Polygamy is just the legal term for having affairs
Melissa Kite is glued to the screen by the US smash-hit series ‘Big Love’ — about to be shown here — and is gripped by the controversy it has triggered over multiple marriage Fifteen minutes into the first episode of Big Love, an American television series about polygamy, I suddenly and unexpectedly had a change of heart. I don’t mean that I went from being anti to being pro, or even vice versa, but rather that I ceased thinking of patriarchal polygamy as a deeply sexist construct where the man gets the better end of the deal.
My volte-face came as the blonde, scheming wife Nicki, played by sultry Chloë Sevigny, demanded more housekeeping money, saying, ‘Barb’s reupholstered all her chairs.’ A while later the wives gather round the kitchen table and draw up a list of repairs that need doing to their three neat houses arranged around a common backyard. This is not male utopia. This is a man’s idea of hell on earth, surely? Having three wives doesn’t just mean you have to service them in the bedroom — more of which later; you have to service them in the emotional, retail and DIY sense too. And to complicate things even further, they are all competing with each other.
Big Love has provoked a storm of protest in the US and, having relished two episodes, I find it hard to know how to explain this. Naturally, the religious Right is not best pleased about a show portraying fundamentalist Mormons with such intelligence and humour that there have been calls for the legalisation of polygamy in its wake.
Traditionalists see the HBO series as an outright attack on Reynolds v. United States, the 1878 Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of antipolygamy laws. The Mormon Church officially banned the practice in 1890, so it can’t be best pleased either. But to say the series is controversial because it’s about an all-American harem doesn’t do justice to the multi-layered and many splendoured offence-making that is going on here.
For starters, the show is eye-poppingly explicit. Not since Sex and the City have romps been so integral to the plot. The finer points of how Bill performs with each of his wives is vital to the storyline, and no camera angle is spared. The basic conceit, of course, is that there just isn’t enough of him to go round, and a fair amount of Viagra is consumed. But the sexual jealousies which ensue are anything but hack neyed. ‘Are you going to wear pyjamas to bed every night, or just on mine?’ asks Jeanne Tripplehorn’s character, Barb, as poor Bill attempts to get some personal space under the sheets for the first night in weeks. You have to wonder at the genius of a TV series whose subject matter promises a misogynistic romp but which ends up making you feel sorry for the leading man.
Bill, played by Bill Paxton, is a ploddingly handsome guy who just wants to do the right thing. Your heart goes out to him because every time he realises what the right thing to do is, he has to do it three times. When his friend Don pops round for dinner with his three wives and announces that another is on the way, it is a stunningly odd moment: ‘We talked about it and decided it was time to add another wife to the family.... You put any thought into a fourth?’ This is not men beating their chests in unfettered macho glory. This is men transformed into brooding homemakers, pondering another wife as though they were clucking over the idea of more children.
Meanwhile, in the kitchen, the women exert a chilling degree of control. They sit down with their diaries and a pot of coffee to work out the rota. ‘You take the 27th.... Are you sure? It’s okay, I get him an extra night that week anyway.... ’ It’s as if someone crossed the Stepford Wives with the Witches of Eastwick. The ‘sister wives’ air kiss, borrow cups of sugar and go into huddles around the sink every time he puts a foot wrong.
At times one wonders how close to the actual world of the estimated 20,000 polygamous families holed up in the wilds of Utah and Arizona this can really be. The whole thing is rather seductive. As with Sex and the City, Friends or Desperate Housewives you unwittingly find yourself wanting to be a part of the gang. It is great television because there is someone for everyone to identify with. Inevitably we will all have a favourite wife. ‘I’ll be there for you’ might easily be the show’s motto.
As the wives squabble kookily about taking possession on ‘their day’ from 9 a.m., it is clear that each woman is deeply in love with Bill and he with them, which, according to the anti-polygamy lobby in the US, just isn’t meant to happen. In an article in the Weekly Standard, ‘Polygamy Versus Democracy’, Stanley Kurtz argues that legalised polygamy would return us to the status of savages because the democracy of the Western world is based on romance. ‘A hard-won lesson of Western history is that genuine democratic self-rule begins at the hearth of the monogamous family.’ It is a heartwarming theory, but sadly rather shot through with holes since it was invented and played out almost exclusively on the set of The Waltons. Aside from all the cohabiting couples who drift in and out of commitment, and the increasing numbers of single people living in promiscuity, what about all those married couples — yes, we all know them — who privately practise an unofficial version of polygamy? It’s called ‘having an affair’, and the last time I checked there were quite a few people doing it.
We already practise ‘polyamory’ en masse so why not give those involved a degree of protection under the law? Why shouldn’t a woman who services a man romantically for 30 years get the same rights and a slice of his estate under law as the woman who has done his washing or borne his children? The obvious answer to those who complain that this would enslave women is that a proper, legalised system would make it possible for women to take more than one husband too. We could call it ‘marriage diversity’.
Another explanation for the row is that the Right believes that the series is part of a gay rights plot. Some critics describe the writers, Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer, as ‘gay marriage advocates’. Their theory goes something like this: if Americans are conditioned into thinking that multiple marriage is OK, they won’t bat an eyelid at the first gay wedding.
Naturally, traditionalists are sensitive to anything that redefines the family and tries to get the state out of the marriage business. For them, even having the debate legitimises promiscuity and destroys any last vestige of pretence that human beings are meant to be married to one person for their entire lives.
On moral grounds I have no objections to the destruction of said fallacy. As far as formalised polygamy itself goes, however, I just don’t think I have the organisational skills.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph. Big Love will be shown on Five at 9 p.m., starting Monday 12 June.
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