Big Love

While browsing blogs this morning, I came upon a couple commenting on a new HBO TV show, "Big Love". This show, starring Bill Paxton, is about a Mormon man in a polygynous marriage with three wives.

After reading these blogs, I googled "Big Love" and read about it on the official show's site. All the blogs and the official site referred to this marriage as a "polygamous" one, which is technically true, but misleading.

"Polygamy" refers to multiple partner marriages where there are either one man, multiple wives OR one woman, multiple husbands. But when most people hear the word polygamy, they think only of the patriarchal, religious, exploitive kind with one man, multiple wives, which is more correctly termed, polyGYNY, which translates as "many women". There is also a specialized term for one women, multiple husbands, "polyandry", i.e., "many men".

Aside from the gender combinations, multiple partner marriages are not necessarily religious, patriarchal, or exploitive. Those that are egalitarian and involving fully consenting adult partners are more properly termed "polyamorous", which can be hetero, bi, or homosexual and involve all possible gender combinations.

Some of the blogs commented about the difficulty of living together in a polygynous marriage, which is quite possible, but monogamous marriages are also not without their problems. Another blog got a little shrill, comparing this to legalizing gay marriage, which she felt would naturally lead to legalizing polygyny. She wrote "polygamy", but this blogger is apparently unaware of other kinds of multiple partner committed relationships, and assumed that all such marriages must be of the patriarchal exploitive nature. Well, you know what they say what happens when you ASSUME.

My comment to her contained much of what I've written above, but I also added that it's not the form of marriage that matters, it's how the people act within the relationship be it one man, one woman, two men, two women, or multiple numbers of the gender combinations. I also pointed out that polyamory has about as much in common with Mormon-style polygyny as an abusive monogamous marriage has in common with a happy, loving one.

To the other blogger who lamented the logistics of living with several women at once, I said that I preferred my free-wheeling promiscuity to their committed multiples.

If I had cable, I'd check out "Big Love", though I'd have preferred the show to have been about a modern, egalitarian polyamorous family, rather than a Mormon polygynous one, but I guess it wouldn't have been so funny that way.

Thoughts?