By Maria Padhila
So I’m poking around on the Internets, waiting for the conference call to start, and since it’s a Monday morning I check out the always fine Molly Lambert Mad Men recap on Grantland. If you don’t know this U.S. TV show, it’s a drama about the advertising business in the 1960s (and a great look at how it grew into a monster that got us into this mess, if you ask me).
I’m reading about ketchup and Dante’s Inferno and that handsome Don Draper, the lead character, who’s always catting around:
Don thinks sexual liberation means a traditional marriage with extracurriculars behind closed doors, and only for the man. His values may have been somewhat avant-garde (‘European’) in the buttoned-up ’50s and early ’60s, but they’re totally retro with regard to feminism and free love, doomed to put him entirely out of step with the forthcoming sexual revolution. … Don would hate polyamory because he gets all of his deviant kicks from lying.
Ha-ha, yeah, you can say that again, I’m thinking. He’s been such a jerk this season, with not wanting his wife to work, and not supporting the women at the agency even as little as he did in the past seasons —
Wait.
Just one minute, there.
Did you see it, too? OK. And first, let me tell you that Lambert is a sort of mainstream writer. I even looked her up to make completely sure that she hadn’t done a book on poly or something and I’d missed it.
Nope. It was just an offhand reference. An offhand, appropriate reference. An offhand, appropriate, CORRECT reference to polyamory. A reference that GETS IT. But made completely casually. Without lots of explanations and definitions. Made, I could assume, in a manner that assumes the readers get it, too.
This is what I’ve been looking for. And it happened so fast!
Granted, Grantland is kind of liberal and progressive and the kind of place that would pride itself on being up on things. But still.
She got it. Polyamory isn’t about lying. Polyamory is about being honest. People who go around lying to partners are getting “deviant kicks.” The polyamorists aren’t being called deviant. The character who is lying to everyone is.
Oh, my. How did this happen?
An answer was ventured by Alan P, who writes the Poly in the News blog, in his keynote speech at the Atlanta Poly Weekend in March. I read the full transcript here.
This is worlds away from how the media used to be toward the poly vision, on TV especially. They really didn’t used to have a clue what it was, or how to treat it other than as a joke or something to pretend to be shocked by. They still don’t always think it’s a good idea, but at least they usually get it now. …
Here is something I saw change in just 2 1/2 years. You remember the flap a year ago over Newt Gingrich demanding from his wife that they have an open marriage. Unlike previous cheating-politician scandals, that event became a vehicle for lots of major media attention to good open and poly relationships, contrasting with how Gingrich did it. There were profiles of people doing multiple relationships well, and articles on how to make them work with honesty and close communication and compassion and respect, in the New York Times (twice), the BBC, USA Today, many others.
Words I never thought I’d write: Bless your heart, Newt Gingrich.
Alan goes on to make a far more powerful point about polyamory and opening up sustainable ways of living into the future that’s pretty provocative. Maybe later. Today, I’m just interested in how fast this changed. How quickly people got it. And how many of them got it right.
It looked fast, but it was the result of a painstaking and painful process of culture change: people who were willing to go out there and be seen and heard, and those same people either making mistakes in getting off-message or being misconstrued or badly edited, and then getting criticized by other polyamorists or queers or fundamentalist Christians and then learning from that and getting back out there again.
It came from poly people being willing to talk to each other and learn from other groups about how you do this thing of shaping identity and presenting a self that is both real and projects the messages you want it to. The Polyamory Media Association will even give free training in dealing with the media and provides contacts who can interview or be spokespeople.
It’s a very tough thing to do, this self-shaping and self-presentation. In my other life, it’s part of what I do, and it’s hard enough when it’s an organization or work-related thing. When it’s your self that’s presented as a media identity, you risk feeling like a cipher, like a Don Draper, unable to see who you are. On the other side, it can be freeing and liberating to be your authentic self, explaining yourself and your life to the public realm.
Activist Sierra Black describes that creepy feeling in her blog post about being on a segment of the US news program, 20/20, on polyamory:
So it turns out my mom likes my girlfriend and my kids are fine and the neighbors don’t care what I do as long as I trim my forsythia and shovel the snow. And it’s great to be given a huge media platform to bust some of these harmful myths about polyamory and show off the good thing I have going.
On the other hand, the media isn’t simply holding up a mirror to the reality of polyamory. They’re shaping the cultural perception of what polyamory is and who does it by carefully choosing the stories they tell.
In real life…I hate rules and hierarchies. I’m queer as f**k and also a big slut.
Good luck figuring any of that out from TV. TV makes it look like I have A Husband and A Boyfriend and A Girlfriend (in that order), not a spectrum of relationships with different friends and lovers and partners. There’s no sex in my TV relationships. On TV, I never worry about money. My husband’s Latin American background is erased, as is his complex queer identity.
So the problem as I see it isn’t that the media is cleverly choosing people who do poly a certain way and depicting their lives. In my case, at least, it’s that the media is cleverly misrepresenting my life to fit a certain model.
While I always have a problem with the characterization of The Media as a monolith — it’s a plural noun for a reason, and there are many, many good journalists out there — I empathize with her frustration in feeling that her life was shaped and manipulated. (Isn’t it amazing how even the “poor” people on TV have nice houses and clothes? And ethnic identity vanishes, unless it’s part of a stereotypical character.)
The only responses I could come up with are to be glad if at least it is being manipulated in one or more of the directions you’d like it to be, be glad if none of the messages are negative or evil; keep it together in the face of criticism from your community; and grow your own. Your own compelling video, show, or memoir will show You just the way you want You to be seen. You’ll also learn even more about who You is. This is one of the reasons I support the blogs, shows and other presentations and publications on polyamory. DIY is the way. No one may listen or view, but you’ll have control of the presentation.
Years ago — in the last century — I was part of a group of witches and pagans that did this kind of work. We visited Congress and we prepared news releases and media fact sheets and we made ourselves available for interviews. By the third annual gathering we held, well, being a witch or pagan just wasn’t that big a deal anymore. Most people got that it was just another spiritual path. There are always little blurps and bubbles of bigotry, largely from the Bible belt bulge area. But most people get it. It’s not really a story anymore.
There were still those who wanted to put us in big black witch hats every Halloween — and some of us obliged. Because really, why not have some fun with it? Play with the images people foist on you instead of fighting them (and sometimes, in the process, making them stronger). I’m a big believer in this ninja-double-reverse strategy.
Getting to normal was a little scary. You get laughed at and mistrusted and looked at like a weirdo. You worry about your job, your family. But you keep smiling, you keep your manners and your wits about you, and you stay sane, and someday, the reward is that you’re just not that special anymore. Thank goodness.
Maria,
Thanks for writing this. I have been having a similar dilemma with the local freethinkers here. Freethinking secularism is usually seen by mainstream religionists as a group of people lacking in morals or decency because they lack religion to “keep their base selves in line.” The group started out with several people needing the cathartic release of just being as drunk, sexual, open, religion-bashing, anything-goes as possible. Trouble is, some of us has moved beyond that stage already; some who have kids and who have rather careful views about what we expose our kids to. I began deliberately trying to tell the group that if they really want a secular community that includes all secular people; they would have to make room for those of us who were more cautious types because of our children. At first I was lambasted for trying to do the same kind of restricting of their “authentic selves” (code for anything-goes selves) and they felt that was counter to their freethinking. I said there should be room for both their anything-goes folks (because I don’t object to that at all; I was once there myself but now I don’t feel my son should be exposed to that yet) and those cautious types. They thought I was judging them; I wasn’t in the way they thought; I do not dislike any of the more open folks and would not dream of exposing my caution to their kids but I think I should have the same courtesy extended to me and my son. There is room for both types.
The group’s foremost outspoken person against my desire for a place at the secular community table finally realized my view when she was contemplating where to place her own son in school. Her desire for a school where he would feel safe, accepted, and able to learn brought my feelings home to her and she publicly relented to me on the FB group.
Just as Poly living has a varied spectrum of what a lot of non-poly people might define as “normal” relating, secular freethinking people have a spectrum of people that go from free and open “anything goes” to rather careful and cautious fuddy-duddies. Getting the world to accept the spectrum is harder; presenting the more “socially acceptable” members of either poly or secular communities to the public is a start in getting acceptance; that was part of my argument and the leaders have found that some new families have already been turned off by the drunkenness of the group at what are billed as family potlucks. So perhaps there will now be room for both types of people in the group. That is what I wanted; activities for those who are more free-thinking and activities for those who are more cautious. We all accept each other better now.