" ‘Monogamish’: The Polyamorous Revolution in One Entertaining and Stylish Documentary"

Abramorama

And in smaller-movie news—

Two and a half years after its kickstarter began, and two years after it premiered at the Rome Film Festival, Tao Ruspoli's documentary Monogamish is finally showing in the United States. It's playing at New York's Roxy Cinema Tribeca through October 19th, then goes on tour. Upcoming screenings.

The movie features several of the poly world's most visible movers and shakers, including Diana Adams, Dossie Easton, Christopher Ryan, Stephanie Coontz, and the coiner of the word "monogamish," Dan Savage. From the blurb:

Independent filmmaker and son-of-an-Italian-Prince Tao Ruspoli takes to the road to talk to his relatives, advice columnists, psychologists, historians, anthropologists, artists, philosophers, sex workers, sex therapists, and ordinary couples about love, sex & monogamy in our culture. What he discovers about his very unconventional family, and about the history and psychology of love and marriage, leads him to question the ideal of monogamy, and the traditional family values that go with it.

Trailer:




IndieWire published its review this morning:

The Polyamorous Revolution in One Entertaining and Stylish Documentary

This new documentary is more than just a primer on non-traditional relationships — though it does that well, too.

By Jude Dry

“Being in love is like being high,” says Roberta Haze, a California-based costume designer sporting purple hair and layers of hoop wearings. “That has to transform into love, because that stays. Like snorting coke, it’s not a state that you can live in all the time.”

...“Every new relationship that’s sexual is kind of an adventure, and then the adventure goes away,” [Dan] Savage tells Ruspoli. “Then it’s just kind of where you live, and then it’s not an adventure. And how can you continue to surprise each other? Without feeling like you have to pull rabbits out of a hat all the time.”

Ruspoli appears on camera as a boyishly charming and somewhat befuddled 40-something, easy to root for by the way he wears his heart on his sleeve. ...

“Our economic system is based on an idea of a male breadwinner supporting a wife and children,” says lawyer Diana Adams. “This is a way governments can privatize dependency and not have to take care of single mothers and their children… Having the government say, ‘Why don’t you get into a sexual relationship with a man who will support you,” is the equivalent to the government being a pimp to poor women in America.”

The interviews in the film touch briefly but profoundly on every major alternative philosophy surrounding marriage, feminism, sexuality, and relationships. “Monogamish” is like a starter course in the prevailing thinking around non-monogamy as taught by its foremost writers, philosophers, and therapists. ...

[Esther Perel:] “In one relationship, we want security, stability, dependability, all the anchoring, grounding experiences of life. At the same time, we also want our love life to bring with it mystery and awe and novelty and surprise and the unexpected and that which fuels desire. We are basically asking one person to give us two sets of fundamental human needs — it isn’t a problem that you solve, it’s a paradox that you manage.”

Following a touching “aha” moment for Ruspoli, Savage sums it up succinctly: “The culture says sex is so unimportant that you shouldn’t prioritize it in a marriage, but sex is so hugely important that you can’t have it with anyone else.”

Ruspoli’s presence in the film elevates “Monogamish” beyond the predictable talking heads documentary. ...

Grade: B+

The whole review (October 14, 2017).

● Diana Adams and others in the movie will appear in person at the 8 o'clock New York showings on October 15 and 16. She posts,

This is the most nuanced and high-level view of consensual nonmonogamy as part of cultural change that I've ever seen, and I highly recommend it. I'll be speaking after the Oct. 15 and 16 shows which each start at 8 p.m. On the 15th I'll be speaking with the director Tao Ruspoli and Daniel Pinchbeck, and on the 16th with Tao and Christopher Ryan. I highly recommend buying tickets before it sells out. I hope you'll join us!

More info about the movie.  Website.  Facebook page.

Update: Salon posts a video interview with Tao Ruspoli (Oct. 13).

[Permalink]

*Monogamish* the movie premiers

Remember the Kickstarter appeal last March for Tao Ruspoli's indie docu-movie Monogamish? It passed its goal of $35,000 and ended with $50,210 from 515 backers.

Now the movie is finished, but it's not yet available; it's supposed to be by the end of 2015. Among its featured people are polyamory movement stars, such as Diana Adams, Christopher Ryan, and Dossie Easton. Here's the trailer (2:28).

Monogamish premiered October 21 to an audience at the Rome Film Festival. The Hollywood Reporter ran this review:

Tao Ruspoli explores the highs and lows (mostly the lows) of long-term fidelity.

By Jordan Mintzer

Love and marriage make for rather poor bedfellows in Monogamish, a documentary investigation that questions the way most modern relationships are supposed to function, underscoring why the concept of long-term fidelity may be the worst way to keep your couple going far into the future.

Directed by Italian-American filmmaker Tao Ruspoli, who was prompted to pick up his camera after suffering a heartbreaking divorce (from actress Olivia Wilde, with whom he was married for 8 years), the movie provides a thorough expose on conjugal practices both past and present, revealing monogamy to be a rather bogus concept that humankind has espoused for only the last hundred-odd years. It also clearly stacks the deck in favor of open marriages and polyamorous relations, with experts and practitioners preaching the benefits of a love life guided more by natural instincts than current societal norms.

...Both a personal odyssey and global overview of monogamy and its discontents (which was the film's working title), Ruspoli chats face-to-face with a number of writers, thinkers and therapists about the failings of his own relationship, and how the desire to stick with a sole sexual partner may have been the root of the problem.

A brief foray into the director’s origins – he’s the son of an Italian prince and American actress; his grandfather was Spaghetti Western star William Berger – reveals a family tree bolstered by royal alliances, until the Ruspoli men squandered their wealth in unions of passion, rather than ones of pure convenience.

To reinforce his study, Ruspoli talks to pundits and authors responsible for cheekily titled treatises like Mating in Captivity, Sex at Dawn and The Ethical Slut. They all have interesting, sometimes provocative things to say about how we’ve constrained ourselves to living against our nature, with one expert summing up the monogamy issue as “not a problem you solve, but a paradox that you manage.”

Their arguments can be more convincing than Ruspoli’s attempts to illustrate them cinematically, with archive footage and cheesily staged reenactments showing various couples going through the throes of a relationship. The filmmaker also relies too heavily on subjects leaning towards one side of the debate: there are only one or two examples of successful monogamous pairs, while many of those interviewed seem to be of the free-loving, West Coast variety (particularly two Santa Monica hipsters who rather smugly describe how they came to embrace polyamory as a way of life).

The film never really questions the emotional repercussions of open marriages or three-way couples, which may be more of an ideal than something many of us could live with on a daily basis. But who knows? Monogamish might be ahead of its time, and in a century from now the idea of spending the majority of your adult life with a single soulmate may seem as archaic as horse-drawn carriages or prefrontal lobotomies....

The whole review (October 29, 2015).

------------------------------


Kate Hakala did a story about the movie for Connections.Mic last April:

A New Movie Is Shattering a Major Myth About Modern Relationships

...Ruspoli was hoping to tackle the subject of monogamy — specifically why, as the 40% to 50% divorce rate suggests, it seems to fail so often.

..."We have tendencies in both directions: We want to pair up with people, we want to make commitments to each other and have a sense of safety and security," Ruspoli told Mic. "But we also have other desires to explore, have a sense of mystery in our lives and obviously keep our sexuality alive. So the question is, how do we negotiate all those tensions?"

...In a 2014 survey of 18 to 49-year-olds conducted by USA Network, 82% of respondents said they had absolutely no tolerance of cheating, but 81% would cheat if there were no consequences....

About half of the Generation X and Y participants surveyed admitted that monogamy was a "social expectation but not a biological reality."

...As a society, we're questioning that ideal now more than ever. Polyamorous, swinging and otherwise open relationships have been around for years, but they're getting more mainstream press now.

..."There's a lot of industry around making people feel like there's something wrong with them if they're not having passionate sex with each other if they've been together for 10 years," Ruspoli said. "We pathologize that — maybe that's a natural thing that happens and we need to address that."

That doesn't have to mean encouraging infidelity or abandoning "traditional" marriage. Rather, said Ruspoli, "We should question monogamy in the service of maintaining that commitment, not as a way of rejecting it."...

The whole article (April 9, 2015).

The movie's website. Facebook page. A podcast interview with the director.

[Permalink]

Washington Post: "I’m into building deep and loving relationships that add to the joy and aliveness of being human."

Front and center on the Washington Post's website this morning is "Married, but not monogamous," about the open-relationship trend and the rapid success of the new dating site Open Minded. The Post published the story two days ago on the front page of the paper's Style section and also on the web. Presumably it's the lead item on the website two days later because it made the list of the site's most-read stories. It's the only one of the top five that's not a news article.

Pepper Mint tweeted, "Somehow manages to not mention polyamory."

How to break free from monogamy without destroying marriage

Illustration by Edel Rodriguez

By Caitlin Dewey

...Open Minded isn’t quite like Ashley Madison, the unapologetic dating-for-cheaters service that expects a billion-dollar valuation when it launches its impending IPO. It also isn’t quite like mobile hook-up app Tinder, where — according to one recent report — as many as 40 percent of “singles” are secretly . . . not.

Instead, says Brandon Wade, the site’s pragmatic, MIT-educated founder, Open Minded is a new kind of dating site for a newly mainstream lifestyle: one in which couples form very real attachments, just not exclusively with each other. He expects swingers, polysexuals and experimental 20-somethings to use his site. But he guesses that most of his 70,000 users are people like Jessie: Those in committed, conventional relationships, who realize that, statistically speaking, few modern couples stay with a single person their whole lives.

...In 2010, Jessie approached her husband with an idea she called “ethical non-monogamy.” They would stay together as each other’s primary, lifelong partners, but they wouldn’t rule out other relationships — as long as they happened openly. Jessie has shown her husband her profile on several dating sites, including Open Minded. When she returns from her weekly date with one of her four extramarital partners, she tells him as much, or as little, as he likes.

...More and more women will make this choice or consider it, [relationship researcher Helen] Fisher expects; it’s in keeping with decades of widespread social change and women’s empowerment. Just 30 years ago, when Jessie was in her 20s, the average woman married at 23 and had her first child within the year. Her mother’s generation didn’t even leave the home. The majority simply raised kids, preached chastity and finger-waved their hair.

“That’s all sliding away from us,” Fisher said. “We’re shedding all these agricultural traditions . . . [and] returning to the way we were millions of years ago.”

Internal data from Open Minded would appear to back that up: Thus far, most of its self-declared “monogamish” users are under 33....

Read the whole article (May 26, 2015).

Conservatives are unhappy. Newsbusters ("exposing and combating liberal media bias") writes, WashPost Promotes the 'Evolution' of 'Forsaking Monogamy':

This being the Post, there is no space for critics of the "evolution" of online adultery Web sites or their users. [Author Caitlin] Dewey promoted the “non-monogamous dating site Open Minded,” where her married female subject, Jessie, advertised, “I’m into building deep and loving relationships that add to the joy and aliveness of being human.” She talked her husband into “ethical non-monogamy.”

The Post also used the term “monogamish,” the cutesy term of radical gay sex columnist Dan Savage to describe the married-but-cheating lifestyle....

I have problems with some actual sloppy journalism that should never have made it into the Post. First, Dewey says (unsourced), "Just consider the number of married men who have partners outside of their marriage — more than 40 percent in the United States." I might believe that 40 percent will have some kind of affair or fling or sex-worker transaction sometime in their entire marriages (though the numbers quoted for that are actually all over the map) — but 40 percent of American husbands "have partners outside of their marriage" right now? Send that lady back to science reporting class!

Second, read this takedown posted by yr_mom on reddit/r/polyamory:

What a horseshit article.

"In the caveman days, humans teamed up in non-exclusive pairs to protect their children. Later, as people learned to plant crops and settle in one place, marriage became a way ... for women — who couldn’t push heavy plows or carry loads of crops to market — to eat and keep a roof over their heads."

Has this author ever seen a photo of a modern-day African woman? They do all the plowing and carrying loads of crops to market -- in addition to hauling water and firewood and raising the children. Marriage doesn't exist because women are/were in need of big strong men to do the farming.

Link: Women do over 50% of the "agricultural activity" and produce 60-70% of the food in modern-day Sub-Saharan Africa

----------------------------

Meanwhile, Bustle continues its open-relationship pieces with What Are Open Relationship Rules Like? Negotiating Non-Monogamous Boundaries, In 8 Steps. These are not rules but actual good advice, IMO, for things to talk about when having these discussions. Looks like the writer has been reading poly literature.

----------------------------

Lastly, Dan Savage just posted about a word distinction to keep in mind:

Polyamorous relationships and open relationships are two different things. Some poly relationships are open, but many poly relationships are closed — that is, three people (or more) are involved with each other exclusively.... The reverse is also true: Not all open relationships are poly. Two people in an open relationship may allow fucking around with other people with the understanding that there will be no dating or — God forbid — falling in love with anyone else.

[Permalink]