning your son in order to keep a favorable boy: girl ratio in your little compound. Marrying 12 year old girls. etc. It's going to gloss it all over, one article said that an issue in the show is the father keeping all his wives satisfied in bed, which leads him to take up Viagra. Stop. The. Presses.
It would be like the Soprano's, only everyone ends up hanging out at BBQ's and NOT getting shot. So yes, I can find death and the mafia entertaining, lord knows I have a fairly twisted sense of humor. However trivializing polygamy is like making light of incest no wait, strike that, child molestation. (My apologies I just remembered that incest can be hilarious)
First of all, I wasn't defending the show - which I have never seen and never hope to see. I was doing what we academic types call "being a dick."
That being said, I feel like we need to take a step back and remember that marriage is a construct, and that one man marrying one woman, in the grand scheme of things, is no less strange or unnatural than one man marrying five women, or one man marrying another man, or five other men, or no one ever marrying at all - which is perhaps the most natural state of them all. Polygamy, while not something I want to be a part of (as most women raised with fairly standardized Western norms and values would not,) is just another option in a wide array of options designed to create and maintain certain power dynamics, be they finanical, emotional, or what have you. I take pretty strong objection to the equivalent relationship you're drawing between polygamy and child molestation. Child molesters, by definition, molest children. Polygamists, by definition, take more that one wife. Anything else they do is extra.
All that is to say, I'm not really sure the topics to which you are referring are "polygamy topics," in the sense that they're an inextricable part of the relationship. Are they really the core issue, or are they just the particular forms of human abuse that can arise out of this particular power structure? Is it impossible to tell a story about a polygamous family without the trading-off of children and a prioritizing of maintaining a favorable ratio in your compound? Can't polygamy exist outside the compound - as it does in this show? While I am not denying that there is a strong correlative relationship between polygamy and all these incredibly nasty things, I am unconvinced that there is a causal relationship, and that's why I feel like I can be a dick and joke around about this instead of treating it with deathly seriousness.
Every kind of human relationship lends itself to certain kinds of abuse. That's just fact. Get two or more people together and it becomes possible for one to do really unpleasant things to the other. For instance: Over 30% of American women in monogamous relationships report being physically or sexually abused by a partner or spouse. Does that mean you can't tell a story about a marriage without the man coming home and beating his wife until her eyes swell shut? Domestic abuse is certainly a "monogamy topic," just as it is a polygamy one, if we're going to create topics for things. But because monogamy is the dominant, accepted relationship type, we can tell a variety of kinds of story about it. Certainly happy and unhappy monogamous homes have their place in prime time. I don't see why we have to show - nay, affirm - the hell that is polygamy in the premiere episodes of the first season of the first show we've ever aired on the topic - unless, of course, the furor is puritanical at its core? But heaven forbid! Forget I even brought it up.
I am also not certain that this show is any different from The Sopranos or any other mass broadcast in terms of glamour. The fact of mafiosos getting shot after the barbeque does not de-glamorize the mafia life; quite the opposite, in my opinion. Have you looked outside lately? America is predicated on the wish to be a big, tough guy, and the Sopranos feeds that fantasy. If nobody got shot, no one would care, and no teenage boys would be sitting at home in their Simpsons parody shirts thinking that Tony Soprano is The. Coolest. Guy. Ever. Period. If it's not glamorous, where are all the kids thinking, "Gosh, I thought being in the mafia would be cool, but this show has really shown me otherwise"? If a subject is on TV, there is going to be a certain amount of glamour around it no matter how it's presented.
In conclusion:
Polygamy does not have to equal incestual trading,
and monogamy does not have to equal "falling down the stairs again,"
but mafia life does equal being summarily executed,
but that's actually kind of cool.
Having just watched episodes 1 and 2 of Big Love with my two wives, Pamila and Jasmine, we all agree that the show presents a Fair and Balanced take on polygamy.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, when you're ready to leave Alan and come to Egypt, there is room in my heart, our apartment and our family for you. I am allowed 4 wives under Islamic Law!
(This is in every way an endorsement of polygamy.)
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