Police: Throbbing artery gave polygamist away (POSTED: 12:37 p.m. EDT, August 30, 2006)Oh dear. Is that a banana in your beehive or are you just happy to see your 72 kohl-eyed wives?
That's a headline as crafted by the writer of a letter to the editor of the Penthouse Forum column. "Dear Penthouse Forum. I never thought I'd be writing to you about this sort of thing . . . ."
I might be compelled to tune into Anderson Cooper 360 tonight just to see if the Coopster provides details. Preferably while wearing tighty-whiteys and blushing profusely throughout the interview with the arresting officer.
* * *
While we're on the topic, let's talk about polygamy. I've been wanting to discuss it for some time, especially after having watched a number of episodes of the HBO series, Big Love. The series, the first season of which aired in the spring and early summer of 2006, relates the story of a fictional Utah family, the Henricksons--businessman Bill (Bill Paxton), his three wives Barb, Nicolette, and Margene (played by Jeanne Tripplehorn, Chloë Sevigny, and Ginnifer Goodwin, respectively), and their children, families, friends, coworkers, neighbors, compound connections, and enemies, both obvious and hidden.
It took me a few episodes to get interested in the show, but it soon became a quasi-guilty pleasure and provocative Sunday-night entertainment. Initially, the show seemed to consist of episodes in which we got to watch how many times Bill Paxton's character could have sex with his different wives during a given day. While this approach to television-making did occasionally provide a nice shot of Mr. Paxton's bare posterior (nothing to be sniffed at, I should add), the show seemed little more than a Salt Lake City-based segment of HBO's old Real Sex series, in which happy, horny couples had bottomless depths of energy and mere shallows of shame with which to backstroke and crawl through lustful interlewds in public places.
Surprisingly, Real Sex was a yawnfest, at least for this homosexual. I mean, why not just go for the taste, go for the flavor, and buy some real porn instead of these softcore put-ons? Admittedly, though, straight porn--often heterosexual male fantasy-centric and filled with women who resemble a cast of blow-up dolls, writhing and moaning as if someone had just let the air out of them--is pretty disgusting.
So perhaps Real Sex 69: Wild in the Wasatch was a step in the right erection.
Anyway . . .
After a while, Big Love started to evolve and keep my interest. On one level the show focused on the difficulty of being a family, whether polygamous or not--managing the jealousies and feelings, setting and adhering to the rules, juggling the competing demands of time, desire, and need, and dealing with outside influences, both good and bad, on the family "beehive." The Henricksons were sort of like your family and mine x 3.
On another level, though, the show became about leading a moral life in a world where you aren't viewed as being moral by "normal society"--the larger world of contemporary Latter Day Saint/Mormon society or even modern suburban America. Nor are you viewed as normal or moral by the "cult of the compound"--in a more general sense, your extended family, but in the Henricksons case, by family members and enemies, who live out their existence in a scruffy, fundamentalist compound, practicing plural marriage and a lifestyle far more tradition-bound than that of the Henricksons.
I'd like to say more, but I don't want to give away too many plot points. Nonetheless (spoiler alert!), one of the more moving episodes was the season-ender, which found Barb being nominated for a Mother of the Year award but then saw her lose her chance when the award committee (headed by the governor's wife) discovered that she was living in a plural marriage. Barb then was swiftly rejected and shamed, pulled off the dais and sent out through the kitchen, finally abandoned by the first lady's security detail in an empty parking lot. Meanwhile, Barb's family waited in the auditorium with the other guests, unaware of what exactly just happened.
The way the scene was acted and staged was quite brilliant. You felt horrified at how everyone treated Barb and the Henricksons like pariahs, while they saw themselves as a loving, moral family, who deserved to be acknowledged for their specialness and strength.
* * *
One of the odd things to me about polygamy is not that it's still practiced, not that there is a television show dealing with it, but that it was once the accepted practice in Utah until the 1890 Manifesto. Then, in order to secure a place in the United States (Utah wasn't admitted to the union until 1896, believe), the state's political and religious leadership willingly banned plural marriage and persecuted those who practiced it. Heretofore, it had been a tenet of the LDS faith, the practice of which, it was felt, led believers on the road to salvation.
Just my luck. On the road to salvation, I stopped off at Stuckey's and spent too much time looking over the pecan logs.
So far be it from me to know enough about polygamy to market it or explain it. Even though I'm speaking from a 21st-century perspective, polygamy seems to me like a practice designed primarily to benefit men (or control male sexual desire within the family unit?), not women, a tad focused on ancient Biblical absolutes. Man on top, woman on bottom, be fruitful and multiply to get right with God.
Nonetheless, I'm a big advocate for letting love live and leaving it well enough alone, of allowing consenting adults to make their own choices about their personal relationships and keeping laws, strictures, and scriptures out of their business and their bedrooms.
So, wisely or unwisely, I feel a little soft spot for the plural marriage crowd, at least the kind shown in Big Love and the young people who recently outed themselves in the media to let everyone know that growing up in polygamous families hadn't damaged them for life. In fact, it hadn't damaged them at all, other than having to hide their love and family dynamics away from everyone else.
It's not easy being different in a world where difference is sometimes viewed as dangerous or even classified as illegal. It's a little lonely sometimes, living your life as a social and sexual "outlaw," despite your otherwise normalcy of job, home, car, TV, and family. So let's not judge lest someone drops a house on your sister.
But for every happy, well-adjusted homosexual, there's an Andrew Cunanan lurking in the bushes. For every laptop, lug wrench, or lipstick lesbian, there's an Aileen Wournos--have gun, will travel, and kill johns. For every Renee Richards or Christine Jorgensen, trying to break down barriers and encourage understanding of transsexuality, there's a pre-op paedophile named John Mark Karr, swilling champagne on a free flight home from Thailand and talking about his "love" for and (alleged) murder of JonBenet Ramsey.
It's to be expected, then, that taking up the guest spot in the point-counterpoint chair for polygamy is someone like Warren Jeffs, whose construct of fundamentalism and plural marriage seems more about controlling and menacing people, hooking up geezers with child brides, and eliminating the competition by exiling young males of the species who pose a risk to his authority and wife supply. Oh, and let's not forget, looking creepy while "throbbing his artery" at a hot cop in a uniform.
We social and sexual outlaws may have reasonably sound business plans, but *heavy sigh* we have horrible media representation. It's as if all our PR was being handled by a firm operated by Mary Kay LeTourneau and Vili Fualaau.
No comments:
Post a Comment