Poly and family in Esquire magazine

"It may have started with Big Love, which starts up again this month," writes Steven Marche in the January Esquire. He argues that pop culture's increasing fascination with family-structure weirdness "reveal[s] a change in the American home":

Tolstoy began Anna Karenina with the famous line, "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Which sounds terrific but is bullshit when you think about it. Unhappy families are all booze and cheating and fighting about money — all the tiresome same. Happy families are the weird ones, all inside gestures and codes of their own, distinct ecologies of need and habit and desire, and the history of the American sitcom has been the gradual acceptance of this complicated truth....

...Not since the time of Utah's entry into the Union has the subject of plural marriage consumed so much psychic energy. "Big Love" begins its third season this month on HBO, David Ebershoff's "The 19th Wife" made fall's best-seller lists.... These pop-culture polygamists have something to sell — namely, the promise of one big happy family — and Americans are buying....

...It's no coincidence that the creators of "Big Love" and "The 19th Wife" are all gay — gay men know about illicit love and households with complicated sexual economies.

...That great bellwether of social change, The New York Times Styles section, recently devoted 1,200 words to the current popularity of polyamory, which shows that polygamy is legal de facto if not de jure. And look who's likely to show up at George Clooney's villa at Lake Como these days: Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, who've sworn off marriage until same-sex couples are guaranteed the same right, and Tilda Swinton, who sometimes lives with the 68-year-old father of her twins and a 30-year-old artist-actor. Martha Nussbaum, the leading feminist intellectual of our time, recently came out in favor of not just polygamy but the 19th-century Mormon model of polygamy. In a recent article for the Philadelphia Inquirer [May 22, 2008; text is here], she argued that polygamy is not inherently more patriarchal than monogamy....

...The fact that mainstream audiences respond to such blue-sky depictions proves that Americans are desperate to believe in a happy family again — any happy family. Far from declining under this revolution in who lives with whom, the American family is resurgent, even as it splinters into kaleidoscopically shifting arrangements of varying sizes and shapes and intensities. The Henricksons and the schlubs of "Two and a Half Men" are the happiest families on television not despite their confusing arrangements but exactly because they've opted out of the standard lifestyle....

I'll buy it. What originally attracted me to the idea of poly, way back when, wasn't the idea of sleeping with two girlfriends but having a big Robert Heinlein science-fiction family.

Read the whole article.

P.S.: Right in line with this idea is Terisa Greenan's poly sitcom on the web, "Family".

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