Poly-ish Movie Reviews

Yet another cop drama with non-monogamous people involved in a murder?  Can Hollywood actually show ethical non-monogamy or is it just another excuse to punish "deviants"?  Joreth reviews the Netflix show, iZombie, to find out. www.PolyishMovieReviews.com  That was a surprisingly hopeful episode.  Well, I mean, the whole series has a hopeful tone, given the subject matter and the impossible situations it spirals into.  But I was still surprised by this one. iZombie is a quirky little show.  The premise is that a young, over-achieving doctor gets invited to a trendy boat party by a rival who is impressed with her doctoring skills.  At the party, a new designer drug is introduced, everyone but the doctor gets high, and then, inexplicably, a zombie outbreak happens.  The doctor, whose name is Liv, gets scratched as she runs to jump off the boat and wakes up in a body bag on the beach with all the other victims of the party. This is just the opening credits.  Now the walking dead, Liv goes into a major depression (I mean, who wouldn't?) upon learning that she's dead and craving brains.  She breaks up with her fiance, quits her promising career as a heart surgeon, and goes to work in the cororner's office, where she can steal the brains from the dead patients when she closes them back up after their autopsies, before sending the bodies out to their final arrangements. Now, here's the kicker ... after she eats someone's brain, she gets flashes of memories from that person's life and starts to take on some of their personality characteristics.  She accidentally has a flash of a murder victim's life while the investigating officer just happens to be in the morgue inquiring about the body.  Her boss (who has figured it all out within 10 minutes of the first episode) covers for her blurting out this data that she couldn't possibly know by claiming that Liv is a pyschic.  Because that's easier to swallow. So now Liv eats the brains of murder victims that her boss looks the other way for, in exchange for studying her condition and trying to find a cure, and she runs around solving crimes as a psychic cororner sidekick to the rookie cop who believes her "visions". I really like this show, but then I really like police procedural shows.  I always have, and I continue to love them even now with all the shit going on about real cops.  But that's not the point of this review.  In this second episode, we meet a couple in an open marriage. Javier is a brilliant young artist married to Lola, who appears to adore him.  Javier is a stereotypical "male artist", meaning that he is all about passion - passion in his work, passion in life, and passion in bed.  When Liv gets a flash of Javier having sex with someone who is not Lola, the crime fighting duo think they have a break in the case with his affair.  As the cop says, "it's always the spouse".  But when they go to Javier's loft to speak with his wife, they find the mistress with her arms around Lola, comforting her. Lola introduces her as "my favorite of Javier's lovers".  This is where we learn that they have an open marriage.  I like this scene because Lola defends her relationship with Javier without sounding defensive, as in "methinks she doth protest too much". [insert audio clip of Lola introducing Tasha as "my favorite of my husband's lovers"] Now, here is where I would normally get really irritated at how non-monogamy is portrayed in pop media.  In The Mentalist, the open marriage was a red herring, and I loved that about the episode.  The cops spend time and resources chasing down dead end leads because sex is so often a motive for murder, but their particular open marriage had nothing at all to do with the murder.  That's very rare, in my experience.  Usually these shows indicate who is the "bad guy" by making them kinky or non-monogamous or a casual drug user, because only deviants do those sorts of things, and deviants must also be criminals, obvs. So usually I get pissed off about that.  But I didn't see the anger in this one, because I see the motive all the time in the poly community, so it's clearly a common experience.  The anger at being replaced, not murder, of course.  That's a very common fear, whether it's from couples who create a bunch of rules to protect their marriage or it's monogamous people who tell us without a shred of shame that they could "never do that" because "what if your partner finds someone they like better than you?"  As usual, in order to discuss the parts that are relevant to polyamory, I have to spoil the big reveal. SPOILERS: We eventually find out that Javier knocked up his manager's teenage daughter.  Which could have led to the manager being the murderer as either pissed off at Javier for "cheating" on Lola, whom the manager secretly loved and not-so-secretly thought Javier was a poor husband for, or the manager could have been pissed off at this older man getting his daughter pregnant. But, as was dropped in the clip I just played for you, Javier and Lola never had children because Javier never wanted children.  The detective neglected to ask Lola if *she* ever wanted kids.  [insert clip of Lola saying that Javier was leaving her to start a family that he never had with her with an 18 year old girl]. I see this play out in a lot of ways in the poly community.  The fear of being replaced is a very common fear.  And, unfortunately, a fear that is realized all too often.  Part of the point of being polyamorous is that we don't *have* to end otherwise working relationships in order to get into other relationships.  That's a monogamous problem.  But this couple in this show was not polyamorous, they were hierarchically non-monogamous.  And, so it seems, are many other people who dip their toes in the poly world. Couples try to "open up" their existing relationships without actually changing their existing relationships.  They make all these rules designed to keep "the couple", not just intact, but at the top of the priority chain.  No matter what, "the couple" always comes first, as if "the couple" is a person in its own right.  You can have other lovers, but you can't *love* anyone as much or more than you love me.  You can have sex, but you can't have babies with anyone else but me, even though babies are a risk of sex.  You can care for other people, but your home and your family are me. In this sort of arrangement, you simply cannot have a situation that Lola and Javier found themselves in.  You can't have your side chick get pregnant.  Nevermind that pregnancy is a possibility in hetero PIV sex, we won't make any contingency plans for it because we have decided that it just won't happen.  So you can't get your side chick pregnant.  Especially if you didn't want to get your main chick pregnant.  Lola can't have another woman bear Javier's babies or have a marriage-like relationship with him, and Javier, apparently (since he wasn't around to actually say so), can only have one primary lover at a time. I've seen lots and lots and lots of people out there hurt and angry that their spouse or primary partner wanted to elevate one of their secondary partners to something resembling the primary relationship, and lots of people surprised to find that they can really only feel what they interpret as "love" for one person at a time and so leave one partner for another even after years of non-monogamy. So, while I really don't like the representation that non-monogamous relationships get from pop media as that of selfish, lust-driven narcissists out to bang everyone with a pulse, seducing questionably aged people, leaving a trail of wreckage behind them, or justifying murderous rage (because I guarantee most of the target audience of this show is probably singing the Cell Block Tango right now [he had it coming!]) ... while I hate that this is the picture frequently painted of us, it's also not entirely inaccurate, although hyperbolic. So I'm feeling ... not quite charitable, because this sort of possessive, limiting, restrictive version of non-monogamy currently flooding and tainting my communities really irritates me ... but I'm feeling like this might have some teachable moments in it for the community.  First, with the candid admission of non-monogamy in the beginning, and later with the horribly absurd yet inevitable conclusion of what trying to do non-monogamy with these sorts of premises leads to.  Not the murder, but the feelings that these people had. This episode is technically poly-ish because there is definitely consensual non-monogamy happening here, and while the conflict might have been about the non-monogamy and not some outside pressure, it was a conflict that I see actually happen in the poly community - that of couple privilege and trying to prioritize one relationship at everyone else's expense (which is, also technically, "pressure from outside" since it's what I call the Monogamous Mindset leaking into non-monogamy).  Maybe (hopefully) it doesn't result in murder all that often in real life, but certainly a lot of people feel an awful lot of strong emotions when their primary relationships are not flexible enough to change with changing circumstances or evolving feelings.  These are the kinds of emotions to expect when we legislate our relationships to prevent addressing our insecurities and fears rather than build dynamic, resilient relationships that can accommodate inevitable change and the processing of challenging emotions that come with change.  The only constant in life is change, after all. It could possibly also be the final thoughts of the episode that make me not hate it.  Most cop dramas do not have final thoughts voice-overs with some sort of moral lesson at the end of the episode.  A lot of them can leave an audience with a sense of hopelessness or despair at the depravity of humanity on screen.  But not this one, with the unusual premise of this show. Liv is undead.  Can you imagine waking up one day to re

A movie in French about polyamory?  Will this finally be the French film that Joreth doesn't hate?  Does it actually have any polyamory in it? www.polyishmoviereviews.com    Apparently my distaste for French ennui cinema extends to French Canadian ennui cinema.  I just don't like ennui, I guess. Yet another Netflix recommendation.  Heartbeats is about "two best friends, Mary and Francis, who meet a charismatic wanderer named Nick and suddenly find their longtime friendship tested to its limits.  As the love triangle between the three intensifies, Mary and Francis vie for Nick's affections in this intense story". Well, it's not wrong, exactly.  It's just not nearly as interesting as the summary makes it sound.  Which, to be honest, wasn't that interesting to begin with. I will say this about it.  I think it was well acted.  The seething jealousy that Marie and Francis feel throughout the film felt authentic as a viewer.  But 2 hours of people smoking and glaring at each other from across rooms is just not my idea of a good time. Marie and Francis meet Nick.  Both develop an interest in him.  Nick is so neutrally friendly that it's not even clear what his orientation is for the entire movie.  He never says or does anything that could be construed as genuine romantic or sexual interest for either character.  And they, of course, don't say or do anything overt to Nick.  They just seem to be really good, affectionate friends. Eventually Marie and Francis actually get into a rolling-on-the-ground fight, ostensibly over Nick, yet neither of them has admitted to anyone that they harbor feelings for him.  Annoyed, Nick stops hanging out with them.  After not seeing him for a while, both Marie and Francis run into Nick independently and admit that they have romantic feelings for him and he rejects them both.  So Marie and Francis fuck each other?  When Francis is gay, not bi? Later, they run into Nick at a party, who tries to say that he's happy to see them, but Francis emits this nails-on-a-chalkboard scream to drown him out, so Nick walks away and Marie and Francis glare at his diminishing back until they, too, turn and leave. Interspersed throughout the story, we see these little vignettes of, I dunno, documentary-style interviews I guess?  Of people who have utterly miserable love lives.  Nothing in any of these stories is about non-monogamy, they're all about breakups, or falling in love with the "wrong person", or one guy who doesn't seem to believe in bisexuality?  I have no idea what any of this had to do with the story, except to maybe set the tone that French people only seem to be happy when they're miserable, I suppose.  I know it's a terrible cliche, but I've yet to watch a potentially poly movie that even tries to disabuse me of this notion. On top of all this, the movie was fucking boring.  Nothing happened.  People smoked a mountain of cigarettes and complained about the movies they saw and Nick flirted his way obliviously through life, until an hour and a half later someone finally admitted to having feelings and someone else said they don't feel the same.  Then everyone was unhappy some more. I got so bored, I started surfing Quora, which was really hard to do because I had to read subtitles. There was no story here.  No plot.  No conflict except the one that the characters made for themselves.  Everyone was just ... unhappy.  Except for Nick, who was oblivious. That's 2 hours of my life I won't get back.

Can a Hollywood-made dramatic biopic made in the current century actually show polyamory?  That might depend on how we define "polyamory".  Joreth reviews the narrative version of Lady Georgiana Cavendish's life as portrayed by Natalie Portman to see if polyamory happened during the Georgian era and if polyamory can be shown in a movie made in the modern era. www.polyishmoviereviews.com    The Duchess is based on a true story about Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, who married William Cavendish, the 5th Duke of Devonshire. Biopics can be challenging to review because, on the one hand, I don't like to give out spoilers and I only do so when it's absolutely necessary to explain why a movie is classified as "poly" or not. But on the other hand, these are true stories that happened years, sometimes centuries ago, and the conclusion is already well-known (or ought to be). I think I said in another review that we don't watch biopics to be surprised at the ending, we watch them to see how this particular storyteller tells this particular story. The short answer here, because I like to give it right up front so that you don't have to sit through an entire review unless you actually want to hear all my ramblings, is that I really enjoyed the movie, and I'm going to say that it's poly-ISH. I thought it was well acted, well directed, the costuming was georgeous (as it should be, given the main character's importance in the fashion world), and it was surprisingly accurate, according, at least, to what Wikipedia has to say about these historical characters. Normally I try to keep my reviews to the poly (or not) content within the film, regardless of historical accuracy, but this time I think its accuracy is relevant to my categorization. Georgiana Spencer is the oldest child of John and Georgiana Spencer, and much loved. In fact, "love" is rather prevalent in her childhood home, in contrast to many noble and upper class homes of her time. Her parents doted on her and, apparently on each other. According to Wikipedia, there is no record anywhere that indicates anything other than loving monogamy for life from her parents, quite apart from the custom of the time. This, unfortunately, sets up our young G with some unrealistic expectations of adulthood and marriage in the peerage. On her 17th birthday, Lady Georgiana was married to the most eligible bachelor in English society, William Cavendish, according to the arrangements of her mother. G (as she is sometimes called) had only met her husband-to-be twice prior to the deal being made, but she believed it to be a love match. Her mother had hoped to not marry her off so young, but could not pass up the opportunity to raise her daughter's station to one of the most powerful men in the realm. Also, a true fact. So, off she went, the new Duchess of Devonshire. Unfortunately for G, William did not consider "love" to be a relevant factor in marriage. He had entered into a business contract for a male heir, not a soulmate. And so begins a long, volatile relationship between the Duchess and Duke of Devonshire. William seems to have no interests in anything other than cards and his dogs. G, meanwhile, develops quite a few passions, including drinking, gambling of all sorts, politics, and fashion. Over the course of their marriage, she becomes the quintessential fashion/style icon of the day, with all of English society hanging on her every design and fashion trend. And, as many of my very male partners have been surprised to discover after numerous rants from me, fashion very strongly influences politics and vice versa, so our young fashionista is also quite politically influential. William does maintain one other interest - sex. G discovers numerous affairs and unhappily looks the other way, as is the custom. Several years into her marriage, G is introduced to Charlotte, the daughter of one of his dalliances from before their marriage, whose mother is now dead and William decides that G should raise her. In the movie, we see G as resistent to and hurt by this revelation at first, but growing to love Charlotte as if one of her own children. The surviving correspondence between G and her mother indicate that the love, at least, was true - she did indeed adore Charlotte as her own daughter. G goes on to have 2 more daughters before finally producing a male heir for William, thereby finally fulfilling her half of the marriage contract that William arranged for. And this is where the poly - or not - content comes in. Until this point, we only see William as having indiscriminate sexual affairs with various staff, and G not having any affairs of her own. At this time in real history, a woman of G's status was allowed to have affairs, the same as her husband, but only after producing a son to secure inheritance. In the movie, this little fact is never mentioned. It is just assumed that her husband is a common philanderer and she is the dutiful wife, pained by his cheating and his withholding of affection, but faithful. 8 years into marriage, after the birth of their two daughters but before the birth of their first son, William and G take a holiday in the city of Bath, where they meet Lady Elizabeth Foster, known as Bess. G and Bess develop a very close, intimate friendship. Surviving correspondence confirms that they had a strong, adoring bond, but no indication of it being anything other than platonic. The movie implies otherwise, at least once. Bess has become destitute after separating from her husband, as one might expect in a society where women had no rights and no property of their own. So G suggests that Bess move in with her and her husband. Some time after moving in, G discovers her husband having an affair with Bess. In the movie, this devastates G, who declares that her husband "took" the one thing in the world that was her own - her friendship with Bess. [inserted movie clip of G's confrontation with William over Bess and her demand that Bess leave and William's denial of that demand] G is now forced to live in the same home with her husband and her husband's mistress, her former best friend, facing them both at the breakfast table every morning. At this point in the film, I would have said that this is not poly, but it could have been a scenario that not-really-poly couples find themselves in when they attempt an open marriage that they're not ready for. Imagine, if you will, a stereotypical unicorn hunter couple, where they agree to "open up" because the wife is bisexual and the husband "allows" her to explore her bisexuality as long as it's only the same-sex part she explores. This hypothetical couple finds a hot bi babe who agrees to be with the wife (but don't worry, he won't participate, because the wife is the only one who is allowed to have sex with him!), except one day the wife comes home to find her hot bi babe is in bed with her husband, contrary to all the rules they have about no sex with the husband, no sex alone with the hot bi babe, etc. So the wife pulls a veto because this was supposed to be HER girlfriend, and the husband just refuses to break up with her. Now the happy little pseudo-FFM triad is a hostile FMF-V with the wife calling the hot bi babe "homewrecker" and the husband totally lost in NRE with the new shiny. So I might have put this movie in a poly analogues category because, other than the sex between the two women (which was only implied once in the film, and not explicitly an ongoing part of their friendship), that's pretty much what happened - hubby stole the side chick from wifey and refused a veto. But we're only at the 1/3rd mark in the film. Apparently, in real history, the talk of the town was that Bess took advantage of her friendship with G and "engineered her way" into a sexual relationship with William. Bess also engaged in several affairs of her own outside of her relationship with William, which were well documented. The whole arrangement of a married man having his mistress actually live in his marital home along with the wife was quite the scandal. But there's more to the story, both in the film and in real life - we'll get to that. So, back to the film, G is being tortured by being face to face with her husband's mistress, her former best friend, every day. Bess keeps trying to be friends with G, but G keeps rebuffing her, and William remains irritatingly aloof and uncaring. Frankly, if it weren't for the implication in the film that Bess was using her connection with William to get custody of her children, I wouldn't understand why she wants to be in a relationship with him at all. He is an uninteresting man with no personality whatsoever. G, at least, was stuck with him because she was married to him and it wasn't her doing. The movie does show tenderness between William and Bess, I'm just not sure what *else* there is to a relationship with him other than using his power. In real life, Bess separated from her husband after 5 years of marriage and he somehow managed to refuse to allow her to see her *two* sons for 14 years. In the movie, William gets her *three* sons back after a few weeks of their little "arrangement". So, while William and Bess are playing house in G's home, making this not really poly because G and William don't love each other and it's basically a cheating story at this point, G starts having affairs of her own. In the film, G knew a young man as a teen, named Charles Grey. They lost touch when G got married and Charles finished school and got into politics. As Charles entered Parliament as a young adult, their paths crossed again. This is the point in real history where G and Charles *actually* met. After her estrangement from William over Bess, G begins a love affair with Charles, not a sexual affair. Remember, in real history, a woman in G's position was allowed to have affairs but only after birthing a son, and in this point in the movie, G has not yet had a son. Of course, in the movie, we d

Many today think of Pee Wee Herman as a children's show character, but that was not always the case.  He started out as a very adult stand-up character that morphed into a weird, surrealist dark humor movie character, that then got a children's show, and THEN ... made this movie. What does all this have to do with polyamory?  Good question!  Joreth watches Big Top Pee-Wee to find out how polyamory fits in with the world of Pee-Wee Herman. www.PolyishMovieReviews.com   Big Top Pee Wee is about as goofy as you'd expect. It's nothing like the first Pee Wee movie - Pee Wee's Big Adventure. That movie is kind of a comedic surrealist masterpiece, Tim Burton's directorial debut and a sign of what we would come to expect from him. The sequel is ... not that movie. Big Top sports a cast of dozens of recognizable B-movie faces and names, which, in my opinion, is just begging to fall under the All Star Curse. That's where the larger the cast and the more famous people on that cast, the higher the chance of the movie sucking. It's sort of a case of a movie being *lesser* than the sum total of its parts. While Danny Elfman scored both Pee Wee movies, Tim Burton turned down the movie in order to direct Batman (good call, Burton). I wouldn't call the movie "terrible". It's enjoyable enough to at least watch once. It's silly and it relies heavily on stereotypical "circus" tropes, which include a noticeable dose of casual racism and sexism and transphobia. But, it was also made in 1988, so what else can you expect? So, the movie is fine, which is not a ringing endorsement. But it absolutely is a poly movie. And to explain why, I have to give spoilers, but, honestly, you'll see it coming a mile away. And I'm going to talk about side characters, without giving away any of the major plot points or the conclusion of the main events. Big Top Pee Wee is a very simplistic rom-com plot - the protagonist starts out in a relationship with the "wrong one", has a chance meeting with Ms. Right, and somehow has to ditch Ms. Wrong and overcome the culture clash obstacles to win over Ms. Right before the final curtain. So far, nothing very poly about that. That comes in with the subplot of what happens to Ms. Wrong. Pee Wee starts out engaged to a school teacher, Winnie, in the very conservative and small town near his farm. They seem to like each other, but for no apparent reason other than appropriate gender, age, and proximity because they have nothing in common and absolutely no communication skills. Then the circus blows into town, literally. A big storm hits the town and when Pee Wee emerges from his storm shelter, a bunch of circus folk and their wagons are strewn across his farm. He invites them to stay on his farm to make repairs and rest after the storm, which gives him a chance to meet the star attraction, an acrobat named Gina. After getting caught making out with the hot Italian gymnast, Winnie breaks off their engagement, leaving her available to be courted by Gina's 4 strapping Italian acrobat brothers, who met her in town earlier that day. Their entire relationship progression happens off-screen, so this movie is really only a "poly movie" because it has poly characters in a successful poly relationship in it, not because we actually *see* any real polyamory happening. First we see Winnie angry at Pee Wee for cheating on her, prompting her to break off their engagement, and then leaving him at their scheduled lunch date to have a lunch date with the 4 brothers, causing Pee Wee to sneer and go off in a jealous rant to his pig about how quickly she got over him. Next, we see Winnie learning some acrobatic routines under the tutelage of the brothers, and mending fences with Pee Wee to transition to friends (after further rubbing salt in his wounds with how much better her life is without him). Finally, we see Winnie in the big climatic circus show, performing with the brothers and sporting 4 engagement rings. So, it's fun and fluffy and it has a happy polyamorous relationship, specifically an adelphogamous relationship. Adelphogamy literally translates to "brother marriage", which is a specific form of polyandry practiced historically and occasionally still practiced in some portions of Tibet and Nepal, in which a set of brothers is married to the same woman. Personally, I'm always rooting for the girl to get the male harem, so I may be a bit biased in my praise of this film. It's worth watching once, if you can tolerate 90 minutes of Pee Wee Herman and some 1980s casual bigotry, because the polyamory, what little we see of it, is presented positively and with a happy ending, and in a configuration we don't get to see in the media often.   polyamory; polyamorous; poly; polya; polyam; poly-ish; nonmonogamy; non-monogamy; ethical non-monogamy; consensual non-monogamy; ENM; CNM; love triangle; polygamy; polyandry; fraternal polyandry; adelphogamy; movie review

Joreth reviews the biographical historical drama Beloved Sisters, a biopic about two sisters, Caroline and Charlotte von Lengefeld, and the man they love, German poet Friedrich Schiller.  Discussing sorrel polygyny, can this FMF polygynous arrangement be polyamorous?  Is it true?  Did it happen?  Does the movie actually show polyamory on screen?  Follow along with this movie review with the transcript located on the show notes page of the website at www.polyishmoviereviews.com    Beloved Sisters is a German biographical film based on the life of the German poet Friedrich Schiller and two sisters, Caroline and Charlotte von Lengefeld. Netflix says: "In the late 18th century, sisters Charlotte and Caroline begin an unconventional romance with poet Fridrich Schiller, who cares deeply for them both. As their situation evolves, each sister finds her life altered in ways she never imagined possible." I have not looked at my Netflix DVD queue in years, so I have no idea how this movie got in my queue. I suspect it was a Netflix recommendation based on other similar films I added to the queue. So I had no expectations whatsoever about this film. I did not know it was in German, I did not know it was biographical, I did not know it was a period piece. I admit that my tastes trend towards "pedestrian". When it comes to foreign cinema, I tend to either love it or hate it, with far more in the latter category. This one, however, I found myself drawn in, way before I looked it up and discovered that it had a few accolades to its name. Was it polyamorous? Yes? I'm going to say "yes", but it was not in any modern sense of the word. It's possible, given how restrictive mores against non-monogamy altered the shape of relationships in previous eras, that it would not be considered polyamorous at the time, but "normal". Period pieces are hard to evaluate for this reason. The definitions of love, of romance, of relationships, all are different in different times and different places. The bonds between women in such highly patriarchal societies tend to be strong, and more common than today's more liberal cultures. Physical affection is different. Hell, even men were, for a time, expected to provide for their wives but save their love and affection for their platonic male friends and their passion for their mistresses. So the bond among these three characters may not have been the norm, necessarily, but would it have been so "unconventional", as per the description, as to have warranted its own term like polyamory? Maybe? Charlotte and Caroline lost their father at a young age, and were raised by their mother, who was widowed from a rare love marriage. Caroline was talked into a marriage of convenience to save the family from destitution, but the mother openly regretted the necessity. All three of them willingly agreed to the arrangement out of love for each other, with Caroline taking on the responsibility without guile or resentment. As children, the sisters pledged their deep devotion to always remain together, to share everything, and they lived by that oath. Charlotte was sent to the big city to be presented at Court in the hopes of winning herself a wealthy husband as well, but she met a poor poet instead. As per the modesty mores of the time, Charlotte and Fritz, as he was called, were chaperoned by her respectably married sister. Because of their deep bond to each other and the considerable amount of time spent with Fritz, both young women fell in love, and he fell in love with both women. Caroline's marriage had to be worked around, so they devised a plan: Charlotte would be sent back to the big city where Fritz could court her under the watchful eye of her godmother and Society, Caroline would stay with her husband to work on changing their mother's mind about allowing Charlotte to marry for love instead of money while somehow procuring a divorce for herself. Caroline sent Fritz away after a one-night-stand, and the three of them continued their scheming and plotting to live happily ever after. Eventually Charlotte was given permission to marry Fritz as he finally started to achieve some success in his career and Caroline celebrated their union. Eventually, the couple went on their way while Caroline remained behind once again, visiting some months later. This is when she learned that the couple had not consummated their marriage out of Charlotte's sense of duty and concern for her sister not being able to "share" Fritz fully with the marriage between them. Caroline urged Charlotte into her husband's bed and slipped out in the night to disappear for several years, except for another one-night-stand at some point when they ran into each other, this one kept a secret from Charlotte. Eventually Charlotte became pregnant and was reacquainted with her sister, who was now traveling in the company of some wealthy man and hoping to begin writing a novel. She moved into the couple's house and midwifed her sister's birth and the early care of her new nephew while writing under her brother-in-law's tutelage. Fritz begged Caroline to finish up the rest of the plan so that the 3 of them could return to his hometown and live as a threesome, but Caroline seemed to get progressively more and more bitter with the knowledge of their betrayal and her recent life choices, including some upper class prostitution with her wealthy and famous traveling companion. Charlotte grew more and more resentful of Caroline's behaviour and at some point discovered her and Fritz's one-night-stand. This drove a wedge between the sisters. So when Caroline announced that she was pregnant, didn't know which of the very many men she had been with recently was the father, and that the knowledge of the baby would almost certainly prevent her husband from finally allowing her a divorce, Fritz arranged for a country preacher to hide the birth and care for the baby until the divorce was finalized. So Caroline set out across the country with the man who introduced the sisters to Fritz, her cousin and one of Fritz' closest friends, as her guardian and protector on the trip. Here, Caroline stops writing and the couple loses contact with her until she finally writes them a very perfunctory wedding announcement between herself and Fritz' best friend. Many more years pass, more kids are born, finally their mother insists on the sisters' reconciliation before her impending death. During this rather morbid family reunion where the mother gets her material affairs in order, the sisters finally have a confrontation, each accusing the other of being responsible for their separation. Until Fritz nearly succumbed to the latest fit from a chronic respiratory illness, whereupon waking, he finds both sisters sitting in shadows, like bookends, at the foot of the bed. Caroline wrote Fritz's first biography and the only biography written by someone in his inner circle. This biography has none of this ménage à trois, as their own mother called it at one point. It has been debated just how close everyone was to each other, but this movie makes it clear that they were definitely a romantic triad, although the sisters did not share any sexual contact with each other. This triad was portrayed as both women equally loving the same man and he loving them both equally, and all three openly dreaming and planning with each other to live as a triad someday. I'm going to say that, although this dream was never realized in this film, and in fact the relationship between the sisters was strained so far at the end that they inevitably parted as two independent couples, that this film nevertheless showed us a functioning triad, kept apart by external forces strong enough to poison the relationships. Both women had a loving and sexual relationship with the man in the middle, both of them were not only aware of each other's feelings but actively encouraged and supported each other (with the exception of the secret, for which it was the secretive part that made the act a betrayal, not the sexual act itself), and the man openly (within the three of them) loved both of the women. They shared a secret language and written code, where they wrote out their plans and dreams, and we saw both honesty within the group and also how secrecy creates tension and breaks bonds. And all of this was set against a beautifully shot historical drama of revolution and class warfare and the patriarchal segregation of the genders. One of the final scenes includes a short but insightful monologue of something that I believe a lot of progressives talk about today - how the real family bonds and the strength of the family comes from the women and the work they do to maintain connections, and how this strong connection may have been what drew Fritz in from the beginning - the sisters and the mother were the real triad, and the intense bond among women was the beacon of family that Fritz had always longed for, so when they allowed him into their inner circle, he was able to feel a connection that is out of reach for most men because that is not how they relate to each other. And that connection among women, once broken, was also responsible for his later isolation and exclusion, because the bonds belong to the women, they merely allowed him along for the ride for part of the time. I really enjoyed this film. It was a drama but it wasn't as heavy as a lot of other dramas I've reviewed. It showed a triad, and even though it did not last, it was not destroyed by bad writing and morality punishments, but rather by the pressures of the culture that can stress any non-normative relationship. And we saw a fair amount of narrative history that I didn't even bring up because it was less relative to the plot than being a backdrop for it - the French Revolution, the beginning of the Weimar Classicism literary and cultural movement, a significant improvement to the printing press that enabled literacy among the masses, and the spread of class

A group of aging friends decide to say goodbye to their youth with ... an orgy?  Joreth finds out if a bunch of single people can navigate group sex with respect and maturity, and does group sex make it poly or not?   OK, I have had this movie in my queue forever and people keep telling me about it. So I finally sat down to watch it. I'm gonna say that it's not poly but ... it's not NOT poly either. Here's the thing, a little personal background on me: When I was in high school and college, I had ... um, friends. I had *those kinds* of friends. I remember having a couple of conversations with some guys who were flirting with me, where I tried to explain how my friends worked. I had never heard the word "polyamory" before I was 21, and I was DEFINITELY not into any kind of "open relationship". I was raised strictly white Christian middle class (there are whole articles out there about how people who aspire to a higher class tend to be quite rigid about class rules, while those who are comfortably in that higher class tend to break the rules all the time, and my parents were both blue collar and Latina trying to move up the class ladder, which means we followed the rules *exactly*, or else!). So, in my world, there was no such thing as non-monogamy, ethical or otherwise. You met your soul mate sometime in your teen years, you got married (after college, of course), got a nice white collar job, had 2.5 kids, a dog, and a house in the suburbs. Exactly as my parents did (seriously, it was me, the brain, and my sister the jock, a dog, my dad proposed to my mom at her senior prom, the only thing missing was the literal white picket fence). Anyway, that was How Things Were Done. Except ... they weren't. So I was trying to find traditional "boyfriends" for a monogamous relationship, but how do you do that when you don't really get jealous and you can't handle your boyfriend getting jealous at you still being friends with your exes and half your social circle is made up of guys you've messed around with between boyfriends? So, in these conversations, I very distinctly remember being asked more than once, if I have sex with my friends and I'm friends with my fuckbuddies, and my friends are actual, intimate, emotionally connected relationships, then what's the difference between them and boyfriends? I know that I had answers to those questions, but I don't really remember them now. What I know now is that I was really straying into Relationship Anarchy territory without that term having been coined yet. So, this movie reminds me a lot of my teen years, and the kinds of friends I used to have. I would not call what my friends and I did back then "polyamory" and I'm not calling this movie "polyamorous". But I turned out to be poly because this was the kind of friend group I liked to have. Or maybe because this was the kind of friend group I liked to have, I ended up discovering that I was naturally polyamorous. I'm going to say that this is *not* going on the poly movie list because there aren't any really poly-specific values or lessons or situations happening here, but it's definitely an example of why taxonomy needs to be taken with a grain of salt. As I've said in several reviews: taxonomy can help us to identify when something definitely is this thing, and when something definitely is not this thing, but there are always those things in between this and that. And this movie is in between. "A thirty-something party animal decides to throw one last crazy beach party at his father's swanky Hamptons pad. The only obstacles are convincing his reluctant friends to join in the fun, a blossoming romance and a real estate agent trying to sell the house out from under him." This description manages to be both accurate and totally vague at the same time. Eric is a guy whose dad owns a beach house and he and his friends spend their summers there every year since high school. Eric's parties are legendary, with themes and costumes and tons of food and massive amounts of liquor and people crashing on the lawn furniture because they're too drunk to drive home, and cops being called 3 times in the same night and the neighbor loaning them a cow, and of course there's the one guy who always gets naked. I spent most of my own 30s going to parties like these. Then Eric's dad decides to sell the house. So Eric decides to have the mother of all parties as their final hurrah. But how to top everything he's already done? Eric decides to host, not a giant bash like usual, but a small, intimate orgy, just between his closest friends who have been with him since they were kids and who actually stay in the house together every summer. This takes a little convincing, but eventually the whole group is in, which includes 3 single women, 3 single men, and one guy who has a girlfriend who is not one of the high school buddies but is accepted as part of the group. The weird thing about this movie is that the scenes where they're discussing and planning for the orgy are somehow simultaneously uncomfortable and also not necessarily wrong. So, for instance, there are a couple of scenes where they're each discussing with each other whether or not to do it, and they cover things like penis size and consent: [inserted discussion montage] Then there's the scene where Eric and his best buddy go to an underground sex party to do research on how to successfully host an orgy. The things that happen in this scene are things I've personally witnessed at "public" sex parties, but, while accurate-ish, they're also played as way discomforting for comedic value. That's actually kind of hard to do. [inserted clip of sex party] Before I saw this film, I was expecting one of two things - either a lot of gross humor and ultimately a failed orgy, or a party where somehow all of these friends end up coupling up and in a romantic dyads where each couple has sex mostly apart from the others. I even had a tweet prepared about having a pet peeve of "mainstream" movies thinking that an orgy means several individual couples having sex exclusively with their own partners, but in the same room. And the movie did actually set itself up for one of these two endings. But it surprised me by not doing either one. There was a big tense moment where it looked like the orgy was going to blow up. And there was a lead up to some coupling up with at least one woman seeming to harbor a secret flame for one of the men. But then things took a turn. And the orgy got started. The couple that was a couple before did stay a couple and didn't go outside of each other, but there's usually at least one of those at an orgy. Hell, *I've* been one of those couples at an orgy. And another 2 people ended up in what looked like the beginning of another couple. But A) it wasn't the couple that the movie set up for us, and B) they still mixed it up during the orgy even though they seemed pretty into each other. But the morning after, everyone seemed cool with each other and all the friendships seemed intact. It was a one-time thing and they went right back to being friends. No weird, awkward, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice moment of regret and a return to normalcy by pretending it never happened. So, after spending the last couple of decades around sex-positive, kinky polys, watching this group of mainstream people muddle their way though the complexities of group sex was a little awkward. But they reminded me of the people I used to be friends with before I had my own first orgy, they're just older than I and my friends were back then. So I actually kinda liked it. And, to be honest, I spent some time in New England with a now-former partner who lived there, who had friends who are not part of the poly, swing, or kink communities ... and I kinda think this movie nailed that kind of social group. I feel like I met all of these characters on one of my trips up North. The one part that I really didn't like was what happened with the married couple. The orgy ended up being 8 people - 7 of whom were high school friends and the girlfriend of one of them who has been part of the group for a while since she started dating her boyfriend. But the complete pack is actually 10 people. Another couple is in a monogamous relationship, they have a baby together, and a wedding planned during the summer the movie takes place. The group decides not to invite this couple because they have a baby and they would have been married about 2 weeks by the time the orgy takes place. For some reason, the idea of this couple having group sex with them squicks everyone out. And I can't figure out why, because the dating couple - the one guy from high school with his outside girlfriend - are exclusive too, and they have sex in the same rooms as the rest of the orgy participants, but they don't have sex with anyone but each other. So I'm not sure what the problem is with the married couple being involved, except that the group obviously has a set of assumptions about what "marriage" and "parenthood" mean. The married couple eventually find out about the orgy plans and get upset that they weren't invited and they decide they want to participate, but the group tells them that they can't come. [inserted confrontation clip] Now, on the one hand, I do appreciate the group being clear about their boundaries. I would have been annoyed if they had tried some sort of shenanigans to get out of it, rather than just flat out telling them "no". But on the other hand, once the married couple said that they were in, seeing as how the other exclusive couple was in, it was kinda a dick move not to include them. I had assumed up until that point that the reason they didn't invite them was because they figured they wouldn't want to because of their relationship, but it turns out that the group was the uncomfortable ones about their marriage and parenthood. During the orgy, the married couple actually show up anyway, thinking that once they're in the house, nobody wo

A married woman takes a lover, but can Joreth take yet another affair movie? www.polyishmoviereviews.com    It's so much worse when they manage to get you to like a movie before they turn it to shit. No, you're not experiencing deja vu. I said that exact same line when I reviewed Paint Your Wagon. It's still true. 5 to 7 was a Netflix recommendation, so naturally I went into it expecting it to be a total shitstorm. Instead, I found it charming. The Netflix summary says: "an aspiring young novelist finds his conservative beliefs about love and relationships tested when a chance encounter outside a New York City hotel leads to an intense affair with a French diplomat's beautiful wife." Everything about this descriptions says this movie should be terrible. The main character is said to be conservative and I can't get into movies unless I can connect to the characters. An "affair" implies a secret, and the qualifier "intense" leads one to imagine this is some sort of dark romantic thriller. It was nothing like that. This was more like a romantic comedy, but surprisingly without any artificial conflict between the two lovers. Brian is very young (to my ancient, middle-aged eyes), a 24-year old would-be writer living in New York. Walking down the street, he sees a beautiful woman smoking outside of a hotel. He crosses the street and manufactures a reason to start talking to her. She seems antagonistic to his overtures but invites him to meet her again at the same time and place next week. So he does. His appearance at the appointed time surprises her and she invites him to spend a couple of hours with her at a museum between 5 and 7 the following Monday. He agrees to that too. So they spend the time wandering around the museum, and later the park, getting to know each other. I still feel that she is sending him prickly signals, but apparently she is just being French. Towards the end of their date, Ariel (as she is named) casually announces that she is married with 2 children and nearly a decade older than Brian. He is taken aback by this information and she responds as if confused that he would have a problem with it. She goes on to explain that she and her husband have an open marriage with very specific rules and it's all very normal and acceptable in her culture, and implies that Brian is a naive, uncultured, close-minded American and thinks his "conservative" monogamous beliefs are the weird ones. Brian is unable to accept that consent is the element that makes something ethical or unethical not an arbitrary adherence to someone else's structure, and says he can't see her. Ariel says that Brian knows where she will be every Friday afternoon if he should change his mind. 3 weeks later, he does. So she gives him a hotel room key and says to meet her there at 5. Apparently, according to Ariel, "5 to 7" is French slang for "open relationship", at least, of a particular type of open relationship. She says that it used to be literal - that it was a reasonable time of the day for a spouse's whereabouts to be ... fuzzy and unknown, so that's when people looked the other way while their spouses visited their affairs. Eventually, it morphed into a saying, something like a "5 to 7 relationship" that meant a primary marriage with side partners. But Ariel and her husband Valerie found the literal time to be convenient for their lifestyle so they keep with tradition. This makes her an "old-fashioned girl". The bulk of the movie is vignettes of Brian and Ariel spending time together and we see their feelings for each other grow. We learn that Valerie has a mistress of his own and the two women know each other, and everyone in the equation feels content with the arrangement, except Brian. Even their kids are cool with things and at one point tell Brian that they're glad he's mummy's boyfriend and they welcome him to the family (which throws him for a loop because he didn't realize the kids knew). So, at this point, I thought the movie was cute and all the non-monogamous people seemed well-adjusted and content, and I was willing to overlook the whole couple-privilege thing because everyone seemed to be happy with things, and the stuff that bothered Brian was less about the couple privilege and more about the very notion of non-monogamy. I got the impression that if they had more of a commune-style or network style relationship, he still would have been uncomfortable. Until it became about couple-privilege. As it always does, because that's what happens with privilege. And with rules. I have always said that if everyone just wanted to follow a rule, then a rule is not necessary. And if someone did not want to follow a rule, then a rule would not stop them. Throughout the movie, we learn about Ariel's and Valerie's rules, which are very much designed to protect their privileged status as an upper class monogamous couple. And that kept bothering me. It would be one thing if Ariel said "as a mother and wife of a diplomat, my schedule is very full. I have blocked off the hours of 5-7 for 'me time', which allows me the freedom to pursue relationships like this, but I have very many other things in my life that I value and this is all the time I am willing to spare right now." I might have wrinkled my nose a little bit, but honestly, my life isn't much more available. But instead, she said that she and her husband had a *rule*. They "agreed" on this thing, and this was what it was. The feelings of the new partner did not matter, and, in fact, the feelings of Ariel or Valerie did not matter. What mattered is that the rule was followed. And people only follow the rules when they want to, until they don't, when they stop. As his feelings for Ariel grow, seeing her only from 5-7 on certain days is not enough for him. He wins an award for his writing and this is a very important moment in his life. Naturally, he wants to share it with the important people in his life. Ariel is not allowed to see him romantically outside of 5-7, but she is allowed to attend public functions with her husband while refusing to acknowledge her side relationships in public. Honestly, that would piss me off too. I'd rather someone stayed home than show up to something important in my life and pretend that we're mere acquaintances. She argues with him that rules are rules. I would argue that the rules did not always exist. At one time, they were negotiated. Now is a time for a renegotiation. So now, the conclusion of the film, because, as usual, it's the conclusion of the film that makes or breaks it for me in terms of whether or not something is to be classified as 'poly-ish". SPOILERS: Brian falls deeply in love with Ariel and asks her to marry him and allow him to be a stepfather to her children. Ariel's first reaction is anger that he has betrayed her by "breaking" their agreements. But her next reaction is to decide to divorce her husband and run away with Brian. I literally facepalmed here. This movie had the opportunity for some real personal growth for all the characters. This is the pivot point of the film - the part that determines the future. This one scene decides what happens to the characters for the rest of their lives. This point was a chance for Ariel and Valerie to examine their couple privilege, to really look at their arrangement and question if it was truly fair, truly *ethical* how they were treating their side partners. Is it really fair for anyone to place limitations on people's emotions? On their futures? On the structure of a relationship? To insist that people serve a relationship rather than a relationship serving the needs of the people in it? This was a moment where Ariel and Valerie could have taken a good look at the privileges they enjoy for pretending to participate in the mainstream culture while stepping outside of it at their whim but not in any way that inconveniences them while massively inconveniencing their partners. And at the same time, Brian could have had the opportunity to keep chipping away at his biases and his insecurities and his narrow exposure to other cultures and other beliefs. Brian could have really stretched his comfort zone by challenging himself to see Valerie as family, the way Valerie professed to see him (of course, he didn't really, as addressed in the previous bit about couple privilege, but that could have been his own growth opportunity). What was never even considered by literally anyone in the entire film was Ariel having two husbands. What if Brian could have become a part of their household? What if Valerie's girlfriend, Jane, could have had the potential to join, instead of merely accepting that this was always destined to be a short-term, time-filling, relationship? What if the children, who had grown attached to Brian, could have had a stay-at-home dad along with a socially active mom and a breadwinning father? And maybe another bread-winning mother? What if Valerie and Ariel had to learn that other people mattered and they couldn't always have things their way all the time? What if everyone had stopped paying lip-service to the term "family" and actually built one? In the end, many years have gone by and we see that all is as it should be - Brian finds a nice monogamous woman to settle down with and have children with, Jane gets her own husband, and Ariel and Valerie are the same old happy family-of-four that they've always been, polite, civilized, and appropriate. Brian and Ariel have now managed to romanticize their past relationship because it didn't last long enough for them to get out of the NRE stage and see each other as full people with flaws and quirks and gross little habits that they hate, and so live on in each other's memories as "perfect". Instead of recognizing that it's possible to love more than one person at a time. Oh, and one more thing, during Brian and Ariel's breakup, we learn that Ariel was apparently never in love with her husband and that she has only known Twu W

Yet another movie named "3" - will this one have some polyamory in it?  Or will it be another cheating film?  Joreth reviews the German film Drei, or 3, for polyamorous content.   I've updated my Netflix queue with poly movies so long ago, I can't remember anymore which movies were added because I saw them on a poly movie list somewhere and which were added because Netflix recommended it to me based on some movie from a poly list that I had just added. So I have no idea where this "3" came from. The Netflix summary reads: "Berliners Hanna and Simon, a couple in their 40s, have grown comfortable in their marriage. Independently, each meets and romances Adam, a handsome younger man. When Hanna becomes pregnant, all three must face what they've tried to ignore." This has every element of a movie I will hate - infidelity, secrecy, Relationship Broken Add More People, and babies as plot devices. This movie isn't going to get a Get Out Of Jail Free card on these points. But I actually liked the movie anyway. First of all, the description isn't exactly accurate. It's pretty close, certainly closer than Sleep With Me was. But Hanna and Simon aren't exactly "comfortable". They seem fairly happy, if settled with each other. I mean, sure, they do seem comfortable with each other, but the description would seem to imply the use of the word "comfortable" as a stand-in for bored or in a rut. This couple still has an active sex life and still expresses affection and love for each other. Their relationship isn't broken and neither of them go out looking for something to fix it, or their lives. They seem more or less content with their lives, although they experience some tragedy early on in the movie. They are "comfortable" if you use the definition of your favorite blanket that you curl up with to watch your favorite movies with. So, they have a fairly happy, long-term relationship that experiences some stress that just comes from life. Then they each independently meet Adam. The description seems to suggest that each half of the couple were the ones to pursue Adam, but I got the impression that he's the one who put the moves on the couple. Adam is, apparently, bisexual and fine with casual flings. He has interludes with Hanna and Simon, and then goes about his business. But Hanna and Simon keep thinking about Adam and seek him out for more (which he is certainly amenable to). And yet, Hanna and Simon still seem happy with each other, and they're still both sexually active together. So, as the summary gives away, Hanna discovers she's pregnant and doesn't know who the father is. So, like in Cafe au Lait, the infidelity is revealed and they all have to deal with it. And this is where I have to give away the ending in order to explain why I think it's a poly-ish movie. I do wish I could start finding some poly-ish movies where the polyamory is the plot (or just another element in the story) and not the conclusion. Anyway, here goes. SPOILERS: When the infidelity is revealed, everyone splits up and stops seeing each other for a while. But then Hanna receives tickets to a show from Simon and when they meet up, they talk. Both admit to missing each other and both admit to missing Adam. Meanwhile, Adam has a conversation with his ex-wife in which it is revealed that he's in love but has lost his chance (he doesn't say who he is in love with). I don't think that the baby was really a plot device to bring them back together. Hanna didn't have some weird "you must now both do your parental duty" moment, at least, I didn't interpret any of the scenes like that. The pregnancy seemed to be an excuse to get Hanna to barge into Adam's apartment when Simon was still there, thereby revealing the connections. But what seemed to bring them back together was that they genuinely missed and loved each other. I feel that the movie could have been written without a pregnancy and the reunion scenes could have still happened as-written (minus the dialog about the status of the pregnancy). So the couple shows up at Adams house together and the final scene is a very artistic threesome that shows everyone naked and everyone loving each other. This film was more artsy than I generally prefer, but then most foreign films are (this being a German film). It did have some gorgeous scenes, including a beautiful dance between a woman and two men that was fairly blatant foreshadowing. But for once, I didn't find the characters hard to relate to. I found Hanna to be the most disagreeable, but she was intelligent and knowledgeable and she liked to argue politics and she was involved in media. Her husband was quiet and passionate and artistic with a soft heart, filled with compassion. And Adam was a brilliant scientist trying to save the world in spite of the public's Luddite fears holding back his research. I think it was obvious why each of the characters liked the others, whether I liked them or not. They were nuanced and complex, and that always wins big points with me. So, yes, the story starts out with an infidelity. Unfortunately, so do many poly attempts, which means that we will have that plot represented in our media. And yes, they added a baby. But it wasn't a cautionary tale, there wasn't any hypocrisy really, and no one was rewarded for truly evil behaviour. I found myself drawn into the story and I would recommend watching it.   polyamory; polyamorous; poly; polya; polyam; poly-ish; nonmonogamy; non-monogamy; love triangle; adultery; cheating; affair; infidelity; group sex; rbamp; couple; throuple; thruple; gay; bisexual; LGBTQ; LGBTQIA+; movie review

3 couples struggle with the definitions of monogamy and fidelity, after some "insight" from Jason Alexander.  Joreth reviews this film to see if any ethical non-monogamy could possibly come out of it at all.   Oh. Gourd. This movie. There's so much to hate about this movie. Where to even begin? "Start at the beginning. Yes, yes, And when you come to the end, stop." Scratch that. You'll probably be asking me to stop much sooner than the end. Anyway, here goes. This movie stars an all-B-lister cast, with the likes of Jason Alexander and Jonathan Silverman and Patrick Dempsey and Angie Everhardt, so not terrible actors. We meet the 3 main couples in the first scene at a dinner party. There's the feminist man who's hopelessly devoted to respecting his pregnant fiancée and she's characterized by her absolute trust and faith in him. They have this pleasantly, non-threatening sort of progressive relationship that's all liberal, but in a quiet, unassuming sort of way. He spends most of his time trying to distance himself from the asshole Neanderthal men around him. Next is the ball-busting, opinionated photographer and her husband. Most of what we see of her is her neuroses. More on that later. He doesn't seem to have anything redeeming about himself to make him stand out in my mind, other than "her husband". I'm not even sure what he does for a living. Finally we have the Jewish attorney who cheated on his first wife with the current wife, and the current wife who, in spite of once being someone's mistress, is naively in love with the idea of monogamy and fidelity and Twue Wuv. To stir up the pot, the lawyer invites a writer who is a client of his to his little dinner party. Jason Alexander shows up playing the role of the cynical misanthropist to shatter the illusions off the happily monogamous couples, named Art. His character really pisses me off because he's the role that someone like me would be in at a real dinner party, except he's written by someone who hates him so he portrays that role as a misogynist Radical Truther asshole. He pulls out the usual tropes, such as [insert movie clip of Art comparing men to sex-crazed dogs who can't control their urges] and he coins the phrase "The Monogamy Denial" which is the title of his book, stating that all people are inherently non-monogamous but men especially are because evo-psych biological urges, must hump everything, reasons. Blegh. My partner watching this with me curled his lip at the character and called him "smarmy". Art is everything I detest about the circles I run in - skeptical, atheist, non-monogamous, alt-sex lifestylers basically using pop evo-psych to justify being shitheads and walking all over people's dignity in the name of "honesty" and "nature". Remember, this is the opening scene. Things go downhill from here. So Art starts spouting his "monogamy is unnatural" bullshit (and I say that as someone who doesn't believe that the human species is inherently monogamous even if some individuals are), and immediately, I mean, with no lead up, the photographer lady gets righteously pissed off, saying "are you insinuating that we are not monogamous, what the hell do you know?" [inserted movie clip of Claudia angrily reacting to Art and leaving the party early] So everyone tries to calm her down and change the subject, but Art keeps pushing the issue, and the party breaks up early. Each couple goes home ruminating about his "truths" in their own fashion, some wondering if men really are inherently non-monogamous (men, not people, men), some angry at the implications, some taking pity on him and trying to armchair psychoanalyze him as having some sort of pathetically bad experience to make him bitter. Next we're introduced to a whole supporting cast of detestable characters designed to support Art's position. The lawyer's brother, for example, is a chubby-chaser - a guy who fetishizes fat women - with an anger management problem. He manages to make a totally reasonable position of someone who relishes the physical experience of sex with different body types and still come off sounding like a disgusting creep. He is also opposed to marriage and believes that monogamy is unnatural. Of course. The feminist man, Sam, is a chef in a restaurant who has a coworker of some sort who fulfills the role of the misogynistic guy who believes women are just cum receptacles there for his pleasure. Sam is, to his credit, outwardly and outspokenly appalled at misogynist's behaviour. But when a feminist woman coworker pops her head in to complain, she had to be written as a bitchy feminazi who disapproves of both men and yells at both of them even though Sam was clearly and verbally opposed to Misogynist Man's behaviour. Then the writers reduce her to a sex object by having her stomp off in a huff, still mad at both men, while Misogynist Man leers at her butt and comments on it, and Sam can't help himself from gazing at it walking away either. Yes, I said "it" and not "her". Because the camera zooms in on her ass. The rest of the movie is a series of scenes of the men being unable to remain fidelitous to their wives in various contexts, each one questioning whether or not this really "counts" as cheating. Does it count as cheating if he masturbates to porn and goes to blue movies? Does it count as cheating if it's a happy ending handjob at a massage parlor? Does it really count as cheating if you pick up a hot chick at a hockey game and take her back to her house and loudly fuck her while your buddy sits in the living room with her friend in awkward silence? The entire movie is nothing but a reinforcement of gender role bullshit. But, remember, the original premise was that monogamy is unnatural for everyone, so the women don't get away scott-free either. It's just that men, apparently, are more likely to cheat and to do so for purely physical reasons (as we're reminded continuously from the justification monologues throughout the film) and women have more complicated reasons for cheating or not cheating. So, enter the wives. Claudia, the photographer, waits until nearly the end of the movie to seduce Art. Remember, the woman who blew up with no build-up at even the insinuation that she wasn't monogamous? Specifically at the guy she is now fucking? So Art asks her about it, and she admits that she and her husband have a DADT arrangement (that's Don't Ask Don't Tell). He comments on the hypocrisy of her defending monogamy at the dinner party and she just says that her sex life is no one else's business. Then we learn that Art doesn't actually believe any of the stuff he was spouting at the party, he just said them to see what the reactions would be for research for his next book. The lawyer's wife (and former mistress), the one who seems like a freaking Disney character with her big innocent eyes and adamant attachment to fidelity and Twue Wuv, develops a crush on her professor in med school and they have an affair. Meanwhile, the lawyer is wracked with Jewish guilt over the happy ending at the massage parlor and the handjob from the friend while waiting awkwardly for his buddy to finish having sex in the next room. So he tells his wife about it, she freaks out, he reminds her that she wanted complete honesty, and she graciously forgives him while warning him how difficult it will be to gain her trust back. She never once admits to her infidelity, which was technically worse because she had intercourse but was somehow justifiable because it involved "feelings". Or something. Sammy, the pregnant fiancée of the feminist chef Sam who likes porn, meanwhile finds one of his videos and completely freaks out thanks to her man-hating sister who was cheated on once and now thinks all men are pigs and will cheat. The sister convinces her that porn automatically leads to real sex. So Sammy hires a detective to follow Sam around and discovers his penchant for blue movie theaters. Convinced that he must also be having sex with women all over the place, they set him up with an "operative" who is "prepared to go all the way" to get the evidence for his cheating. But, as Sammy watches from the surveillance van down the street (seriously), Sam proves himself to be worthy of her love and doesn't bow to the seduction, confessing his devotion and love to his beautiful pregnant fiancée. This movie reinforces gender roles, evo-psych justifications, a cynical view of love, and yet still manages to also reinforce monogamy and social expectations. All the couples remain in their couples, only with lies and secrets and guilt between them, and they all end smiling at Sam & Sammy's wedding in a veneer of happiness with the implication that all is as it should be - cheating husbands and all. I think the best summary for this movie was given by my then-partner when I asked him what he thought. He said, "It was almost a good movie. It had a budget, it had decent actors, it had locations and nice sets, it had some funny moments. It was almost a good movie except for that bit in the middle. Where they talked."   polyamory; polyamorous; poly; polya; polyam; poly-ish; nonmonogamy; non-monogamy; open marriage; open relationship; adultery; cheating; affair; infidelity; mistress; movie review

There are so many movies called "Three"!  Is this one that actually has polyamory in it?  Is there really an FMF triad like on the cover?  Are any of the characters polyamorous?  Or is this just another cheating cautionary tale or threesome gone wrong story?  Joreth reviews this particular "Three" to find out! www.PolyishMovieReviews.com    There are several movies by this name. Every time someone recommends a movie to me called Three, I go to look for it on Netflix and half a dozen movies pop up, and I can't tell which one is which. So it wasn't until about 10 minutes in that I realized I had already watched this movie. But I haven't reviewed it yet, so I guess it wasn't a total waste of an hour and a half. I'll be honest, from the Netflix description, I didn't have high hopes for this movie. The very summary makes it sound like a torn-between-two-lovers-and-forced-to-make-a-choice movie. And that is what it was. But the title screen on the DVD is incredibly misleading. It shows an FMF threesome that never happens in the movie. The movie was interesting, and it certainly had a lot to say on the subject of homosexuality and coming out, so I might recommend it on that basis. But it wasn't poly. Tito and Elsie are unhappily married. Tito is an arrogant, entitled, selfish asshole and Elsie is incredibly fearful - she moves through life on the path of least courage. Tito is screwing a colleague, Susan, who is desperately trying to steal Tito away from Elsie, even though Tito has never given her any reason to think he would leave his wife (I think he's getting off on the idea of cheating even more than the sex itself, and leaving his wife for her would take that away). Before Elsie married Tito (at her mother's insistence), she had a secret lesbian relationship with Alice, the "tomboy" next door. Elsie couldn't handle the idea of her mother finding out or experiencing any sort of cultural shame for being gay, so she bowed to pressure and broke up with Alice and married Tito. But Alice has cancer and wants Elsie back - not just because she wants her hot lovin' but because Alice very strongly believes in personal authenticity and coming out and being true to oneself. She worries that Elsie will never come out and will continue to live a lie, unhappy in her marriage until she dies, if Alice doesn't inspire her to be more courageous. But, just to add another layer of complexity, Alice has been living with another lover (whose name I never caught) who stays with her through everything, caring for her, giving her the shots & IV drips, even being with her on her deathbed and yet is tossed aside as soon as Elsie walks in the door. When Elsie leaves her husband for Alice, she manages to live with Alice and her now-former lover for 9 months before even bothering to ask the lover who she is to Alice or what their relationship was before she came along. So, there's no polyamory happening here. Tito cheats on his wife. His wife leaves him for her ex-girlfriend. The ex-girlfriend dumps her own partner to get back together with the wife. And everyone is contemptuous and disrespectful to the poor ex-lover still living in the house, caring for her terminally sick love. And the story is told from her point of view. There were some really interesting bits about Tito getting over his homophobia, coming out to Elsie's mother, raising a child in a gay community, parents who don't love each other trying to co-parent and live together, courage, fear, and personal growth. Anyone interested in movies on these kinds of subjects might want to check out this movie. But I didn't like any of the characters, and as regular listeners might know by now, if I can't empathize with the characters, then I have trouble enjoying the story. At least this time there was a reason for putting together the main couple when they didn't actually like each other. Usually movies do that and expect us to just accept that they're in a happy relationship that we should be rooting for (or that they're not currently in a romantic relationship but that we should be hoping that they get into one in spite of not liking each other). So I didn't have any trouble wondering why they were together since they didn't like each other. I just thought that everyone did really foolish things and it was completely obvious to me why everyone was unhappy. Somehow, that made it much easier to sit through than movies that give happy endings to people who totally fuck up their own lives or who vilify or sacrifice those who do something contrary when they should have been happy.   polyamory; polyamorous; poly; polya; polyam; poly-ish; nonmonogamy; non-monogamy; love triangle; adultery; cheating; affair; infidelity; mistress; lesbian; queer; LGBTQ; LGBTQIA+; movie review

Can a movie with blockbuster names be a poly movie?  Joreth reviews Bandits with Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton, and Cate Blanchet to see if there is any polyamory in this star-studded film. www.PolyishMovieReviews.com  It's past time that I did a review of Bandits, but for some reason I keep putting it off. This is a quirky story of 2 mismatched bank robbers and the woman who comes between them. And it's a poly movie, and one of my favorite movies, poly or no. Bruce Willis plays a gruff, stoic, spontaneous bank robber with a temper problem named Joseph. We first meet him in prison, where he's shackled to Terry (played by Billy Bob Thornton), a neurotic, hypochondriac, obsessively compulsive thief who can't shut the fuck up. Joseph wants to escape, but being shackled to Terry necessarily requires Terry's cooperation. One day, in the prison yard, Joseph spontaneously makes their escape, much to over-planning Terry's annoyance. But escape they do, and they continue their bank robbing career once on the outside. But then Terry starts running the numbers, and decides that the risk of being re-captured is not worth the traditional bank jobs that they usually do. So he comes up with the idea to visit the bank manager's house the night before, and then enlist the manager's unwilling cooperation when he opens the bank the next morning, before the customers or any employees arrive. This works out so well, that it earns them the moniker The Sleepover Bandits. During a nearly botched escape, Terry ends up running into Kate ... or rather, Kate ends up running into Terry. Literally. Kate is a flighty, also neurotic, lonely housewife with a mischievous streak who is fleeing from her loveless marriage when she stumbles upon the exciting life of the notorious bank robbers. And so follows their tale, as Kate gets to know the two men independently, and each of the men gets to know her, and all their respective relationships flourish and flounder amidst the backdrop of their turbulent career choices. It's a really interestingly shot film, with a mixture of classic action film sequences, "buddy robber" scenes, romance scenes, and "mockumentary" scenes with footage from an interview that the Sleepover Bandits give to a journalist about their fame and exploits intermixed among the regular movie scenes. The characters seem a little superficial and one-dimensional, but I think we get to see a little depth as the plot progresses, and I, at least, started to care about the characters about halfway through (although it was hard for me to empathize much with them - Terry just bugs the shit out of me). I was already poly by the time this movie came out, but I did not realize this was a poly movie before I saw it. I think I was actually a bit trepidatious about seeing it, because I don't tend to go in much for artsy, indie films and I think I had the impression that this was that kind of movie. But I ended up really liking it in spite of myself, and I liked the strain that Kate found herself under as she realized that she loved two men who were very different from each other and gave her very different kinds of relationships - relationships that she could not possibly have with the other one and relationships that both brought value to her life for their uniqueness and individuality. It would be nice, though, for a movie heroine caught between two lovers to not declare that, mixed together, the combined men make up the perfect man. I really don't approve of the Frankenpartner sentiment to polyamory. But I think her point is that each man is unique & she can't get from one what she gets from the other, and I think that point comes across clearly. I recommend watching this movie. We showed it at our local Poly Movie Nights, and it was a big hit with the whole audience.   polyamory; polyamorous; poly; polya; polyam; poly-ish; nonmonogamy; non-monogamy; ethical non-monogamy; consensual non-monogamy; ENM; CNM; open relationship; triad; love triangle; vee; mfm; relationship; polycule; throuple; thruple; movie review

Can a movie set in the '60s and filmed in the '90s really feature a polyamorous quad?  Joreth reviews The Blood Oranges for a little-seen poly structure to see if there is any polyamory in it at all. "Husband and wife Cyril and Fiona explore new ground and new relationships when they take a vacation in the tropics. While on holiday, the pair meets another couple, Hugh and Catherine, and their three children. Relationships become intertwined when Cyril and Fiona lose their inhibitions and seek sexual intimacy with Hugh and Catherine in this erotic drama." So Netflix says. It sounded pretty promising, and yeah, I think this fits under the "poly-ish" heading. Cyril and Fiona are clearly in an open marriage with both of them openly supportive of each others' interests. Honestly, though, I was surprised to see that this movie was made in 1999. It just felt like another '60s sexual revolution type of film, not the least of which was a slightly predatory personality from Fiona and a pseudo-sex cult leader attitude from Cyril, but also it just kind of looked like it - the cinematography and lack of a soundtrack, I think. Here's what I liked about the movie: An attempted quad instead of unicorn hunters looking for the hot bi babe The newbie love interest struggles with deeply indoctrinated beliefs of fidelity & ownership Neither the polyamory nor society around them was responsible for ending the relationships How non-traditional parental relationships affects children old enough to have internalized society's messages about relationships A couple not letting their pre-existing relationship make the other relationships "secondary" and doing what's best for the family instead of "protecting" their couplehood at all costs Here's what I didn't like about the movie: The characters I like serious dramas, but I'm really picky about them. I don't tend to like movies that I describe as "very French" - filled with unnecessary angst and smoking and existential ennui and desolation. Unfortunately, in movies that explore alternative sexuality, if it's a drama and not a comedy or something uplifting, I too often find it's one of these types of dramas. Such was this movie for me. I didn't like the movie, but that's based solely on personal taste. One might say that I have no taste, since I'd rather be watching cheesy '80s sitcoms, so there you go. I'm extremely character-driven in my entertainment preferences and I just didn't like the characters. I found Cyril to be pompous, elitist, and blind to his own privilege, even if I happened to appreciate his understanding that possession should not be part of interpersonal relationships. I thought Fiona was selfish, predatory, and naively idealistic. Catherine, I just felt sorry for and wished she would grow a backbone. And Hugh! I have no idea why anyone liked Hugh. He was controlling, possessive, self-righteous, arrogant, dismissive, condescending, and filled with disgust. There is one scene in particular (that I won't describe so as to not give away spoilers) where he is such a hateful asshole that I immediately disliked every other character just because they overlooked Hugh's behaviour and attitudes. Even after he did something that I would have found unforgivable, it was everyone else's primary desire to make him feel better and keep him a part of the family. But they were trying to build a strong family, and for that, I have to give this movie credit ... or at least say that it's a poly-ish movie. Cyril and Fiona were not the typical movie couple, where the guy wants some hot chick & talks his wife into it. They both seemed equally enamored of the other couple & welcomed them and their children into their home. Cyril in particular tried very hard to reach out to the children and soothe the oldest, who noticed something going on and seemed resentful. Cyril and Fiona both did everything in their power to help Catherine during her own time of emotional crisis without putting their own relationship above everything else. So, I'd recommend this movie if dramas are your thing and you want to see a poly movie that doesn't end with polyamory destroying everyone's lives and, in fact, the polyamory is beneficial to providing an emotional support structure in difficult times. www.polyishmoviereviews.com   polyamory; polyamorous; poly; polya; polyam; poly-ish; nonmonogamy; non-monogamy; ethical non-monogamy; consensual non-monogamy; ENM; CNM; opening up; open marriage; open relationship; quad; polygamy; relationship; polycule; wife swapping; partner swapping; free love; movie review

How well does this particular fan recommendation hold up to Joreth's poly critique? Sometimes I think that maybe I'm actually speaking a different language from everyone else, and maybe I have some kind of universal translator or babelfish so that I can't tell, but that the translator is buggy or slightly off in some ways. Because people don't seem to use words in the same way that I do. Even with a dictionary, people use words differently, and I find that I am constantly having semantics arguments because we can't discuss a topic until we are all on the same page about what the words we are using mean. One of those words is polyamory. I'm a pretty big proponent of using the definition of a word that the person who made up the word uses. In some cases, I think the Argument from Authority is a good one. If you invented or coined a term, then you get to decide what it means. This is even more important, to me, the younger the word is. And if the word was invented or coined within the same generation (i.e. roughly 30-ish years) and the coiners are still alive, then there shouldn't be any debate about "living languages" and so forth. So, to me, polyamory is about having or wanting multiple simultaneous romantic relationships in which all parties consent to the arrangement. That means that they all know about it and agree to it willingly, not grudgingly. If you don't say yes, it's not consent. If you are coerced, it's not consent. If someone uses their position of authority over you, it's not consent. If you are not aware of any other options, it's not consent. If you are not allowed the opportunity to back out, it's not consent. And so on. Polyamory is also, to me, more about building intentional families (even if some of those relatives are "extended" relatives) than in experiencing sexual encounters (also explicit in the definition - a word's definition is not necessarily limited solely to it's literal translation, the intent and cultural context of a word is also taken into account). So when someone suggests a movie to me that they claim has polyamory in it, I am now highly dubious about that claim. I have been recommended all manner of cheating and swinging and other non-monogamous movies, but very rarely do I find actual polyamory in these films. Every so often, a cheating movie might make it into my Poly-ish Movie List because I believe from the context of the story that it would be polyamorous if not for the circumstances, like the era or culture, that prevents the characters from openly declaring their relationships that are, nonetheless, loving (like Same Time, Next Year) - I basically feel that the characters are poly but possibly trapped somewhen/somewhere that they can't express it properly. Many times, it's hard for me to really quantify why a particular borderline movie is poly and why this other one isn't. It usually boils down to tone, and a vague sense of "moralizing" that I may or may not get from the storytellers. This was the problem I had with The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I kept getting told that it was a poly movie, but there was just something wrong with its tone. Tomas is a philanderer who seems to be afraid of commitment and keeps his emotional entanglements to a minimum. Basically, he has sex with lots of women a few times and drops them when they start becoming "serious". Except for one woman, Sabina, who basically seems to have the same outlook as Tomas, in that she hightails it outta there as soon as a guy starts getting "serious" about her. They appear to have a mutual respect in addition to their mutual attraction and mutual passion because of their shared interest in not letting anyone get close to them. Ironically, that barrier that they both erect to keep people out is what ties them together. Along comes Tereza, an innocent young girl who manages to, as far as I could tell, guilt her way into Tomas' life. She shows up on his doorstep with no place to stay, and so breaks his rule about kicking every girl out before morning. After a whole bunch of these mornings, he finally ends up marrying her. This is yet another case of a couple who doesn't seem to have anything in common and doesn't seem to like each other very much. At least, the director and/or screenwriter didn't establish their relationship very well. We know what Tomas likes in Tereza - she's female - but we don't really see what brings the two such different characters together. She's young, naive, innocent, apolitical, and extremely jealous and insecure. He's worldly, sophisticated, educated, misogynistic, contemptuous of most people, and a horndog. Other than the fact that their bits fit together, I couldn't understand their relationship at all. Tomas continues to cheat on Tereza throughout their relationship, and every time Tereza catches him at it, she throws a huge fit that borders on emotional blackmail. I think she's probably depressive to the point of suicidal. Not that I'm defending Tomas either - Tereza doesn't consent to an open relationship, so he's cheating. Period. She deserves better. There is only one scene that could even possibly be confused for a pro-poly scene. And I have to say that I didn't even interpret the scene this way until someone else suggested it. I still don't see the scene this way, but I can at least see how someone else might. Tereza suspects Tomas of having an affair with Sabina, who has been introduced to the new Mrs. Tomas as his friend & occasionally socializes with them. So Tereza, who is told to get into photographing naked women if she wants to be taken seriously as a professional photographer, approaches Sabina to be Tereza's first nude model. Sabina, a confident, sexually liberated woman in the '60s, is the only person Tereza knows who might even consider the proposal. So we have a scene where Tereza photographs Sabina, and eventually Sabina (who is also a photographer and artist) talks Tereza into posing nude for her in return. The two women, who have before been very awkward together, gain some sort of comfort and familiarity with each other through this mutual nude photography session. I didn't see how this was poly, really. The argument was made that it was basically two metamours who had finally reached out to each other and were able to get past the jealousy to see each other maybe as how their mutual partner could see them. The reason why I didn't interpret the scene this way is because Tereza had only suspected Sabina as being Tomas' lover (he never confirmed) and neither woman spoke of anything relationship-oriented at all. So maybe they did get past some of their jealousy and learned to see each other as people, and maybe this was a bonding, and even a learning moment for both of them. But it was still cheating and still a secret and Tereza still never approved of Tomas' philandering, and the two women never saw each other again on screen. This movie was not about a poly vee. This was a political commentary on the war in Europe and the Soviet invasion of Czecheslovakia, using the characters as vehicles for the commentary. The movie was brilliantly made, using real footage and photographs from the invasion itself, as chronicled by art students at the university at the time, and staging the characters on the sets to flip back and forth seamlessly between the real archival footage and the movie. This was the first and best comprehensive collection of the record of the invasion ever made. This movie was based on the book by the same name, which is also widely touted as a brilliant piece of literature. It was critically acclaimed, although, like any book-based movie, many were disappointed with the conversion to film. So I recommend this movie if history and foreign films and high-brow media are your thing. I just didn't feel that it was particularly poly. SPOILERS: Tomas and Tereza eventually settle down when Tereza convinces him to leave the city (and, hence, his ready supply of willing adulterers) and live in the country, and they seem to be happily monogamous for a time. So when a guy who can't remain sexually fidelitous is finally able to only by removing his access to other women, and when the couple is shown as finally happy when said other women are removed from the picture, I have a hard time accepting the badge of "polyamory" or even "poly-ish" that the movie has been given. It comes too close to "open relationships are a train-wreck and everyone is happier when they are monogamous" to me. Sabina does appear to have remained a close friend of Tomas, right up until the end, but even she was removed from his reach, and she had to love him from afar. She also proclaimed herself as "their closest friend", meaning a close friend to both Tomas and Tereza, but "close friend" from across the globe and not having seen or spoken to them in years is really tough for me to stretch into "poly". This is one of the few artsy-foreign films that I didn't dislike for being too artsy & foreign, and I'd like to read the book. I might have liked the movie better if I had just come across it on my own instead of having it recommended to me as a potential poly film, because I watched it through a filter of hopes and expectations of poly content. I will not be including this on the Poly-ish Movie List, but it was an interesting movie and I'm glad I saw it. www.PolyishMovieReviews.com    polyamory; polyamorous; poly; polya; polyam; poly-ish; nonmonogamy; non-monogamy; couple privilege; adultery; cheating; affair; infidelity; mistress; couple; movie review

Can Spike Lee's inaugural film really be a poly movie as everyone claims?  Joreth watches this groundbreaking movie to find out! There's something about student films and classic French movies that just do not work for me. Maybe it's the penchant for black and white even in a color era, or maybe it's the frequent complete lack of musical score or soundtrack, or maybe it's the excruciatingly slow pace and shitty acting, or maybe it's all those years I spent as a film student, forced to watch the painfully "artistic" films by my peers and dragged to pretentious indie art houses to see confusing avant garde movies. I don't know, whatever it is, they're just not my cuppa tea. And Spike Lee's debut movie fits squarely in the middle of that je ne sais quoi that makes my eyes glaze over. But you might have different tastes. She's Gotta Have It is another Netflix recommendation that I was expecting to be misleading at best. Plus, the black community, at least as it's portrayed in pop media, has never been sympathetic towards multiple partnerships, especially if it's the woman with the multiple partners. Nola is in love with 3 very different men. At first I thought it would be another cheating movie where the girl would eventually find The One (who, of course, was not one of the guys she was fucking, because sex is dirty, or something). But then I discovered that she was honest about her "friends", as she calls them, so I thought it was more like Café Au Lait, complete with detestable characters who didn't actually seem to like each other. It did feel a lot like a Brooklyn version of that movie - none of the guys liked each other, I didn't like any of them, and no one had any redeeming features to make me understand why she liked them or why they liked her. I kept waiting for her to get pregnant so they could have a Dysfunctionally Ever After ending. But then I noticed something. I noticed that the arguments the guys used to try and convince Nola to be monogamous were the exact same shit I got over the years from cowboys. When you're not monogamous living in a monogamous world, and you don't know anyone else like you to date and can only draw from the mono pool, this movie is exactly what you might get. I'm having trouble categorizing this one. On the one hand, she's honest about her multiple partners and claims to love them. On the other hand, they hate each other and are all competing to be "the winner" - the sole object for her affection. On yet another hand, this is very much what it feels like for some of us to be poly (or something not monogamous) without a community or support or understanding from anyone since no one else is like us. On the final hand, it was yet another movie with characters who didn't really like their dating partners. I think I want to include this on the Poly-ish Movie List because I think a lot of polys go through similar arguments before they find a community, and I think it's a valid part of the broader story of what it's like to be poly. But this was not a story of a poly relationship. If anything, it was the story of a poly-ish woman stuck in a mono world. www.PolyishMovieReviews.com    polyamory; polyamorous; poly; polya; polyam; poly-ish; nonmonogamy; non-monogamy; ethical non-monogamy; consensual non-monogamy; ENM; CNM; open relationship; ethical slut; solo polyamory; solo poly; solopoly; sopo; movie review

Polyamory in the wild?  Can a TV show that isn't about polyamory at all really have an episode with polyamorous characters in an open marriage and treat the subject well?  Joreth reviews an episode of The Mentalist to find out!   Here's a new one! I find poly movies to review by one of 3 ways: 1) It's on a poly list somewhere on the internet; 2) Someone learns that I review poly movies & suggests a movie to me; 3) Netflix suggests a "similar title" based on me adding known poly movies to my queue. What has never happened, to the best of my recollection, is me stumbling upon a poly show completely by accident. The closest I've come is watching movies or TV shows that are strong poly analogues - shows that are not explicitly poly, but, other than the sex, they might as well be. For example, Sex And The City (the TV show, not the movies), a story about 4 female, non-sexual (with each other) best friends who are actually each others' soulmates and form an intentional family of sorts between them. Think of Cunning Minx's Poly Weekly podcast episode about "What Would Monogamists Do?" where her basic premise is that, what we do isn't all that different, and if you're stumped for how to deal with a situation, just ask how you would handle it if you were monogamous, and the answer will probably be very similar. I say all the time, "that's not a poly problem, that's a people problem." But I'm getting off topic. Stumbling across actual polyamory in popular media with no notice, right. As regular followers undoubtedly know, I am also a skeptic. In addition to my collection of poly media, I am also building a collection (mostly an online list, but I will slowly collect the physical media too) of skeptic media - movies, music, podcasts, books, etc. I like lists and categories, and just like the poly community, the skeptic community suffers from a lack of specific-to-us art & entertainment. Much like the poly community, the skeptic community not only suffers from a lack of art, but is drowning under a deluge of "art" that promotes the antithesis and even outright reviles everything we stand for. What both the poly and the skeptic communities have in common, is that they are both subcultures struggling to find a toe-hold in a society that has built into its very institutions, its foundations, a support structure for mindsets & philosophies that are both opposite and intolerant of these subcultures themselves. But again, I'm getting off topic. All this is to say that I've been watching The Mentalist. It's a TV cop drama about a guy who was a con artist using the label "psychic" to bilk people out of money by making shit up about their dead relatives, and other related cons, until he offered his "psychic services" to the police on a serial murder case. In his arrogance, he did what media-hungry con artists (*cough* Sylvia Brown *cough*) do, and that was to spout off on television about his "work" on the case, insulting the serial killer and pissing him off. So the serial killer, Red John, targeted Jayne's (the "psychic") wife & daughter, and made damn sure that Jayne knew who had done it and why. Now we come to the actual start of the series, where Patrick Jayne works as a consultant for the California Bureau of Investigation, not as a phony psychic, but using his skill and expertise in deception to help catch criminals. Although he closes cases left and right and has been a tremendous asset to the CBI, his sole motivation for working with them is to get close enough to the Red John case that he can find Red John and kill him, and the other closed cases are merely incidental. He knows that he will go to jail, and possibly get the death penalty, but revenge is what drives him and helping people are a side effect. Patrick Jayne is an atheist and a skeptic, and every episode highlights, not only the kinds of things that people do to trick other people, but also how we can fool ourselves. The character states outright, unashamedly and in no uncertain terms, that there is no god (episode 2), and there are no psychics, faith healers, people who can talk to the dead, none of that (almost every episode). He is James Randi, Jamey Ian Swiss, Penn & Teller, and Joe Nickell, all wrapped up in a slick, charismatic, borderline sociopathic, TV protagonist package. With expensive suits and vests. You can see why I might like him, yes? So, what does this have to do with polyamory? Nothing, and that's why I was caught by surprise and why I liked the episode as much as I did. In Season 2, there is an episode called Code Red. It takes place in a bio-warfare lab where one of the research scientists goes into the containment area to do her work, opens the scary briefcase of deadly toxin, finds one of the vials missing, looks around, and sees it lying, open, on the floor. Knowing she has only a few hours left to live, she hops on her fancy research computer there in the containment lab (which is also connected to the internet) and finds the "best detective" in town - Patrick Jayne - and calls to tell him that she has been murdered. So, Jayne does what TV detectives do, and rounds up the usual suspects, including her husband / co-researcher. In the course of the investigation, we find out that she has been having an affair with another researcher. Well, that makes Hubby the number one prime suspect, right? SPOILERS: Normally, it would, and the team immediately turns to the husband. Except they find out that the Mister & Missus have an open marriage. As they try to poke the husband for hints of jealousy, husband and wife both put their hands on the glass wall separating them and gaze soulfully into each others' eyes as they both admit to having "affairs" and to not being jealous. The husband goes so far as to explain that he loves his wife so much, that her happiness means everything to him, and her lover makes her happy, therefore he is happy about the lover. [inserted clip of the husband being happy for his wife having a lover] Well, at this point, the writers have a choice to make. They can, like they did in House, show the cracks in the facade of this weird "open marriage" and eventually lead us to some jilted lover or the husband who was secretly really jealous or even the wife taking her own life in some sort of guilty conscience and wanting to frame her husband or something. Because, of course, only "crazy" people have open marriages, right? Or they can use the open marriage as a red herring that eventually leads to a dead end, to distract us from who the real killer might be. Guess which path they took? I'll give you a hint. In fact, I already gave you the hint. I liked the episode. That's right, this was treated as something none of the main characters understood, but, as it didn't actually lead to the killer, it was immediately dismissed as unimportant. We met the wife's lover, and we also met a former lover of the husband. [inserted clip of the wife's lover describing his response to the unusual arrangement] The husband's former lover had nothing but kind words to say about both husband and wife, with no estrangement or bad feelings post-breakup. In fact, she revealed some of the social backlash that *she* received for participating in this unusual arrangement. [inserted clip of the husband's former lover describing the backlash] The relationship was not dysfunctional and did not contribute to the case, therefore, even if the main characters didn't "get it", it was not otherwise worthy of comment. There was also no relationship re-evaluation by the main characters in light of the events that eventually led to a reaffirmation of social norms. The polyamory (although they never used the word) was just a non-event. In order to explain why I liked the episode, I did have to reveal the red herring, which is a common plot twist in murder mysteries - any good one will have at least 2 before the crime is solved. So I ruined that for you. But I won't tell you what the actual resolution was, in case ya'll want to actually see the episode. And I do recommend watching the show. It's a TV drama, where complicated murder plots have to be set up and then revealed in an hour, so we have all the expected super-cop stuff that happens in TV shows, where warrants come in on time and fingerprints can be run in a couple of hours, and Jayne's deception expertise borders on real magic. Blah blah blah, I like the show anyway. And I liked this episode because an open marriage was introduced and ended up being, as far as I can tell, exactly what the couple said it was - a happy open marriage with satellite partners who didn't seem too harmed by their experiences with the couple - and their open marriage did not lead to death and destruction. Therefore, this was not one of those morality plays I hate so much that want to tell us "polyamory is doomed to fail, here, watch this train-wreck to see why". Jayne's detection skills seem supernatural, which could be bothersome to real skeptics. In fact, those of us who have spent time learning about "psychics" and their tricks know how sloppy they actually are. When you're not their target, when you are aware of what they're doing, and when you're looking for it, these people really aren't very good. They throw out a whole bunch of bullshit like spaghetti to see what sticks to the wall, and their "marks" do the work for them - remembering the hits and forgetting the misses, supplying the answers themselves but misremembering later, stuff like that. I mean, they're really not very good. Hell, I used to do it myself when I was a teenager, and I amazed everyone. Cold reading combined with an intuitive sense of people, relationship dynamics, and psychology can be a pretty amazing combination. But in the end, it's just a lot of guessing. Jayne, in the nature of television, skips over all the misses and just seems to "hit" every single time he opens his mouth. I know that's not how it works, and I don't care. He also breaks all the

Can a web series about a poly triad really be about polyamory?  Yeah, it probably is.  Joreth reviews the show Family, a creative endeavor by Teresa Greenan, a polyamorous filmmaker based out of Portland, OR.   I've posted about this show before on my personal blog, but I haven't done an official review yet. First of all, it's poly. It's about as poly as you get. Second, it's funny and weird. Third, I liked the first half better than the second half, but I liked it in general. Mostly it was just a couple of episodes in the second half that threw me off. Family is the brain-child of Terisa Greenan, a polyamorous filmmaker in Seattle, WA. The show follows the lives of Ben, Gemma, and Stuart, a live-in triad (I get the impression that it's sexually a Vee, but they all consider themselves equal family, so I'll call them a triad) that is very loosely based on Terisa's own life. Each episode is roughly 7 to 10 minutes long and posted on YouTube, although there are 2 or 3 "uncensored" episodes that are posted elsewhere that doesn't have YouTube's ridiculous nudity taboo. We start out by just meeting the three main characters and getting a feel for how their family is arranged. My favorite episode is the second one, where the triad goes to a poly meeting. If you've ever been to a poly meeting and have a sense of humor about yourself, this episode will have you laughing out loud at the caricature painting of poly people. The entire series is available as a DVD, and watching all episodes one after the other is about 3 hours, and worth the watch. The show covers things like adding new partners, getting along with metamours you don't like, meeting the "in-laws", dealing with conservative neighbors, and even dealing with the media. About halfway through, though, the show takes a turn for the weird. It introduces some pretty bizarre characters and some of the plots have less to do with polyamory and more to do with just having strange people squatting in your garage, with a bit of psychosis-masquerading-as-woo thrown in for flavor. But it doesn't leave polyamory completely, and the series finale brings it back with a very serious issue that our main characters have to face together as a family. The production quality is pretty good, and although the acting is a little wooden at times, it's not so terrible that it distracts from my enjoyment of the show in general. Really, the strange characters starting about 8 or 9 episodes in was more distracting than any less-than-stellar acting. I definitely recommend watching this show and, like Summer Lovers, no list of poly movies would be complete without it.   polyamory; polyamorous; poly; polya; polyam; poly-ish; nonmonogamy; non-monogamy; ethical non-monogamy; consensual non-monogamy; ENM; CNM; opening up; open marriage; open relationship; hierarchy; hierarchical; couple privilege; unicorn hunter; triad; vee; threesome; quad; mfm; fmf; mff; relationship; polycule; ethical slut; unicorn; couple; throuple; thruple; NSSO; movie review

Ah, French ... the culture of love!  Where "alternative" relationship structures are not frowned upon and the people understand the power of passion!  Or do they?  Joreth reviews a movie filmed in the Swingin' '60s on recommendation from a listener, to see if there is any polyamory or ethical non-monogamy in this film made during a time of exploration and experimentation, or if it will just confirm monogamous tropes.   Someone recommended this movie to me as a poly movie, and I can see why he did, but I have to disagree. I don't think this was a poly movie. I think this movie had a poly character in it, but the movie was not polyamorous. As far as enjoyment goes, my tastes run towards the banal and crude - I like action flicks and screwball comedies. I've written several times that I just don't get artsy films or foreign films made during the sexual revolution when things were all experimental and everything looked like the writers and directors were permanently on LSD.   So you might like this film if your tastes differ from mine - don't avoid seeing it on the basis of my personal enjoyment if you happen to be into artsy or foreign or '60s movies.  And as far as artsy or foreign or '60s movies goes, this wasn't even all that horrible. It didn't have the bizarre music or jump cuts of A Woman Is A Woman. But, probably because of the difference in cultures, I just didn't find this movie very interesting or the characters very compelling. I know, there's irony in that statement after admitting that I like movies like Caddyshack. But it's the truth, I found the movie just kind of blah. However, I can see other people enjoying it. I have lots of friends who like lots of movies that I don't enjoy, and I can see some of them really liking this film.  As for the poly stuff, the plot is about a married man who loves and adores his wife and kids, but who falls in love with another woman. According to my movie guidelines, cheating movies do not get added to the list, but a movie where the cheater genuinely loves both of his partners and there is some outside constriction preventing them from living honestly (such as social taboos) may be exempted and be added to the list. Francois loves Therese, his wife. He's very happy with his life; content. But then one day he meets Emilie. And he falls immediately in love. This was his first strike against him, for me. I don't much hold with the love-at-first-sight bullshit. I believe people can have instant attractions to each other, and then sometimes, by coincidence, they are attracted to people who happen to also be compatible to them, so the attraction-at-first-sight can blossom into a true love, and it is when that happens that people think they fell in love at first sight. But we don't hear epic tales of attraction-at-first-sight that then turns out poorly. It's a matter of confirmation bias, or the Fake Boob/ Fake Toupee fallacy (which says "I can always spot fake boobs/toupees because they look fake, except when they don't and I can't"). Love at first sight is real, except when it isn't. Anyway, so Francois falls in "love" with Emilie and immediately begins an affair with her. As I said, cheating movies don't make the list, but loving both partners might exempt it, so this movie could have been added to the list. The reason why it's not is because of the ending, which changes the whole tone of the movie into "multi-partner relationships are Wrong and Bad", and which I'll go into next, so spoilers ahead. SPOILERS: I think Francois is a selfish, egocentric jerk, more concerned with his own pleasure than anything else. Not liking a character, of course, is not grounds for expulsion from the list. But I didn't like him anyway. There isn't any indication in the movie that there is strong social pressure against turning this cheating V into an honest relationship. It just appears to be How Things Are Done, but there's no constriction or struggle against it. Francois is honest with his mistress, Emilie, about being married with kids and about being happy with his home life. He gives her no illusions that she might one day become Mrs. Francois. So he has that going for him. But he never expresses any interest or desire in trying to change things, and Emilie accepts that she is the mistress out of hand. However, the conversation we see between Emilie and Francois about this very thing is what makes me believe that Francois is actually poly and not just a cheating bastard who thinks with his prick, and is probably why the movie was recommended to me in the first place. He explains to Emilie how he loves both his wife and his mistress, that they're very different people and not interchangeable, and how happiness and love grows when there are more people. In this conversation, he says that it was only chance that led him to meet his wife first and Emilie second, but if they had met in the reverse order, he would probably be living with Emilie instead. Emilie doesn't try to talk him out of his marriage, doesn't pout and wish to replace the wife. She seems to accept her role as mistress without any fuss. So this is why I don't see any particular outside pressure because the characters don't seem to be stressed or pressured to conform - they seem to be content with the way things are. Later, Therese, the wife, notices that Francois has been extra happy of late and asks him why. Francois tries to get out of telling her, but she pushes, and he finally admits that there is another woman. Here we have another conversation that indicates he is obviously poly. He explains to Therese that his love for Emilie is not love taken away from Therese, that all his love for Theresa is still all his love for Theresa, it's just that extra love grew for Emilie when he met her. Therese's lines indicate that she is unhappy with this revelation, but her acting doesn't show any emotion at all. At the end of this 2 minute conversation, Theresa smiles and does a complete reversal, accepting that her husband has a mistress and instigating sex. At this point, I'm thinking, "ah, French films ... I just don't get them." But then came the part that took this movie out of the running for me. This conversation between Francois and Therese takes place in the woods on their weekly picnic with the kids. Francois takes a nap after the sex and wakes up to find Therese gone. After a frantic search through the woods, he finds a crowd of people surrounding the body of his wife, who drowned herself in the lake. Obviously, Therese did not accept sharing her husband. So we went from a movie with a poly guy stuck in a mono world with a wife and a mistress, to a movie with a selfish man whose personal pleasure was more important than the life or happiness of those around him, who cheated on his wife and kept the lie for as long as possible with no intentions of ever telling her except that she browbeat it out of him, and of said wife being so opposed to non-monogamy that she killed herself immediately, leaving her two toddler-age children alone with her cheating husband. This, to me, sets the tone for "non-monogamy is doomed to fail, here watch this train-wreck to see why" and takes this movie off the list. But it's not over yet. So then Francois is left alone with his kids. But because he's a single father in the '60s, it is determined that he cannot care for the kids himself and gives them up to his brother & sister-in-law (or is it sister & brother-in-law? Whatever, it's the kids' aunt and uncle) to raise. After finishing the rest of the summer without his wife, without his kids, and without his mistress (he stayed in the town he was working in, rather than going back to his home, where the mistress happened to also live), he decides that he wants his happiness back. So, conveniently, he has a young woman sitting around waiting for him and immediately sets her up in the role of substitute wife and mother. Emilie is just so happy to have Francois back in her life that she agrees to anything he wants. So Emilie steps in and Francois goes back to, basically, his original setup with a beautiful young wife and two young kids. And that's where it ends. This is why I find him to be selfish and egocentric. This whole movie is all about what Francois wants and he maneuvers everyone else around him to provide him with the life he wants without regard to everyone else's feelings. Emilie is now saddled with two toddlers, and we see a montage of Emilie feeding the kids, cleaning up after them, and being the dutiful housewife, whereas Therese was happy being the housewife, but the news of his infidelity made her so miserable that the only way she could see out was death. And in the end, Francois gets his life back with apparently no consequences except that he only has one woman instead of two, but he doesn't seem to mind all that much. By the end, the two women certainly seemed interchangeable to me, as Francois walks off into the sunset with his new wife and kids, all holding hands and strolling through the woods as if nothing has changed. Although Francois said a lot of very good poly lines, this movie had that elusive and hard-to-quantify tone that implies, to me, that non-monogamy is bad. As I said in the guidelines, it's not whether a movie ends happily or tragically, or whether a multi-adult relationship breaks up or stays together - it's what the movie says about non-monogamy that puts it on the poly-ish movie list or not. And, in spite of the main character clearly being about loving multiple people, this movie said to me that non-monogamy is cruel and wrong and that a happy nuclear family is the goal. I think one could defend some ambivalence in the message, with Francois being written sympathetically and not as a villain, so I don't actually recommend that ya'll avoid seeing this movie. It may be worth your time. But I think that the way things were wrapped up, ambivalence aside, the message was more pro-nuclear-family than pro-

A priest and a rabbi walk into an airport ... to meet their childhood best friend, a tomboy who has grown up into a beautiful, intelligent, independent, CEO.  As she visits her hometown and her two best friends, the men struggle with their growing romantic feelings for the same woman.  Could this really be a tale of polyamory, snuck into mainstream cinema?  Joreth reviews this Ben Stiller film to see if a polyamorous MFM vee could really make it onto the silver screen. I think this is one of those movies that Netflix recommended to me based on adding some other "similar" movie. I wasn't even entirely sure, with a title like that, if the movie was on the list to review for polyamory or for my list of skeptical movies. But with the happy surprise of the last movie I reviewed (A Strange Affair), I was actually kind of hopeful about this one. It was the story of two young men who were best friends as kids, growing up to become a Jewish rabbi and a Catholic priest, and the tomboy who was also their best childhood friend coming back into town as a successful, beautiful, corporate CEO. Because it had big names in it, the movie was most likely to be not-poly, but the setup had some potential. Unfortunately, it flopped. Not that the movie wasn't good (that's debatable, based on whether you like romantic comedies and movies that involve secrets), but it wasn't poly at all and it should have been. These two men love this woman - she was perfect for them both. But because the rabbi is allowed to have sex (and because he is being pressured to find a wife before he becomes head of his temple, or whatever), he immediately acts on his crush when the priest does not because of his vows of celibacy. So the woman spends about half the movie developing a romantic relationship with the rabbi, but keeping the priest safely in a box labeled "do not touch". And as anyone who spends any time in the world of the Monogamous Mindset knows, when a girl puts a guy in the Friend Box, he's stuck there for life, no matter how strong her feelings for him ... those feelings are just very strong "friend" feelings.* So, anyway, by the time the priest confesses his love and he has just about talked himself into leaving the priesthood for her, she is already thoroughly immersed in her relationship with the rabbi and totally oblivious to the priest's growing attraction to her. So the priest has to swallow his embarassment and go back to thinking of her like a sister. Now, you might be able to put this movie in the poly analogues category, because the three of them remain a strong group throughout the whole movie. The priest somehow manages to only be angry at having their relationship hidden from him, but he doesn't seem to feel any major jealousy. Well, there is the one fight where he gets drunk and yells at the rabbi that the rabbi stole his girlfriend, but mostly the priest seems to recover from his one- or two-night bender and move right into compersion for his two best friends, only nursing the hurt feelings of being lied to (which, frankly, I can totally understand). SPOILERS: The movie ends happily ... for a monogamous movie ... with the rabbi and the woman back together and the priest happy for them both and everyone is one big happy (monogamous & platonic) family. So it might fall under the category of poly analogues, where the only difference between them and us is that the woman would be sleeping with the priest too if it was us. But the reason why I didn't like this movie is because I get upset at plots that put a convenient excuse in the way, basically cockblocking a poly relationship from happening. Usually, it's death, but in this case, it was vows of celibacy. See, in the world of the Monogamous Mindset, a person can only romantically love two people at the same time if one of them is dead. It is only acceptable for a woman to say she loves two men if she is referring to her dead husband and her new husband, whom she met a safe time-distance after the death of her first husband of course. So most Monogamous Mindset movies conveniently kill someone off to allow the person torn in the middle the freedom to love them both and to force her to make a choice (*ahem*Pearl Harbor*ahem*). In this case, the priest's celibacy interfered with his ability to pursue a relationship with the love interest and his religious faith gave him something to hold onto after he was rejected and allowed him to remain in the picture. Whereas with most romcom love triangles, when the love interest rejects one guy for another, he just disappears somehow (maybe he's a bad guy & goes to jail, or maybe he's a good guy and walks away voluntarily, whatever). But because this is a Catholic priest, he is safe enough to keep in the picture and safe enough for both the rabbi and the woman to continue loving because his faith and his vows make him a non-threat. In any other movie where he isn't a priest, the "other love" has to disappear because you can't have the "other love" hanging around your new wife. Or something. This kind of thing can often be more tone than something specific. It's not very easy to quantify why some movies that end with a dyad still make it to the poly list but other movies don't. It's something in the way the actors and the director interpreted the lines that affect the tone of the movie. These movies never have a bit of dialog where someone says "Whew! It's a good thing my husband was killed in that war, so I can safely love you now without falling out of love with him or having to choose!" So, in Strange Affair, where one partner had a serious illness that sort of forced the characters into a position where a love triangle could happen, the tone of that movie didn't strike me as negative. It suggested, to me, that these are people who live in a world where nonmonogamy was Just Not Done, so they needed some kind of extraordinary circumstances to leave them open to the possibility, to give them the impetus to even consider something outside of the norm. But this movie just didn't have that same feeling. The way it was portrayed suggested more of a situation where three people happened to love each other in a world where they shouldn't, so they wrote the circumstances in such a way as to give them a monogamously acceptable way to do that. Basically, they had to neuter one of the characters in order to keep him in the picture, which isn't the same as killing him off, but it belies a tone sprung from the same well. I would love to see this movie re-written, where the priest and the rabbi are forced to re-evaluate their religious faiths in light of their growing love and attraction for the same woman (of no particular faith); where the priest and the rabbi both decide that their mutual love for this woman is incompatible with what they have been taught about religion, which then makes them question everything else about religion, and which leads them to the realization that they have always been a happy threesome so there is no reason why they can't continue to be a happy threesome in a much fuller sense of the word. I'd love to see this movie where the woman does not put one of her best friends into the Friend Box, but allows her love for them both to flourish, and where she comes to the same realization - that they have always worked best as the Three Musketeers, and breaking off into a dyad + 1 would change the dynamic in an unacceptable way. Unfortunately, that was not the movie I watched. *The Monogamous Mindset is a particular set of beliefs and viewpoints about monogamy that create the society in which I live. It does not mean that everyone who happens to be monogamous has this mindset, nor does it imply that people who are non-monogamous are automatically free of this mindset. The Monogamous Mindset is a set of rules and morés that dictate how relationships ought to be, many of which are inherently contradictory, selfish, and harmful. One such set of contradictory Monogamous Mindset rules is the rule that you are supposed to marry your best friend, but you're not allowed to be involved with your friends because that would ruin the friendship. And that's the one I'm referencing here. There is this weird rule out there that people, women especially, can't get romantically involved with their appropriately-gendered friends because that would automatically (or could most likely) ruin the friendship. Men's magazine articles and lonely guys online like to lament about the dreaded F word - "friend". Being called a friend is like the worst thing a woman can do to a man who is interested in her, because it means he will never have a chance. Of course *I* know this doesn't always happen and that there are exceptions, which is why I speak so condescendingly of the Monogamous Mindset and of this rule in particular, so please don't leave a comment like "but I married my best friend and it's the best relationship I've ever had!" I know, that's what makes this rule so irritating. But it's out there, and it permeates our society, and is quite possibly responsible for a significant amount of unnecessary heartache.   polyamory; polyamorous; poly; polya; polyam; poly-ish; nonmonogamy; non-monogamy; love triangle; vee; mfm; relationship; polycule; NSSO; movie review

Can a made-for-tv movie about a broken marriage have polyamorous content in it?  Joreth reviews this Judith Light film to see if there is any polyamory in a low-budget, '80s flick. The Netflix summary reads: "Judith Light stars in this sexy made-for-TV drama about a married woman who discovers that her husband of 23 years has been unfaithful. Just as she finds passionate love in another man's arms and prepares to divorce her husband, he suddenly has a stroke and becomes physically incapacitated. Will she move back in with her husband and take care of him ... even though she may risk losing her new lover?" When a movie arrives in my mailbox, I don't always remember if I put it in my queue because it was on a poly list somewhere or because Netflix recommended it to me as "similar" to the poly movies I just added to my queue. Judging by the summary, I assumed this was one of the latter types of "poly" movies. I sat down with this movie with the lowest of expectations, prepared to hate it for yet another cheating drama that would probably end with some kind of choice being made, and possibly even a choice I would think was toxic or foolish. I couldn't have been more wrong. And I love it when I'm wrong about things like this. First of all, the Netflix summary gets the order of events wrong, which is partially why I had such low expectations. Lisa is married to Eric, a charismatic, charming film maker who hasn't made a film in 7 years and spends his time gambling with the money he steals from his wife and fucking his secretary. We are introduced to this plot by meeting a loan shark's thug who has come to intimidate Lisa at work in the very first scene. Eric is the kind of guy I loathe - an idealistic dreamer who has absolutely no connection to reality and thinks his charm entitles him to break the rules and treat everyone around him like shit. But he's charming, and a lot of women find themselves in love with charming users like this. And once you're in love, it becomes all too easy to overlook, to excuse, and to rationalize, until you are trapped - held hostage by your own emotions. But Lisa finds her spine and prepares to leave now that both of her children are out of the house and in college. Except that the day she actually gets the courage to leave, she gets a call from her daughter saying that her husband has had a stroke. So Lisa returns home to care for her husband. What I really like about how the writer treated this situation is that he made no secret of the resentment that Lisa feels at being trapped again, by her love and her responsibility to Eric. She moves back home to care for him, but she is also excrutiatingly honest when she tells him that their marriage is over and she is only there because her conscience won't let her abandon a dying man who is also the father of her children. I found this to be a bold, courageous choice in storytelling because it is not socially acceptable to be "mean" to someone who is sick and/or dying. Being struck with a crippling illness doesn't erase that person's past as a jerk, and it doesn't necessarily change them, automatically, into a nice person either. It might be inconvenient timing, but leaving someone or disliking someone who has had a near-fatal incident doesn't necessarily make that person a bad person. And that's a really bitter pill for some people to swallow. The rest of the movie follows Lisa as she attempts to recover from the financial ruin her husband has put her into with his gambling while now being financially responsible for his medical care, and two people with a painful history learning to live together with a debilitating and life-threatening illness. Now for the poly stuff. Enter Art, the mechanic who takes pity on Lisa when her car breaks down and she tries to work out a payment plan because she can't afford to pay the bill. Art starts doing stuff around the house for her to make her life a little easier. And in the process, he falls in love. I won't give away the ending or the details, but what transpires is a very touching story of a woman who learns to fall back in love with her husband while discovering love with someone new. And, even more touching is the story of a man who loves his wife but who is ultimately selfish and is then forced to re-evaluate his priorities and deal with the fact that she loves another man. This is also the very touching story of a man who falls in love with a married woman, who shows us what true love is - the desire to see another person happy and to facilitate that happiness, whatever it means. If she still loves her husband, then her husband must be kept around and must be honored as the man she loves. I think this is a good example of the kinds of situations that people can relate to - a bridge between the poly and mono worlds. It's not really a poly analogue because she flat out says that she is in love with two men. We see the tension between the metamours, we see the disapproval of the children and the neighbors, we see the resentment of being held back, and the loving amazement when poly works well. It's just a story told within the framework of a situation that non-polys might be able to sympathize with ... a setup that puts a monogamous person in a very difficult position where things are no longer black and white. What do you do when your husband & father of your children is an asshole but you still love him? What do you do when you are trapped in a marriage that is over but love finds your doorstep anyway? What do you do when you are financially strapped and alone and someone offers no-strings-attached help simply because he thinks you could use it? What do you do when you fall in love with someone you are not supposed to love? This was one of those poly-ish type movies - a situation that lives on the fuzzy borders of what is and is not polyamory. But the tone of the movie, the scenes between the metamours, the complexity of emotion, the selfless version of love, all make me feel that this movie fits quite squarely into the polyamory category in spite of any debate over which configurations really "count". I recommend this movie, both for the poly-ish movie list and to watch.   polyamory; polyamorous; poly; polya; polyam; poly-ish; nonmonogamy; non-monogamy; open marriage; open relationship; love triangle; vee; adultery; cheating; affair; infidelity; mfm; relationship; polycule; couple; throuple; thruple; movie review

Can a mainstream movie about an "open marriage" really have some polyamory in it?  Joreth reviews the movie Fling, starring Brandon Routh, Steve Sandvoss, and Courtney Ford, to answer that very question.   This movie caused me quite some consternation because it had equal parts of "include" and "do not include" on the Poly-ish Movie Criteria List. In fact, it was so ambivalent that it prompted me to write the Guidelines post which became the first episode of this podcast, to help me decide whether or not to include it. I have decided that it should be included on this list, but I am very torn about that decision. This movie started out as the very first "include" criteria - which is a relationship that appeared happy and functional between two people who enjoyed additional sexual partners besides each other. This movie ended with a tone that seemed to me to be suggesting that the only people who would be interested in open relationships are people who are immature, selfish users, and afraid to commit. The big problem I had with the movie is that the first half and the second half didn't mesh well. It almost seemed to me as though it was written by someone who knew people in happy and successful open relationships, who wrote the characters faithfully and well, but who had a personal belief that open relationships were wrong and so wrote an ending that he believed people in open relationships ought to have. Naturally, in order to explain, I have to give out spoilers. But I'll leave a good deal of the details out so you can watch the movie without feeling as though you've already watched it. SPOILERS: Mason and Samantha have an open relationship and have been together for several years now. We start the movie with the two of them living together and getting ready to go to a wedding. At the wedding, both of them hook up with other wedding guests and then come back to their hotel room together, apparently totally comfortable with the fact that they were each with other people. They told each other everything and they fell asleep in each other's arms. Later, Samantha starts dating someone (as opposed to just fucking someone) and she has to explain how her relationship with Mason works. I think this is a very valuable couple of scenes. Samantha is adamant that she is happy, that her relationship with Mason is secure and functional, that she is not a victim and chooses her life, and that jealousy is a symptom of insecurity. She faces someone who is disgusted and contemptuous of the idea of a woman having multiple sexual partners. I think she adequately defends her position and I think it is important to see the reception that people in open relationships receive when they admit to being in open relationships. Meanwhile, Mason also has a friend who is completely disgusted and contemptuous of their relationship, to the point of appearing personally offended and violently angry about two people insisting that they are happy fucking other people even though he is not involved with either of those people. Again, I think it is important to see this kind of reception. Mason is not quite as good at defending himself, he mainly deflects the questions and accusations in an attempt to remain friendly with his buddy. The assumptions from the opposition are fairly common - that the only reasons to get into open relationships are: 1) fear of commitment; 2) fear of being alone so willing to put up with being "cheated on"; 3) selfish; 4) using others for sex; etc. Mason and Sam do not appear to be these kinds of people. Their love for each other, their dedication to honesty, their obvious acceptance of each other's other partners (for instance, Mason gives a guy tips on how to hit on Sam when the guy comments about not having any luck without realizing that Mason is Sam's boyfriend and Sam reassures Mason's new girlfriend that it's totally OK to be at their house & to have fun together), their defense of their choices, their declarations that they are confident in each other's commitment to them - all suggest that this is a happy and functioning relationship. Then the movie goes off the rails. Both of the main characters make decisions that seem totally out of character for the confident, happy people so far portrayed. Mason keeps a secret from Sam, and since Sam actually knows about it from the beginning, she lets Mason keep the secret, which poisons her own feelings about him to the point that she chooses her other boyfriend - y'know, the one who looks on her in disgust and contempt whenever he is reminded that some other guy puts his cock in the same place he does. Mason is constantly accused of being a user and being afraid to commit, but, as my metamour, Maxine, pointed out to me, "yeah, so that sort of fear of commitment only makes sense if your definition of 'commitment' is to monogamy and being jealous and controlling of your partners", since Mason seems disinclined to leave his relationship with Sam. He seems pretty committed to remaining in his relationship with his partner, to me, he's just not committed to being sexually monogamous, which isn't a commitment that his partner is asking of him.  In fact, there was a scene where everything could have been resolved in a happy poly way, and given what I thought I knew of the characters before, I would have believed the movie if it had taken that direction, and I did not believe the characters choosing the other path. The implication is that yes, Mason really was a selfish user who was afraid to commit and Sam really did want a traditional life. The problem is that I just didn't see them that way.  I do not think that the first half of the movie justified coming to that conclusion and I don't think that the characters were written or directed to make that a reasonable assumption or conclusion. So, I have my guideline that says "if the moral of the story is 'polyamory is doomed to fail, here watch this train-wreck to see why' then it doesn't go on the list". But the main relationship in the movie wasn't a train-wreck. It was a pretty realistically functional one, in my opinion, until the two characters made, what I consider to be, out-of-character decisions that ultimately led to a train-wreck. So, I refined my guidelines to include movies that offered scenes of valuable situations, like coming out to family, introducing new partners to the concept of open relationships, discrimination, etc., all of which were in this movie, since a happy ending was never necessary to be included on the list. We do see a coming out to family scene; we do see an introduction to a new partner scene; we do see the negative reactions and assumptions of people about open relationships in several scenes; we do see a couple who defends their relationship choices in positive terms, such as being attracted to others not changing the love they feel for each other and feeling secure and confident about their relationship, and all of these feel fairly realistic. Basically, this movie could be summarized as "this is what non-polys think of polyamory and open relationships, and how things are supposed to end for us". But that means that there really was a poly-ish relationship in it, which means it should go on the list. It also means that, if this is the case, then this movie would be valuable to the poly community to show what non-polys think of us and other non-monogamists.   polyamory; polyamorous; poly; polya; polyam; poly-ish; nonmonogamy; non-monogamy; ethical non-monogamy; consensual non-monogamy; ENM; CNM; open marriage; open relationship; hierarchy; hierarchical; couple privilege; love triangle; adultery; cheating; affair; infidelity; relationship; couple; movie review