"The Invite" lowdown. "This Is Poly" TV series. We get 9 minutes on ABC's Nightline. And a friendly but very real examination of modern throuples' messes

If you think polyamory and ENM have slowed their 15-year sweep into mainstream fascination — nope, ain't happened yet.

So, at what point does this thing. . . go too far? Are we already there? Repeat after me: polyamory is not for everyone. Not even, perhaps, for most who are now rushing into it.

I say this having evangelized for the possibilities of group romantic love since even before the Zell nest invented the word "polyamory" at the end of the 1980s.

●  The movie The Invite, an indie fave at Sundance last January, is now being mass-released in megaplexes to solid early box office. (Spoilers coming:) Its tantalizing early publicity — that it would show polyamory addressing a fraught dead-marriage situation — was a tease. Near the movie's end the "invite" falls apart, and the story stops just where it could have begun. This is mostly a very well acted bad-marriage comedy — with Oscar potential, some reviewers say.

The ENM on offer is not love-centric polyamory but what you might call enlightened swinging. The upstairs couple tell of their sex clubs where you pick your kinks from a menu, and they are running something like that themselves in their poorly soundproofed apartment. And Hawk's black ring, pointedly fondled and flashed to the camera near the end, is swing-world insider code.

But ENM-wise the movie does represent a positive new twist, as Marie Claire magazine points out (July 4):

The Invite gives ENM [ethical non-monogamy] the nuanced portrayal it rarely gets on screen. The story follows two couples whose dinner descends into arguments, flirtation and, eventually, a proposition. Yet, for once, the open couple aren't the dysfunctional one. Instead, it's the supposedly "normal" monogamous pair (Olivia Wilde and Seth Rogen) whose relationship begins to unravel.

It's getting both good reviews (early Rotten Tomatoes: 9.8) and good audience-exit interviews. When I saw it the audience was sparse, but that was at 2 p.m. on a weekday. So far the movie is on track to become a summer hit.

A Guardian story (July 3) begins,

‘I feel both thrilled and ruined by this’: Olivia Wilde and Edward Norton on making sex comedy The Invite

Their movie about marital bed death is this summer’s buzziest, funniest film. ...

By Catherine Shoard

The good-example couple (right) offer something new to the fighting monos.

Earlier this week, Edward Norton took a night flight from New York to London and felt so dreadful the next day he decided to get a massage. “I hadn’t had one in such a long time,” he says. “And I almost started crying. You’re like: ‘Oh! Ah!’ ”

He has heard similar sounds from cinemas screening his new movie, The Invite, which is about the devastating impact of marriage on your sex life. “People are almost tearful. They’re like: ‘I haven’t had a good, adult laugh that made me feel seen in a long time.’ ” ...

Fanbolt says, How Olivia Wilde’s ‘The Invite’ Puts Polyamory in the Multiplex Without the Doom (July 10)

By Emma Loggins

Hollywood has spent decades treating non-monogamy as either a punchline or a plot device headed for catastrophe. ... The Invite lets an openly non-monogamous couple be the most appealing people in the room instead of a cautionary tale, even if the film itself gets cold feet before the credits.

...The marketing dangles an orgy the film has no intention of delivering, and once the night pivots from comedy into something closer to group therapy, The Invite pulls back right when it could have gotten savage. ...

So the framing that this is the film that finally makes polyamory the happy ending is not quite right. What it actually does is subtler and more interesting. It lets Hawk and Piña be desirable and emotionally intelligent rather than doomed, and it uses them as a mirror to expose everything calcified in Joe and Angela’s marriage....

The Cultural Moment Is Real, Even If the Film Hedges

...Intimacy experts keep pointing out that for a lot of viewers, movies and TV are their only window into what [ENM] relationships look like, so when the depictions are relentlessly negative, they warp public understanding of lives that are far less doomed than the screen insists. That is why a movie built to let a poly couple be the aspirational ones matters, even one that flinches. 

The Invite treats Hawk and Piña as people with something to teach rather than a threat to be survived, and that alone is a shift.

...The value here is in the framing, not the follow-through. ... That is a smaller swing than the trailer promised, and I wish the film had matched the audacity of its premise. But a mainstream comedy that can imagine a version of love not automatically ending in a single couple walking into the sunset, and that treats the alternative as attractive rather than tragic, is a real tell about where this is all heading.

Dozens more reviews.

 

●  Also new in mass-market media is (oh God) This Is Poly, a reality show on WeTV.  The trailer opens excitedly but turns cringy with "reality" drama (of course coffee is thrown with the perfect camera angle). Episode guide so far.

Confession: I don't watch reality TV, so find reviews elsewhere. And I don't trust AI, but this pithy summary of early reviews from Google's AI may save you time:

While intended as dramatic, trashy entertainment, [This Is Poly] is widely criticized for spotlighting dysfunctional, toxic, and non-ethical dynamics rather than healthy, consensual polyamory.

This from Reddit user Polyamorouspotato seems typical:

I just finished “This is Poly” and I have noted that every dynamic is entirely toxic. From “throuples” to harems. Rules and all the couples dating together. Also notes of poly under duress.

This show made me so angry lol. I understand the choices to show drama on tv but woof there isn’t a single example of ethical polyamory.

Almost all 63 commenters agree. One that didn't:

I LOVED it. It did not disappoint in the entertainment and cringe. I hosted a watch party of CNM folks which was the best way to enjoy the show. BQ and his friend Pauly may be my favorites for having the best douchiest lines of the show and providing me a ton of laughs. But the “999,000 bitches” roster girlies also brought the toxicity and the clipboards.

I Lost the Remote and Watched 'This Is Poly' — I Wouldn’t Wish That on Anyone (TV Fanatic, June 17).

One of the five polycules on the show told ShowBiz Cheatsheet what they underwent during filming: ‘This Is Poly’ Power Throuple on the ‘Pressure Cooker’ of Reality TV and the Importance of Hard Conversations (June 26). Trent admits the filming "was more than we bargained for." Says Nita (whose three DUI arrests and mugshot are now famous), "I feel like I could have [done] a lot better communicating through a lot of it." She could also have grasped that if you go on reality TV, of course your arrest record and mugshot will come to represent whatever you represent. Kami, having invested so much of herself in the show, tries to see the positive:  

...“One of our main goals for doing it was really to help people see that this is actually a really viable option and you can do it in a healthy way,” she said. “Yes, it might still be messy. There’s not a rule book for it, so it’s hard … it was really showing people that this can be a really beautiful thing. And it is something that if people really want to grow and expand and love, it is something that’s possible.”

●  On a rather higher level, the Presbyterian Church USA (the larger and more liberal branch of the split Presbytherians) just went through some tumult over polyamory, as has been happening in other churchs. A proposal to its recent General Assembly would have expelled ministers in non-monogamous relationships. This made the news.

From the Associated Press, in many newspapers: As polyamory gains visibility, monogamy faces a vote in the Presbyterian Church USA (via Religion News Service, June 12)

By Katheryn Post

A proposal that would require ordained clergy to be monogamous is on the docket at the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s General Assembly this summer.

The overture, CON-10, has generated strong reactions online but not yet earned broad support from PCUSA groups. A separate proposal asks for theological studies on gender and sexuality, life-giving relationships and the Christian vocation of family that would support the denomination’s commitment to inclusion of different familial realities. Together, these overtures show that as polyamory gains visibility in broader culture, it may have policy implications, especially in theologically progressive Christian denominations.

“I think it is the next big conversation that most mainline denominations will have,” said the Rev. Claudia Aguilar Rubalcava, director of engagement for the LGBTQ-affirming nonprofit More Light Presbyterians.

 La Fabbrica Dei Sogni/ Unsplash/ Creative Commons

More Light Presbyterians released a statement last month, saying the proposal on monogamy targets queer communities. “It centers a single model of relationship as the only faithful expression of Christian life, ignoring both the breadth of biblical witness and the lived realities of many faithful people,” the statement says. ...

Last month, More Light Pres­by­teri­ans hos­ted a “Faith­ful Polyamory 101” train­ing that framed the Trin­ity as mod­el­ling the kind of mutual, over­flow­ing love that can be reflec­ted in polyamory. ... Chris­tian advoc­ates for polyamory often point to the range of rela­tion­ship mod­els in the Bible — though many con­trast poly­gamy, which often has hier­arch­ical implic­a­tions, with mod­ern forms of polyamory — and emphas­ize the import­ance of safe, con­sen­sual rela­tion­ships with clear bound­ar­ies.

...Aguilar Rubalcava told RNS that at speaking engagements, she routinely encounters polyamorous Presbyterians hungry for support. Kate Davoli, who serves as co-moderator on the board of More Light Presbyterians, told RNS they were dismissed from the denomination’s ordination process for being openly polyamorous. 

...As polyamory gains exposure, other mainline denominations have begun to confront their stance on it. At least three Episcopal priests have renounced their ordination vows due to tensions between their church roles and family structures, and in 2024 the Episcopal Church considered, but did not advance, a resolution intending to study diverse family structures. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada voted in 2023 to create national resources to support conversations that include “ethical non-monogamous relationships.”...

Two for the record:  God’s love is not scarce: A Presbyterian case for polyamory, by Dr. David W. Congdon (The Presbyterian Outlook, June 23). The other side: One flesh, one spouse: A clear standard for Presbyterian ministers, by Rev. Alexander Haines (same issue).

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

The outcome? The assembled Presbyterians punted. They voted 433-44 to send the proposal to a committee for more study.

You church-going polyfolk reading this (yes there are quite a few of you), please make yourselves known if you can. Your silence lets TV shows like "This Is Poly" represent you in the eyes of your church.

-- Lots more Poly and Christian coverage from a while back.

-- My own church, the Unitarian Universalists, voted overwhelmingly at its 2014 General Assembly to add "relationship and family structure" to its list of Welcoming Congregation protections. That drive was led by the Unitarian Universalists for Polyamory Awareness, which still lives on as a Facebook group: the UU Polyamory Alliance.

●  Just out is a landmark newspaper feature on the boom in people forming throuples and the emotional swamps they often mire in:  ‘They said to me, You were the best sex toy we ever had’: the pain, pleasure and paranoia of life in a throuple (The Guardian, July 12, in its US, UK, Europe, Australia, and International editions.)

This story is long, deeply informed, and friendly to us. But romantic triads have a reputation for being an especially hard dynamic to make work well for everyone, and the writer doesn't hold back about the crises she saw throuples going through across six months.

Rant ahead: Now that we're squarely in the mass-market era of poly and ENM, way too many people try to glide past the steep standards that "ethical" actually requires here. Or, triads don't think to train up, as a group, in both speaking and listening fearlessly. This thing really is, as is often said, "graduate-level relationshipping." The good odds are for people who are brave, secure, and self-examining; and no-nonsense but genuinely good-hearted and motivated by poly ideals. And who are ready for big changes. Did we mention being naturally honest, clear about boundaries, and unusually emotionally intelligent? Such people are willing to let the relationships be what they are, un-mandated and unforced. Because no two relationships are ever alike, and that's okay.

And you don't have to be a naturally low-jealousy compersive meltyheart about your metas. But it helps.

Nevertheless, there are exceptions to every poly rule. You sometimes find happy, easy-functioning, long-term throuples who took every "wrong" approach and are doing great. People can surprise you. (Just not often.)

End of rant. I've been saying this sort of stuff ever since my Central Park bandwagon speech in 2008.

Excerpts from the throuple article:

From Hollywood movies to confessional memoirs, three-person relationships are everywhere. But is it really possible to keep everyone satisfied? Happy trios, bruised couples and rejected lovers tell all.

By Kitty Drake

Priscilla can pinpoint the moment she realised that her throuple was falling apart. Her fiancee, Kiara, had started kissing their shared girlfriend, Olivia, in a way that went on for just a little too long. One night, after the three of them had gone out for a romantic dinner in Savannah, Georgia, where they live, Olivia and Kiara started kissing in the front seats of the family car and it seemed as if they were never going to stop. About 10 minutes in, Priscilla tried to reach out and touch her fiancee’s shoulder, but her seat belt was buckled. Unbuckling and leaning forward felt intrusive. And, anyway, Kiara and Olivia seemed to have forgotten all about her. Watching the kiss unfold, squashed into the back with all the baby seats and toys, Priscilla thought about how by rights it was her turn to sit up front. She was always in the back seat. She felt a flicker of something competitive. “I worried, am I desired less than her?” she recalls now. “Will I be replaced?”

In the early days, Priscilla felt giddy with the excitement of being in a throuple. She and Kiara had been together for eight years, and adding a third person to their relationship felt like a way of exploring non‑monogamy without losing one another, because every new romantic experience would be shared. Olivia was an old friend, so Priscilla and Kiara’s children were comfortable with her. When the kids were in bed, they would walk to the beach holding hands as a three, to watch the sunset. At night, they would curl up to sleep together, and form a kind of cuddle chain. Priscilla would cuddle Olivia, and Olivia would cuddle Kiara.

Priscilla (left) and Kiara, who are engaged, had a shared girlfriend who
left them earlier this year. Kendrick Brinson/The Guardian

Sometimes in the night, Priscilla would wake up alone on one side of the bed, and see Kiara and Olivia cuddling without her – at first this didn’t bother her. “I felt a little left out, but I was happy that Kiara was happy,” Priscilla says. The problems really began when both Priscilla and Kiara moved beyond lust, and began to fall deeply in love with Olivia. “The thing about throuples is that when real emotions get involved, things get more complicated.”

In a throuple, three people commit to forming a romantic unit together – just like a couple, but with one extra person. In other forms of non-monogamy, you might have multiple partners, but you are typically only ever in bed with one partner at a time. Throuples are different, because they date and have sex and sometimes even raise children as a three. ...

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

On screen today, you see throuples everywhere. ... But as the throuple becomes more commonplace, there seems to be a growing backlash against this relationship structure. Recent research suggests that younger generations are rejecting the complications of polyamory and beginning to yearn again for the perceived safety of traditional coupledom. An analysis of sexual fantasies by the Kinsey Institute suggests that gen Z are turning away from polyamory, with 81% fantasising about monogamy instead.

Being happily polyamorous requires a daunting degree of patience and thoughtfulness, because you have to continually debrief with your lovers to check that their needs are being met – but throupledom seems to require even greater reserves of emotional maturity. Managing the desires and insecurities of three people at once is a feat, and even within polyamorous circles, throuples have a reputation for being fraught. ...

I have spent the last six months talking to people who have been in throuples that have gone spectacularly wrong (and some that are going spectacularly right) about how to manage infighting and rivalry in three‑person relationships. How can you make a throuple work? And what happens when a throuple implodes?

In The Ethical Slut, the authors write that in any menage a trois “there are actually three couples, A&B, B&C and C&A”. What makes the throuple unstable is that, at any time, the mini-couples within the throuple can become more estranged, or entwined, and there can be dramatic reversals in allegiances. In Priscilla’s throuple, it was initially she and Olivia who were the closer pair – and Kiara who felt excluded. In the first weeks of the relationship, Kiara discovered that Priscilla and Olivia had been having sex while she was at work. Sex as a twosome wasn’t technically against the rules of the arrangement, Kiara tells me, but “it was very hurtful and it broke a lot of trust”. ...

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

I speak to Alissa for the first time over the phone from her home in Connecticut, and we have to pause the conversation a couple of times because I can hear her teenage son coming in and out. Alissa and her husband, Rob, have got five children aged 14 to 22, and, while the older children are aware that their parents have experimented with an open relationship, they don’t know the details.

After 21 years of marriage, Rob revealed to Alissa that he was bisexual. Experimenting with another man together seemed like a way to cope with that revelation without it breaking their marriage. Initially when they met Michael, 33, who lived in a neighbouring city, Alissa felt anxious. She worried that Michael was only pretending to feel an attraction to her in order to get to Rob, and remembers one awkward early date where Michael was all over Rob in a cab, and the two of them barely looked at her at all. But as the relationship progressed, Michael and Alissa developed an intense bond, and Rob felt increasingly threatened.

One night when the three of them were in bed together, Alissa and Michael started kissing, and Rob became so distressed he had a panic attack. Alissa had put on new underwear, and Rob started interrogating her about why he had never seen this lingerie before. “He was, like, ‘Well, you haven’t put that on for me lately!’ – but the truth was that Rob and I hadn’t been having sex with each other because we saw Michael two times a week, and who is having more sex than that?”...

Initially, Rob hadn’t wanted to talk to me because he found the breakup too painful to revisit, but a few weeks later the couple call me together so that he can offer his perspective. “I was madly in love with this guy,” Rob says. “Head over heels.” He is speaking to me from his car speakerphone. He says that it wasn’t simply the case that he was feeling possessive over his wife; he also felt horribly rejected by Michael. ...

When a throuple is going right, the amount of love feels almost unquantifiable, because you are “chosen and loved by two people and have two people to love”, Rob reflects. “Having him as part of our equation, I could love her 150% and him 150%”. But when a throuple breaks down, you have to deal with the inverse of that exponential love: exponential rejection. At times, Rob says, he didn’t feel “chosen” by anyone.

Alissa says that her and Rob’s marriage has survived the whole experience, but only just. Sometimes she feels resentful because dating another man wasn’t originally her idea, it was Rob’s. “I was pissed because I had this little tiny seedling that I didn’t even want in the first place and I gave it all the sunlight and all the water, and then when it started to grow Rob was ready to end it.”

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

...The criticism of [Lindy] West’s memoir [Adult Braces this spring] was often cruel, but I think the intensity of the reaction speaks to a real fear many of us have that, as polyamory becomes more mainstream, terms such as “throuple” and “ethically non-monogamous” will be wielded by faithless partners who want to legitimise their desire to cheat. However, having spoken to real-life throuples, the picture looks more complicated because the dynamics in the triad chop and change. The wife who was initially reluctant might end up being the most adored and enthusiastic member of the throuple. The husband who initially begged for it might wind up desperate to leave.

Even within the polyamorous community, throuples are considered messy and potentially unethical – not necessarily because they disrupt an existing couple, but because [they have a reputation that] they exploit the third person who enters the relationship. On polyamorous online message boards, couples who post that they are looking for a third person to join their relationship are often criticised for being “unicorn hunters”. ...

...Caitlin, 31, from London, tells me [such] a story about feeling used and discarded by a couple she met while living in Marseille.... “You know what they said to me? ‘You were the best sex toy we ever had.’ ”

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

I spoke to happy throuples while I was researching this article, and most of them told me that when you feel intensely heartbroken or hurt by a particular member of your triad, the key is to acknowledge it. Rather than leaving the throuple, or exercising a “veto” because you feel threatened, you have to talk through the pain as it comes up.

Rachael, Aaron and Kasey, a throuple from the Tampa Bay area of Florida who have been living together for seven years, say that they attribute their success to diligent emotional housekeeping. The first time I speak to them is in early April on a video call, and they are in exercise gear, ready for an early morning workout together at the gym.

Steady as they go: Aaron, Rachel, and Kasey . . .

Rachael, who describes herself to me as a “type-A, high-achiever, highly organised person”, tells me that these qualities are very helpful in a throuple. “It’s just 33% more – more to schedule, more to plan, more money to divvy up,” she says. Rachael and Aaron are in their 40s, and were together for 20 years before they met Kasey, 35, but they have worked hard to make sure she has equal standing within the throuple. They have created a trust that outlines Kasey as a beneficiary, and have given her medical power of attorney, should anything happen to either of them. They apply the same organised, thoughtful approach to hashing out emotional issues in the throuple, too. “We joke that if monogamous couples talked half as much about their feelings as we do in our throuple, the divorce rate would plummet,” Aaron says.

...and outside their bunglaow in Gulfport, Florida.
(Zack Wittman / The Guardian)

The throuple have a weekly date night, but Rachael has a regular one-on-one night with Aaron, too. She also has a regular night with just Kasey. And Aaron and Kasey have their own scheduled one-on-one time. The idea behind the one-on-one nights is to make sure that all the individual bonds within the throuple continue to grow. Rachael explains that she usually leaves the house for the evening when Kasey and Aaron have their couples night, and that re-entering the home at the end of the evening isn’t always easy. She doesn’t feel jealousy, she says: “It’s almost more like I know that they’ve had a very connecting moment, and me coming back to it feels intrusive. It feels like they almost have to baby me and say, ‘Oh, come back in.’ ” Rachael has been completely open with Kasey and Aaron about these feelings. She has developed a system where, instead of greeting them when she comes back at night, she takes a shower and even considers sleeping in the guest room. Then they “wake up and have a fresh day as a three”.

...In a way, people who form throuples are just braver than the rest of us. The fear of the third haunts most relationships. Throuples choose to invite the third into the relationship and live through all the difficult emotions the rest of us are trying to bury. Recently, Priscilla and Kiara told me that they are thinking about trying to form a new throuple. Kiara is wary, but Priscilla is excited. “We’re still discussing it,” she says. “But I think it will be an adventure.”

●  Meanwhile, happy triads continue to represent proudly in public. On ABC News Nightline last night (July 13) came this 9-minute video report: Throuple opens up about their polyamorous relationship. It's lovely!

The creators of “Camp Throuple” open up about their polyamorous relationship. Kevin Jankay, Alana Underwood and Megan Smith say their non-monogamous relationship is the best one they’ve ever had.  

They live in Colorado and are in their sixth year as a closed polyfi delta triad. What fine, great-hearted, smart people these seem to be. Watch and learn.

(If the embed above doesn't work here's the link. I don't find a transcript.)

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

Elsewhere in the world... The current changing tide of the Ukraine war shows how, when a free people don't give up, fortune may swing their way.

If you still don't get what this war means to our own future as free cultural weirdos — not to mention to the whole rest of the world — you need the long view.

BTW, the logo of PolyamoryUkraine:

 

...while in Russia, speaking up for "nontraditional sexual relations" is a crime punishable by up to 12 years in horrible Russian prisons under the "anti-extremism" laws. "Extremism" meaning whatever the emperor dislikes.

And BTW, The Invite's first international release was in Ukraine.

[Permalink]

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Berkeley poly-rights law nears passage. "Challengers" movie: poly or not, it's a thing. Book publishers hope polyamory is "the new bonkbuster." A ruling class fad? OPEN fires back. And more.

●  Poly news of the week: Berkeley, California, is now a short step away from enacting protections against anti-poly discrimination — bigotry due to family or relationship structure — in housing, employment, and other areas. The proposal adds "family and relationship structure" to the list of protected categories, alongside race, religion, national origin, and others. It covers not only polyfolks and other non-monogamists but also multi-generational, single-parent, and platonic co-op families. Berkeley would join neighboring Oakland, as well as Somerville and Cambridge, Massachusetts, in enacting similar measures. 

"John Owens speaks with his partners Emily Savage (left) and Alejandra Bravo Ducey at
a celebration party at the East Bay Community Space in Oakland on April 16, after a bill prohibiting discrimination of non-monogamous families passed." (KQED)

On Tuesday, May 7th, the measure passed the Berkeley City Council unanimously on "first reading." If it passes at "second reading" on May 14th 21st, it becomes law.

That's virtually certain. Berkeley's PolyActive group worked alongside the legal whizzes of the national Polyamory Legal Advocacy Coalition (PLAC), activists in the Organization for Polyamory and Ethical Non-monogamy (OPEN), and in particular the Berkeley City Attorney's office to iron out any potential glitches and legal bugs in advance. The City Attorney scrutinizes proposed ordinances for potential conflicts with existing law. They agree that all's good. 

We're not shooting off the fireworks quite yet (watch us on Wednesday the 22nd). But KQED in the Bay Area treats the measure as a done deal: Berkeley Passes Legal Protections for Polyamory, Joining Oakland (May 8).

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

●  Did you have hopes for the hot, buzzy new "polyamory" movie Challengers? Now that it's out, poly opinions are mixed at best. I'll go with "Sigh, not there yet."

In the online New York Sun, ‘Challengers’ Is Almost the First Great Polyamory Movie (May 1, registration-walled)

The famous opening scene that promises too much

By A. R. Hoffman

...A Gen-Z remix of sports film and romantic comedy, it is less a scandal than the suggestion of one. ...

“Challengers” centers on a tennis prodigy, Tashi Duncan (Zendaya).... During her time on the amateur tour, sparks flew with the doubles team of Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor). They go by “Fire and Ice,” and bunked together at boarding school. At the beginning, they want her as well as each other.

The trio quickly becomes a duo and a remainder, as Duncan and Donaldson end up marrying. ... Titles follow, but the slog to the athletic apex is a joyless one, all twitchy anxiety and soulless hotel suites. ...They are a power couple, but their power appears to be in making each other miserable.

Zweig immediately jumps to the professional [tennis] ranks... at the fringes of the tour. He ranks 271st, sleeps in his car, mooches breakfast sandwiches, and arranges dates on Tinder with wealthy women so he has a place to lay his head. ... He lingers at the outskirts of Duncan’s marriage, a tempting troublemaker. 

...If “Battle of the Sexes” — its subject was the match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs — captures one sexual revolution, “Challengers” feints to another, defined by growing eclecticism of attraction (nearly 30 percent of Gen Z identifies as “queer”) and greater openness to non-monogamous romantic arrangements. ... “Challengers” volleys with these trends, but avoids the risk of hunting an ace. It relaxes into a conventional love triangle rather than exploring more exotic shapes of desire. ...

●  A wildly opposite opinion: "Challengers" is the best thing that could happen to polyamory (Vox, May 2). It's written (and photocaptioned) from a gay sensibility.

The relationship style has been the topic of talky articles and books. Finally, it’s the sexiest element of the year’s sexiest movie.

By Alex Abad-Santos

...Just when you thought that the entire idea of being communally entangled felt too examined, too picked over to ever be sexy again, Luca Guadagnino’s "Challengers" comes swooping in. Sun-drenched and sweat-soaked, the film demystifies polyamory into something blazingly simple: being in love — physically and emotionally — with two people and being loved back can make a person as happy as they’ve ever been or ever will be.

[Spoilers below]

The three are part of an intricate, ball-bashing love triangle, and it’s no accident that every corner is so acutely hot. Zendaya in particular knows how to wear an old-money sweater. Faist and O’Connor spend a lot of time arching their backs, whether they’re wearing tiny shorts or not.

Perhaps most important, this is a triangle where, as screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes told NBC, “all sides needed to touch” — and they do.

"Imagine if it was you that Josh O’Connor (right) was gesturing this to!"
 

That’s crystal clear when they first meet, as teens at the Junior US Open. Art and Patrick are attracted to Tashi for completely different, at times murky, reasons. ... The boys invite her to their room, and the great American tennis hope shows up. “I don’t want to be a homewrecker,” Tashi tells them. On the surface, it comes off as a joke. Their closeness and intimacy could be seen as something that’s a little funny for two men who aren’t explicitly gay. But the comment also functions as something truthful. Minutes later, during their three-way kiss, Tashi cocks her head back in a devious, ecstatic grin not because, as one might assume, Art and Patrick are paying her attention — but because Art and Patrick are kissing each other, lost in the moment.

...What she really wants is to see them up their [tennis] game. She tells the boys that whoever wins their face-off match the next day can have her number. ...

Somewhat later in their lives, 

Not unlike the way Tashi was miserable with Patrick when they weren’t talking about Art, Tashi is miserable being married to Art without Patrick. Though Guadagnino and Kuritzkes wrap the couple in plenty of material success — luxury endorsements, high-end clothes, lush hotels, and six grand slam wins — Art and Tashi are not happy as “the Donaldsons.” They have everything they ever wanted, winning tennis’s biggest tournaments and having the money to do anything, but it can’t spark excitement in their lives.

...In [the movie's] closing [tennis game], Patrick changes up his service routine and places the ball in the neck of his racket. This is his secret code to Art that he slept with Tashi, a gesture the two created together as teens without Tashi’s knowledge. Art snaps. He goes into a catatonic, post-marriage state. He lets a couple points pass, and by losing them, plunges Patrick and himself into a tiebreak — a race to seven points. ...

We don’t see who wins because all the camera’s focus is on Tashi, who growls — a carnal howl — in pleasure. The only other time we’ve seen her this happy was when all three of them were together, with all their desires for each other and with each other out in the open. And they’ve found that again, finally.

●  A more realistic take IMO: in the Washington Examiner, Challengers isn’t about polyamory — or anything else (May 7)

What follows throughout the rest of the film [after that three-on-a-bed opening] is not a story about polyamory. It’s a story about drive, perfectionism, and what happens when excellent cinematography is paired with a disharmonious soundtrack. But ultimately, it isn’t a story about much.

...Tashi finds herself picking and repicking the winner and the loser between her “little white boys.”... Challengers seems really to be about two men who are in love but can’t admit it to themselves and the beautiful but ruthless woman who controls them. ... The film’s unwavering focus on its protagonists makes it seem as if there’s more going on among the three of them than there actually is. For Tashi’s part, sex is leverage, a way to bargain with the men to get what she wants, which is “to watch some good f***ing tennis.”

Whether you want to say Challengers is about sex or power or something else, the unfortunate reality is that it isn’t about much. The New Yorker’s Tyler Foggatt rightly calls it “a shot of dopamine that doesn’t really argue anything.” Challengers leaves you with no one to root for and substitutes an incongruous EDM soundtrack for real emotional turbulence.

In the final scene, Art and Patrick are facing each other in a tennis match after years of fighting over the same woman. The last, dramatic moment ends with Art lurching to hit the ball and landing in Patrick’s arms. We’re not sure who won the match, but the good thing is we’ve been given no reason to care.

●  Nevertheless, the movie is having cultural fallout. From KQED in San Francisco, ‘Challengers’ Has Ignited ‘Throuple’ Discourse — One Polyamorous Couple Weighs In (May 2). The tl;dr: they say it's bad poly but makes a good movie. 

...Mary: It’s not a rule book for how to date, but it’s a very good fantasy. I love that it was a movie that purported to be about a relationship, but really was about winning.

Izzy: ...Patrick doesn’t demonize Art for being jealous, even when he’s low-key sabotaging Patrick’s relationship. He’s turned on by it. He’s like, ‘You little snake, I see what you’re doing.’ They both fulfill each character’s competitive spirit and drive.

Mary: That’s what makes the movie hot. It’s kinky. There’s a certain amount of ambiguity around consent because, of course, cheating and infidelity is bad. But then there’s this question: Is anything fair game if it’s in the service of tennis?

Mary: It sells itself as being a film about a throuple. But this is not how throuples work in ethical ways. ... I mean, there’s no communication. So from that perspective, I would want to draw that line. But I think it’s a fantasy, and it’s a really effective fantasy.

...Mary: When I’ve experienced a situation with more than one person, there are all of these side conversations to check around consent, and what is and isn’t okay. I think that kind of awkward conversation, and allowing for the stumbling and the awkwardness, and not being sure what is going to happen or if everyone is attracted to everyone else, [is] really sweet. 

...Izzy: This movie just reminds me of also being young and inexperienced. ...

●  Deadline, an entertainment-business site, says (May 2)

Challengers is establishing itself as a Gen Z "date movie," with a 75% female audience, mostly under the age of 24. Its high-powered social media campaign triggered a $25 million opening weekend globally, defying the pre-summer box office torpor.

●  From PinkNews, Viewers want their own ‘Challengers summer’ after the tennis film’s polyamory (May 4)

Some fans have expressed their desire for their own “Challengers summer”. Forget hot girl summer, it’s time to explore being in a throuple.

“Two guys walking past me just said I look good. Challengers summer starts now,” wrote one viewer on X....

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●  From films to books:  The Sunday Times of the UK asks Is polyamory the new bonkbuster? Publishers certainly hope so. "There’s a growing pile of books about open marriages and relationships involving multiple partners." (April 28, paywalled.)

By Phoebe Luckhurst

From Jilly Cooper to Danielle Steel, bonkbusters have always been big business for publishers, but these bestsellers increasingly feel rather dated.

While strapping polo players and heteronormative dynamics used to sell vast numbers of books, the only number that matters now is three. Partners, that is. Sometimes more.

Publishing is experimenting with polyamory, with a stack of new books about non-monogamous relationships raising pulses and questions at book clubs, in libraries and on the 8.03am from Guildford to London Waterloo. ...

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●  In research news: Study identifies key factors boosting compersion in non-monogamous relationships (PsyPost, May 4).

(Getty stock photo)

By Eric W. Dolan

A recent study provides insight into the predictors of compersion, revealing that

–  emotional closeness with a partner’s other intimate connections,

–  clear communication about these relationships, and

–  reduced feelings of jealousy

are key facilitators. The findings have been published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior.

...The researchers collected data through comprehensive surveys filled out by 255 participants, who were recruited from online communities that focus on polyamory and other forms of consensual non-monogamy. The survey included the COMPERSe questionnaire, which assesses three subtypes of compersion: positive feelings toward a partner’s metamour, excitement about a partner forming new intimate connections, and sexual arousal related to thinking about one’s partner and metamour together.

“The factors most predictive of compersion differ depending on the subtype of compersion we look at,” Flicker told PsyPost. “Far and away, the strongest predictors of compersion towards one’s partner’s relationship with an established metamour (an intimate partner of one’s intimate partner) was how one feels about their metamour.

“In contrast, the strongest predictors of an individual’s response to a partner’s new flirtation or budding intimate connection were jealousy and attachment anxiety; in other words, feeling less secure about their relationship with their partner meant lower levels of compersion.”

“Interestingly... intrapersonal factors, such as self-esteem and personality traits, were not strongly related to the experience of compersion,” Flicker noted. ...

The study, Your Happiness Is My Happiness: Predicting Positive Feelings for a Partner’s Consensual Extra‑Dyadic Intimate Relations, was authored by Sharon M. Flicker and Flavia Sancier‑Barbosa.

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●  Remember that hostile Atlantic piece, Polyamory, the Ruling Class’s Latest Fad, reacting to last winter's poly-in-the-media wave? Tyler Austin Harper argued that polyamory is a narcissistic fad of the power elite, and they're foisting it on the unwashed masses who can't handle it. I couldn't tell if Harper was coming from the far left or right or both. It was full of sweeping philosophy based on factual ignorance.

Now comes a point-by-point rebuttal. It's from the director of our most able and productive activist group, the Organization for Polyamory and Ethical Non-Monogamy (OPEN), the same folks who helped craft the Berkeley and Oakland legislation. It's on their website for your perusal after the Atlantic wouldn't put it on theirs. Excerpts:

Polyamory and the Ruling Class: A Response to The Atlantic

By Brett Chamberlin

Executive Director, OPEN

A recent article in The Atlantic titled “Polyamory, the Ruling Class’s Latest Fad” ...ultimately delivers a deeply incurious, consistently sour, and occasionally downright contemptuous critique which betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of contemporary American polyamory. 

...Is polyamory indeed a fad of the ruling class? The question has been asked and answered: more than one in five American adults have practiced some form of consensual non-monogamy throughout their life, and this proportion remained constant across age, education level, income, religion, region, political affiliation, and race. If only participation in the ruling class were as evenly distributed as polyamory is!

...Polyamory is certainly having its moment in the media spotlight.... Yet stepping back, we find more evidence of a rising tide than of a passing wave. 

A recent article in TIME magazine noted that American “polyamory’s roots reach back at least a century to the Progressive Era, if not further,” while the term “polyamory” itself was coined in the early 1990’s. Two new books, American Poly: A History and Fifty Years of Polyamory in America each offer glimpses into the rich history of the movement. ... 

...It is true that much of the recent coverage of polyamory has centered individuals with privileged identities and class position. In large part, this is more a reflection of access to media representation than of the underlying demographics of polyamory.

...Polyamory––and non-monogamy overall––is a marginalized practice.... Various studies and surveys have found that about half of non-monogamous individuals reported experiencing prejudice or discrimination on the basis of their non-monogamous identity across a range of areas including employment, housing, healthcare, mental healthcare, immigration proceedings, and custody disputes, not to mention family and community acceptance. ... This lack of protection and its resultant risks are perhaps why public visibility is largely reserved for those who have achieved a degree of economic security and do not hold intersecting marginalized identities.

On another theme of the Atlantic article, that polyamory is based on capitalistic, self-centered individualism,

Polyamory is an expression of political values which place cooperation over competition, connection over consumption, egalitarianism over individualism, and which elevate compassion, communication, and consent. ... Networks of polyamorous relationships––and the broader communities that surround them––are fertile ground for the establishment of the social connections [being lost in American life].

In this way, non-monogamy represents a return to humanity’s true “oldest institution,” which the article’s author misidentifies as being the “monogamous marriage.” No, our oldest social institution is the community, the tribe, the village, the family defined not by blood but by limitless love. Polyamory is a turn away from our atomized and commodified paradigm and a return to an indigenous understanding that everything is in constant relationship with everything else.

So no, polyamory is not an expression of the ruling class’s desire to “have their cake and eat it too.” It is far better understood as an emergent response to the austerity politics of the ruling class which for decades has little more to offer us than “let them eat cake.” 

●  We now have a thorough, well-researched article that examines all that survey data you have seen about us: Nonmonogamy by the Numbers. One clear conclusion: "Polyamory isn't just for wealthy people." It's in Slate (May 5), by science journalist Tim Requarth. 

Bookmark it for where to find the most scientifically trustworthy numbers when you're asked for them.

●  Speaking of OPEN — which we can't help but do these days because it has so many irons in the fire — go take its third annual Non-monogamy Community Survey to help set its next directions:

... Will you take a few minutes to complete it right now?

This survey is an important way to gather information about the identities, experiences, and needs of the global non-monogamous population. Those data help to steer and support OPEN's work in important ways. Your feedback about our programs and priorities helps us measure our impact and focus our work. Your stories, particularly around experiences of stigma and discrimination, provide important evidentiary support for our advocacy work. Finally, this snapshot of a vibrant global community helps to shape a more authentic and inclusive understanding of non-monogamy in the mainstream cultural conversation. Add your voice!

Last year, we collected around 2,500 responses from 48 countries and 51 US states and territories. This year, we're aiming for 4,000 total responses. ...

Here's OPEN on Instagram, where they do much of their posting.

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Meanwhile, looking wider...

    

Aid for Ukraine made it through Congress — hopefully not too late to save a free and promising society from genocidal extinction, but too late for thousands of pro-democracy defenders and civilians  — after six months of blockage in Washington by the pro-Putin half of the Republican Party. The list of shame.

Here is why I've been ending posts to this polyamory news site with the Ukraine situation: I've seen too many progressive movements die out, or get wiped out, because they failed to scan the wider world accurately and understand their position in it strategically.

We polyamorous people are a small, weird minority of social-rule breakers. Increasingly powerful people call us a threat to society — because by living successfully outside of their worldview, we expose its incompleteness.

Our freedom to choose our relationship structures, and to speak up for ourselves about the truth of ourselves, is just one way we depend on a free and pluralistic society that respects people's dignity to create their own lives, to access facts, and to speak of what they know.

Such a society is possible only where people have reasonably good power to govern themselves, combined with legal structures that are at least supposed to guarantee the rights of all.

Innovative people, communities, and societies who create their own lives, and who insist on the democratic structures and legal rights that enable them to do so safely, infuriate and terrify the authoritarians who are growing in power around the world and in our own United States. Now with direct mutual support, which is increasingly unhidden.

Such rulers and would-be rulers seek to stamp out other people's freedom to choose their lives — by intimidation, repressive laws, inflammatory disinformation and public incitement, weaponizing police abuse and stacking the courts, or eventually, artillery.

For what it's worth, Polyamory in the News received more pagereads from pre-invasion Ukraine over the years (56,400) than from any other country in eastern Europe.

You can donate to Ukraine relief through this list of vetted organizations (last updated Oct. 2023). We're giving to a big one, Razom, and to a little informal one, Pizza for Ukraine in Kharkiv, the project of an old friend of my wife.

But that is only the start. For those of us born since World War II, this is the most consequential war of our lifetime. Because we have entered another time when calculating fascism, at home and abroad, is rising and sees freedom and liberalism and social tolerance as weak, degenerate, delusional — inviting easy pushovers. As Russia thought it saw in Ukraine. The whole world is watching what we will do about it.

Background: "The United States has a much higher stake in Russia's war on Ukraine than most people think."  More: "If we stop supporting Ukraine, then everything gets worse, all of a sudden, and no one will be talking about “fatigue” because we will all be talking about disaster."

The coming times may require hard things of us. We don't get to choose the time and place in history we find ourselves born into. We do get to choose how we respond to it. 

Need a little help bucking up? Play this. Another version. More? Some people on the eastern front trying to hold onto an open society. (TW: war is awful.) Maybe your granddad did this from a trench against Hitler's tanks— for you, and us, because a world fascist movement was successfully defeated that time, opening the way for the rest of the 20th century.

But the outcome didn't look good for a couple of years then, either. Popular history remembers the 1945 victory over the Nazis and the joyous homecoming. Less remembered are the defeats and grim prospects from 1941 through early 1943.

Remember, these people say they are doing it for us too. They are correct. The global struggle between a free, open future and a fearful revival of the dark past that's shaping up, including in our own country, is still in its early stages. It's likely to get worse before it gets better. The outcome is again uncertain, and it will determine the 21st century and the handling of all its other problems.

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PS: Ukraine should not be idealized as the paragon of an open democratic society. For instance, see If Ukraine Wants To Stand for Liberty and Democracy, It Should Rethink Some of Its Wartime Policies. And it has quite the history of being run by corrupt oligarchs — leading to the Maidan Uprising of 2013, the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, and Zelensky's overwhelming election in 2019 as the anti-corruption candidate. So they're working on that. And they're also stamping hard on the old culture of everyday, petty corruption.  More on that.  More; "Ukraine shows that real development happens when people believe they have an ownership stake in their own societies."

Now, writes US war correspondent George Packer in The Atlantic, 

Here was a country with a tragic history that had at last begun to build, with great effort, a better society. What made Ukraine different from any other country I had ever seen—certainly from my own—was its spirit of constant self-improvement, which included frank self-criticism. For example, there’s no cult of Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine—a number of Ukrainians told me that he had made mistakes, that they’d vote against him after the war was won. Maxim Prykupenko, a hospital director in Lviv, called Ukraine “a free country aspiring to be better all the time.” The Russians, he added, “are destroying a beautiful country for no logical reason to do it. Maybe they are destroying us just because we have a better life.”

They have a word there, with a deep history, for the horizontal, self-organized, mutual get-it-done that grows from community social trust: hromada. Learn that word. It's been keeping them going  to the extent they've been able. We polyfolks often dream of creating something like that community spirit in miniature, in our polycules and networks. Occasionally we succeed.

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Social attitudes in Ukraine are mostly traditional, rooted in a thousand years of the Orthodox Church. But not bitterly so like often in the US; in the last generation the ideal of modern European civil society has become widely treasured, and social progressivism has room to thrive. The status of women has fast advanced, especially post-invasion. More than 43,000 women volunteer in the armed forces, flooding traditionally male bastions — including as combat officers, artillery gunners, tankers, battlefield medics, snipers, and infantry. (Intimidating video: "Thus the Witch has Said".) Ukraine has more women volunteering in combat positions than any other armed force in the world.

  
Some LGBT folx in the armed forces display symbols of LGBT pride on their uniforms, with official approval, whereas in Russia it's a prison-worthy crime for even a civilian to show a rainbow pin or "say gay." A report on Ukraine's LGBT+ and feminist acceptance revolutions. Another. Another. Another. War changes things.

And in December 2022, Russia made it a crime not just to speak for LGBT recognition in Russia or occupied Ukraine, but to speak for "non-traditional sexual relations." Belarus, a Russia subject state, has followed suit. Pre-invasion, Russia had a visible polyamory education and awareness movement.

Polyfolks are like one ten-thousandth of what's at stake globally. Ukraine must have our full material backing for as long as it takes them to win their security, freedom, and future. Continue to speak up for it.

                                     

A Russian writer grieves: "My country has fallen out of time."

Women defenders near the eastern front

PPS:  U.S. authori-tarians, such as Sen. Ted Cruz, are saying that allowing women in front-line roles is a woke plot to weaken America's armed forces. Ukraine puts that shit to bed. Do you have a relative who talks like that? Send them this video link to Vidma, who commands a mortar platoon, recounting the story of one of their battles near Bakhmut.

Update April 22, 2024: A year and a half later Vidma is still alive, still with her mortar unit, and posting TikToks. They are now at the front in, it looks like, the battle for Chasiv Yar, a strategic hilltop town west of Bakhmut that will soon, unfortunately, be in world news. A young girl who looks high-school age showed up to join them. Another. Their lives, and their promising society, depend on us. 

And maybe our own? Says Maine's independent Senator Angus King (Jan. 31, 2024),

Whenever people write to my office [asking why we are supporting Ukraine,] I answer, 'Google Sudetenland, 1938.' We could have stopped a murderous dictator who was bent on geographic expansion…at a relatively low cost. The result of not doing so was 55 million deaths.

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